Disposable Words

Cleaning House

2011-10-14T04:12:00.002-04:00

The archives around here have obviously gotten rather patchy. I cleaned out most of the posts, including any related to, well, pretty much all of my longer works. They're frankly embarrassments at this point. Hell, they were embarrassments when I first wrote them. This doesn't mean I'm coming back to work on this any time soon, but I couldn't stand knowing they were still up there for people to see so readily.

Jobs: the Hunting

2010-10-07T20:23:00.003-04:00

Facing a few job interviews over the next week, and I'm literally stressing out so much I'm making myself sick. So, writing is going on the back burner for a while once more. Hopefully I get some work and get started quickly, which will make for an easier time writing for me.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 7, 409 words

2010-10-07T01:54:00.000-04:00

Sitri crossed the campus as if she had been born there, others scurrying to get out of the way of her determined stride. She probably had soft-screen contact lenses or a wireless neural implant and could call up the campus map at will, leaving Sean feeling like a lumbering, archaic dinosaur with his AR glasses despite being the younger of the two.

Eyes followed Sitri, many male (and more than a few female) students staring openly. Her confident poise and the sharp lines of professional dress gave the impression of someone a solid decade older than her true age. Some students muttered to one another as they passed, Wonder what she teaches, and Too late to get into one of her classes? Sean grimaced as one stage-whispered Who's the runt?, doing nothing to hide a direct look.

He looked away and tried to refocus on his search results, but was far too distracted just imagining that others were regarding him, and with such contempt. Sean valued anonymity, something he got too little of. And which it seemed was about to fly out the window, now that he was one of the Goetia.

Doctor Halloran's office overlooked a small greensward frequented by others with more free time than they knew what to do with, an area between buildings that caught plenty of sun and had a few trees off to one side. Sean had enjoyed the relative peace and quiet, once, reading there between classes or idling around online while he lay back in the shade. But much like Halloran's office, Sean rarely saw the greensward anymore; her sole window was half-obscured by an overstuffed bookcase and a shelf full of knick-knacks, with a gauzy curtain that dimmed the fuzzed what little natural light made it into the room.

It was one of the most horribly stereotypical professor's offices that Sean had ever seen, but for the series of flatscreen monitors mounted on the one single wall. Several had screensavers with twisty fractals dancing across their expanses, while others were clearly busy modeling and compiling code. Halloran, squinting at the screens despite the glasses perched high on the bridge of her nose, flew across the very physical keyboard set before her at lightning speed with a loud clatter of plastic on plastic. A sensor and motion-capture rings rested on the desk nearby, ignored entirely. The doctor was a brilliant theoretician and programmer, but in many ways very behind the times.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 6, 407 words

2010-10-06T01:31:00.000-04:00

Dropping into a more sedate pace, but with the occasional extra step to keep up, Sean considered the woman he'd been handed off to. A little icon blinked in the corner of his screen lenses, the results of his search waiting unobtrusively since before Asmoday had dismissed them. He flicked his eyes to them and the window expanded across half his field of vision, translucent so he didn't risk running into someone or something while he skimmed the results. The web browser styled window was horribly archaic, but Sean considered it far easier to keep an eye on the world with text rather than a direct feed.

Several hundred results popped up, even after a smart parsing to get rid of coincidental names and redundancy. Sitri wasn't some mere tech or manager, and despite her appearance was less than a year older than him. Sean ran a filter over the results to sort by age, with some of the earliest results only two years old.

The absolute earliest mention was from a school newspaper's online edition, with the lists of students on the honor roll. Several followed, until a final article about the 16 year old who was valedictorian of her graduating class. More results from a small-town news site about a messy emancipation suit shortly thereafter, culminating in a sudden disappearance and issuance of a missing person report. Legal emancipation obtained when she reappeared several months later in the employ of Stellar Dynamics, an aerospace start-up, which was gobbled up the next year by StarGen. No formal post-secondary education, but several papers and one monograph published already on psychological conditioning for long-term isolation in deep space missions, and the validity of weak and strong AIs for companionship in such circumstances.

One pointed entry on a blog called futureWatch (motto: “Making war on the past... for tomorrow!”) noted how the reader could readily tell how invested in the university and corporate-based research structure a reviewer of Miss Valentine's work was, by how vehemently they attacked her work without substantive arguments against its premises and results. The blog also highlighted a recent announcement from Miss Valentine and StarGen that she would be one of a dozen heading for the void within a year as part of a direct test of her hypotheses. Subsequent grumbling mostly came in the form of complaints against her ability to be objective as a test subject. On this, she was heretofore silent.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 5, 419 words

2010-10-05T01:14:00.000-04:00

Asmoday's resembled a set of crosses tagged together at their bases in a symmetrical pattern, while the woman's lamen brought to Sean's mind a set of empty candelabra resting in a deep basin. Neither projected names; it was occasionally advantageous to let someone know nothing more than that you were one of the Goetia, not which one.

“Agares, this is...” Asmoday paused for a fraction of a second, so quick that most would have missed it, weighing how to introduce the woman. “Sitri the Prince, Master of 60 Legions, and one of the up-and-comers in StarGen Aerospace. She shall likely be looking down on the rest of us from a very great height within the next few years.”

“Ah. Um. Nice to meet you,” Sean said, offering her PAN a digital handshake. She took it, though only after a brief but noticeable hesitation as if a germaphobe confronted with an actual hand. Their computers exchanged basic contact information, and she nodded with a muttered acknowledgment.

Adeline Valentine. Well, that certainly sounded familiar, though Sean couldn't connect the name and face in his memory. He spun off a search process to dig out details on the name and StarGen, though wondered how famous a tech or middle manager at an aerospace company could be, no matter how bright she was.

“I understand you've got some business to attend while you're here,” Asmoday asked, addressing Sitri. “Take Agares with you, it's surprising how invaluable a native guide and go-fer can be. But I will expect him back in good condition.”

Sitri nodded. “Where do you suggest I start my inquiries?”

Asmoday was already turning back to his work, fingers flying through air. Distractedly, he said, “Try Doctor Halloran. She's the chair of the CS department and heads up the AI research project. If you can get anything out of her, pass it on to Purson.”

“Will do,” Sitri said before walking away, Sean apparently forgotten. He trotted after her, turning a quick glance to Asmoday, but the older man was wrapped up in his own little digital world, fingers dancing.

That he still used a pseudo-physical interface suggested Asmoday was either vastly behind on the technology curve by choice or circumstance – which Sean severely doubted – or, more likely, he already overwhelmed the other inputs with constant use and needed yet another. Asmoday casually shuffled an order of magnitude more data than most any other human could handle with dedication and focus.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 4, 377 words

2010-10-04T01:42:00.000-04:00

He stopped short when he noticed another person coming up the other side of the table, a tall woman with a purposeful stride and an expression of cold disinterest on her fair features. She, for one, didn't seem the least bit perturbed by Asmoday's off-putting aura, and without a moment's hesitation crossed the invisible border that held most back. Asmoday looked up at her approach, betraying no surprise, delight, nor any other emotion. If she was unexpected, he didn't show it.

They looked... good together, Sean realized with a momentary pang of jealousy. She was slender, tall, and very WASPy, with long blonde hair pulled back to accentuate sharp features and icy light-blue eyes. An image of sharp, lean professionalism complementing and complemented by the strong sense of presence and energy Asmoday wore like a cloak. If Sean didn't know better, he'd say the man was the face to the woman's managerial talents.

The two spoke quietly for a few moments before Asmoday's gaze started to drift sideways. So, not something he felt required his full attention. Asmoday's eyes lit upon Sean and he gestured for the younger man to come closer. The woman paused, looking over to see just for whom Asmoday thought it worth interrupting their discussion. She frowned.

“This is my assistant,” Asmoday said by way of introduction. “He has potential, though he still needs to be cut and polished. Call him Agares.” A file uploaded to Sean's PAN, from Asmoday, and opened to reveal a picture of something like a stylized shield with wings. A small text summary explained: it was the lamen of Agares, Duke and Governor of 31 Legions, the symbol by which the demon could be conjured – and the digital nametag that marked its bearer as one of the Goetia, visible only to others of the group via AR lenses like the glasses Sean wore, and to whomsoever they chose to display it.

Sean blinked. Asmoday had dumped a Goetic name on him as casually as he poured a cup of coffee. Sean had no sense up till that moment that he was to be marked as one of the elect. Now, with his own lamen, similar badges appeared over the hearts of Asmoday and the woman.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 3, 403 words

2010-10-03T01:37:00.000-04:00

“We may be demons, but we shall be demons of our word. Noble demons. Treat fairly and wisely with us, and you shall get what you desire, but do not be surprised if we lash out at being handled harshly or foolishly. And just as Solomon built his Temple with the Goetia's aid and expertise, so shall ours be invaluable in building the future for our employers.”

Asmoday paused, looking off in the distance for a spare couple seconds to gather his thoughts. “Some of you, particularly within the founding core of our group, have heard some of this before. The rest of you have been invited to hear this for a reason. Each of you has an invaluable talent to lend the Goetia, as well as a personality and views that would mesh well into the group. Most of you are the rising stars in your fields, with knowledge and a certain daring to push your limits, a trait lacking in many others.

“What I am proposing is an economic alliance of the brightest talents in the Solar system, from psychology to quantum physics, marketing to computer science. Think of the Goetia as the most elite of talent agencies, and yourselves as the celebrity power to be managed and supported. Those few of us who have already self-incorporated have some of the highest stock values of any individuals of our generation, and I trust that the rest of you would join us on these lofty heights if you followed suit. I want to put that all that power to work together.

“Think about it.”

The Seal of Solomon faded away behind Asmoday, and the lights rose in the room. Asmoday sat down at the head of the room's only table and plunged immediately into work on his PAN, while the others present began talking quietly or getting up and leaving. He appeared to type on air, using a virtual keyboard which nobody else's systems had permissions to visualize properly. Even Sean had never gotten a look at how Asmoday set up his control scheme.

Sean rose from his seat at the foot of the table and went to approach Asmoday. It had taken Sean nearly a month to learn to ignore that closed-off aura the older man wore like a shield while he worked, else nothing would get done – Asmoday didn't even seem aware he projected it.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 2, 368 words

2010-10-02T01:22:00.001-04:00

So far as Sean knew, Asmoday had neither boyfriend nor girlfriend – nor, for that matter, any variety of significant other. During a working lunch at one of the little on-campus cafes, Sean had hesitantly commented on a sprightly young woman walking by, only for Asmoday to snap at him for getting distracted. Similar test results came back when using a delightfully muscled fellow in a tight shirt as subject. At this point, Sean was pretty sure that Asmoday just didn't do anything, at least not anything that belonged to the meat world.

Asmoday reached the end of his circuit and spun about to begin pacing across the meeting room once more. He gestured, and a signal pinged Sean's PAN, and that of everyone else watching. A hexagram appeared on Sean's screen lenses, imposed on the background behind Asmoday's pacing figure as if projected on the wall. It was bound in a circle, with Alpha and Omega, Tau, and the syllables of Tetragrammaton arrayed around and within the hexagram's borders. One of the systems on Sean's network helpfully tagged the hexagram as the Seal of Solomon, and offered links to various metaspace sites for further information. He blinked them away, concentrating on what Asmoday had to say.

“Most everyone these days knows this symbol, or something like it,” Asmoday went on. “A binding circle to hold demons and spirits in thrall, so that the mere mortal might command them and bend their expertise to his will. Ancient superstition and absurdity, of course. There's no Hell from which to conjure its denizens. But the symbol remains. The demons remain.” He stopped, looking over everyone with a calm, measured gaze, and tapped his temple. “They remain in here.”

He resumed pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “This is what it would mean for us, to become the Goetia. To assume the public persona of the demons that hide in the heads of others. This symbol,” and he gestured to the Seal, “shows how we may be chained to productive use, but the legends also warn that it is not absolute. The Seal must be handled with care lest the demons get hold of it themselves.

"Goetia," Symbolism, pt. 1, 361 words

2010-10-01T01:43:00.001-04:00

“It's all semiotics,” Asmoday explained calmly to the others. “Direct use of symbols as communication.” Some were present before him physically, but only a mere handful – the vast majority watched remotely, whether his image captured by camera lens or the gestures of a digital avatar in their shared simspace, the virtual clubhouse nicknamed Pandaemonium.

“Some of us already use these names, drawn from the Lesser Key of Solomon and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonium, because they entertain us. There's at least one account of how Solomon used the demons for building the Temple, or at least exploited their knowledge. That's what we should mean to others, as the Goetia.”

Asmoday was a young man of Chinese descent, lanky and nearly two meters tall. Darkness defined his physical presence; black coat and pants, messy black hair, sharp dark eyes, all contrasted with ghostly-pale face and hands. He paced slowly back and forth in the cramped meeting room, borrowed with the permission of the student union manager for this purpose.

Sean was the only other attending student of their group there (surname: Alway; born 2037 CE in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; enrolled in MIT 2054 CE, Major: Computer Science, Minor: Intelligence Dynamics); , though he was a mere undergrad while Asmoday was working on a doctorate already. Everyone else present was older than Sean, though only one or two looked any older than Asmoday. Members of Asmoday's far-flung social group who had been close enough for a day trip, or had already been in the area for other reasons. Three dozen more watched through metaspace, via camera feed and motion capture input on Asmoday's PAN.

The two met because Asmoday was TA'ing a low-level programming class. Sean had picked up a quick crush on the intense but quiet older man. He still hadn't said anything to Asmoday about it, but worried it was pretty obvious. Asmoday had been more than willing to pull him in on the planning and plotting, though. Had a use for “a minion with more free time than they know what to do with,” and as an undergrad Sean automatically fit that category in Asmoday's view.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 11, 418 words

2010-09-30T01:46:00.000-04:00

Legally, it's somewhere between a fifty-some-odd member group civil union and a limited-liability corporation, though some members are bound together through some form or another of religious marriage. They compose the Solar system's most far-flung economic commune, with members in every colonized gravity well and beyond. And if the drone lands safely, their collective wealth will jump through the roof, with the exploitable resources of an asteroid under their control. Sitri will take a ding to her personal stock value when she gets fired from StarGen once this gets out, but that's something she could not care less about if someone paid her to.

Sitri won't even be the one receiving the drone's confirmation signal once it lands, despite being closest to it. By the time it impacts, The Sanity Box will be well underway on the next leg of its search (and gone through more than a dozen new nicknames), with an unknown plotting vector. Andrealphus, meanwhile, will be on Phobos – a far better choice than any other member of the Goetia in terms of proximity, clear space, and known location for the drone to transmit its confirmation signal.

And best of all, out of this whole mess? The drone's seed AI, Morax the Great Earl and President, Governor of 30 Legions and with a waiting seat in the Goetia executive board, will be smart enough and have the means to expand to other asteroids. Add in some simple telepresence to get a “real-born” intelligence signing off on claims and discoveries (AI rights are still stalled for various political and philosophical reasons, not least of which is the question of whether they're truly intelligent yet or just very good simulations, and also because it's one of the most acceptable remaining bigotries reinforced by neophobic science fiction that fears a robot uprising), and the Goetia will be looking at a steep increase in wealth for a long while yet.

Trapped in a tiny ship now void of air, Sitri rigs the security and damage control logs to reflect a micrometeorite impact in the area of the railgun, an event that accidentally kicked off the black box drone and sent it mewling into the outer system. By the time a StarGen inspector will get a chance to look at the ship, in another one and a half years, the hole will have long since been repaired, new atmosphere synthesized from the alchemy tanks, and all damaged materials and the “micrometeorite” dumped into the tanks for processing.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 10, 430 words

2010-09-29T01:39:00.000-04:00

The railgun is exposed directly to hard vacuum, so when Sitri cuts open its tiny bay, everything goes crazy. Pressure loss results in a gale-force evacuation of atmosphere, and alarms start blaring shipwide until there's too little air for sound. Even then, red emergency lights flash incessantly. Purson's virus may keep the damage control bots from going to work just yet, but the alarms aren't slaved to the computer; they have their own sensors for when the pressure gets too low too fast.

There's one last trick the virus has, with its claws deep in the guts of the security and damage control systems. Once Sitri pulls out the black box probe and sticks her own drone inside, both more than half as long as she is tall, the virus just needs her to send the signal and the railgun will open fire. Impart some momentary drift and spin on the ship via maneuvering thrusters, put the bulkhead plates (complete with radiation and magnetic shielding) back in place with some welding putty, and make sure the railgun is pointed at the second asteroid receding in the distance, and push the big red button.

The railgun fires off with a ship-rattling pulse, felt through the boots and up the body of Sitri's pressure suit. If the plotting algorithm was correct and Andrealphus's (legal name: Ngare Kimunya; born 2029 CE; currently a citizen-shareholder of the Phobos Megafactory) estimates of the railgun's power were accurate, then the drone should be impacting with the asteroid in a week or three, at which point it will unfold and begin cannibalizing all non-essential components to feed mass into its own printer, and start the mining process.

The whole process – from chance sighting of an asteroid that must be skipped (but now, thanks to observation, has a known path that may be plotted) to trusting they can hit that target with a high-tech slingshot – is risky and full of room for error, but the potential payoff is boundless.

Sitri and the rest of the Goetia incorporated together several years ago. Most had already undergone personal incorporation, trading their potential future wealth and reputations on the stock market in a practice begun once corporate persons started getting more legal rights and tax benefits than born humans. At the behest of Asmoday the Great King, Governor of 72 Legions (legal name: Yuan Li; born 2032 CE; no further information available, would you like to make another query?), they each sold a significant percentage of their personal stock to themselves as the board of directors of Goetia, Ltd.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 9, 410 words

2010-09-28T01:48:00.000-04:00

Once her drone is finished, Sitri pulls on a pressure suit and drops some extra instructions into her printer. She also uploads a self-destructing virus into the ship: it temporarily lobotomizes the security and damage control systems, disabling the ship's repair bots and cameras while leaving everything else intact. By the time The Sanity Box is ready to shove off, the virus will have looped a carefully-sampled video of Sitri's routine work during an asteroid survey, wiped its presence clean from the ship logs, and unwound itself into incoherent data no different from any other blank sector on the hard drive. The virus is a special job done up by Purson (legal name: Roza Zajac; born 2032 CE; arrest record sealed upon achieving age of majority), one of the Goetia and the best programmer Sitri has ever met. She has every confidence it will work as advertised.

Sitri doesn't much enjoy the numb, distant feeling of wearing the pressure suit, but for the next few hours it's a necessity. She has a few tools in her personal cargo, and pulls them out – with the printer and these tools, she's on record as enjoying a little hands-on artwork of the destructive sort. Everything went back into the alchemy tanks when she was done, the overall expense negligible enough that StarGen overlooks whatever she does with “their” matter.

They wouldn't overlook this, though, and for that she silently thanks Purson once more and takes the cutting torch to a bulkhead. On the other side of several vacuum-sealed layers rests a simple launch tube, a makeshift railgun composed of a set of magnetic coils and a battery charged with enough power for a single shot. A small probe sits nestled in the works, loaded every twenty hours with a back-up of ship data and an emergency beacon. A shielded outer shell keeps the magnetic pulse from scrambling the probe on launch, and is promptly discarded via explosive bolt once it clears half a klick.

In case the Joyeuse is disabled or severely damaged without being destroyed outright, the railgun spits the probe sunward, whence it begins blatting to StarGen about the loss of the ship. There's honestly no hope that anyone could get to the Joyeuse in time to rescue Sitri, but StarGen could sling an unmanned probe on an intercept close enough for the black box to securely squirt its data before falling into Sol or some other gravity well.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 8, 396 words

2010-09-27T01:39:00.000-04:00

And if they're left to their own devices, the nanites will continue to alchemize every bit of matter within reach. This is the reason it's still illegal to use them in a terrestrial gravity well, despite their value to manufacturing. One recursion in the supervisory software, or one night where the operator forgets to shut things down before going home, and you wake up to a runaway gray goo scenario. A massive nodule of pure palladium in the middle of the Antarctic, where a hot lab stood not twenty-four hours before, reminded everyone rather pointedly of this, at least until the international backers of the research project almost caused a major diplomatic incident over who owned the palladium nodule.

The composition of the asteroid confirmed (large quantities of silicon compounds, nickel, and iron), the ship printers fire up and spit out a mining package of several small drones with their own seed colony of nanites. One of the drones is a mobile printer with just enough sophistication to make an identical copy of itself, at which point they step up into exponential growth for a short period of time and then get down to the real work of coring the asteroid for anything remotely useful.

One of the last activities before shoving off is the shuttling of raw mass up to the ship from the asteroid to refill the alchemy tanks back to optimal load. Using mostly silicon, iron, and nickel, it takes a lot of matter to fill the tanks, but there's plenty to go around. While the ship fills up, the first priority in the unpacking mining suite is the construction of a communications array and processor hub. Just as the alchemy tanks are topped off, the Joyeuse squirts a hundred gigs of data down to the asteroid's new “brain” in a couple seconds, followed by the system linking up to the StarGen hub back at Earth's L4.

In comparison, Sitri's drone requires an upload of a few hundred terabytes and takes just over two hours to transfer through from her PAN. And that's with some very fancy compression and a mere AI seed, rather than a full-grown AI. It's designed to run solo, though, compared to the dumb StarGen systems which are in constant (if lagged) contact with the master network. Nobody will talk to Sitri's drone for the next couple years.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 7, 444 words

2010-09-26T01:20:00.000-04:00

(The best protection against claim-jumping is that it's horribly impractical. Only megacorporations like StarGen can even make it out here to dump a mining package, never mind the additional investment of time, resources, and effort that would have to go into sending down bots designed to disable someone else's mining facility. By the same token, an entrenched mining platform has the nanoalchemy colonies on hand to feed as much of the asteroid's mass as necessary into powering easily-assembled defensive laser arrays. Any incoming assault drone would drain its power reserves and be destroyed well before the mining platform ran out of reaction mass, and if the assault was ever comprehensive enough to outlast the platform, every usable particle of the asteroid would already have been spent in its defense. Anything else effective would just fragment too much of the asteroid's mass, creating the same end result. Claim-jumping is a losing game, especially with so many other asteroids out there waiting to be grabbed and the Trojans in Jupiter's L4 and L5 as yet untouched.)

While The Sanity Box (nee Tin Can) works out the elemental composition of the asteroid, Sitri fires up her personal printer and begins tapping into what little remains of the alchemy tanks. Lightweight alloys, improbably pure elements, and high-tensile polymers feed into the printer's input and are shaved, shaped, spun, and sliced into a sophisticated piece of electronics that would put StarGen's “good-enough” mining package to shame. Sitri boots her PAN out of quiescence while the smooth black ovoid of her drone is spun out and packed with kilometers of wound microcircuitry and an elaborate suite of fabbing tools. Finally, a seed colony of alchemy nanites is decanted from the tanks and packed into Sitri's drone while she uploads a weak AI with very detailed instructions.

