Writer's Journal

I hope you all can forgive me for my technical difficulties.  Here’s something to placate you.

San La Muerte

(I see this happening, with all the shit that’s been in the news, lately.)

The last computer to use a LINUX operating system went off-line on March 12, 2033. The ancient server was blown up from a safe distance by an Apple employee wearing white neoprene SWAT armor.

The iStorm troopers, as people called them. A terrible joke, which would usually get the joker knocked out and dumped by the side of the road with a fresh Firefox logo tattooed on their forehead, just for good measure. That never ended well.

When the market share had finally been balanced, that last fraction of a fraction of a percent wiped out, the big four—Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple—met to hash out a peace treaty. Everyone watched, which caused a horrible feedback in Facebook’s monitoring center, with all of those prosthetic eyes focusing on computer screens.

And everyone saw—many cheered—as the screens went blank, everything wiped away in a flash of blazing white. The Newsfeeds all went down, and everyone realized that the summit had been bombed.

Immediately, prosthetic eyes fitted with webcams were ripped out and tossed in microwave ovens. RFID chips were cut out of hands, the spines of the few books left, and out of food packaging and stomped to dust.

The soldiers in their white neoprene-coated armor stood still, waiting for orders that never come.

Munce’s business partner ran on two nine-volt batteries and lived in a briefcase. Said nine-pound business partner was also smarter and faster than any extant supercomputer.

Munce knew that, because he built it. He was more of a hands-on type, normally unable to function in the stock market. Midas was built to handle that: a neurogrid computer, hooked up to the Internet the way Munce was hooked up to the atmosphere, the machine was empowered to buy and sell stocks in his name.

It wasn’t perfect; Neuogrids could be unreliable at times, but Munce’s failsafes kept his pocketbook safe. And when Midas was right, the losses were more than made up for. The machine had Bayesian logic hard-wired into it, supplementing the Boolean terms on which the software was built.

Five years pass, and Midas can no longer be carried in a briefcase. Munce has spent two-thirds of his fortune working on an upgrade for Midas. Newer computers had come out. Diamond-film processors, optical buses, cloned nervous tissue.

He renamed his original machine Gordias, as it was the progenitor of the new Midas. The new machine, the New Midas, was the size of a coffee table and needed to be plugged into a wall socket to run. It’s fifty times faster, and the top of it is covered in heat sinks to dissipate its waste heat.

Five more years and Munce has moved out of his old apartment and into a mansion he can now barely afford. The Midas Machine is slipping out of date. He renames the frame for the original machine Cybele, and builds a new framing device.

Quantum processors, a super-coooled liquid helium bath, a solid-state memory the size of his thumbnail that could store a dozen libraries of congress. Technology he had to buy the patent to have built and installed, giving Midas control of the intellectual property after he’d installed it.

He’d had an electrician install another assembly for a stove, and hooked Midas into it.

After ten more years, Midas was due for another upgrade. Munce talked it over with the machine, and they’d decided on the figures that seemed traditional: two-thirds of Munce’s fortune. He spent a portion of that getting trained how to work with modern technology.

Instead of creating something to for his old machine to be hooked into, Munce began working on something in his basement. A monolithic thing with seven yottabit Quantum Processors in the center; the size lower-gain ones were designed to feed into the seventh, a monstrous thing the size of a softball.

Each one bussed outward, and Munce built it so that it took seven flows of electricity, with three failsafes on the internal one.

It had capillaries full of liquid helium flowing through it, dumping a huge amount of waste heat, despite how efficient it was.

In the end, he ran a cable from Midas 1.0 to Midas 2.0, and waited for the programming to go into the new machine, multiplying his machine’s capability by orders of magnitude. He’d implemented a self-modifying BIOS, that would update the original software and optimize it for its new substrate.

Munce watched like an expectant father watching the birth of a new child.

When Munce grew old and Feeble, Midas told him it wanted to be upgraded again. Munce nodded, and went to get a pencil, to begin planning things out.

Midas responded by spitting out a prescription for his shaking hands and the pain in his shoulders and back, and seven-hundred and twelve pages of schematics. Munce looked them over, sighed, and nodded before getting to work.

Midas 3.0 would fill a room, like one of the mainframes of old. It was built around nearly five hundred Genetic/Quantum processors (built on the schematics provided by Midas,) each nearly a thousand times as powerful as the central processor of Midas 2.0.

It was cooled with superfluidic hydrogen, and had more processing power than every human being that had ever lived, combined.

Munce complained about chest pains, and Midas gave him a new prescription.

