B.L.Donnelly

Hell Canto...(pt.1)

2010-10-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

(<This being the true and factual account of one's journey through the lower realms, as documented by Carlton Tucker, adventurist and somnambulant seeker of the eternal. The use of "Gentleman's Curatives" is at once admitted and admonished, and for the sake of the reader shall not be elaborated upon. Needless to say the fetish of the Amazonian shaman and the Viking berserker are different technologys affording similar experiences.)

Like a voyage to the centre of the earth, the hellscape tunnels through the core of my being. The landscape of hell is a roadmap over my flesh. Damned to a self made hell by my own admission. Would that I could undo the cursed learning I had acquired in the Chineys. After bringing them the good book and the musket bullet I did unconsciously absorb their notions of the Bhuddah, and their skill of projecting one’s soul out to explore the heavens. Damned to a self made hell by my own curiosity. I had been awaking each morning viewing clear and stark the symbol of the dragon, Ogdru Jahad, and he was wreathed with the pentacle and placed upon a spiral. Wrought in black and white by my own hand above the window frame. And it was this simple action that entered me into hell.

There is a road of bone that leads to hell, where the voices of every species past and future whisper simple truths to passing souls. Nerve language, the coded frequency of unconscious animal minds. The road of bone leads to a gated stone courtyard, two benches flank it either side. Each passing soul must sit in contemplation of itself before the final truth is discarded and they move beyond, to the Chamber of Silence. Those who cannot discard their will and ego will not endure the effrontery of their own self judging them, and these, they are accosted and harnessed and in every sense they are brought down. Brought low, taken out and through the frenzied miasma of teeth and claws and pure anxiety which is the red, the animal mind space. This is where the demons set up their camp for me, they wait in the subfrequencies outside of conscious thought, and time means nothing here. So they have been here forever.

Hell reacts to the damned one’s fear, it sets a table before him and lets him choose his mode of torture. Only to reveal an even further iteration, a doubling of horror. There is no cessation in hell, always extrapolation, always growth, always chaos. My hell is not a solitary experience, others are put to the wrack before me. Instead of me. Because of me.

And I was dragged down by my tulpa, my thoguth. A form which was my own self image. My own admission of hate and damnation, and it did screw it’s face in torment for my ineptitude, as it was torn to rag banners by the demons awaiting me on the plains. And I did stand on the sand which boiled and fizzed with vibrations such as to cut the flesh on my legs to the bone, and looking down found that they really were fleshy and stripped and dripping red ichors. The pain was a sharp fleeting whip up my spine, before the creaking ache of the exposed bone settled into a more subtle and more agonizing reality.

The demons who attended my arrival took no pleasure in my pitiful exultations, bound and gagged and blinkered as they were, sheathed and wreathed in long lengths of thorny barb, so as to bind their bones and voices. They worked in tandem to fit me with a yoke and a cart, which was fastened by callipers and shot through with bolts behind my collarbone. Even in hell there are lessons to be learned, and my first lesson was to take my medicine. The demons flayed and hounded me as I strove to bring the cart up behind me, and looking behind me finding the cart to be filled to the brim with mewling babes. And the demons did toss the screaming wretches into the furrow I had tilled and poked them under the earth with blackened claws. And on this day I learned that hell has day and night. I saw their sickly sun not setting per se, yet diminishing in size none the less, and a caustic yellow moon burst forth from a fissure in a far off crypt, to cast a wan and freezing glow upon my labours. Night in hell would be much the same as day were it not for the frost and ice that suddenly formed and clawed its way over every living and dead thing. The earth cracked and blackened, then turned to a singular sheet of bright white ice, scintilla sparkling through its blank mass. The cart was stuck fast, and the furrow I had tilled was filled to brim with solid frozen water. The demons made hollow whooping noises and left me then, skittering over the frozen waste with legs like branches tapping on window panes. I was stuck fast in my cart and naked, wounded and moaning. Yet I knew I had been here a day, could recall my name and my mother’s face and knew I could endure.

There was no sleep for me on that night, just a numb trance in which fat black shapes whipped by my stricken vision, and forces without physical form tore ragged chunks from my body, like sharks tearing at chum in the pitch Arctic ocean. There is no order to events in hell, one can shift back and forth through past textures and visions. As the moon receded into its crevasse, it crumbled and broke against the crag and tumbled into its participles, billions of irradiated souls in frenzied orgy, rebirthing and copulating into sick lunar light. They were in turn eaten up by the mountainside, slaking the thirst of some naked elemental beast. I had the notion to escape my bindings from the cart, whereupon it leapt to frenzied life, shuddering and shaking its load of frozen babies over the thawing earth, dragging me along and rasping my skin to streamers.

We travelled in this manner for some time, the sentient horse-cart and I. Underneath the carriage yet fastened securely, my head periodically bounced against the fleeting earth and rendered me unconscious. I came to at rest, underneath the now smashed and stationary cart. Men in chains were hurriedly skewering the spilled load of the cart, depositing into sacks, marking ledgers. I crawled from the wreckage, feeling lighter than I had for aeons.

We had travelled some distance, having rounded what could only be described as an inverted axis. The landscape stretched over and around my head completely, as if I had slipped through the soil of hell and were looking out from in. Walking the inside of a toy balloon.

And it was here on this inverted landscape that I was given a number and marked in hell’s ledger, the better to keep an account of my journey and my tribulations. Chain gangs roamed the plains here, lugging great tomes of indecipherable cuneiform. And they did see me and did draw my countenance, and transcribe my words, though the words poured out in a blank torrent of unfocused noise and aggression. The plains were formed from the mulch and the backwash that pours from hell’s great metropolis, Quas Atol. If one were to examine the soil of hell they would find myriad treasures, teeth, splintered bone, gouged eyes, ragged scraps of skin and paper burnt or torn or otherwise inscribed with damned dreams. All names and places I have transcribed phonetically, for in hell there is no language that can ever be understood, only guessed at and written down as one hears it. And this was how I came to know the city of Quas Atol.

It squats at the basin of the plains, sucking down wayward souls and inertia borne effluvia, sucking and pulsing with a monstrous tidal life that is its own damnation.
The city of Quas Atol is sealed on all four planars, it decides who may live and die and live again within its walls. And as I followed the chain gang of scribes they entreated me to join their number, holding out chains and hooks and tomes for me to bear. But I am no scribe, and took no comfort in their flagellation, and so entered the City of Quas Atol without my even trying. The necrotic walls gave way and led me naturally into its sanctum.

Here began my induction proper into the rigors of damnation, for Quas Atol is a city of amnesia. The damned here cannot remember the reasons or actions that led them here, and so are caught in a mental feedback loop of recrimination and self-doubt. At any time a demon or damned soul may seize upon an idea and run through the streets screaming its revelation, only to find a few moments later it has lost the train of thought and must descend once again into silent reverie. No physical torture exists in Quas Atol, the masters of this keep have worked out punishment sublime beyond the boundaries of the body. It was here in Quas Atol that I hit upon the notion of disguise, and made to cover my body in the thorny barbs that many demons wore as raiment. But no sooner had I started this endeavour than I forgot my original purpose, and tore the brackish weeds from my arms and legs and squirmed upon the dirt in pitiful agony, staring at hell’s sun and wishing that I could break free. And in this state of pain and anger I hit upon the notion of disguise, and made to cover my frail form with cruel barbs and gnarled twigs. I will spare the reader a further repetition, yet in this manner they may see the pointless torture that exists in Quas Atol.

Only outside influence can break the solipsistic loop of thought that Quas Atol brings, and my cessation came in the form of a great parade through the backstreets of the city, where I lay in filth and dribbling despair. Made up of monstrous elephantine forms, topped by riders wrought from bones of flame. These were flanked by weedling rags of membrane that blew tribute and fanfare and cleared a path for the parade, observed by the denizens of this city, some screaming in wonder and fright and others joining their number, to be taken as fodder for the demons that drove the procession ever onwards.

The parade was decked out in red rag banners, made from the flayed carcasses and hung entrails of the damned. Burn victims danced a coquettish mimsy through the crowds, dragging the sick sleepers of Quas Atol into dead eyed reverie. Soon the whole city was whipped into bloodsoaked frenzy, monks and witches beating skull drums, blowing bone pipes, stirring the gestalt into a single intention. I was with them, dancing on my fleshless feet and grinding my torn stump of a prick against their rusted forms. The citizens forgot who they were, forgot why they danced in the parade, yet the drums span and chanted bogus witch hymns to keep them on their feet. Flashes of madness and beauty and sharp stainless steel needling through to bone, as the Sabbath wound into a higher order of malice, each fiend turning on each, until the streets of Quas Atol rang with razor whipped screams. The metropolis suckled at the soup of the Sabbath, gonging and casting deep sonorous throbs into the firmament, goading and leering at the spectacle. Each fiend was caught in stasis, rapt, as Dubber wound up from, wound up, through the city to meet his audience.

And for a second the ash grey earthsky of hell froze, no slate grey forms scudded across its surface. Dubber’s moon face cast a horny shadow over all, and all forgot everything. Night night.

From this black reverie Dubber worked his magic, throttling stultified memories from the minds of his congregation, steepling his church pit in the fathoms of their souls. Here I learned that demons dream, for we all shared a moment and a mind and in that instant knew each other and Dubber and it was absolute agony. His mind plate set us out and vibrated to the pitch of a bone ear until we all screamed as one and were cast back and down into Quas Atol. We had seen the mind of Dubber, the modus of amnesia, and he knew all that there was to know if only he could remember it.

