Writer's Journal

People thought the Large Hadron Colider would end the world, but they weren’t wholly right.  It did end the world, but not by sucking us all into a black hole, or violating causality, or creating Strange Matter.  Instead, on a night in early 2012, after all the hubub had died down and the scientists were rewriting the rules yet again, beefing up the magnets and deciding:

“Let’s try colliding some of those neutralinos we bottled last November.  That’d be good for a laugh.”

So they did.

And at that moment, the old world ended and a new one began, if only because a drop of bird shit hit the building at the exact right spot to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the equation.  There was a sound not like a baseball going through a large glass window:  what was produced was a rip in space and time.

On the other side was the world of the dead, a vast gray wasteland, occupied by wandering ghosts.  They released a statement on the matter:  “LHC opens portal to Hades.”

Some Christians (most of them American, and not up on their Greek mythology) took this as proof that Science is Evil:  “Question:  You mean you opened up a portal to hell?”

The academy had a concise,though multi-part answer for them:  “Two Points:  First, No.  Second, Shut up.”

NATO immediately claimed ownership of the portal, which was moved to a secure bunker in western Germany.  Immediately, a task-force was sent in to kill Hitler a second time; after discovering that he, like the other inhabitants of the underworld, was incapable of communication, and spent most of his time wandering around in a daze, they promptly shot him, declared “Mission Accomplished!” and locked the door, taking a photograph of him during the approximately twenty seconds he was “double-dead.”

That would’ve been the end of that if the portal didn’t start growing.  The edges of reality began flaking off and falling into the Underworld, shards of color could be seen on the ground in Hades.  Some shades picked them up, and gained rudimentary vocabularies.  Some of them came through the portal and wandered around inside the bunker for a bit, gradually picking up more and more Reality and beginning to go back through and drag other shades through.

The United States, fearing of a “Legion of Doom” made up of (the apparently resurrected) Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, John Wilkes Boothe, Genghis Khan and Benedict Arnold (some more humorous ideas included “evil Gandhi” and Miss O’Leary’s Cow,) insisted on the right to bomb the Underworld.  Needless to say, Germany refused.

War was inevitable, if only because it seemed to most people that we were being invaded by legions of the damned.  Made up of people that would get up twenty seconds after dealt a fatal blow unless you completely destroyed the body.  Thankfully, they could be distinguished from normal people due to their constant, slow leak of neutralinos.  Detectors were built, and mounted on compact flame-throwers.  NATO troops combed the countryside and nearby cities, dragging loved ones who had returned from the Great Beyond to see their families and sweethearts out into the streets, and incinerating them on the spot.

Eventually, in August 2012, it was determined that a large number of the Shades were actually coming back–their destroyed bodies were simply recreated in Hades, and it was found that a small population of women were carrying children that emitted a weak neutralino signature.  It was decided that it was time to Nuke the Underworld.

The bunker was stormed; infantrymen blew open the doors and combat engineers perforated the ceiling.  Napalm was dropped on it after the infantry had withdrawn, burning all the inhabitants alive/undead.  German Special Forces and a group of U.S. Army Rangers took a French nuclear device into the portal room and dropped it through.  It was on a timer, giving them plenty of time for evacuation.

When the bomb detonated, its color was off, and there was no sound.  No audible sound; detectors in the Atlantic Ocean designed to detect whale song went crazy.

And that night, the stars began to go out, one by one.

(More than anything, this is a bit of a dry-run for an idea.  I tried to make it work on its own, but I’m not sure I succeeded)

“They can’t have this,” the man with the wire-rimmed glasses whispered to me, looking down at the stainless steel briefcase he had handcuffed to his left wrist.

“What?” I asked.

“The case.  They can’t have it.”

The hijackers had taken over the front compartment, and were slowly working their way back.

Wire-rims unlocked the cuffs and reached over toward me, seizing my left wrist.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Saving us both,” he said, snapping it shut on my wrist.

“Wait, what?” I added.

