Writer's Journal

(This began as simply the title.  I needed to come up with something to fit it, though.  I might turn this into a sporadic series, like I did with Deputy Connors and one or two other things.)

He just got out of the interrogation room, and needed a fix. The sodium pentathol in his blood–put there so he could be questioned about something he knew nothing about–was making him loopy, and he wanted to take the edge off.

The junky asked around.

“You got anything on you?”

“No.”

“You got anything?”

“Screw off.”

“You?”

The man he asked had heavy-lidded eyes, and said nothing. He just nodded, and pulled the junky into a corner. He reached behind him, and pulled out a small object wrapped in butcher’s paper, with a rubber band holding it closed.

The man with the heavy-lidded eyes held it out. It was maybe the size of the last joint on a man’s hand. He unwrapped it, looking at the lump of material that looked vaguely like brown sugar. There were flecks of something else in it, something silvery and metallic, but he didn’t care. A fix was a fix.

The Pusher dressed in a plague doctor’s mask, with its long, bird-like nose. He stood in the corner, and offered vials of the meta-narcotic for cheap. It was easy to make, once you figured things out.

Drug users came from far and wide, because his product made everything better. Mix your fix with it, and the effects would be more potent, and with no noticeable increase in side effects.

Other than the disappearances.

The Junky had to be taken to the infirmary, because he’d gone into convulsions. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he began to lose weight at a visibly noticeable rate. His skin was red, and he was sweating profusely.

The doctor tried to inject a sedative, but the needle couldn’t pierce his skin, distending it and then breaking.

Eventually, they got a sample of his skin, and sent it to the lab. The collagen in the man’s skin had begun to change, becoming a pseudo-aramid compound resembling kevlar

The Enforcer looked around at the scene of carnage.

The safe house had been painted with the blood of his soldiers, and chunks of them littered the ground.

“What…what did this?” he asked, bewildered.

One of his men vomited.

There was a broken window, large enough for a big child or small adolescent to scramble through.

They found one of the dead men’s heads, and he had a look of shock plastered in his eyes.

It looked like someone had pulled the head right off.

The Junky went limp for six hours, and they inserted a feeding tube, trying to keep him hydrated and alive. His heartbeat was irregular and quiet.

At the end of the six hours, though, it was forceful and thunderous. The EKG machine shorted out, and the man woke up. He was filled with a strange hunger, and bit through the feeding tube, swallowing it.

He then proceeded to work the screws out of the bed and began to eat them. When he finished dismantling the bed, he began to pull wires out of the EKG machine and eat them.

The guards came in when he cracked the machine open to get at the wiring inside.

“Freeze!” one shouted.

The Junky didn’t, shoveling metals and plastics into his mouth.

The guards fired, and the bullets ripped through the hospital gown, but merely thudded against the man’s skin.

He dropped, moaning, to the ground.

“Jesus…” one of the guard’s said, as the man rolled over, and looked at them, blinking.

The Manager looked out his eighth story window, and nearly choked on his espresso. A woman crawled across his window, leaving the outline of a handprint behind her.

She glanced in at him, and blinked, before crawling up higher.

He threw away the drink, and told his receptionist to cancel all appointments for the next hour, before leaning back and putting on a sleep mask.

The Junky was very compliant, telling them that he had eaten about a gram of something he had been convinced was heroin, but with something else inside of it.

“Possession of heroin is a crime,” the interrogator informed him.

The man was sweating again, and bound to a chair in the interrogation room.

“I know. It wasn’t really in my possession for longer than ten…maybe twelve seconds. Just long enough to notice these shiny, glittery bits inside of it. Unless it being in my bloodstream, via the stomach, counts.”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to check.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. Terribly sorry if it does. It wasn’t that good. Didn’t really vomit, or anything.”

“Is that a good sign?”

“Oh, the best stuff makes you vomit. You’re not on Vice Squad, are you?”

“Uh…no.”

