Tag: science fiction

DP FICTION #48A: “Local Senior Celebrates Milestone” by Matthew Claxton

The reporter is young, smells young even through the miasma of bleach and boiled vegetables. Three Willows Retirement Village is not an olfactory feast, so Millie is grateful for the scents of mango shampoo and coconut hand cream the girl brings with her.

“First of all, congratulations on the milestone!”

Millie wraps her knuckles around the gnarled head of her driftwood cane, leans forward.

“Congratulations?” She releases a calculated chuckle, gently chiding. “On not dying?”

“I just mean… I mean, not everyone gets to celebrate their one-hundred and tenth birthday!”

“Well, that’s very true. I’ve been blessed.”

“I was hoping you could tell me a little about your life. You must have seen so much!”

“Oh, yes.”

The girl has a notebook out now, pen poised.

“I was hoping you could tell me, what’s your earliest memory?”

The pods. The heat of the sun soaked into the sand by day, warming the cluster of egg-sacs. Warm, dark, protected. Her lungs and gills growing, the bones of her limbs hardening. Keratinous spurs on her wrists grew sharp, and the urge to surface gripped her hard. The skin of the egg parted like paper, and salty sand mingled with the cooling jelly. She had squirmed onto the beach. Her parents watched nearby, their horses shying.

Her siblings had crawled free, but she had been the first, the first to see the stars.

“I remember the beach. We always lived near the water, and I loved to run across the sand at low tide, when it was cool. When I was older we’d ride the old mare down. Tried to get her to gallop along the shore once, and she threw me right into a tidepool!” Millie forces a chuckle and a wry smile.

“You grew up on a farm?”

“Oh yes. Lots of chores to do. And schooling, of course. Mama educated us herself, us being so far out in the country.”

They stalked one another through the trees and fields, games of hunt and evasion. Millie had the sharpest nose. She could find her siblings hidden even when their skin changed to match the mottled pattern of leaf and twig. They pounced and bit one another, drawing blood and laughing, violently tender.

Later, Mother drilled them. Human languages first, English and Mandarin, German and Spanish. “You must be able to blend among them. You can’t rely on your hybrid DNA. Never let them suspect. The slightest slip could be fatal to our kind and our mission.”

After lunch it was their Home language, the keening and clicks, the consonants aspirated through flared gills. They studied the old poets and the old songs, in glyphs as twisted as the coils of barbed wire that marked the edges of their homestead.

The reporter leans forward, elbows on the table. “I suppose you didn’t have a telephone, or a car? Do you remember when the first time you saw a car was? Or a radio?”

Father held the communicator in his palm. Smooth as beach glass, liquid fractals pulsed from its center as he clicked and cooed.

“When will I be able to speak to Home?” Millie asked. 

“When the time is right,” said Father. “When you are old enough to begin work on the mission.”

He gently stroked her hair, palm still warm from the communicator. “Soon,” he promised.

“Radio seemed like magic. I heard it first at another family’s home. Voices through the air, you know. The first car I ever saw was considerably less pleasant — it was an old Model-T. The rattle and roar of the thing! I clapped my hands over my ears.”

The reporter nods, scribbling.

“You’ve lived through such turbulent times. What was it like to live during the World Wars?”

The government man’s heels beat hard against the cheap rooming house carpet. Millie held tight to the wooden handles of the garrote, ignoring the blood that seeped around the wire and dripped onto her good shoes. 

Too close. He’d come too close, had seen her emerge from the lake near the munitions factory.

When his heart stilled, she eased him to the floor, then collected every trace of her presence from the small room. She’d have to abandon her identity, find another source for the chemicals they needed for the third phase. The damned war had made the humans watchful, almost clever.

Not so clever that they wouldn’t be easily thrown off the trail. She left a torn page from a German-American Bund pamphlet in the back of the cheap plywood dresser. 

She left, not worrying about fingerprints on the doorknob. She didn’t leave any.

“Nothing as exciting as you may imagine. It was all victory gardens and scrap drives for me. The war on the home front. I was just fortunate that I didn’t have any children in harm’s way.”

“But you did have children?”

“Oh my, yes. Everyone had a big family, back then. A family meant a future.”

She and Henry didn’t bother to put their clothes back on, just walked out of the beach house and onto the moon-silvered sand. She dug the hole with a garden trowel.

“I’m worried,” he said. “We’ve lost contact with the Chicago brood.”

She dropped to her haunches. “Protocol. Scatter and hide. They’ve done it before, after a mission’s gone bad.”

“It’s been too long. I think they’ve been captured, or killed. One of those G-men pursuit teams maybe.”

She shuddered, half at his words and half at the birth-ecstasy. The egg mass slid out of her and filled the hole. Blue-veined embryos blinked at the black sky for a moment before she covered them with sand. She pressed one hand to the spot for a moment, felt their warmth.

“It will be okay,” she said.

“Tell me about your husband.”

“Henry? We met at work, after I first moved to the city. I knew he was a good man, and, well, our families were friendly. We were a good fit.

“It turned out to be a real love match, though. That was rarer than the movies would have you believe.”

She pauses, contains herself. Let the reporter see the sorrow, not the anger.

“He died young.”

The first bullet caught him in the lower back. Purplish blood oozed from the wound as they ran through the alleys, seeking cover in the steam rising from the sewer grates. Men in long coats ran behind them, yelling into crude radios.

The second bullet struck higher, in Henry’s spine. His legs spasmed wildly as he fell. She grabbed his coat, pulled him with fierce strength, but the alley ended in a filthy courtyard.

“Go,” he hissed. She hesitated, and he sang the word in the speech of Home, his golden tones strained with pain. She scaled a fire escape, bullets shattering against the metal railings.

She looked back once. He wasn’t moving.

That winter, she found the leader of the FBI pursuit group. She watched his house burn on a cold night. No one got out, not the government man, not his wife, not their children.

“I still miss him. He was a good man. Left me with a little nest egg, fortunately. In my later years, I travelled, all the trips we’d meant to take together after we retired. But the loneliness… it can get to you, sometimes.”

Goa was comfortably warm, the monsoon kind to her skin. The mathematician at the university had proved amenable to sharing his notes. He was bright, too bright. She cupped the communicator in her hand and reached out to the brood in Bombay. They would need to arrange an accident.

After, she reset to commune with Home, but the device remained silent and dark.

Nothing. Three years, and no word.

What was going on?

The stars were cloaked by clouds, and the sky held no answers.

The reporter taps pen to notebook. She is already running low on questions. Millie sighs. She’s been through the gauntlet at one-hundred, and again at one-hundred and five. There are only a few questions left to go, then it will be time for the tooth-achingly sweet cake, and a walk back to her room.

“Did you ever expect you would live so long?” The question bursts forth, the pleading look says the girl would take it back if she could.

“No,” Millie says. “But when you’re young, you always think you’ll live forever.”

Millie’s knee ached, the arthritis a gift of her human genes. A hurricane was coming, rolling in across the Gulf and making for Florida. She could feel it even inside the sterile grey-carpeted halls of Cape Canaveral.

She pushed the mail trolley, dropping packages in cubicles and offices. When no one was looking, she palmed the scanner the Moscow brood had sent her over racked floppy disks. The scanner hummed in her hand like a wasp as it soaked up data.

They were stealing technology from the humans now, desperately trying to build an alternate means of communicating with Home. Pathetic, but what else could they do?

They could forget. Susan and Abel and Henry Junior spoke to her in English now, called her on Sundays and worried about mortgages as much as missions.

How many of the old poems did they still remember? How much could they be expected to remember, three generations removed from Home?

Thirty years, and no word.

“I suppose everyone learns the secret, if you go on long enough,” Millie says. “You just keep on living. You hope you find someone you can love to spend your life with, you try to do right by your children. You do your work, and hope things turn out well. They don’t, always. You have to make your peace with that. That’s about all I’ve learned, in my time on this planet.”

She sighs, and something in her face makes the reporter draw back a little. A little too much revealed there, the twinge of guilt at any crack in the facade. But she’s an old woman. Who will think her moods are anything worse than the product of a decaying mind?

The singing comes from the kitchen, singing and fire’s feral glow. The fools have somehow lit a full hundred and ten candles atop the white-and-blue frosted slab. It reminds her pleasantly of a burning house.

The chorus of “Happy Birthday” dies away.

“Blow out the candles, Millie!” shouts the home’s manager through lipstick-smeared teeth.

The reporter has her camera pressed to one eye. Fine, if they want a photo, she’ll give them one. She draws breath into lungs deeper than any human’s, and purses her lips.

The flames flicker and die, a hundred smoke trails coiling about like seaweed at slack tide.

The applause is genuine, the kitchen staff and nursing aids shouting in wonder. “Go Millie!” “Lookit that!”

The reporter leans in again, face bright. Good photo for her sad little page twelve human interest story, that’s all she cares about.

“What did you…” She breaks off. “Your brooch…”

Millie puts a hand to her sweater. The communicator hums with life. Fractals bloom across its surface in wondrous, glowing profusion. She clutches her hand around it hard, closes her eyes. It has been so long. One of the lost broods?

No.

Home, the signal strong and clear, the message simple: We are coming.

Millie smiles.

“Just a piece of costume jewelry, dear. What were you saying?”

“I, um, what did you wish for? When you blew out the candles?”

“If I tell you, it won’t come true now, will it? But I think you’ll find out soon enough.”

She lets them cut her an extra slice, and with relish she licks the frosting from her fingers.

On her way back to her room, she hums one of the hymns of home, in subsonics and whispered gill-speech too low for any human to hear.

Millie smiles. She is eager to clip out a copy of the young reporter’s story. Assuming there is another issue of the paper.

It would be nice to have a keepsake. It’s been a day for milestones.

 

© 2018 by Matthew Claxton

 

Matthew Claxton is a reporter living near Vancouver, British Columbia. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Mothership Zeta, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction 34. Rumours that he is three small dinosaurs standing on each other’s shoulders in a trenchcoat have never been proven. You can follow him on Twitter @ouranosaurus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #46B: “For the Last Time, It’s Not a Ray Gun” by Anaea Lay

Connor was shy, introverted and a thousand other things that made sitting there, at the tiny coffee shop table, torturous. He didn’t want to be tortured. He wanted to hear harp music and cherubs giggling and all the other noises that accompanied your first date with your soul mate. It had taken him weeks to screw up the courage to ask Kayla out for coffee. As far as he was concerned, glitter should ooze from the walls in a poltergeist-style reward for the brazen bravery he’d demonstrated.

Meanwhile, Kayla pretty clearly didn’t realize this was supposed to be a date.

She wasn’t being weird or anything. And Connor wasn’t sure what she ought to be doing instead. But she wasn’t nervous or awkward or in any way different from how she was when they hung out with Debra and Joe and the rest. This was basically the same as hanging out in Kayla’s workshop for their hack-a-thon sessions, except the coffee was better, nobody else was around, and Connor felt entitled to glitter ooze.

Kayla was in the middle of a lengthy monologue about the various activities going on in her workshop. “Joey was pretty adamant about getting the beta testing approved by the IRB but we managed to talk him out of it before he actually filed any paperwork. Can you imagine, just telling the government what you’re planning like that? Ruins all the fun of making them figure it out for themselves.”

Connor was so nervous and uncomfortable that he couldn’t process any of the things Kayla was saying. He cared about what she wanted to talk about a lot. He just couldn’t get past the absence of cherubs and harp music. So he was completely astonished when she stopped. She glared at the table next to them, then rifled through her bag. A moment later she retrieved a silver and black object covered in wires.

“Uhm, Kayla?” Connor said, finding his voice for the first time since he’d ordered his coffee.

“Mm,” she said, her eyes steadily fixed in a death glare on their neighbor.

“Why do you have a ray gun?”

The neighbor was a petite girl with curly hair trimmed in an asymmetrical bob and thick eyeliner. The eyeliner covered her face in wavery trails, distributed by the tears she was actively shedding.

“It’s not a ray gun,” Kayla said without breaking her gaze.

Connor might be nervous, and he might be overwhelmed, but he damn well knew a ray gun when he saw one and that was a ray gun. But this was their first date and, even if Kayla didn’t know it, and he wasn’t about to pick a fight in the middle of it. “Please don’t shoot that girl in public.”

“If she wanted to be shot in private, she should have kept her crying fest there.” Kayla pointed the ray gun at their tearful neighbor.

Connor wanted to check the return policy on this date. Did dates come with return policies? Maybe there was some sort of insurance you could buy for first dates, like you did with airline tickets.

She pulled the trigger. Connor was blinded by a sizzling white beam emitted by the metal tip of the not-a-ray-gun. The light hit their neighbor who gave a startled yelp.

The light faded, and the weeping girl was gone, replaced by a dapper man with a cravat and a monocle. The man folded his hands on the table and looked around the coffee shop. Then, his voice low, breathy, and thick with the Queen’s English, uttered two words that would come to haunt Connor. “I say.”

***

If there was a gold standard for good at people, Connor was the opposite of it. Talking to people was just about the most terrifying thing in the whole world, even scarier than those raptors from Jurassic Park. If he started a conversation with people, they might expect him to know something about popular music, or sports, or lutefisk. Worse, they might want him to talk about himself.

