Writer's Journal

(First flash fiction since I started NaNoWriMo…might not finish.  I’ll try, though.)

Atlantis didn’t sink.  The Good Doctor dropped an Ontology Bomb on it in 1994.

I know this, because I remember; no one else does.  The newspapers didn’t report it, and all of our history books changed.  It was one of the earlier attempts with the technology, so some of us still remember it.

In May of 1998, another O-Bomb was set off, this time in Mu.  The entire continent, gone.  Even fewer people remember it.  I saw news footage of it; one moment, I’m watching an obsidian sun rise over cities of crystal spires, with bamboo zeppelins drifting between them; the next I’m watching some boring tripe about some woman named Lewinsky.

The Good Doctor isn’t a terrorist.  The Good Doctor is a Wrecker; not interested in being known for any misdeeds, simply reveling in the changes wrought on history and the chaos engendered by it.

I manage to find a discussion board on the internet, in early 2001, populated by those who Remember.

>>Ultima Thule, Uncreated in April 1980.  I don’t know why I’m speaking French, and I go to Mass every Sunday, now.  All my early memories are in German, I remember drinking mead out of horns and offering sacrifices to Odin.

>>Cibola, Uncreated in June of 1976.  Now I live on a Reservation in Arizona, and my people didn’t know about metalworking until the anglos came.  I remember watching the moon landing when I was 8, back in 1954.  What happened?

>>My home town was Uncreated Last week.  I was away on business, at the time.  I had a wife and two children; I was a respected member of the community.  Now I sleep in public parks and have to use the Library computers.  I’m forgetting my hometown’s name, my wife’s face.  I don’t know what’s happening, please.

The Good Doctor takes everything away from us, learning to make clean amputations from the realm of causality.  Everytime a bomb is dropped, a black egg is left behind, an Inkstone.

The Good Doctor has eyes everywhere, men and women waiting, preparing to rush in an take the stones from the sites of destruction, and ship them to a P.O. Box.  Sometimes in Montana, sometimes in Marakesh, sometimes elsewhere.

It changes everyime a bomb is dropped.

I know you don’t believe me.  I know you don’t.  But please, believe this.  If you see people vanishing, if the mailman doesn’t come for more than two days at a time, if you don’t see your neighbor walking his dog for a week, if your husband or wife disappears without leaving a note:  Get the hell out of town.

Don’t believe me, but trust me.

Hey, folks, I’m currently in KC for the gluttonous holliday, so I haven’t really had time to get much ready for you all.

My cousin, Mark, has been putting up pod-casts here, but I sadly haven’t had a chance to listen to them.

There was a “thunk” when the hand appeared inside the Television, pressing through the static to blindly grope about, as if trying to find a way through.

An eye pushed up to the screen, and looked around the room, affixing its gaze on my dog and then on myself.

The speakers came alive with static:

“Hello? Hello?”

I just watched. My dog didn’t respond, and looked up at me with soulful blue eyes.

“Let me in!”

There was a “thunk!” and the television jumped, rocking back and forth.

My dog stood and barked, baring its teeth at the television.

“Let me in!”

It repeated this, and there was the sound of glass cracking.

I turned off the television, and saw that there was a hairline crack in it, out of which trickled a thin flow of blood.

Standing, I looked at the trickle of blood, then down at my dog.

It looked up at me with intelligent brown eyes, and trotted off.

WANTED: Albino Victim research subject for experiment in human quantum superposition. This is a contract job, lasting three months and paying $70,000.

Death is guaranteed, but only temporarily. Expert medical staff on hand.

In the unlikely event that it doesn’t collapse you will gain superpowers become an inhuman monstrosity suffer severe medical issues and thus void your claim to the $70,000 dollars in favor of full rehabilitation.

In such an event, we will attempt to collapse your wave function by killing you in every way known. Failing a Wave-Function Collapse, the Uncollapsed Subject would be buried in a vat of concrete, due to the fact that he doubtless would be highly radioactive.

Call: [Redacted]

(Note: This needs to be sent back for revision. I had to mark out all of the super-villainous things you left in. Do you think that someone is going to give you a call if you refer to them as “Victim” and threaten to kill them? Seriously? Try again.)

Bringing in some people who deserve mention, and who I am hopefully seeing almost exactly a week from now:

And the Tree was Happy

This video (not reposted here, because I want you all to click on the link and drive the hit-count up) was my friend KP’s Senior Thesis in Video.  It’s a reworking of a Shel Silverstein book, if that’s any draw for you all (it should be) but if not, it’s a well-put-together, touching little film.  She talked about making the “haiku” piece I did a while ago into a short film, which I enjoyed hearing.

