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.

High in the Mountains

Just when the last rockets left Earth, a small group of secessionists were busy setting up base camp on Everest. The ground was littered with the garbage of a thousand previous attempts. Jerry Zajdel, team leader and former paramilitary commando, was busy with the communications array when an unexpected transmission sent him racing for the tents.

Aliens had landed.

They wished to speak to the leader.

They wished to purchase property.

How Jerry understood them was easily explained. Earth was a hot property in the solar system. At the end of the day there were not as many virgin (by the aliens estimation) planets as there had been predicted by Earth science and naturally, following the exodus of most of humanity to greener pastures, the aliens wanted a slice of Earth's pie before humanity realized how little real estate was actually left out there.

So, of course, they spoke several Earth languages, including English.

"You've got to here this!"
"Uh? Jerry?"
"They've landed and they want to talk to the leader."
"Who's that?"

Jerry, veteran of countless opportunities, knew his moment.

"Everybody get dressed!"

Running and kicking climbers out of their sleeping bags, Jerry rushed back to the radio and told the aliens possibly the most unbelievable fishing story in the history books.

He told them he was the leader.

Having no concept of lying themselves, the aliens believed him.

It was almost true anyway, most leaders had been the first to take advantage of faster than light travel. Lured by the desire to spawn whole planets under their political vision.

All that was left of humanity were the antiextraplanetary seccessionists and a few crackpots.

Jerry sold them Everest for the monetary equivalent of trillions, in any currency. His team of climbers roped into the charade by the comfortable expedient of wealth beyond their wildest dreams.

The aliens themselves were ecstatic, had they but known the metaphor, they would have said they bought the island of manhattan for a song. While they knew nothing of lying, they certainly knew the difference between cost and value.

Jerry and his team, having first refused to leave, were now eager to go.

Paradise pales when it's all you've ever known.

On a chance intercepted transmission, Jerry had staked their future.

Now the stars themselves reached out to their entrepreneurial spirt.

"What a beautiful universe," sighed his first officer, formerly Jane Simon, champion climber.

"Yes," said Jerry, before adding:

"Let's develop it."

The Ratiocinator

Eviction - originally, the physical expulsion of someone from land by the assertion of paramount title or legal proceedings

Larceny - the felonious taking and carrying away of the personal property of another, without his consent, with intent to deprive the owner of the property

Gifis, Steven H., dictionary of legal terms

One day, the entire population of the planet Earth was evicted and moved to a replica world. Not only humans, but plants and animals, down to the smallest bacteria and virus. The process was seamless and transpired over 24 hours, each section of the world disappearing under cover of night.

Earth itself was molecularized in order to feed the enormous power demands of an advanced spacefaring civilization, once the potential threat posed by humanity was removed, the rest of the solar system, including Earth's sun, was also molecularized.

This alien race had not yet fully abandoned all morality, hence, the replica. More efficiently built than an actual planet, using construction methods and materials far beyond the technology of the people of Earth, orbiting a synthetic star, in a reproduction solar system, mirroring the astronomical behaviour of it's referents in every way that modern human technology could detect.

However the economies created by the aliens were not without their costs. The replica solar system had a short lifespan, only a few thousand years.

Humanity had until then to find a way off the planet.

Humanity wasn't even trying.

Interstate Jones, a drifter, doctor of philosophy, sculptor, handyman, political lobbyist, Sunday school teacher, librarian, roughneck, soldier of fortune, attorney and beautician, studied the classifieds and noticed an opening for physics professor at the State University. Well, he reasoned, I haven't been a physicist yet, I may as well apply.

Interstate Jones, possibly the worlds' smartest man, knew how to get any job he wanted. He just walked to the University and started teaching physics to the first group of students he found. It didn't matter that they were first year pre-law students. It didn't matter that there was already a professor teaching the class. Jones just went in and did his thing and before anyone knew anything, the entire class including their law professor was taking notes on Unruh-Minkowski equations and discussing Hamiltonian operators and everyone was generally getting very excited indeed.

Jones reasoned any person of modestly above-average intelligence could be taught anything if you made things addictively fascinating. For all his intelligence, he didn't understand why everybody didn't do things that way all the time. The only person who knew the real answer to that question was so smart even Jones didn't understand her sometimes.

Little sisters can be annoying that way.

Naturally the administration discovered what was going on and sent security to stop him from trespassing.

The security guards did very well on the next quiz.

Finally, their options exhausted, University administration hired him as a tenured professor with the highest salary in the history of the school.

On Wednesday, Professor Jones and his students built the first prototype zero point energy phase space modulator.

