Writer's Journal

This contains some good bits.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but the characters in this story are among my favorites.  Hopefully, I’ll enjoy the characters in future projects to the same degree, but we’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Enjoy.

Patterns in Noise 61-63

He didn’t want to be here, but something inside him compelled action.

Upon seeing the abandoned building, a shiver had gone up his spine, an almost sexual thrill at the possibilities.

It was a cathedral, abandoned, but with enough wooden fixtures to suggest the possibilities. Its windows long ago broken out, leaving drifts of jagged glass deformed by time and gravity on the floor inside.

He had broken in, forcing the back door with a crowbar, and inspected the structure.

The Cathedral was a skeletal building, all baroque fixtures worn away by time and gothic arches in solemn stone. Its architect and its later minders had not been able to agree upon a feel for the building.

Was this the house of a lord of light and joy, or a grim courthouse for the world’s judge?

Was it the living, beating heart of a community, or a charnal house for a dead god?

He dwelled on this briefly, trying to imagine it as it was, filled to the brim on Easter and on Christmas, and on other, less widely revered holy days.

The pews were good and ancient wood, and the altar was lacquered to give it the appearance of gold, though.

Meditative for a moment, he breathed deeply in the musty, open air, then began to splash kerosene everywhere.

He covered everything that he could find which would burn. The pews and the wooden fixtures, the altar and the few abandoned hangings.

Whistling as he went, he doused the vestry and soaked the carpet until it squished when pressure was applied.

There was no reason for him to do it, other than the throbbing in his head and the singing in his blood.

He finished by the door he had opened, and he stood there, one foot in the doomed cathedral and one foot out of it.

The tension was exquisite. Standing on the precipice of destruction, waiting for an opportunity to bring ruin to this prospective ruin.

He lit the match and tossed it in. It flickered out before it had landed, and he bit back a growl of frustration.

So he lit another one and that took.

Walking slowly from the scene, he saw the glorious golden-orange flame emerge from the building, a beautiful, scintillating jewel rising from the gray stone sheath, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

From every window was born a poppy-red flame that danced like flowing water, and he was content.

[I attempted a stream of consciousness, and all I got was confused tenses.]

The table wobbles, and the music is loud. The room is dark and the wind through the open windows is pleasant and smells vaguely of creosote and the rain that passed through

Imagine this instant, a gap between two moments.

One conversant says one thing, and the other takes a moment to parse it.

This is that point, as the message is traveling from brain to tongue passing over teeth and lips parting, through the air to the ear and the back-brain and the mid-brain until it is funneled finally into the fore-brain in a manner that would once could have been compared to a game of Chinese Whispers.

When I grew up, we called it “telephone”, which had neither trochee nor iamb, and I could never get behind, leaving behind just an anapest or maybe a dactyl. I don’t know, I can never remember all of them.

So the message is put into the pulse of a nerve and the throb of the air to become a movement of ions in the nerve and then that thing we called thought again.

And once it’s passed one stage, there’s no way to take it back to a previous. And once its out, the mind tries to will Xeno’s Paradox to apply to a wave of sound.

It never works. Never.

But still it goes out, and I’m left to realize that I’ve just used the term “counting coup.” And when has that ever been an interesting or clever thing to say, in comparison.

But when has talking about “getting someone” been clever, and I’m left to realize that I’ve said something that stopped the conversation, possibly through the use of a combative metaphor and possibly due to the fact that it quite simply wasn’t a smart thing to say at all.

Possibly both.

So our conversation wobbles along for a bit, a missing wheel amputated from its mounting and just moving along due to the rut it had been stuck in. And it’s a funny mental image, one I only thought of after you added a bit of weight onto the other side and the tension was released.

And you did say something, and I was left with the conversation recontextualized, and I didn’t know where to go.

But I hadn’t in the first place.

So I’m left trying to understand what you meant by that comment that you protested making in the first place, but which you couldn’t help but laugh afterward.

I couldn’t help but laugh, either, but I now I don’t know where to go with the conversation, so I pause. And I think a great deal.

And there’s a certain point at which self-consciousness can be artful, and another point where it’s neurotic, but sometimes I’m not sure which one comes first, or if the two flip back and forth in a confused orbit.

Perhaps everyone gets that, though.

This is the point where the doldrums start to wear off, and I begin to move into the final section of the story.  Enjoy.