The nanites are a marvel of engineering, but by God they're dumb. They can perform atomic alchemy, changing one element to another at a great expense of energy. This energy is provided from direct cracking of the atoms involved, a certain percentage sacrificed for quanta of energy while others are reassembled into a new configuration. It's fission at the most intimate level. Large colonies with sufficient instruction could actually generate anti-matter out of the mess, and use that for a much more efficient “conversion” process, but this colony is not that big – yet. Nanoalchemy is most energy efficient when working in the realm of elements smaller than iron on the periodic table, with the energy requirements climbing faster the higher your target atomic number. It's why the optimal load for an alchemy tank is a large matter block of trans-ferrous elements.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 6, 361 words

2010-09-25T01:42:00.000-04:00

Space is ridiculously vast, even within the Solar system. Mind-bogglingly so, to the point that even most upgraded human minds still can't grasp the utter emptiness. It's the biggest obstacle to interplanetary travel, never mind interstellar. Given the dimensions of the asteroid belt, and the actual mass involved (an estimated 3.6 x 10^21 kilograms, or only about four percent of the mass of Luna), an asteroid might go a very long time indeed without seeing a neighbor. The biggest exception comes in the form of asteroid families, which are formed when one strikes another and the shards go off in the same direction. These two rocks are merely a close pass, already getting farther and farther apart.

Asteroid sighted, the Joyeuse's automated systems leap into action. Despite herself, Sitri feels a quick thrill of adrenaline as ship operations steps up. Reaction mass burns at a fantastic rate as the ship orients into a matching vector on the nearest asteroid, the alchemy tanks coming dangerously close to bottoming out. This takes almost a full Earth day, and the maneuvers alternately press Sitri flat as a pancake or make her guts flipflop like a circus performer on meth.

Once in proximity, a set of tethered drones – little more than fancy drills – drift across the gap between ship and rock, and impact on protected undersides. Diamond-tipped spikes jam into the rock, then wind in tight to hold steady in the asteroid's microgravity. Core samples are drilled out over the next day or so, shipped up the tether back into the Joyeuse, and analyzed for mineral content while Sitri prepares the official claim report marking the asteroid as the property of StarGen Aerospace. All she needs to actually do is include a sample analysis and sign off as witness with her biometrics, a formality agreed-upon by all the major aerospace corporations and enforced down the chain. Otherwise, every corporation would have simultaneously filed claim on the basis of unprovable “unmanned probe” visits, turning the interplanetary gold rush into a corporate bloodbath. And despite the relative emptiness of the belt, 4% of the Moon's mass is still plenty to go around. So far.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 5, 395 words

2010-09-24T01:14:00.000-04:00

The matter used in the printer comes from the ship's own stores. Strictly speaking, nanotech is a reality, but it's not a very useful reality just yet. No independent nanite colonies able to follow complicated programs or host AIs; data storage media and processing power haven't yet shrunk enough to be viable. Instead, a fist-sized colony of dumb nanites (which are so dumb that they're illegal to use for mass production inside a gravity well, out of fear for a gray goo “Sorcerer's Apprentice” scenario) chew through a dense block of metals to generate the raw materials for everything from ship fuel to spare parts in an act of nanoalchemy that would make Paracelsus green with envy. Shipboard printers handle turning those raw materials into finished product, and any waste matter gets dumped back into the alchemy tanks.

The only essentials that don't originate from the ship's matter block are Sitri's food, supplements, and medicine. It's bad enough that she has to subsist on flavored protein cakes and nutrient powders (mixed in water to the consistency of a thin milkshake), but the idea of eating tasteless nanoformulated bricks the texture of sand is enough to make her want to heave. Almost half of her remaining personal cargo mass after the printer has gone to a large box full of candy bars, gum, and other little indulgences.

Meanwhile, the Joyeuse drifts complacently through the void, hopping from rock to rock in the asteroid belt. Approximately once every Earth revolution, a set of low-power laser arrays spark to life and saturate local space with a burst of ultraviolet light. Days, sometimes weeks of absolutely nothing are punctuated by a harried half a megasecond or so whenever some of the laser light bounces back, pinging an asteroid's profile.

Today, for the first time since Sitri got out to the asteroid belt, two signatures ping back. Two asteroids, moving on notably divergent paths, are almost within visual distance of one another. Most often, multiple pings mean a close-knit asteroid family, which are far too risky to exploit.

Most people still think of the asteroid belt as something out of old science fiction movies and video games: a dense mass of rocks the size of small office buildings, spinning sedately in Solar orbit and constantly at risk of being struck by anyone who dares to venture within its bounds.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 4, 380 words

2010-09-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

Like many of the past two and a half generations born in the West, she's used to omnipresent connectivity and the comforting knowledge that a friend can be reached in an instant by querying the IM programs in her PAN, or, for the particularly old-fashioned, by pulling out an honest-to-God physical phone. She finds physical presence somewhat discomfiting, unless it's one of a small group of close friends, with even most of the Goetia too unfamiliar to fit that subset of humanity. But to be so utterly disconnected, spending half an hour or more to send a message and get a response, is well beyond her normal tolerance. It makes her feel like she should be wearing hoop skirts and riding in a horse-drawn carriage, communicating through posted letters.

Her goal, the promise of the big payoff for her and the rest of the Goetia, is enough of a motivation to go through with it all, however. She's ready to tolerate a stint of two Earth orbits around Sol out here for the sake of material security forever after. All it takes is breaking contract, and keeping that contract-breaking secret until after she gets back home.

Part of her personal cargo includes a three-dimensional printer. She had to sacrifice more than half her allotted mass for the printer, which was so cutting-edge when the Goetia bought it that their collective stock took a noticeable dip to afford it. It can produce microprocessors to the latest commercial specs, stuff that's almost nano-scale in size.

In another twenty generations of processor miniaturization, they might finally have access to smart nanite clouds, but for now this is the best stuff available to the general populace. She's been tooling around with the printer to the best of her abilities, optimizing the performance to keep up with each new development reported in her regular data squirts, occasionally using the printer to build the tools necessary to upgrade it.

Someday printers like this will be smart enough to upgrade themselves, but – mercifully, for Sitri's current plan – not yet. She doesn't need it out-thinking her in a mad race to rampancy and delusions of godhood, she needs it to be a dumb drone that's only just smart enough to carry out some very complicated instructions.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 3, 386 words

2010-09-22T01:48:00.000-04:00

Meditation only reinforces the screaming silence in her head, where her wetware had once buzzed with the constant reassuring chatter and presence of the other members of the Goetia, and metaspace in general, that virtual universe grown over the bones of the Web. She tried when first on the way out, but her mind refused to settle down. A storm of primal urges demanding her attention; the need to feed, relieve herself, check her newsfeeds. But now that she's learned how to ignore all that, instead the dull hum of the Tin Can gets into her skull and overrides everything, making her feel slow and fuzzy as if drugged.

Just lying there with nothing to do is about as bad. It's like meditation, but a lot less focused, her mind wandering off on any random path it feels like until a stray sound jolts her out of her reverie and into a low-level panic. Not that she could fix the ship even if she wanted to. She's a glorified caretaker and sometime pilot. Nothing's broken yet, though; every time it's been the engine adjusting, or an air filter stepping up, or a service drone performing routine maintenance.

Her PAN – personal area network – has barely seen activity since getting more than five light-minutes out from Earth. With data flow slowed to a crawl, she's been able to handle reality and metaspace completely unassisted. The last thing she bothered using it for was to write a religious text while still tethered into her bunk, a strange whim that came upon her after spending a month out amongst the rocks on near-perfect radio silence. She got five pages in before abandoning it as too derivative of I, Robot and The Ghost in the Shell, despite featuring neither robots nor cyborgs.

Last week, she spontaneously decided to blast all her music collection (and uploaded as much more as her daily bandwidth limit would allow) at all hours on shuffle. Now there's not a genre she isn't sick of.

Today, all that mind-numbing boredom is about to pay off.

***

There's a good reason Sitri took this job, or else she wouldn't be out here of her own volition. She's somewhat asocial, but not enough to get a sense of fulfillment out of such complete avoidance of all other people.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 2, 418 words

2010-09-21T01:53:00.000-04:00

(That has a purely pragmatic excuse as well, of course. It's vastly cheaper to send out the same people who are already in space for successive missions, rather than train a green dirtsider and haul them up out of a terrestrial gravity well. Radiation shielding, vitamin D and calcium supplements, and high-bandwidth communications are a cheap price to pay in comparison to a FNG every mission.)

Time grinds out here. Sitri can barely stand it. The communications lag grew worse and worse on the way out, to the point that the lag became more annoying to Sitri's permanently-connected sensibilities than complete shutdown, so she killed all but the essential data feeds back to the L4 base. Now she flips them back on once every thirty hours or so for a burst from her readers and some old social networks that she still visits only on habit. Most of the time, she's gone through everything an hour after arrival and sent any outgoing responses, to wait another day for any links she's opened, videos requested, or webcomic archives to pore through. Condensing everything down like that in one burst has made her realize exactly how much time she wasted every day browsing through metaspace, looking for updates and poking around for anything of interest. Sitri could be a lot more productive like this, if there was anything to do most days. The irony doesn't escape her.

Reckoning gets real funny real fast. Years have no strict meaning when you're not in a regular orbit or subject to seasons, and months break down too. Days go out the window even faster, as people adjust to live independent of the sun's rise and fall (a trend begun more than a century before with the incandescent light bulb anyway, now cemented out in space). Hours hold on through habit, and with the artificially imposed schedule of check-ins at least once every sixty. Most people check in a lot more regularly than that, though Sitri has been slipping farther to the outer edge as time has gone by.

A lot of other people out here in the void have started reckoning by the second, as if that little slice of time is any less arbitrary than any other. Sitri tried it for a while, but gave up after the first million seconds. The numbers ticked up encouragingly at the rate of one second per second, but that did nothing to keep the minutes and hours from bearing down inexorably upon her stimulus-deprived psyche.

"Goetia," Patience, pt. 1, 488 words

2010-09-20T01:54:00.001-04:00

Being out in space requires re-discovering the fine art of patience. For Sitri the Prince, Master of Sixty Legions (legal name: Adeline Valentine; born 2036 CE at the bottom of Earth's gravity well; legally emancipated 2052 CE; began employment at StarGen Aerospace 2053 CE; further profile access DENIED), it means relearning sanity. It means being a good fourteen light-minutes from Earth at the best of times, and half a light-hour away at the worst (not to mention the huge burning ball of radiation that's directly between Sitri and Earth at those moments, fouling transmissions and forcing them to bounce the long way around).

Now, out amongst the rocks for several months – by dirtside reckoning – Sitri feels just about ready to step out the airlock. Or she would, if there was one. The Joyeuse (today's nickname: Tin Can; yesterday's: The Sit-and-Spin; tomorrow's: The Sanity Box) is sealed tight to prevent accidents.

There're a few pressure suits in case of hull breach, but the Joyeuse was built with a design philosophy geared toward minimizing human error, and that every point of articulation on a device is a point of weakness. Nothing is meant to be human-serviced, not out in vacuum; any problem is fixed with a swarm of repair bots that hide just under the outer hull and inside the bulkheads. In theory, Sitri can take control of them, but the swarm interface requires dividing her attention too many ways to be useful. Meanwhile, the entryway was sealed with a flash weld using a fast-burning electrically charged sealing putty, and can only be opened with a cutting torch.

In all, the ship violates a staggering number of safety regs, but OSHA and other safety agencies have no pull outside atmosphere. There's a waiver stored in no less than four different media, including a very secure paper copy with Sitri's signature (Adeline Valentine rendered in the shaky, angular script of someone who has used a pen maybe twice before in her life) and several digital versions all backed by her biometrics, that declares the undersigned, heretofore referred to as the Employee, understands and agrees that StarGen Aerospace, Incorporated can in no way be held responsible for injury or illness sustained by the Employee while serving the agreed upon contracted service period, et cetera, et cetera.

She's sure she's probably misremembering a lot of the precise phrasing, buried in legalese, but the gist of it is that she has no recourse if she comes out of the mission with three different kinds of cancer and no use of her legs, such rights signed away because she wouldn't be able to get away from near-Earth orbit otherwise. And StarGen is one of the more progressive of the system-exploration corporations that still uses live humans on their ships instead of weak-AI assisted telepresence. At least they make an effort to keep their crewpeople healthy and sane in case they want to re-up.

Possible Return

2010-09-18T05:00:00.003-04:00

Started writing again finally. "Another Angel Down" is probably going on indefinite hiatus, along with most everything else. (Of projects already begun, the few most likely to see a return include "Never Special," "Sword Gods," "The Free," and "Remember Peace.")

At the moment, however, I've begun a new project called (tentatively) "Goetia," a near-future SF story following the hand a circle of associates has in the development of AI in the outer Solar system. If I'm lucky, it won't end up too horribly derivative of Charles Stross, John Scalzi, or Alastair Reynolds.

I'll begin posting again when I feel I've got a comfortable buffer of at least a week's worth of posts, because my creative energy is already on a pretty thin trickle at the moment.

Yes, Again

2010-06-30T23:05:00.002-04:00

I hate saying this, but frankly? I am about ready to quit writing.

Except for the very rare bright spot, my life for the last year and a half has been pretty depressing. Lost a job at a toy store two days before Christmas, haven't been able to find another, forced to move away from the only place around here likely to have job opportunities, sudden extra complications in my lack-of-a love life... I may not be starving yet, but at best I'm a burden on others. And if you haven't experienced that, you have no godsdamn clue how depressing that is.

I'm usually pretty good at hiding it, but overall I feel like shit. And my ability to write is influenced quite strongly by my overall mood. If I feel like hell, then achieving a consistent quality and quantity is a major mental chore, and any progress in improving my writing quality slows to just about nil. I seriously do not feel like I've gotten any better in my writing over the past year.

I started this because I wanted to write. I wanted to make a living writing. I'm not so sure that's an achievable or even a desirable goal anymore. I just don't have the mental energy these days.

So, to keep myself from completely losing it and quitting outright, I am taking a break. Its absolute minimum will be a week. More likely, it will be Rather Longer. And if I never reappear, then you know why.

Ann Onymous, pt. 5, 455 words

2010-06-28T01:49:00.000-04:00

“Jesus Christ!” Ann yelled, snapped out of her shock by the figure's voice. Bad, a distant part of her mind chided. Shouldn't speak, now they've got your voiceprint. The scarf may have muffled it, but who knew what they could still extract despite that. She backpedaled, bumping her shoulder into the door and stumbling out.

The figure crouched and stepped forward, scraping the ceiling. The floorboards screamed under its feet, creaked as if they were ready to shatter. And they probably were. Despite the speed the figure had displayed chasing her, and what it must have had to get here ahead of Ann – and how did it know to come here, of all places? she wondered – it moved slowly, hesitantly.

Ann turned to bolt, but the figure's voice held her back a little longer. “Don't try running,” it said. It stumped out of the bathroom, into the faint light filtering in from the windows. Its body was covered in a matte black bodysuit, or perhaps the armored cloth had been fused on to replace its skin. “The place is surrounded with drones. You can't lose them if you run.”

A challenge. Ann couldn't help but grin despite the situation. The drones – the good drones – had thermal and light-amp imaging, and enough resolution to catch the shape and texture of a kid's nose-pickings.

Ann flipped a small metal cylinder out of her coat pocket. A small metal pin was threaded through a handle. She popped the pin out and lofted the firebomb gently towards the figure. It paused in apparent shock, and Ann dove for the window, hooking her hand on the wall and swinging around out to the downspout once more. On the ground, she pulled a second flashbang free and hucked it as high and hard as she could before turning to bolt.

The firebomb had a longer fuse than the flashbang. Both went off about the same time with a thunderous roar. By that time, Ann had torn the scarf loose and thrown the goggles aside. Her coat flipped inside-out to hide the camo layer, and velcro patches let the trailing skirt fold up to change its profile. The plastic hood followed the goggles, and Ann's gloves went last into a pocket. Only her feet remained unchanged, now that her boots were burning merrily in the old house.

The fire hid her thermal shadow while she slipped out. The flashbang fouled the drones' light-amplification long enough to give her time to change her visual profile. And while she doubted the firebomb had actually killed her stalker, the figure would have no clue what she actually looked like. Ann slipped out into the night, anonymous once more.

Ann Onymous, pt. 4, 390 words

2010-06-27T03:18:00.001-04:00

The stash was in an old, abandoned house nearby. The place had been condemned years ago, though nobody had bothered to take care of it. The property wasn't worth the cost to rebuild, probably not even to smash it down to an empty lot. Squatters didn't stay for long, either. The floor was rotting out in most places, and the stairs were even worse.

Ann shimmied up an old downspout, which she had bolted back into place. Some extra dirt, scuffing, and a sprinkle of an oxidizer had made the bolts look as old as the rest of the house and ready to fall out. She gained the second floor and climbed into a window, ducking out of sight as quickly as possible. The floor up here was stronger, but not entirely secure.

Ann crept into a small bathroom, squinting against the dark. Something felt wrong. Some sense of presence in the air, though all was silent but for her own breath. Ann closed her eyes, listening carefully as she stepped forward into the dark.

The floor. She hesitated, and tested again. A board that all but screamed when stepped on barely squeaked. Ann stepped back quickly and fumbled a flashlight from her pocket. Its tiny cone of light illuminated the room.

The figure stood, stooped over, in the bathroom. It was a good two and a half meters tall, head bumping the ceiling. It leaned down into the light, glaring at Ann.

It was ugly. Hideously so. Not a kind of ugliness that a person could be born to, but one that had to have been manufactured. The echoes of human features remained in the figure's face, but any previous identity or sex had been obliterated. Scraps of skin stretched tight between smooth, hard plastic plates, the only sign in its face that it had even once been human. Its nose was gone, its mouth sealed over. Blank polarized caps covered its eye sockets. No hair, just a dark metallic cowling, and ears that had been trimmed back to the barest protrusion with some stiff fabric material stretched over the openings.

The figure had been as utterly dehumanized as possible while remaining recognizably human.

“Hello, Number Four.” The words were flat and monotone, the voice that of a corpse. Nothing moved on its blank face. Not a twitch.

Ann Onymous, pt. 3, 407 words

2010-06-26T00:08:00.000-04:00

“Shit!”

Something whirred close by overhead. Ann ducked in reflex as she ran – and drew to a hard stop as an entire landing from the fire escape crashed into the rooftop before her, the iron twisting and breaking with the impact. Ann threw another look over her shoulder, and saw the huge figure hauling more of the fire escape up and snapping off pieces of the old iron. A chunk of railing went flying, and Ann barely dove out of the way in time.

One hand ducked into a coat pocket, producing another little toy. Ann popped a switch and let fly before turning away and shielding her ears.

The flashbang went off with a piercing concussion, and the lenses of Ann's goggles polarized briefly against the sudden flare. She kept moving, and toy number three came out of yet another pocket. At the roof's edge, she slapped a palm-sized metal disc against the rooftop. An explosive bolt went off. A thin cable unwound steadily as she took one end and slipped over the edge, rappelling down the side of the building.

Dropping the last ten feet, Ann landed at a run. Other pedestrians barely noticed her until she was past, bowling them over in her wake. More and rougher debris crunched underfoot here at ground level, but she ignored it. Her feet could hurt after she got away from the... the thing chasing her.

God damn it, it should have been a routine night. How did they even know where she was going to hit? But they had, and this thing had been lurking in the shadows, waiting for her. It had been well-armed with several firearms and a full dozen knives, but had spent its ammunition wastefully and flung the knives from an absurd distance before closing. As if it had wanted to get the distance out of the way and tear into Ann with its bare hands.

Ann chanced a look back, quickly scanning the rooftops. Nothing unusual, no strange shadows crouched overlooking the street. The figure was nowhere in sight. Right. Time to get lost.

One of her stashes of normal clothing was nearby. She could drop off the camo coat and contraband hardware, walk out in boots and a jacket like any normal person, with nothing on her to show that she was anything but another wage-slave out to pick up a late dinner on the way home from work.

Ann Onymous, pt. 2, 382 words

2010-06-25T01:30:00.000-04:00

They were a fake-out move, designed to scarecrow people into compliance when they saw one whistling by. They were thrown out on the cheap so the cops could look like they were watching places that hadn't yet been properly hooked into the surveillance society. Places like this neighborhood, which looked like the decaying ruins of the last century and were low on the priority list for proper surveillance. Nobody rich lived or worked here, after all, so who cared?

But there were other drones, in the same shells but with far better imaging equipment. Sent out on the rare occasions they actually needed to find someone in places like this. Rare occasions like right now.

And so Ann ran.

The rooftops were the worst place to hide from hovering drones, up top of everything and in clear view. But they were also the fastest way around. Ann needed to gain ground more than she needed to duck out of sight. Losing the drones was the easy part. It was amazing how well some of these old buildings could hide a thermal image, giving her a chance to change her clothes and then slip out and join the masses on the street. The real problem was coming up behind her.

Ann kipped up onto the next building with the aid of a battered air conditioning unit. At the same time, a loud crash came behind her, the fire escape screaming as it tore away from its anchors. Ann dared a glance back, wished she hadn't. The figure chasing her was huge, as if someone had slimmed down a gorilla just enough to force it into a black bodysuit that still looked ready to burst at the seams.

It was fast, too. On a level stretch, Ann could outpace it, but every obstacle turned into an advantage for it. It could jump higher and climb better, so that anything that slowed Ann even for a second let it get that much closer.

It should have been a routine night. Simple smash and grab, emphasis on the smash. And maybe a little boom too, for that matter. The firebomb still jostled in one of her coat pockets, one of a variety of little toys which made life easier for her and hard on someone else.

Ann Onymous, pt. 1, 422 words

2010-06-24T00:12:00.000-04:00

Don't stop. Don't think. Just run. You know this part of the city like the back of your hand, you know it better than anyone, just run.

Ann ran. Loose stones and stray bits of broken glass and plastic ground underfoot. Only a thin polymer mesh kept the debris from cutting her soles open, one that conformed to her feet like a second skin. Not that it wasn't uncomfortable to run over broken glass or old nails anyway, but the tactile sense and balance she'd never get out of boots or even just shoes more than made up for it.

Like right now...

She raced across rooftops, old buildings jammed together like sardines. Ahead, a street divided this building from the next. She didn't even think about it, placing her feet through instinct and feel, and pushed off. The old concrete scraped against her soles.