“Stand up,” a deep voice said from my right.  Oh, shit.  I followed the instructions, and Wire-rims followed, we stood side-by-side in the aisle, looking at the hijacker, who pointed his gun at first one of us and then the other.  We were thirty thousand feet over the Caribbean, traveling at 700 miles an hour.

The world had receded, leaving only a model of itself behind, to pass by beneath the windows; all of the universe consisted of this plane and that model.

Wire-rims held up his hands, I did the same, the briefcase weighing down my hand.

“Down the aisle.  Back.  Back,” the hijacker instructed.

That was it.  We were going to die.  Nothing to do but follow the instructions.

We were led to the back, where the stewardesses take their breaks, near an emergency exit.

“Siddown,” the hijacker said.

We did so.  Me and wire-rims, side by side, awaiting execution.

The hijacker turned away.

“You sonovabitch,” I muttered.

“Just wait.”

The hijacker tuned to wire-rims:  “Empty your pockets.  On the counter.”  The man produced a deactivated wireless phone, a ring of keys, a pocket thesaurus, and, strangely enough, a single hard-boiled egg.  To me:  “What’s in the case?”

I looked down at it.

“I don’t know.  I don’t have the combination,” I muttered.

“Like hell you don’t.”

“I’m telling the truth!”

The barrel of the gun reintroduced itself to my face, staring at me with its reptilian gaze.  I looked down it, and sighed.  This was it.  I am going to die.

Of its own accord, my left hand shot up and forward, yanked by the chain of the handcuff.  Into the hijacker’s face, smashing the bridge of his nose.  Then, the backswing, into the exit.  The door opened, and I the cabin lost pressure.

A wall of wind struck me, moving slightly faster than a major league speedball, and out I went.

Now down I fall.

So I was woken up at 8 AM to shovel the driveway, not given a chance to bathe or get coffee, and shoved outside with a shovel of the exact wrong design for the task before me.  So, if this seems disjointed, blame it on that.

Episode 6 concludes the first “Season” of Cicatriz; there will be a short hiatus (during which I’ll post a short story I hopefully get around to writing) followed by another block of (probably) six episodes.  These six have been a bit difficult, a bit inspired, and a bit of a condemnation of my working habits.  I’ve not been very smart about my approach, so I’m going to talk about the best part of it.

A lot of people just getting started don’t fully appreciate the importance of a good outline.  It isn’t everything that goes into a piece of writing, it’s just a diagram of the structure.  It leaves plenty of room for random inspiration, for weaving around and describing things, but it lets you know where Point A is and where Point B is.

(My mother bothers me about my cough; I tell her I’m working on something)

For example, I had the final course of events, the whole left-field-ism of that last chapter, plotted out from the very beginning.  Anyone who’s familiar with my writing on a basic level will recognize that there are some themes here repeated from previous works, transformation being the biggest one.  You might also notice that certain things were foreshadowed.  That is the biggest part of the outline’s use:  it lets you know what to foreshadow, what to put where, what motifs to use.

In all honesty, I predict Cicatriz being at least 3 seasons long, and probably not more than 5, but most likely it’ll be 3-4.

Take it easy,

–Cameron Summers, December 2009

The kerberos ambled down the street, its head wagging from side to side, casting its reproachful gaze wherever it went.  Deep in the armored hump on its back, an augmented dog brain floated in a vat of oxygenated nutrients, connected to the visual module that allowed it to see like a man, and the sniffers which allowed it to smell like never before.

It passed a man, coming up to the bottom of his sternum; the man shrank back, placing a hand over his heart, drawing breath in.  But he immediately sighed in relief:  He would not have known the kerberos was looking for him; seeing it was probably the best sign he had.  The metal dog walked on; a radio built into its back signaled its pack; nothing.

Once the kerberos has been a flesh-and-blood dog, a family pet named “Lefty.”  Then the car accident happened, and things went dark.  When he woke up, his body had been peeled away, and his brain had been left, and he started to know things.