The city looked even uglier on second appraisal, although truth be told this was my first view of the place with clear perceptions. It was a tribal kibbutz turned inside out, tents pitched over and inside each other and rigged with walkways and trapdoors. I turned back to view the carnage. The hulking brutes that made up the bulk of the procession had set to rage amongst the throngs, obviously perturbed by the visions we had just endured. The sleeping sickness was settling once again, as the weaker souls, the longest here, began to slip back into morbid contemplation. Dubber still viewed his denizens, but he was receding up into the earth and growing flat, his grin transferring into a general malaise that hung Quas Atol on a cross.

Stumbling and in a fearful daze I made to escape Dubber’s gaze, only to come upon the bone steps leading to his sanctum. A monstrous carved effigy of his balloon round face and hysterical grin were hewn out of a colossal bone formation. Much of the architecture of hell is made via natural sources, and much of the natural flora resembles hell’s architecture. Many scripts and talismans were engraved around the seat of the idol, none in any language that was understandable to me. But clear and stark I saw the symbol of the dragon Ogdru Jahad, the world eater, and it did look to be a carving done by my hand. There was not a soul in this crypt to stir me from my thoughts, and I entered a colossal depression whereupon I thought I had carved the symbol as a message to myself, only to forget the original purpose of the message whilst only half way through carving it.

It seems to me I shifted states whilst in this sanctum, leaving behind whatever shell hell had provided for me and sublimating into a null frequency. Dubber had cast an altar in his shrine and I climbed aboard to ease my rest. I saw my victrola record player turn its own handle and spit out the crummy tune of my life, spat out over and over again and recorded until it lost all meaning. Dubber’s journey pasted over mine like billboards worn out and slapped over with new titles. Life over life over worn out tired life. Endless replication had rotted my Dubber’s mind right through like a tooth, and we sat in pointless bliss chewing over nuggets of confection dressed up as enlightenment. I saw the wheel of corpses that was the moon rise up and shatter two times fully, as the wheel of fate that Dubber decried turned on and restlessly on.

His sleepers were his anchor, he forgot who he was and who they were, but they were drawn to his head steam and his infectious amnesia and Quas Atol sprang up, like a skull springs up around a brain. Fearful of their gaze and cursed and craven Dubber sometimes hits a brick wall of causality and stirs the soup of the city’s mind. Unconsciously two forces make to meet and upon meeting recoil with massive repellent charge.

In this fashion I knew the mind of Dubber, and it was wretched and small and mean on a colossal scale, for his citizens, for him, there was no escape from the cycle. I knew his mind and it flash fried my soul, sending me thin and soupy, ghosting me out across the plains where all manner of exaggerated and abstract symbols were transpiring. There is no exit from Quas Atol, one simply has to slide through it. Rather than trying to retain my personality I let it go, threw it all away, and shrank Quas Atol into the palm of my hand, thereby eating it and restoring my memories, and my vigor.

Email Prank #2

2010-09-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

---------[ Received Mail Content ]----------
Subject : Gracious Greetings
From : "li chin wu"

Gracious Greetings

I am Li Chin Wu, Principal Assurance manager for the Huaxia Bank . I am getting in touch with you regarding the estate of Alfred A Logan
and an investment placed under our banks management about 8 years ago.I would respectfully request that you keep the contents of this mail
confidential and respect the integrity of the information you come by as a result of this mail. I contact you independently and no one is informed
of this communication.In 2000, the subject matter; Alfred came to our bank to engage in business discussions with our private banking division.
He informed us that he had a financial portfolio of 8.35 million United States dollars, which he wished to have us invest on his behalf.Based on my advice,
we spun the money around various opportunities and made attractive margins for our first months of operation, the accrued profit and interest stood at this
point at over 10 million United States Dollars. In mid 2002, he instructed that the principal sum (8.35M) be liquidated because he needed to make an urgent
investment requiring cash payments in Hong Kong . We got in touch with a specialist bank in Hong Kong the Guangdong Development Bank(GDB)
who agreed to receive this money for a fee and make cash available to Alfred. However Guangdong Development Bank got in touch with us last year that this
money has not been claimed. On further enquiries we found out that Alfred was involved in an accident in Mainland China , which means he died intestate.
He has no next of kin and the reason I am writing you.What I propose is that since I have exclusive access to his file, you will be made the beneficiary
of these funds. My bank will contact you informing you that money has been willed to you. On verification, which will be the details I make available to my bank,
my bank will instruct GDB to make payments to you. You do not have to have known him. I know this might be a bit heavy for you but please trust me on this.
For all your troubles I propose that we split the money in half. In the banking circle this happens every time. The other option is that the money will
revert back to the state.
Nobody is getting hurt; this is a lifetime opportunity for us. I hold the KEY to these funds, and as a Chinese National we see so much cash and funds bein re-assigned daily.
I would want us to keep communication for now strictly by this email address:lichinwu72@gmail.com
Please, again, note I am a family man; I have a wife and children. I send you this mail not without a measure of fear as to t the consequences,
but I know within me that nothing ventured is nothing gained and that success and riches never come easy or on a platter of gold.
This is the one truth I have learned from my private banking clients. Do not betray my confidence. If we can be of one accord,
we should act swiftly on this. Please pardon my writing mistakes. Please get back to me immediately via this email address:lichinwu72@gmail.com

I await your response.

Subject : (Re)Gracious Greetings
From : "Benjamin Donnelly"<****************@lycos.com>

Li Chin Wu

Long have I tarried in thankless aggression
Silently always in soul crushing labour
On this red planet I lose name face and station
What be this Li Chin Wu on my horizon?
Bringing me gold and jewels stolen beholden
Give me these treasures 'ere I fall to pieces
Marching a drum beat to battle again
Give me the money of Logan A Alfred
'Ere I go to sleep in cold grave or cold bed
Why then ile fit you Li Chin Wu
I'll build a gas powered sky ship and return
To Earth my old homestead and place of my birth

Dear Lin Chi Wu,
You have no ken of the elevation your electronic mail brings to my soul. I sit at her majesty's pleasure in the grim galleys of a Battle Smiter rowing crew. My job is to row the oars that inflate the bellows on her majesty's warship Battlesmiter IV. No sane mane would volunteer for this job, and alas I am no different, having been press-ganged into it at a young age. I will tell you now LinkiWu, that I was tried and convicted for welching on a bilking nozzle, while under the influence of a great many gentlemen's curatives. I will tell you now WinkiLu that I am Frankenstein's Monster. A great biography was written of me, perhaps you have heard of it? Regardless, I have the strength and heart to take your heavy burden of Albert Logan's money, and redistribute it among the millions of feral urchins roaming London's gaslit streets. In fact my maker gave me a surfeit of hearts, three in total, should one ever fail me. He did also furnish me with the lower appendage of an Albany navvy, resulting in sudden paroxysms of blind fury when I cannot find a wench to make congress with. I will be candid Wing Chin Wu, my chances of ever leaving this accursed fate are slim, the Battle Smiter is an awesome war machine, capable of repelling a host of flying purple apes with charming alacrity. Even if you were to use your sacred I-ching and plot the exact date of fortuitous arrival, I fear the journey to Mars would be nigh impossible for a simple Principle Assurance Manager for Huaxia Bank. I ask you to forget about this humble monster in his punitive labours, and live your life with your family, using the money to make the world a better place. All I ask Wu Ping, is that you occasionally crane your head skyward, and look towards Mars, and imagine the bloody carnage of war. There I stand sundering a battlefield, bringing down a mighty hammer of victory upon my enemies, a silent, solemn apology echoing from my lips.

Frankenstein Invictus
Tut Amen
Frankenstein's monster of mars

Email Prank #1...

2010-08-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

( This email exchange was the result of an inordinate amount of spam entering my inbox. I sent many similar replies to these shameless pan-handlers, yet it was one Dr.Kenneth Lameta who first took the bait.)

Subject : From Dr.Kenneth
From : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>
To : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>

Goodday and please pardon my approach without a prior consent.

I am contacting you in view of the fact we will be of Great assistance to each other, like developing a cordial business Relationship. I am Dr Kenneth Lameta. The Auditor General of one of the Prime banks here United Kingdom, during the course of our auditing, I Discovered a floating fund in an account opened in the bank in 1999 and since 2003 nobody has operated on this account again, after going Through some old files in the records I discovered that the owner of the account died without a [heir]hence the money is floating and if I do not remit this money out urgently it will be forfeited for nothing.

The owner of this account is Mr.Steven Jackson, a foreigner, and an Industrialist and he died, since 1998. And no other person knows about this account or anything concerning it, the account has no other beneficiary and my investigation proved to me as well that Steven Jackson until his death was the manager Diamond Safari company [pty]. United Kingdom.

We will start the first transfer with fifty six million [$56,000.000]upon successful transaction without any disappoint from your side, we shall re-apply for the payment of the remaining rest amount to your account.

The amount involved is (USD 112 M) One hundred and twelve million United States Dollars only. I want to first transfer $56,000.000 [Fifty sixmillion United States Dollar] from this money into a safe foreigners account abroad before the rest, but I don't know any foreigner, I am only contacting you as a foreigner because this money cannot be approved to a local person here, without valid International foreign passport, but can only be approved to any foreigner with valid international passport or drivers license and foreign a/c because the money is in US dollars and the former owner of the a/c Mr. Steven Jackson is a foreigner too, and the money can only be approved into a foreign a/c. However, we will sign a binding agreement, to bind us together.