And she landed, foot touching down on the arching neck of a streetlamp. It shook and jerked under her weight, and she kicked off again from the head of the lamp. Cars whizzed by beneath, oblivious to Ann scrambling and leaping like some crazed monkey over their heads.

The streetlamp on the other side of the road shook harder but held, taking Ann's weight when she snagged the neck. She crabbed sideways, hand-over-hand, until she could haul herself up along the pole and, after a moment spent regaining her breath and balance, leaped again. An ancient fire escape creaked and groaned as she snagged an iron railing, then scrambled up the steps to the rooftop.

Anywhere else in the city, she would have had to worry about thermal imaging and closed-circuit cameras watching her every move. A broad scarf and goggles baffled facial recognition software, and a pattern-shifting knee-length camo coat messed with programs designed to pick out the human form and the contrast of moving objects against a static background. A translucent green plastic hood had been drawn tight over her head, keeping her hair down and blanking any color. One could barely even make out her skin tone.

Anywhere else in the city, the outfit would have immediately picked her out from the crowd, an extreme of Privacy Vogue that few cared to match. Everyone would have noticed, even as it anonymized her.

In this part of the city, it was noticeable because it was unnecessary. Sensor drones skimmed by overhead, but they were few and far between, and their optics sucked. Ann knew, from knocking one out of the sky and cracking it open.

Trigger Event: Graduation, pt. 2, 435 words

2010-06-23T01:50:00.000-04:00

The first thing you saw clearly was the guy up in the tree, someone from your graduating class. He stood on a thick branch, one hand still holding to the trunk. Below, the rest of the class were gathered around the bonfire, watching him, and all of them were drumming. Some on the ground, or on their own thighs, or the backs of books. There were even some teachers there, and other adults you didn't recognize. And it wasn't some repetitive thud-thud-thud without variation,
but a complicated, cycling pattern. Something that had taken serious practice. None of them had noticed you yet.

The one up in the tree, one of three different Matts in your class, stepped off the branch – and into open air. His bare foot took his weight, supported on nothing, and then he took another step, and another, until he was walking in midair.

You almost ran out there to join them, ecstatic at the impossible sight. Instead? Just as you set one foot forward, so did he, and it went out from under him. He fell, with a short but sharp scream, and crunched to the ground. His head turned the wrong way. Very wrong.

The others barely noticed. One got up and started climbing the same tree, and the drumming adjusted to pick up his missing part. At the same branch, he stepped off into thin air... and fell to join the dead Matt on the ground below. One by one, each of the other students got up and took their turn. A handful made it to another tree and climbed back down, but many, many fell and joined the others.

By the time everyone had taken their turn, and the bodies disposed of in the bonfire – now grown huge and bloated with flesh and fresh wood – the night sky was starting to gray in the east. Remembering overheard stories of older siblings “gone away to college” and never coming back even during summer breaks, you bolted before anyone could spot you in the growing light.

Away at college, you worked to put the town firmly out of your mind. However, your sister frequently called you up, lonely because now she had nobody there but your parents to even talk to. Her calls gradually took on a different tone at the beginning of the spring semester, of growing acceptance amongst the others. You were still in the middle of exams when high school graduation came around, and you tried to warn her off from the after-party. Instead, she just laughed at your story and hung up

Trigger Event: Graduation, pt. 1, 420 words

2010-06-22T05:41:00.001-04:00

Your older brother was a real fuck-up. Drugs, petty theft, got a girl pregnant, the works. He finally went just a step too far and ended up dead one day, so your parents finally decided it was time to take you and your little sister out of the city. Your family ended up in a small town in the ass end of nowhere, chosen because the school was supposed to be pretty good.

Well, a little scandal with state exams being opened early and administered as “practice tests” put the lie to that, but your family couldn't afford to move again. The drug problem was about as bad as the city, too, only the harder stuff wasn't easy to find anymore – everyone was too poor for the area to be a good market, but there was plenty of weed grown in someone's unused field and people could still get high off cough medicine. And there were more than a few teenage pregnancies around, too.

Not that you were at much risk of getting caught up in that stuff. Most of the people were related in some way, mostly cousins and through marriage, but it boiled down to the simple fact that your family were outsiders. You knew the pot was around, but it's not like anyone told you about it. Nobody liked you enough for an opportunity to become a teenage parent. Parties? Right out. Hell, you and your sister were lucky to find a seat on the school bus most days. It got to the point where you insisted your parents help pay for a car in her name instead of yours so she didn't have to get stuck on the bus again once you graduated a year ahead of her.

In other words, and not to put too fine a point on it, growing up in small-town America sucked. And you were all too happy to get out. But you were still curious about what you missed out on, so when you caught wind of one last party being held after graduation, you decided to crash it.

The strange music was the first sign that something was wrong. Not something issuing from somebody's radio or boombox or any speakers at all, but a rhythmic drumming sound. You could see the faint glow of a bonfire in the distance as well. It was all on the other side of a hill, a small depression up against the edge of somebody's private property where the trees grew wild.

Diplomaths, 572 words

2010-06-14T01:49:00.000-04:00

Near the border of the Kingdom of Wax, a small fiefdom has carved out a safe existence in the Nowheres. Treaties keep the smothering wax at bay for the lord of the land, Sir Pinski, has sworn fealty to the King. Sir Pinski has demonstrated the utility he offers the Wax King in his independence, as his soldiers and agents are more powerful and intelligent than they would be if smothered under a layer of wax.

Sir Pinski's greatest asset, however, is that he is actually one of the Awake. He was a mathematician and physicist in his slumbering life, and grew obsessed with esoteric maths designed to explore and explain higher-dimensional reality. Instead of string theory, however, what Pinski found was that his models kept leading to a much different interpretation of reality. One that bordered on the magical, even more so than the wildest dreams of quantum "spooky action" and nonlocalized phenomena. No matter how he checked and double-checked his models, no matter what he did, following the evidence led to the same conclusions. Pinski refrained from publishing his discoveries, but the stress and pressure of keeping such a secret destroyed him (and his career) as surely as revealing them would have, if in a less dramatic fashion.

He abandoned his own research and went to work with others, seeing if they ended up with the same discoveries. Not one of them did, and he jumped from project to project only to find the same results. Wrapped up in doubts about his own sanity, Sir Pinski finally Awakened and realized the magical world hiding around him all this time, heretofore caught only in his models. He tried to flee from the realization of his research, burning all the notes and evidence he'd built up on his model, but the Mad City still swallowed him up just as it has so many others.

Sir Pinski's power comes from Math. Or rather, it comes from the insane mathematics he constructed around the true shape of reality. He can bend and manipulate the mathematical laws underlying the Mad City, shifting space and writing new equations to serve his needs. One of his most valuable creations with this power has been the Diplomath, a living equation that he sends as emissary to other realms in the Nowheres. The Diplomaths have argued and negotiated many the beneficial arrangement and treaty for Sir Pinski, giving him great power in a short time.

The average Diplomath appears to be a complex arrangement of interconnected numbers and symbols, floating free a few inches above the ground. Each is two-dimensional, apparently the writing stripped off a page and expanded until it is almost half as tall as a human, and is suffused with a faint violet light. They can talk, though they have no visible mouths, and can see and hear without eyes or ears. They are sturdy to survive the journeys to foreign courts in the Nowheres, but their real power arises in debate and negotiation. Every one is a complete, solved equation that describes in intricate detail the utter mathematical certainty of their agenda, as they were written by their lord. They may not be swayed from their agenda, and surviving a debate with them with your own viewpoint intact is beyond most normal humans and more than a few Nightmares. The only surefire way of getting past them in an argument is not to have it.

Malefactor, 610 words

2010-06-13T05:54:00.001-04:00

Out in the far reaches of the Mad City, beyond District Thirteen and the patrol routes of Officer Tock's clockwork bobbies, beyond the reach of the Tacks Man, a wide swath of the City lies in ruins. Not the product of some earthquake or fire, some war or storm, the area has been decaying slowly for decades simply because nobody cares about it anymore. Even in the Mad City, urban decay can set in and reduce a formerly vibrant neighborhood to a pocket ghost town. Wild Nightmares and other, stranger monsters have taken up residence in the ruins of the Abandoned District, stalking and squabbling over the territory like feral cats. Over time, the District has been pushed steadily farther towards the edges of the City, and may someday sink into the Nowheres or disintegrate entirely. Though this may have recently changed.

Rumors spread of strange things coming out of the Abandoned District, the native Nightmares fleeing ahead of the expanding border of a new presence staking out its territory. Officer Tock has sent men to investigate, clockwork coppers and conscripted deputies both, but none have returned. The Tacks Man has refused to send his minions forth, though he claims to know nothing of what happens there. Not even the Paper Boys will investigate, having already lost several of their own in hunting down the story, to no avail. All that returns from the Abandoned District is rumor and a cold wind tinged with the scent of machine oil.

In the heart of the Abandoned District, a new power has taken root. Some strange Nightmare assuming the shape of a factory has begun to scavenge and smelt the very substance of the City, forging it into a new urban landscape. This area of the City is slowly being recast into a Streamline and Googie aesthetic, seen through a dark Gothic lens - an anachronistic unfuture seen by midnight. The architect of this change is the Malefactor.

Despite the zeerust futurism of the Malefactor's work, everything has an oppressive air of conformity and sameness. Every sweeping line, every glass panel and neon highlight is the same from building to building, devised by the same algorithms and cut by the same machinery. The novelty of the architecture wears off quickly, once one realizes that there is no end to this but that everything becomes as the Malefactor desires.

The stuff of the Mad City is not all that the Malefactor smelts and reforges. In its factory bowels, the Malefactor gathers up cast-off dreams and memories, captured Nightmares and locals, and especially the Awake. The more deviant, the more the Malefactor desires it. In the same facilities that somehow recast ruined brick and concrete into chrome and glass and stucco, these deviant memories and beings are smelted down and molded into a new form. These monochrome singlesuited unFuture Men are the servitors of the Malefactor, gathering its materials and enacting its will. Though they are individually unremarkable, the Malefactor has many to spare. A single Awakened can produce a small horde of unFuture Men from the smelted power of her madness, so the costs are usually returned amply.

And as its domain expands, so too does the Malefactor. The factory complex has subsumed more and more of the new buildings, and they produce faster and faster. Each of these buildings is a hazard in and of itself and a potential host for the Malefactor's consciousness should the core building be destroyed. Nothing short of razing its entire domain is likely to bring it to a complete halt. If its growth goes unchecked, it may well expand out to encompass the Mad City someday.

Shadow, pt. 3, 426 words

2010-06-12T17:11:00.002-04:00

“That’s different,” he said. “Those are just…”

Animals? Flesh is flesh. Blood is blood. Life is life. You’re not destroying it, Andrew. You’re just moving it around.

“I… I can’t…”

You’re dying by inches, Andrew. You’ll die slowly and painfully, freezing from the inside out. You’ll waste all you did with your life, all you learned, for something that will probably never turn out to any good? Look at this world, Andrew. Your child will never be great. At best, he’ll just be another statistic. At worst… The shadow’s words trailed off, and it shrugged.

“So instead of me freezing, it’ll be Daniel?” Andrew’s voice had gone hollow, and his throat was dry.

No, he won’t. He’ll just die peacefully in his sleep. Painlessly. He’s just a baby, he won’t live through the shock. But it’ll be a mercy, to spare him from this cold world.

Andrew closed his stinging eyes. The battle was already lost, but he tried to rally one last time. “I can’t. I don’t know how to…”

The shadow grinned again, all teeth and points. I do. I can give you the knowledge, and I can give you the ability.

And Andrew knew. He knew how easy it would be to crack open his son’s shell and take what he wanted. A strange warmth passed through him. More important than just knowing, he had the strength.

Andrew reached down and touched his son’s forehead. The shadow mirrored his gesture. Do it.

“Good night, Daniel,” he whispered.

Something was boiling on the stove. Smelled like pasta. Andrew looked over at Michelle at the kitchen table, reading a book and waiting. “Shelly, hon?” he called quietly, his voice tinged with concern and fear.

She looked up from her book. “Andrew? Is something wrong?”

Andrew closed his eyes, looking pained. “Daniel… I think he stopped breathing. He’s cold.”

Before he had finished, Michelle had sprung from the chair, her book flapping and thudding to the floor. “Daniel!” she cried, rushing past Andrew to the child’s room. After a moment, she yelled out, “Andrew, call nine-one-one!”

Andrew was already slipping on his shoes and pulling on his coat. He patted his pocket, felt the reassuring weight of his wallet. He paused, then turned on the cordless and dialed the three numbers. He set it down on the table while it rang.

“Nine-one-one. Hello? Hello…?”

The screen door shut quietly, and Andrew began walking down the street. He did not stop for quite some time.

Shadow, pt. 2, 413 words

2010-06-11T02:37:00.003-04:00

Before two weeks ago. He still did not know what she had done. Nor, really, who she even was. But she had cracked him open and took out what was inside, and now everything felt so cold. And his shadow was talking to him.

“She must’ve just drugged me,” he whispered. “I’m just feeling some of the side-effects still.” Even as he said it, he knew he was just lying to himself.

Poor little Andy, the shadow mocked. Got his spirit stolen and doesn’t know what to do. Are your fingers numb yet? How about your toes? Your heart certainly is. Never knew a chill could cut that deep, did you? It grinned, displaying countless pointed teeth.

Andrew reached out as if to grab at the shadow’s neck, but pulled his hands back after a moment when he realized what he was doing. He was trying to strangle a shadow, for Heaven’s sake.

The shadow laughed derisively, so loud that Andrew was sure Michelle must have heard. Instead, he just heard her close the tap in the kitchen. Daniel did not even twitch.

Go ahead and take it, Andrew. It’s right there waiting for you. You brought it into the world, why shouldn’t you use it?

Andrew leaned away from his shadow. The very idea reached through the apathy that had wrapped around him like a heavy blanket, and he felt the bile in the back of his throat. “It’s my son. I can’t just—”

Of course you can, the shadow cut him off. Its voice was thick with disdain. You just believe you don’t want to. You want to believe that this is bad, and that I am bad for suggesting it. I am you, Andrew. And the only thing bad about this is that you aren’t willing to ensure your own survival, since we both know that this problem of yours will end you if you don’t do something about it.

“It is bad! It is wrong!” Andrew was not yet shouting, but realized he was getting loud, and lowered his voice. “I can’t do that to my own child!”

Somehow, the shadow sneered. Then go, and pretend nothing’s wrong. Eat your dinner with her. Pen a pig or cow in one place for all its life, then knock it on the head and bleed it dry. Boil a lobster alive in its shell. Chop a chicken’s head off and let its body spasm, running all—

Shadow, pt. 1, 392 words

2010-06-10T01:46:00.000-04:00

Andrew looked down at the sleeping infant. He leaned carefully against the side of the crib. His son had finally fallen asleep, and Andrew was grateful for the silence. It seemed like the child had been screaming nonstop since he was brought home several days before. Andrew shivered slightly despite the room’s warmth, and crossed his arms.

Michelle stepped into the room, watching her husband watch Daniel. She was glad he was finally taking an interest again. He had seemed so distant the past couple weeks, even when she had gone into labor. She cleared her throat, and Andrew turned around.

“Are you sure you don’t want any dinner,” she asked, concern edging into her voice.

Do it. Andrew shook his head. “I’m sure. Don’t make anything for me. I’m not hungry.” His voice was a flat monotone, much as it had been in the past weeks. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he should be offering to prepare the meal for her. Oh well.

“Okay,” she said, her tone lowering into doubt as she stepped back out into the hallway. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

Take it. Andrew nodded, already turning to look back at the infant as Michelle left. Kill it. “I’ll let you know,” he said, already trailing off and only really mumbling it to himself. Consume it.

He frowned, looking around to make sure Michelle was gone. He could already hear her in the kitchen. “Shut up,” he hissed.

Take it. Take it take it take it take it—

“Shut up,” he repeated, louder. Daniel stirred a little, but settled back into sleep. He stared down not at his child, but at the shadow he cast over the child. He swore he could make out distinct features in the shadow’s depths. Without light, fangs still gleamed.

You want it. You need it. Take it. Fill that hole.

“I’m going insane,” Andrew muttered. “You’re not real. Just because I’ve heard you for the last two weeks doesn’t mean you’re real.”

I’m as real as you are. The shadow grinned. Andrew did not move, but the shadow uncrossed its arms and reached out, as if stroking Daniel’s cheek. As real as he is. I’ve always been here, Andrew. You just couldn’t hear me before.

Songspinners, 417 words

2010-06-09T01:12:00.000-04:00

In the farthest regions of the Nowheres, where the howling wind cuts like a knife, there are places where even the sound of the wind is overwhelmed. There, strange haunting melodies twist and weave amongst the rocky pillars in the abject darkness, confusing all sense of direction for anyone not born to these songs. There, creatures made of horrid song and razor edges tend the skeins of music that define their realm. There, the Songspinners live.

Left alone, Songspinners are some of the more passive denizens of the Nowheres. They tend to the well-being of their home, harvesting living song out of the air and using it to create silken webs of incredible complexity and beauty. The webs can be difficult for an outsider to comprehend, as they do not conform to the mere four dimensions of normal reality. The rare few visitors to their realm invariably come away with headaches, and the occasional waking hallucination as their minds attempt to come to grips with the unreal geometry of the spiders' webs. Navigation through these webs is all but impossible for a normal human mind, and difficult even for the unhinged.

Most Songspinners have a passing resemblance to humans, at least on first glance. They stand almost six feet tall and are skeletally thin, with humanoid legs and arms. However, they also possess two extra sets of segmented, chitinous arms that terminate in razor-sharp claws. When they travel beyond their homes, they tend to cover up and hide the extra limbs folded against their bodies. Their faces are a feral melding of the human skull with a spider's mandibles, though they can force the shape into that of a normal (if lean and angular) human face. They still have to hide their compound eyes behind sunglasses. When angered, their claws can tear through flesh like butter.

In place of a normal thorax, a Songspinner instead has a pair of harp-like arrangements mounted along a spinal column. Thick metallic strings pluck and play in a constant melody, though an individual's song is incomplete. Instead, each Songspinner is born in a small group called a clutch, composed of at least three hatched from the same batch of eggs. The clutch play their songs together in a complete piece, and it is also how they communicate with one another. Technically speaking, any given clutch is a single mind distributed in multiple bodies. The death of one is a harsh blow to the others, one from which they never quite recover.

Machinations, 492 words

2010-06-08T01:19:00.000-04:00

Machinations are a strange new thing on the streets of the Mad City. Where so much of the City and its inhabitants seems outdated, echoes of the fears of bygone times, these creatures are an incursion as if from the future or an alternate past. The Machinations are Nightmares of technology, percolating and growing in the collective unconscious since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. Only recently have they begun to wander the Mad City, given new life by modern fears of science and technology.

No two Machinations look exactly alike. Each is a ramshackle construction of seemingly random parts that just barely holds itself together. Steam engines, car engines, and other power sources lie at the heart of each, though none have ever seen one take in any kind of fuel. Their bodies look to have been assembled from whatever was at hand in a junkyard, and they clatter around on uneven limbs. Some teeter on two legs, others stumble on three or four, and some skitter around on more legs than a spider. But all are festooned in ragged pieces of steel, with claws and spikes and armored ridges that have been hauled from the same junkyard and bolted onto their frames.

The smallest Machinations are by far the most common, about the size of a small pony. They are solitary creatures that stake out a territory and scavenge junk to augment themselves, and sometimes attack other Nightmares and locals. Many are dismembered after misjudging the strength of their prey, but not before more than a few weaker travelers are caught out on their own. They hide in dark alleys, sewer entrances, and other secretive lairs where they can spend the time fitting new parts to their frames. Larger Machinations are vastly more dangerous, with a more streamlined construction accomplished through constant experimentation. Inefficiency is slowly cut out as they rebuild themselves, and they can pack more power into their frames. They add extra equipment and grow larger to gain more raw power as well (increasing their Pain scores gradually as well). The largest known Machinations are the size of small tanks, but fight like giant armored cats.

What few know is that not all Machinations modify themselves for technical supremacy. Instead, they hunt and harvest locals and some Nightmares to study and co-opt organic structures. Most who follow this path modify their bodies into the humanoid form, acquiring smaller power sources that will fit into a human-sized chest cavity. Over time, they replace and cover various parts with living tissues, until they are a mechanical skeleton and machine "organs" surrounded by flesh. Some have to replace their flesh regularly, but others devise how to keep organic support systems running so they can blend into organic society perfectly. The true population of these Machinations is as yet unknown, and while some readily give themselves away with their rudimentary social skills, others have learned how to imitate normal human behavior.

Inkubus, 409 words

2010-06-07T01:21:00.000-04:00

The Inkubus is a statuesque figure, reminiscent of the Classic male ideal in build and proportions. However, unlike the statues it resembles, its flesh is a perfect black - subtly glossy under direct light but otherwise apparently matte black. Despite this appearance, one can usually make out distinct features despite everything being rendered in black on black. They rarely seem to move, instead assuming poses of grace or power and remaining in that position for hours or even days at a time. Many frequently mistake them for statuary as a result. When they descend from their poses to travel amongst the people of the Mad City, however, they move with the fluid agility of a stalking cat. All but the most powerful Nightmares keep well clear when an Inkubus is on the hunt.

Though it looks to be carved of some kind of living black marble, an Inkubus is a creature of living liquid - as its name suggests, it is made of animate ink. When it wishes, it can abandon its solid form to pool and flow along the cobblestone streets of the City, where few will notice a smear of foul water flowing through the gutters. It takes advantage of its form in a fight, flowing around attacks that could harm it and allowing others to pass through. In such a case, even if its prey has escaped, the Inkubus has often stained its prey with some of its own body, and can follow that stain anywhere it wishes . It is tireless, and its fluid form allows it to slip past many barriers that would be otherwise impassable.

An Inkubus is also something of a social mimic. Much of their time spent imitating statues is used to observe others. As such, though the Nightmare is only barely more intelligent than a wolf or tiger, it can learn and imitate the patterns of social behavior. It is not an innovator, so if it has not observed how to behave in a particular situation, it cannot devise a way to behave. If caught out, it may attack or retreat depending on how hungry it actually is and how likely action is to bring about undesirable consequences (in its limited judgment). Unfortunately, several newcomers to the Mad City and more than a few locals have been taken in by the dreadfully handsome figure that offers assistance or a swift seduction, and have been drowned in ink as a result.

Sakura Blossom, 519 words

2010-06-03T00:07:00.001-04:00

High on the Rooftop Jungle, in a small area well away from the worst runs of the Paper Boys and the Roof Rats, a small park is kept as a respite from the horrors of the Mad City. There, the keeper tends to her flowers and trees, welcoming wanderers with open arms and invitations to explore her Hanging Gardens.

