Yes, I know it. Dr. Mansard will just have to wait until I have a functioning brain again.
Monthly Archives October 2009
27 – The Arrest
There was a layer of coarse black sand and round stones on the bottom of the swimming pool. I watched this out-of-place sea bed drift slowly towards me, until my head made gentle contact. The pressure was painful in my ears, but I bore it and resisted the urge to push myself back up through the water to the air above. There were shells down here, and there, just inches from my eyes, a bone. Yes, of course. There would more, many more.
Number 26
Before you read number 26, read number 21, and before you read number 21, read number 4. Yes, the rules state that each week’s output must be a complete story in its own right, and you could argue that I have pushed the limits a bit, but the story taking place here is bigger than I anticipated and I think the integrity of the story and its universe is a bit more important to me than my arbitrary self-imposed rules. Sure, as stand alone stories, 21 and 26 leave something to be desired, but the rules don’t state they have to be good stand alone stories. Think of them as stand alone stories that just happen to end in cliffhangers.
Number 27 will wrap up the story started in 21, though of course you could read it by itself if you really want to.
Welcome to the halfway point.
26 – The Enlightened Machines
It was time to take stock. It had been a long day, in which too much happened too quickly. I had to consider the possibility that I had been reckless – could I have found a more rational and clever way to deal with the situation? Possibly. Could I do anything about that now? No.
I considered my surroundings. These were, essentially, the echoing blackness of the inside of a sealed metal box somewhere in the front end of a very large walking robot, in form and movement quite reminiscent of a spider. I could faintly feel the gentle rocking motion of the smooth arachnid gait.
25 – Happy
I was working as a programmer at the time, corporate infrastructure, boring but steady work. It was a big enough company to have layers of legacy code and infrastructure, but rich enough to be deploying newer technology. I specialized in that interface between the two, a specialization with a finite lifetime, but lucrative while it lasted. Mostly, I sat in a little cube with my haptic holographic interface, pushing blocks of code around and sticking them together like legos. Occasionally I got to turn on the old-style monitor and keyboard to massage the old code. I liked the old stuff, it was all hand-made, inefficient and baroque, but it had personality. Back then, the hand of the programmer left its signature, everything felt like it was created by a craftsman, or occasionally a mad genius. Horrible stuff to make work with modern systems, but it was a kind of art in its own right.
I had been in town for a few months, settled into my bland little apartment and finally slipped into a groove at work in which things were routine enough for the mind can wander during the day and predictable enough to know I’d be done with everything when it was time to go home.
Home was close by a long winding park that followed a creek along the edges of the city, it was my usual refuge from the sense of loneliness that was beginning to seep into my little apartment. I liked walking north, up into the wilder parts where the clear water ran over wide shelves of slate and the trail petered out in the trees next to the creek. The water ran wide and shallow over the smooth stone, and on hot days I would take my shoes off and walk through the cool ankle deep currents and hot sun-baked black rock.
And one day, one summer day heavy with humidity and the sound of cicadas, I stepped out from under the trees onto the hot slate and saw a body sprawled out in the water. It was female, skinny and long, thin white dress plastered over visible ribs and steaming out into the water. For a very long time, I stood frozen, the hot stone burning into the soles of my bare feet. What do you do when you see a body? Hazy scenes from first aid classes of my youth spun by in random order, and finally something solidified enough to release my body back to conscious control. Talk first, if she’s not really dead you’ll look an idiot when you call 911.
24 – Test!
I have been studying for the Graduate Record Exam in Physics. I have devoted every spare moment to trying to absorb into ready memory what amounts to my entire undergraduate curriculum in the two weeks prior to the test date. I have put aside other projects, neglected writing and social demands, and stayed up far too late trying to remember principles of Quantum Mechanics and Optics.
I tried, oh I tried, to write a worthy story with the ragged remains of my creative energy. I wrote a page of rambling and senseless prose that I could not see any way to redeem. I stared at the walls, and then wrote more, failing utterly to make progress against the sleep deprived fog of fatigued neurons. Somewhere in the soft opacity were solid pieces of truth, beauty and literature, I blundered around and past them, seeing only that they were there but never discerning their actual outlines.
With the test looming up in the all to immediate future, I realized I would rather tell you this little tail of failure than slap an incoherent ending on the failure itself and post it as if it were a story. The books are piled up and waiting. Perhaps the truths and comprehension they contain will be as obscured by mist as were the plots and themes of the Story, but I will forge into that fog and try my best.
23 – The Colors
I watched him watch the tiny drop of super glue fall through the air and land on the skin of his forearm. He blew on it, very gently, then touched it tentatively. He moved the little bottle a few inches along his arm and watched the little clear droplet form on the end of the thin nozzle.