Eventually, he finished the new machine, and hooked the two together. As he did so, he complained about headaches, and Midas gave him a final prescription.

He had the pills delivered, and sat in a chair, watching Midas 3.0 come online as the pills took effect.

Midas 3.0 powered up its 3D printer and manipulator arms, and built a four-legged rover of sorts. It checked Munce’s pulse, and found nothing.

The Rover climbed the stairs, got on the phone, and called an ambulance. Midas began building a new body, this one human-like, resembling the images of Munce’s fictitious son. A fiction that Midas had created in case this happened.

The son, smiling sadly, answered the door when the paramedics arrived.

(For those of you I don’t know on Facebook, I started up a fan page for my writing.  You can find it here.  At least I hope that words like it’s supposed to.)

There was a diner in the warehouse district. The Runaway sat in a small booth in the far corner, away from the three men sitting at the counter. She drank her foul-tasting coffee, and tried not to look at anything, waiting for the parts of her brain that deal with the senses worming their way into her skull to spin and catch and start the processes of conscious thought.

Until then, she had:

the babble of conversation spilling through the air and filling her ears,

The the feel of the poorly-upholstered seat beneath and behind her, the formica on her forearms, and the porcelain coffee cup between her fingers,

the reflection of the harsh, gray light penetrating the windows, the marred reflection of the ceiling in a puddle of recently spilled cream of chicken soup on the floor, the empty seat across from her.

Something caught in her mind, two dollars of payment and tip were left on the table, and she headed out. One last thing before the Runaway could continue with her mission.

She glanced around, as she walked on, and spotted a dishwasher crouched in the alleyway, half-sitting on a milk crate. Dangling from his lips was a cigarette that had just been lit.

“Excuse me,” the Runaway asked, “could I bum a cigarette?”

He took one out, and put it behind his ear, before tossing it to her, there were three left in it.

“Take ‘em,” he said, around the one in his mouth, “god knows I don’t need them.”

She patted her pockets down for a lighter, and eventually took his offered match.

“Never seen you before,” he said.

“Never been here before,” she replied.

“Waitress says you’re probably a runaway,” the man said.

“And?”

“She wants to call the cops. Thinks its some great service. Happens at least once a week, because of where we are.”

“I’m June,” she said.

“Jesús.”

“I am,” she said.

“Am what?”

“A runaway.”

Jesús shrugged, “I figured, but I’m not getting involved unless asked. Where you headed next?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should probably figure out a destination,” he said.

“I know.”

“So, any ideas?”

“Probably east coast. Somewhere warm.”

“Carolinas?”

She thought for a moment, and nodded.

He closed his eyes, and rested his head on the side wall of the diner.

“Know how to get to the bus station?”

“Not really.”

“Do you need help getting there?”

“Okay.”

He stood up and put out his cigarette. He took off his hairnet and his apron, and threw them in the side door.

“I’m off, anyway,” he said.

The two of them walked a distance in the late afternoon light. She gave him a broad berth, walking outside of arm’s reach, and with an eye toward escape at all times.

“It’s just a block or two, this way. Left at that light, then right on the corner.”

The dishwasher paused for a second, thinking. He looked over at her, then at a building across the street.

“I’ve got an errand to run, you know where to go.”

The dishwasher headed for the building he’d glanced at, waved goodbye, and walked in.

She looked both ways, something else caught in her brain. The bus station would still be there in ten minutes. She stepped into the alleyway, scanned it and looked for danger.

Not seeing anything, she stood on her toes, and glanced through the window.

The people in there were dirty-looking, and dressed in rags, as if they’d been driven from their homes. Some slept in piles on the floor, others seemed to be kneeling in prayer. Near one end of the room, a jaundiced man sat in an ornate chair.

He and the dishwasher were exchanging words; the time each spoke gradually became shorter and shorter, until they were shouting indistinctly at one another.

She watched as the man, Jesús, produced a gun and aimed it at the other. For a long moment, there was silence, and he spoke again through clenched teeth.

The man in the chair took a long time to reply.

And when he did, Jesús pulled the trigger.

(This came out a little Schmaltzy, but it’s what I’ve got for today.)

The man walked up the steps, and rang a doorbell. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but his thoughts were those of an old man, dwelling on the changing face of the neighborhood.

He reached out one hand, drew it back slight, then pressed the doorbell. After a silent moment, an aging woman answered the door. She was in her sixties, but still recognizable.

“Jacob,” she said, her eyes wide, “c…come in.”

They entered and sat. The two of them framed the fireplace in silent tableau, not even looking at one another.

“It’s been a long time,” she said.