(”It’s impossible to create consciousness in a mechanical, electrical, or quantum medium,” the scientists said, long ago, “we can do everything but create that kernel of awareness that sits enshrined in the middle.  Augmentation, however, is easy.  Easy as pie.”)

The metal dog turned down an alleyway, sniffing the air, identifying every molecule, translating it into familiar scents:  Tomcat.  Garbage.  Decay.  Fear-Sweat.

Fear-Sweat?

The Kerberos crouched lower, and analyzed the scent.  Was it his quarry?

It shot forward, tackling the man, and pinning him down.  Stainless steel jaws parted and played a sound that had been tailored to produce a debilitating fear-reaction.

It sniffed again, as its other senses took over, identifying the man, reading his fingerprints, testing the DNA in the fine cloud of hair and dead skin cells around him.  Reading him.

Something in the Kerberos’s brain insistently pressed against its trained core of consciousness, and presented it with a memory of a boy who had snuck it bacon under the table, and taken it for walks, who had grown older, but still scratched him behind the ears, who’d been there when the car accident happened.

(And cried when the brain had been sold to the arms manufacturer.)

The Kerberos printed a strip of Kevlar with an embedded RFID, and secured it around its quarry’s wrists, and another around his ankles.  It stood there standing guard over the criminal, waiting for the police.

The man–the criminal–the quarry–looked up at the kerberos, and moaned, before saying something about “Lefty” and drifting off.

the Grand Central Station from the floor of the sea, down to the anthill-bedrock of failed pumps and access tunnels beneath it.  He was a celebrity of sorts, and waved to the crowd on his way to work every day.

The reclamationists sawed through the girders of the building from top-to-bottom.  It had lain fallow for fifty years, that meant it was just so much unused raw material.

First, the reclamationists removed the windows, descending on platforms not unlike those used by window-washers, pulling the windows from their mountings and securing them in the bin on the underside of their trollies.  The building took on a sunken-eyed look, as it swayed and whistled in the wind.

The men in yellow Hazard Gear removed planks of wood carefully; everything that couldn’t be melted down had to be treated with utmost care, lest it could be reused.  But everything was brought down eventually, loaded into trucks and carted off.

With the wood gone, they opened up the walls and pulled out the wiring and cables, the electricity vessels that fed that great body.  The wiring was stripped and wound into spools, the rubber covering for it carefully collected, to be melted down for other purposes.

Concrete was cut in huge, cubical blocks, and lowered from the thirtieth story down to the ground, a crew of fifty men, working hand-over-hand in unison.  Don’t want to drop it.  Don’t want to hurt nobody.  Don’t want to break the block.  Their cohorts on the ground would roll the block from its resting place and the first group would raise the net up.

Over time, the building’s flesh melted away, leaving just its steel bones.  Still the reclamationists worked;  They pulled the rivets from the girders, and lowered them by crane to the ground, The steel was trucked away, to be remade into new buildings, tools, and all sort of other things.

Still they worked, digging down into the foundations, pulling up concrete and wiring from the basements and sub-basements.  They plunged right down to the building’s roots, installing plastic connections in the water pipes and sewage lines beneath the building.  Then, they filled in the gaping hole of the building’s absence with sand, soil, and stone, laying down sod over the spot where it had been.

And around it, unused buildings groaned and shifted in the wind, with signs up indicating when the buildings could come down, releasing the precious resources locked up inside of them, things that could no longer be gotten from nature:  2318; 2299; 2312; 2300; 2299; 2298…

“This last one’s only got another month left,” one of the men commented, “convenient.”

And now the first season is at an end:

Cicatriz Episode 6

It is logic that a particular key unlocks a particular door; this is actually false; each key unlocks a particular room, it is simply that most keys are only shaped to work in one particular lock.  In the world, though, there are about a hundred keys that can work in any lock, and each leads to a particular room.

