Writer's Journal

Hey, folks.  It’s going to be another week before I get a new chapter of Cicatriz ready  But, for today, I’d like to just post a collection of links for all previous episodes of Cicatriz.  So, go ahead and reread, if you’re forgetting anything; it’s been a while since the earlier ones went up, and if you’ve been reading along the whole time, you might be a little lost.

Cicatriz Episode 1

Cicatriz Episode 2

Cicatriz Episode 3

Cicatriz Episode 4

Cicatriz Episode 5

Cicatriz Episode 6

The man had been sitting in a cafe, reading a book he held in one hand and drinking coffee. This plan was interrupted by the intrusion of the Bureaucrat, the short, thin man stormed in with his tie flapping over one shoulder and a black briefcase trailing behind him in one thin arm.

“Mr. Jones,” the Bureaucrat said, even managing to pronounce the “.” in “mr.”, “I’ve been looking all over for you. I need you to sign these forms.”

A thin folder slid across the table.

“What?” the man asked, marking his page in the book he’d been reading, “what do you want?”

“Those forms should’ve been signed eight years ago.”

“Can we just say that ship’s sailed?”

“No, sir. You were supposed to have died eight years ago.”

“Wait, what?”

The Bureaucrat sighed.

“Okay, I’m the representative of death, and I need to get your signature so that you can have died in a lightning storm eight years ago.”

Mr. Jones looked up at the bureaucrat.

“But I don’t want to have died eight years ago. I’ve got a wife and daughter.”

“But it will have never happened, and you’ll be dead anyway. It won’t matter.”

Mr. Jones furrowed his brow.

“That doesn’t make me feel better about it. I don’t want to have died.”

“But it’s foreordained, you can’t fight fate,” the Bureaucrat said emphatically.

“I can choose not to sign your paperwork.”

“No, you can’t,” the Bureaucrat said.

“I think that’s what I’m going to do,” Mr. Jones said, picking up his book again and opening it emphatically.

“We’ll garnish your wages, take your house. Up until you choose to have died in that thunderstorm eight years ago.”

“Do that and I’ll sue your ass, Mr. Death.”

The Bureaucrat’s face darkened.

“Well, Mr. Jones, I’ll see you in court.”

(This is kind of a rough sketch of something I want to write later on, a sort of deconstruction of the “Lensman” books which is the root of all Space Opera–most directly Star Wars, Mass Effect, Babylon 5 and the like; Less so Firefly or Star Trek, though there’s some influence, there.  I might fit a short version of it between Cicatriz seasons 2 & 3.  Don’t worry, though, it’ll be better written than AM was.)

“Going into Inertialess in three…two…one…” the Navigator said, flipping a switch.

Immediately, every crewman aboard suffered a brief wave of vertigo as their worlds shifted from Newtonian to Aristotelian physics. The whine of the engine increased in volume, and the front windows locked down with anti-radiation shutters, as the light in front of them blue-shifted into hard x-rays and that behind them red-shifted into radio.

The auto-pilot engaged, the Navigator sank back into his acceleration couch, and sighed. To his left sat the only other technician in the cockpit, a LIDAR tech. Behind the two of them stood the Watchman, whose expressionless gaze didn’t seem to focus on any particular aspect of the cockpit, but neither did he seem to miss any detail. The lens of crystalline material set into his forehead reflected a dark, blue sheen, which was strange, due to there being no overhead lights.

The LIDAR tech switched over to passive scanning, to prevent the emissions from the sensors from pushing too much against the interstellar medium.

“What’s our ETA?” the Watchman asked. His surgical modifications were evident; the vertical slits to either side of his eyes puckered slightly, and the “Third Eye” in the middle of his forehead was surrounded by a faint patch of irritated skin. The “gifts” he’d received from the Benefactors, those unimaginably ancient beings in the heart of the galaxy, were not agreeing with his human flesh.