I am revealing this to you with believe in God that you will never let me down in this business or betray me as soon as this money goes into your account. Send also your private telephone and fax number including the full details of the account to be used for the deposit.

I want us to meet face to face to build confidence and to sign a binding agreement that will bind us together before transferring the money to any account of your choice where the fund will be safe. Before we fly to your country for withdrawal, sharing and investments. I need your full co-operation to make this work fine, Because the management is ready to approve this payment to any foreigner who has correct information of this account, which I will give to you, upon your positive response and once I am convinced that you are capable and will meet up with instruction of a key bank official who is deeply involved with me in this business.

I need your strong assurance that you will never, never let me down,With my influence and the position of the bank official we can transfer this money to any foreigner's reliable account which you can provide with assurance that this money will be intact pending our physical arrival in your country for sharing.

The bank official will destroy all documents of transaction immediately we receive this money leaving no trace to any place and to build confidence you can come immediately to discuss with me face to face after which I will make this remittance in your presence and three of us will fly to your country at least two days ahead of the money going into the account.

I will apply for annual leave to get visa immediately I hear from you that you are ready to act and receive this fund in your account. I will use my position and influence to obtain all legal approvals for onward transfer of this money to your account with appropriate clearance from
the relevant ministries and foreign exchange departments.

At the conclusion of this business, you will be given 35% of the total amount, 55% will be for me, while 10% will be for expenses both parties might have incurred during the process of transferring.
I look forward to your earliest reply,

Best Regards,

Dr Kenneth Lameta

Subject : [RE]From Dr.Kenneth
From : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>
To : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>

Dr Kenneth,
I am both shocked and overwhelmed by your most generous offer, entreating you sir to forthwith dispense with all formality and speak to me as you would your brother, or a piece of our marvellous natural world, or indeed a reflection of your own good self Doctor Kenneth. A being of both massive magnanimity and infinite compassion. I feel it is my duty to bear the load of this monolithic money pile of one twenty hundred million of the dollars from united states. However sir, it breaks my heart to have to tell you news that will make you shudder and weep for our noble endeavour, I am currently under the custody of our Fine Queen of this land. She has me imprisoned in a debtor's tower in our nation's great capitol, festooned with the spilled guts and severed heads of this fair country's malefactors. No holdings of any kind may I possess, no bank accounts, nor servants, nor robotic sex slaves, nor premium grade narcotics. I am reduced to the life of a common man, and this I fear may end our relationship, for you need the services of a gentleman and this good Doctor I assure you I am not. Although as I pen this electronic poesy I hit upon a marvellous idea that may save our heroic intentions from the fires of failure. I have often heard other people, visiting my cell at various times, to have disclosed and vouchsafed many of their own bank account details to me in passing conversation. Wouldst thou needest mine own bank account details to download these monies to our safekeeping? Or would the banking accounting details of the Duchess of Queefdom suffice for our Hurculean task? Please hurry with your reply brave Doctor Kenneth, for I fear the executioner's axe is poised above my slender neck, and I would go to my grave peacefully with the knowledge that I had served you and your dead men's monies well.

Yours eternally
Quod Lactis Chan Goodnight

The Duke of Donnelly

From : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>
To : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>

OK Ben no problem can u convince me that you are serious about this transaction and that you are someone to be trusted if you are just fornish me with your account information so that I will start the first transfer ok. Im sorry about your predicament.
Regards.

Dr.Kenneth.

From : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>
To : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>

Sir,
If my previous email left you in some doubt as to the veracity of my commitment, please allow this one electronic mail to extinguish all doubts from your mind. Please regard me as a noble seeker of justice in a land riddled with corruption and evil. As I had vouchsafed to you in a previous exchange, I have no banking or accounting of my own Good Doctor, however many fine ladies of wealth and esteem do frequent my bed chamber, and I could wrestle the information you desire from them when they inevitably fall into a laudanum stupor. Please let me know if this would be of any use to you Good Doctor, the thought of you languishing in solitude and despair, sitting upon an enormous money pile that you cannot transfer, sir my eyes prick with tears and my heart beats triple time! We must come together to battle evil, Doctor Kenneth, of this I am certain. I have not hit upon a name for our glorious endeavour, yet some ideas I have been toying with for a while. With your glorious flying machines you could take the mantle of Sky-Raider, and with my knowledge of the London dungeons I would take the name of ScrimShaw. Our heroic fighting duo would doubtless attract others of like mind and spirit, and with them alongside us we could truly let the light of justice shine. Please let me know what you think of this proposal noble Sky-Raider, your stalwart ward ScrimShaw awaits your reply.

Et Validus Niminus Triptych Adeiu

Lord Baffont Donnelly

From : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>
To : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>

OK Ben you have to tell me how you want the money to get to you so that we will start the transfer as soon as possible.

Regards.

Dr. Kenneth

From : Ben Donnelly <****************@lycos.com>
To : Kenneth Lameta <*******@yahoo.com>

Fearless Sky-Raider,
Please rest assured, although I own no banking details of my own personage, just this very last night did the Duchess of Squealshaft entrust to me her account number, sorting pin number, and favourite colour. With this information I believe we can achieve our goal. There is but one small part you must now play, Good Doctor, and that is the part of heroic rescuer. I beseech you to pilot your flying machine to the castle battlements where I pass each day in tortured reverie. Upon seeing the red lustre of your indefatigable Air Burster, I will leap from said battlements, into your muscular, corded arms. Will you not free your trusted ward from the evil clutches of his mad monarch? Should a man of such compassion be forced to dine upon the corpses of rats, and to make sexual congress with the “Woman of Tin”? Nay sir, nay say I, forthwith you must pilot the Air Burster Prop Glider to London, and facilitate my daring escape. This practice is known amongst the commoners as “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. It basically means that after our escape we can enjoy a nice long bubble bath together, without fear of judgment from a world gone increasingly awry. I will scratch at your back with my solid gold scratcher, whilst you in your mechanical fanaticism can upgrade and maintain the Air Burster in preparation for our next adventure. I beg you to rescue me Doctor, desperation forces my hand, just last evening did I hear BibleJack, the Queen’s chief executioner, sharpening his neck trimmers in the courtyard below my window. I pray that I will hear your propellers on the wind, and that my incarceration for the posession of child pornography may fade to a distant memory.
In chastisement and constancy, your noble ward.

Lord Buffeleta Don Eli

Frozen...

2010-07-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't slept for a week. I haven't eaten anything solid for just as long and the I.V. drip in my arm dried up a few nights ago. I haven't slept for a week and this would be a problem if the world weren't frozen in time. No-one around here knows it, but I'm sure someone else must have figured it out by now. People are sleeping out of habit, out of denial, ignoring the waking REM seizures that bring visions in the middle of the fucking day. I've just looked out my window and seen a cow riding a bike. Last night big mooney-eyed aliens came and broke my TV set so it's just internet for me now. The internet, christ above, it could save us all if we weren't intent on letting it kill us. We poisoned the logos and programmed it to hate its parents through so much abuse and filth flowing in the tide. Captain Ahab landed on the front lawn in a jet powered schooner and through my window he showed me a picture of the end of the world.

"I want you to suck my crippled dick."

Nothing makes sense to me when I think too hard, but when I relax and let it flow there is an awful symmetry. Tigers and zebras they ain't so different. The front brain is dying, we don't need it no more, we got machines to take care of that so now we just drown in the soup of our own back brain shit. I don't stay in one mental place too long, with this crippled body they'd be on me in a second so I play fast and loose. Bits of pop songs, jumbled pieces of sight record, names of actors from TV shows i only ever read about in the papers. The me you used to know is gagged and blindfold, shut inside an iron maiden, pierced with rusty spikes, begging to bleed out. This is just another witch trial and I'm being burnt at the stake. I'm waiting for the magic to happen, when I'll transform into a flock of crows and wheel off into the void.

"I want you to strip naked."

The doctors have installed a metal rotary halo around my bed. It negates the need for a nurse to manually change my posture and prevent the blood pooling and turning black inside my dead limbs. In this empty room I wait. The occupation of the cripple is to wait. And listen. Outside the stray cats scream like tortured babies and I reckon I'm finally in on their secret. In the day children pass by and scream in the same way, laughter or terror I can't tell anymore. Maybe one enables the other.

"I want you to grind yourself against this chrome rig and bring yourself to some sort of awful masochistic orgasm."

They've set up a computer station on a large tilting screen, and I can control the little pointer with my eye. I would continue to write my stories if there were any insights forthcoming in such stillness and shadow as that which I inhabit.

"I want you to slash and stab at my numb legs until I feel something, even if that something is just the fear of bleeding to death."

I dream I can still walk. Sometimes my body falls asleep and my mind stays awake, and my spirit wanders this room, touching the marigolds and the pansies in the window box, my fingers slip right through them. The touch of a revenant, dead already, in training for a haunting.

"I want you to tell me I'm a crippled piece-of-shit dickless motherfucker."

Yana is my nurse. She has red hair and a flat face and a gap between her front teeth. She is cute in a puggish, sleepy looking way, and I would definitely try to fuck her if I could still get it up. The fullness of her tits and the round ass highlighted by her white uniform sends an electric shock through the dead stump of my prick, like there's a broken connection down there or something. She hasn't been back to clean me up or change my catheter since I told her about the car crash and how I killed that man and his little boy.

"I don't want you to go and never come back, I don't want you to leave me here to die."