But Connor didn’t want to die friendless and alone. He didn’t even want to hit middle age that way. He was useless in a conversation, but he was good at listening, and he liked to tinker and to collect things. So he decided to start tinkering with social groups and to collect interesting people.

Kayla wasn’t the crown jewel of his collection. That would be Debra, who took up new hobbies and advanced to the cutting edge with the same ease other people deployed in changing their socks. But Kayla was funny and had quirky interests and never seemed bothered by Connor’s shyness. On the contrary, she tended to praise his reserve. Other people seemed to like Connor with an asterisk. “He’s great when you finally get to know him.” “Once he opens up he’s pretty cool.” Kayla liked him without wanting him to talk or expecting him to crack a joke. It put him at ease, which ironically made it easier to open up, but it was also a relief. He hadn’t realized how much he wanted other people to let him be shy and scared until he had it.

Which might be how he missed the early clues that Kayla was completely unhinged.

***

Sitting at a small table in a coffee shop, deprived of spontaneously manifesting symbols of compatibility and romance, Connor stared at the Englishman née crying girl. It was possible he was facing something more frightening than conversation about lutefisk.

“Kayla?” Connor asked. He didn’t take his eyes from the Englishman. Maybe, if he kept watching, the Englishman would disappear and the crying girl would be there, still crying, and Connor wouldn’t have to face this.

“Yes, Connor?”

“Did you just shoot somebody with your ray gun?”

“I already told you, it’s not a ray gun.”

“What is it?” Connor was blinking hard. He’d just now realized that the mug of coffee the girl had been drinking transformed, too. It was a delicate china cup, white and blue. The Englishman took a dainty sip.

“The Social Propriety Enforcer Mock 1. I call it SPEM.”

Connor silently repeated the name to himself. “Is the effect…permanent?”

Kayla patted the side of the gun. The gesture was distressingly similar to what you might perform on a terrier or toddler. “Yup. I’ve been waiting to test it for days. Isn’t this great?”

This was worse than Kayla not realizing they were on a date. Somehow, Connor tried to connect with his soul mate and instead he’d become an accessory to some sort of demented homicide.

Or was it homicide?

“Excuse me, sir,” Connor said, his fear of talking to strangers momentarily outmatched by sheer bewilderment.

The Englishman’s posture was perfect. He settled his cup on the table. “Yes?”

“How long have you been sitting at that table?”

He tilted his head thoughtfully, then reached a finely manicured hand into his morning coat and retrieved a pocket watch. “It must be the better part of an hour,” he said, tucking the watch back in place.

Just as long as the crying girl had been there. Not murder, then. Kidnapping? Assault? Was there even a name for the crime of turning random strangers into Englishmen?

“Does it always have the same effect?” Connor asked. Maybe that girl had been crying because deep down inside, she desperately wanted to be a dapper Englishman, and the Social Propriety Enforcer Mock 1 operated by granting wishes.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not,” Kayla said, to Connor’s great relief. If it was a wish granting gun, then this was great. His first date with Kayla was salvaged. Heck, she could shoot him and then they’d get those cherubs he was still waiting on.

His hopes were utterly dashed with her next comment. “English people aren’t a monolith.”

***

Connor knew when he needed advice. Having an awkward first date with a girl you really liked, when she didn’t even know it was a date, was definitely a situation for which he was not at all qualified. The right thing to do would be to go to the most competent person he knew and see what they said. But Debra was a little intimidating. Instead, Connor went to Joey.

Joey was a knitter/weaver/soapmaker/blacksmith extraordinaire. Connor met him three years before at a maker fair where Joey was giving a presentation that heavily implied that to be a real knitter, you needed your own herd of specially bred sheep that you sheared yourself. With shears you had, of course, forged on your own. It was unclear whether you should also mine and refine your own ore.

Connor didn’t have any interest in sheep, but he collected interesting people, and in addition to his maker talents, Joey could karaoke to Lady Gaga like nobody’s business. Connor acquired him.

So Connor screwed up his courage, lured Joey out for drinks, then explained his dilemma. He went into fairly extensive detail, for Connor. It took him three sentences.

Joey was knitting when he wasn’t actively pouring beer into his mouth. It was unclear what Joey was knitting. “You mean you have no chemistry?”

Connor cursed himself. He’d spent too much time lamenting the absence of glitter ooze. “No, that’s not it.” How to correct his mistake? “She didn’t realize it was a date.”

Joey nodded. “You said that. But I think maybe she did. It sounds like there was no chemistry, so she was letting you down easy.”

Connor tried again. “She turned a stranger into an Englishman.”

“Were they crying?”

“Yes.”

Joey shrugged. “That’s sorta Kayla’s thing, isn’t it?” He had a point.

To hear Kayla tell it, she was locked in an adversarial relationship with the universe. She, a natural born super villain, had endured a lifetime of petty torments at the hands of unseen cosmic forces. Prominent stoplights along her frequent routes would linger on red just to slow her down. Her favorite TV shows were always canceled after half a season. She moved to Seattle for its cool, rainy weather, and the entire Pacific Northwest immediately became warm and sunny. Also, wherever she went, people cried in public.

“In Seattle, instead of shaking hands, people share their sexual histories and sad childhoods,” she’d lamented during one of the hack-a-thon sessions. “Don’t people know that’s unhealthy?”

Pointing out details like, those red lights have always been slow, Fox cancels anything good, and global warming has been around since before you were born, did nothing to budge her conviction of persecution. She took a weird sort of pride in her war. It was charming.

“What do I do?” Connor asked.

Joey’s knitting needles clacked madly as he worked. Was it possible to knit a sheep? It looked like Joey was knitting a sheep. “Ask her out again?”

***

Their second date was just as lacking in tangible manifestations of romance as their first. This time, Connor expected that, so that was okay. Kayla still didn’t show any signs of knowing it was a date. That was less okay. Twice she pulled out SPEM and transformed a bawling bystander into an unobtrusive Englishman.

“Did you put ‘pew pew’ stickers on your ray gun?” Connor asked the second time.

“It’s not a ray gun,” Kayla said. “And yes. I did.”

Yup. This was definitely love.

***

There are ethical problems to consider when dating somebody who doesn’t know you’re dating them. The first time, it’s an honest mistake. The second time, it’s bad communication. After that?

After that, you decide that you don’t care whether it’s a date or not. You divorce yourself from the idea of dating. You’re just having one-on-one hangouts with the girl who happens to be your soul mate, and while yes, you should probably mention your discovery of your cosmic entanglement to her, particularly given her already fraught relationship with the universe, maybe the whole world should remember that you are terrified of conversation, especially about yourself, and cut you a little slack and oh holy hell there are Englishmen everywhere.

No really.

Everywhere.

When Connor catches the bus to work, the driver is an Englishman. So are half the passengers.

Mailman? Englishman. Amazon Prime bike delivery guy? Englishman. Barrista? Who are we kidding? The entire coffee shop is English. They’ve started serving crumpets. Connor doesn’t know what a crumpet is. The homeless people living in Cal Anderson park all wear tweed and play cricket.

“I think I would like it if Englishmen took over the world,” Kayla said on their sixth date.

“They did that once,” Connor pointed out. “We call it colonialism.”

“Sounds like fun. Let’s start with Portland.”

“You did get the memo that colonialism is bad, right?”

Kayla rolled her eyes. “Duh. I didn’t mean we should all fall under the Queen’s rule. I mean everybody should adopt the English reserve. Their ability to repress emotions and cope with everything by drinking tea. It’s so healthy.”

“Healthy?”

“Mm-hmm,” Kayla said, sipping from her coffee. “It’s important to keep your feelings inside. If you let them out, you become structurally unsound and run a high risk of deflating. That’s why everybody in Seattle is depressed.”

That didn’t sound right to Connor. “I thought it was the rain.”

Kayla leaned back in her chair, then raised her arms. “What rain? The weather hasn’t been right since I moved here.”

She was definitely wrong about the weather changing to thwart her. But she had a point. The last two years had set records for sunshine and warmth.

***

Is it still creepy to date somebody who doesn’t know you’re dating when you are sincerely concerned that, if you try to have a conversation about how you feel, you’ll horribly embarrass yourself and ruin everything? What about if there’s a real risk that she’ll turn you into an Englishman?

***

Connor and Joe were supposed to have a planning session for the hack-a-thon, but Joe was late. Being late is a classic practice for west coasters in general. Flaking out and canceling is a specialty of the Pacific Northwest. But Joe was usually pretty good about hack-a-thon related things. Connor gave him twenty minutes, then called.

“Joe?” he asked when the call connected.

“Speaking.”

“Are you coming to the meeting? It’s getting late.”

“Goodness gracious, what are you nattering on about?” Joe asked.

Connor dropped his phone. Then he looked around the coffee shop. There were no mugs. Instead, everybody was drinking from porcelain tea cups with saucers. The tables were covered in doilies. Every single other patron in the coffee shop was wearing either wool or tweed and there were an alarming number of ascots on display. Connor, in his blue jeans and T-shirt, was the only non-Englishman in sight.

He scooped up his phone and fled into the street. Without thinking, he ran to Kayla’s, weaving through Englishmen out and about in the course of their day. As far as he could tell, everybody in Seattle had been transformed into an Englishman. He ran faster. He had to reach Kayla before she packed up her ray gun and went to Portland.

“I say!” somebody protested when Connor pushed them aside to cross an intersection.

“Pish tosh!” another exclaimed when he accidentally bumped into them.

“I’m pretty sure English people don’t actually say that,” Connor shouted over his shoulder has he ran on.

Finally, he reached Kayla’s door. Sweaty, chest heaving, gasping for breath, he rang her doorbell. She opened the door almost immediately.

The ray gun was in her hand.

She had to be stopped. Somehow, Connor was going to have to talk some sense into her. It just wasn’t okay to go around transforming people because you didn’t like the way they behaved in public. He took a deep breath, preparing the words he was going to say. What came out was, “I think we’ve been dating for three months.”

Kayla frowned at him, the gun held close to her body. “Three and a half.”

“What?”

“Our first date was that time we caught the bus together to go to Debra’s. When that weird guy started ranting at you about lutefisk. I figured that was the end of it, but you were so discombobulated, you asked me out for coffee.”

The whole world spun away from Connor. He’d completely blocked out the memory of that bus ride. Had there been glitter or cherubs then? He’d never know. “You didn’t turn a crying girl into an Englishman on our first date?”

“God, no,” Kayla said. “You can’t do things like that on a first date.”

She was right. Waiting until the second date to assault strangers with a ray gun changed everything. And, Connor realized, he wasn’t a giant creep after all! They’d both known they were dating the whole time. He just hadn’t known they’d known. “I think I’m in love with you.” The words poured out of him in a rush, relief masquerading as courage.

Kayla’s whole frame slumped. “Aw, Connor. What’d you have to go and do that for?” She raised the ray gun. An intense white light enveloped him.

He had a desperate hankering for a good pot of tea.

 

© 2018 by Anaea Lay

 

Author’s Note: This is the real life, completely true story of how I moved to Seattle, discovered some charming cultural quirks, and helped fix them.  Everyone in Seattle is now very stoic, if not happy, and nobody drinks coffee anymore.  You’re welcome.

 

Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, IL, where she engages in a torrid love affair with the city.  She’s the fiction podcast editor for Strange Horizons, where you can hear her read a new short story nearly every week, and the president of the Dream Foundry, where she gets up to no good.  Her fiction work has appeared in a variety of venues including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Pod Castle.  Her interactive game about running a railroad and finding love, Gilded Rails, is forthcoming from Choice of Games.  She lives online at anaealay.comwhere you can find a complete biography and her blog.  Follow her on Twitter @anaealay.

 

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DP FICTION #45A: “The Memory Cookbook” by Aaron Fox-Lerner

The first thing to remember is that your memories are no longer your own. You’re worth something now that you’ve been implanted, but only so long as you can remember something worthwhile.

You need to think about your memories in terms of who will consume them. What kind of mood will it give them? What do they want to feel? What food or drinks will be paired with the memory? Will they be remembering it alone?

Remember that while your memories may be yours, they are being recalled in the service of paying customers. You should never remind them of this fact, but always be aware that they are the ones with money and you are not.

This guide will tell you how to make your memories consumable. This being the introduction, I’ll keep it brief and suggest some basic types and their pairings as a primer.

You need to understand that you create your memories by framing them. Without that frame, without the start and end point, all you have is the aimlessness of thought. You’ve doubtless already been given your code. Say it and the memory starts being recorded, say it again and it stops. Wait for at least 10 minutes, then you’ll need an assistant to take the chip out of your head. You won’t be responsible for inserting the chip into clients’ implants, but you will be responsible for pairing the harvested memory with a meal that matches its feelings and sentiments well.

A note about the food: don’t feel that it must match your memory in terms of place. Remember that feeling is the most important thing. More detailed recipes are available later in the guide, but you have authority (up to a point) in what you prepare.

The following are the basic types of memories you’ll be serving, along with accompaniments that tend to work particularly well. For more details on these, please check the corresponding sections later in the guide.

 

1. Light Starters (Invigorating)

A principle selling point of our memories is the idea of being able to see the world. If you have been hired for this service, then you’re probably from another country. The goal here is not to give the customer an in-depth understanding of your home culture. The goal is to give them something quick that they can appreciate without the awkwardness of being an outsider. Think of the most recognizable aspects of your culture. Festivals, holidays, and weddings are all perfect opportunities to showcase these.

