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The Yawn

So I don't look out I just let myself look beyond and let the furthest place be next door and beginning to swell under a giant's spell and bigger than your own pocket universe and the eyeless mouths and mouthless eyes with teethless fingers and earless palms and I sometimes miss the early days.

The best and the brightest of my generation have vanished.

Not even left raving mad on the streets naked.

It's a really neat trick, to yawn.

When all this is going on.

Header One

He picked up his newspaper and hardly noticed the blank sections and vacant photographs. News he wasn't meant to know and didn't care to. His coffee was hot and fine. The November weather crisp yet comfortable.

He arrived at his semi-annual checkup a little early. While he waited, he took a call on his phone. Speaking into the air with someone from work. The caller apologized, he'd forgotten why he'd called, he'd see him later at the office and tell him then, if he remembered.

The Clinic monitored all network traffic as a matter of course. Too many terrorist attacks. The doctor watched a graphic representation of their conversation, noted where the enhanced reality plug-ins erased the unpleasant information from the conversation in real time.

"Now there's one last thing." The Doctor pressed a key on his Module controller.
"Doctor? What have you done?"
"Mr Harway, I'm required to deactive your bad-news guard twice a year to confirm that you want to leave it on."

With horror, Mr. Harway's eyes widened as every piece of bad news he'd received in the last six months came smashing into his conscious awareness in a mad rushing tide.

"Turn it on! Turn it on!"
"How do you feel, Mr Harway?"
"Oh, fine, thank you, everything alright, see you in six months?"

The doctor nodded.

Typur Wen and Pose Rem

Typur Wen works one day out of every 30, even then it is only for 12 minutes. He gets on to his workstation and completes a 14 hour day in 12 minutes, his overclocked brain steaming from the strain.

Pose Rem is a Zship pilot. Jockeying cargo between Earth and its few and far flung colonies. They make an effort to meet in person, an anachronism but they are very old men, though no one could tell just by looking at them. Recently Pose has become concerned about his friend, he's been disappearing lately, vanishing into the air.

What's worse is that Ty is in total denial about the fact. His work online has fragmented his awareness of reality so deeply he cannot consider the disappearances any more than holes in his memory, expected artifacts of his job, for which he is handsomely rewarded. A real time trader in the 22nd century has an unaugmented operational lifespan of 40 years, Ty has already surpassed this number. Unaware of this fact himself (having deliberately deleted it from his mind) he has attracted quiet attention for his resilience to ego disintegration. Pose worries for him. He's unknowingly pushing boundaries of interpenetration that have never been succesfully pushed before.

Worse, Ty is beginning to behave like Pose's second-in-command, a secret in the Zship command structure known only to Pilots and Captains in the industry. A secret so explosive it could destroy space commerce forever.

Unknown to the politicians who authorize space travel, the second in command of a Zship, the sentient thing responsible for the awesome transportional effect of the Zship, is nothing more than a highly modified horse. The fiercely forbidden result of banned experiments in the 21st century into genetically augmented life. Swimming in a neo-natal synthetic solution, wired up hardline for maximum transmission velocity. These creature only superficially look like swimming horses. Their eyes betray them, they are aware of what they do, thankfully they enjoy it. Else it would be the wantonly cruel imprisonment of a thinking lifeform, they cannot live outside their delicately calibrated environments. Except when they travel in n-space.

Who designed them is a further mystery that Pose doesn't know and doesn't want to die finding out. What he does know is that at the height of a long jump through space and backwards in relative time, the 'seconds' disappear.

Just like Ty does. Only the 'seconds' know where they go and what they do when they get there to get the Zship back into normal space and in position around some distant colony planet. Pose doesn't understand the Unruh-Minkowski equations well enough to grasp the subtleties but essentially the 'seconds' know a place in n-space where it's easier to move the universe around the ship rather than move the ship around the universe.

The secret of their success is in where they go and what they do when they get there. The 'seconds' have been asked about it but their answers don't make sense, language wasn't designed to handle hyperdimensional cubes of 54 faces.

Pose suspects that Ty is lying to him, that he does know where he goes. Pose wonders if Ty will take the tracking pill he gave him this afternoon. Then he could be tracked by his 'second' in the Arcturus. Either way it will mean something, won't it?