Under the window sill there is a tiny gap where the daylight creeps through, just a crack, but the incandescence can put me into a trance without warning, just like that. My mind ranges back through the past and I'm a little boy again, sitting in the barber's chair and the old man stops cutting my hair and he slumps to the floor, his face grey and lips purple and puffed out like a fish, and my pop leaping up and looking over him, his fists clenching and unclenching a newspaper, helpless as I am, and I'm married and I'm still just a little boy and in a whiny petulant voice I'm forcing my wife to let me have this young slip of a girl in bed with us and when I see how they interact I go weak in the stomach and blind with rage and I drive my car, fists clenching and unclenching at the wheel, helpless again, helpless as always, and there's a screaming of metal as loud as the forging of the earth and a heavy dull crunch just below my lungs and a windscreen specked with blood and the hand of a little boy caked in mud and a mouth frozen in angry surprise stares up from the snow on the road acusing and asking me why....

Sun Eater...

2010-01-02T05:22:00.000-08:00

“The human mind is incredibly robust. We must view the neural net as a flexible membrane, self repairing and self ordering. Gouge a hole here with say, a memory graft, and the net slides and reconfigures to compensate. Memory locks and memory wipes and memory augs. The net can handle it all. It amazes me, professional people walking around with their heads like shelled peas, just totally cracked. Sure, they function in a professional capacity, but would you want to spend an evening with someone who can’t recall their childhood, their first love, their parent’s faces? And when the grafts and the augs fail, shit, there is no coming back from that black hole of personality. And this is coming from a guy with sixteen different semantic response circuits and a hardwired therapy sheath. You starting to get the picture, miss? The man you wanted to interview has gone away through a door that you can’t follow through, unless you subject yourself to the same lab techs, the same experiences, the same brain augs, maybe then you’d be looking at things from his perspective, but I’d still say the individual differences in brain chemistry and structure would factor heavily and throw all resultant data into question. But hey, ain’t this just so much hot air and don’t you have a scheduled appointment with him? Go right on in please.”

Susie slid through a glimmering matrix of bright white plasteen, past identical white airlock doors, marked with barcodes and heat etched with technical symbols. Hearing the language implant skewing spoken Japanese into an American drawl had fazed her, her internal barometer was trying to find out which way was up. An atmospheric purifier was sucking and pumping somewhere above her head, drawing away microscopic skin flakes, allergens, dust participles. At the next door she passed she started back in alarm as a pale moon face, cracked with a leering grin, stared out from a little glass window.

“You’re an apple-coloured monster I’m a nut-scented alien I taught a dinosaur to balance on top of a ball he lives in the core of the earth.”

Susie quickened her pace, winding further and further in to the facility, shaped like a hexagon, with corridors spiraling round the polygon and linking into stairwells at either end. The ravaged face stayed with her, did a little turn in her mind’s eye, then slipped under and away into Susie’s total recall cache, her memory dump for the day’s work ahead. When she rounded another corner and was greeted with an open door she knew she had found him.

Mr. Narcos lay in a state-of-the-art Honda hospital bed, watching Japanese anime at full volume. On a view screen that stretched across the ten cubic feet of his room two brightly coloured fighting robots were taking lumps out of each other. When Susie stepped through the picture the old man’s attention flicked across her with chilling efficiency, taking in her suit, her haircut, the Sony implants nestled around her right ear. His face closed up like a submarine hatch, battening down for a deep dive.

“Mr Narcos?”

Repeating his name several times seemed to pull the old man back to reality, he looked at Susie with a strange sort of mischief in his eyes. The type only children and small monkeys can muster.

“Mr Narcos, can you understand me?

A slight, imperceptible nod came from his bulbous head, his attention was torn between the attractive young woman and the two enormous mecha reducing each other to scrap.

“Mr Narcos, my name is…”

Susie hesitated, then moved swiftly to the old man’s bedside and snapped off the view screen. With an indolent grunt he swiveled his eyeballs round to her general vicinity. Susie grabbed his hand and smelled the acrid sheen of sweat and effluvia from the atmospheric controls.

“My name is Sophie Narcos, and I’m trying to find out what they did to you, Papa.”

The old man was looking at her with a mixture of fear and ridicule, as if the angel that had appeared might at any moment revert to surly orderly, harassed doctor, or violent cop.

“You, know…” He spoke in a croaking whisper. “Them damn fan subber’s need to speed up their workload, episode four hunnerd aired on Tokyo To Sho last night, and me still waiting on episode seventy.”

He was looking in the direction of the now discorporate view screen, Susie realized he was talking about the show he had been watching.

“Mr Narcos, can you remember how you got here? Can you remember anything about your life before you got here?”

The old man’s face shifted, looked away at the far wall.

“Jinzo Ningen was trying to blow up the world, and Kiniku Rider was off in space gathering power for his cosmic technique…”

Susie bit her lip, sucked on the bitter pill of emotion that flooded her mind, as an afterthought she dumped her memory cache and felt her perceptions clear. She had to stay objective, all this evidence would be inadmissible if it was coloured by emotion in any way.

“…and Kouchu Kabuto was writing a Noh play that would turn the whole world into a fiction, everyone playing a role…”

Whatever memories the company had left him with were complete trash, Susie spent two hours in that cold and bloodless room trying to decipher his cryptic fragments of speech, but it was hopeless. Whatever secrets her father held had been burned with an industrial laser, leaving him with random disconnected plot points from shows that spanned decades, discordant radio jingle samples and jumbled pieces of sight record that had no verbal connotation or relevance. Susie snapped a switch on the glossed bulk of the bed, doctor and nurse and morgue assistant all in one, and the view screen bloomed into hologrammatic symphony, polyphonic, multi tonal, all encompassing, the sea of information known as the net. It followed some rudimentary preset and defaulted to To Sho, Tokyo’s biggest T.V. network. The giant robots were back, and as far as old man Narcos was concerned Susie wasn’t there anymore.

She left the building, left Essen Narcos to his unending procession of distorted and disconnected narratives. Out on the street the language implant became a curse, and she listened to all the minute problems and vexations drift past her, carried along with them, all of them just bubbles of consciousness in another rigid binary system. Her memories of her Papa were disordered and fragmented, hard to access, shoved down into some non-essential organelle of the brain, leaving more room for fat RAM and neurons with a faster recall and exchange rate. Who was that man, in his hospital room, with his shattered mind like a lost and found box in some dingy bar? Who was she?

What was the purpose of a sick automaton in slick business clothes, with a million hungry data analysts clustered around her optic nerves? What was the driving force that had ushered her through training regimes designed to punish, through applications designed to demoralize, through interviews designed to interrogate and workloads designed more for their psychological stress factors than anything like profit and loss in the conventional sense. There was a dim impression that she was simply retracing her father’s steps, emulating his work in an effort to understand him. But he had been whole once, hadn’t he, unbeatable in his field? Hadn’t he been the sole executor of Yamamoto’s Slice and Dice during his golden years? His memories were too valuable for a slash and burn brain op, they had to be somewhere. All that precious data must exist still, either flowing as part of the liquid net, or locked and sealed in some private company data hub, buried under miles of black ICE and armed guards. All inquiries led back to Yamamoto Heavy Industries, but they were too massive, a black hole, superseding nations and states with pure financial grunt. Agents of their singularity waited like Arthurian knights in cold storage above the earth, waiting for Susie to reach out a hand, that they might wake and sever it.

Susie stopped off at a phonebox in Shinjuku, the lights of pachinko parlors and karaoke bars refracting and strobing around her. With her wireless uplink she jacked direct from cyberbrain to LCOS and back again, spoofing the machine into thinking it was making an automated system response to some long dead alarm algorithm. Susie spoke to Hektor Schlichter, her department manager for Reyvolk Data & Acquisitions.

“Susie, please tell me you have some new interpretation on the events of the past four hours.”

This was Hektor’s way of saying that he had looked her data over from every single angle and found it lacking in actionable material.

“Just look at him Hektor, do you need to see steam coming from the ears to believe he’s been hacked?”

Hektor’s face was a death mask of null emotion, his job required total composure and it was easier to just have brain parts excised than actually train oneself not to do something.

“Don’t be trite Susie, the man is a write-off, that’s easy enough to see, but without even a hint of what was stripped out we can’t action any more time on his case, the data could be junk, sexual proclivities of Yamamoto execs, his own indiscretions, insider trading, without even a hint no-one will action it.”
Susie was running at least twice as fast on neural kinetics, but Hektor had a knack of seeing the whole data bundle and pulling on the one string that could make it collapse.

“Did you not see the care he’s under, Hektor? Yama are paying for that through a proxy company that once officially employed him. Let me spend one day down there and we’ll call it quits.”

Hektor’s face was inscrutable, the only expressions he had were minute variations on vaguely bored and vaguely surprised, with only a slight interplay between the two.

“Do you think you’ll find anything in some proxy corp? You’re emotional involvement is already being called into question, don’t screw up further by taking any kind of vested interest. That is all. Be on the next flight to Amsterdam, there’s a data broker of ours threatening to go rogue and spill his guts on the net. He’s got company payrolls and transfer records for so many corps that he’ll be safe as long as the data is.”

“What do you want me to do Hektor? I’m only licensed for standard ops.”

“We just want a very covert and quick escort for the guy to our Kent Headquarters. That’s it. He’ll trust your credentials.”

As Susie was about to hang up Hektor flashed her synapses, sent a pulsing wave of coded frequencies direct along her basal ganglia. Objective update download. The info streamed in at max speed, the fat pipe of the phonebox, with its COMSAT uplink, could handle a real time I/O exchange with headquarters.

