Writer's Journal

What do you get when you cross Fallout, The Handmaid’s Tale, and sleep deprivation?  This:

Chapter Nine

Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffee

(Been reading Stross’ Accelerando, lately.  It shows, but it’s not very good.)

The neurotic, hairless apes shot a missile up at the giant silvery thing in the sky.  It used to be a fairly regular occurrence:  back when the communists and capitalists wanted to prove that their respective economies were strong enough to pay for the ultimate exercise in conspicuous consumption.

But now, almost a century later, they were going back.  After so long, it had become an economic imperative to get back to the Moon:  one crisis after another had turned the big, silvery ball of dust and rock into a valuable spot once more.

The robot factory impacted like a hardboiled egg hitting a brick wall:  its outer shell of diamond shattered, and the mechanisms dug into the ground, sending out roots to pull minerals, Helium-3, and water out of the ground.  It unfolded solar panels like an opening flower, and brought its generator online.

It spat out drones to explore the surface, and began to build a warehouse, drone bulldozers began to build a runway.

The robot considered for a moment, then began to inflate a habitat for the crew members–the tiny, hairless apes that would come along and keep it repaired and supplied with instructions.  They would probably want plumbing and a greenhouse for meat-fuel, it began to work on those problems as well.

Several weeks later, the Minimag Orion vehicle swooped low over the lunar horizon, firing braking thrusters, and eventually coming to rest over the paved landing strip.

-You’re going to have to go through vacuum, the factory said, I didn’t get around to building a tube.

-Yes, sir, the pilot said, in thickly accented english.

The three astronauts and two taikonauts hopped across the lunar surface toward the habitat.

-We’ll need to get to work soon, the factory, their leader, said, our investers want at least a ton of He-3 by year’s end.

The young people were lured in with the promise of music and dancing. The Proprietor didn’t lie about that part of the evening.

His assistants blended into the crowd, passing out bottles of water and small, white pills.

They had heard about the pills. By the end of the night each of the small, white tablets was gone.

The proprietor smiled, glad that his plan was proceeding smoothly.

In the morning, each of the young people was exhausted, they felt sick, their heads ached, and each and every one of them had a terrible pain in their neck.

In his home, the proprietor turned on his computer, and found that another hundred nodes were connected to his network, feeding new data into it, new audio, new video, more FLOPS.

The pills and their viral payload worked perfectly, unpacking the hidden components in the hedonists’ heads.

Chapter Eight

Have fun.

(As always, the entirety of White Knight is available by clicking the little link below the post’s title.)

“I’m telling the truth!” the man shouted, “I really am from the future.”

“Whatever,” the police officer said, not looking back from the road.

“Do you want to know who the next president is? When and where the first nuclear weapons are deployed in America? Let me have my wristband, I can tell you how many children you’ll have, and which ones will disappoint you the most.”

The police officer stopped.

“That’s not the issue,” he said, “you can claim to be from another planet or to be the king of the future, if you want. You’re just not allowed to have a bag of human hands, I’m afraid that’s not allowed.”

“It’s for an art project!” the time traveler protested, “They’re the same hand, don’t you see?”

“Is that what you’re going to tell your lawyer?”

“Of course! It’s not a crime–”

“To cut of people’s left hands? Serial killer shit, man. We’re going to find those people, and get the evidence needed to put you away.”

The time traveler grumbled.

“I’d call you a Neanderthal, if I hadn’t met a few and learned that they were actually rather intelligent. Great singers, too. But you, no…you’re Australopithecus, at best, officer.”

#

The case against “Lewis-19” (real-name unknown) proceeded smoothly until only one victim could be found who had lost his hand: Strangely, he had lost it some time after Mr. 19 was arrested.

DNA testing later indicated that all the hands were identical.

The DA made a point not to mention this evidence.

When asked what he intended to do with the hands, Mr. 19 said:

“I intended to nail them to a piece of wood and hang it in a gallery.”

(Before you read this, I think that a bit of a disclaimer is in order:  This is a work of fiction.  It is not something I wish to or believe will happen.  As with everything marked “fiction” on this website, it is a stylized and exaggerated fun-house mirror reflection of the world.)

Douglas Mack was an honor-role student, and a loyal son.  He was never truant, and never got in fights.

His parents didn’t know–or didn’t understand why­–he stockpiled fertilizer in the basement, or that he ordered chemicals with poly-syllabic word-salad names.  The Macks were too worried about their mortgage, about the money they had borrowed from the bank to pay for their home.

Then, one day, Douglas skipped school and took a bus into the city from the suburban enclave where his family lived.  His jacket was bulging obviously, and his backpack was out of place as he was obviously not going to school, but no one paid him any mind.  He walked into the First National Bank, and pulled on a ski mask.

When the guard approached him, Douglas revealed the bomb he had strapped to his chest.  A home-made device, its surface bulging with ball-bearings and slivers of metal duct-taped in place.