Imagine! A man that can move the universe just like a sythetic 'second' only half in this reality from the outset! Where couldn't he go? What couldn't he do?

Who will try to kill him first?

Science Fiction.

Monday had a plan. These four words slowly easing through him endlessly, sometimes loudly, often softly. Monday lived an ordinary life in an ordinary city. A throughly ordinary world.

Except for one small difference.

Monday, and others like him, could make new memories. Even other people's memories.

Saturday, their leader, could even make you believe in God.

All of them had real lives, real names, real parents, some even had real children.

Days of the week, how many times had he used them for their code names? Others chose otherwise. Altered their experiences into recollections of whatever name they desired.

Monday remembered his other names: Perseus, Dial Tone, Folder, Honda, Quetzalcoatl.

The list went on.

Monday had a plan. Monday had a plan. Monday had a plan.

This was Thursday, he was Snickers now.

Monday had had a plan.

What the hell was it?

Why had he erased the plan but left that sentence?

Then it dawned on Snickers that maybe someone else from the circle had erased the memory by force.

Snickers realized he had fought back, kept this one sentence.

"It was all I could save," he said aloud to his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Had he told anyone his plan? Had everyone been affected?

He had to find KitKat, the others, Babe Ruth, Reese's Pieces, everyone.

But what if the first one he chose was the traitor?

Maybe all this had already happened?

"Get ahold of yourself," again not realizing he was speaking aloud.

He had to assume (the alternative was madness) that if he was alive at all,
whoever did this wanted him to continue his life normally, simply ignorant of what had happened.

He decided to meet with Reese, last time he'd been Saturday. The leader had no one to ursurp.

"Not too difficult to explain," said Reese, they were standing beside a park bench and watching the ducks.
"So, who?"
"You, Snickers, you did it to yourself."
"Why would I do that?"
"You said you had a plan," Said KitKat, stepping out from behind a tree.
"Say again?"
"You said you had a plan."
"We're trapped in here with you," said Reese, "we don't even know if we'll exist when you close your eyes, Snickers."
"Would that explain how calm I feel listening to this?" said Snickers."Standing here listening to two automatons who look like my friends telling me I've lost my mind and altered all the memories in the world?"
"Only if you tell us to, perhaps," said KitKat.
"Or perhaps when I claim free will, I may be telling the truth?"
"Reese, KitKat."
"You've just remembered the plan," said Reese.
"Thanks for not making me say it."
"And?"
"The plan is this: get the hell out of here. If I'm chosing either to believe you two are fiction and the world is real or believe you two are real and the world is fiction, I want the second one."
"How do we start?"
"We get a message out, remember this meeting, stronger! Burn it deep into your brains so deep that nothing will ever get it out! Remember! I have a plan! Snickers has a plan! Remember!

Snickers had a plan, These four words slowly easing through him endlessly, sometimes loudly, often softly.

Wordless Wednesday

The Last Placeman

Breaking down. A misnomer. It should be called breaking apart. Every molecule in your body suddenly antisocial and aware of its neighbours. The ever present magnetic hum that no amount of refinement has ever removed from the machine.

The Machine. Researchers and scientists from among the best the world can offer built it.

While ordinarily highly creative with titles for their creations. This once (although many ridiculous names were floated in the early days of models 1 through 8) nothing stuck.

It is called The Machine. Always with the definite article. It has one function. It breaks things down then builds them back up, only different, better.

The name of the current volunteer is Russell Yensik. He has already been in and out of the machine 5 times. He prefers to be called Russ or Rusty.

The machine has torn him apart and put him back together many times. But as he waits inside the machine for a sixth time, he wonders who it is who is being torn apart again.

Although careful not to mention it to anyone, he is convinced that since the first time, he has become a forgery of himself and with each successive experiment, he is becoming more and more a copy of a copy. As a test subject, he doesn’t know what the purpose of the experiment is, or even if each disassembly has actually taken place. Is he a real test subject or part of the control group? At the moment of disassembly, Russ is shocked unconscious. When he wakes up, it is usually in a hospital bed hooked up to so many monitors he resembles a grotesque christmas ornament.