“Well, ask your buddies in Vice about it, if you’re interested. Don’t know why you would. Wish I’d never started.”

“Why are you being so forthright?” the Interrogator asked.

“I think the sodium pentathol is still in my system.”

“That should’ve worn off hours ago.”

“It didn’t. Can I go, now?” the Junky asked.

The Interrogator laughed.

“Sure. You can go now.”

The Junky stood up, tearing the chair apart in the process, and walked to the door. He grabbed the knob, and pulled it right off, staggering a bit.

Blinking, he looked around, at the stunned interrogator, and gave a sheepish smile.

“I don’t know how that happened. Honest. Never happened before.”

(My artist didn’t like this one, and I kind of see why.  However, I’m having a bit of trouble waking up, so you get to have the prose version of it.)

She looked up at the city on nestled between the mountains, and smelled smoke in the air. The last person she’d seen had been the trucker who dropped her off three hours ago as he headed off toward the weigh-station, letting her know that he technically wasn’t supposed to give anyone rides.

And now, here was a city that wasn’t on any map.

She shouldered her knapsack, looping the arm strap over the “Nomad” patch on her shoulder, and trudged up toward it.

Off in the distance, she could hear a payphone ringing.

Turning off the road on a whim, she made a beeline for the sound, and eventually emerged into a clearing with a concrete platform in the middle. A payphone emerged from the middle.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

She picked up, and held the receiver to her ear.

“Guilty!”

“Hello?”

The receiver emitted a blast of black static, and she dropped it. Putting it from her mind, she walked up the hill, and into the city.

A building was burning on main street. Flames danced around the concrete-and-metal sign that read “library.” She watched.

A figure ran in. It emerged later, blackened with soot and with an armful of books. Dropped the books, and entered again. Emerged, blacker with soot, dropped the books. Entered again. She didn’t see it emerge.

Turning, she walked along a cross-street, passing businesses until she met warehouses. Finding one that was condemned for reasons other than mold or fire damage, she broke the door down, and walked into the empty interior.

Moonlight mixed with firelight streamed in through windows, and she walked into a corner, crouched down. Out of her pack, she pulled a thin sleeping bag and a bottle of water, and settled down to sleep, her mind considering the issues of guilt, and filled with images of burning libraries.

For your reading pleasure(?)

Cicatriz Episode 3×03

He was downwind of the road, crouched at the top of a ridge, watching the pack of berserkers run down the highway.  There had to be almost a dozen, running between the cars, bounding onto and across the hoods of abandoned cars.

Their manic laugher was audible, even up here.  Half giggling, half panting.

The man shivered and lay his head down.

He kept his ears pealed, listening for sounds of them doubling back.  When it seemed like they hadn’t, he went down the side of the ridge and began to search the cars.  He walked away with a pack of cigarettes in his pocket, five beers, a bottle of water, and a bag of chips.

Not many people scavenged along the interstates.  They all fed from and fed into the cities, which were giant death traps.  But he’d worked out a system.

He opened the trunk of every car he’d looted, until he found one with an internal latch to pull, and just in time, because the man soon heard distant laughter.  He climbed in the trunk and closed it around him before opening one of the beers.

It wasn’t until morning that he discovered that the latch was broken, and wouldn’t let him out.

8Ball was a surgeon. Had been a surgeon. Now he operated out of a van that drove through Baltimore’s lower class areas in a preplanned route. He didn’t have a proper driver, just a wetware system programmed to not hit any solid objects and get to a charging station when the bar turned from blue to green to yellow to orange. It was old enough that it had been converted from a gas-driven vehicle.

8Ball smoked as he tinkered in His patient’s nervous system. Before he’d begun work, he’d taken a slug of gin and a blast from the laughing gas tank.

“So, this is a work expense, yeah? Not quite a tax write-off, but a good way to do things, good way to live through the rougher parts of the job. I’m the best, you know. Of course, they don’t let me do some work, or buy certain kinds of anaesthetic, anymore.”