The name is quite literal: the Hanging Gardens look as if someone had taken a small city park and inverted everything from the topsoil up to the tops of the trees. A thick layer of soil hangs in the air some twenty feet up, covered in lush grass and beautiful flowers, and out of which sprouts the inverted trees that grow towards the ground below them. The vast majority of these trees are Japanese cherry blossom trees, though other flowering trees are scattered around as well. The blossoms are in a constant state of growth and shedding, with petals falling all around — some to the "ground" of the Rooftop Jungle, some to the layer of soil above. There is even a faint glow that suffuses the area, as if the sun is just on the cusp of dawn.

The keeper is, like the Wax King, not obviously either Nightmare nor human. Her appearance strongly suggests it, but her manner is too polite and kindly for many to take her as a Nightmare. The name she gives is Sakura Blossom, though rumor maintains that it is not the only name to which she responds. She is a short, slender woman apparently made of wood, bark, leaves, and sakura petals, wearing a silk kimono that does not quite fit any of the common women's styles. In all ways she is polite, deferential, and calm right up to the point of stereotypical feminine passivity. Blossom never has a harsh thing to say to or about anyone, dedicating her life to the tranquility of the garden.

Even when questioned with pointed, direct answers, she seems literally unable to conceive of the horrors that throng through the Mad City — or even through the City Slumbering, where mere humans commit no end of violence upon one another. The most horrifying facts and arguments are swiftly rationalized away, and if there are any holes in her logic, the peace and serenity of the Gardens is often enough to allow such to pass uncommented upon.

For some, the peace of the Gardens is overwhelming. Whether it is some power of Blossom's or the influence of the Gardens, those who wander too deeply amongst the trees run the risk of being ensnared by the soothing atmosphere. For at the heart of the Hanging Gardens, there one can find the ultimate peace. There, the saplings grow in the shape of nooses, hanging freely from the soil above. They each await a single weary soul, ready to set aside the burden of being Awake, trading a harsh life for a peaceful death. Once a sapling has snared someone, the tree grows down and through the person's body, encapsulating them for all time.

And the Gardens grow a little larger.

Blind Knights and Match Girls, 560 words

2010-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

The Blind Knights are warriors in the service of the Wax King, who appear to be human but for the candles that burn blue in their empty eye sockets. The candles do not go out until the Blind Knight dies… but sometimes the Blind Knight dies because the candles go out. This is a rare circumstance, one that is more rumor than fact, for few have ever seen it and survived to tell the tale, for whatever reason.

Even more rarely, a Blind Knight survives his candles going out by fueling their flame with his own flesh. After a short time, they are burned from top to bottom, covered in a "shell" of crisped, blackened skin and subcutaneous fat. They wear midnight-black armor and hide their visages behind closed helms, but the stench of charred flesh never leaves their presence. Fire follows in their footsteps everywhere they go, with a trail of cinders and smoke at their heels. These rare few become Blackguards.

Blackguards are the most dangerous of the Wax King's minions, but also the rarest. He is loath to spend any needlessly, reserving them for the most important tasks. As the most important tasks are also the most deadly, the attrition rate is still high amongst their ranks.

Despite their heavy plate armor, they can move in near-perfect silence should they so wish, and very frequently their duties require it of them. However, their most potent power is not their silence, swords, or the word of the Wax King, but their power over shadows. When the fire burns out, all that is left is darkness. So to it is with the Blackguards, who may move through shadow as one might walk through a door. This power is not unlimited, but in the lightless depths of the Nowheres, they wax mighty.

***

The Match Girls are the Mad City's female counterparts to the Paper Boys. Outdated and anachronistic, they frequently inspire pity in the foolish and unwary. They look like little girls made out of bundles upon bundles of matches, tied together by fraying white string. Often, the actual match heads are hidden by the ends of the next bundle up, so they appear to be made out of simple wood. However, the faint smell of sulfur follows them wherever they go, just noticeable enough to be unnerving. They mostly manage to cover it up with the musty, moth-balls smell of the tattered old dresses they wear, in small-children fashions from mid-Victorian England, though not completely. They're most often found wandering the streets of the City, especially when the weather has turned cold, trying to find places to hide from the biting wind and sobbing quietly to themselves.

This act is just that. An act. They are Nightmares just as much as any other, and they seek to turn others into them. Alone, a Match Girl is little threat. But in groups, they can be deadly, and there's almost always another hiding somewhere nearby.

When they strike, Match Girls burn. They don't have to strike themselves on anything, they simply come alight and attack. Their flames are not real fire, however; they sear not flesh but the spirit, not skin but the soul. A Match Girl can burn away your memories and personality until you become like them, just another faceless urchin on the streets trying to escape the cold...

Gray Hound, 445 words

2010-06-01T01:04:00.000-04:00

A Gray Hound resembles an old black-and-white cartoon of a dog. Most are larger breeds, never any smaller than a beagle. They are obviously two-dimensional and move jerkily, as if several frames of animation are missing from every motion. Gray Hounds are usually loners, though rarely packs of them form and rampage across their chosen territory in the Mad City until they anger a more powerful Nightmare, who breaks up the pack.

An individual Hound is terribly dangerous on its own, more than most Sleepers could hope to contend with. Their jerky, uneven movements hide a frightful turn of speed, and their teeth sink into a person's flesh just as well as a real dog's would. The worst part of a Gray Hound's attack, however, is that anyone bit is drawn into the same colorless, two-dimensional existence. As the Hound savages a person, their victim slowly loses all color and substance. If they escape, a victim can eventually heal the harm done, but it's not unheard of for someone to bear some mark of the experience forever after - hair turned solid black or white, a limb turning into a crudely-drawn monochrome outline, or the like.

Savage packs organize around the fiercest, most powerful Hound in a territory. Their presence draws the color out of everything, until the immediate neighborhood is a sea of uniform gray. They tend to patrol the territory in sets of two or three, and drag any kills back to the den for the pack to share - and for the alpha to get first dibs.

The alpha of a pack draws strength from its position, and is mightier than the other Hounds. As well, an alpha has far greater control over its two-dimensional form. While normal Gray Hounds still move and act as if they were three-dimensional creatures, the pack alpha can take advantage of its form to pass through hair-thin cracks and openings. Attempts to escape and hide from the alpha are therefore much more difficult than normal, as only the most perfect barriers can keep them out, and they can take shortcuts impossible to three-dimensional beings.

Rumor holds that the Tacks Man is always interested in acquiring captured Gray Hounds, especially alphas. Nobody's quite sure how to take him up on the offer, and it may not be wise to do so: rumor also holds that he knows how to turn them into new Needle Noses. But the rewards can be great, too - hefty bounties of wax coin, or perhaps a return of something taken in an earlier encounter with the Tacks Man. And what you get doesn't necessarily have to be something that you'd originally lost.

Cuckoo Flock, 377 words

2010-05-31T01:40:00.000-04:00

The Cuckoo Flock looks like a swarm of tiny clocks of many designs, all flying on feathered wings. Individually, a given Cuckoo is a harmless pest, and will flee anything much larger than a house cat. It is when they gather together into a Flock that they become dangerous.

A Flock is a Cuckoo mating swarm, which gathers together on some arcane yet precisely-kept schedule. Much as salmon must swim upstream to their original spawning grounds, each Swarm keeps its parents' schedule. A small Flock in full mating frenzy is of little danger, while larger Flocks are a much greater threat to anyone in the surroundings. This is because of how they raise their young.

Which is to say, they don't. Cuckoo Flocks are psychic brood parasites, like their avian namesakes. Once the mating is complete, the Flock will lay their eggs in the minds of everyone in the immediate proximity, and then die off. A small Flock may use one or two people as a nest, while the largest Flocks can nest their eggs in the minds of dozens of people. Few know they've been compromised until the eggs shortly hatch. When the eggs hatch, the fledgling Cuckoos unseat the host's consciousness and take over the body, killing the original personality.

For a time that may last weeks or even months, the host becomes as a local in the Mad City, living only to fill its role. They transform into gray-suited, gray-faced businessmen that wander the City streets to and fro, going from place to place on precise schedules. If blocked, they walk around the obstacle. If constrained, they fight fiercely to get away and resume their schedules. They don't stop to talk, eat, or drink unless it's part of the schedule, and even then they'll do the exact same thing day after day — even if there's nobody to talk to or nothing to consume, they say what they have to or go through the motions of eating the same foods over and over again.

The cycle ends when the Cuckoos inside have finished their growth, having fed off such pure, dedicated precision in their host. They violently depart from their host's mind and scatter, to come together when next the mating cycle begins anew.

Superheroes, Peregrine, 484 words

2010-05-30T01:17:00.000-04:00

Peregrine is one of any number of well-endowed but unremarkable "flying bricks," heroes with the extremely common powers of invulnerability and strength. She's also picked up a nickname, whispered behind her back, of "Black Widow," not to be confused with the spider-themed villainess of the same moniker.

Peregrine has had bad luck with boyfriends all her life. It started in high school, when a relationship ended in an acrimonious argument the day after they first had sex. Her ex-boyfriend shed his bland "good student" habits and turned into something of a delinquent shortly thereafter. Her track record didn't show much improvement at all as she found her relationships falling apart through college and afterwards, but it didn't really get bad until after she developed her powers in a car accident, when a tanker truck full of strange glowing chemicals overturned on the highway. Her boyfriend at the time, a bit of a narcissistic prat, was in the same accident, and came out of a two-week coma with his own powers and some fresh scars that marred his "all-American" (read: unthreatening white male) good looks. He freaked out on her for coming out of the accident clean, especially since she had been driving, and blamed her for their crash into the truck. They broke up there and then, while he was still in his hospital bed, and she only learned a couple months later that he'd started using his powers to enable a crime spree.

Since then, Peregrine has had a string of failed relationships, in her mid-30s now with no signs of this bad luck stopping. Two of her previous boyfriends have died, one in a freak accident within a week of proposing to her, and the other murdered and stuffed into a fridge by a villain who she had crossed paths with one too many times. After recovering from that second death, she's kept her relationships restricted to her secret identity, so nobody can pin boyfriends to Peregrine again and repeat the act.

Peregrine is an unassumingly pretty woman in her civilian life, who "dresses to repress" -- thick nerd-glasses, baggy t-shirts and jeans (or bulky sweaters in the winter) that hide her figure, and her long brown hair tied back in a simple ponytail. In costume, she looks and acts completely different, with her hair flying free and flaunting her ample figure in a skin-tight suit that leaves little to the imagination. Unfortunately for her reputation, she's hardly the first to go this route with her public persona, meaning she's easily mistaken for other heroines with regularity. Still, she has a small but intense group of fans who admire her from afar and spend far too much time in online groups dedicated to discussing her latest exploits (including, in one infamous case, a wardrobe malfunction during a fight that revealed once and for all she doesn't wear a bra underneath her costume).

Superheroes, Science Jesus, 412 words

2010-05-29T01:42:00.002-04:00

Science Jesus is a science-fictional messiah, prophet of the Technocracy of Heaven. He claims to have appeared in a cloning tank, as a donated egg cell miraculously fertilized by no known sperm donor. When he was decanted at full growth, attended by the three wise heads of the operation, the infant blessed the AmnioSynth (tm) fluids in the tank, and the LikeLife brand artificial placenta was claimed as a holy relic by the representatives of a fringe religious order. When he reached his thirtieth year, he was struck by a holy vision that informed him that he was the only cloned son of God, and he went forth to spread the gospel anew.

Or so he claims. Most people think Science Jesus is a crank with a talent for engineering, but he has a dedicated -- if small -- following. He supposedly performs miracles wherever he goes, as well as preaching to any who will hear him. Two recent incidents of note have focused the public eye on him, however. The first was the Sermon on the Wal-Mart, where he got up on the roof of a department store in a small city in the middle of the business day and gave a lengthy exegesis on his transhumanist philosophy, attracting attention from everyone down in the parking lot.

The second event was when Science Jesus went down Wall Street and into the New York Stock Exchange and -- personally -- caused a near-riot. He drove the stock traders from the building, knocking things over and throwing them around in a general ruckus, all while decrying the use of so much technology to enable a "den of thieves," as he called them. Police arrived on the scene in short order, but he eluded capture. Some witnesses claimed he yelled "Not this time!" as he ran.

Science Jesus looks like a 30-something man of Middle-Eastern descent, with long and scraggly black hair, a heavy unkempt beard, and a long white lab coat that hides his emaciated frame. He looks like he hasn't slept in weeks, but moves with a frenetic energy, as if every second spent idle is a sin. Despite his unsavory appearance, people who've met him say that he has a light in his eyes like the burning passion of a true believer, one who's seen the divine and has to spread the word. If he really does perform his miracles by strange super-tech devices, nobody can see the devices on him.

Superheroes, LAN, pt. 2, 166 words

2010-05-29T01:41:00.000-04:00

Pariah has been playing the anti-hero ever since. He uses his powers more personally now, preferring to fight directly instead of providing support -- mostly because nobody else will have him on their side, now. He uses his telepathy to plant suggestions and fear into the minds of his foes, to erase his presence from their minds, and has started dabbling with mind control to turn enemies against one another. His technopathic powers have made almost any mechanical or electronic device more current than the transistor radio into his plaything, and he exploits them to near-lethal effect. Most modern facilities have the potential to become death traps in his hands. He's still not a very strong physical combatant, but he's been working on that. And his reputation is almost as effective now in cowing criminals as any power.

As soon as he finds out who set him up, though, there's going to be nothing holding him back from annihilating his foe's mind and destroying his body.

Superheroes, LAN, pt. 1, 424 words

2010-05-28T01:38:00.000-04:00

The hero once known as LAN is a telepath and a technopath both. Given his rare mixed gifts, he found a place aiding other heroes as a sort of one-man "mission control," offering the ultimate in secure communications and information support, and prospered.

Then, one day, he was found next to a pile of dead bodies.

The deceased were all members of a small organized crime family, apparently all murdered in spectacular fashion in an abandoned warehouse. An anonymous tip sent the police to find the bodies, and when they arrived, LAN was still standing over the pile of corpses. His costume had blood from the dead all over it, and forensics found only the finger- and footprints of LAN and the deceased in the area. There was too much blood everywhere, in such a horrendous mess, to make a good survey of genetic evidence.

The trial was a media circus. LAN had to go in with inhibitors strapped to his head to keep him from trying to influence the course of the case with his powers, and his real name was revealed and dragged through the mud. He maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and claimed that he had gotten a similarly anonymous tip -- telepathically, and breaking his personal "encryption" -- to investigate a meeting of local crime heads, a prime opportunity to listen in and learn any number of things to exploit against them. The tipster, he said, had offered some vague reason why he or she couldn't listen in him- or herself, so LAN decided to give it a look, because the opportunity sounded too good to pass up. LAN and his lawyer pushed the point that his registered powers had only minimal offensive and defensive capability, certainly not enough to murder a dozen men and women and come away unscathed. The prosecution countered by pointing out that many supers, for one reason or another, failed to register all their powers, or changes in their powers.

Prosecutors and the police blamed what they called the "CSI Effect" for LAN's eventual acquittal. The lack of comprehensive forensic evidence of LAN's participation in the murders -- his finger and footprints only established that he was there, and he claimed the blood on his costume was from trying to check for survivors -- put enough doubt in the jurors' minds as to whether he did it. He got off, but not cleanly. His reputation would tarnish him forever, and in a fit of melodrama he took on the new hero name of Pariah.

"Stormborn," The Golden Age, 423 words

2010-05-27T02:54:00.001-04:00

“We saw our future in the stars. Glorious, perfect, unchanging and unchangeable. Those of us born under a favored sign took power, set ourselves as high above common men as the stars were above us. Led by the greatest of us, we shaped an empire constant as the stars and unstoppable as the dawn.

“But the stars are not constant. A change came upon them, one that no man could read or foretell. It was not a sudden thing, but one in the workings for countless, unknown years. A fractional misalignment, and the powers of the starborn nobility began to fail. Not all at once, no, for such things were measured in generations, not years. The eldest starborn kept their potent powers, but their children were marginally weaker – so little as to be unnoticeable. But each generation weakened, and over the centuries the powers of the starborn became lesser things.

“And the stormborn waxed as the starborn waned. Disaster wracked the land, hurricanes and earthquakes and grand fires, empowering and multiplying the stormborn until there seemed as many with such powers as those without. The very heavens above seemed set to wipe the starborn from the face of the world, to be replaced by a mad rabble strengthened by cataclysm and war, the chaos in the stars reflected in the chaos of the world. What none knew was that the changes in the stars that had so weakened the starborn were also to sweep away the stormborn, once both powers were burned out.

“And so, on a river of blood, a golden age was borne away, the world swept clean for ages of stone, bronze, and iron. And the stars, silent in their heavenly reaches so far above, no more touched upon the fates of men.”

–The End of an Age, Jairal the Eunuch, last scion of House Cadin

***

"We told ourselves that we had found perfection. A golden age that would never end, an empire that would rule forever. We promised glories unsurpassed, a glorious future for all our children and their children, on nigh unto infinity.

“We should have known better.

“Perfection isn't what it used to be. The golden age is gilt and rust beneath. The empire is rotting from within. There are no glories, and the future is a lie. Infinity shall never be ours to grasp.

“And we have nobody to blame but ourselves.”

–His Immortal Resplendence, Emperor Taal the Solitary, first and last of the Methis Dynasty

"Stormborn," House Gorav, pt. 3, 410 words

2010-05-26T03:55:00.001-04:00

Every starborn of Gorav is raised with the sure knowledge that there is more grace and glory in the smallest act of creation than in the greatest acts of destruction, encouraging them all to seek acclaim through the pure exercise of their Art. This does not mean they’re all productive – by no means! – but it does mean they tend to keep out of harm’s way, discouraged from entering the military or even their own House’s armed forces. As a result, Gorav has a slight edge on most any other House but Jerit on the number of starborn in its ranks. While many of them are fools and spend far too much idle time (from the House’s perspective) on their personal interests, every so often one comes up with something in their dabbling that’s useful to the House and the Empire.

By the grace of their Art, House Gorav trades in expertise. It runs many of the most productive mines and quarries in the Empire, most under the auspices of the Empire – a percentage of the output kept free for Gorav’s own purposes in exchange for hefty taxes on any profits, and every speck of carmot uncovered. Gorav uses what it keeps for its private construction efforts, many commissioned by the Emperor. Other Houses also employ the Gorav for their own needs, building fortifications and maintaining the provincial roads. As well, the artisans of House Gorav produce many of the finest goods in the Empire, from the deadliest arms and armor down to the most exquisite bone china, all for noble and Imperial customers. House factors provide a similar service in producing goods meant for the common market, but do not hold as tight a monopoly over that as the House itself does on higher-quality goods.

The Sign of Gorav is the Salamander, a great lizard wreathed in flames. Salamanders have long been considered both auspicious and dangerous. Legend tells that they are responsible for giving fire to man, but they are also rapacious and all-consuming. To this day, many forest fires and other similar disasters are blamed on salamanders, to the point that those guilty of arson will claim a salamander did the deed if questioned. By the same token, the fire that they gave to man is also a metaphorical one: the spark of inspiration, the fire of industry. It is this which House Gorav claims for itself, promising the very future itself in their Art.

"Stormborn," House Gorav, pt. 2, 391 words

2010-05-25T02:05:00.000-04:00

Taal granted Ludo a rare title of merit, making him Lord Engineer and eligible for a marriage into one of the Houses. Despite the embarrassment of the revolt, Gorav snatched him up in a trice with a first marriage to one of the matriarch’s second-born half-sisters. With the matriarch’s untimely death without issue some years later (which, despite various efforts to prove otherwise, could not be pinned upon Ludo nor his wife), Ludo was in a position to assume the head of the House. The promise of his expertise in warfare and siegecraft, and the favor in which Taal held him, appealed to enough of the House elders to assure him sufficient support for his claim, especially as Gorav had long been looked down upon as a House of common craftsmen. As Ludo’s star has risen, so has that of House Gorav.

Under Lord Engineer Ludo, House Gorav has made some sharp changes to how it operates. More commoners than ever have been brought into positions of power, based on merit more than birth. The starborn of Gorav still hold a privileged place, but in the fashion of spoiled children given amusements to silence their tantrums. True power in Gorav’s affairs belongs to those who earn it. Ludo’s changes have painted Gorav further with the black brush of “commonness,” but their efficacy cannot be doubted. Only stormborn are barred from holding a high post. Ludo knows that granting them any true power will bring the wrath of Taal down upon his head.

The Art of Craft grants its bearers the natural talent of a master craftsman. A starborn of Gorav is preternaturally capable with any act of creation they set their minds to, from pottery to smithing, from sewing to carpentry. Clay almost seems to shape itself in their hands, and the grain of the wood always seems to flow perfectly for whatever they make. A Gorav starborn can fold and forge a fine steel blade in a fraction of the time that another swordsmith might, and almost from the moment they can first lift the hammer and tongs. Through various marriages to the Emperor and others of House Methis, they hold all the contracts on supplying Imperial arms and armor, be it the ceremonial blade of a Grand Exarch, or the short blade and breastplate of an Imperial soldier.

"Stormborn," House Gorav, pt. 1, 222 words

2010-05-24T04:36:00.001-04:00

Ludo of Kir is an oddity amongst House leaders. He is not starborn – he is not even of the Gorav blood. He began his career as an engineer in the Empire’s siege corps, a military body used to trap annoying commoners and embarrassing young nobles in a dead end. The siege corps had been moribund for centuries, after the Empire had solidified its hold on the continent. As an overseas war of conquest was not and has not been in Taal’s interests, the siege corps became useless, maintained at a minimum standard of readiness. Even that standard declined over the centuries, until just thirty years ago, when a commoners’ revolt managed to capture a Gorav fortress that oversaw Ludo’s home city of Kir. Considering the fortress was of Gorav make, it was nearly impenetrable once taken. Ludo, the head of the last intact company in the siege corps, was tasked with cracking the fortress open – both because of his knowledge of the region and the fortress as a former Gorav factor, and because his superiors found him annoying enough to hope that he failed. Instead, he succeeded brilliantly by winning the trust of the rebellion’s leader and an old friend – the same woman in one – and sharply betraying that trust once he learned the weaknesses of her defenses.