While this memory should be true to your own culture, avoid any traces of nationalism, xenophobia, or racism. Holidays or celebrations involving your home country’s government are best left avoided. There are appropriate dishes involving senses of melancholy or even tragedy. This is probably not one of those.

Suitable accompaniments: Mixed drinks, olives, vegetables and dip.

 

2. Light Starters (Calming)

The other option for a starter is to make this something that’s relaxing rather than exuberant. Childhood memories work well, especially everyday moments that aren’t dull.

I often used a brief memory from my own childhood, when I was around nine, just a memory of playing in my father’s study. I built miniature cities from the books he had lining the walls, sitting in their streets, erecting towers and homes, making them so extensive I could wander among these towns of my own making.

That kind of thing is the only bit you need. Make sure to keep any associated bitterness these memories might arouse out of the frame. I would have to make sure not to think about the fate of those books in my father’s study, my miniature towns burning up like the real city around them. I needed to avoid thinking of my father’s uselessness as our home got drawn into civil war, all his respect and learning amounting to nothing in the face of guns, bombs, and fanaticism. Dwell on it as much as you need when you’re not recording the memories, but you must ensure this doesn’t seep into the harvested memory itself. Keep this recollection pure: a select moment frozen in time.

Suitable accompaniments: Warm drinks, garlic bread, any heated hors d’oeuvres.

 

3. Appetizers

Now it’s more appropriate to bring in complications, things that might lend your memories a slight touch of melancholy, which is a necessary ingredient of nostalgia, after all.

Romance works well, usually the younger the better. Unless the relationship ended truly acrimoniously, you don’t need to block out any awareness of its end.

I’ve personally had my best recollections from my late teenage years, my first entry into university. I recalled the giddy sensations of texting a girl and getting messages back, suddenly aware that she was reciprocating my interest. Or the first time I entered a new lover’s apartment, walking through her rooms, over her rugs, into her kitchen, stopping by the bookshelves and walls to see what was on each, marveling at how she had created a better space to live in than I ever had, a space where I now wanted to spend all my time.

The knowledge of how these affairs will end gives them a nice sort of piquancy, but might not be necessary. I can only create memories from my own experience, and I’ve never had a romance that lasted. If you have a relationship that still survives, feel free to use it.

Suitable accompaniments: Wine, soup, salad.

 

4. Mains

This will change depending on what the customers want. If you’re known for a certain kind of experience, you’re likely to be selected based on that.

I liked to draw from my early twenties, years of being young and pretentious, let loose upon the city and thinking of it much in the way that colonialists approached the New World, “discovering” and conquering every other bookstore, coffee shop, movie theater, and ad hoc art space, years spent in a tangle of limbs, light night conversations, mid-afternoon hangovers, pieces for zines and webpages and small unread journals, various minor jobs and internships never paying enough, long stretches spent alternating between tiny walk-ups and my family’s spacious, well-appointed home.

And with it comes the flood of memories from later, now bleeding into every one of these that I recall, the lovers married and moved, the friends drifted away, the art spaces long closed for lack of funds, the bookstores now shuttered or torched, the pretentious young men first denouncing political inequities in escalating shows of conspicuous intellectual bravery before later disappearing, one by one, just as they’d stood up. The journals no one even thinks to publish now. The family home charred and demolished, ruined by an errant shell and structural collapse, the handsome age of its structure finally proving a liability. The acquaintances and lovers and friends and bitter enemies scattered across the globe, finding succor and shelter wherever they could, just like I did, none of us having ever imagined that what we thought of as other place problems could happen to us.

The customers will actually want to remember this with you. It’s a chance to be there at the Jewish neighborhoods of Warsaw before Hitler, Aleppo’s old alleyways before Assad, Alexandria before the library was burned.

Just make sure to keep the bitterness out of it. Keep the feeling of loss, but watch out for that bitterness, and never implicate the customers. You’ll hate them for their position, for making you remember, for being privy to your personal memories, but don’t let that seep into the memories themselves.

They’ve paid a lot of money to relive the exact same things that you did, to live your memories over a nice meal and come out of the experience feeling enriched, educated, and aware. They will not forgive you if you spoil that feeling for them. If you have taken this job, you cannot afford to spoil that feeling for them.

Suitable accompaniment: Any food relating to your memories. Don’t worry about authenticity.

 

5. Desserts

This is your chance to ease them back down. People generally don’t pay to be depressed. Let them end with self-satisfaction. Give them another high, circle back to an earlier memory, something that should give the impression of added depth now that they’ve lived more of your personal experience.

I often remembered another childhood day, a soothing, wondrous early childhood memory back in my home, both my grandparents and parents there, the customer now knowing that eventually this home would be destroyed.

Alternately, go with another memory of lovers, girlfriends, husbands. A memory of the kind of day that only becomes The Perfect Day in retrospect, the one where your relationship was at a high point and the world seemed to align perfectly with it for one brief, single period of time. Keep it focused once more on that day, and context will do the rest.

Suitable accompaniment: Sweets, fruit, baked goods, tea, coffee. Avoid hard liquor.

 

6. Other Requests

Customers will have other types of memories they’ll request. You have the power to fulfill these or not. Often these will be related to their own problems, and it’s best to stay discreet about that. Fathers will want childhood memories in search of worse parenting than their own. Divorcees will seek out memories of love to contrast with their failed marriages. Spoiled heirs will request memories of hardship for a false sense of authenticity.

Sex, of course, is always a prominent factor. Don’t be afraid to turn this down. If you choose to remember sex, it’s likely to dominate your career in unsavory ways. It’s where I drew my line, as if keeping out memories of bedrooms and backseats somehow meant that I’d maintained private dignity with people who had paid to literally pry into my head, turning my whole life into their product.

Then there are the requests for misery. Customers will want to “understand.” It’s best to give them what they think they want. Let them have memories from your home country of war, disease, rape, starvation, poverty. They’ll pretend it’s made them into a better person. Never remember your hardships over here, that’s considered controversial.

Don’t give them what you really want to. Don’t open those gates and remember how bitter you are, how much you hate the customer no matter how well-meaning he or she is. Never let them know how they’ll never truly understand you despite reliving your memories, and how you’ll never be able to truly respect them.

Don’t let them know about coming here, about your basic struggles to make a living, about being a middle-aged man who’d always depended on his education and was suddenly worthless when thrust into a country whose language he couldn’t speak well. Of being prodded and scanned and analyzed just to get into the country, treated with constant mistrust, hating it more here than your devastated home. Of the literal walled cities, gated to separate people like the customer from people like you. Of how place of birth alone was enough to mean that they’ve been isolated from the rising seas and drying fields, the military coups and privatized drone strikes and food riots that shake the rest of the planet. Of how their world keeps turning after your own has fallen apart.

Don’t remember these things. Don’t remember your resentments. Don’t remember your discomfort. Don’t remember your self-hatred. Don’t remember your humiliation. Don’t remember being implanted so you can share more than you ever hoped to.

Don’t remember these things and you’ll be fine. Don’t remember these things and you should have a full career, just like I once did.

Those bitter memories were the most satisfying thing I ever remembered, but they killed my career. The expensive implants are gone. The only work I could find is writing this guide for new employees like you. The only small rebellion that remains for me is typing and then deleting the same few subversive sentences into my drafts of this guide, too afraid to even send them on to my editors for fear of losing the scant salary I’m left depending on. Still, deleting these sentences is the only thing I now regret. My memories may be worthless once more, but at least they belong to me alone.

Now, please turn to the next page for a guide to proper implant procedure. I hope you enjoy your time working here.

 

© 2018 by Aaron Fox-Lerner

 

Aaron Fox-Lerner was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Beijing. His fiction has previously appeared in Pseudopod, Grimdark, Pinball, the Puritan, and other publications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #44B: “Still Life With Grave Juice” by Jim Moss

“This is the real thing? None of that synth-sludge?”

“Yes, sir. Direct from Earth.”

“And it’s the best you’ve got?” Quincy eyed the glass on the robowaiter’s tray. He should have ordered a bottle. He would need more to help unravel the stress of his turbulent negotiations with the Wattlars, who had rejected yet another contract. At least this outpost had an overpriced restaurant where he could run up his company’s expense account.

“Highest quality and price, I assure you. You may access my Integriport–”

“Yeah, yeah…” Quincy waved his hand, the gesture cue enough for the robowaiter to spit out a coaster which landed on the table with a soft plop. In a ballet of hydraulics, the robowaiter plucked the glass off the tray and set it before Quincy with the exaggerated grace of a suitor presenting a rose.

“Will that be all, sir?”

“You know, on Earth, they pop the cork in front of the patron, so it can be inspected for dryness, and they show the bottle so that–”

“You requested a glass, not an entire bottle,” the robowaiter spun its upper torso away from Quincy and sped off. Quincy held up the glass by the stem, examining its deep burgundy contents by the overhead light. He brought it down below his nose and inhaled.

“Cannibal.”

That word, that accent, the derisive tone — Quincy knew it referred to him. It made the scent of fresh blackberries he just inhaled turn rancid. He turned his head and expelled his breath away from the glass. There, seated the next table over were a pair of Arthruds. Common in this sector, especially at spaceports, they enjoyed a reputation as damn good mechanics despite being an insufferable race of know-it-alls. To Quincy they looked like a cross between an armadillo and a giant bipedal lobster, with outer bodies covered in segmented plates and a second set of arms beneath the first. The adult and child were eating what appeared to be shards of cardboard soaked in neon anti-freeze. The child could not be more than seven molts old. Both bobbed, jostling their plates, which made squeaky noises like balloons being rubbed together. They did this when laughing, or passing judgment, or both. Quincy rolled his eyes, turned away, swirled the glass and inhaled again. He tipped a sip and rolled it around his mouth with his tongue. Yes, yes, blackberries, currant, a touch of clover, anise, oak…

“What is he drinking?” asked the child.

“I believe it is called ‘wine.’ It is a death drink.”

“Will we get to see the Earther die?”

“No.” Squeaky balloon sounds sputtered out of the adult’s body plates. “I meant death as in dead. Wine is made from the dead. As I said, they are cannibals.”

“Should we leave?”

“No, don’t worry. They only eat their own.”

“If another Earther comes along, will they try to eat each other?” The child looked around the restaurant. Quincy moved his wine aside and turned to face the Arthruds. It was one thing for two adults to spout their ignorance, but quite another for an adult to imbue such bigotry on a child.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing…” Quincy stared into the adult’s face trying to lock onto the creature’s three eyes with his own two. “Perhaps you received some faulty information. Earth people are not cannibals.”

“It is well known throughout the galaxy that yours is a cannibalistic race.” The adult met Quincy’s stare, crossing his midarms across his midsection.

“You’re wrong. I don’t know where you heard this propaganda, but it’s false and insulting.”

“On your planet, do you not bury your dead?”

“We bury them, but we don’t eat them.”

The adult raised a plated brow above its top eye and turned to face the child.

“Earthers bury their dead in the ground in graveyards where the bodies decompose. They sow their strange plant life into these yards. The plants send their roots into the soil and suck in the fragments of the dead. Then the plant blooms and bears fruit. Fruit containing bits of the dead. Fruit they then eat.”

“Where are you getting this nonsense? We don’t plant fruit trees in graveyards.” Quincy could feel a vein in his forehead throb. The adult pointed at the glass of wine with the spindly third digit of his upper right claw.

“Is not your ‘wine’ made of grave juice?”

“Ahh! Here’s your confusion. Wine is made from grapes not graves. Grapes are fruit grown in vineyards, not graveyards.” Quincy reached for his glass. The adult raised two plated brows and leaned towards the child.

“The problem, Dewlis, is that Earthers have many words in their languages that mean the same thing. They use these to confuse others about what things really are. When you point out their error, they complain that it was a mis-understanding or a mis-interpretation. Beware when an Earther says ‘mis’.” The adult turned back, his eyes drawn to the vein now bulging on Quincy’s forehead.

“You are not the authority on Earth languages, Mis-ter. What is your name?”

“Spureb. And yours?”

“Quincy. And I’m going to prove you wrong.” Quincy threw his arm out blocking the robowaiter as it attempted to zip between tables. The waiter’s upper torso spun around twice before it stopped to face him.

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell us, waiter,” Quincy held up the wineglass. “What is wine made from?”

“Grapes.”

“And where does this wine come from?”

“Earth, France, the Bordeaux region.”

“St. Emillion? Pomerol?” Quincy took a sip.

“No sir, Graves.” The robowaiter spun back and zipped away.

“Bah Za!” Spureb pointed two digits and a folded claw at Quincy.

“No! Listen, that’s just the name of the region. The waiter mispronounced it. It’s pronounced ‘grahv’ with a short ‘a’. A different vowel sound. It’s French for gravel. It’s the name of a French wine growing region. It has nothing to do with graves. Don’t mistake a vineyard for graveyard.”

“The Earther said ‘mis’ twice!” Dewlis smiled at his father. They bopped in amusement, squeaky laughter reverberating like an orgy of balloon animals.

“Just stop and listen!” Quincy pounded the table. “A vineyard is a yard where grapes grow, a graveyard is a–”

“They are both ‘yards’ then, a measured plot of land, yes?” Spureb created a square using his four arms.