8Ball was a tall man with a bulbous head. His nickname came from the implant in his black forehead. The white circle with the ultrasound sensor that fed right into his visual cortex.

He sniffed.

“Going to slice open your spine, and put in some fiber optics. Won’t heal on their own, but you might not need to, if you get good enough, you know? Might be a little rough.”

He flipped the patient over, and cut along the back of the spine.

“I like to think of Surgery as a performance art. I can do such creative things, you know? Once, I wired up a man so that he could smell wireless signals. Another man had me install a drill in a place where a drill shouldn’t go. But his credit was good, you know?”

“Jus’ dooo the job…” the patient slurred.

“Oh, I get it, not much for conversation, eh? Well, I’m going to keep talking, because I’m the doctor. Of course, I’m the doctor. How do you think I got this laughing gas, eh?”

“Going to put some ports in your wrist, just like you asked. Use those smart-cloth streamers that were all the rage twenty years ago. You can do artful things to a body with those, you know? Amputate limbs without the guy even knowing.”

8Ball began his work on the spine.

“Maybe after this, I can do your eyes. I can replace one with 3D imaging technology, and the other with a millimeter-band microwave detector. Or! Or! I can put in a gun. You want an eye-gun?”

“Noooo…”

“Ah. Spoilsport. Maybe I rewire your colon. Make you mess your pants every time you stand in the way of a cellphone signal. Make you go and live in the interior just so you can wear pants.”

His patient closed his eyes.

“I’m only joking. I would never do that. Too many useful spare parts to go about being vindictive. Can I have a kidney? Maybe a testicle? I’ll cut your price for every extraneous organ you give me.”

“’M okay.”

“Fine, fine.”

Well, that was a short episode, but I think that all the important things that were in my outline happened (yes. They did. Don’t question me.)

These episodes are a little more urban fantasy, a little less episodic. Cicatriz, as a whole, has made a drastic move from one-off events to long stories, which kind of fit the “detective” thing more; in all honesty, the whole thing started because I wanted to attempt the “occult detective” subgenre that was so popular in the pulps, but now occupies only one or two series of trade paperback books (The Dresden Files and Anita Blake, I think, neither of which I’ve read.)

The choice of positioning your work in a genre is important, even if you write mundane fiction. No one would really argue that The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby are the same genre, or that either of them match Great Expectations, Gravity’s Rainbow, or On the Road. Yet those are all “literary” fiction. Funny, that.

(In truth “literary” just means “historical or contemporary fiction.” Anyone who tells you differently is trying to protect something.)

So, Cicatriz is an occult detective story. And something else. Something else entirely.

Because every story should be something else entirely, if only somewhat. You understand?

About Cicatriz:

Okay, the Duplicate. There are going to be more of them, and they serve an important role in the story. No, they’re not the same as the Shadows from Atlus Entertainment’s Persona 4, though I’ll admit that those are back there in the DNA of the idea.
It’s more related to the “Duplicates” from Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, for a variety of reasons. No, I’m not going to elucidate more, you can figure it out on your own.

Back next week.

–Cameron Summers

June, 2010

(Happy Bloomsday, here’s something absolutely nothing like James Joyce.)

For more information, go here.

Human beings are a veritable primordial soup of ideas. Just as biological life arose out of inanimate matter, and sentience out of biological life, so to does memetic life come out of sentience.

Certain humans are inhabited by a great deal of memetic life. Rarely is this harmful, though in the case of dangerous ideologies such as fascism, it can be. Most of the time this is a symbiosis harmless to the individual (normally an artist, advertising executive, or someone in a religious vocation.)

Among the simplest examples of memetic life is the sequence of percussive notes known as the “Amen Break” (originally from the song “Amen Brother.”) Though it cannot seek out sustenance, a trait common to most memetic life, it does inspire musicians to repeat it. Due to the simplicity and resilience of this stream of notes, the Amen Break has been wildly successful, being repeated over and over in a wide variety of contexts.