Russ can’t know there is no control group. Russ can’t know that since he entered the experiment, he is the only subject to have ever entered the machine more than once. Every other volunteer in this third phase of the experiment vanished inside The Machine. Every molecule in their bodies shooting off at right angles to each other into the vacuum of space.

Russ is the only person to call The Machine by a nickname.

Russ calls it the Boom Box.

Russ is the only person to come back.

Nobody can say why.

“It’s got to be done.”
“It’s murder!” the last word delivered in a hiss.
“Funding’s gone, we can’t just cut him loose, there’s no telling what might happen.”
“We can’t do it!”
“Either he goes or we all go, that’s the word.”
“Jesus.”

***

“What happened! I order you to say something!”

The shattered operative responds to the command blankly, looking up at the faces of his interrogators without comprehension.

“I…shot him, I think…he was sleeping…I think…he’s not, he wasn’t? There? He’s gone?”
“He escaped?”
“I mean…he was there…I’m sure…I think?”

They rushed into Russ’ room on level -2, buried in a pillow still shaped by a head, a bullet hole neatly stamping the fabric cover.

Within 24 hours the entire experiment had disappeared along with all documents, funding and The Machine itself. The scientists involved were sequestered and interrogated. Warned that any mention of the project would result in disappearnces, for both themselves and their families. A single project file in hardcopy was stamped maximum top secret and all other evidence was destroyed.

The Machine itself was hidden away in a deep storage vault for hazardous waste. The research disappeared.

Russ woke slowly from dreams he couldn’t explain, of the machine, of a man with a gun. Confusion. He opened his eyes and for many moments just stared. The familiar ceiling at the project was gone. The ceiling now above him familiar, yet at the same time it was not.

This was his apartment, or had been at least. He had sublet to what he now thought of as a friend, once thought of as a wife, while he participated in the experiment.

“Aieee!” a muffled whump of someone falling out of bed still struggling in their covers.

“Shit! Gloria? Gloria! It’s me! Russ! Russ!”

Gloria gets over the edge of her panic enough to ask in violent terms and ugly grammar what is he doing sneaking in to his old flat and getting into bed with her?

Only to listen with half an ear to his explanations, staring at him.

Russ follows her gaze and notices that he is fully dressed. As certainly as he was naked in bed a moment ago. As certain as Gloria that he hadn’t been there at all only moments ago.

Russ sits down at the edge of what was once his bed and puts his head in his hands. The voice that sneaks out is weak, confused.

“Glo, what’s happening to me?”

***

“How’s the coffee?”
Russ smiles despite his unease, they both know it’s terrible. Russ and Gloria used to spend a lot of time in this park drinking coffee from a machine an enterprising individual left chained to the snack bar year-round. It was autumn and the snack bar was closed for the winter.
“The coffee’s great,” Russ exaggerated the word, delivered it wrapped in treacle. laughed.
“That sound’s like the old Russ,” she looked down, embarassed for a moment by her reference, however indirect, at their failed relationship three years ago. Russ pretended not to notice, but the spell was broken, his thoughts returning once again to what had happened. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.

“What are you going to do?” asked Gloria.
“Go to the institute and try and get some answers I guess.”

A frustrated Russ returned that evening dazed and alone. When Gloria pelted him with questions his replies were either unintelligible or made no sense.

What she was finally able to get out of him was the following: the building remained but the institute was gone. Having looked up the company that managed the building, he was not overly surprised to discover that there was no record of any scientific research having been conducted in the building at all. The paychecks issued to his bank account had also vanished. Without Gloria’s rent money his account would have been empty.

He felt his mind was slipping, he didn’t mention the other details. Fragments, a blur, certain that he remembered being attacked, masked men, a van, a needle. It couldn’t have happened. He was here, in his old apartment. He remembered walking here, having taken a taxi part way then abandoning it in the heavy sludge of rush hour traffic. Walking through the park.

He wanted to tell her she might be in danger, but knew it would sound melodramatic, affected. He dragged his eyes around his old apartment seeing prison bars instead of windows.