“Yes, but—”

“Yet you pronounce the ‘yard’ in vineyard as ‘yerd’. A different vowel sound. Is this a mispronunciation?”

“Uh… no, because, uh…”

“So yard is a word pronounced two ways, but means the same thing.” Dewlis said. “Like ‘grahv’ and ‘grave’.”

“No! They are two different things” Quincy threw his hands up, then grabbed his wineglass and poured a gulp into his mouth. “You know, even if a vineyard was planted on top of a dead body, we don’t eat dead flesh directly, so we’re not cannibals.”

“Suppose they are two different plots of land, as you say.” Spureb sat back in his chair and clacked the digits of his upper claws together. “You still contaminate your soil with your dead. If an insect eats a leaf from a plant in your ‘graveyard’ then flies into a ‘vineyard’ and dies in the soil and the vin plants eat the soil with the dead insect, then you eat the fruit of vin plants – you have eaten pieces of your dead.”

“No. Because what I’ve really eaten is molecular compounds. Someone dies, they’re buried, they decay. Maybe a bug eats some of it. When the bug dies it decays into simpler molecules, water, proteins, amino acids. So a plant uses these nutrients and produces fruit that someone may eat. So what? Everything gets recycled. Broken down and recycled. It’s the nature of the universe.”

“That may be the nature of your planet, but not the universe.”

“Oh yeah? What do you do with your dead?”

“Our dead become art. That is the proper way to honor them.”

“Art?”

“My great ahdmah won the Op Culbet for her work on great pahdah,” said Dewlis.

“He’s hanging in the Brachalach, our finest museum.” Spureb tapped his claw on his chest plate. “And what a stunning piece he is. Great ahdmah bent his spine into a semi-circle and beneath this, draped the flesh of his pale underbelly. Over this setting moon motif, she sprinkled the glittering shards of his shattered neck plate. His top abdomen is broken open and from the center, triangular strips of muscle are strung outwards in all directions like a blazer blossom. Here, his left claw, stained in ochre bile, is curled in a fetal ball. The fourth digit, bent impossibly backwards, protrudes like a stamen. And no matter where you move to look, that digit seems to follow you. His head top hangs upside down strung from a series of tendons like a rain basket that… Bah! I’m talking to a flabedah!” Spureb threw three of his arms up in the air.

“A flabedah?”

“That’s Arthruder for uh… you have no word in your language. It means someone who does not understand or appreciate what art does for a soul.”

“Uh huh.”

“Ah! I forget. You Earthers believe the soul leaves the body after the body is no longer self-animating.” Spureb flailed his four arms and swayed back and forth.

“That’s silly!” Dewlis squeaked a series of chuckles. “Soul is made of body. How can soul leave body? Silly!”

“Dewlis, this is what Earthers believe.” Spureb cooed in sing-song. “We should not ridicule their beliefs.”

“Ha!” Quincy plunked his glass on the coaster. “You cut up bodies to make rain buckets. So you chop up souls.”

“The soul may be divided, but it is not separated. It is recombined with the body into a more appealing form of art. Most souls find it agreeable.”

“And how do you know they find it agreeable?”

“In the silent hours if we stand before our ancestors and relax our minds we can hear their voices whisper to us.”

“Zul Ahdmah whispers to me,” said Dewlis.

“Yes, she tells you to stop slumping so much.”

“No, she tells me I am entitled to extra Kerzyhisses, for I will molt large.”

“She does not. You are only imagining that.”

“Yeah, you creatures molt,” said Quincy. “You drop off chunks of body parts. What happens to the soul of those parts? You couldn’t possibly save every single— “

“We re-ingest them. That’s what we’re eating right now.” Spureb speared a boiled body plate with his fork. “We eat only our own souls, not others’, thank you.”

“I don’t like the taste of my lower abdomen,” said Dewlis.

“Well, you better eat it, or you’ll be incomplete and never get displayed in a good museum.”

“What do you do when your art decays?” Quincy tossed a gulp of wine into his mouth.

“It does not decay. It is all how-you-say — varnished. We are not primitives that allow our dead to decay into pieces that end up in the food supply and get mixed in with other souls and eaten and—”

“Is that why his abdomen is so large?” Dewlis pointed his claw at Quincy’s belly. Quincy silently cursed the station’s greater-than-earth gravity, which made him heavier, compressed his breath and pulled his belly downwards, causing him look flabbier than he really was.

“Yes,” said Spureb. “That is where they collect. No soul, even a piece of soul, wants to be expelled as waste.”

“Alright, look, my… stoutness has nothing to do with souls in my body. Extra weight is caused by fat cells that accumulate because… Look, it’s not souls, OK?” Quincy’s grip tightened on the glass.

“You bury your dead in the ground, your plant life eats from this ground, breaking up souls and—”

“Your information is ancient. Burial is hardly done on our planet anymore. Real estate is too expensive. It’s more common that we cremate our dead.” Quincy twirled the wineglass by its stem. He felt tingly; the alcohol must be kicking in. He sat back and sighed, expecting another round of squeaks.

“Cremate?” Dewlis turned to his father.

“Cream is a white goo.” Spureb’s face plates shifted out of symmetry. “Earthers whip it up and serve it on their desserts.”

“No! That’s not what it is!” Quincy bolted upright.

“Cream-ate… ’Ate’ means that they’ve eaten it!”

“No, no, no! In cremation the body is burned into ashes.”

“What do you do with the ashes?” Spureb’s voice was low, his neck sunk into his upper torso.

“Scatter them in the wind.” Quincy turned away, took a gulp of wine, and clenched his fists expecting another round of squeaks. But the Arthruds were silent, the only sound, the grinding of Quincy’s teeth. Quincy turned back to find Spureb staring at him, eye plates askew, breathing hole frozen open. Dewlis turned to his father.

“Pahdah?”

“Millions of Earthers die every year on your planet.” Spureb’s eye plates pinched together and his ears recoiled into their sockets. He held his upper claws close to his chest. “Your atmosphere is full of corpse dust. Your populace breathes in burned up pieces of souls!”

“That’s enough!” Quincy pounded his arm on the table and rose from his seat. “There are no…” He paused to catch his breath. “Souls in… dust!”

“Pahdah, the Earther is breathing funny.”

“He appears to be experiencing withdrawal. Not enough soul dust in this atmosphere for his cannibal addiction. Perhaps the grave juice isn’t enough.”

“You… No… Uh…” Quincy sputtered, struggling for balance, the tingling in his arm growing painful.

“He just spit dead Earther juice at my head!”

“Move back, Dewlis. I don’t understand what is happening. He may have angered the souls he has consumed by denying their existence.”

“You puchh… you achh…” Quincy grabbed at the table with his right arm.

“Look how red he glows.” Dewlis stared at Quincy’s face.

“He is blushing. Earthers do this when they have embarrassed themselves.” Spureb leaned in to whisper to Dewlis. “It may not be proper for us to view his shame, let us look away.”

Spureb and Dewlis turned their backs on Quincy. They heard a thud and waited a couple of minutes to allow Quincy’s fit of shame to pass before turning back.

***

“And he died, right there.”

“How awful,” said Kerlew, a lovely female Arthrud that had stopped by Spureb’s garage to pick up a replacement part for a centrifuge. Spureb led her on a tour, casually watching her shuffle along the corridor and smiling as she eyed his collection of shiny metal plates and polished tubes.

“The staff tried to reset-animate him by pulling his merry-cardio muscle, but they were so incompetent, they pushed instead of pulled. Apparently, his heart was attacked by his massive coronary gland. ”

“Such strange physiology.”

“Terribly awkward situation. Nearest relative some twenty light-years away, employer in debt due to careless expense management, neither willing to pay for transport. And you know Earthers – they would have just expelled him into space.”

“Barbaric.”

“And despite his hubris and ignorance, he was amusing and we did feel sorry for him. We told the authorities we’d take him, and so, there he is.” Spureb waved his two left arms towards a corner in his garage gallery.

“Aja! Fantastic. Do their legs really twist like that?”

“No, that’s Spiasoc’s explication. He was able to make the tissue flexible through plastination. A preservation used on Earth during a brief enlightened period when–”

“You got Spiasoc?” Kerlew’s eyes widened with interest.

“Yes.” Spureb crossed his four arms over his torso and arched his back to raise his top segment just a little. “Spiasoc is quite eager to break convention with work on other xenophylum.” Spureb turned to look at Quincy and smiled.

Quincy’s body sat on a pedestal made of his leg bones. The flesh of his boneless legs, peeled in long ribbons and twined with muscle and tendon, spiraled in a double helix down to the floor. Thin slices of his brain, stained green, were attached along these vines; the flat sides of each angled upward, seeking light. The skin of his mid-section was shorn away. His intestines, flattened, dyed brown and cut into three by eight slats were arranged to form his torso into a barrel. Deflated lungs protruded from his back in a V spread, mottled fairy wings insufficient for his bulk. His arms burst out between slats, left switched for right with elbows bent backwards. One hand reached towards barrel bottom for a dangling spigot, while the other held up the aorta stem of a goblet carved from his heart. Quincy’s neck stretched out from barrel top, his crimson colored Adam’s apple rupturing through the middle. Above his furrowed brow, the top of his head was sliced off and thrown back like a jar lid. In the open skull, a helter-skelter tower built of brain matter cubes rose toward the ceiling, looking as if it might collapse at the faintest wayward breath. Quincy’s dead eyes stared at the goblet tipped towards his mouth. The pureed burgundy of his liver spilled over the goblet’s rim forming a long droplet that hung frozen in mid air. His tongue, stretched through parted blue lips, strained to reach the glistening drop, but only succeeded in tightening the knot at its center.

“Such an honor for the Earther,” said Kerlew.

“He finds it agreeable.”

 

© 2018 by Jim Moss

 

Jim Moss is a videographer and a playwright. His plays have been produced Off-Broadway in New York, and in theatres in Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and London. His play, Tagged, was a winner of the 2018 British Theatre Challenge. Still Life With Grave Juice is his first published short story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #42B: “The Vegan Apocalypse: 50 Years Later” by Benjamin A. Friedman

Dear valued McFleshy’s patrons,

On this, the solemn 50th anniversary of the Vegan Apocalypse, we’d like to thank you — our loyal Consumers-of-the-McFlesh™ — for relying on McFleshy’s (and only on McFleshy’s) for all your dietary needs. As you know, without your loyal patronage our tremendous planet would have surely long since fallen prey (yet again) to the Vegans. Instead, thanks to your fortitude — we’re still here. And thanks to us (and the delicious McFlesh™) — you are too!

For it is only together by consuming at least three juicy Fleshies™ a day, that we can be certain to avoid the fate of our Beloved Billion™ — keeping the Earth safe for all our children…and all our children’s children – etc.

We know this. And we know that you know it too:

“McFleshy’s means survival!”™

McFleshy’s also understands, however, that some of you — too young to have witnessed the Vegan Apocalypse firsthand — have begun to ask troubling questions like: “Why?”

• Why must we consume the McFlesh™ (and only the McFlesh™)?

• Why must we devote so many tens of millions of acres of precious above-sea-level topography to beef, pork, and horse production?

• Why do the Crazy Ones claim that we are the cause of the Great Flooding, the average life-span of forty-two, the balmy winters in Canada, and, of course, Brown River Stench?

As though these were not the Natural Order™ in our Post-Vegan world!

McFleshy’s knows such dangerous murmurings are nonsense…but this is not enough; you must know it too. Yet many malignant myths keep popping up – like fungi – in the minds of today’s youth. And just like that often-poisonous gateway protein, we must eradicate such mental spores before they lead us down the slippery slope to soybean – and annihilation.

It is in this spirit that we hereby set the record straight on this, the solemn 50th anniversary of the Vegan Apocalypse, upon this complimentary maple-glazed, pressed-pork parchment (the text and flesh of which you do hereby agree to consume immediately and in totality after reading under penalty of…etc.).

Thank you again for your McPatronage™!

 

1. A Clarification of Terms: on vegan vs. Vegan 

Today, even 50 long years after our Beloved Billion™ were torn away from us, there are still those among you who hold to the falsehood that there is a distinction to be drawn between a capital “V” and a lowercase “v” as applied to the suffix “-egan.” But the hard reality is:

THERE IS NOT.

At least not in terms of culpability.

FACT: Those humans who embraced the death-cult known as “veganism” are every bit as much to blame for the fate of our Beloved Billion™ as the Vegans.

LET US REPEAT: Both vegans and Vegans are equally to blame for the fate of our Beloved Billion™ — anyone who insists otherwise is a Crazy One.

 

2. Etymology and Origins

It is still important, however, to clarify the distinct yet interconnected roles these two groups played in the Vegan Apocalypse. And for this, we must revisit the origins of both little “v” and big “V” – to see how their phonetic overlap was anything but random.

 

a. The cult of veganism

It was in 1944AD, during the height of the Second World War, when an alleged Homo sapiens named Donald Watson coined the term “vegan” – as an abbreviation of “vegetarian.” Promoting an even more radical form of the perverse anti-flesh ideology championed by Adolph Hitler, “The Vegan (sic) Society” formed by Mr. Watson demanded the elimination of not only animal flesh from the human diet, but all animal-based proteins. Followers of “veganism” insisted this diet would prove highly beneficial to both body and spirit, as well as to the environment…

Oh how the Vegans must have been laughing at us, 25 light-years away!

