A la Node

Once upon a time a mouse found an enchanted sword. It was small and fit his little paws perfectly. He took the sword and used it to defend himself and other mice from their enemies, from cats and owls and dogs and snakes. He slew a great tomcat, and became the most famous mouse of all time. He was the first hero he mice had ever had, but when they spoke of him, they always spoke of the sword as well.

‘Oh, the Hero and his amazing Sword’, they would say, or ‘Thank the great God that the Sword came to our Hero’. The hero himself began to think very ill of this. He grew angry that the credit for his feats was shared with the sword, as if his own bravery and cunning were only a minor part of his own accomplishments.

One day he took the sword and thrust it deep into a cobblestone of flint. “I am done with the sword, for a hero needs nothing but his own bravery and intelligence,” he proclaimed.

He strode away from the crowd of stunned mice and found the largest of the feral dogs that plagued the mouse community, and he slew it with a toothpick. He climbed into the high trees where the owls nested, and he drove them out of the forest one by one. He sought the snakes in their underground tunnels, and tied them into knots.

When he returned from his quest, the other mice seemed enthralled by something going on in the clearing. A handsome young mouse had wrapped his paws around the handle of the enchanted sword and was heaving mightily at it, trying to release it from the heavy stone. As the hero approached, the young mouse pulled the sword free and held it above his head in triumph.

The hero watched as all the mice cheered the new young hero, and then we walked quietly out of the clearing.

The Hero of Mice, and his Sword by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The soot poured out in clouds, inky black billows that cast surreal shadows on the pristine white carpet before settling from the air to make those shadows a permanent feature. Heavy back boots settled down onto the fire, revealing unreasonably clean red pant legs above. I would have sworn no human body could fit into that chimney, and even if i were wrong about that, no rational explanation exists for the complete lack of soot on the man’s bright red suit, the failure of a large cheerful fire to burn of singe it.

He bent down to step out of the fireplace, bent far too low, stepped out of a space that wasn’t sufficient to hold him in the first place. Space became putty around him, size and shape suddenly fluid concepts, flexible restraints on the reality around him. He was a big man, but not slow, not awkward. His smooth animal grace was frightening, unreal. We cowered behind the couch, our eyes peeking over the back frozen in incredulous terror.

He, perhaps It, stepped lightly across the room to the tree. The strange star atop it illuminated the massive costumed figure but seemed to leave the rest of the room in darkness. The big man seemed to acknowledge the pulsing ethereal light  briefly before placing two wrapped packages gently on the floor, and it seemed to me the acknowledgment was mutual.

It was the star we had found in the crowded and musty old second-hand store we had wandered into in the fall, and had never been able to locate on subsequent trips into town. I remembered thinking it beautiful but oddly discomfiting, Steven had insisted on  bringing it home. In its blue-violet glow, was had sat before the tree and talk to each other of our wishes.

That was last night. Tonight, on the eve of Christmas, the last thing we had expected was for those wishes to be granted, and certainly not by Santa Claus himself. The specter before us was undeniable, though, the beautifuly wrapped boxes on the floor had the size and the dreamlike certainty about them that convinced me they contained precisely what Steven and I had said we wanted.

Then, as the impossible figure crossed the floor to the fireplace, he turned. The face that peered directly at our hidden face was the archetype of jolly, the very essence of cheer and robust good humor. He put a finger to the side of his large nose. His eyes were black voids, dark like the space between stars, threatening to suck us in.

He bent down and stepped into the fire, oblivious of the flames and the very impossibility of the act, and then he was gone. Soot black footprints marked his path back and forth across the room, stark black impossibilities on white carpet that glowed in the light of a gently pulsing star.

The little voice in the back of my head told me to sign the agreement. It didn’t feel right, but I suppose that was the whole point. After all, doing what felt right was playing right into their hands.

How did I end up here? I ask myself that quite a lot, but the answer bears repeating. Our descendants will remember this day, so let me spell it out, there is an important lesson here about Human ingenuity.

The problem was not just that someone’s old thesis project held the keys to saving what was left of the human race. It wasn’t just that the little kit-box of electronics wouldn’t communicate with the network, nor that its only interface was a screen, a camera and microphone. No, the problem was that it didn’t want to talk to them.

To Mom for unbending faith and more money than I deserved and Dad for everything he taught, to both of them for damn good genes. To siblings for their perseverance and the examples set before impressionable young eyes. To every lover for every word and touch and gift that may yet prove I am worth loving. To friends for being friends. To all the above and to sheer good luck, for my health and strength and sanity. To Miranda for that privileged spot in her young universe, and to everyone who taught, everyone who gave, everyone who cared. Thank you.

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.