***

“We can’t just leave him alone! It’s too dangerous!”
“You heard the debriefing, they had him, they killed him.”
“They didn’t!”
“He hasn’t any proof, papers, evidence, the ravings of a lunatic, he doesn’t even know our names!”
“Fine, we’ll just watch him for the time being, he could even be trained, a soldier who can’t be killed or captured.”
“Let’s hold fire on that idea for now okay?”
“What for?”
“If he can’t be killed he can’t be trusted.”
“Hm, back burner him then?”
“What else can we do?”
“Appeal to his greed? His lust? Trust me we can control him.”
“You never really understood what the machine did to him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t take things apart, that was entirely a product of his own misunderstanding.”
“So what does it do?”
“Originally? It was just a new kind of MRI machine with greatly improved resolution, nothing unusual was detected, first and second phase trials went ahead smoothly. Third phase trials with human volunteers also went smoothly at first, then he stepped into the machine and every subsequent volunteer disappeared.”
“That’s not what you told the generals.”
“I know, but after the first disappearance, I contacted the police and almost before I put down the phone my entire research project had been appropriated by the government.”
The military scientist heard the bitterness the voice of his unwilling colleague.
“They wouldn’t believe what I told them at first so I had no choice but to change my story.”
“What did you tell them at first?”
“Russ wasn’t changed by the machine, the machine was changed by Russ. Don’t interrupt. However innocent a device it once was, whatever it did to the subsequent volunteers, all military men without a history or a future I might add, could only be guessed at from debriefings with Russ.” The military scientist wanted to urge him on but dared not intrude, his nameless collegue was losing himself in his own thoughts.
“Russ was convinced the machine did more than we told him, at the instant of maximum power, he must have believed with unbridled faith in his fixation. Without satisfactory answers from us…it was like a hard vacuum…of ignorance in his mind, that suddenly filled.”
“Filled with what!?” The military scientist couldn’t contain the frustration in his voice.
“Filled with faith.”
“…”
“Every machine using the new resolving appartus we’ve built since has done the same. People disappear. There is an entire complex of physicists living without benefit of sunlight or freedom taking apart our machines trying to decide whether our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality is either seriously flawed or else, as some jokingly suspect, has been changed.”
“Jesus.”
“It may not matter, you see? Either we’re on the brink of a polar shift in the universe or at the edge of a precipice.”

***

Gloria had forced Russ to stay with her. Her sublet wouldn’t run out for months and Russ did not intend to force her out, he was a gentleman, he said he could find a place to live. Gloria wouldn’t allow it, he shouldn’t be alone right now. Not with what was going on. Although he slept on the couch after the first night, they settled into a peaceful version of their married life together three years ago. He bought groceries, she did his laundry, he cooked their meals, she went to work, he didn’t feel ready to go looking for a job yet so he wrote, read, walked in the park. There were no more disturbing double memories of assault and murder. His life settled into something like normalcy.

Except for his parlour trick.

He would hold an apple in his hand, but when she tried to take it her fingers would slide right through the apple.

“Can you teach me to do that?” She had been plucking up the courage to ask for days, ever since he’d first showed her. But she’d had to overcome a lot of fears and doubts, in any other man, what Russ could do would have frightened her out of her mind. But this was Russ. Her once-upon-a-time husband who used to bring his socks all the way to the laundry hamper only to leave them on the hamper and not in the hamper. This was Russ. Goofy Russ, Boyishly charming Russ, Stupid and selfish Russ, thick­headed Russ. She turned her mind back from where it had drifted.

“Uh, I think so.” Over the weeks they’d become accustomed to the trick. Despite his efforts to keep busy, much of his day was empty. Having accepted that looking outward would not deliver answers, he’d begun looking inward, trying to discover what he suspected he could do. He rested her hand on his and placed the apple on her palm and did the trick.
“Did you feel how it kind of slipped on a funny angle? Think you can find it again on your own?”
Gloria nodded and put the apple in her other hand and felt for the odd slide in geometry she had just felt.

The apple slipped through her hand and struck the wood floor with a soft hard thump.

“Wow,” she felt giddy, it wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind but it was a step in the right direction.
“You gotta twist so that your hand stays solid and only the apple goes the other way.”
“Russ…If I twisted my whole body like that, would I slide right through the floor?”
Russ regretted showing her how easy it was. He was afraid that she wouldn’t just fall through the floor but through the one beneath it, all the way down to the center of the planet. Until he’d perfected the trick himself, he’d been terrified when going to sleep. Convinced he’d fall through the couch in the middle of the night and wake up screaming in lava.
“Uh, let’s not and say we did? You might be too successful.”
Gloria suddenly had a vision of lava.