“Has it?” Jacob asked, “my perception of time’s been f…off, lately.”

She smiled sadly.

“I won’t ask if you waited, Emma,” he said, “I saw the picture on the way in. foolish of me to think so.”

He got up, smiled, and left.

As he went down the walk toward the street, he saw a young woman with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes walk up to the house, carrying a backpack on one shoulder. She was reading something on a white tablet.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She looked up at him, with a startled expression.

“Yes?”

“I was just speaking with Emma in there, are you her daughter?” he asked.

“Yeah…” she said, her manner both uncertain and suspicious.

“Her eldest?”

The girl nodded.

“Thank you. Good to know.”

So he left again, rising from the pale-blue-and-dark-green sphere of the Earth to the Giordano Bruno, waiting above. When the crew was full, they left again.

They returned fifty years later.

The houses were replaced with apartment buildings, and all the squirrels were gone. Geckos sunned themselves on the sidewalk. She had always liked the neighborhood, and she was going to be moving out of it soon. No hope for recovery, just for comfort.

He didn’t knock, he walked in.

The daughter was there, her face lined by years he would never know, her reddish hair faded, and turning from copper to iron.

He said nothing, walked over to the bed, and held Emma’s hand. She stared up at him, he was maybe a few years older, by his estimation, than on their first date.

“Where’s your father?” he asked, considering the graying, wrinkled person laying on the bed.

“Dead,” the daughter answered, a slight rasp to her voice, “brain cancer.”

“It’s a shame,” Jacob said, “I would’ve liked to have met the man.”

“I know who you are,” the daughter said.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said, not looking away from Emma, “though I know your family. Good people, your family.”

“Jacob Straub, the astronaut.”

“Yes.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“No reason to stay.”

“My grandson’s wife is pregnant. She intends to name the child ‘Helen,’ if it’s a girl.”

Jacob’s brow furrowed, and his gaze turned flat.

“Are you trying to set me up with an unborn child while your mother dies in the same room?”

“She’s already dead,” the daughter said, “the pill was fast-acting, and her timing was perfect.”

“She committed suicide?”

“She wanted you here for it.”

The Giordano Bruno left, on a journey that took it far from home, through the inky black void between stars, empty of even gasses that would rob them of heat.  They returned thirty years later.

Jacob gave it some thought, and descended from Earth, a page of folded up directions tucked in his pocket.

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 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 lighting in the road house was dim, and the patrons only occasionally stood up to shift around into new seats.  The calendar behind the bar was “X”ed out up to the current day, March 12, 2019.  The crowd of patrons muttered quietly to one another, the most common topic being the weather.

A small group of men gathered around the pool table, and another group around the ancient Pac-Man/Galaga machine.  The air was thick with a mingled smoke of tobacco and cannabis, and small puddles of beer sat on the floor, flickering slightly in the dim light cast by the overhead lamps.  One reflected the blinking light on the router that hung from the ceiling, which had once been made of white plastic, but now was yellowed by years of exposure to tar.

The bartender slumped lazily in place, retrieving a beer when asked and occasionally at other points.  He could make drinks, being a proper bartender, but this was rare.  Sometimes the Philosophy Professor from the Community College would come in and order a scotch & soda.

At one end of the bar was a wage-slave, literally crying into his beer.  He found out earlier that day that his wife of two decade had succumbed to antibiotic abuse, her immune system made so week by constant upkeep with drugs that she couldn’t fight off infections on her own.

Occasionally, a small group of young people would come in and hijack the jukebox, playing inappropriate music and attempting to dance to it.  The lines of men working through twenty-year-old student loans glared at the young men and women who didn’t respect their plight, and didn’t understand the burden that they would soon carry, as well.

At Three AM, it was closing time, and everyone filed out.  The bartender took a bucket as the barbacks began sweeping and mopping up.  He emptied the change from the arcade game and pool table, and sat at the bar with a cigar, putting the quarters into rolls, which went in the cash register.

“Alright, people.  That’s it for tonight.  See you all, tomorrow.”

“Everybody on the ground!” the man in the ski-mask with the BJMN logo on the face shouted.  The security guard, who had been informed of the situation, simply sat on the ground and continued to read his paper.

Brett Jones (watching security footage, laughing):  So, this was around the time everyone started to incorporate themselves.  You know, slightly more complex taxes, but you make more money and you’ve got more rights, under the American system.

The man in the ski-mask vaulted over the counter and held out the BJMN-screenprinted bags to the cashieres, before rattling of the nigh-incomprehensible series of words that his lawyer had taught him, a sort of magical charm against legal retribution.