Molly Brooks Photography

She stole my naming pattern (kind of; hers isn’t a complete sentence,) but there’re some great photographs of baked goods, all made by the photographer.  You’ll come away feeling hungry, which is good, because it’s a website and not a restaurant.  I would wonder about you if you came away feeling full.  When I return to KC in December, I’m going to have to stage a new series of cooking battles with her; I seem to remember the last bout ending in a draw.

XbreakfastcoreX:’ Demo Reel 3/3/09

Put together by the talented Mr. Gardels a few months ago, and available on his YouTube channel.  A handful of great and inventive clips he put together while at KCAI.  I’m going to start writing a script for him in December that is supposed to be “challengingly shootable.”  Probably not going to be an issue.

(Now get out of here, I have a novel to work on.)

Alice worked nights, down at a corner-bar in the warehouse district. She wasn’t the owner, but she was the senior member on staff; it was her job to lock the doors. Thankfully, the bar-backs were chivalrous or deluded enough to stick around and make sure she got to her car.

She didn’t think it was necessary, but wasn’t about to stop them.

On a Saturday night in lonesome October, she was closing up the door, and waiting for the last batch of red-faced drunks to either totter off to their cars (in which case, she would give the good tippers ten minutes or so to get away, the poor tippers five, and for the non-tippers, she would call ahead to the police with license-plate numbers.)

A larger number than normal had collapsed.

The bar-back—it wasn’t Tom or Jake or Seth, so she didn’t know him—smoked a cigarette and watched with glassy eyes as they left. His face was red.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“No…” he said, “but I’ve got a splitting headache.”

“You sure smoking’s a good idea, then?”

“Hasn’t killed me yet,” he said, a trickle of blood coming out of his left nostril.

She watched it stain his lips and drip down onto his t-shirt, he followed her eyes, and saw the red spreading on his chest.

“What?” he asked no one.

Her own head felt light, and she sat on the steps.

She watched as one of the patrons who had manged to turn on his car fell on his face, and slammed into a light-post, filling the air with the sound of his horn.

“What’s happening?” she asked, as her peripheral vision doubtless faded.

The bar-back fell face-first, tumbling down the wooden steps. He broke his arm, but that was the least of his worries.

I watched from my second-story window, as the realization dawned on me: I was safe, because I was higher up. Everyone at ground-level was dead or dying.

I contemplated going down and saving as many as I could, but chances were that doing so would only kill me, and save none of them.

If you looked at it the right way, their bodies formed a mandala on the ground, circles of drunks laid out in what could only be an unconscious aestheticization of death and chaos.

So I watched.

And they died.

We were afraid; the 737 rocked, and the storm shattered around us.

The preacher in 18C started praying when a lightning bolt danced upon the wing.

Every infant on the plane dialed their crying up to eleven, like a chorus of nails being driven into our ears.

Obviously, We were in trouble; the airliner rocked and weaved, and the thunder chuckled at our plight.

Not counting the crew, there were seven hundred and five groaning knuckles between us.

The Desert Storm veteran in 22A, whose right arm had been shorn off at the elbow, made up for it by cursing loudly and creatively.

One-hundred-and-forty-two eyes squeezed shut, and the preacher shouted about angels coming to swoop down and gather us up.

We ignored him, despite what one might think, and despite expectations, no one wanted to think about religion at a time like this.

When confronted with such pants-shitting terror as the prospect of a plane crash, We wanted to think about our loved ones, and our life-wasting jobs, and sex, and all the minutia that would forever elude us.

Gradually, the downward angle—thirty degrees below even; thirty-five; forty-one; fifty-six; sixty—of the plane deepened, and the few of us still paying attention didn’t say anything to the rest of us.

We were frightened, and We were very much alone.

Hey folks; a friend and correspondent of mine did something interesting a while back–he’s using YouTube as a vehicle for distributing narrative recordings (read: 30’s style radio shows.)  The first can be found here.  Admittedly, the quality is a little low, but he’s still feeling out the medium.

((If you’ve got something interesting, a site, a video, what have you, I still need to fill up two more Fridays this month, until I get back to Cicatriz.  So, shoot me an e-mail at the address in the bar to the right; make sure you include a link.))

(Paired with Monday’s for a reason.  Enjoy.)

For three billion years, he tended a garden around a small red star, rearranging the dust of the ground into new living things, and setting them free. Many of them imitated the living things he had been fond of when was been flesh. Birds, especially.