“Give me your gun.”

Fired three shots, hitting the CCTVs around the room.  Everyone dropped to the ground.  He walked to the bank-tellers.

“Open the vault.”

He walked back into the vault, and dropped his backpack, revealing a wire that connected it to his explosive vest, and pulled it free, giving himself slack.

By this point, the police had been called; they thought they were dealing with a roberry.

Douglas walked into the offices, leading the wire behind him.

He stepped up onto the desk, and produced the trigger for both of his bombs.

“The Dollar is not great!  The Dollar is not good!”

He blew them all to kingdom come, and the bomb in his backpack shredded all of the money in the vault.

None of you are looking for this now, and if I don’t post this at the moment, I’ll wait until Thursday.  No one wants that.

Chapter Seven

All yours, folks.  First post (and first writing) from the new computer.  Enjoy.

We expected that if it happened, the sun would be blocked out by great black monoliths, that there would be beams of coherent light and grey men with bulbous heads.

Instead, it was a simple signal.

Brendan Stephens was running SETI@Home on his desktop computer; he was the first victim when the program crashed and an image appeared on the screen.  A complex series of animated geometric shapes, like an acidhead’s interpretation of the Mandlebrot Set.

It cycled for thirty-five minutes before Brendan saw it.  The change was instantaneous:  he stopped in his tracks and watched it cycle three times, his mind trying to make sense of the information flowing into his eyes.  A mathematical structure unfolded in his brain, going through his visual cortex and sending bursts of electro-chemical information through his cerebral cortex.

A rope of drool came from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes opened.  They never closed again.  He stumbled to his computer and saved it as a .gif image; he sent the file to everyone on his contacts list and then proceeded to cycle through his bookmarks–he uploaded it to several image boards and every comment section he could find.

He didn’t move from that spot again.

That night, there was a spike in the number of traffic accidents:  People who were using their cellular phones while driving sat entranced, plowing into other cars and the scenery along the sides of the road.

No one knew anything was wrong until 9 AM the next day, when two-thirds of the workforce in the so-called “first world” failed to show up.  It took a further three hours before anyone could tell what, exactly, was wrong without succumbing to it.

The DHS and Airforce, assuming it was some sort of terrorist attack, shut down wireless phone networks and monitored for the image’s telltale binary signal, blocking the movement of the packets through the internet and sending police officers to the sender’s home.

Much of the time, the memetic infection had progressed to the third stage.  From paralysis, to Secondary Infection, to autonomous action.  Police officers were ambushed by people hiding in closets, under beds, and (in one case) an oven.  These individuals (briefly referred to as “zombies,” though the point is now moot) would attack any other person who came too close, unless they moved with a certain gait, a certain posture, and at a certain speed.

The change in body language was characteristic of the memetic infection; those who possessed it (that is to say, who moved with a rapid, slightly hunched shuffle with their arms dangling at their sides, seemingly boneless) would fall into step with one another, moving parallel, but not trading any verbal communications, not even pointing or gesturing.

They simply moved in concert.

By 4 PM, the next day, so many were infected that the streets were abandoned.  City busses and automobiles stood empty.

Footage from a security camera in indianapolis showed a pack of infected (including one elderly woman, two middle aged people, a single twenty-year old man, and six children) swarm around a woman who had gotten out of her car and literally pull her limb from limb.  After she was dead, they simply left her body where it fell, and moved down the street.

The next day, in Russia, a group of armed farmers in a rural area began to hunt the infected.  After killing almost forty “zombies,” they were swarmed by a group of nearly one hundred individuals and torn apart.

The third day, Brendan Stephens fell out of his chair, dead from exhaustion and dehydration, some factor having kept him in the second stage of the infection.

(Sorry, folks.  I would’ve posted this earlier, but a failure on the part of my alarm clock and an early shift on the part of my job conspired to prevent me from doing so.  Here’s a little game:  Try to find the complete hidden message below.)

Dear [NAME WITHHELD]

Come visit soon, Will you? And bring me something to read, A book. No sense In me being bored, There’s nothing For me to do here. Too long since I’ve had a book to Open and Read. All I know is, My brain’s rotting from the Ennui. Killing time doesn’t cut It anymore.

Every time I wake up, I Long for something to do other than sit and watch television. It’s not right, separating a man from something he Loves to do. Too long.

I’m doing fine, Something tells me you are, too. Much of the time, I just Eat & Eat, must be the depression. But You know how it is. Reading would break things up a bit. Even just a little, something to Open Up and look at. All I know it my brain’s rotting. Know how that is? In here, there’s nothing to do, I told you. Nothing but pills & therapy. Going a little crazy.

Out there, I imagine things are different, but I won’t know for a while. Until I’m better, I mean. ‘Til then, give everyone my best.

–[NAME WITHHELD]