"Stormborn," House Methis, pt. 2, 286 words

2010-05-24T04:34:00.000-04:00

House Methis makes nothing, trades nothing, and sells nothing except power. The Emperor holds that the prosperity of the Empire this last millennium is based upon unprecedented continuity in governance, with no wars of succession and policy upheavals every century or so. Taal rules the Empire like he ruled his army, with a clear and direct chain of command that leaves no official in doubt as to exactly where he stands in relation to the Emperor – and that all are ultimately subordinate to the Emperor. All the most powerful officials in the Empire are either scions of House Methis, or have a Methis heir as first spouse. As well, every appointee to a position on the Imperial payroll must be approved personally by Taal or one of his many second spouses.

The Sign of Methis is the Naga, a snake with the torso, arms, and head of a man. Nagas were originally associated with a wide range of occult matters, including the practice of magic and numerology. The early serpent cults of pre-empire Ordal revered the Naga as the final reincarnation of an enlightened mortal, and so they were also associated with special knowledge of the spiritual and divine. The first Methis lords adopted a Naga motif for their favored arts and architecture. When the Art of Longevity emerged amongst the Methis, the association with enlightened mortality became conflated with the practical immortality of the greatest Methis, and so the Naga became a symbol of immortality through spiritual awakening, an image the House promoted. The Sign of the Sorcerer, which had once been called the Savant, assumed the Naga’s aspects relating to magic and occult lore, particularly when House Crowan developed the Art of Foresight.

"Stormborn," House Methis, pt. 1, 431 words

2010-05-23T01:15:00.002-04:00

In the Golden Empire of Ordal, House Methis has held the reigns of power for over a thousand years. Presiding over House and Empire, Taal is the master of all he surveys. To defy Taal is to defy the Empire. Yet despite that, the Emperor is but one man, and his House but one of many. Defiance of the Empire, even within Methis, is more common than one might suppose.

House Methis’s supremacy comes from its Art. The sign of the Naga is the sign of Longevity, and the greatest of the House are said to be immortal, falling only to wound and disease. Indeed, the Emperor is known to be more than 1500 years old, but looks like a man only just approaching middle age. He is the oldest member of his House, and history says that his ascendance came from a brutal House War against House Cadin in his youth. The elder starborn of Methis fought each other almost as much as they fought the Cadin forces, and were wiped out to a man in the course of the war, leaving Taal at the head of the House. His first act was to consolidate the forces of the fractious, now-deceased Methis leaders, and followed up by making a bloody example of any Cadin he could get his hands upon. Despite the supremacy of Cadin’s Art in war, Methis exacted a violent toll upon them under Taal’s generalship. When the Cadin finally acceded to Methis’s dominance, it was to be only the first of many Houses to fall.

The Art of Longevity gives its bearers the fullness of vision required to manage their extended lives. The most powerful Methis are therefore the most long-ranging planners, finding ways to fill lives so much greater than those of other men – even other starborn. Under Taal’s leadership, Methis embarked on a three century campaign to weaken and dominate each of the High Houses in turn. By the grace of their Art, House Santh was the last to fall, but in the least violent manner, leaving them favored in the eyes of Taal. With the last of the High Houses in line, the Minor Houses ceased all struggling and bowed before the new emperor. Taal has thus spent the last 1200 years amusing himself with the juggling exercise known as politics. Those who knew a time before his rule have been dead and gone for at least 1100 years, meaning he is a central fixture in the minds of his subjects, as constant and immutable as the rising and setting of the sun.

The Wirtwood Tree, 482 words

2010-05-22T03:47:00.001-04:00

Young wirtwood trees are actually sapient, known once to the ancients as the "elders," repositories of knowledge about magic and the natural world. Modern peoples have lost this knowledge, however, due to the nature of the wirtwood's seeding. Mature trees, which takes upwards of a millennium to fully grow, do not reproduce through the normal methods of seeded fruit as is so common in other trees. Instead, the maturation and seeding of a wirtwood is a nearly apocalyptic event for those who live in the immediate region.

A wirtwood seeds only once in its life, during which it dies. The magic power bound up into the tree is released, destroying the tree in similar manner to burning, but releasing far more smoke than it should. What look like great, massive thunderclouds -- all perfectly black -- gather and sweep across the sky. Where the wirtwood's magical smoke blots out the sky, a black fog spreads across the land beneath, the seeds of the wirtwood saturating the earth.

Living creatures caught in a wirtwood's seeding fog are as good as dead from the first breath they take. The minds of people and animals alike are destroyed by breathing the fog, leaving insensate bodies that might as well be corpses but for the fact that they still breathe, their hearts still beat. In the worst cases, whole spans of a hundred miles around can be wiped out by a large wirtwood going to seed. It was some of these revered wirtwood "elders" which grew to maturation and annihilated the greatest cities and centers of power of the ancients, who had transplanted great wirtwoods around the known world so they might honor the trees and learn from them. The survivors of the ancients, when they learned what happened, destroyed all the younger wirtwoods they could find to prevent this from happening again, including their own village trees. In this manner did ancient society collapse and knowledge of the wirtwoods was lost. The trees themselves, however, did not go extinct. Each wirtwood has maybe four or five viable seeds in the storm of billions that it throws out, and so the trees have grown up again in the past millennium, with none knowing what disaster they harbor.

Rarely, so rare as to be as yet unknown, a single person may survive the seeding of a wirtwood tree. They do not come out of the experience unchanged -- whether through the influence of the seed-smoke or simply living through the horrors of such an event -- but they retain a functioning mind. Such a person is marked specially by the wirtwoods, though to what end nobody knows. Such purposes could be fair or foul, as nobody even knows whether the wirtwoods maliciously kept the secret of their seeding or are simply victims of their own need to reproduce and the horrible means by which it is done.

Weekend Break

2010-04-15T01:53:00.002-04:00

There may be a short break of a day or two this weekend, unless I'm not too completely exhausted on Saturday to write Sunday's page. Going to Vermont to a burial on Saturday, and it's a four hour drive each way. So, yeah, don't be surprised if at least Sunday is blank.

"The Free," Antichrist, pt. 2, 426 words

2010-03-26T01:28:00.000-04:00

“Well, as the saying goes, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a conspiracy. And when the angels and demons came out to play, we knew for certain who the conspirators were.

“There are no estimates for how many people are left. If it's anything worldwide like what I've seen in the past year of travels, then I'd estimate less than a billion. Far, far less. And so, if you are hearing this, you are a survivor of the biggest war in history.

“Those who side with the angels, both kinds, claim that those taken were lifted up to Heaven or conscripted into Hell to escape this broken remnant of a world and join the winning side. They were the saved. The elect.

“I've talked to angels. And I've talked to demons. The Rapture was the opening salvo.

“There are no more good people in the world anymore. There are no more bad people. There are only us: those caught in between, the unacknowledged bastard children. Us... and the invaders.

“I'm no savior. I'm no messiah. I'm not here to offer you succor or one last chance at salvation. I'm here for one thing only: to tell you, ask you, plead you – beg of you on my knees, if need be – to stop.

“Stop playing the game. No matter which side you play, they win and you lose. Playing at all is a loss.

“There's a phrase, a title thrown about too-casually in pre-End politics, especially here in the United States. It refers to the one who, at the end of everything, rises up in defiance of God's plan. There were whole industries based upon speculating about their identity, the signs of their coming, their plans and goals.

“The word you are thinking of is Antichrist.

“My name is David Arthur Freeh, and I name myself Antichrist. I defy the powers of Heaven and of Hell, I spit on the names of God and Satan both. I refuse to follow their plan.

“And I beg of you, if you hear this message: join me. Defy the invaders. Flee them if you must, fight them if you can. Become antichrist. Even if they drive the last of us to extinction, die with the simple dignity of knowing that even in the face of Armageddon, you stood before them instead of cowering at their sides.

“This is our world. If we can't stop them, we can at least die free.”

"The Free," Antichrist, pt. 1, 430 words

2010-03-25T03:37:00.001-04:00

“Ladies and gentlemen... Ah, pardon me. That's not quite accurate anymore. The world has no more place for gentlefolk. You know this, as well as I. So let me address you appropriately:

“Survivors.

“For that is what we are. Make no mistake. Best estimates at the time held that, just over two years ago, approximately three and a half billion people disappeared from the face of the Earth. You've known that many, many people disappeared, but most of you have not had an idea how many.

“Let that sink in for a moment. Between one second and the next, just about a third of the world population just faded away, as if they had never been. Even more miraculously, the disappearances seem to have crosscut almost every demographic criterion you could name. Race, age, sex, sexuality, wealth, nation, religion, politics... Name it. About half of them went missing. This much the various world governments were able to discern before they finally collapsed from one third of their bureaucracies disappearing, too unbalanced by the loss of officials at all levels. Too much lost track of in the chaos that followed.

“Approximately another half billion died in the days and weeks afterward as a direct or indirect consequence of the disappearances. Not so many planes went down as one might imagine, but highway accidents shot through the roof in that instant. Chaos and panic. Rioting by terrified people afraid of a second wave of disappearances, and opportunists reveling in the madness and egging it on to greater heights. Military actions by despots convinced that if their blessed homeland had been so scourged, then those in the next nation over must have been taken even worse.

“Famine, as modern agriculture and distribution chains gradually broke down. Plague, as modern medicine met similar difficulties. The Eastern Seaboard of the United States shut down in a night as a flaw in a transmission station, that should have been spotted by a now-missing technician, finally gave over and caused a surge that cascaded across the power grid and shut everything down.

“It seemed like, on top of the disappearances in general, they had struck precisely amongst those whose loss would cause the greatest trials and tribulations for the rest of the world. It was improbable, perhaps even impossible.

“Nobody had a rational answer. The best one anyone could offer was that all of it must have been acts of God. The disappearances were the Rapture, clearing the elect out so they would be spared what was to come.

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 6, 424 words

2010-03-07T01:09:00.000-05:00

However, an open-sourcing project eventually produced and published cracked forms of the NMR software, followed by new software standards which were released and propagated across much of the Internet. News distribution and ranking sites were flooded with the technical information, and before it could hope to be suppressed (many NMR companies employing cease and desist orders and injunctions against the publishing of their proprietary software), the information flashed across social networking and filesharing systems in an unstoppable torrent. The genie was out of the bottle irrevocably, and the Post was finally to begin.

Anyone could now produce whatever they needed to survive and thrive, a state in which we exist to this day. Nanotech colonies were reproduced and shared in moments, and the unlocked software to run them was anywhere to be found. All one needed was spare matter for the colonies to work with, and that was available in abundance. Trash, dirt, even the very air could be used to manufacture high-grade electronics and gourmet cuisine, when the tools could reassemble matter at the atomic level. While there was great turmoil out of this state of affairs for most of the next century, as some explored the destructive potential of NMR assemblers – including the creation of disassemblers – the world as we now know it was seeded in those tumultuous days.

It is tempting to romanticize the turmoil of those times, but one must bear in mind the accounts of those who lived through it. It was the last war that humanity would ever have to know, and one of the worst. And yet out of it came a new peace. And so, as every great cycle begins in war, so another must end in war. But now, war is incomprehensible to the common person. What need for war in this age?

This is, after a fashion, truly the end of history, and perhaps it is a happy ending that will go on for quite a long time – an end without end. So many of our ancestors saw one age end and another begin without knowing quite what happened around them, only that it was a time ending and another birthing in pain. It is, I think, not an unreasonable hope to believe that we have broken that horrible cycle and may continue to grow and mature as a species without such catastrophes in our path.

Excerpted from Fallout: the Post and the legacy of the Atomic Age, by Doctor Sasha Yǐn; published 6 January 2372, two days before First Contact

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 5, 476 words

2010-03-06T03:20:00.000-05:00

The advent of the Internet brought globalization down to the middle class, and eventually even further. Those who could afford computers, or who lived in communities that offered free computer access in some form, could take part in a global community that focused on the exchange of information and ideas. Purchasing power went global as well – eventually, that is.

Previously, most people remained stuck within a very small range within which to select merchants. Massive corporate chains put down roots in most major communities within their operating region, but by and large people were restricted to what was in their immediate surroundings. That meant what they purchased was limited by what was offered, the market dictated almost wholly by supply and not so much by demand except when a merchant was willing to place special orders. And even those merchants were limited by their distributors. Such situations were supplemented by mail-order and similar services, but these were ultimately a rather small piece of the market.

Suddenly, the Internet opened up wide new markets, for merchants and customers both. Niche markets became easier to cater to, making hyper-specialization a sustainable practice for a merchant, while customers found it easier to explore a wider variety of options. For a brief period, known as the Dot Com Bubble, the Internet was the fastest-growing economic sector in the First World. Even after the Bubble “burst,” so to speak, various online merchants thrived, and many found a new life in filling an empty niche. And the social and intellectual life of the Internet grew in leaps and bounds in comparison, especially with the creation of social networking sites. There were no end of troubles, as is normal in any fledgeling system, but the bounties were numerous.

In comparison, the Post has been an almost complete economic reversal of the Internet, while only spreading its social and intellectual aspects to the ultimate end. The technology that enabled this matter is formally known, after the official project designation of its developers, as Nanoscale Matter Recombination. More popularly, minifacture or nanotech. (From a technical standpoint, “minifacture” refers to manufacturing performed by nanotech assembly tools, but the term has undergone genericization.)

Economically speaking, nanotech has destroyed all varieties of manufacturing industry. The last surviving such businesses were NMR producers themselves. Even this did not last very long. Attempts to control the propagation of nanotech colonies and production were soon brought low by the Internet itself. The NMR companies believed they had created “unpirateable” and uncrackable software locks with which to control the distribution and use of their minifacturing colonies, which were technically only leased and licensed for specific uses. By maintaining a rolling system of constant update and invalidation of old software standards and licenses, they were able to hold dominance over the market for a few short but disastrous years.

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 4, 387 words

2010-03-05T01:53:00.002-05:00

Post-war. Post-scarcity. Post-agriculture. Post-industry. Perhaps even post-human, as the potentials of our technology and understanding continue to unfold. Post-everything.

Comparisons to the rise of the Internet and the Information Age are inevitable, when it comes to understanding the advent of minifacture and the Post in a historical perspective. We can see, from the lofty perch afforded us by a mere two centuries, when the Post began and what it did to human life worldwide. At the same time, those present for the founding of the Post were turning their critical eye upon the founding of the Information Age, picking it apart in similar manner, studying its every intricacy.

There is a saying. “Human behavior is economic behavior.” It summarizes the essential basis of most of the major political and economic theories of the Industrial and Atomic Ages. From Marxism to Objectivism, and every descendant theory that sprung up after them, the zeitgeist of the last few centuries before the Post was determined increasingly by the competition of different theories of how people should order themselves economically. Government power on all sides of the divide waxed mighty from the argument, and the lengths to which each side was prepared to go in protecting and propagating their view. And so, this saying held true, to the extent that people allowed these theories to hold sway over and shape their governments, politics, worldviews – and, yes, their economic habits. There was even a religious movement known as the “prosperity gospel” which promised God's favor in the form of material wealth in exchange for donations to the churches which preached such gospel.

So, in light of economic behavior may we best compare and contrast the rise of the Information Age and the Post, to achieve a greater understanding of each. These two eras changed both the economic and ideological landscapes of humanity drastically, in relatively short periods of time.

The development of the Internet was, in its way, a natural consequence of the increasing globalization of the time, as well as a contributor. The Internet and globalization fed into one another. Previously, globalization had primarily been a force at work at higher levels than the common person, where more large corporations went multinational and could act on a worldwide scale, gaining influence over politics due to their overshadowing presence.

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 3, 399 words

2010-03-04T03:33:00.001-05:00

Through all this, causing and caused by such expenditures and disparities, tensions remained high. Detente was the exception, not the rule, until well into the Post. When the Great Enemy of the capitalist First World fell apart, another was swiftly found – and, to a certain extent, manufactured. Hegemony justifies any act taken to maintain it, in the hegemon's eyes.

It took a dramatic restructuring of human thought and economics to end this sorry state of affairs, an act which almost did not come to pass. Indeed, the change in economy had to come first, an event that drew human thought in its wake like a planet sweeping up meteors. Prevailing culture has to race to keep up with its own creations. Like the founding of the Internet, which subdivided the Atomic Age into the Cold War and Information Ages, the development of reliable minifacturing technologies eventually ushered in the Post.

The profound change brought upon by widespread minifacturing – more formally, Nanoscale Matter Recombination – cannot be understated. We exist in an age where subsistence is not a struggle, where waste is unknown and unknowable, where weal no longer depends upon monetary power. This state of affairs seems as natural as breathing, as automatic as the beat of one's heart. We are taught but do not understand the years of turmoil that resulted from the selective control of minifacturing. We forget, as a fish forgets water, the intensive cultural engineering employed to keep the abundance we experience from warping our societal values into a sense of finalized achievement and mass ennui.

This is the world we live in: the Post, an era so named for its position as the capstone of human achievement. It is, philosophically speaking, the end of history. By this I mean that history, as presented for so many centuries as a succession of “kings and wars and dates,” no longer properly describes the course of human events. Indeed, the very name of our time derives from its immediate philosophical and cultural predecessor, postmodernism.

As postmodernism's heralds defined it in reaction to the era that came before, so did our founding philosophers name our time in reaction to its predecessors. However, we speak of the Post not strictly in relation to postmodernism – post-postmodernism being something already formulated and explored in the early Information Age – but in relation to everything that came before.

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 2, 430 words

2010-03-03T01:14:00.000-05:00

A popular question in the latter decades of the Atomic Age, when anti-intellectualism was cresting at a new peak, was why spend so much money on pure research? Why build a space station that does nothing but eat money? Why build massive particle accelerators looking for the Higgs boson? These efforts were seen as sinecures for the intelligentsia, funds thrown to academics to justify the need to throw more funds at academics. A similar question could be asked of how one expected war to produce useful peacetime technologies. How does making a better bomb to drop on foreign soil translate into a better life at home?

The answer to both was in fact the same. The research necessary to reach these goals necessitated following related lines of research that could spawn a variety of technologies. Research, after all, is not a straight line towards a marked-out target. It is a confluence of many lines that then branch off again once they intersect. Atomic bombs contributed to atomic power. Particle physics provided a great boon to nuclear medicine, instrumental in the detection and treatment of cancer, heart disease, and many other illnesses.

Yet the equivalence otherwise rings hollow. Military research is predicated upon an institution that requires massive expenditure in countless other areas. In the most egregious cases, such research might only be a tenth of the total military budget, and still be more than twice that of any and every other form of general research budget to which the government devoted its funds. For every unit of currency spent on that military research, nine more went to the entire rest of the military endeavor. It remains the most monetarily inefficient form of research in human history, while simultaneously lionized as the source of greatest progress by those of the era.

In other words, the Atomic Age's view of the primacy of military conflict and development as an efficient source of progress was an article of faith. It was never directly put to the test in a scientific manner, whether this system of conflict-growth was truly more efficient and effective at producing knowledge, wealth, and progress than a peacetime effort where pure science funding exceeded (or even achieved parity with) military research funding – to say nothing of being comparable to aggregate military funding in general! And it was a self-reinforcing system, where one nation that kept a high military budget induced paranoia in all other nations, forcing all to keep military expenditure high. Just the materiel maintenance costs of some large nations would have crippled the economies of smaller nations.

"Do You Remember Peace?" Introduction, pt. 1, 410 words

2010-03-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

Conventional wisdom through the Atomic Age held that war was good for business, to sum it up in a cliché. The Atomic Age was founded on war, after all, and so war overshadowed all its thinking. And for much of the First World, those societies that came out of the war flush with power and influence, it really was good for business – and science, and politics, and everything else. Many technological advances, whose progress in leaps and bounds were the hallmark of the Age, came out of developments during and immediately after the war.

Easily overlooked in this war-worship was the corollary that peace was good for business as well. The Second Great War was lionized as the source of all good in the modern Western world, while simultaneously generating a complementary evil that one could fight and thus be good against. Those who bothered to look back any further stopped on the First Great War, and pointed to the decade of abundance and weal known as the “Roaring Twenties” immediately afterward, and supposed they saw a pattern that held: war created good for the victors, and victors were good. Oh, it would eventually come apart, as any tower might eventually fall, but it could be drawn back up out of the mire and even closer to heaven with a new war.

Some took this as a lesson that eternal war was the answer. If not a single conflict fought constantly, then a variety of conflicts fought in staggering succession. A war-driven economy would flourish, because there would always be demand for more bullets, more weapons, more people. If no war was being fought, then present the threat of war, and the promise to stay ever vigilant, ever prepared. To stay ever prepared, then, one must always develop new, better weapons, and build enough to replace the old stock. And the other benefits of war, the technological achievements made in its name and the affluence that came from overseas influence, would filter into society.

The problem with such a state is that it does not confer upon a society the benefits of constant war as readily as a cycle of punctuated conflict and peace grants. Power develops and grows, yes, but it concentrates as well – the powers that be need more of it to carry on a state of eternal conflict. In contrast, embracing peace after war will carry the advancements of war into society more immediately.

Father Paolo, pt. 3, 576 words

2010-02-04T01:41:00.001-05:00

One fight caught his eye. A pirate, better trained than the others, and the watch officer, over near the warning bell. The pirate fought with a saber in his right hand, a parrying dagger in the left. He moved fast, an easy match for the watch officer, though he defended better than he attacked. His motions with the dagger were swift and sure, while his blows with the saber were clumsy and often overextended. His easy facility with the dagger saved his life more than a few times as the pirate and the officer traded blows. Finally, though, the pirate caught the officer's own blade and knocked it aside, and ran the poor man through. He turned to look for a new fight, and caught the priest standing there, alone.

Indecision struck. It would be a small thing to use his Gift to blast the pirate where he stood... But that's why Father Paolo held back. Because it would be a small thing. Had been a small thing, before, entirely too often. He had not always been a priest.

Before he could make up his mind, the pirate came close and held his blade up. He grinned, showing a few missing teeth, and said, "Hoy there! Cap'n says we're not to kill any priests, so it's your lucky day. But he didn' say anything about not robbing 'em!"

Father Paolo spread his hands out to his sides. "I'm sorry, my good man, but I've nothing of value on me. I am a priest, not a merchant."

The pirate snorted in derision. "Everyone knows the Church's got scads of money. I've seen the fancy clothes and jewelry brought out on holy days, so I know you're gonna have somethin' of the like on ya. So hand it over!"

Paolo sighed. True, the high clergy's formal attire and symbols of office could be rather expensive, but... He was an itinerant. What did the pirate expect, a silver amulet carried at all times to help perform blessings over births and deaths? A gold knife for ceremonies to represent the cutting away of old sins? How absurd, out in the Sky. Silver tarnished and gold was heavy. But this one wouldn't listen to such things. He tried a different tack.

"Tell me, my son, when you first learned the saber, did your teacher smack you for taking the blade up in your left hand? Force you to use your right?"

"Huh? What of it? Stop trying to distract me, holy man."