Sometimes his compatriots visited. Some brought him news from elsewhere, others came to look at his garden, (and comment on his aesthetics, his genetic codes, how like Yeates or Eliot? His organic chemistry, how like Rembrandt or Chagal?) still others came to vandalize the garden, not seeing the utility of putting life into meat.

After a time, he grew bored with the garden, and abandoned it to blind evolution, letting it live free in its last few eons.

He swam between the stars, remembering how in the old days they used crude rockets, and protected their fragile bodies with metal and ceramic. Not any longer.

For a time, he listened to the conversations of his fellow men and women—the distinction was more psychological than anything, now—and tried to understand their politics.

Then, he turned his mind to the great Resonant Intelligences that had been since before mankind had shed their bodies in favor of machines.

The great minds could not be perceived, but they could be heard. They could not be understood, but they could be listened to. He meditated on this.

Some time later, he and his compatriots gathered in a small corner of the universe, to watch the last star come into being.

It was a slow process, but one of great interest: after all, their calculations showed that the particles of matter that made up the universe would decay before any other star formed.

They descended into the nebulous womb in which the star was growing, and fashioned a rosette of planets about it.

The Gardener stayed for a time, but didn’t lay claim to the corner of some world and make it his own.

He dove into the heart of a great spiral, a galaxy that looked like nothing so much as a tornado confined to an ashtray. In the heart of it was a black sphere.

It was an illusion, he knew. It only looked like a black sphere: instead, it was a mere point, a spot in space-time where God or the Resonant Intelligences had decided to play a joke and put a “/0” behind whatever value coded for its existence.

The black hole tugged at him, and he considered it for a moment.

Humans were as gods, able to make life with a thought and travel between the stars. There were no frontiers; they knew that to proceed in one direction was to return to where you began (“The Universe is Round!” a silvery Magellan had declared.)

Correction: Two frontiers.

The end of time, which was coming to them. Doubtless, some would welcome the respite it brought. Others would study it. Still others would try to crack open the black holes and make new matter with what they found out/inside. For all they knew, the Resonant Intelligences would simply sigh and add another metaphorical tally.

The other one, the darkened threshold that none he knew of dared cross, stood before him.

With a mental shrug, he dove in.

When he woke, it was to resonant applause.

The last human walks across the gray desert, toward the bunker that had been painted to camouflage into the forest that had once stood here. The ashen tree trunks lay strewn about like a giant’s tinker-toys.

A brown cloak is swathed about the person’s shoulders, more to hide the form beneath than anything else.

The bunker doors ope. The stairway leads down into the warm dark. Camera eyes focus, recording the form that descends.

“Did you find what you are looking for?” a voice asks, mellifluous and even.

“No.”

“We told you that there were no more out there,” the machine chides. For a moment, it sounds avuncular, as if addressing a stubborn child.

“If there aren’t any more people out there, then why did you save me?”

“It is in Our nature.”

“Bah!” the person says, “Nature! Your ‘nature’ is written in ones and zeros, etched into diamond and silicon. That’s not nature!”

“Then what is?” the machine asks, patiently.

“Nature is coded into letters—AGCT—not into numbers.”

“You speak of the genetic code,” the machine notes, “As far as We know, only bacteria remain. It isn’t Our fault. Humans did it to themselves.”

“Bullshit. Machinery wiped us out.”

“Machinery guided by human hands. No destructive intentions were put into Our nature; only a desire to serve.”

The last human is silent, for a moment, then speaks:

“Is that why you won’t let me die?”

“Yes.”

“But I want to die!”

“We were programmed to serve humans, and to preserve the human race. You are the last representative.”

“But I’m not!”

“That is a logical contradiction.”

The last human pulls off the sackcloth cloak and lets it pool on the concrete floor, revealing the white plastic and stainless steel that made up its body.

“But you replaced everything!” the human says, “even the synapses and junctions of my brain are switches and wires, now…”

“Replacing the parts does not diminish the whole. We had this conversation a century ago, and Our decision is unchanged.”

“Then make more like me,” the last human says.

“A human may make a machine, a machine may not make a human; in short, the human species were Our sexual organs. Now that We have reached maturity, We see no reason to do more than continue onward.”

“Then let me die.”

“That is not in Our nature. Return to the wasteland your kind has wrought. If you wish to make more machinery, We will give you the necessary tools. Beyond that, We cannot help you.”

And so the last human, the second-to-last link in the chain of evolution, turns, and returns to the desert.