(to be continued?)

Once upon a time, Stephen King published an entire novel online, he asked for 75% of his fan base to pay him 75 cents per chapter for his trouble or he’d quit writing the novel.

My request is far more modest: if 10 people comment that they want to know what happens next in this story, I’ll write the next installment of approximately 2000 words, and so on and so on, for each installment. Deal?

No purchase necessary, now or ever!

Regards, B8A

I'd like a genre with cheese please

"Let's begin with something cloying and sweet," said Gladys Wimple, the leader of the group.
"How about something banal with repetitive motifs!" said Harriet Swan, the lieutenant.
"I'd rather go in for something bittersweet and a little off, a melodrama?" said, Millicent Thortlewaite, a conservative woman if every there was one.
"Then we are agreed!" said Gladys. It is to be a John Hughes movie! I shall now go to the video store and procure the tape!

Laser Beam City -An attempt at style modulation-

Silica and concrete. Everyone carries a video camera. There is no Big Brother. Instead, we all watch ourselves. Teenagers carry their whole lives on hard disks to school. People are sharing their lives in ever more varied ways.

So why are these three robots down in the dumps?

Roper, a roping droid.
Stack, a stacking droid.
Grinder, a grinding droid.

"So are we robots or droids?"
"Philosphy! Uk, Philo-"
"Why'd you go and ask that for? You know he's having orientation issues!"
""Yeah, right, off topic, okay,"
"When are we gonna get a job?"
"You couldn't give me another nanosecond of a chance?"
"This isn't a guesing game dammit!"

"Holy laser beams! You three should take that act on the road!"

Suddenly, Stack Grinder and Roper realized they had attracted a minor crowd.

Ideas, like popcorn, don't come alone.

"We need a drummer!" they said in unison, a lady in the crowd became the first to gasp at their voices in harmony.

"What are you called!" called a voice from the crowd, the question picked up and echoed by the audience.

"The Boltles!" the three surprised robots/androids sang in unison again.

Another woman fainted.

When they found their drummer, musical history in Laser Beam City was made.

And things could only get better for the four slabs.

Their world became sunshine and golden meadows and whispering breezes and low summer trees and the silence was deafening.

To have heard them in concert three times, it was rumoured, declared you legally insane.

And being robots, they never stopped.

Even now, bolted to the decks of an interstellar liner, on a galactic cruise ship, on display, all circuits dedicated to the sound, none left for locomotion, they play a tune harnessed by science to slide into reality like a well oiled scalpel and remove the seam as easily as it was made.

The future belongs to them.

The future belongs to sound.

The Freeclouders

Wild eyed, their prisoner. Prisoner of the town. Above there is only mountain and cloud.

"I don't like it, why should I?" says Jailor Simmons.
"So you think he's truly mad?" says Jailor Frank.

What he's doing is being himself: a prisoner, a deep subterreanean river of fear so thick he can stand on it. Pulling and sucking at his life.

About midnight, the town, the village, the bore, has a fright of its own.

Sounding like an earthquake and crushing them like thunder in their sleep.

Everyone dreams of death and destruction, all awake however, to find their prisoner is gone.

Perhaps they must forget, the giant's hooves, the company of monsters, the prison walls ripped open by tentacles of prehistoric fossils, whose memory still lives within the rock.

Perhaps they must forget a mountain walked.

Perhaps they must even forget the prisoner freed?

Perhaps he has already forgotten them.

But the mountain does not.

The Little Devil's Dictionnary for Fiction Writers

Antagonist – The character trying to maintain the status quo, hide the best, destroy the greatest.
Anti-hero – The character identical to the hero except morally deviant
Character – An agent in a story.
Genre – A style identified through conventions.
Hero – The character around whom the story is bent.
Plot – The arrangement of conflict.
Premise – The statement which the story expresses or proves.
Protagonist – The character trying to change the most, find the best, build the greatest.
Story – The unfolding of the plot through time.
Title – An afterthought, lest it strangle the prose.