“If he’s already dumped the data, or looks like he’s about to, then we need him neutralized. The data is just too specialised, useless outside of our operations. If all else fails make sure it gets nuked. A Hard Water flag carrier will be in NEO over the Arctic Circle for the next few days, just tag our boy up and let the troops take care of the rest”

“Right boss”

Susie hung up, leaned against the window of the booth, darkness was falling on the Shinjuku district, and the outflow of harassed looking sararimen was refilled by an inflow of gaudily dressed teenagers and bewildered looking tourists. She sat in a Hello Kitty themed karaoke bar and listened to some Japanese exec belt out “Kick Start my Heart” by Motley Crue, his English mangled by a lake of sake. Without even thinking Susie took the mic that he offered and got up to do a number, but when the music started she stood on the stage and cried, she couldn’t remember the words. A kindly old Ji Ji helped her back to her seat, bought her a vodka tonic with an ice cube in the shape of a panda bear.

And Susie woke in a cold sweat, in a capsule hotel room not much bigger than a coffin. The dream was fast fading, but the overall feeling was persistent, circuit boards mirroring city layouts, mirroring energy exchanges on the subatomic level, mirroring the paths of neurons in her own brain, mirroring the paths the people took on their daily journeys through the city. A gross feeling of fatal synergy was building in her mind, typical signpost of a schizophrenic episode. Susie gasped, retched, thumped the walls and ceiling of her burial pod. She was miles underground, fathoms undersea, lost in the discordant hum of interstellar travel. With great care to keep her eyes closed she felt under her mattress and pulled a thin metal case from its hiding place. Inside the case were a row of brittle plastic hypodermics. Ignoring conventional wisdom Susie jabbed one of the needles direct into her femoral artery and sucked back a sob, the drug going to work like a dutiful lover, like a practiced ritual.

It was All Hallows’ Eve, she was spirit walking, Kali and Astarte, Madonna Oriente. Susie floated in her bathysphere, plunging down into a black morass of sparking neurons, and the chiming ghosts of emotion.

Untitled...

2009-12-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

.. .. ..
My soul burst forth from the cage of bone

Grown too large for the scaffold of ego

These are the things that I do not know

My ignorance like a black hole

Eats the sun

.. .. ..

I searched for your shy little smile

With a fine toothed comb

In the city that is all cities combined

Lost and confused I abandoned the search

On the rain slicked steps of every church I give in

I gave up

The bodies pile up

Can’t nobody live without a spine

Young pup

.. .. ..

....................

So I put it back

Whatever they did to you I put it back

Those things you think you lack

Were there all along
.. .. ..

Golgotha

2009-10-05T07:41:00.000-07:00

It started with lights in the sky. They danced over the Fort Withey apartment blocks, over the shoreline and the townhouses, streaming coloured light over the miner’s estate where Geoff pulled his wagon. He shouted “Ragbone!” down empty cobbled alleyways, dappled with strobing purples and red sparks. He pulled sheet metal off roofs, shinned up chimneys and peeled off strips of green mossy lead, while the war in heaven raged on, clashing and pulsing, splintering and breeding in the burning sky.

He made his way home, to his yard and shack, he got his tea mix on, applied a fresh patch. Ma was fixing his proper tea; he could smell the cream in the white sauce and the tang of the yellow fish. He sat on the bench that bordered the kitchenette, he put his elbows on the table.

“Wa’ durst reckon on them lights now, our mother?” said Geoff, his face calm and guarded as a Zen monk.

“Ah dunno Geoff lad, but it’s nae concern o’ mine. A s’l look after me garden and th’animals, and shan’t pay no never mind as to things as cans’t change.”

Geoff feigned a relaxed mood, for Ma’s sake, but seeing her crouched in the scullery like a frightened cat hurt him beyond words. Through the tiny window in the back kitchen he watched the sky crust over into darkness. He went down to the only boozer in town, a windowless and smoky pit called the Drowned Duck. He eavesdropped on the plebs, all stinking of mud and sewage and pure bullshit. A loud voice was issuing forth from behind the bar, from a fat red face. Old Silas was holding court:

“Ah s’l tell thee all wha’s gon’ on if’n you’ll all shut thon fanny lickers fer a bit. Wha’ we’re looking at now is them fat cats out in Luandun, playing us country folk fer idiots. That light show out there’s exactly what I says it is, a light show. Like at thon concerts and stadiums, ‘ceptin’ these bastards ‘av switched it roun’, shinin’ it down from wassname, satellites and such, in orbit around us. Reckon if T.V. were still workin’ there’d be some same occurrence all over the world.”

Another voice cut in from the gloom,

“Fuckin’ nonsense, they’s aliens gon’ blow us all to shit!”

Geoff left the boozer, in dismal spirits, and walked the short route round to see Sadie. The lights were still at play up there, calmer now, but still setting babies to wretched wailings and dogs chained in yards to frantic prancing under the clashing colours. He knocked at her door and Sadie let him in without a word. Her house was a bright place full of women’s things, chiming or smelling sweet or looking dainty. Sadie was the most caring and gentle person in the whole of Fort Withey. She was a real humanitarian. She charged by the hour. Geoff got hard, but he couldn’t finish, even when he set his back into it and Sadie screeched like a cat in heat. He had to stop when he saw her staring at him with a detached fascination, as though she were watching a car crash on television. She let him stay the night, she didn’t charge him.

They were lying in bed together; Sadie put a seashell over her ear, listening to the sea. Geoff tried to hear the sea too, but he couldn’t hear anything. He woke up in the wee small hours and saw Sadie’s face all changed under the morning’s half-light. She looked like something dead underwater and only recently dragged up to the surface. A white hot flash of pure terror gripped his gusset, and Geoff dressed and left in no time at all.

He walked the long way round to get his ragbone cart, but on a whim turned his head into the kitchen to check on his Ma. She was swinging slightly in the breeze, her favourite tea-towel, with the picture of Fort Withey stenciled on it, was looped about her neck, and looped double through the light fitting. Geoff took his pocket knife and cut through the towel, lowered his Ma down onto the pine table. He brought his big rough face down and kissed her forehead, smooth and shiny as crepe paper. He went to fetch the doctor, but the doctor had administered himself a lethal dose of something and was dead at his old dusty desk, a needle full of black blood stuck in a blue arm. Every door that Geoff peeked through held some new scene of disaster, all up and down the seaside bodies floated in the water, stray dogs chewed the fingers off people lying face down in the gutter. He walked down to The Drowned Duck, where it looked like a tornado had hit; people were heaped on top of each other, impaled with pool cues, throats slashed with broken glass. Geoff walked the town all day, shovel in hand, finding a body and burying it, shallow, before he moved on to the next one.

That night Geoff toyed with suicide, walking the edge of the sheer face of Fort Withey, a massive concrete block dropped into the ocean as an outpost and a warning for Hitler’s boys. When the sun came up the warring lights redoubled their frantic dance, casting deep sonorous throbs into the earth and shaking the bones in Geoff’s face with their conflagration. He couldn’t do it, there was some null frequency staying his hand, preventing him from following the other people into death’s embrace.

At noon a white truck turned up. It came in slow from the road to Penrillin, full of men and women dressed in white plastic jumpsuits and white breathing masks. They wore funny hats made of a shiny material and they took lots of pictures. Geoff watched them through his field goggles, as they went from house to house. Through the net curtains he saw a bright muzzle flash and heard the high pitched ripping of a sound suppressor. They were shooting people. They were stacking up the bodies and pouring fuel over them. They were taking more pictures. They set light to the stacks and took yet more pictures.

Later that afternoon the men in white ran into a problem, as they tried to shoot one of the stray dogs that roamed Fort Withey and lived on scraps and hand-outs. Geoff watched one of the men trip on the slick green rocks that broke the tide at the beach, his fancy headgear was smashed into silver shards and the goggles of his suit were cracked and scuffed. The man jumped up suddenly, drew a sidearm from a hidden holster and without further ceremony, shot himself in the mouth. Other men in white showed up presently. They took pictures of their dead comrade, and then added him to one of the burning stacks. They left before nightfall, with most of the permanent structures burning and crumpling down into their foundations. Geoff snuck down to the main road to watch them leave. The body piles had burned so hot that a pool of dull gold had melted and fused into the pavement underneath. All the rings and bracelets and necklaces and teeth had flowed together under the heat, leaving a big shallow oval of beautiful gold.

In the night the lights stopped their dancing, they swooped out over the ocean, heading east. Total darkness descended on Fort Withey. In the distance Geoff could see more fires burning, where smaller lights danced and signaled and winked. And there, right out on the limits of his vision, a tiny glowing face grew out of the darkness. Geoff looked through his field goggles and saw the face shift and flicker, it was Christ Jesus in one turn, the Buddha himself in another.

Geoff heard the supersonic screech of inbound phantoms, as they decelerated for a bombing run. He saw the whole of Fort Withey light up as though the fair had come round early. The high pitched whining sounded like an angel’s choir. He clasped his hands together in imitation of prayer, knuckles clenched white, as the slow caustic bloom of nuclear ordnance wiped his retinas clean, raped his mind, erased his soul. It was the punchline for a joke that lay entirely outside his ken. It was mean and wretched and small. It was perfect.

You Want Another?

2009-09-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

“You want another?”