"Oh, very well." He shrugged, and reached into his robe. "Let me get my purse, then," he said, and ran a silent prayer through his head, asking for forgiveness for the lie. Instead, he grabbed a hold of the saber at his side, curling his hand around the grip. He stepped closer to the pirate, as if ready to hand something over -- and rammed the sword's pommel and his fist up into the pirate's chin, catching him by surprise.

The pirate's teeth clacked together audibly, and Father Paolo would not have been surprised if he had bit his tongue or cracked a tooth. The pirate went down swearing, and looked up at the priest with an expression of utter malice. He started to climb to his feet, grabbing for his dropped blade, and Father Paolo casually cracked the saber's guard against the man's temple. The pirate collapsed.

"You should have fought left-handed," he suggested to his prone foe.

Father Paolo, pt. 2, 431 words

2010-02-03T01:58:00.000-05:00

Paolo strode calmly out of the cabin, and went to the steep, short set of stairs that led up to deck. The same winds that blew the pirate ship their way, descending like a raptor out of the Sky above, whipped across the deck. The priest folded his arms against the chill, and waited, watching aft as the pirates closed. Their ship was swift, sleek compared to the overladen tub that was the Lily.

Crewmen and women took up guns and manned the cannons. A couple rangefinding shots fell well short, ball plummeting to the distant Blue below. They waited nervously, priming the cannons once more as the pirates approached inexorably.

Tentatively, the priest raised a hand and tested out his Gift. He was a little rusty from lack of use, but the familiar power came to him, and he fought the wind with his will. The Thunderbird wasn't with him, that day, however, or perhaps the winds were just too strong against them. The pirate ship closed no matter how he fought to take the wind out of their sails. Nor was there much he could do to push the Lily any faster; its sails already strained near to breaking in the gusty winds.

And then the pirates were upon them. Chainshot clipped the Lily's mainmast, tearing the sail down with it. Men in wingcloaks flitted out from the other ship, most flipping and swooping on the breezes to dodge the hail of musket fire that met them. While the wingmen stooped down upon the Lily, the pirate ship drew up and fired off grapples. Between one breath and the next, the Lily was boarded.

The crew formed a fighting front line, but were pushed back as the pirates swarmed over. The pirate ship must have been overloaded with men, many only half-trained thugs there to soak up the losses yet leave the pirates still able to fly after the fight. The fighting was too close, too many men packed together for the priest to safely use the other aspects of his Gift, so he helped pull wounded men back and tie strips of fabric over the worst of their wounds, offering a small prayer before sending them back into the fight.

But the line could not hold. There were simply too many of the foe, too few of their own. The concerted effort became a series of skirmishes across the deck, and the priest retreated. He felt more than a little shame at such, but a rout was a rout. No matter where he turned, men fought and died.

Father Paolo, pt. 1, 413 words

2010-02-02T00:03:00.002-05:00

Father Paolo cracked his eyes open and sighed. The feeble light of early dawn shone through the porthole in the small cabin he shared with the Soaring Lily's navigator. He wanted to go back to sleep, given the hour, but sat up in the bunk nonetheless. Sloth was not exactly sinful nor dishonorable in the eyes of Vaoz, no, but the disrespect it showed to others when you were needed... Ah, that was another matter altogether.

From outside the cabin, he could hear running feet and the clanging of the warning bell. The mate on watch was ringing for all he was worth, rousing the whole ship to action. When you were needed, well, that's when it was disrespectful and dishonorable to give in to the urge to turn over and pull the blanket up.

He took a moment to consider the saber hanging on the wall. It had been pressed upon him by Captain Armandsdar when he had come aboard. She didn't plan for trouble, she said, but 'twas better to be prepared than not. He agreed, in theory, but his creaking joints reminded him that his best fighting days were past. Nonetheless, he pulled the saber down and belted on its scabbard. He pulled a robe off a neighboring hook, more for the warmth against the open Sky than because his vocation demanded it. Despite the frenzied rushing outside, he took a moment to smooth his thinning hair down and peek out the porthole.

Ah, he thought, there. Another ship, far off but closing fast. The winds seemed to be on the side of the black-sailed pirates that accosted them, and not the Kingdom ship. A shame, but such things happened. Vaoz had made the world, but He did not command its every nuance and detail once it was set in motion. To do otherwise would have been to deny men their freedom under the Skies, if the world itself strove to constrain them against ill deeds. Might as well have made every man unable in his heart to lift a sword, then, and where would be the value of honor and proper piety then, if goodness was written into man as immutable as the motions of a child's wind-up toy?

Still, this was a good crew. Honorable and pious. And skilled, which in many ways was more important than faith. With luck, they would fight off the pirates and go on their way only a little the worse for wear.

Death in the family

2010-01-09T13:43:00.003-05:00

And, on top of everything else, there's been a death in the family. Really, half the reason the hiatus has been going on this long was waiting for this to happen, and seeing if I could write better without it weighing on matters. The funeral's Monday, and involves a long car ride to get over there tomorrow afternoon. And, given how many animals live here that need taking care of, and how well we get along with the rest of our extended family, we'll probably be back Monday evening. Still, I'm going to try to use that time away from the computer to work on plotting details and ideas and the like, and hopefully I'll be in better shape to write by Tuesday. Hopefully.

Extended Break

2010-01-04T01:42:00.002-05:00

Obviously, I've taken off more than just "a day or several." The short version is that I just have no will to write. I know it sounds like a lame excuse, but it's up there in importance. Quite simply, I just don't care. This isn't like a day job where I have a vested interest in going in despite my apathy; this is something that I do as much for my own sense of enjoyment and accomplishment as it is for the goal of someday getting published. When I derive no pleasure from it, when it feels like I'm just dithering and accomplishing nothing... There's no point. I can't make myself write if there's nothing there.

And right now, there's nothing there.

Plotting (and sanity) Break

2009-12-19T05:38:00.003-05:00

Yep, time for another one of these. I know broadly where the story's going, but somewhere in between "overall plot" and "daily writing," I'm getting kind of muddled. When it gets to the point that I'm up past 5am still trying to get my writing done (I write the evening before it goes up, like most webcomickers, but sometimes have to do it in the wee hours of the morning), it's probably a safe bet that I'm screwed for the day -- and possibly for the next few days, until I figure out whatever's getting in the way of my story. Add in some other positive but definitely serious changes in my life at the moment, and looking at some more before too long, means I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.

Writing is the first thing getting a break because one of the other biggest time-consumers in my life has already been cut (socializing with friends, most of whom are gone thanks to winter break). I'm also dead serious about doing this story right, so the idea of floundering blindly through a couple fairly important scenes is currently quite anathema to me.

So, I'm going to be taking a day or several off. Hopefully not too many, because I really do want to move forward with this story. But I do need some time to recharge and get in the right headspace. I know that Frank Herbert is quoted as saying how he could never tell the difference between writing done in a flight of inspiration and writing done just to get the writing done, but I'm not Frank Herbert. I'll hold myself to more professional standards when I've got a much better chance of being a professional.

Five Days, 1111 words

2009-12-08T01:54:00.001-05:00

A tiefling man, not feeling quite so young as he had five years ago, stared up into the night sky. Above, the lights and fires of the Hive sprayed across the darkness, like a scattering of stars. Every point represented a person, or a group of people. Sometimes one of the lights went out, but a new one would alight to take its place, changing the constellations in an endless, intricate dance. Even in a place as dismal and hopeless as the Hive, love could blossom and burn, for a time.

From his vantage near the Grand Bazaar, on the blurry border between the Market and Guildhall Wards, the tiefling wanted nothing more than to reach up and swipe every one of those lights away. He wanted to plunge the whole city – nay, the whole of the planes – into darkness. If day never rose again, that would suit him well.

What had he to offer, he reflected bitterly. No wealth and no prospects. He was not an ugly man, but with his fiendish heritage he was far from fair. He had a little magic to his name, but no more than she. There was nothing, not even his affection and attention, that she couldn't get from someone else.

Cold seeped into him from the stones of the bridge, through his palms and the seat of his trousers. He had perched on the half-wall that came up the side of the bridge, which arched over one of the small canals-cum-rain gutters that ran throughout much of the city below The Lady's Ward. Despite its proximity to the Bazaar, the street saw little traffic – no shops lined the street, just the homes of countless faceless guild factors and city officials, who liked their peace and quiet. In the old days, the Hardheads probably would have tossed him into the canal for simply being a tiefling in the wrong part of town. Now the Sons just nodded as they went by on patrol, content that he wasn't doing anything wrong.

He lifted a hand off the cold stone and pressed it to his forehead, as if the chill could quell the thoughts in his head. Memories. Too many memories, all his but... not. The same night burned in his mind, the same acts done six, eight, a dozen times, in a dozen different ways and places. The same first kiss done a dozen times over – here on the bridge after a chance meeting; outside a cafe where they'd shared a meal; while gasping for breath in an alley after an desperate flight from a pair of muggers; at the front stoop of her home...

Living in Sigil could do that to you. If you weren't careful, if you tried to live too many lives, suddenly you really were living all those lives. And, they discovered, they'd been living them together. All the different copies of them, all the possibilities collapsed into one after that first night.

The trick was living in one life after spending so long in so many others. Too many memories. Too many different versions of her and him, of them – too many hopes and fears crowding together in the same head, jostling for space. Too many expectations.

Her embrace had grown claustrophobic. Her eyes were a cage. Her kiss was suffocation. And, she had revealed after their disastrous first time sharing a bed, so his had been for her. They had become too much and too little for one another all at once.

He closed his eyes and wished... wished what? That it had never happened. That she had been a bad dream. That one day he had turned left instead of right.

A warm hand pressed down on his, on top of the bridge stones, and he flinched. He hadn't heard anyone. He looked over and saw her, a beautiful aasimar, granddaughter to angels and sitting on the bridge next to him, and all but jumped away. He held his hand close as if burned, staring at her. It still hurt to look. Five years since he had met her, three since they'd exchanged even a single word, and it still hurt.

“What,” he managed to croak, his voice strained as if he hadn't said anything in those intervening years.

“I didn't know you still came here,” she said, her voice melodic still, if softer than before. Unfair, he decided, hating the planes all the more. She looked up in the skies at the same fires he had been staring at just moments before.

“What is it,” he demanded, finally sounding like normal. He too-casually held his hands at his side. He couldn't help but remember five days before, when they'd suddenly bumped into one another in the Bazaar – he with more deliveries to make, she with some new purchase. Literally. They'd dropped their things, scrabbled desperately to gather them together, and separated without a word. He'd glanced back, and she had still stood there, looking a little lost.

She looked at him again, now, and he turned his gaze away. Her eyes shouldn't have shone that brightly in the dark. “I'm sorry,” she said. She may as well have driven a sword through a lung. “For my part in how things happened. I'm sorry.” She sat silently, hands folded in her lap, watching him now that she had said her piece.

“I... I...” He stumbled over his words, nervous under her eyes. Finally he managed to blurt out, “I'm sorry, too. But I wish – I wish we'd never... I wish I'd never met you.”

“Do you still love me,” she asked barely above a whisper. He almost couldn't hear her. Wished he hadn't. He felt like he'd kicked something small and fluffy.

“After what I just– what do you think?” He looked out over the houses, imagining the people inside settled into sleep. Sleep and silence. He envied them.

She took his hand and his heart leapt in place so, he feared it would escape. “Would it be so bad? To say so?” she asked.

He tried to draw away but she twined her fingers in his, held him fast. “Reda, please,” he half-moaned. “Don't ask me that.”

“Colius,” she said, and his stomach knotted up at hearing his name on her lips again, “it's been three years. The same mistakes don't have to happen again.”

Colius let out a shuddering breath, and squeezed Reda's hand back. “I...” He couldn't say it, couldn't get the words out. But something about her hand in his felt better.

Five Years Apart, 603 words

2009-12-02T03:20:00.002-05:00

The following two vignettes were written five years apart, almost to the day. I can think of nothing I've written that better illustrates my views and fears about what the passage of time can do to people. Call it emo and angsty if you will, but it's something I need to get out of my head.

Colius and Reda are six people. Colius, a young male tiefling, first met Reda, a female aasimar, when he was delivering a package to her home. He met her again when he started studying under the same wizard who teaches her, and met her again by chance in the Great Bazaar a few days later. Each time, the two fit themselves into distinct roles. When he delivered the package, he became polite and deferential while she was gracious and welcoming. When they studied under their teacher, they argued magic in sharp debates that both thoroughly enjoyed. When they met in the Bazaar, they exchanged pleasantries and went back to the business at hand.

Colius has been absolutely infatuated with Reda almost from the moment they met. He's gotten hints from the aasimar that she reciprocates the interest. He can't bring himself to break out of the roles they find themselves interacting in, however, and chastises himself constantly for his cowardice.

Reda is attracted to Colius as well, but is reluctant because she knows so little of him, and her own father would never condone the relationship.

It was not long after their third meeting before strange things began to happen. Various friends of the two would mention seeing them arguing near their teacher's, or chatting politely in the Bazaar, far more often than the two had been going to either place. It was strange, but strange is normal in Sigil.

What had happened was that the two created more of themselves. They began to conceive of their different roles in each case almost like being different people. They became different people in different situations and eventually there were three different Coliuses and three different Redas. The six continued their lives as if their alternates did not exist, fulfilling their defining roles.

There are still at least three of each wandering Sigil, each Colius drawn inexorably towards its counterpart Reda, and vice versa. Neither has yet become aware that its "brothers" or "sisters" exists, and any attempts to tell them seem to be swiftly forgotten. There may be dozens of other pairs of the two, created each time one of the existing pairs defines a new role for the two to interact in. Those who have noticed the situation, and the few of those who care, think that perhaps if even one pair acknowledges their mutual attraction and establishes a relationship, the others will no longer be needed and will cease to exist.

***

Colius and Reda are two people. Once, they had struggled to get a grasp on their feelings for one another. Once, they had ended up as a multiplicity of would-be lovers each playing out a determined role in their intricate social dance.

"Once" doesn't last forever.

They came together. Briefly, brightly. Colius loved Reda and Reda loved Colius. All of them met their partners in a perfect embrace.

But every embrace ends.

They were circumscribed by one another. Defined, delineated, limited. And they found... that it wasn't enough. The circle bound by a lover's arms is a cage too small, and they had become too many to all fit. They fell apart and fell away.

Separated, they lessened even further. In each of them in their isolation, many became one, and one almost became none.

Now, they flee from one another. They flinch away and hide their faces when they meet. They turn their backs to avoid passing on the same street.

They each wonder how to admit to the other that no longer do they simply not love one another, but wish they had never felt that way at all.

I Aten't Dead

2009-10-22T06:12:00.002-04:00

No, I haven't forgotten about this place. The past few days of thinking have been helpful, even if I'm not sure how they'll reflect on the actual quality of writing. However, I think that I've made some strides in my... understanding of how to plot, and how "Another Angel Down" must go.

It helps immensely, of course, to have actually developed something of a plan. About where things are going, the major themes I want to touch on, the relationships between the characters. I've been going about this all wrong all this time.

I've been calling this blog a place for my "glorified outlines," but what I've been doing is flailing blindly through my first drafts with no planning. No, an outline can be done on a few pages without devoting months of daily writing. And knowing where I'm going can save me no end of frustration when it comes to actually sitting down and writing. (This is, indeed, how I tend to live my life; flailing around blindly without a plan, and facing a great deal of frustration when it comes to actually trying to do anything I want. But that's something to discuss elsewhere, not here.)

Hopefully, I'm doing things right, now. Or, at least that I'm going in the right general direction.

Plotting Break

2009-10-17T00:48:00.003-04:00

Taking a few days to try to analyze my plotting skills/tools and see if I can't sharpen and refine them. I experience my own stories too much like my own characters, seeing them in the single layer of "what's happening," and not enough like a composer bending multiple layers together into a cohesive whole.

"Another Angel Down" isn't helping much on this, considering it's written from a first-person perspective. And my other stuff has been third person limited, not omniscient.

It's troublesome being able to see these problems and not knowing how to contend with them. How to correct them. It doesn't help that, when it comes to learning things, I have a hard time internalizing processes. I can grasp something in terms of facts (aspects), but in terms of how to do it (the whole)? Not so easy.

I feel sometimes like I'm trying to divine fiction writing from first principles. I know I'm actually not, considering all the stuff I've read and watched that I'm consciously and unconsciously drawn on, but still.

Trigger Events: The Phone Call and The Dark, 726 words

2009-09-30T00:40:00.002-04:00

The Phone Call

Late one night just after moving into your current apartment, your phone rang. You didn't recognize the number on your caller ID, but you were still curious and bored enough to pick it up. The voice on the other end, which sounded oddly like yours, simply said, “Listen,” followed by a loud burst of static. Before you could pull away, it ended, and the voice picked up again, “Don't tell anyone what you heard, until you receive the password.”

“What password,” you demanded of the voice.

“You'll know it when you hear it,” the strange voice said, and hung up.

Less than an hour later, a fist began hammering on your door. When you cracked the door to check who was there, a heavy shove forced it open and left you stumbling back. Before you could recover, a pair of people in dark suits marched into the place and grabbed you. Both had your face, though one had obviously suffered a broken nose at some point.

They began interrogating you, asking you where “it” was. They beat you a bit when you wouldn't – couldn't – answer, and eventually left with warnings that they'd be watching you.

You woke up the next morning in your kitchen, sore from the night spent on the floor but otherwise none the worse for wear. When you went to check yourself in a mirror, you were completely unhurt. But the strange number was still in your phone's caller ID memory.

The Dark

Your parents really weren't the sort of people who should have had children. Certainly, you've wished more than a few times that they hadn't had you. It's not that they were physically abusive, no – if that had been the case, then a teacher probably would've called Child Services long ago. No, they never beat you... but you got very familiar with a certain dark closet whenever you misbehaved too much, or embarrassed them in public.

The dark, confined space frightened you a lot, especially at first. Over the years, though, you got more used to it. The dark became almost comforting, in a way – you learned there was nothing there, and it was a (forced, admittedly) respite from homework, chores, and your parents. You look back on it now and realize what a horrible experience it was, but at the time you just tried to make the best of a bad situation. The really bad times grew fewer and fewer, where you finally stopped having panic attacks and crying fits at the darkness.

You turned to your imagination to keep the boredom, loneliness, and growing claustrophobia away. You made up imaginary friends to replace the real ones, and created silly adventure stories to run through your head. And if you indulged in the occasional revenge fantasy where the shadows came and carried away your mother and father, well, who would blame you?

When you were twelve years old, you had a really bad night in the closet, the worst in a couple years. The place seemed to close in on you and the darkness grew oppressive and palpable, as if you weren't the only person in there. And then you were certain you weren't.

Some of the shadows seemed to take on a physical presence, an inky human-shaped blot distinct from the rest of the dark. And then it spoke, offering to kill your parents for you, just as you always wanted. When you refused, it grabbed you and began to take on your appearance and the sound of your own voice. You felt yourself fading away as the shadow took on more substance, until you found it in yourself to fight back with all your will. The last thing you remember was grabbing the shadow as it had grabbed you, and then you blacked out. You came to early the next morning when your father let you out.

You've rationalized it away, since then, as a hallucination of your traumatized, panicking mind. You understand how sensory deprivation chambers work, how if you're denied stimulation your mind will inevitably make up its own displays. Sometimes these hallucinations are beautiful and enlightening, other times they're horrible and damaging.

However, you still can't bring yourself to sleep without the flickering glare of the TV or the yellow glow of a streetlamp pouring in your window.

Trigger Event: The Cat, 370 words

2009-09-29T01:25:00.000-04:00

You were about five years old when your younger brother was born. You were jealous of the attention he received, but you also noticed that your mother turned almost hostile towards your family's pet cat. The cat was never allowed anywhere near your brother. When you asked why, your mother mentioned an old folk tale about how cats would steal the breath of sleeping infants – not that she believed it literally, no, but that what really happened was cats would climb on top of a sleeping infant and accidentally smother it.

Late one night, you got up from bed to go to the bathroom. Your brother's nursery was across the hall from your room, and you saw the door was cracked open. Just big enough for a cat to slip through. Worried, you pushed open the door. There, your cat had perched delicately on the side of your brother's crib. You rushed forward to pull her down, but stopped short when she leaped into the crib and back out in one swift motion, holding a tiny creature in her mouth.

The creature looked like a cross between a cartoon elf and some kind of beetle. Tiny jars, some filled with a strangely luminescent gas that swirled and twisted hauntingly, hung from its belt. The creature struggled against the cat, but was dashed violently to the floor for its troubles. The cat pounced upon it and tore it apart with her claws and fangs, until the creature disintegrated into a yellowish fog. The jars broke in the fight and you could see the luminous gas snake up and back into your brother's crib.

The infant suddenly gasped and began crying, loudly. You went to quiet him, but after a minute your mother came storming in. She yelled at you for letting the cat into your brother's room, and threw the cat out. As she yelled, you could see another of those tiny creatures, riding her shoulder and whispering into her ear. She wouldn't listen to a thing you said about the cat saving your brother, and made sure to lock the cat into the guest room every night.

Three days later, your baby brother was found dead in the morning.

Message in a Bottle, pt. 5, 656 words

2009-09-24T04:35:00.001-04:00

And not just that. As I came closer, I saw that it wasn't some single pile being battered by the surf. Like some strange spit of land, the bottles continued out into the water, held stable by their sheer mass. I clambered over them, overtaken by curiosity, and they shifted little under my weight – there were just so many that they held remarkably stable, even if the glass wet by the ocean spray was also extremely slippery. I fell a few times before I made a slow, crabby crawl across the bottles.

My hand closed around a different shape, after a few painfully slow minutes crabbing across the bottles. I looked down and found, nearly buried by the bottles, a brownish jug – also glass, so far as I could tell, and also stopped with a cork. I squatted down to tug the cork free, and a scroll of paper fell out when I upended it. The paper looked older – more discolored, stiffer, tattered at the edges. Very, delicately thin. But still the same message.

The bottles mounded higher as I went, now safely above the waterline, and they compacted together to create a more even surface. I could walk over them, with a little care. Gradually, they changed from bottles to jugs, a rolling wave of green giving way to brown, like a healthy plain bleeding into drought and blight.

The brown glass jugs gave way eventually to old, dirty clay jugs. No fine ceramics, they were rough under my feet compared to the glass, and I kicked up a lot of dust. The ocean was a joke now, with no hope of cresting this mass. If I looked hard and carefully to either side, I could just make out a glimmer of silvery-gray light that might have been the setting sun reflecting off the water. The causeway – no, the peninsula of bottles and jugs stretched as far before and behind me as I could see.

Had I really been walking so long, that shore was out of sight? I shook my head, dismissing the question, and continued on.