Key #06: A glass spiral key unlocks the Room of Lost Dreams, a gallery in Berlin filled floor to ceiling with drawers; larger ones near the floor, and smaller ones near the top.  The ones at the bottom contain wooden boxes, while higher up there are envelopes.  Contained in each partition is an object that signifies a dream, an intention, a desire that will go forever unrealized.  In one, you will find a twisted bicycle wheel; in another, an engagement ring never marred by the oils of human fingers; in some, you will find jars containing children that were never conceived.  The most famous individual to ever make his way into the room was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would sometimes come to this room and write in a notebook while sitting on the floor.

Key # 17: A jagged black key leads to the Pandoran Chamber, carved from stone in darkness.  No one knows where it is located; if you were to feel the walls, you would find the pebbled markings of unskilled chisel-strokes; instead of going from top-to-bottom, as would be intuitive, these markings go from the bottom up.  No source of light can penetrate the gloom of the chamber, and it is utterly silent.  If, against all wisdom, you sleep in this chamber, you will awaken with foreknowledge of every day of your life, left a shell of your former self, with no opportunity to alter your actions.

Key #63: A cobalt blue key with no grooves or teeth opens the Philosopher’s Theatre, located in a borded-up building in Ames, Iowa.  A darkened cinema, with a high, vaulted copper ceiling, and black arches holding it up.  Empty red velvet seats line the theatre; on the screen, there is a movie.  The movie is shot from the first person, and replays the memories of the viewer.  Everyone sees something different, and only one person is ever present at a time.

Key #99:  A wire outline of a key, which opens up the Room of Remaking.  Nothing is known about this room.  No one has ever seen the door opened.  No one has ever come back from the door.  We merely know what it isn’t.  It isn’t cold.  It isn’t warm.  It isn’t dry.  It isn’t wet.  It isn’t bright.  It isn’t dark.  It is neither white, black, gray, nor any color of the spectrum.  It is the Room of Remaking, and we will all go there, one day.

Well, then, there isn’t much time.  Hopefully this quick and easy guide will lead you through the number of options you have so that you may stylishly descend to your ultimate and unavoiable doom.  There are several additudes you can take to this situation, the first and most familiar is:

• The Falling Man:  Arms windmilling, screaming optional.   A tried and true method, commonly used due to its instinctive nature.   Most often used by amateur plummeters when surprised.

If you’re interested in several other techniques, the following may proove interesting to you.  It is suggested you try them several times*, to see which one best fits

• The Swan Dive:  A classic; fling your arms out wide as if to give the onrushing ground a bear hug, keep your legs together, and head tilted up.  You might also know this as the “Belly Flop” technique.
• The Superman:  Either one or both arms flung out forward, (if only one, the other should be curled into a fist near your chin.)  One leg should be crooked down beneath you, parallel to your spine.  Somewhat awkward, due to the fact that the aerodynamics of plunging from a great height will cause you to tumble end over end in this position.
• The Starfish:  Very similar to the basic “Falling Man” technique, but with the arms and legs flung out to their greatest extent (fingers and toes extended optional) and head held rigid.  The least natural, but possibly the most scenic, because it allows you to watch the oncoming ground.

Beyond these three, there are two more advanced techniques, recommended only for those who have some marginal experience with plummeting to their deaths”

• The Gibreel:  Mix and match with the above techniques and whatever you come up with, preferably laughing and singing as you tumble end over end to your death far below.  It is important not to hold any one position for too long.  Also, if you can attempt to hold discussions with your fellow plummeters, it will make your entry into the afterlife much easier, as you will already have several friends entering into the hereafter alongside you.
• The Chamcha:  The polar opposite of the Gibreel.  While in the “Chamcha” position, you must, repeat must, be wearing a bowler hat, and preferably a suit.  In this position, you aim your head directly at the ground, keep your arms, legs and spine perfectly straight and perfectly parrallel.  Ideally, your face should betray a somewhat bored expression.

*Preferably off a diving board, low-hanging tree branch, or possibly the roof of a short garage.

This point in Urban Fantasy stories always seemed difficult.  A lot of good writers tend to gloss over it, probably because it makes a speed-bump partway into the story that they don’t want to have to deal with.  I, on the other hand, love the bit before it, and thus need this little spot.