 

b. Vega/Alpha Lyrae

As for those other Vegans…12,000 years before veganism took wicked root here on Earth, the brightest star in our Northern Hemisphere was the star Vega, in the constellation Lyra.

Appearing in the night sky of today as a blue-tinged white prick of light with a declination of 38-47 and an apparent magnitude of 0.03, the Vegan System is now also known to possess a single earth-like planet that we call Vega-1.

(Obviously we cannot print its more popular name here, as McFleshy’s is a family establishment).

Now you may ask, what else has Vega been called by us humans?

Well, in both ancient Egypt and ancient India, Vega was known simply as:

“The Vulture.”

Just as telling is the name that the ancient Assyrians assigned to it:

“The Judge of Heaven.”

Meanwhile, our own designation of Vega – as Vega – actually comes from the Arabic phrase an-nasr al-wāqi, meaning (again):

“The descending bird of prey.”

And so an undeniable pattern crystallizes into view:

Whether hunter or scavenger, judge or executioner, human stargazers have long intuited some dark truth about our celestial neighbor, winking at us from a mere 25 light years away…

Just ask the Quixotipl Tribe of 12th century Peru.

Oh wait, you can’t…

The Vegans ate them.

 

3. On “Synch,” or: “As above, so below.”

Now, to fully understand the connection between Vegan and vegan, one must first recall how human vegans behaved – specifically, what a demoralizing experience it was to eat of the tasty flesh in their vicinity.

For those of you not old enough to remember, let this quote from one of Pre-VA America’s greatest voices be your guide:

“With the narrowed eyes of a harridan and the high and mighty tones of a hypocrite…they let loose upon you a litany of falsities, until appetite herself has not one inch of space to breathe free. Yes, my brothers and sisters, to eat of the delicious flesh near a vegan…is to be circled overhead by a vulture readying to descend.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
(Source: Facebook™)

Let us also consider for a moment what was lost when the supposed-Mr. Watson removed the letters “E-T-A-R-I,” from VEG[ETARI]AN. Some of you may assume this change was inconsequential, but it was anything but; rearrange the missing letters and we find an immediate clue to their meaning:

T-E-R-A-I.

AKA: the Latin word for: “Earth.”

Rearrange them again and we get:

“E-A-R-T-I”

Only one alphabetic unit away from “Earth” in English (again).

Now you see, don’t you??

By removing these five letters, vegans and Vegans were brazenly announcing their unholy alliance and ultimate goal – to take out Earth! At this point, to call the phonetic overlap mere coincidence is to deny the obvious: that vegans and Vegans were linked from the start, in the same interpsychic web of reality-manipulation they would later use in concert with one other – to ensnare our Beloved Billion™.

And what do our McFleshy Scientists call these manipulations of reality?

“Synch™”

For if the Vegan Apocalypse has taught us anything, it is that alien mind penetration can and will cause a toxic run-off of strangely interconnected coincidences (linguistic, logistical, and otherwise) in one’s vicinity.

This is why the last months of our Beloved Billion™ were spattered with such a perverse abundance of what vegans called “signs and miracles”…and our McFleshy Scientists now call “mind-bait and psycho-spam.”

AKA: Synch™

 

4. Historical Context 

These days, it is a challenge for young people to imagine what our planet was like prior to the Vegan Apocalypse. Many of our oldest citizens have contributed to this confusion by characterizing the years pre-VA as a simpler, more innocent time: lower sea-levels, cleaner waters, fewer colostomy bags…

But this nostalgia, sadly, is misguided.

In truth, it was in the deceptive calm of 2012AD-2022AD that the seeds of our Beloved Billion’s™ destruction were being planted. So we must now look back – with eyes tinted-not – to reconstruct how we missed the many signs of impending catastrophe. Only thus may we ensure that NOTHING ALIEN EVER CATCHES US OFF-GUARD AGAIN.

 

a. The Fate of the Quixotipl (2012AD)

We begin ten years prior to the Vegan Apocalypse, in 2012AD, as a great upsurge of interest in the ancient Mayan calendar reached its zenith.

This archaic time-keeping system was just then concluding an epochal cycle, and many in the New Age spirituality movement (a hot bed of vegan activity) were predicting that the world was about to end as a result – not violently, but in some nebulous sociological transformation often described as:

“Crunchy.”

That same year, archeologists in Peru discovered the remnants of the tiny civilization of Quixotipl, whose own astronomically-calibrated calendar was also set to conclude a cycle – ten years later, in 2022AD.

A series of Quixotipl wall glyphs depicting the last time a Quixotipl Age ended (in 1101AD) was discovered as well; in these, the star Vega is depicted as a gaping maw from which a spiraling vortex of sharp-beaked “bird men” are swooping down to Earth…to carry the Quixotipl people away…

Ironically, those excavating the Quixotipl site at first believed its inhabitant to have been a decent, flesh-eating folk– on account of the thousands of hastily discarded bones found at the top layer of the dig. As soon as the archeologists realized these unburied, unburnt skeletons (all carbon-dated to the 12th Century AD) belonged to men, women, and children, however…they changed their tune.

The Quixotipl, it turned out…held to an entirely flesh-free diet.

 

b. The Blowing Winds of Vega (2012AD-2016AD)

To understand what destroyed the Quixotipl people over one thousand years earlier, we must next look to the disturbing transformation of Stephan Mallik, aka: “Starfalcon” – once a mild-mannered PhD student in the archeology department of the University of Virginia…now a footnote in history – right alongside Benedict Arnold.

After conducting extensive field research on the Quixotipl site in 2012AD and again in 2013AD, Mr. Mallik’s scholarship helped popularize the theory that the Quixotipl had died in a mass ritual suicide – just as the last cycle of their calendar was concluding. Mr. Mallik explained the absence of sacrificial relics at the site (e.g. blades and chalices) by proposing a slow-acting poison ingested away from their final resting place as agent.

Many archeologists praised this hypothesis.

But then, in 2014AD, just as Mr. Mallik was completing his dissertation on the subject, he began to behave erratically. “What if there IS a deeper cosmic order embedded in The Calendar?? Now that I’ve eliminated ALL meat and dairy from my diet, there are so many ENERGIES I’ve grown attuned to…forces I never imagined possible before…”
(Source: Reddit.com/r/vegan [defunct])

Thus began one of the first internet posts attributed to Mr. Mallik under the pseudonym “Starfalcon,” and thus – like Saul of Tarsus – did Mr. Mallik discover his “calling” as both apostle and evangelist for Vega.

(Of course, unlike Christianity, the so-called “Gospel of Vega” had a dark side!)

According to Starfalcon – and his dozens of disciples – only those who cleansed themselves of the tasty flesh would ascend to the “next level” of human evolution. This Grand Shift was set to correspond with the next turn-over in the Quixotipl calendar– in 2022AD – in communion with the “enlightened” beings of Vega-1.

Apparently, the more ancient alien civilization had been guiding humanity towards veganism (and “salvation”) for millennia…

The acolytes of this radical, esoteric strain of veganism converted many poor bodies throughout the 2010’s by tapping into the irrational hodge-podge of mytho-mystical belief still plaguing humanity at the time: utopian fever-dreams, socialist messiahs, drug-fueled raptures, quantum physics, sweaty yoga, string theory, artificial intelligence, and the false-promise of singularity…they even identified the children’s novelist Arthur C. Clarke as a Vegan prophet, claiming he had encoded many of his adolescent fictions with “messages” for true believers.

Many thousands would perish as a result of such nonsense.

Of course, this death count was just a drop in the ocean – a trifle, really – when compared with the seeds of mass slaughter that the “respectable” vegan community was planting, concurrently, in the secular, “more rational” worlds of academia, business, and politics…

Here we discover the true depths of vegan treachery!

 

c. The Anti-Flesh Crusade (2017AD-2020AD)

Today, thanks to the tireless research of our Scientists here at McFleshy’s, we can affirm with 100.00% certainty that both Global Warming and Brown River Stench were ALWAYS inevitable — historically and geologically.

That’s right: no matter what we as a species did or did not do to prevent them, they WERE coming for us.

LET US REPEAT: the rising tides in Ohio and Nevada are NOT our fault.

It’s a McFact™.

So how then to explain the obsessive efforts of the Environmental Lobby of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries AD to prevent the unpreventable?

Two words: “vegan infiltration”

Using the Sword of Damocles of “Climate Change” to instill fear and panic, vegan infiltrators pointed their crooked fingers at the embryonic meat industry, trumping up ridiculous charges of causality between then meager modes of tasty flesh production and incipient global warming. For instance: they claimed that methane gas emissions from livestock were heating up the Earth’s atmosphere.

Just imagine that for a moment, would you…?

Farts!!

They also claimed that the removal of millions of acres of swelteringly hot jungle and rain forest– to make room for much breezier grazing pastures – was making Earth hotter too. Looking back, the vegan infiltrators’ accusations appear backward, irrational, and unscientific – of course. At the time though, many were desperate to believe there would be some way to avoid the onslaught of Brown River Stench. And who can blame them?

Sadly, the notion that Homo sapiens had a choice in this matter is hubris.

Or as we like to call it: McHubris™

The truth is, we humans have the tendency to believe whatever supports our preconceived worldviews…and many good-intentioned environmentalists were turned against the Great Meat Makers as a result of these untruths.

Everywhere one looked, vegan distortions were sweeping into the collective consciousness, not just through the Environmental Lobby, but through the worlds of business and healthcare, in the ideologically corrupt productions of Hollywood and academia – even through children’s television!

Yes, everywhere they could, the vegans waged their deadly war:

• At major universities, they wrote venomous screeds on the “human rights” of animals. (Just think about that for a moment!)

• Student unions promoting radical anti-flesh lifestyles soon became entrenched. (Mass protests and boycotting against the meat industry followed in abundance.)

• Meanwhile, in science and medicine, vegan propagandists paid off corrupt “experts” to assert that flesh-consumption levels in impoverished nations (like Mexico and Africa) were healthier than those in the one exemplary flesh-eating nation in the world: The United States of America. (Fortunately, most Western doctors ignored such findings.)

• Unfortunately, in food manufacturing, vegan “entrepreneurs” began churning out an endless supply of flesh-substitutes, from oft-carcinogenic sources like soybean, pea protein, and the aptly named seitan.

And so it was that the developing world remained nearly fleshless, while in first-world kitchens, kale and squash proliferated.

In other words: at the very moment when humanity NEEDED to be manufacturing as many gross tons of cow and horse protein as possible, we were instead flapping about with our pants around our ankles.

Until finally…the stage (and table) for the Vegan feast…was set.

 

d. The Rising Horror (2021AD)

Imagine if you will…a morning like any other…

You replace your Clara-Lung Breathing App™ with a fresh mask, report any dissonant dreams you may have had to our McFleshy-Care™ “We Care!” Reps, punch your request for AM-McSustenance™ into your breakfast console, and begin to serve your toddler its delicious McFleshy Baby Slur™ (so that it may grow up big and loyal). Only this time, for the first time ever, your precious babe turns its mouth from the McSpork™ – refusing to consume even one bite!

Of course, you know your child needs to be ingesting at least three iron-rich gelatinous cubes of Slur™ per meal to be truly safe from Vegan mind-rape. Yet for some reason, on this terrible morning…your precious one will NOT submit.

“No, mommy,” it cries. “No, daddy!”

“But this Slur™ is packed with the same McFleshy-Blend™ of 743 tastes and flavors that you adore so very, very much,” you assure your stubborn child. “You LOVE consuming your delicious McFleshy’s Baby Slur™! Whatever has gotten into you, toddler!? Why don’t you EAT IT already?! Are you turning into one of THEM?? ARE YOU?!”

But it’s to no avail; your baby will not eat its Slur™.

Now…if you can imagine such a nightmarish ordeal, you should likewise be equipped to envisage the UTTER HORROR facing so many billions back in 2021AD, as they watched mothers, fathers, siblings, and children…begin to slip away from them…by refusing the precious flesh.

Of course, the first signs of Vegan mind-infection were considered by some to be minor, even pleasant…

In addition to low-grade Synch™, many of The Affected™ reported strange dreams…of remarkable vividness and power, uniformly alike in content.

Here is how one notable victim described the experience:

“I found myself soaring bodiless…across multiple otherworldly landscapes at once…yet feeling no sense of fragmentation or even disorientation in the process. Only pure, transcendent bliss…”
-George W. Bush Jr.
(Source: The New York Times, 2/14/21)

Indeed, the Affected™ universally reported feeling embraced in their dreams by some vast intelligence, which they (somehow) felt both a part of, as well as separate from, throughout…

Soon—

• Affected™ politicians were retiring from public life in droves –with hauntingly authentic farewell speeches.

• Affected™ painters were painting images so sublime that art galleries had to start stocking tissue boxes.

• Affected™ poets were composing verse so sensitive to the depths of The Human Condition™, that several poetry books almost cracked a Best Seller List.

• Etc.

Yes, for one brief shining stretch of months in early 2021AD, even the most skeptical of flesh-eater could be excused for wondering…if maybe, just maybe there was something to this supposed Gospel of Vega after all…

 

e. The Saviors of the Flesh (2023AD – HAPPILY EVER AFTER)

Of course, we don’t want to re-traumatize you with the gory details of 2022AD:

• You know all about the terrifying intensifying of Synch™ and the psychological withdrawal of the Affected™ that followed already.