“Well, we’ll get to Eridanus in three days, refill our capacitors and dump heat, then get going out into the direction of Antares. I give it two weeks, if we don’t have any problems.”

Two weeks with this creep staring over my shoulder, the Navigator thought to himself, wonder if they took anything out when they cut him open.

“If you need me,” the Watchman said, “I’ll be in my bunk.”

“Right. Yes, sir,” the Navigator said, not looking up from his displays.

After the Watchman left, the LIDAR tech glanced over at the Navigator.

“Something on your mind?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Are you telling me that someone whose had surgery performed on them by ancient astronauts doesn’t creep you out?”

“What’s your point?” the LIDAR tech said, glancing around and producing a pack of smokes, he reached up and adjusted the air scrubber above him, setting it on high.

“Look, those aliens–”

“Benefactors,” the tech muttered around his cigarette.

“–yeah, whatever. They’ve been around since…when? Middle of the Precambrian? If they’re to be believed? What do they need us for?”

The LIDAR tech nodded, and offered the pack to the Navigator, who declined.

“Who knows, maybe they’ve just got a need to build civilization when they see raw material?”

“Yeah? Then why do they look so much like us? Hell, why does every alien look so much like us?”

“They don’t look that much like us.”

The Navigator sputtered.

“What? Of course they do; name one species that lacks more than two of the following: DNA. Levo-Proteins. Animal. Two sexes, with some degree of sexual dimorphism. Billateral symmetry. Central nervous system. Vertebrate. Upright posture. Opposable thumbs. Binocular vision. And, finally, a functional larynx in roughly the same place and with the same purpose as ours.”

The LIDAR tech thought a moment, and then asked.

“Why is all that such an issue?”

“Man, we’re more closely related to lichen and a goddamned moss can’t bum a cigarette off of you. Think about that.”

The tech nodded.

“Alright, but the Watchman is human.”

“Ostensibly.”

“Dude, what?”

“Who knows, maybe they hollowed him out with an ice-cream scoop or something. We don’t know. He could be all alien under that delicious human shell.”

“Dude,” the LIDAR tech made a cutting motion across his throat.

“What?”

“They can read minds. You haven’t been thinking this stuff with him around, have you?”

“What? Oh, shit.”

Ave Machina 4

Well, that’s that.  Cicatriz returns the first Friday in February; it takes me about two weeks to write the average episode.  I’ll find something to fill the gap, next Friday.

I think A.M. was something of a failed experiment.  Not quite what I had in mind, really, but I’m still glad I did it; you can learn more from a failure than a success, so long as you know what to look for.

The package sat on my doorstep.  It had no return address, and, strangely, no postage.  No markings of any kind on its brown paper exterior.  Just kite string tying it shut.

I don’t know what it was; the damn thing had just appeared out of nowhere, sitting there like the unmovable center of the universe.  There was something solid about it.  I stood on my porch, looking down at it, smoking a cigarette and thinking about opening it.  My new roommates had yet to move in; it was possible it was meant for one of my older ones.

“What?” the first one I called had replied, “no, I don’t know what that would be.”
“I don’t know anyone who would do that,” the second told me, flatly.
“No chance,” the third had said.

I put away my phone, snapping it shut, and looked at the box.  I nudged it with my foot; it shook back and forth like a block of jello encased in cardboard.  I plucked apart the knot on top, and the string flopped down.

Taking out my keys, I grabbed the longest, and cut a gash in the top before I fitted my fingers in an pulled it apart, revealing the box underneath.  An ordinary cardboard box, with a note taped to the top.  I ripped it off and unfolded it.

“your words stick with me  i hear and i obey”

There was no signature.  I nudged the box with my foot; this situation was beginning to bother me.  If I was smart, I would’ve called someone.  If I was wise, I would go inside and lock my doors.

Unfortunately, I was not smart enough, nor was I wise.