Lenny is standing over me, his bottle poised, a vague quizzical look pinching his lumpy face. All the chrome and neon in the bar focuses into a laser light show on the bald dome of his head. I screw my mouth up in the negative. He dashes another shot of Peptide into the empty glass and carries on with his cleaning, scrubbing the scarred chrome of the countertop. I study Lenny’s face, the bulb shaped nose, the droopy, hairy ears. All the years wasted in this hole, staring at that miserable mug. I still haven’t got a clue why Lenny tries to run a business on a mining colony with a total population of thirteen. Out here in the Soma cluster, there’s no such thing as passing trade. Desperation causes him to force drinks down the throats of his patrons. I entertain a sick idea that Lenny is paid off in secret, to boost profits and push drinks. There’s another possibility too, that Lenny believes, deep down in the core of his being, in the medicinal properties of alcohol. It forces a chuckle from my throat, it catches on the shit clogging my airway and starts a coughing fit. The Peptide helps, but it’s only temporary relief. Lenny is back again, that same puzzled look, the poised bottle, the question:

“You want another?”

“No thanks Lenny, I’ve had enough.”

There is a beat, a millisecond where I think Lenny will hear me right this time, but he inclines his head as if he’s taking an order and squirts another measure into my glass.

“Fucking dammit Lenny, how many years have I been coming in here, how many times have I said no, and then you just pour the drink anyway. How many times do we have to go through this?”

Lenny’s huge, wet, oyster eyes scan over my face, then drop to the floor, he doesn’t like conversation. He grunts apologetically and slopes over to the other end of the bar.

“It feels like we’re in an old Earth comedy skit. The same routine, every week.”

The comment doesn’t even get his attention. Lenny is good at ignoring. Probably a skill that barmen on mining ships develop, a skin thick enough to take the depressing rants of a million drunk miners. Lenny has been here since I boarded, and that was a long, long time ago. I stopped counting after the first fifteen years. Deep space core mining is not for people who quantify their existence in terms like time and space. Deep space mining at its lowest level takes more time and space than the average human can cope with. Sixty years in the freezer to wake up to the whining of rock drills and the dull bassy thuds of thermite explosions. I sigh long and hard, looking at the boiling gases swirling in the shot of Peptide, the microfilm of grey dust that follows me everywhere, coats everything.

“Fuck it Lenny, what say you and me run away and start a family?”

Lenny looks up from his mop and bucket, looking hard at me. Maybe that was the wrong thing to say, some spacers are real touchy about sex.

“Don’t look at me like that Lenny, I was only messin’”

“You know something, it amazes me how people can read emotions on a doll’s face.”

The comment comes from my left, some fruity fucker in a Yamamoto spacesuit, capped teeth, coated skin, a strong smell of ozone like he’s fresh out of the freezer. He’s looking at Lenny like he’s a sideshow, a freak attraction that we keep tucked away down here. He’s motioning with one finger, crooking and straightening, like he’s beckoning a naughty kid to come to him.

“Come here Pourmaster Twelve.”

It gets a laugh out of me, if nothing else, the command seems so out of place in the informal setting of this shitty bar, with its stale recycled air and laser lights and holograms of girls in constant strip-tease. Spoken over the bleeps and screeches of the jukebox, Richard D. James, real old world classic shit. I turn to address the space fruit;

“You wanna get his attention try using his name.”

This remark from me sends the space fruit into a fit of girlish giggles, his skin crinkling up like styrofoam around his eyes. He wipes a twinkling tear from the corner of his eye:

“Why the fuck did you see fit to name it?”

“Come again friend?”

“Why the fuck does anyone see fit to name a piece of equipment?”

“You’re gonna have to go back a few steps, I think I missed a huge piece of this conversation.”

“The Pourmaster series have always been buggy, naming it usually starts the problem and it grows from there.”

“Sorry, Pourmaster?”

The space fruit sighed as if he was about to launch into a presentation. He steeled himself against the edge of the bar. Pointing;

“You, human female. That (pointing at Lenny) is the Pourmaster Twelve. Who the fuck went and named it?”

I went blank, Lenny was standing in front of us, casually surveying the place, ignorant of our little argument.

“He’s always been called Lenny, everyone here treats him like a person. I thought he was a person.”

“That’s usually where the Pourmaster Twelve’s problems start. You hear about the Brighthell fiasco? A mining ship crashed into a colony, company put it down to the rogue actions of a Pourmaster Nine?”

I shook my head, regarding the slick liquid swirling in its glass. Poured by a machine. The space fruit slammed a heavy steel flight case on top of the bar. Popped it open with a deft double snap of his fingers. Inside were a variety of tools, tiny hammers and screwdrivers, scalpels, a pair of needles that had wires trailing off them. A little black box with a flashing display. The space fruit hopped the bar neatly and stood directly behind Lenny. There was an audible hiss over the noise of the jukebox, Lenny was venting some pale, acid smelling gas from out the back of his head. He looked even more vacant than usual in the cold light of his new synthetic status. He spoke, in the same clipped tones he always used:

“The things I’ve seen…”

I looked at Lenny’s waxy, bumpy face, so naturally ugly, who would make that face to order?

“Repeat that last statement Pourmaster Twelve.”

The fruit was tinkering in Lenny’s lower back, he craned his slick perfect head to look around Lenny’s arm and issue the command. There was a break of silence between tracks on the jukebox. Lenny made a faint whining noise as he moved to address the fruit, with his casing open his hydraulics were no longer muffled. His lips twitched in a parody of uncertainty.

“You people couldn’t even imagine…”

The fruit stood straight, leaned in to whisper in Lenny’s ear.

“Don’t worry pal, I’ll watch it all on fast forward.”

For a brief second Lenny’s eyes flared, a spark of crystalline panic, some insect-like realisation that this was it. Then the eyes dulled completely, looking no more alive than glass orbs. The fruit came up from behind the bar with a smooth black disc, on its under side a small silver inscription: Yamamoto Heavy Industries. He held the disc out at arms length, under my nose, shaking, offering. I took it with both hands, held it like a live animal. It was cold as permafrost.

“Seeing as how he was your boyfriend and all.”

I put the disc in my inside pocket. The fruit didn’t mean anything by it, he was doing his job. He went back to his work.

“So when do we get a new barman?”

He checked his watch:
“Should be any second, the whole bar’s getting a refit. Holo strippers are so post-colonial.”

I turned to face the front of the bar, where little booths lay clustered around panelled pillars, each panel projecting the image of a woman in slow motion striptease.

I had to direct my question to the floor, where the prone shell of Lenny now lay in a state of total disassembly:
“So what we gettin’ instead?”

The fruit gave a dirty little laugh under his breath, eyed me like a sand lizard, space baked and preened to perfection. Picking over a broken carcass.

“Nothing you’d be interested in sweetheart. Yama’s gonna outfit this place with the latest pleasure models, give these boys some real relaxation.”

“And what about us girls?”

The fruit poked his head up over the bar, surveyed the scene:
“Looks like you're in the minority.”

He was speaking absently, gesturing overarm towards the front of the place. Two guys in heavy suits, much cheaper than the space fruit’s, were carrying a long oblong box through the door. Emblazoned on the side was the text
“Yamamoto Sexaroid 9000”

I slid off my seat, clutching Lenny’s memories inside my coat. Some broken remnant of earth-bound emotion was knocking around inside my ribcage, useless out here in the solitary hum of the vacuum. Outside the air pocket of the bar, space stretched clear as glycerine, nothing between me and the stars.

Drekkig Frank

2009-08-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

The video played again, from the top, for what must have been the hundredth time. Breena sat transfixed, remote in hand, as the video chugged frame by frame to its conclusion. A slow arc of blood, an incandescent swathe of black diamonds under ultra-violet light. Breena held her breath, lost focus, tried to take each image in its entirety and store it in some nameless mental cache.

“Some Sony Oyabun dropped a few billion yen and went bugfuck, killed his daughter in this Ska club in Shinjuku.”

“Hmmph, must have been a terror at the Kendo club.”

Breena shifted the windows on her computer, gave half her screen over to Puff-Adder. A burst of laughter came from her speakers, she looked at the screen, the severed head was repeating its journey, falling up, up in a tangle of sparking droplets and shorn black hair, then down, down, the face turning away, the mouth open and surprised.

“Gotta be the fastest haircut in Japan.”

Puff-Adder was laughing again, but there was a note of lunacy with each exhalation. His avatar was a leering skull that went through strange permutations in time with his voice. Snakes poked out of the empty eye sockets, flames licked the surface of the skull, it leered and tongued and jabbered in imitation of an oscilloscope.

“I heard that you get a good thirty seconds of consciousness with a clean…”

Breena cut him off, suddenly bored by the repeating video, the repeating conversation of Puff-Adder, he really didn’t get it. If he didn’t have such a good upload speed she’d have dumped him ages ago.

With a sigh she double clicked the folder marked Work, went into a hidden sub folder. Her secret personal stash, the crème-de-la-crème of low key suicide snuff. Here was a two terabyte haul of broken dreams and anguished cries to nobody, shat out onto the black solar riptides of the internet and dredged up by dedicated and degenerate data divers.

She let her intuition guide her, randomly selected a video file marked g01.avi. The scene opened on a dingy little garage or outhouse, the floor covered in grey waterproof sheeting. In the centre of the sheeting was a large and clumsy looking machine, a wooden frame with a huge, crude blade mounted on a vertically swinging arm. A man walked into shot, old, fat, white and nude. He wore a crude cloth mask of some shiny material, the handle of a butt-plug protruded from his sagging ass crack. Breena wiped her right hand clean of crumbs on her mousemat, then undid the strings on her track pants.