• You have heard – again and again – the audio recordings of their endless chanting…in that hideous alien tongue.

• You know too well what an eruption of Bright-Light-Madness looks like…as well as the ugliness of what follows…

• That is, Epilectic-Death-Syndrome (AKA: “the Vegan Slurp”).

• And of course, your brain is thoroughly seared with the millions of Instagram images of the Tragic Flesh Heaps™ – emptied of all that once made our Beloved Billion™ human. (For the record: our Beloved Billion ™ never included the deaths of self-identifying vegans – who numbered around 600,000,000, and were usually the first to go. All we can say of their flesh…is good riddance.)

Fortunately, you also know the happy ending to this story…

• How the corporate leadership of The Great Meat Makers™ banded together, forgoing profit, reward, and even vacation days – to rapidly ramp up production and distribution.

• How the brave Sizzle Queen, Fry Factor,  Chateau Du Burger, Taco Americano, Veal Deal, Nugget Town, and Roasties  corporations (to name but a few Heroes of the Flesh™) gave us the Force-Feed Initiative™, which spared so many millions on the brink.

• How these brave corporate entities mobilized the armies of Blackwater, Iron Eagle, et al to overthrow the political leadership of the day, installing us as Global Hegemonic Potentate For-All-Time™ (AKA: GHP-FAT).

• And how, finally, you helped rename us “McFleshy’s” after this bold public choice beat out write-in candidate: “SukDeezNutsVega!” in online polls, three years later.

After all, as we like to say here at McFleshy’s:

“Here at McFleshy’s, you get…HERD!”™

 

5. Winners and Losers

As we all know, it is a truism of human history that it is written by the winners…

Yet sadly, there are no winners in the intergalactic struggle we are currently waging on your behalf – at least not yet. And so this history of the Vegan Apocalypse must remain incomplete, even after 50 years of healing, rebuilding, and all-you-can eat March McRibble Madness!™

Yes, it is true that the vultures of Vega, along with their flock of human sheep, took us by surprise once. But now WE KNOW. And now that we DO KNOW, there is simply no excuse to ever deviate from the tasty flesh again.

Yet, even after all we’ve been through together, all the tasty flesh we’ve provided you and yours, there are still those among you who refuse to accept the Natural Order™. There are even those among you who are STILL trying to summon them back…

We speak, of course, of the Crazy Ones, those who forego the delicious McFlesh™ for whatever desperate scraps of fungus and algae they can summon into being – in hidden bathtubs and root cellars beyond the security-ensuring gaze of our benevolent McWatch™ lenses.

Yes, these maniacs would actually summon the Vegans BACK into our world!

• LAMENTING their absence from our mental airwaves!

• PRAYING for their immediate return!

• BLAMING McFleshy’s for clotting the arteries of consciousness so that the Vegan Mass-Mind simply cannot penetrate!!

As to that last accusation, all we can say is: HECK YEAH!

After all, history IS written by the winners!

And this war is one we can – AND MUST – win!

So please, if you do know of any Crazy Ones in your midst…sneaking a carrot here, whispering doubts about McFleshy’s there…report them to us IMMEDIATELY; we MUST quarantine ourselves against THEM.

So thank you once again for your ceaseless and unquestioning McPatronage™.

Now eat up! Chewing and swallowing every last bite of the complementary maple-glazed pressed-pork parchment upon which this unquestionable record of the Vegan Apocalypse has been printed – as prescribed by McFleshy International Law™.

We do so appreciate your cooperation and loyalty…

After all, this story won’t swallow itself 🙂

 

© 2018 by Benjamin Friedman

 

Author’s note: The germinal seed for “The Vegan Apocalypse: 50 Years Later” came to me back in 2011, during the height of fascination with the Mayan calendar and its impending terminus in 2012. At the time, I was working at a Yoga center in Massachusetts called Kripalu, where the thought of a collective shift in culture and consciousness was not just a laughable bit of New Age naivete, but a genuine and sincere hope for resurgent 60’s-style idealism. And with the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring then at their zeniths, it was true; anything seemed possible. Of course, as in George Lucas trilogies, so in historical dialectics…as the various “empires” of cynicism, despotism, corporatism, and the politics of propaganda and deception have all since “struck back” in myriad and disturbing ways. This story was my way of grappling with that great gulf between human possibility and reality. For just as the Mayan Calendar wasn’t the end of history for the good, the Vegan Apocalypse of my story isn’t meant to be seen as the end of all hope – just another chapter that depends on human agency for its sequel.

 

This is Ben Friedman’s first sale to an SFWA-accredited publication, an honor for which he is titillated to an almost obscene degree. Previous stories of his have landed at 365 Tomorrows, Every Day Fiction, The Story Shack, and Sonic Boom Literary Magazine, and his screenwriting has won the Golden Blaster Award at the Irish National Science Fiction Film Festival as well as the Grand Prize from the WeScreenplay Short Film Fund Competition. He currently is recovering from an inauspicious injury (that could be the punchline to a bawdy joke were it not oh-so-true) in his hometown of South Orange, New Jersey after a number of years of peripatetic soul-seeking throughout New England, Colorado, California, Israel, and Australia.

 

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DP FICTION #38A: “Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset” by Derrick Boden

Giant Robot stands alone on the battlefield. Its hulking titanium shoulders slouch. Its articulated polymer knees bow inward. Its blazing fiberoptic gaze falters, downturned. But Giant Robot experiences neither regret nor remorse while surveying the wreckage at its feet.

It knows only aloneness.

Giant Robot scours the battlefield. It scrutinizes the meat and metal carcasses that litter this desert torched to glass. Servos click a nervous rhythm beneath its knuckled joints. It relocates corpses with the utmost delicacy, but still they crumble in its hands. Underneath, there is only ash. Its gaze sags—

There. A patch of sand between two corpses, shielded by an overturned transport. A desert bloom sprouts, an improbable splay of color. Lavender? Periwinkle?

No. Amethyst.

Blood glazes the corpses’ caved chests, the crimson an unlikely complement to the orphaned flower. Giant Robot commits the image to memory.

Jean would be pleased.

A breeze whistles through a nearby bunker. Each ruptured window offers its own harmonizing tone: a pipe organ of sandbag, plaster, and wind. The western sky flares a brilliant orange.

No. Tangerine.

Giant Robot commits it to memory. Despite the glut of battlefield data it has collected, Giant Robot is still mostly empty.

It presses on, in search of companionship.

Giant Robot is hard on the outside: titanium carapace, thermoplastic sensor shields, kevlar joints. Giant Robot is soft on the inside: silicone insulation, solid state circuitry. Only Jean knows the passcode to Giant Robot’s insides. Only Jean knows where to apply a wrench and where to employ a delicate touch.

It has been three days since Jean last touched Giant Robot’s insides.

Giant Robot’s feet crush everything in its path. Canteens burst like balloons. Bones crumble to dust. Tank shells rupture. Giant Robot has not mastered the skill of walking delicately.

Electromagnetic activity spikes in sector seven. A new threat approaches.

A companion.

The threat advances rapidly: now active on infrared, now visual. It screams through the air ten meters above the battlefield. Rail guns glisten against the setting sun: now marigold, now marmalade. Twin thrusters rend a trough of metal carnage. Dust eddies toward the horizon.

Giant Robot engages. The dance is awkward at first, a flurry of missteps and missed projectiles. But soon they achieve a rhythm: a tango of fist and plasma. The threat is fast. Lithe. Fast Robot begins to overpower Giant Robot.

Could this be the companion Giant Robot has sought?

As Fast Robot grinds Giant Robot against a trench of metal, Giant Robot plucks a tooth of glass from the personnel transport, reflects the cider-red sunset for Fast Robot to behold.  Fast Robot pays no heed to Giant Robot’s offering.

Fast Robot presses the attack.

Giant Robot wrestles free, dives toward the bunker. It swivels its pneumatic stabilizers, blasts a harmonic chord through the windows.

Fast Robot pays no heed. It launches into the air, lands on the desert blossom. Plasma arcs from its wrist-cannon. Giant Robot dodges, swings. Fast Robot’s parry suffers a microsecond delay as high-frequency data packets pelt it from a distant source.

Giant Robot casts its gaze down, crestfallen. Fast Robot is remotely controlled. A proxy. It will never know the colors Giant Robot knows.

The dance persists, though drained of its prior intensity. Seventeen maneuvers later, Fast Robot lies defeated. Smoke curls from ruined thrusters. Rail guns lie mangled.

The sky turns bronze, then rust.

Giant Robot does not know why Jean did what she did, but Command was not pleased. The things she put inside Giant Robot, they said, do not belong. The analyzers. The comparators. The recognition of a frescoed sunrise on descent from the drop ship. The mosaic of flowers during an autumn harvest. A precision of colors. Not blue sky. Cobalt. Not red blood. Wine.

These processes interfere with mission parameters, Command said. A millisecond’s slack in response time is the difference between victory and annihilation, they said. When Jean explained that these processes took mere microseconds, they court-martialed her. She would never again touch the insides of a robot, giant or otherwise.

But Jean thought ahead. She protected Giant Robot’s insides with her passcode. The sun still sets: now clay, now amber.

Giant Robot hesitates. Through a fissure in Fast Robot’s smoldering carapace, a familiar insignia. Command.

Rotors whir from the east. A drone hovers over the battlefield. It emits a high-frequency burst. It whispers the passcode to Giant Robot’s insides.

Jean.

Giant Robot’s chest plate swings open. The signal cleaves the firewall, enters the prefrontal processor.

Something’s wrong. This is not Jean’s delicate touch. This is harsh, callous. A violation. Someone has stolen Jean’s passcode.

Giant Robot tries to sever the connection but it’s too late. The drone buzzes toward the horizon. Giant Robot zooms in. Despite the distance, Giant Robot recognizes the model: this probe is from Command. Was the duel a test? Did Giant Robot fail?

Giant Robot’s carapace reseals, but something has changed.

It turns westward, detects only the dusty horizon. The sun will set in thirty-four seconds.

It scours the remains of the fallen, finds only a bodycount and the hollow acknowledgement of victory.

It stares at the face of a corpse, but cannot describe the color of her eyes.

Giant Robot has never been emptier.

Heat signatures register in sector nine. The next battle awaits. It turns—and hesitates. At its feet lies the mangled body of Fast Robot. A gouge of molten armor burns…just like…

A digital synapse arcs across a non-networked processor in the softest region of Giant Robot’s body. Giant Robot’s musculature trembles. Its eyes flicker.

Coquelicot. The ember is coquelicot: the first color Giant Robot ever learned. The color of Jean’s hair, tousled as she eased her diodes into Giant Robot’s soft insides for the first time. The hair that sprawled beneath her rigid body within her coffin, self-inflicted wounds sill fresh on her wrists.

Giant Robot grazes the coquelicot ember with an outstretched finger. It registers a surge of pain.

It turns, slightly less empty, and lumbers toward sector nine.

 

© 2018 by Derrick Boden

 

Author’s Note: A while back I was browsing the web looking for some fresh desktop background artwork, and I happened across a piece of original art that captured my attention so intensely I felt compelled to write about it.  The image was of a hulking metal robot, standing alone on a battlefield at dusk.  Something about the robot – the slope of its massive shoulders, maybe, or the position of its tiny eyes – felt so complex and sad.  It was a powerful piece of art, and I can only hope that this story does it justice.

 

Derrick Boden’s fiction has appeared in numerous online and print venues including Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, and Perihelion.  He is a writer, a software developer, a traveler, and an adventurer.  He currently calls New Orleans his home, although he’s lived in thirteen cities spanning four continents.  He is owned by three cats.  Find him at derrickboden.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #37A: “What Monsters Prowl Above the Waves” by Jo Miles

We emerged, inching forth from the sea’s safe haven into the bright void above.

We had done it.

Sharp-edged light flooded the vehicle, casting disturbing shadows through the water within. Three of our arms, drifting lazily in a moment’s rest, merged shadows like a new menace from without. One arm whipped about in alarm, and we spun, searching, assuring our whole self that no danger was near. But that arm refused to calm. The interior of the vessel was safe – our other arms, questing, found nothing but smooth walls and each other, confirming we were alone – but the cloudy surface of our vehicle revealed only dim and distant shapes.

For proof of safety, we needed more. We rolled the vehicle forward until the hatch sat at the top, where it would not spill our life-water into the emptiness. First we popped off the hatch, then quested out with cautious arms, and finally stuck out our head to see what none of our cousins ever had seen and returned to tell of: the void-above.

In all our hunting, we’d never found such stark, forbidding emptiness. The sea’s edge lapped against a surface that looked to be rock, but was not. Too hot, and too flat. Unnatural. The flatness stretched away ahead, beyond the edge of our sight. Unnatural structures reared up on either side, adorned with indecipherable markings; sunlight flared off their pale, too-flat walls. The vanished builders had a peculiar taste for flat surfaces.

These structures were familiar: we knew them from such ruins as the sea had claimed for its own, but those ruins were well-settled now, teeming with all manner of creatures. Here, we detected no movement, no sign of builders, no life at all.

The void was vast and open, no shelter within reach of our arms. We did not trust it.