Patterns in Noise 58-60

I’ve been running kind of low on inspiration, lately.  This isn’t a terminal condition, nor do I intend to let this interfere with my writing.  I do, however, think it might be time to ask for a bit of help on a project.

Today, I started using Google Reader.  It’s a good service, and I’m going to continue using it, but I think that I can solve my issue if I use it to overload myself.  By this, I mean that I intend to subject myself to a mad jumble of information that I couldn’t possibly hope to interpret, and then proceed to draw from it.

To do this, though, I need more information to work with.  So, if any of you would like to plug a blog, or something, mention it in the comments.   I’ll probably add it to my reader, and if it really resonates, I’ll put it in the blogroll.

[The below two stories are true.  Sleep tight!]

Two policemen were dispatched to examine the bodies that the kite-flier had found. Two men sprawled out in a hollow by the hill, seemingly struck dead in an instant.

Both wore heavy raincoats and lead masks, of the type worn to protect them from radiation.

They called the coroner, and circled the bodies, carefully combing the area for any sign of what had happened.

When the medical examiner arrived, he looked over the scene and loaded the bodies into the truck to be examined. No injuries were found on either man, and the only clue was a notebook, in which there was a single entry:

“16:30 be at the agreed place. 18:30 swallow capsules, after effect protect metals wait for mask signal.”

It was a head-scratcher, to be sure, a real mystery.

The two men were eventually identified – even if their cause of death never was – and names were put to the faces: Miguel José Viana and Manoel Pereira da Cruz, two electricians out of Campos dos Goytacazes, in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The case has remained unsolved ever since.

Other cases bear some superficial similarities, however:

In 1959, seven years before the Lead Mask Incident, nine hikers in Russia were killed in the Ural Mountains by what Soviet authorities referred to as a “compelling unknown force.”

This was the Dyatlov Pass Incident, named for the leader of the expedition, Igor Dyatlov. Dyatlov’s name was attached to the location of the incident, which was named for the place, in an odd bit of peculiarly Soviet circular logic. It was, perhaps, meant to combat superstition.

Before the incident, the place where it occurred was known as Kholat Syakhl, or “The Mountain of the Dead.”

The expedition’s tent was found torn open from the inside, and the nine were found far from it, seemingly having walked barefoot through heavy snow in temperatures as low as negative thirty celsius.

There were no signs of struggle, but the nine were found heavily injured, with wounds ranging from broken limbs and ribs to an excised tongue.

The force necessary for some of the wounds was comparable to that of being struck by a car.

Moreover, all of the bodies were found to be highly and unexpectedly radioactive.

To this day, there is no explanation for these events.

[Had a bit of a scare earlier, regarding hosting, but everything's back to normal, now.  My fourth year of fiction begins today.]

…a brief moment of blood and screaming and a confusing riot of sensations.

The moment after birth was always disconcerting.

I had done it thousands of times, in thousands of bodies and situations, but it was always a riot of sensation, painful and confusing. Sometimes there was a mistake, and I would be shuffled off, back into the bardo of pre-birth.

This was the price I now paid, with no real chance of undoing it.

I had spent centuries shuffling from one body to the next, and there was always this period, when I would wait for the body to harden into a suitable vehicle, its personality scabbing over my own, another permutation on the same general theme.

Soon enough, I’ll submerge myself into this bardo, dreaming this life fitfully and waking again at the end of whatever time he or she gets here, remembering the vaguest impressions of the mountainous triumphs and abyssal defeats of this small life, and take them with me off to hide in death a while.

I could still remember a bit of my first life.

I had been a priest, of some sort, living in the mountains on a distant continent. I had practiced the proper austerities and performed the right sacrifices, but I had loved the world too much to let go of it.

And so here I am, conscious of all my rebirths and re-dyings, born again and again into a small pale body that will forget me soon enough and move along on its own course, driven by the forces that are invisible but palpable in ways that the mind of a single person can’t help but be aware of.

It becomes clear to me, but it’s not as if I can do much with the information.

So I do as I always do when I become conscious: sit and gurgle thoughtlessly…I contemplate, and wonder about the course that brought me to this ignoble moment.

While I possessed enough wisdom to realize the illusory nature of the world, it was a pleasant illusion, one I did not wish to part from. So instead of awakening into buddha-hood, I had become a sleep walker, of sorts.

I was like a fish that dwells in the mud of the river bottom, emerging when the sediment is disturbed to swim for a time, then plunging back into the muck when it suits me.