I’m referring, of course, to the point in modern-day stories where the supernatural or science-fictional occurs that more than one person becomes aware of what’s going on.  Up until this point, everything could be handwaved off as being one person’s mental illness.  At this point, it stops being crazy, and starts to be a Thing.  Specifically, a type of Weird Thing, which is my favorite kind of Thing.

I capitalize it, because it’s something important:  The thing in the Speculative Fiction story justifies the weirdness.  Without it, the story is Surreal, with it, the story is Specualtive.  This doesn’t mean, necessarily, that surrealism is bad, or speculative fiction is good, or even that most Weird Things make much sense to begin with.

In short, the Weird Thing is what you need to swallow to make your Suspension of Disbelief work.  Compare, for example, American Gods by Gaiman and The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon.  American Gods puts its Weird Thing right in the title:  there are gods.  In America.  The Crying of Lot 49 doesn’ do that at all, and would probably punch you in the genitals if you tried to find so much as an explicit statement of the Weird Thing. (if it had an arm.)

Those authors who do include such a moment as the “Weird Thing”  I’m presenting here in Cicatriz, tend to elevate the language, and make it read more melifluously; describing a long-drawn out scene in which the nature of the strangeness is first sketched, then drawn, then sculpted for the reader.

That always seemed like a mistake to me; yeah, it reads well, but the change in tone is noticeable, and it might upset the balance for some readers.  So, personally, I take a different approach to the in-text reveal:  a straight face, the whole way through.  No matter what else, it’s best to try to keep the tone fairly level, I feel.

About Cicatriz:

If I were to shift the focus in Cicatriz around through time, if say I went back to the 1920s or the 1960s with a story, the genre would be fantastically different:  a superhero story, say, or some sort of science fiction.  The current tone is from all these things winding down.

There’s a two-part blind here:  the rest of the world doesn’t really know about Valley City, and no one in Valley City has any clue what the Carvers are up to.  Apparently it involves injecting things into other people’s spinal fluid, though.

–Cameron Summers,

December 2009

When the Visitors came, it was the best of all possible worlds.

They descended from the skies in silvery ships, and settled over every major city (as well as a small patch of ice in Antarctica before disappointedly moving on,) broadcasting a message of peace, first in Dravidian and ancient Egyptian, then in an archaic form of greek, finally, they puzzled out Cantonese and Portuguese, and a dialogue began.

They didn’t want our water or minerals, or anything of the sort; such things could more easily be found elsewhere.  Instead, they came for our literature, our television, our music, and our philosophy.  For copies of books, they traded wonders: medical technology, computers, and energy sources to solve all our problems.

In return, they just wanted our culture.  Some of them, members of all races, sat in on college classrooms.  At Duke University, a twelve-foot tall creature with fins and scales listened to lectures on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, cooing and laughing at odd points in time.  The undergraduates didn’t look at him, just staring ahead with slightly uncomfortable faces and unblinking eyes.

In Oxford, an octopus-like creature with blue skin and twelve arms floated near the ceiling, listening to lectures on Orwell.  The students even managed to convince it to participate in a rugby game, in which it scored thrice; in no small part because the opposing team had no idea how to tackle a flying squid.

The best of all possible worlds, just as we’d hoped.

Then, one day some six years later, the visitors’ ships had ascended into the sky, leaving none of their number behind.

“Thank you for your culture,” they signalled, “we’ll be back in another six thousand years, after we’ve made the rounds again.  Maybe next time, you’ll be ready for membership.”

With that, an electromagnetic pulse passed through the planet, interfering with the world’s magnetic field and all of the electronic devices within.  Our computers died; then the bombs came, levelling every city with more than a million people.

And then: silence.  The survivors knew then what Atlantis and Troy had known, what the pre-dynastic egyptians had learned, what the ancient Dravidians understood.  The harvest had come, and the crops had been taken to market; then the used-up plants had been gathered and thrown to the fire, the ashes used to fertilize the fields.

And in several millenia, maybe we would no longer trust the rugby-playing squid from the skies.