I crouched down, and opened the box.  Inside was a bone-white mask, shaped like a bird’s face but big enough for a man’s head. the mask sat on top of a large mass of pale, soft leather.  I picked up the mask, and looked at it.  A porcelain face, made with a foot-long, downward-curving beak.  It had eyeholes, and a strap of the same soft leather to hold it on the head.  Confused, I set it down, and reached in.  Picking up the soft leather, I unfurled it.

A human skin.

It was huge–every person has about twenty-two square feet of skin, altogether, and someone had taken the effort to remove and cure all twenty-two of those feet into leather, stitching it in some places, and adding buttons to the front.

In horror, I released it, and it fluttered a ways before dropping to the ground.

I looked down at the mask, and then in the box, there was a revolver, and another note:

“it’s your turn to”

and the note was unfinished, a large dollop of blue-black ink obscuring the last word.

He ran from the light of the road, his arms and legs feeling stiff and heavy.  But he needed to move, to get away from the things that were chasing him.  Everything hurt; it felt like his heart was having trouble pumping blood, his lungs had trobule taking in air.

Stumbling between two trees, he caught one with his right hand, and used it to whip himself to the left.  The Fugitive hoped that his pursuers would have trouble finding him.  If they’d brought the dogs along, surely they’d find him and kill him, hopefully they didn’t.  The Things seemed to have a hard time getting the dogs to do what they wanted, sometimes.

Just to be sure, he kept his back to the wind and began zig-zagging, looking for a creek.  Eventually, he stumbled upon one, and gently lowered himself in, walking slowly and carefully downstream, before pulling himself up and out.

He considered his options:  climbing a tree was out of the question, considering his physical state, but he wasn’t tired.  He could run all night, if need be.  That seemed about right–he looked to the moon, and chose his direction from the quarter of the sky he saw it in.

There was a sound of engines, far distant but coming closer.  Glancing over his shoulder, he realized something important:  I need a plan, if I’m going to come out of this.

Glancing around, he realized that the ground sloped up away from him on one side; he stood at the base of a small hill, with large rocks strewn about, and a heavy covering of trees.  They would have trouble following him.

He began running, pulling himself up the hill with hands and feet alike.  A light fell on him, and he heard a “CRACK!”  a pain blossomed in his left leg, and he fell, clutching it.

“Jenkins, you go up there and make sure that sonovabitch is dead.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

Flipping over, the fugitive groaned a bit, and pulled himself onward.  Thinking, knowing:  If they find me, they’ll kill me.

He managed to pull himself thirty feet from his position when a flashlight fell over him.

“You’re a persistent bastard, you know that?  But it’s okay.  It’s all over know.”

Jenkins raised his sidearm.

“Last of the goddamn zombies.  Glad to see you go.”

Ave Machina 3

Sorry about not posting yesterday, I had to go get some work done on my car, which sort of spiralled out of control and stole my day.

(This is probably a piece of something bigger, but was written primarily for the central image of the story, and to justify the use of parentheses in a story, which some of my classmates in creative writing express irritation with.)

The platform on the train station was full, but the people were not frantic. Most seemed to move through that sort of macroscopic-scale Brownian motion that crowds seem to have when no one is in a hurry. Charles Trencher watched it out the window, thinking about what he was going to do.

In the course of two days, his apartment inexplicably erupted into an inferno. Obviously, he was done with this city.

(—had been lying on the couch, waiting for his girlfriend to show up. Nodded off for a moment. Then a haze of smoke in the air, a whiff of ozone. It’d been a freak accident—the fuse for his apartment was a lemon, one solid mass of metal, combined with already-bad wiring. Fire began pouring into the room from the light fixtures and outlets. The ship of the world was sinking into the Ocean of Hell—)

It had been a one-in-a-million instance of bad luck, at first. Pared down to about one-in-ten-million when his girlfriend left him the next day, for some superstitious reason.

Maybe he was just bad luck.

Maybe not.