On Thursday, Universities around the world had duplicated his results.

On Friday an Astronomy class on a field trip to the asteroid belt found carved into the side of a large asteroid something unusual, words in several languages, clearly alien.

Professor Jones had guest lectured their astronomy class on xenolinguistics after guest lecturing the tourism and hospitality students next door on n-parallel processor design and construction.

As the asteroid spun into full view outside their portholes, the entire class gasped as the meaning of the words became clear to them.

The nearest English equivalent meant: Temporary Replacement Solar System. Made in the Horse Head nebula, for questions or comments, contact...

When Interstate Jones heard about this, he shrugged, took down the contact information, sued the spacefaring alien civilization for infringement and incredibly, Jones won. It was all the more incredible because before Jones won his case for humanity, among the aliens there was no concept for court, law, lawyer, unlawful eviction, larceny, judge, jury, tort, negligence, or even legal in the human sense of the word.

A shamefaced and puzzled galaxy spanning civilization put everything back where they found it.

Jones walked out of a lecture one day and disappeared, possibly off-planet, possibly kidnapped by the government, possibly just bored with all the attention and hiding out in a log cabin in the mountains somewhere.

Lenny Vin was new to waitering. He didn't know how long either the new name or the new job would last.

Kids from the local college came here to drink bottomless coffee and study.

Recently they'd been doing incredibly well in school.

You know the beginning, you know the middle, this is how it ends.

Fred woke up in his new apartment and switched off his alarm. The flat was much bigger than he had either use or furniture for, after years with too many things and not enough space, he'd decided to try it the other way around. The only room in the flat that looked busy and lived in was the kitchen. Spacious, not always organized, a well stocked fridge, fresh herbs on the window sill, a generous spice rack, a breakfast bar, a flat panel television in the corner and a radio; Fred spent most of the time in the kitchen. The rest of the place didn't quite seem like home yet.

But it would.

There was a radio in the kitchen, set to 97.7 fm 'tok' radio. Warsaw's first and only talk radio station. Fred kept it on most of the time. Radio gave the place a simulated life. It was the first thing he turned on in the morning and the last thing he turned off at night.

Beginnings were always delicate times.

In the enormous living room, without couch or coffee table, only piles of assorted cushions, Fred spent his hours after work reading or watching television. On the far wall, designed by him and built with the help of his friends, a shelving unit made of a single column of bricks set closer to the floorlength windows and brushed steel beams for shelves radiating across the expanse and into the far wall.

Fred was wounded by such details. At once, they hurt yet felt so good.

Sometimes while in the middle of an exciting scene in a book he was reading, Fred would look up at his bookshelf. Admire how its design belied its strength. It always looked on the verge of falling over, books, shelves, column and wall.

Sometimes when this happened he would say something to himself, his own voice would surprise him.

Few friends knew that Fred, so talkative in company, was silent as a monastery at midnight when alone.

In the evenings, not too late, Fred would turn in. Turning off 97.7 just before he went to bed. In his bedroom there was only a bed. He had resolved that his bedroom would never again have anything in it but a bed. Even though he enjoyed reading tremendously, he had consciously decided not to install a reading light.

In between waking and sleeping, Fred worked of course, and while Fred loved his career this isn't about Fred and his career, This is about Fred and his life.

About how it ends.

Nicky Thundercats versus the Pumas of war

Nicky dove as the first timed explosion rocked the pier. Splinters of wood drove into him and the shockwave knocked him off his feet into the water, he dove further to escape the heavy machine guns erupting from the dockside bunkers. Tearing away at the splinters he could reach, some as thick as a dart, he pulled himself deeper. Even underwater he heard the clumsy whup whup whup of an assault helicopter getting closer.

Nicky had to act fast. Pulling a 10 minute microlung from its velco safety sleeve at his shoulder he bit down on the rubber nipple and forced his lungs to breathe slowly. Ogladam Puma, a television fanatic, and Gram Puma, a video game addict, would not give up until they killed him.

With swift underwater strokes he quickly left the burning pier behind and reached his cache of scuba gear, just a rebreather and long fins.

Silent and invisible, he swam down deeper and headed for open water.

On the burning pier, Ogladam and Gram hoped it had been worth it. This elaborate ruse.

Nicky had it coming. The virus he unwittingly carried away from this attack, from a dart fired at the moment of the explosion, would deal with him.

It would deal with his whole operation in South America. The Outfit was finished.

Their most hated enemy, now their avenger.

The Puma brothers didn't smile. Had they been what they were not, they would have.