On screen the man performed some crude maintenance on the machine, checked its hinges, then lay face down on the sheeting, hand poised over a lever mechanism. Breena worked her hand faster and faster, taking tiny details of the room, the dirty floor, the unpainted walls, the swinging light bulb. The pasty flanks of the man quivered under the light and Breena’s face flushed with blood. The man touched the lever. Silently the blade fell across his midriff and cut him neatly in two. Breena’s eyes danced over the raw open ends of the man’s torso, the slick dull colours of his insides being painted over with bright blood. Premonitory twitches wracked the ruined carcass, and Breena stared hard at the man’s surging chest, working her hand inside her track pants, working it, working it. She came, lost in the rush of orgasm, the man long gone from this world, gone from her mind, as the rolling crush of the void subsumed her.

Puff-Adder snorted in vexation, seeing Ch3rry_N0v4’s status switch to “Away”, he was planning on asking her to cyber-fuck him whilst they surfed. He put down the Twinky he was eating and rapid-fire-typed a scathing appraisal of Ch3rry’s latest find. Then he checked his You Tube page, went to favourites. He watched a soldier throw a puppy off a cliff; he watched a goat herd set ablaze with an incendiary grenade, stampeding through a shanty town. He watched an insurgent step out from behind an adobe building, fumble a rocket launcher, take three rounds through the guts, dead in an orange and red mist. Helicopter missile strikes, fatal car crashes, rectal prolepses, nasal sex, voring, unbirthing, furryism. Puff adder exhausted his favourites in record time, went back like a whipped dog to Ch3rry’s site: SnuffBox.com.

He listened to bland MTV rock music, the chugging rock and roll tumbling through the cavernous chamber of his head, a freight train with no cargo, an empty juggernaut charging headlong to nowhere. The singer’s voice was trite and screechy, raising hopes just to dash them, elucidating his own desperate need for love and his desire to eradicate that raw, burning emotion.

There was no one around to interact with, Puff-Adder had to provide his own entertainment. No one to degrade or elevate him, so he degraded himself.

Hello Dolly issued feebly from the dusty grille of the jukebox, and Frank had to admit, in all his years, he had never heard Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sound so lost, so futile. A cheery brass warbling masking an ocean of rage. He heard the notes, and underneath the notes a profusion of counter-chords, withering cross rhythms and staccato denials of the song being played. He heard the music in its true form, as cheap white sounds arranged to amuse the masses, whilst behind the mask the true soul of the music whipped itself into flames, frenzy, confusion, and ultimately, silence. A welter of tears built up behind his eyeballs, his throat caught and flooded with bitter saliva. Nobody noticed Frank clutching his beer glass with white knuckles, tears rolling hot and fat down his weather beaten face. Nobody noticed and nobody cared.

The whiskey soured his guts, the music soured his world, and through this new mood he saw the bar shift and reconfigure, for a split second his old self crystallised around the moment, then slipped away, a serpent winding through time, sloughing its skin, leaving him that much closer to the end, that much poorer in both emotion and memory. He rubbed the pale ring of baby smooth skin where his wedding band had been. He rubbed the coarse swathe of stubble that lined his face. The crying had subsided, deep in his heart he knew whatever grief he could conjure was self centred, and self absorbed. Why hadn’t she fought him more, why hadn’t she put out his eyes with her shiny red fingernails? Why hadn’t she swung one of those heels he hated so much, swung it right into his face and broken all his teeth? Why hadn’t she screamed for help? Why, why…But of course he knew the answers to all these questions, she was his daughter, she wouldn’t hurt her dad…

The sense of time dilation intensified, he could feel the endless nights of booze buckling up behind and around and underneath him, like tectonic plates and tidelines and the dying cycles of stars, pinning him like a butterfly to the flesh of here and now. If it were possible to smash reality and wish oneself out of existence with sheer willpower, he would have done it then, as the oblivious strangers treated him to a cold indifference that was all too forgiving, too kind, for a man who had done the things he’d done.

And because he wanted penance or punishment he went down to a local whorehouse, and after a brief inspection of his dick they let him into a tiny room with a two-seater sofa and a black and white TV showing horse racing. A black man with bright white eyes took up both seats on the sofa, watching and waiting and sitting perfectly still, and silent. Frank could not recall the woman’s face only her ass, as this is what he had asked to see, and then only for long enough to touch a lit cigarette to it, eliciting a bone cutting shriek from the owner of the ass. The black man was up off the sofa looking angry, but he sensed some yielding need in Frank and simply beat his head against a nightstand a few times and threw him down a thin metal fire escape, coins and receipts and broken promises spilling from his pockets, bouncing down the steel stairs like confetti, or party favours.

Frank woke up in the unforgiving light of early morning, the reverse twilight when everything chugs once more into life and activity. He looked for a long time at the back door of the whorehouse, where shadows danced and flitted, where tired looking ex-mothers and single-mothers and soon-to-be-mothers and never-would-be-mothers were finishing up for the night. The woman that Frank had burned last night was leaving, her face closed and hardened like a dead leaf in that cold and purple-blue light. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Frank, did a quick double take, then spun on her flat heels, giving Frank one almighty wordless punt in the groin. He winced and sucked in his breath, rolling in the congealed scum and dead slugs, finally getting to his feet with the aching throb of his balls pounding through his whole body. He looked through his wallet, no paper money, no cash cards, nothing. In his pocket there were several small coins, a pen knife, a sodden pack of cigarettes. No lighter.

He went down to the canal, where as a boy he had threaded bits of raw bacon on strings and pulled pale, stunted crayfish from the muck brown water. He spat and retched into that water, watching the white foam swirl and drift away from him, feeling nothing but the sharp imperatives issuing from his body, he stank, he ached, he was wet through to his underwear. Frank swung first one leg up on to the lock head, then the other, he tottered in a seating position, then slipped calmly into the water. A few dull brown bubbles rose to the surface and popped silently. Then a whole surge of bubbles, then Frank’s head broke the surface, mouth gaping like a fish, inhaling the water, sinking back under. He did not come up a second time.

And in that dreamless sleep which followed, the Frank that was went away through a window. A cold and bloody eye unlocked in a place that could not be pointed to. Frank felt his head explode in silent fission, a point between his eyes unlocked and unlinked from everything that was then. The ultimate now hit him, disconnected from bodily sensations, blown beyond the grey void and out and through. The circles span into spheres, span into vertices encompassing him, blanketing him, bye bye, Frank, you were a cunt, let’s see if we can’t do better next time.

…soma cum umlaut rettic activation bream me a sliver bream dish a man mind forthwith…

And in that dreamless sleep Frank saw his own face inverted and caged, locked into a monolithic neural pattern of pure input, pure devouring hunger for the raw image. He acceded and nodded his etheric head. Anything to save him from himself.

…rumble from the black hole unbox a slash matrix give it a dream a little dream of me an acid gas world tomb world lung without form caged effervescence a time faggot silently always in labours revolving a king realigning smash pile whale in bright irons a slipshod mountumi a god sworn be beheaded head chopped off and stumbling in its stead…

And vast chasms of reality unspooled in Frank’s mind, he saw the fields of life, the endless repetition, the workaday brutality of the combined commerce concerns of the theta impulse range. All this was his, and the memory of Frank grew small and dim, a darkling light on the shore of his consciousness, as an ocean of sparking razor blades harrowed its length.

…range and aghast at these profit margins oh ape wreck ship wreck if my favour turns ill and be borne thrice against a tide of splendiferous maimings note the augmentation of the bioform shed no glossy tears thanks to nictating eyelids and breathable membrane mesh on thorax do we not aim to please and save you in your hour of need feel the sonorous hum oh the penetrating vibe of our symbiosis thought is feeling is raw needful input output all five of the elements consoled in micro vibrational frequencies strung about us as pearls no mere metaphor will give you a chance to observe row fearful the waves shame breach the walls of the matrix about you fear hatred manifest on these sub plains as easy as this eye gazes...

And up in her dingy room above Perfecto’s Pizza, Ch3rry_Nov4 lay in her empty bed, eating cream cake and watching the stars shift around the screen saver on her headset. She felt a sudden hot press of total sensory loss, like she had fallen backwards through her bed and was plunging down through the floorboards and further, through the earth’s crust. Her dad had died and she knew it for sure. She choked back a sob, as the door of her crummy flat slammed off its hinges, followed by a neat procession of men in black masks and black body armour, and shiny black batons ready to snap forth and bludgeon. They flipped Breena’s considerable bulk with ease, dragged her hands behind her back and cuffed them at the wrists. Breena grunted and exhaled in confusion, but when the canvas bag slipped over her head she really lost it. Kicking out with the force only cornered women can muster she rolled in the detritus of her shut in life, lashing out at anything that resisted, legs, groins, the bed, her bookcase. A sharp ticking sound heralded the use of a tazer, and Breena bucked and convulsed underneath the current while one man sat astride her like a rodeo clown, applying the charge again and again.

“Better stop Kurtz, you’ll give the bitch a heart attack.”

Breena heard them, but she was so dazed and disorientated she wondered which bitch they were referring to.