(—door had been on fire, he crouched down, pressing his cheek into the rough carpet, and waited for either rescue or perdition; it would be the former. Perhaps—)

Charles looked out into the crowd, and his eyes widened:

Standing in the middle of the crowd was a man whose body was completely engulfed in flames. His features were only visible as a darkness foregrounded against fire, but he did not seem to be panicking. The man was burly and tall, but the twisting mass of fire above him added another four feet to his presence. No one seemed to notice him, simply giving him a wide berth and not looking at the man-on-fire.

The Burning Man looked at Charles, and he looked back.

Recognition took a half-second, but that long, drawn-out instant took an eternity.

(—out of the fire, lifting him up, bursting the door outward from air pressure. Charles stepped from the inferno, unharmed but for the smoke in his lungs. His rescuer disappeared back to the place from where he came—)

“Ticket?” the conductor asked.

Charles looked up.

“What? Oh, right.”

He dug into his bag, and glanced out of the corner of his eye. The Burning Man was gone.

The Detective produced an envelope marked “ESPER” and a straw before entering the Interrogation room. The powder inside, manufactured from a lichen found in the Martian Permafrost, was a dull beige color, and smelled vaguely of mildew, despite being completely dry. He waited for the desired allergic reaction to kick in–thankfully, it was the desired one; some people simply dropped dead as soon as the powder touched their nerve endings.

Sniffing a bit, he entered the room, where the suspect was sitting, drinking a paper cup full of water. Information bombarded the Detective’s neocortex; it felt as if other parts of his brain were about to wilt and drop off, but he managed to avoid staggering or dropping asleep until he could sit in the chair.

“Morning,” the Detective said.

“It was One PM when I was brought in,” the Suspect said. Is he…?

“So it was,” the Detective replied, “How are you feeling?”

“A little hungry, a little tired. Mind telling me what this is about?” I think he’s tripping on something…those pupils are dialated all to hell.

“You know damn well what this is about,” the Detective snapped, before pressing in a code on the intercomm in the center of the table, and saying in a calm voice, “Joe. Mind grabbing some burgers for us?”

“Sure thing.”

“I don’t know what this is about,” the Suspect said. Is he referring to…?

“Sure you do. What were you doing Last Tuesday at Eleven PM?”

“I was at home, watching my nephew,” the Suspect replied, not quite mechanically, but fast enough to indicate that he’d been thinking about it.

“Oh, really? How old is he?”

“Seven,” the Suspect said. I haven’t seen him or my sister in a couple years. He’s seven, right? Well, he is now.

“Not at the liquor store?”

“I don’t drink.” That rang true.

“I didn’t ask you whether you drink or not. I asked whether you were at a liquor store.”

“No.” Yes.

“You were.”

“I just told you I wasn’t.”

“That’s not what you meant, though,” the Detective said.

“You’ve got evidence of anything?” the Suspect said.

“Just my Esper Allergy,” the Detective said, grinning.

Shit.

A beat.

“That’s not admissible in court,” the Suspect pointed out.

“Neither’s a polygraph. Doesn’t mean we don’t use it. In fact, as soon as I mentioned that, you started broadcasting fear on all your emotional bandwidth. Why would that be, if you’re innocent?”

“Nobody’s innocent, devoid of context. You might decide that something I did without thinking was a misdemeanor. Or report me to the RIAA.” Or realize I knocked over that liquor store. Goddammit.

The Detective nodded.

“Fair enough. But you’re guilty.”

“What?” shit.

“You’re throwing up chaff, and you just mentioned it in your internal monologue.”

“Still not admissible.”

“Sure, it is. Just need to know where the weapon is.”

“Not telling.” Dresser Drawer.

“Don’t think of the color blue.”

“What?” blue?

“Yahtzee.”

The Detective stood up, and staggered out of the interrogation room, smiling as a trickle of blood dripped from his nose.

The Second Part of Ave Machina, this one gets us halfway.  After the next two parts, season 2 of Cicatriz will begin.  As long as I can get the outline written, as well as all of my academic obligations.

Ave Machina 2