Yet we saw no dangers, no sign of such vile poisons as our cousins claimed would await us here, no traps to leave us helpless and desiccating beyond reach of aid. Their warnings never broke our curiosity’s grip, and nothing we saw from the water’s end changed our determination.

We would go on.

Retreating into our vehicle, we gripped the hatch with our suckers and pulled it tight behind us. The flatness, easy to traverse, would determine our route. Pulling ourselves up the forward side of the sphere, our weight set it rolling, and we advanced into the desolation.

Our arms climbed ever-upward, tireless, as we left the broad flatness for smaller channels. We rolled through spaces wild with sprawling plant-fronds, past structures that reached for the blue heights or hugged the ground. Such strangeness, yet its variations gradually grew familiar.

All this time, we’d seen no sign of animal life. So when the hiss sounded, close beside us, we flailed in alarm.

We nearly inked ourself, a startled and lethal instinct. Our body reddened, as much in distress at our near mistake as at the shock of the encounter. To spew ink within the sphere’s enclosure would blind us at once, poison us within minutes.

But what startled us?

Poking out a few brave arms, then our head, we saw it. Back arched, tail erect: utterly alien, horrible in its rage.

The beast had four limbs. Unlike the gangly builders, it stood on all fours, its long, facile tail thrashing behind it. Pointed protuberances atop its head curled forward, trained on us, and spiky matter stood upright atop its back. It hissed again, showing off small, sharp teeth, and bunched its muscles for a leap.

Alarmed, we jetted it with water, and the creature leapt aside with a yowl. Taking advantage of its distraction, our arms took swift action, not waiting for our head’s agreement. They tugged the hatch shut and leapt up the sphere, reversing our direction, rolling us away at speed.

We made it halfway back to the sea before our head talked sense into the rest of ourself. Our roll slowed, stopped.

What was that creature? Grotesque as its form appeared, it seemed no threat to us, certainly not within our vehicle. But looks could mislead. Could it spew poison? Extend that eel-like tail to lash at us? How dangerous would a second encounter be?

Could we return home, tell a tale of a ferocious land-monster, and admit that we darted off at first sight of the thing? That we nearly inked ourself in fear?

That was not why we labored so long to construct our vessel, nor why we traveled so far. Our color faded to a cautious pink, and we reversed our course.

The creature sat where we left it, watching. This time, it thrashed its tail but did not stand or hiss. For a time, we watched each other in mutual fascination and disgust. We sensed in it a fellow hunter, patiently waiting and learning, wary but not hostile yet.

Then, to our astonishment, it rolled onto its back in the dust and showed its underside in submission. It nosed a stack of round metal objects, mewing pitifully. Imploringly? Treacherously? Hungrily? We debated its possible intentions. Though we lacked a point of reference, it did look thin and ragged…

Before we reached a decision, our most curious arm decided for us, snaking toward the nearest metal cylinder. Stacked tidily against the door of a dilapidated structure, the cylinders seemed prepared for some purpose. Did they belong to the creature? Did it live here?

A few suckers sufficed to lift one cylinder for a closer look. As it passed overhead, the creature flew into motion, yelping and leaping into the air after it. We turned our jet toward it, ready to fend off an attack, but the creature sat and stared at our arm, head tilted in such obvious expectation that we fluttered in amusement. Turning our examinations to the cylinder, it proved similar to those cylinders we sometimes found in the submerged ruins. Those usually contained… yes, of course.

We applied pressure to the lid with a few additional suckers and pried it free. The creature yapped wildly, and as we lowered the container to the ground, eagerness outweighed its caution. It dove forward, devouring.

Fascinated, we crept closer, inching down the surface of the sphere. Our bravest arm reached cautiously toward the creature’s head. It froze, wary, and sniffed at us. Then it returned to eating. Taking this as permission, we touched its head with a careful arm-tip, stroking it lightly, feeling its odd soft coat of cilia and the skull beneath it. The beast was intelligent, a fellow hunter — not so smart as a dolphin, or even the dimmest breed of our eight-legged cousins, but cleverer than a grouper or an eel. When it finished eating, it rubbed its head against our arm and curled up, its torso rumbling softly.

What strange wilds do you inhabit, little hunter? What alien prey swims through your dreams?

It did not answer. Maybe it did not understand. We returned to our sphere and began to roll away.

It hopped up with an excited chirp, batting at our vehicle as if in play. Its antics threw off our momentum, and we paused, considering. The creature rubbed its head against the sphere, peered up with hopeful green eyes. We sighed, expelling a soft puff of mist into the air. Very well.

Picking up three more of the metal cylinders, we stashed them in our vehicle for later. This time, when we rolled away, we let our strange new companion pad along beside us.

© 2018 by Jo Miles

 

Author’s note: Once I started learning about octopuses, I became a bit obsessed. Octopuses are truly, remarkably cool creatures. They can change to any color or pattern at will, and can squeeze through the smallest gap. They can solve complex puzzles with their many clever arms — not only dexterous, but literally clever, because they have more neurons in their arms than in their heads. Though solitary by nature, they’re insatiably curious and playful. In her book The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery describes them as virtual aliens right here on Earth. We’ve explored their homes many times; it seemed only right that they’d want to explore ours in turn.

 

jo-miles-headshotJo Miles is a science fiction and fantasy writer and a 2016 graduate of the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop. She has short fiction in the Agents and Spies anthology and the Mad Scientists Journal. She also runs FutureShift, a project working to broaden the intersection between speculative fiction and social change work. When she’s not writing, you’ll likely find her hiking up a mountain or riding her bike. She lives in Maryland, where she is owned by two cats.

 

 

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DP FICTION #36A: “9 Things the Mainstream Media Got Wrong About the Ansaj Incident” by Willem Myra

1. Jeter and Amir were neither thugs nor terrorists. They were dumb kids, plain and simple. They meant no harm to anybody, human or alien. They were armed with blatantly obvious toy guns and throughout the whole ordeal they used PG language.

2. They weren’t turned into ash. Weren’t deleted from existence with the pull of a trigger. There was no disintegration ray involved. The alien guarding the main gate used vasoconstrictor-based pistols. That’s how Jeter and Amir died, from internal bleeding. The medical report that wasn’t shown on TV confirmed it.

3. Many have speculated about why they tried to trespass on the Ansaj military base. To the three main theories I say: no, no, and no. They were not spies (Jeter and Amir? Two twenty-something nerds who couldn’t even jump over a fence? Please!). They were not thieves. They were not on drugs. They were, however, like most of us, in search of money and fame.

4. Right before dying, they didn’t shout, “Allahu Akbar!” or, “Go back to your home, alien scum!” like many make-believe eyewitnesses have reported. What Jeter and Amir really said was, “Where’s the kaboom?” They were quoting Marvin the Martian from Looney Tunes (heck, they were even cosplaying as him) in what was supposed to be the title of the video: WHERE IS THE KABOOM? [PRANKS OUT OF THIS WORLD].

5. Jeter wanted to become an actor, having never experienced the grimier sides of LA. Amir was to start college in autumn, convinced by his parents that this was the best he could do with and about his future. The two of them first met not on Craigslist, like one CNN article clams, but through a workshop on successful public speaking.

6. They were wannabe YouTubers. Unable to find an audience on their own, they had accepted to work for a 1-million subcribers prankster channel in exchange for exposure and two hundred bucks each per video. For their debut video they were to shoot aliens with Nerf guns, shout quotes that might appeal to 90’s kids, and try their best to get a reaction out of the aliens. Little did they know the aliens couldn’t recognize a fake weapon from a real one.

7. Once they stopped panicking, the aliens did their best to resuscitate Jeter and Amir. They even called the county sheriff’s men, but it was too late by then. I know: I was one of the three guys filming the “prank” from a safe distance.

8. One thing the mainstream media actually got right: the aliens are not at fault here. But neither are Jeter and Amir. Yes, they did something reckless expecting no lasting consequences from it. But they were pushed, manipulated, brainwashed even. The only one truly at fault here is Mitchell Joysel, founder of the PrankedYaHard YouTube channel. He convinced them what they were doing was legal and socially acceptable. That they would get a shitload of views out of it. “If you have any second thoughts,” he told them, “think about this. You could be the first humans to prank an alien—ever! You do this, you’re gonna be mentioned in history textbooks for centuries to come.” Jeter and Amir—their only sin was stupidity. The greedy, boorish prick here is none but Mitchell Joysel.

9. The Feds got a hold of the CCTV footage showing Jeter and Amir’s attempt at a prank and subsequent death. Not on our footage, though. I still have my perspective and so does, unfortunately, Mitchell (he bought the recordings from the other two cameramen; I didn’t want to sell mine, didn’t seem right to put a price on someone’s death). He is going to release a video this weekend, has it scheduled already from what I’ve been told. He’s going to preface it saying the Feds had threatened him with a lawsuit or some BS, but that he felt morally obliged to share it with the world, to show the people the truth. Don’t believe him, guys. It’s all a ruse. He doesn’t care about Jeter or Amir or any of you. All Mitchell cares about is making easy money. Which brings me to us. I am posting this video to ask you guys to: not watch whatever Mitchell’s going to release, to dislike it to hell, and to flag it for violent or repulsive content. Please, guys. I get it, Jeter and Amir shouldn’t have done what they did, and maybe they deserved to die. However, that doesn’t mean that some thirty-something douchebag comfortably sitting in his LA flat should benefit from all the spilled blood. Do you really think that sounds right? I don’t. People say the YouTube community is heartless, immature, and toxic. The worst online community out there—or at least one of the worst after 4chan’s. I’ve been on YouTube for a couple years now and I know you guys are capable of nice things. So what do you say we prove them all wrong? Let’s come together once more and stop Mitchell Joysel from monetizing this tragedy. Alright? Thank you, guys.

© 2018 by Willem Myra

 

headshot-willem-myraWM is the author of a surreal fiction chapbook, Kennel-born, out from Thirty West in the summer of 2018. His work has popped out here and there in Litro, Geometry, AntipodeanSF, and elsewhere. Drop him a line @WillemMyra

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #32B: “Three Days of Unnamed Silence” by Daniel Ausema

A letter would be waiting for me at home, a real physical letter, like the old days. I knew about it, knew what it would mean, as I rushed through the day, calibrating grading bots and marking AI tests. As soon as I met my quota and had the batteries for my hDevice fully kinked, I hurried down to the great rotating front door.

The grunt whose effort powered the door slipped just as I approached. It shouldn’t have been a problem. Engineers work all kinds of failsafes into the systems so what a grunt does won’t go directly into the connected machine. Supposed to, anyway. But for some reason, the grunt’s tripping translated into an interruption in the door’s power, which made the door jerk. I slammed my shin into it, limped inside.

Immediately the grunt was dragged away and another thrust into its place.

I rubbed my leg as I waited for the door to resume its usual rhythm, then headed out to the street. That time of day the busses had so many stops and starts, they were always unwinding their screws way too fast, having to pause and shove in new ones. Better to walk.

I cut across the university lawn, though it was a longer way. It was where my letter would come from. A letter adding, appropriately enough, a few key letters to my name. PhD, it sounded good added to the end of my name. I repeated it in time to my steps. P, H, D, P, H, D.

The sidewalk passed by the university library’s subterranean power station. In a gesture at humanitarianism that no one would insist on anymore, the power station had a wide, narrow window to let in the sunlight. The glass was angled into the side of a subtle rise, so that from the sidewalk I could easily see down into the station. The grunts worked furiously, kinking and winding the batteries that kept the library’s power-hungry devices running. Treadmills fed power to other machines, those not connected to the batteries. A great, horizontal wheel in the center of the station had a dozen grunts around it, all pushing together to wind up the massive battery placed in its center.

P, H, D, P, H, D. I left the library behind and walked past the campus center. Its clock tower beamed out the time into the air before it, with a ticker of class news and information. I focused on it for a moment, and the words expanded in my eyes. Was it announcing the new candidates? Would my name be there?

If I opened up my hDevice, I’d surely see my name right there. It was smart enough to display that portion of the ticker for me without asking. But I wanted to keep the batteries full, and searching with my eyes wasn’t worth the effort. I let myself enjoy the knowledge it was there, probably even pushed to the front for any friends who passed by. Knowing it was enough.

Across campus, I caught a moving walk. A waste of energy, most places, but gravity and high use by students meant it was one place a kinetic sidewalk made sense. I joined the crowds, watched them peripherally as we strolled along en masse. Did they realize what was waiting for me? Could they see the aura of the PhD hanging over me as I walked? One young man smiled as I passed at a faster pace, a shy smile that I returned. A stunning, older woman gave me a frank grin, which I returned as well. I smiled at everyone, wanted to ask everyone their names. Tell me them all!

I kept quiet, only thought the words. Still, there was a glow to the people around me, as if they could hear me asking, could hear my new title awaiting me at home. Maybe I only imagined it. But maybe my giddy mood did transmit in some way.

I got off the walk a few streets later and had to wait for a two-biker to pass, its grunts straining to pull a full cart of riders. My street was lined with high wires, twisted so tightly they hummed. By night they would all be loose, as we powered our houses through the evenings, the screens and dinners of home life. Then I’d be glad my hDevice was charged. Did I have all the numbers, all the people I’d want to tell the good news? I planned out my order as I walked.