If only one of my consciousnesses would restart the path, and begin to work toward Nirvana, then I might emerge from this state and be dissolved. But that is a foolish hope, one I should not dwell upon too long.

I only have all of eternity, but it is an eternity seen out of the corner of the eye, apprehended in fits and starts, in gasps.

My only other option would be to restart my austerities anew, performing them between the moment of death and the moment of rebirth, meditating through whole lives and…

So, another week, another three-pack of chapters.   We’re within 100 pages of the ending, now.  I learned quite a bit writing this story, so I hope you manage to enjoy it.

If not, something’s wrong with you.

Patterns in Noise 55-57

Waking up on a park bench is a strange experience, I have to admit. Doing it with a just-patched hole in your skull is a different one.

So I drifted towards consciousness, aware of only the shooting pain in my skull and the bright light. Squeezing my eyes shut, I fumbled around, discovering that I was dressed in a bath robe.

I fumbled around my pockets, and found a cheap pair of convenience store sunglasses with the tag still attached.

Yanking the tag free, I donned the glasses and glanced around. I felt exactly like I expect a hung-over root canal patient would, all dehydrated and subjected to brain-throbbing.

I got up, and glanced around.

A park, complete with a playground and a picnic, greeted me. All I could think was that this was not where I had gone last night, though an attempt to retrace the evening was unsuccessful.

My memory blanked after I was surrounded by six men wearing matching black suits and earpieces. My stupid, hung-over brain could only conclude that I had somehow, drunkenly, become the President, and the secret service had scrambled to protect me.

On the other hand, this was stupid. Beyond stupid.

“Hello, welcome to the Manchurian Mk. III Murder-Chip!” a bright and cheerful voice said, seeming to come from everywhere. Given my hung-over state, this was horribly painful.

“Oh, shit,” was my only response, lying back down on the bench and covering my eyes.

“You have been selected for a mission of utmost importance by the CIA, and will be given the opportunity to serve your country in a new and exciting capacity!”

The voice in my head seemed to have had everything scripted for it by a spam bot, and I didn’t want any of it.

“Shut up,” I muttered.

A woman walking with her child sped past me, clutching the child by the hand.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that! Not until you agree to kill the Prime Minister of Monaco!”

“What the hell is Monaco?” I asked.

“It’s a small city-state in the French Riviera.”

“Oh. That’s nice. I’m going to get some bacon and a screwdriver.”

I got up, and shuffled out of the park. The location, conveniently enough, was close enough to home to walk, though it was going to be unpleasant with that CIA cheerleader in my brain.

“Did you know that the Manchurian Mk. III is the most advanced mind-control device on the planet?” the voice said.

“Don’t care.”

Just them, I lost the ability to walk, pitching forward onto the concrete sidewalk. It felt roughly like I had been tased in the kidneys, and I flopped around uselessly for a few minutes, my seizure managing to stop an in-progress game of Ultimate Frisbee while the “athletes” watched.

“I can do this as long as I need to!” the voice announced cheerfully.

“I can’t kill the prime minister of Monaco…”

“Sure you can!”

“…if you keep this up.”

The pain stopped.

“You only have a three hour window, better hurry up! You own a gun, right?”

“What? No?” I said, getting up, “I don’t own a gun.”

I fell again as the chip turned off my legs and replaced my spine into a high-voltage power line.

“All good Americans own guns!” it chided in that cheerful, horrifying voice.

“I guess I’m not a good American,” I muttered, staining the bathrobe with tears and drool.

“We can fix that! Go buy a gun!”

“Sure thing, murderous voice in my head.”

The pain stopped for a moment, then it gave me another jolt to make sure I knew who was boss.

“Can I get some food in me, real quick, before I go and assassinate a foreign dignitary.”

“Permission granted!” it said with a giggle, though it still hit me with an electric shock.

I ran home and changed into jeans and button-down shirt, wearing a hoodie over it. I looked in the mirror, and saw a small bandage on my temple.

Getting in my car, I went through the McDonald’s drive through, and then listened to the chip’s directions.

“There’s a pawn shop less than a mile from here, over on Windom Street.”

“Over by the hospital?”

“Yeah, that’s the one!”

“Cool, good to know.”

I ate as I drove, swerving all over the road, and went right by the pawn shop.

“You missed it! It was right back there! You drive like a woman!”

“What?”