Jugs became amphorae became wax-sealed pots, and eventually clay became leather. Waterskins, some rigid and others flexible, sealed with wax or pine pitch, plugged up with clay or wood stoppers. And even these disappeared at the last. Soon, I walked not on glass or clay or leather, but bone.

White surrounded me, like being caught out in the winter. And a ghastly, macabre winter, as a chill wind picked up from nowhere I could tell. The ground under my feet was composed entirely of skulls. Human skulls.

Many were bleached white, as if left out in the desert sun for years. Others looked fresher, with a more natural color than the glaring white, while others had the tarnish of time spent buried. All were intact, though none had their jaw bones.

One caught my eye. Where the thousands – no, millions of skulls around me were all about adult-sized, this one was much smaller. A child's skull. It had all its upper teeth, tiny little things that had yet to fall out and be replaced by permanent teeth. I remembered when my own baby teeth had started to fall out, and realized the skull's owner couldn't have been more than six years old when he or she died.

Something shifted inside the skull as I turned it about. I looked into the hole at the base, where the spine goes up to meet the brain, and shook another little scroll out. I don't think it was paper – it didn't have the right feeling, the right consistency. If I'd had to guess, it was probably a scrap of vellum. Incredibly old, and falling apart even as I unrolled it. Pieces broke off and fell away in my hand, leaving nothing but the tiny shred upon which had been written the words:

help me

Message in a Bottle, pt. 4, 407 words

2009-09-23T01:45:00.000-04:00

Now... now I was really beginning to get disturbed. I got up and looked back at the bottle I'd tripped on. My eyes were drawn along the direction its neck was pointing, and I saw another – not one of the others I'd already grabbed and dropped, those were clustered together a short distance away, but a fifth bottle. Involuntarily, I walked over and tracked my gaze in the direction that the fifth bottle's neck pointed. Number six poked out of the sand.

Just to be sure, I pulled number five out of the sand and forced the cork out. help, written in that same reddish-brown ink on an identical scroll of crackling old paper.

Wait...

I yanked an adhesive bandage off my elbow, which I'd scraped yesterday. A few hairs tugged loose with it. Holding the bandage in my hand next to the paper, I squinted in the failing light.

It was hard to be certain, but the ink could have been blood. The small stain of dried blood on the bandage looked almost exactly the same color. For all I knew, the differences in color could have been from fading with age, or something in the paper.

Slowly, drawn on by mounting curiosity, I followed the path laid out by the bottles. One led to another and another and another, up the beach an interminable distance. I lost track of time as I followed the line, convinced this was a horrible idea but too intrigued to stop. I wasn't sure that turning back would help me anyways.

The bottles came closer and closer, soon in groups of two or three. Sometimes more. Every once in a while I paused to check one, and the same note was within each. The beach seemed to go on forever, a thin strip of sand with the ocean on one side, and ever more trees on the other. I looked up, shading my eyes against a ray of light that broke through the clouds as the sun lowered in the sky, and the water in the distance looked different. The wrong color.

I stepped lightly, hurrying forward to see what was wrong. The discoloration came closer, and I soon realized that it was a mass of bottles. All of them that same cloudy green color, so many that they choked the beach where they gathered. Waves splashed futilely against their mass, trying and failing to reach the sandy shore.

Message in a Bottle, pt. 3, 386 words

2009-09-22T01:25:00.000-04:00

I picked up the bottle and turned back. It was past time to head back to the little beach house; my mother would probably be preparing dinner shortly. She was a professional chef, and hadn't missed a trick when it came to gathering recipes and ideas all last week here. Now she was going to spend the next week at this resort trying things out on us, while there were still some of the more obscure ingredients readily available. No doubt the little Asian food shop back home was about to see an upturn in business, too.

My foot whacked up against something else hard again, striking the same toe with which I'd hit the bottle. I swore a little more sharply, and leaned down to rub my toe and check what I'd hit.

I blinked, nonplussed. Another bottle. An identical bottle. Even a near-identical chunk of cork, cut in the same shape and jammed in hard. And, I could just barely see through the cloudy glass, another tiny scroll tied with a string.

Swallowing a nervous laugh that suddenly threatened to bubble up, I looked around the beach. Was someone playing silly buggers with the stupid gaijin kid?

But there was no one around to be seen. There weren't even many places around to hide that also offered a good view, unless you had binoculars. I sighed and grabbed the second bottle, if just because it was there, and went on.

When my foot hit the third bottle, I threw the other two down into the sand and marched on without checking for the scroll inside.

A strange feeling stole over me, after marching along for several more minutes. I'd gone beyond the bounds of the resort when walking out along the beach, but I should've come back to it already by now. None of the beach houses were yet in sight, though. The sun was already setting and the clouds rolling back in, but it wasn't so dark that I shouldn't have been able to see the white houses. I set off at a light jog, growing uneasy.

And I swear that the fourth bottle hadn't been there before I stepped right on it. It slid out from under my feet, skidding aside easily, and I got a mouthful of sand for my troubles.

Message in a Bottle, pt. 2, 403 words

2009-09-21T01:12:00.000-04:00

Eyes half closed, not really paying attention to where I was going, I suddenly stubbed my toe on something half-buried in the sand. Muttering a quiet profanity, I knelt down and saw an old glass bottle. It had been stopped up with a tough old piece of cork, and dried salt and sand encrusted its side. The glass was a cloudy dark green, almost opaque – from age or by design, I had no way of knowing. It was absurdly heavy for its size.

Curious as to what might be inside, I tugged the cork out. It took a lot of work – I didn't resort to pulling it with my teeth, but I did have to wrap the hem of my shirt around the cork for some extra friction. The cork came out with a loud poonk, and I tucked it into my shorts pocket.

A low whistle escaped my lips. The bottle was completely dry inside – no ancient pirate rum, a fancy that had run across my thoughts in a moment of irrational imagination. Not that I was on the right ocean for that kind of thing. This was almost as strange, though: a small strip of paper, rolled up tight so it could fit through the neck of the bottle and tied with a string. I thought that kind of thing only happened in old stories and cheesy movies.

The string didn't want to untie, but it was easy to just slip it off the paper. I dropped it back in the bottle, set the bottle down in the sand, and unrolled the paper. The paper crackled with age, stiff and yellowed but not yet so old as to fall apart. I had to fumble a few times before it unrolled fully.

In a soft, delicate hand that had swept the letters out in broad loops, some faded reddish-brown ink made a single word, written in English.

help

I think I didn't breathe for a full minute after that. Certainly, I was light-headed when I looked up, blinked repeatedly for a few seconds as if something was in my eyes. I stared off at the dimming, cloudy sky and pondered what I held.

A prank? Maybe. What little payoff, though. They'd never see who had been gotten. And in English, for something found on the coast of Japan?

If it was a prank, it was a flat-out weird one.

Message in a Bottle, pt. 1, 403 words

2009-09-20T01:50:00.000-04:00

The storm had passed, finally. I sighed softly, upset with the time already wasted, and slipped out of the hotel room where I'd been trapped for the past half-day with my family. A big trip overseas, which Mom and Dad had spent years saving up for.

We spent the first week playing tourist in Japan's big cities, the stupid white foreigners who had to consult a phrasebook to ask where to find the toilets. That got old fast. After that, we came to a small beach resort to spend the second week of the trip. Japan's got some lovely beaches, or so we'd been told, but our first day there hadn't been very exciting. A storm blew in from nowhere and spent the whole day shaking the little rented villa with thunder and rain. I took off the second the storm broke, determined not to be trapped there with my parents and sister any longer. Even if it started raining again while I was out, I'd rather be in the middle of a thundershower than play another hand of Go Fish.

After the rattling, crashing, booming storm the beach was almost silent. The waves lapped against the shore, but they were low, background noises, easily ignored. Nobody else was anywhere to be found, the other beach resort villas still closed up against the storm and the encroaching evening. That suited me just fine.

The sunlight piercing the clouds limned everything in a faint golden hue, like being covered in a layer of some fine, glittering pixie dust. I tromped down through the powdered-gold sand and kicked a few furrows as I went along, spraying light around me. Only where sea met sand did the illusion of gold give way to reality, as the sand went muddy and brown as the waves went back and forth over it, drenching it more steadily than even a torrential rain could.

The storm had left a lot of flotsam and jetsam on the beach. I kind of pitied the resort's employees, that would have to clean it all up by tomorrow and restore the illusion of pristine paradise.

I kept walking, up along the waterline. The waves lapped against my feet, sometimes engulfing up to my ankles, and I let the muddy sand squelch between my toes. The air was still thick with humidity, but a fresh breeze off the water cut through the worst of it.

Another Angel Down, Second Draft

2009-09-18T02:32:00.002-04:00

After some extended thought, I'm taking another shot at "Another Angel Down." I really don't like how the first one turned out, so here's the second draft. Most of the characters will be... similar, with the same names and mostly the same personalities. But the world is changing a lot, as is the plot. I'm hoping to learn from my mistakes with the first draft.

Obviously, this won't go up every day. I'm taking more time at thinking it out, considering how the plot should go, so there'll be plenty of shots of other stuff -- more "Sword Gods," which I'm still liking so far (a rarity, this far into things), maybe more "Never Special" if I ever get the plot outlined further with my co-author, and other one-shots and ideas as they strike me.

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 8, 366 words

2009-09-17T06:03:00.001-04:00

The smith shook his head dumbly. “I was a... a captive.” His thoughts came more easily now, but his tongue still lagged behind. He swallowed against a dry throat.

The other man paused for half a step before continuing on. His gaze slid along the wall, considering the dungeon doors, down there in the depths of the keep, and moved back to the smith in careful thought.

The smith managed to grab at the other's shoulder, shaking his head. “Not a criminal,” he said. “I live in Ordal. Blacksmith. Was brought in by force, to make swords. A sword.”

“A sword? Why wouldn't a Calland smith do?”

“Don't know,” the smith lied. His hands suddenly shook, and the tremor swept up his arms and down his body. He nearly fell out of the other's arm, still doubled over as the shaking went on. He gritted his teeth and tried not to bite his tongue.

“Hey– hey!” Hands on his shoulders held him steady. “Why didn't you say you have seizures?”

“I don't normally.” The smith bit back a sharp profanity. “I was just stabbed through the frigging lung. I think I'm allowed an unpleasant side-effect or two.”

“How are you even still standing?”

The smith squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a moment, and had to make a serious effort to straighten up. Taking a deep breath and letting it out before answering, he said, “With effort.”

“No,” the other man said. He let go of the smith and backed away, shaking his head. “No, no, no. That isn't – it isn't normal.” A pause, and then, “Are you... are you a god?”

Sighing, the smith again briefly closed his eyes. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Not sure.” He touched the ragged tear in his shirt, where the sword had pierced him. “Not much of one, it seems.”

“Swords...” The man shook his head. “I've never heard of gods actually making their swords – or any swords at all. I don't know, they just... don't.”

“Like I said, I'm not much of a god,” the smith said tersely.

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 7, 400 words

2009-09-16T01:36:00.000-04:00

Footsteps hurried to his side, and an arm slid under his shoulders and hauled him upright. A hand cupped his chin and forced the smith to look up. Blearily, the smith closed his eyes for a moment to stop the world from swimming wildly around him, then opened them to squint at eyes staring into his.

“Who... 're you,” he managed, barely, around a tongue thick and stiff like he had been sick for days.

The person holding him was a young man, late in adolescence and features only just taking on the full sharpness of adulthood. He had a narrow jaw with little chin, and soft brown eyes that, combined with the long black hair pulled back in a queue, conspired to make him look more feminine than masculine. But his features blurred in the smith's eyes, something recognizable in the shape of his nose and the set of his mouth, something in how his brows drew down over those brown eyes in intense scrutiny.

The smith physically recoiled from the younger man, seeing the knight in his features. He fell backwards out of the young man's arm and cracked his head on the stone floor. The ancient straw offered no cushion against the blow.

“...ohh ow...”

“Damnation... What the blazes was that about?” The young man knelt down beside him. Questions flowed in a babbling rush. “Who are you, and how aren't you dead? What are you doing here?”

“Stop,” the smith croaked. “Get away.”

“What? No, you're hurt. And in a place as filthy as this...” He shook his head. “Come on.”

The young man grabbed the smith and hauled him up with surprising strength for his small frame. The smith braced himself, but the pain he expected never came. Oh, his body ached and the wound still throbbed, but he was lifted carefully off the floor so he didn't pull at his hurts. He rocked unsteadily on his feet, but the younger man held him up.

As they shuffled out of the chamber, the smith managed to ask, “Who... What're you doing here?”

With a sideways look at the smith, the younger man said, “I should be asking you that. I live here.” He flicked a quick look around the dim hallway. “In this city, that is. I don't think anyone could live down here.”

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 6, 381 words

2009-09-15T01:06:00.000-04:00

Air.

Choking, the smith flopped over onto his stomach and gagged a wad of blood and phlegm out of his throat. A thick film of drying mucous and blood coated the roof of his mouth and tongue, and his stomach heaved. He spat up a thick, half-congealed clot of blood nearly half the size of his fist. More, smaller clots followed. The smith nearly vomited again just from the feeling of forcing out the thick, stringy globs. Something crackled in his chest with every breath as air forced its way past something else in his passages. More blood, he felt certain.

But...

Lying on the ground, ancient straw crackling and squelching under his shifting body weight, face-down in his own bloody vomit and lying in a puddle of cooling blood... he didn't care. He could breathe. He was still alive.

Even the wound didn't hurt as much as he felt it should have. He had been stabbed clean through a lung, and now it hurt less than the time, during his apprenticeship, he'd stepped on an old nail that had been discarded carelessly. The nail hadn't gone right through his foot, but it had bit in deeply, and one of his toes was still numb to this day from some damage it had left behind. The bout of lockjaw he'd developed afterward, and barely survived, had been worse yet. In all, it had set his apprenticeship back by the best part of a year.

After a few minutes, he tried to move. His muscles protested, and the angry pain in his chest flared bright. He flopped flat against the floor, gasping. His desperate need for air made the only noise in the entire room.

The door creaked open, unutterably loud in the dark, silent chamber. Light from the hall stabbed in and at his eyes. He flinched away. His body screamed in pain at even that tiny movement, but he ignored it. All he could do was huddle on the ground in fear of what came now to do away with him.

“Bloody abyss...”

The smith froze. That voice– it wasn't the knight or the Blood God. He'd never heard it before. He tried to uncurl, to look up at whoever had found him, but his limbs refused to respond.

Short Break

2009-08-31T01:30:00.000-04:00

Moving again. Taking a short break while I deal with it all and settle in. Can't say I'm going to be enjoying where I'm to be living, but it's only for about 3 months.

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 5, 392 words

2009-08-31T01:18:00.000-04:00

The god snapped his hand up and grabbed the tip of the sword in his bare hand. The razor edge cut deep into the god's flesh, but he held on tight, and managed to shift the blow into the ground. The smith lost his grip in surprise, and the god used the sword for support as he pulled himself out from under the rubble. Blood streamed freely but, as the god turned to glare up at the smith, that was the least of his hurts.

Horrible burns marred the god's no-longer-handsome features. He'd had his face all but thrust directly into the heart of a fire when he was pinned, and even a god could burn. Fat had charred and flesh had melted, deforming the god into a waxy parody of himself. His left eye was completely destroyed by the flames, and the right one looked half-blinded as well.

The god reached up and gripped the hilt of the sword, pulling himself out of the rubble pile. He grabbed the longsword in one hand and snatched up his falchion in the other. Most of his clothing was destroyed, charred and burning away, and burns crawled all over his body. Still, the god came onwards inexorably, and as the smith stumbled back he tripped on a fallen beam. The smith fell to the ground, and the god came to stand over him.

Before anything could be said, before anything could be done, the god drove the tip of the longsword through the smith's chest, sliding the blade between ribs and pinning him to the ground. It was the smith's own blade, it wouldn't have killed him – couldn't have killed him – but it did hold him in place long enough, as the god raised his falchion high and then brought it low, cleaving clean through the smith's neck.

Dark.

Nothing.

A sudden welter of confusing images and sounds. More dreams. More visions. Random scenes with no rhyme nor reason.

(A beautiful woman kissing his cheek, the point of contact which suddenly blooms with an irritating itch, which spreads swiftly all over his body.)

(Beating iron impossibly thin, in foil-like sheets, cutting out and assembling delicate flowers out of the foil, each petal's edge sharper than the finest knife.)

(Embracing the god, laughing, the faces flushed with excitement and spattered with drying blood.)

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 4, 396 words

2009-08-30T01:38:00.000-04:00

He lay on the ground, surrounded by a deadly obstacle course of fallen debris. The god leaped down from the a gap burned in the ceiling and the floor above, his blade descending inexorably toward the smith. In desperation, the smith kicked and rolled away, the falchion crashing down mere inches away from his head. His back stopped up against a burning timber, and he reflexively rolled back aside and scrambled to his feet.

The smith's knee screamed in pain as he rose, but he gritted his teeth and forced a stumbling, hurried trot to put more of the fallen debris between himself and the god. Slowly, slowly the pain abated as the smith moved, until he could almost hobble at his normal pace.

Rising to his feet, the god came at the smith once more. His blade swept out and high, drawn back for a decapitating blow, and the smith held his place just long enough to commit the god to his attack. At the last moment, the smith dove back and to the side, and the falchion clove into a support beam. Driven by the god's might and will, the blade passed through the wood as if it were mist.

The smith smiledlaughedmockedhahaHAgotyounow and smacked the cloven timber aside with the flat of his blade. A normal sword should have broken before it could have moved the thick support beam, even sliced through as it was, but the beam slipped aside anyway. The god recovered from his wild blow just in time to glance up as the ceiling above, deprived of support, gave way. Fire and rubble descended, pinning the god to the ground. If only briefly.

In a fit of spite and malicious joy, the smith clambered atop the flaming rubble, trusting his boots and the thick leather of his clothing to protect him from burns, and stomped hard. The god below screamed in fury and pain, fighting to get up and out from beneath the burning wood and hot stone.

The smith looked down at his trapped foe, quelling the urge to gloat. The god's head, neck and right arm and shoulder were still exposed, not completely pinned but still immobile. The smith sheathed his short sword and took the longsword in two hands, point angled down. He raised it incrementally, then plunged it downwards, to jab clean through the god's neck.

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 3, 428 words

2009-08-29T03:34:00.002-04:00

A building cracked loudly and crumbled directly behind him, as the flames consumed the wooden skeleton that held it in place. Without thinking, the smith threwswamflewmoved himself aside as a flaming support beam from the roof crashed through the wall and hammered to the ground where he had stood. The beam's other end still leaned against the wall, an invitation into the burning hellinfernoabyssbuilding dietherewillDIEtheredieDIEdieDIE.

The smith threw a profane gesture at the god, and leapt upon the fallen beam. Flames licked around his ankles, but couldn't burn through his boots. He ran up the beam, still mostly intact, with inhuman balance. The god followed, blade flashing in the firelight eyesflashinginshadow.

The floor had burned out in several places, pieces of old planking dropping to the ground below. The smith leaped across one of the gaps, his back exposed, daring the god to follow. Another plank went out from under his foot as he landed, and he barely avoided crashing through the floor. Part of the board levered up as the plank tilted to descend, and he kicked it up and across at the onrushing god's face. The god wasted a split second in thrashing the flaming board aside, and the smith was upon him.

Even in the hands of a sword-god, the falchion was not made for defense, especially in an even fight. In an uneven fight, distracted and in a hostile environment... In the hands of a sword-god, a heavy, chopping blade like a falchion was an expression of the wielder's aggression. To be thrown on the defensive left one at a disadvantage. And the versatility of a longsword, and the calm and balanced will that it expressed, became an advantage.

The falchion came up in awkward deflection, parrying the longsword by spare inches. That left the god wide open as the smith slipped his shorter blade in. A single sharp jab and the god was stumbling back, tripping over the burning remnants of the fallen roof.

The blow would have gone clean through a mortal man's liver and left him gasping on the floor, but a god would not shamepityrelief be felled so easily. The god hooked his free hand on a support and used it to swing his momentum about and out of the smith's path. When the smith came around to engage him, both blades up and ready, the god struck. A kick to the knee, identical to the one that the smith had delivered outside, audibly cracked the bone and sent the smith back, back and down a hole in the floor.

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 2, 367 words

2009-08-28T01:12:00.000-04:00

He needed (needed?) to kill the man in front of him.

No, not a man, he realized. The figure in his dreams (dreams? figments-fantasies-memories?) towered impossibly tall, moved faster and more gracefully than any man. He wielded the blade, meant for hacking and chopping, with the same grace with which a master fencer might bear a rapier. A god of the sword, implacable and mighty. The blade did not move as an extension of his hand so much as it was part of his hand, while still something separate. It was, he understood in that perfect clarity of dreams (knowledgerecollection), a sword forged by the god who wielded it, as perfect an expression of that god's skill and will as the god's own word.

But the smith flowed with every blow, parrying and blocking that deadly whirling edge. With every opening, he slid the tip of his longsword – selfhandsoul – through the other's guard and scored a red line.

Every cut tallied a sum owed the god, earnedhow? howwhenwhyearned?and soon to be paid in full. Crossing his blades once more to catch another sweeping slash of the falchion, he kicked the god hard in the knee and propelled himself back with the force of the blow. He took that precious second to glance around his surroundings, looking for anything that would give him the advantage. The smith fought too defensively to have a hope of slaying his foe.

The environment swam into focus, now that he acknowledged it. A city burned around them, in the dark of midnight. People were nowhere to be seen, but the flames from a burning shop garishly illuminated a spray of blood on the nearby cobblestones. More blood had been slopped against the sides of some of the burning buildings, as if someone had heaved it there from a bucket. The complete lack of any other human remains only made the spectacle even more surreal.

Where were the dead bodies? The men with their guts laid open? Those pierced and brought low by a dozen lesser wounds? Severed digits, bodiless limbs, decapitated corpses? Did they fight in an empty city, built and set ablaze for the climax of their violent performance?

"Sword Gods," Awakening, pt. 1, 409 words

2009-08-27T01:37:00.000-04:00

The god and knight departed in short order, leaving the smith alone to bleed out. Eventually, darkness closed over him, and he wasn't sure whether it was from the fading of the room's lights or death's approach. One was as good as the other, he supposed.

Somewhere on the edge he floated, a place he'd known only in those precious moments after a night's sleep but just before waking fully to the dawn. Dreams still haunted him, then, but took on a surreal note as the real world and his own thoughts began to intrude. Those dreams no longer moved to their own logic, but instead played out by rules borne of the waking world and dreaming world's haphazard commingling. They came more vividly and lingered longer in his memory, but in broad strokes at the expense of meaning and detail.