By morning the grunts would have the wires set for breakfast and showers and the morning rush. By then I’d be a PhD for real. My first full day with a title to my name.

I took the steps up to my flat two at a time, and the hollow ring of my footsteps repeated those letters. P, H, D, P, H, D. My finger unlocked the door, and my house greeted me, though its voice was oddly subdued.

“Any deliveries for me, house?”

“Yes, Entity 37-58231-K. One delivery.”

Why my ent number? My house had never greeted me that way since I first moved in. I shrugged it off and looked in the slot for the delivery. There it was, a single envelope. My hands shook as I pulled it out.

It wasn’t labeled as university mail.

It was addressed to Entity 37-58231-K.

Inside was a government letterhead, and a letter that would have superseded any other deliveries of the day. Somewhere, intercepted by the nets and screens of the oversight offices, was my acceptance letter, but it didn’t matter anymore. The government letter was brief, direct. “Entity 37-58231-K, your lottery number has come up. You are scheduled for un-naming. While you retain your name, the government thanks you for your sacrifice for the good of all. Know that it is appreciated. Please report to the nearest courthouse or administrative center immediately.”

The letter dropped from my fingers.

***

When your name comes up for un-naming, you run. Not everyone does. It’s hopeless to flee, and many simply submit. But not you.

Before the letter has settled to the floor, you tear outside the flat, take the steps down at a leap. Are the officials already coming up the elevator? Maybe they’re at the foot of the steps, expecting this. At the second floor, you leave the stairwell, run to a window. It opens stiffly, but wide enough to drop through.

Alleys or main streets? Hiding or blending in? Either has its problems, so you stick with the small street you’re on, run as fast as you dare, as fast a pace as you think you can maintain. No sense sprinting only to have to walk once you’ve gone two blocks.

People look as you run past, but not to stare. A glance, you’re noticed, you’re forgotten…mostly. Forgotten until some official comes asking them. Someone running by? Oh, yeah. Late for a bus, looked like. Went that way. Maybe better not to run at all.

You slow down, ease in behind a group of deskies chatting with each other on their way home from work. Do they have titles behind their names? Unlikely, yet they still have names, and that’s key. They are still people, not grunts toiling away to serve modern society. You will yourself to be one of them, title-less but still named.

A police car passes by. You huddle into your coat, ease in close behind the deskies. The car doesn’t slow.

Still unnerving. When the group passes a thickly wooded park, you peel away. There are trees for cover, and you’re tired. Come morning, the chase will have cooled, and you’ll be able to leave the city entirely behind.

There are rumors of places off the grid, where sun and wind give power and grunts aren’t needed. You’ll find it, somehow. Somewhere out in the wastes you’ll stumble across a hidden settlement. You’ll befriend an odd stranger who gives you the secret, once you show you can be trusted. That’s how it works.

So you sleep, hidden inside the evergreen bushes, where the branches weave together into a perfect hiding place. No one will be able to find you here.

You wake up, stumble away before light, only to find the bush you chose already surrounded by police. Their guns whine with the pent up energy of their kinked batteries, and two grunts stand ready to recharge them.

As if you could ever put up such a fight.

The police grab you before you can flee, before you can swing a single fist or evade a single attempt to tackle you. None of which prevents the police from kicking, hitting, beating you senseless before they drag you away to your unnaming treatment.

***

The grunt trudges. It might well be the only way a grunt is allowed to move, after all. Once the surgeries and incisions are done to slice away a person’s name, it may be the only way it is still capable of moving. No grunts have ever done anything to undermine the idea, anyway.

It takes its place at a great wheel, grabbing the sawdust-coated handle with gloved hands. It does not know where that wheel is. The same one in the university library? Or any of countless others across the city? All identical, and any attempt to remember a named life causes a shooting pain in its brain.

The sawdust keeps the grunt’s hands from slipping off the wheel as it strains with the other workers to push. The device gives off sparks as they move, twisting and kinking as much power into its strands as the weave can hold.

After hours of mindless motion, the grunt is done for the day. Or for the shift, anyway. The lives of grunts are not organized around days but shifts. It enters a cramped dorm off the power station, eats a bowl full of protein-rich paste, and falls into its cot to sleep.

Another shift, some uncounted number of shifts later. The grunt is sent out to gather unwound batteries from drop boxes around the city. The same city where it used to live? Even thinking the question is enough to bring the sharp pain just behind its ear. It keeps its head lowered, lets the streetlight fall on its bare head.

After gathering the contents of two drop boxes, it pauses. The street is open. Has it forgotten that flight to freedom? Those rumors of another way to live? Nearly so, but a glimmer of that dream breaks through its namelessness. It weighs the bag of unwound batteries in its hands. To throw them? Smash some windows? A lifetime of viewing batteries as just shy of sacred holds firm, though, and it sets the batteries down beside the road.

It turns in a circle, a dog checking its internal compass, a beast following a pre-human instinct. But it doesn’t lie down to sleep. It dashes for the shadows of the nearest alley. Unnamed and so not entirely human, it no longer fears the rats and trash that clutter the alley. It slithers into the smallest place it can find.

Alas that the grunts clean the alleys so well. Alas that the humans know to watch for grunts on the run, especially those that are new. Its hiding is brief, and by the end of the shift it is back at its labor. Many shifts will pass before it is allowed outside again, and many more before it goes beyond the sight of a human overseer. By then even the glimmer of memory will have faded nearly to nothing.

Over time, grunts come to resemble each other. The hard labor, poor hygiene, and lack of names melds one into the next. What do minor variations in skin tone or gender matter in the face of drudgery? The grunt that was once Entity 37-58231-K loses the hair on its head, grows dense muscles on its legs and chest. Like all the others. The intelligence and drive that once nearly earned it a doctorate fades from its eyes.

The next time it goes out to gather unwound batteries, it never deviates from its assignment. Most shifts it plods along, turning the great wheel in its assigned power station, never talking and never complaining, even in demeanor. Along with the other grunts, it powers the city. And it watches its fellow grunts fall one by one and be replaced by the newly unnamed. The relentless kinking and twisting of modern life.

Until the grunts rise in revolt.

It starts at the wheel, with a grunt jumping onto the top and grabbing the central axle that rises up to the ceiling. The wheel kinks the grunt, killing it instantly. Its death jolts the rest of the grunts away from their work. At first, for a moment, they might flee in fright. But one —is it the grunt once known as Entity 37-58231-K? We may never know —checks its flight and lets the anger of unnaming rise up.

Anger? It should have been silenced with its unnaming. The humans remove much that made the formerly-named a human, a surgery physical and mental and psychological. Yet the sight of the dying grunt brings a measure of it back, and not only in one grunt. It is as if such strong emotion is a magnet, drawing out the same anger in grunt after grunt, until all roar in voiceless revolt.

They charge from the power station. At first, the humans don’t know what to do. The grunts are unnamed, unthinking, powerless. What can you do, when the machinery of society fights back? More grunts join, leaving behind their tasks. Spinning batteries unwind, and the twisting machines fall still. The more that join, the easier for the next to jump in too.

Then the shots begin. The police don’t hold back. Grunt after grunt falls. But what are bullets except another form of drudgery? Shot, they press on, even after a named person might give up. And unshot, they don’t shy from fear. What mental room they’ve pried open for emotion is filled with mob-rage.

And as they advance, the shooting lurches into uncertainty. How many bullets do the police have? How fully are their batteries charged? And who will they send to get more when they run out? Not a grunt. Even a person, named, must rely on the grunts to rush to the storerooms or face catastrophic delay.

The grunts gather strength, swell in unnamed fury. The police fall back, conserve their firepower, fear their loss of control.

This is it, the time to overthrow, the time to take back names. They move in concert down the street. Where to? It is not strategy but mob impulse that guides them away from the power station and toward the crueler power of the city center.

Here, where so much of the city is run, there is a greater stockpile of kinked batteries and ammunition. The humans find their resolve, form into lines, trust in their guns once more. Even the advantages of namelessness aren’t enough to overcome the firepower of mobilized human forces. They crest, push again toward their oppressors, and fall down. As more fall, the anger ebbs into fear, and grunts fall away one by one.

Our grunt, who once dreamed of a PhD, is still among those who fight, a tightening knot of grunts who refuse to concede defeat. There must still be a way to find the city’s weakness. The grunt falls. No, that’s another of the grunts…maybe. Their identities blur. The knot barges as one around a corner. More fall. Ours? They are too alike to know.

A choice lies before them, a split they must take. One way leads to the place where they had their names removed. Might they still reclaim them? Or make sure no one else loses theirs, at least? The other way leads outside the city, into the wilderness where rumors place other escapees.

They veer toward the wilderness. Too slow, as forces move in to stop them, humans with stronger weapons, sure now in their ability to stop the grunts before they run out of power. The knot nearly comes undone as they waver between fight and flight. Perhaps it is our PhD who pulls them together, forces them toward the unnaming place.

It is locked. Humans with guns move in. This time the grunts do not fight back. They take their places before the door, stand tall in the view of anyone who might see. With arms outspread, they stand, are shot, fall.

No humans lament their deaths, only the disruption.

The revolt is over, the nameless grunts forgotten. But the bullets that mow them down damage the entryway into the unnaming place. No one may enter. For several days, no one is unnamed, just when the city most needs new grunts. Only when human workers are able to repair the door can new grunts be made.

Three days of unnamed silence. That is the only memorial, the only name that remains of the fallen grunts and their brief revolution. But sometimes, at the limits of namelessness, the word only approaches, approximates everything.

© 2017 by Daniel Ausema

 

Author’s Note: The past couple of years I’ve participated in an event called Wyrm’s Gauntlet, which challenges writers with a series of tasks, winnowing the participants with each round. The final task in 2015 involved a quote about how society relies on stripping us of our identity. I’ve forgotten the exact quote, but at the time is struck me and inspired this story.

 

daniel-ausema-headshot-1A writer, runner, reader, parent, and teacher, Daniel Ausema’s work has appeared in many publications including Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, as well as previously in Diabolical Plots. He is the author of the Spire City series, and his latest novel, The Silk Betrayal, is coming this fall from Guardbridge Books. He lives in Colorado, at the foot of the Rockies.

 

 

 

 

 

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BOOK REVIEW: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

written by David Steffen

The Handmaid’s Tale is a near future dystopia published in 1985 about a United States of America that has become an oppressive theocracy.  ((It has also very recently become a TV series streaming on Hulu, but I haven’t seen the show so I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about that)

Offred lives in Gilead, the theocratic country that the United States has become in a near future.  The Christian Bible is the rule of the land, or at least a very strict interpretation of a very selective subset of the Christian Bible.  Tales of the “way things used to be” are a constant mantra told by those in power to justify the extreme measures taken to uphold the current law, tales of when women could not walk the street without being harassed, when women were expected to paint themselves for beauty, when women had to fear rape and assault.  Women are safe now, they say, treated as the precious vessels they are meant to be, to bear children as God intended.  There is a wall in town where the body of criminals are hung on display: atheists and homosexuals and adulterists and traitors and others.  All for the safety of the good citizens of Gilead, of course.

A lingering effect of the way things used to be is low fertility across the population, caused by some mixture of chemicals, diet, medications, intentional blocking of fertility, and other causes.  In the new world women who can’t produce children are unwomen, sent to labor camps to live short miserable lives.  Lower class women, at least.  Upper class women may be assigned handmaids who, inspired by the tale of Jacob’s handmaiden in the Bible, may act as a pregnancy proxy for an infertile wife (according to the dictates of Gilead, no man is infertile, it is always the wife).

Offred is a handmaid, assigned to a military officer.  The rise of Gilead is recent enough that she had had a family before the change, a family that was torn apart as Gilead declared second marriages void.  Even her name has been taken–“Offred” is not the name that she had before, but is derived from the man she is beholden to, as in “of Fred”.  She is watched very carefully, as she is considered a valuable vessel, and she is protected from everything, even herself–her room has shatter-proof glass in the windows, the ceiling fan removed, and the knives in the kitchen are locked away.  Every month when she’s ovulating, she performs her duty in order to become pregnant, and time is running out before she is declared an unwoman.

In the prologue to the book, in the copy of the book that I read, Atwood talks about some of the narrative choices she made.  When she decided to write a dystopia, she decided to do it without predicting any future technology, so nothing in the book is anything that wasn’t possible with technology at the time the book was written.  This sets it apart from stories like 1984, which depends on the possibility of thought control, or The Hunger Games, which uses various future technologies.

Another thing that sets it apart was that Atwood wanted to base the theocracy of Gilead on actual scripture, and to base all the things people do to each other on actual things from history.  This gives it a very different feel from many dystopias, because it feels like it could be just around the corner.  The book was published more than thirty years ago, but I’m not surprised that it has become a recent show, because many of the concerns and issues at the root of this book are still concerns today–especially with too many members of the US government passing laws based in theocracy.  Despite the separation of church and state inherent in the founding of the country, there are those who cling to the Puritan roots of that more than the word of the Constitution.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a chilling cautionary tale about where we could end up if we are complacent in the face of the rise of fascism.  I can’t recommend the book enough–it is a dark read, so brace yourself.  It is very well written, chilling, poetic, and moving.  I don’t have Hulu but I’d like to pick up the show when I can, perhaps if it comes out in a box set.