On the other hand, despite the profusion of reproductions, very little advancement has occurred, with limited examples of evolution.

He sat on a low stone wall, and checked the safety on his gun. The sky above was gray streaked with black, and there was a distant sound of thunder, though the air smelled as dry as a desert.

The burned out shell of the church stood before ex-deputy Connors, an ancient stone skeleton of a building. He could feel a ball of ice in his gut as he considered it.

Tucking his gun into his coat, he hopped to his feet and headed up the hill.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and put one in his mouth. He tucked the pack back into his pocket, and pulled out a lighter.

The gun stayed in his right hand the whole time.

Looking down into the pit, Connors took in the whole scene, the oldest example of the county’s aberrancy.

The cellar of the church was filled with a half-a-foot of brackish ash-saturated water. Dozens of round white stones stuck up through it, floating like frog’s eggs.

Connors blinked, and acknowledged what they were: skulls.

At one end of the cellar was a broken statue, something like a man, but malformed and bulging. No eikon he had ever seen resembled that shape, no representation of Christ on the cross was so loathsome.

There was a low altar in front of the statue, with a mildewed cask sitting in the middle of it.

He screwed his eyes shut, and turned away. He holstered his gun before walking down the hill toward his car. He pulled out two large gas cans, and carried them up to the church before tossing them in.

He repeated the process twice, tossing the large jugs of gasoline into the water.

Producing his gun, he put a hole in each, spilling the contents into the ashen muck at the bottom. He flicked his cigarette butt down in, and was disappointed when nothing caught fire. The stink of the fumes was almost overpowering.

He made one final trip down to his car, and retrieved a road flare from the boot of his car and lit it before tossing it in.

Connors watched as the fire spread, and began to consume the remains of the church.

Well, here’s the new one.  A little short, and a little late, but I like to think that certain things begin to become clearer–or at least more compelling–in this episode.

Cicatriz Episode 3×02

Also, Jave was correct in the comment on the backmatter for the last bit.  The quote does come from Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.  The reason for that should be made clear in this chapter.

The boy, a young man of maybe sixteen, was strapped down on the table, his eyes taped open.  The room was fairly dark, but there was a faint glow from a projection screen.

A sequence of sounds:  Click.  Hiss.  Ash…

“We don’t have much time,” a gravelly voice said.

“Who are you?” the boy asked.

“I’m you.  I’m from the future,” the voice said, “I’ve only got half-an-hour, now.  You should’ve gone limp on the first hit.  I hope I didn’t do any permanent damage.”

The boy made a confused-sounding noise in his throat.

“Just listen.  My life is shit.  I paid $250,000 to come back here and instruct you how not to screw up your life.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s begin.”

On the left side of the screen was a restaurant, on the right was a bookstore.  A date in next april was underneath the bookstore.

“Don’t apply at the restaurant.  Apply at the bookstore on this date.  Walk over there on that day, and ask if you can get a job.  Repeat it to me.”

“April 13th, go over to the bookstore, and ask for a job.”

“Good.  I’m leaving a notebook full of these for you.  Keep it in mind.  Now.”

The screen changed.  Full view of a woman; she was pretty, but had tired eyes.

“This woman.  Avoid her like the plague.  Trust me.  It’s like God designed someone for the sole purpose of ruining your life.  Don’t get involved.”

“Do I get a name?”

“Not even a name.  You see her, you walk the other way.”

“…Understood.”

The screen changed again, and showed a copy of the ACT.

“This is the exact test you’ll get.  I’m going to leave the actual answers for you.  Memorize them.  Apply to any school other than those on the list I provide you.”

“…okay,” the boy said, a little more enthused.

“After that point, your life will be so different that my instructions won’t have any effect.  Have fun.”

The man stubbed out his cigarette, untaped the boy’s eyes, and stuffed the notebook into the boy’s pocket.  He released the restraints, and struck the button on the belt unit he had been wearing, thinking:

“Maybe it’ll work, this time…”