One of those dreams came to him as he sank into the darkness. A broken, disjointed narrative that flowed from scene to scene with little sense of how he had moved from one to the next.

Visions of casting and forging, of a multitude of beautiful swords of all varieties finished in his smithy. Only it wasn't his smithy, and the blades appeared as if by magic, the secrets and details of their creation never revealed to his dreaming eye. Some, he could deduce what he might do to produce such a thing; others, he had little idea about. And he had tried, but all were crude things compared to the works of art of his dreams.

And not merely the creation of such swords, but their use as well. Practice against imaginary foes, against wooden posts and dummies rigged out of sackcloth and stuffed with straw. One dream jumped erratically back and forth, as the straw-filled dummies turned into men stuffed into uniforms, or the motley of peasants pressed into infantry. Blood spilled freely before turning back into straw and cloth, and a dummy screamed piteously and stank of urine and shit as he plunged a blade into its breast. More dreams of violence assailed him now than he'd ever before remembered upon awakening.

One dream shook him more than any other. A desperate need clutched at his heart with icy fingers, and he shook with exhaustion. He fought with two blades, a long one held tight in his right hand and a shorter blade in his left, crossed to block the blow of a razor-edged falchion.

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 6, 539 words

2009-08-26T01:36:00.000-04:00

“No, my lord,” the knight answered. A small, curious smile crossed his face. “But it is time for blood to flow.” Involuntarily, he flicked his eyes upwards to the ceiling, presumably at the throne room or the king of Calland's chambers.

“Excellent,” the god purred, and jammed the blade point-first into the smith's right breast. The hot steel slid in as casually as it might have passed through lard, slipping between ribs to come out his back. With the same ease with which he had thrust the blade through the smith's body, the god slid it out and twitched the blade aside, flicking blood off in a light spray.

The ceiling forced its way to the forefront of the smith's vision, clouded by a black fog that ate away at the edges of everything. A cracking, breaking pain billowed out from the back of his head, and his breath suddenly came with difficulty. His whole body grew chill except for a bright, searing slice of pain that cut straight through him. Something hot and wet spread over his chest and under his back, and if he recognized what it was, that recognition came only distantly. His thoughts were paralyzed with shock and surprise, consumed with pain.

The cowled figure of the Blood God knelt over him. Proximity did nothing to counter the shadows that obscured the god's face, but his eyes took on more definition than a blurred glow. From so close, the smith thought he could see a slightly darker slit down the middle of the eye, like the pupil of a cat. The god's eyes narrowed in malicious amusement as it stared down at him.

“If you are who you seem to be,” the god whispered to the smith, “this will be the second time I'll have killed you. And by a blade of your own manufacture, no less. I don't suppose you can appreciate the irony of that, but we're... well, we're not supposed to be able to be slain by our own blades. So either you're not who we think you are, or you just haven't awakened to your true nature yet.

“Either way... it works for me.”

The smith managed a shallow breath, just enough to wheeze out, “True... nature?” Was the Blood God really saying what he thought he was?

The god laughed. “She never told you. She really never told you. I'm almost surprised. She forced the compact on the rest of us for you, you know.”

“Why...?”

“The compact? Because the others wouldn't let her get away with killing me. She decided the next best thing would be to fetter me – and all of us, really, given who we are.”

The smith summoned all his strength, barely enough, and managed to shake his head just a little. “No,” he breathed, “why... kill me?”

The god straightened up, looking down upon the smith. He couldn't tell if the god was amused at the question or not. But finally, the god said, “You won't believe me. None of the others ever did. But I'll tell you anyway: it was self-defense. So, I suppose, was this as well. Proactive self-defense.”

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 5, 391 words

2009-08-25T01:01:00.000-04:00

Light flashed on suddenly, brighter and more glaring than the noon sun. The smith recoiled, trying to shield his eyes with his free hand. He heard a sinister, hissing laugh before he could see anything, and his blood chilled at the sound.

A gray blur resolved into the source of that laughter: a towering, nightmarish figure shrouded in dirty ashen robes, its face hidden in the shadows of its hood but for two glowing eyes, while the open bony beak of some unearthly huge carrion eater framed the opening. The effect was profoundly disturbing, and the smith felt something deep in his gut curdle and twist at the sight. He knew, in an absent and distant way, that the figure should not have been quite so frightening, but something about it felt distressingly familiar, as if something seen in a dream – and coupled with that sense of familiarity came hair-raising terror, as a rabbit must regard a wolf.

“The Blood God,” he whispered. He couldn't help it, the words slipped out before he could think.

The Blood God, or so he was called by the old veterans back home – and there weren't many old veterans. Wielded by Calland against Ordal and other nations in battle after battle, the sword-god wrought devastating losses amongst the common soldiery. Held back, occasionally, by Ordal's own goddess of the sword, when she wasn't engaged elsewhere. He laughed as he slaughtered, and only stopped the butchery when his blade finally broke. Sometimes it worked against against Calland, when the opposing forces had all fallen and the Blood God turned on their own men. And sometimes he fought so savagely the sword broke in spare minutes, but that meant little to the men hacked apart on the field.

The god laughed. “Are they still calling me that?”

“My lord,” the knight said, and nodded to the sword. With an ungentle shove, he sent the smith staggering forward to present the sword. Repulsed and terrified, the smith did his best to make himself small even as he held the sword up to the god. The god didn't even pause to inspect it.

In one swift motion, the Blood God snatched the sword out of the smith's hands and swung it about the room. “It is time for battle, then?” the god inquired.

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 4, 388 words

2009-08-24T01:43:00.000-04:00

“Very well,” the knight said, and turned to the open doorway. That, and an open window high on the wall, were the only concessions to ventilation in the place. “Bring it.”

Carefully, the smith took up the sword with his gloved hands, looking around for some kind of sheath or scabbard. None presented itself, and he certainly hadn't had time to get one made. With a tired sigh he carried it carefully at his side, trying to keep the tip from striking stone while not touching the hot blade.

The knight led them down several floors and through a series of ill-lit halls. After a few turns, the smith felt very thoroughly lost. No guards presented themselves this deep in the castle, and he began to wonder if this wasn't some sick joke being played at a peasant's expense. Was he being stuck down here to rot, with nothing but the sword as an escape? Wagers made as to how long it would take him to commit suicide with the product of his labors?

They stopped at a door much like any of the others down there. A single torch on the wall opposite lit the hallway, poorly. The door had, the smith noticed, a simple latch, no bar nor lock to keep an occupant prisoner. The knight put his shoulder to the door, then turned the latch as he shoved against the heavy oak. After a few grunts and forceful heaves, the door rattled open.

The smith's stomach turned at the almost palpable stench that billowed out of the room. He turned his head to his shoulder and coughed hard as his throat tried to close up against the reek.

“Go in,” the knight said.

With a look into the stinking dark and a quick, doubtful glance at the knight, the smith stepped in. He tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, but the horrid stench clawed at him from every direction. It sunk into his clothes and hair and flesh with vile insistence, refusing to be ignored. The smith wanted to retch and, as he stepped in, the squelching of slime under his boots only made it worse. Between his nervousness and nausea, he nearly vomited right then and there when the knight closed the door after them, plunging the room into darkness.

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 3, 362 words

2009-08-23T01:30:00.000-04:00

The hilt had to be finished next. It was a cast iron grip and cross guard with a hole down the length, so he could slide it up the tang to the base of the blade and hold it in place. The end of the hilt was circular and the tang stuck out almost an inch, and after casting he had spent hours cutting suitable threads into it. Its mate sat nearby, a heavy blunted spheroid that would serve as the pommel. It fit comfortably into the smith's palm, and had been threaded on the inside as well for mounting on the hilt. More importantly, the bottom half of the sphere was nearly hollow, as if it had been cast around a mushroom. After heating the protruding end of the tang and screwing the pommel on to the hilt, he hammered it down to secure the pommel and hilt, and to allow the soft, hot end of the tang to mushroom inside the pommel, so the end would be too large to withdraw from the opening.

He spent more than an hour after that on the grindstone, giving it a dull but serviceable edge, feeling ill-inclined to put so much care into the work as he normally would have, yet balking at leaving it too unfinished. He salved his wounded pride by pretending the blade was to be only a ceremonial tool.

By the time all this was completed, the blade's temperature had cooled from searingly hot to merely scorching. The hot air of the forge did little to encourage its cooling, and he found himself guzzling any provided clean water and pouring it over his head to keep from passing out. The smith was shortly soaked to the skin in sweat and water, and spattered droplets about with every motion. Twilight had set firmly in, if he could guess at all from the light through the window.

The smith took a deep breath and said, “It's as done as it's going to get.” Which wasn't to say that the sword was finished, not nearly to his satisfaction, but it was as finished as the knight's impatience was likely to allow.

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 2, 372 words

2009-08-22T01:08:00.000-04:00

The smith bit back the retort waiting on his tongue, instead taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Very well,” he said after a moment. “Then can you at least bring me some extra layers so I might handle the blade safely while it's still hot?”

The knight shook his head a little. Damn him, he wasn't even sweating. How was that even possible in this closed-up room barely suitable for smithing? “That is also your problem. If the same tools as you keep in your own forge are insufficient to the task... Or is it your insufficiency, perhaps?”

Gaping at the complete leap of non-logic, the smith realized the knight had to be goading him intentionally. Nobody in his position in life could be that – no, no, check that. They could be that stupid. He'd met more than enough who believed the vagaries of steel and fire could be bent to their private schedules. One could tell them that It doesn't work that way until your voice was gone, but they'd just respond every time with Can't you make it work that way?

The smith turned his back on the knight and closed his eyes. A headache already blossomed right along the line of his brow. After a moment, he opened his eyes once more and looked around the room, doing a silent inventory. His life was at stake here – he couldn't forget that – and he had to do what was demanded of him if he hoped to live.

If his captors could be even remotely trusted to let him live.

The room he was in had been used for storage, at one point, and not all of its materials had been cleaned out when the forge was installed. Included in those leftovers were some sheets of leather, cut and bound for easy storage. He took up a small knife and went over to the leather, cutting a piece loose from its bindings. Under the knight's wary eye, he cut the leather into strips and wrapped them awkwardly over his gloves. He sliced a hole into another sheet to make a thicker work apron, and so encumbered, took up the still-hot sword blade.

"Sword Gods," A Test, pt. 1, 384 words

2009-08-21T00:34:00.001-04:00

The smith pulled the blade from the blazing heat of the forge. Sweat ran down his face in sheets, and he awkwardly wiped it away on his arm to little effect before setting the hot blade down to cool. He set the heavy iron tongs aside as well and began to slowly clean and sort his tools. He sighed quietly as he fumbled with the unfamiliar set-up, and wished once more for his own smithy.

“Is it completed?” the knight – his ever-present guardian and captor – asked. The smith refrained from flinching or glancing over his shoulder at the black-armored figure, instead focusing upon the tools.

“It's tempering,” the smith said. “It needs time to cool, and then I can grind an edge on and affix a proper guard and hilt.” He glanced out the high window, considering the dimming daylight that came through the panes. “And considering you haven't answered any of my requests for proper materials to temper it in, it might be ready sometime late tomorrow. The day after is a bit more likely. Air tempering is always a bit loose, especially if I leave it racked here in a warm forge.”

The smith could almost hear the disapproving frown in his voice as the knight said, “Finish it now.”

“While it's still hot?” The smith turned in place, wondering whether the knight was an idiot or intentionally pushing him. “Do you really understand what you're demanding? It needs to cool on its own to prevent irregularities and weaknesses, and it's not like I can hold it very safely for the grinding while it's this hot!”

The knight crossed his arms with a muffled clanking and scrape of armor plates. “That's not my problem,” he said. “This is your test, and if you fail...” He looked meaningfully at the cooling blade.

Hesitant, considering, the smith said, “Maybe if you brought me an extra pair or two of leather gloves, big ones, I could be able to hold it well enough for grinding. And another apron. But are you trying to sabotage the blade? What would your god think of that?”

“What my god thinks isn't for you to worry about, peasant,” the knight said, disdain dripping from his voice.

"Sword Gods," Master and Servant, pt. 4, 512 words

2009-08-20T00:12:00.001-04:00

The room looked the cage for a wild animal. Countless marks marred the bare stone walls, long scratches that ran from ceiling to floor as if something had scrabbled to get out. Ancient hay and straw lay strewn across the floor, matted down by the constant passage of feet over it. What didn't crackle and crunch drily underfoot was thick with some mold-like slime, the only source of which could have been the barren room's sole occupant.

The bearer of that amiable, absorbing voice seemed a creature of its surroundings. Or, rather, the surroundings seemed a thing of their occupant. Tall and broad of shoulder, half a head taller than even the knight, he won attention by his very presence. He made himself large, with a wide and open stance, shoulders back and head held high – royalty could have learned from him simply how to stand.

But the mien of a king was shrouded in ashen gray robes, voluminous things which swept along the floor and hid all but the broad outlines of the being's body. A capelet hung over his shoulders, edged with yellowing fangs each more than three inches long, taken from some massive specimen of wolf, which clacked and clattered together gently as he moved. The figure's face was shrouded completely in shadow by the hood of its robes, leaving an inky void out of which issued the glow of two burning eyes. The bony ridges of some titanic scavenger-bird's hooked beak protruded from that void, wide open as if the eyes stared out from within the darkness of the bird's gullet.

The sword-god loomed over the knight, staring him down. “Tell me what you know,” he hissed, his voice no longer pleasant.

The knight swallowed against a lump in his throat, and reminded himself that the god was harmless without a blade. No sword-god fought without a sword. “My lord,” he began, “the mounted lady commissioned a blade from a village smith. The smith was said to make exceptional blades, and she had broken her old one in combat, so I was sent to ascertain the truth of his reputation and arrange for him to forge her a sword.

“The smith was a young man, barely taken to his craft, but he made a sword that impressed even her. And it was ready within a spare few days – my lord, this was no simple soldier's blade to be hammered out in a handful of hours, but one suitable for a swordsman of your caliber.” The knight chose his next words carefully. “I believe, my lord... that he is the one you and yours have been awaiting. And so does she.”

The god stood still as a statue for several long seconds, but the light of his eyes grew brighter, betraying the excitement that overtook him. Finally, the god turned his back abruptly to the knight and declared, “Bring him to me.”

“As you will, my lord,” the knight said, kneeling once more in the filthy straw below.

“Always.”

"Sword Gods," Master and Servant, pt. 3, 404 words

2009-08-19T04:41:00.001-04:00

Were he not clad in armor, the knight would have clasped his hands at the small of his back as he responded. Instead, he settled for keeping them at his side, but inclined his head towards the two points of light in the dark. “Never, my lord, for the day I tire of the duties of my station is the day I tire of life.”

The voice chuckled in amusement once more. “So you always say. I wonder, though...” It trailed off, as if in thought. The voice wondered quite a lot. “So what brings you to me this fine morning,” the voice asked. Somehow, it always seemed to know the time of day or night above, no matter how long it had been secluded down in its dark chamber.

“To the point as always, my lord,” the knight observed. Another part of the ritual. For one that spent months at a time alone in shadow, the voice belonged to one who loathed dithering and small talk. “I come bearing news.”

“News,” the voice said dismissively. The points of light grew more angular, eyes narrowing. “Quaint tales of the mayfly lives of mortals. The same things happening over and over again, unto the end of time. There is nothing new to the news, and there is only one kind that interests me. Do you bring it?”

“No, my lord,” the knight said. “I have no news of war to bring you–”

“Then be off with you,” the voice declared, its glowing eyes swinging away in the dark.

The knight simply said, “'Until the fallen rise again.'”

The eyes stopped, turned back to regard the knight. “What did you say?”

“That is the news I bring before you, my lord.” The knight held his hands out, palms upward, as if offering up a physical thing that he carried.

A low growl carried through the darkness, followed shortly thereafter by the voice barking out an insistent, “Light!”

Well, that happened rarely enough. The knight knew not by what mechanism it happened, but light rose gradually within the room. A pair of small crystal orbs glowed brightly, mounted on opposite walls, clean and white like fresh sunlight. As with the rare few times this had happened before, the knight concluded once more that he should have liked the lights to remain quiescent.

"Sword Gods," Master and Servant, pt. 2, 380 words

2009-08-18T03:51:00.002-04:00

He pulled the door to, once again plunging the room into darkness. In a smooth motion practiced by long repetition, the knight knelt down in the muck and mire below, bowing his head. While he wore his hair long, he'd learned to keep it trimmed enough so it would not touch the filth below when he went down on one knee like this. Already in his mind he gnawed over having to clean his armor when he got out of here; it would not do for a knight to look as if he had been on his knees in a barn, after all.

After a count of ten heartbeats, drumming slow and steady but heavily in his breast, he dared to raise his eyes from the piece of shadow that hid the floor. Two points of light, like burning embers, floated in the darkness. A soft hissing chuckle came to his ears.

“Arise,” the chuckling voice whispered. The voice was entirely incongruous with its surroundings. It was smooth and soft, and the knight almost found himself leaning closer to hear it more clearly, as he always did. It was the kind of voice that belonged to a preacher before his congregation, not in this pit of shadow and offal. The knight came to his feet, not knowing entirely whether he did so of his own volition or if driven by the subtle undertones of command in that one word.

“My lord,” he began, but the voice went on, amused.

“Always so careful. Always as precisely deferential as possible. Do you ever tire of it, I wonder?”

The voice had asked that question, or one much like it, nearly every time the knight came here for the past several years. At first it had seemed an insult, and the knight had nearly lashed out at the voice for it. It continued to rankle for quite some time, but at last he had seen it for what it was: a tiny amusement for a being awash in tedium and ennui. A simplistic attempt to get under the knight's skin, one that had yet to be abandoned even though it was no longer effective and now rendered, by time and repetition, into another part of the normal ritual of greeting.

"Sword Gods," Master and Servant, pt. 1, 381 words

2009-08-17T01:17:00.000-04:00

The knight leant his weight upon the door, momentarily grateful that he hadn't yet taken the time to divest himself of his armor. He set his shoulder to the iron-banded oak and heaved. The door gave way on the third shove. Grumbling under his breath at the resistance, the knight straightened up and drew his hair back out of his face.

He had traveled two days with the goddess back to her quarters in the capital, then mounted back up immediately and headed east. On “family business,” he had claimed. Not entirely a lie. His family's holdings were near the eastern border of the kingdom, nearly two weeks' travel away, and this was technically family business. A fact he'd killed to keep secret, but there it was. It had been a simple matter to get over the border from there, and the best part of another month of travel to reach his destination.

The knight had no fondness for the lengthy journey, and wished he could have made it faster. He bore news that could not wait even an instant. Only his horse's needs kept him from pressing on through the night. Finally, just before the noon sun had reached its peak, he had arrived at his destination. The stablemaster's boy, familiar with his comings and goings, had taken the knight's horse for grooming and feeding, while the knight had marched into the bowels of the keep and the business awaiting him.

The room beyond the door was as dark and stifling as the spring day above was bright. A thick, cloying scent billowed out the doorway and filled the air, smoky like incense but thick with odors of rot and decay. The knight schooled his face to stillness, repressing the urge to cover his mouth and pinch his nose shut. No matter how often he came here, the stench never grew any less horrible. Then again, other than for his visits, the door was opened maybe once a year.

Something skittered and scratched in the dark, crossing the room. The sound was suddenly cut short with a muffled squeal, barely audible. A new note entered the foul odors clouding the air. The knight trod into the room, feeling ancient hay squelch under his feet, thick with some festering slime.

majest1k_w0n, the future, pt. 4, 342 words

2009-08-16T01:47:00.000-04:00

Let me express it simply, clearly. No code words, no euphemism, no fauxlosophic rambling: no future.

I'm not calling for an end to humanity. I'm not a complete misanthrope, despite what some of my readers may think. I mean just what I say.

Imagine to the end of all the plans for how the future develops. Imagine an end to the agendas and politicking and wars and other bullshit. Imagine an end to all the symptoms of a sick system based on everyone trying to make sure their future comes to pass. Imagine an end to the elder generation forcing its visions of the future onto the younger generation.

I don't mean an end to individual life planning. I don't mean people should stop worrying about the fact that they have to eat and sleep somewhere eventually. I mean that the attempts to build or chart a future should be abandoned. No future means no social engineering. No demographic engineering. The worst human excesses come from fear of the future, because fear of the future leads to attempts to direct it.

Aryan militia groups that fear the demographic changes coming to the Western world as Caucasian birth rates decline faster than those of other ethnicities. Neophobic neoconservatives that fear the end of the US superpower and formed the Project for the New American Century that led directly into the ruinous policies of the so-called War on Terror. Muslim and Jewish and Christian and other theocrats who fear that new ideas might challenge power structures and ideological pyramid schemes centuries or millennia old. Multinational megacorporations that fear losing their profit margins and try to dictate, package, and stifle the next cultural or technological change.

Everything controlled, everything planned. Until those plans intersect, and everything goes to hell. And the next generations are the collateral damage in the wars for the future. So what's the solution? What will go a long way to ending the wars? Take away the prize that everyone is squabbling over.

Imagine no future.

Until next time.

majest1k_w0n, signing off.

majest1k_w0n, the future, pt. 3, 346 words

2009-08-15T04:05:00.001-04:00

And that's just the internet. If you have a job, if you have a credit or debit card, all your physical transactions are traceable. We don't need a shadowy government agency prying into our electronic and physical mail, trying to puzzle out the secrets of our private lives. We each leave such huge footprints that someone would have to be blind not to be able to follow each of us if he wants.

Niche marketing and customer profiles create an illusion of individuality. Screen names and passwords create illusions of anonymity. And every time we click a link rating some media we've experienced, every time we fill a section on a social networking site's user profile page, we're participating in those illusions. You rate a movie, and your ratings are compared with the ratings of thousands or millions of other consumers, and you have been tracked, profiled, and rated in turn. You type in a short phrase describing an interest, and it's a hyperlink to every single other person who's put that same interest in, and the number on a meter somewhere ticks up by one.

And every one of these sites has the rights to sell this profiling information to others. For “marketing purposes.”

It will only take one agency, be it private or governmental, to start actually doing the data-crunching, buying the rights to your information for “marketing purposes” and feeding it into their algorithms, before everything about each of us is known, recorded, and filed away. There is no anonymity in this system. There is no individuality in this system. Even if we don't wear it, carry it, or ever see it, each of us now has a number. Each of us now is a number.

That's the future we're creating. And each of us is a willing participant in it.

So, some of you will say, what do I think the solution is? Everyone has a system they want to tear down, but they never have any suggestion as to what will replace it. But, I say, why replace it?