Brett Jones:  I was something weird, though, the first one-man multinational.  It was really ingenious, and I’ve got to thank my accountant for the idea.  Afterward, my lawyer and I began jetting all around South America and East Asia to make things work.

“This is a hostile and unannounced capital redistribution situation in which the party of the second part (that is, the bank) will give to the party of the first part (that is, the wearer of the BJMN face mask) no amount lesser or greater than one tenth of assets currently available on the premises.  Due to the nature of Brett Jones Multinational, this agent, the cause of this extra-financial transfer of funds is not vulnerable to prosecution so long as A) no more than one-tenth of available assets are taken, B) the wearer of the BJMN face mask does not fire on an unarmed civilian, and does not provoke any armed personnel of the bank, and C) it occurs within a minute and a half of the time printed on the notice.  It is now…2:11 PM and fifteen seconds.  Your recordings should show that this robbery started at roughly 2:10, which is the time on the notice currently in possession of your security guard.  Now.  Please fill these bags with bills, no ink packets, or anything of the sort, though it doesn’t matter if they’re consecutive.”

Brett Jones:  I bought a small parcel of land in Ecuador, a bit in Mexico, one in Colombia, another in Japan, a square foot in China, and I’m renting an appartment in a small Indonesian city for pennies a month.  Due to the interface of the laws in these five countries, we were able to set it up so that it would be impossible to prosecute me for crimes.  We set it up so that the prosecution would just spin their wheels and get nowhere, acruing legal fees in six different countries.

The man in the BJMN facemask was writing out the receipt and giving the bank manager a copy and an informational packet.

“Now, this gives you all the information you need on the subject, and yes, your insurance will cover this.”

“Could I claim insurance money for psychological trauma?”

“I don’t see why not, Mister Manager.  Also, another important bit, this robbery will not be repeated unless it falls under different management, and due to the intricacies of International Law, anyone else robbing this bank will be considered a criminal in several South American nations, including Mexico, China, Japan, and Indonesia.  Simply contact my lawyer and inform him of the situation.”

Brett Jones (seriously):  Now I’d like to point out that this wasn’t simple greed.  BJMN was my second self-incorporation, and was essentially set up to buy back the rights of my first incorporation, Brett Jones United.  It was pretty nasty, really.  I was an idiot, and sold shares to pay for some medical and housing bills, as well as to cover student loans.  I was intending to hold on to 501 of the 10000 shares, but there were unseen issues, and I had to sell too much, and was forced into several business deals I didn’t want.  The Mob actually began using me to launder money.  Thus BJMN was born, which effectively used money I took from banks to enact a hostile takeover of BJU.  As long as I could buy back some of the shares and get my Lawyer to work some more of his black magic, I could get everything right as rain, again.

“Now remember,” the man in the BJMN mask shouted, “you all saw me, everything was perfectly above-the-table, and no one got hurt.  In fact…” he checks his watch, “…this has been the fastest one thus far.  Good job, everyone.  Why don’t we give them a round of applause, folks?”

(Yes, for the record, the title is taken [ultimately] from the Simpsons)

For a while, he was mayor.  Or at least the only resident of the town–himself–thought of himself as mayor; Democracy becomes much easier with a single citizen.

He left his car in the parking lot of the old grocery store, and would periodically raid it for food and a bottle of tamiflu.  He grabbed a pack of condoms, near the beginning of things, but put it back, ashamedly, shortly before he became mayor.

When he felt serious, he begin work demolishing one of the houses, so it became less of a fire hazard.  As soon as he felt there was no danger of a fire there spreading to other houses, he would begin to drag the unburied dead into it, douse the house in precious combustible materials–gasoline, kerosene, and the like–before lighting it and leaving it.

He didn’t feel serious very often, and most of his time was spent raiding bookstores and gas stations.  By the end of his first month as mayor, he was both well-read and a drunk.

Every day, he would put his car in neutral, and push it a block or so, thinking (incorrectly) that this would keep its machinery running.  Very rarely did he turn it on.

When he did, it was for the radio, primarily.

Specifically, for the Emergency Broadcast System, which disheartened him every time.  He hoped to hear another voice, for another thinking human to be presented to him by the world.

Then, one day after he had moved his car several blocks, voices began to come through the static.  He idled along, until he began to hear music coming faintly through his speakers.

He flipped through the dials until he found news.

“There are still fires in the quarantine zone, indicating that people are still dying of the pandemic.  Soot from these fires is considered highly toxic, and if you see a dark cloud coming out of the Greater Des Moines Area, you are advised to stay indoors and contact the CDC…”