“Oh, are you some kind of pinko? You only have another hour to kill the prime minister of Monaco.”

“Yeah, now that I can remember things, I’m not sure Monaco even has a prime minister.”

“What difference does it make?” the chip asked, as I drove into the emergency entrance of the hospital, ripping the bandage off my temple.

I got out, and ran inside, still bleeding from the hole in the side of my head.

“This isn’t where you’re supposed to go! This is a hospital! You need to buy a gun!”

“Shut up!” I shouted, as the chip shocked me again, and I collapsed into a pile of jellied limbs.

The colonists from the moon strained under the weight of their own flesh when they found their new home on Mercury. But as time past, they grew accustomed to the perpetual shadow of their polar homes, and the crushing weight they had to wear exoskeletons to bear.

But they had a mission, and they weren’t about to let the Cartel down. They dug tunnels through the Hermetic rock and built factories to fabricate the mass-produced ships.

The craftsmen wove the fibers of aluminum and carbon for the ship, and prepared the launch and the capsule. They had brought an experienced pilot, and earth-man, along for the first flight.

He was a former Confederation Expeditionary Force soldier, whose comrades had cracked open the city of the Grimaldi crater and fought for five years before their commander had abandoned the mission and given themselves to the mercy of the “loonies” they had come to fight.

The man, Mohammad Dillinger, crawled into the tiny capsule when construction was done, saluting his former enemies and new employers as he did. The tall, pale loonies – Hermians, now – saluted back, and retreated from the launch.

The launch silo was evacuated of air, and the first stage of launch, the great magnetic coils in the silo’s housing, turned on, flinging the dart-like space ship upward.

It looked as if the great coil gun had flung its javelin almost to orbit, far enough out that it appeared to drift counter to the planet’s spin, tumbling as jets too small for the eye to see turned it perpendicular to its launch trajectory.

The Hermians glanced away from the visual; even with the filters, the ignition of the primary motor would be painfully bright to look upon.

The fusion torch ignited, and for ten full minutes, burned at five times the gravity of earth.

As it burned, the outer shell of the javelin peeled away, unraveling along hidden seems, to reveal the craft inside, emerging from the husk like a moth emerging from a cocoon.

The craft spun slowly, using centrifugal force to aid in the extension of the masts, extending guy wires.

A vast silvery wall extended behind it, and a faint electric current shivered through the entire sail. The magnetic field would provide thrust from the charged particles in the solar wind, and the reflective film would pick up the pressure of the light.

The pilot inside the capsule ejected the spent primary motor, trusting the former ex-loonies on the ground to manage it.

Captain Mohammad Dillinger drifted up from his seat, and drifted back from the pilot’s seat. It would be three weeks to Earth Orbit.

He had a lot of reading to get done.

For the majority of the trip, the astronaut would sleep for ten hours, exercise for two, and run simulations for four. The remainder of his time was spent waiting for something to go wrong. He read with one eye on the diagnostic screen, he played round after round of old video games with the sound turned down to hear a warning buzzer, he watched movies with his thumb on the pause button, waiting to be called away.

But the construction was solid, and the Outworld Express ran beautifully.

When the ship reached cisterran orbit, he prepared for the complex ballet by which he would collect his payload.

There was only a narrow window, but he was confident that he could get it done.

First, the primary guide was extended, a small rocket shooting off in front of the ship, the carbon-fiber structure held rigid through miraculous engineering and a thin flow of electricity.

Captain Dillinger watched as the payload approached. Capsules full of materials and a small number of specialists and engineers, bound for Ceres.

The ring-shaped capsules were arranged in a complicated series of orbits, lined up and rotating in a staggered fashion, forming a rough, time-lapsed line below the moon’s orbit and on out, bent to allow for the gravity whip.

They accelerated up to almost his velocity, and he felt the jolt as the primary guide threaded through the first capsule, the Outworld Express’s weight increasing dramatically.

Mohammad Dillinger collected a dozen such capsules, swinging by the blue dot that he remembered, his childhood home wrapped in cloud and clothed in ocean. He kept his eyes fixed on the job, hands steady, but a single tear rolled from his eyes as he caught sight of the cradle of humanity out of the corner of his eye.

If he were to take his eyes from the task at hand for a mere second, the result might be disastrous, but the proximity was more than enough for him.

With the help of the gravitational whip, the ship shot off, toward its final destination, heading out toward the stars, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.