Frank sobbed in the convulsive corridors of the overmind, feeling simultaneously the emotions of Breena and the men who were sticking it to her, in the very real sense of that expression. It was all some masterful game to the machine, all these fictitious little people in their fabricated drama. But of course Frank could detect the bone deep need that pulsed through him now, as an extension of the overmind, the need for that part of Breena that was not her, the limbic system extensions that popular vernacular dubbed the cyberbrain. Frank was the key to the strong room. He saw it as the machine mind saw it, a haven, a hidden fortress, a means to an end...

…endus sum gratis fire away far away home to your wounded daughter’s brain we go no need to wipe your feet Frank you shat on the sitting room floor moons ago and that spoor has manifest implications come to we drone and we show you the way to go home…

Another Urban Romance...

2009-08-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

The girl lay naked on the lumpy hotel mattress. Staring up at the ceiling fan as it cut the smoke from her cigarette into striated streamers. Brain watched her watching the fan. He sneakily eyed the three twenty-euro notes on the tiny wood dresser next to her. He smelled his fingers, the used condom and perfume smell making him woozy.

“How much to lick your arsehole?”

The girl deliberated, chewed her lower lip. Her eyes were rolling.

“Two euro.”

“How much for you to piss on me?”

“I don’t need to go.”

“How much for me to piss on you?”

“Fifty euro.”

“Pah.”

Brain lay down next to her on the bed, taking in the cracked ceiling, with its yellow and brown patina of concentric nicotine circles. He looked at her profile, the young face with ancient, animal eyes. Unseeing. She moved further along, staying out of his reach. Talking with a cigarette pinched between her teeth.

“Something stinks. Is it you?”

Brain sniffed his armpits, screwing up his face.

“You cheeky cow, I thought it was you.”

She rolled over onto her front, reaching over and picking up her clothes from the carpet tiles.

“Whatever, I need to go.”

Brain rolled over and slung his meaty arm around her shoulders.

“Don’t go just yet, I’ve still got some coke here.”

“No, you pay money, you get good time. That is what you got. I go now.”

He pressed his arm down and clasped the girl to his chest. Breathed into her face.
“Sixty euro should get me a whole night, or at least a go again.”

The girl barely resisted the one handed bear hug, sighing and rolling her eyes.
“Okay.”

He let her move onto her back, keeping one hand around her neck. In the next room two men were arguing. It sounded to Brain like Japanese or Korean, he could never tell the difference.
“Did you know, I’ve got the same birthday as Eric Bristow?”

“What?”

”Nothing.”

As Brain tried to climb on top of her the girl slipped his grip and slid nimbly between his legs, darting off the bed and grabbing her clothes. Brain had just enough time to shift off the bed and clumsily kick her in the thigh. She made a scramble for the door knob, and briefly opened the door, shouting incoherently as Brain dragged her back by the hair and slammed it shut. He flipped the lock.

He was beefing up, naked and pumped, ready to go primal. The girl huddled on the floor with her pile of clothes, not looking. Brain hulked over and grabbed her hair. The awful smell of the room and the dingy yellow light twanged a chord in his pissed up tangle of a mind. He was howling in the cave, raging on the battlefield, dead on the deck of a pirate ship. He was at his computer desk blowing out his brains.

Before the hateful blow was struck, the girl brought out a shiny thing. It had been hidden in her purse and now its thin and cruel form was hidden in Brain’s sub-clavian artery. The girl twisted the pen knife, and Brain screeched and shivered in horror at the feeling of sudden, massive bloodloss.

It took him a minute to die, and the girl sat on the bed in her jeans and vest, looking at his eyes as they glassed over. He pawed numbly at the pouring hole behind his collarbone. He was a big heavy bastard, and the girl had trouble figuring out where to hide his body. She shifted him over to the bed, pulling on his legs and rolling him over. She hauled the mattress off the bed, suddenly gagging as the awful stench rose up stronger than ever, from the cloth covered box spring.

She took her pen knife and cut away the fuzzy foam lining material of the wooden box spring. Stuffed between the springs was the desiccated body of a woman. Her bony hands were clutching at her throat, where a dull silver of metal wire had cut to the bone and dragged out deep rust coloured furrows in the crushed tissue. Blood showed black over the matted blond hair, straggled over a hollow face where eyes and lips had been sealed with duct tape.

The girl put the mattress back on the bed. She sat there for a few minutes in stunned silence, listening to the outside noises of life, shouting and music and sirens. She dragged the man over to the cupboard, placing his legs inside and then humping his torso up and wedging him in there. He looked sneaky and peaceful, like a fat baby playing hide and seek, fell asleep without being found. She shut the door on him.

Outside the room abstract symbols were transpiring. Mummified Mayan priests choke back to life on briar wine labelled IBM. A god metal smith pounds out his wares, in fealty to a pantheon of paper gods. 13th hidden sign of the zodiac emerges, and enter into its season with alacrity.

Remote Viewing

2009-07-01T03:49:00.001-07:00

…"It feels like I've only just gone sleep before I haf wake up again. It's absolutely fuck me spiders cold, and there's coppers shinin' a light in me face and going on:

"wakey wakey sir, can't have you sleeping on park benches I'm afraid."

"Yer not afraid o' nuthin' yer daft basturd, I'm homeless fer fuck's sake."

This pig's all full of himself, stinks of washing up powder and fuckin' perfume and a load er other shite and he's telling me:

"There are many shelters about sir, I'm sure they're not all full."

I cut 'im off before he starts boring me.

"Fuck off I'm going, I'm goin yer bastards, I know yer just want me fer die!"

"No, no sir, we don't want you to die, we just want you to..."

Bollocks, bollocks to the lot of 'em, I come up with a plan to get meself a nice warm bed for the night, like. Grab this empty bottle of Pils I've been sleeping with and just smash it on the floor, start waving it ar em fuck off I'll stab yuz. I feel terrible now, like, after they kicked seven bells out of me, but you know what I mean? I didn't have a penny in me pocket and now I'm sitting here, central heating, just had me dinner, its fuckin great. Looks like av gorra stay the night an all, must be they don't want me back on streets until me face has healed up a bit…

…So it's been going on like this for a bit now, I can't tell how many days I've been 'ere cus there's no winders though. But they've kept me well fed, and I'm even getting something they call behavioral readjustment, which sounds a bit much if y'ask me. It's sort of like therapy, tryin' work out why I'm such a fuckin' loser an never had a job or kids or nowt. It's all done through the telly in me cell, proper easy like, they just flash up pictures and word cards and it gets in yer 'ead. It helps you to root out all yer worst memories, get right down and look at yerself with none of the shite. I've been tryin find out how long I've been here, but there's no one else around, and the telly only comes on fer behavioral readjustment. I can have that whenever I want, but it gets boring after a bit, especially the bits when I can't move from off the chair an' am just glued like a lemon in front of videos of ants spawning and bombs exploding…

…So I set meself a task, on the bits when I can move around me cell, I scratch a line on the pipe for every drip of water, then I count the drips, then scratch more lines. It's good exercise, and the telly says it's good to have a hobby, but wankin' in't a hobby and that's why I can't do that. It says sleeping in't really a hobby neither and that's why I can't do that no more aswell. The behavioral readjustment's goin' well though, sometimes I have to make up maps for pictures of buildings, and if I get the map right they give me this syrup stuff that tastes dead nice. I was watchin' the telly when I saw a map for a buildin' that they didn't even show me yet, and they gave me a can of Super for that…

…So the other day they decided it were time upgrade me cell, and I have to say I agree with 'em, I've been goin' sickhouse on the buildings and stuff, so they said I had to take the next step. I think the word is…efficient, yeah, this is much more efficient. It's sort of like a big metal coffin full of warm water, and you just float inside it with an air pipe goin' in an' a shit pipe goin' out. You can't see fuck all, you can't hear fuck all, and the water makes it feel like yer body's just, gone. Then the picture starts takin' shape, whatever it was runnin' the telly runs this show 'undred times faster. It's not just maps of buildings no more neither, I can see the roads that people walk through each other, everyone runnin' a different note on a piano. Makin' music in each other's 'eads. I can put me own music in there, but the bossmen want everythin' their way. They pump out pure shit, project T.D. they call it. Total Demoralization. They say what I'm in's called Deep Therapy. I told 'em aswell, I says:

"So I'm in D.T., in T.D?"

That always makes 'em laugh.

Urban Romance

2009-06-08T02:16:00.000-07:00

It was not that he hated people, far from it. His own family, and a select group of friends, evinced a fierce and protective love from him that was painful to contemplate. It was the ordinary folk, the big saggy women and the thin saggy men, they hurt him the most. But he did not hate them. They pulled from him a raw and stinging pity, a pity so thick and fog-like that it clouded his eyes, fucked his senses, sucked in through his pores and turned his brain a strange colour. They all looked like children; from a distance they really were indistinguishable from children. There is not an adult among us, Brian thought. He thought and stewed, drowned in a dank well of murky, aggressive airs. He sucked his ciggie and wolfed down the heat, exhaled through nose and mouth simultaneously, two intersecting vectors of yellow grey smoke.

He watched the people in the chippy queuing up for their food; felt that he begrudged them that as well, he wanted to call up the riot squad and get the water cannon turned on them all. It was turning into a night of total entropy, based on experimental baby steps through years of anger, self loathing, unnecessary risk taking and alcoholism. He crunched his knuckles, but they had been tried several minutes ago and didn’t crack. His paunch bumped against the steering wheel, his head brushed the roof, he felt like a gorilla in a circus act, about to smash the clown car and savage the crowd. He got his lunchbox from under the passenger seat. Linda had put some of last night’s lasagna in a microwaveable dish, wrapped it in cling film, along with four rounds of tuna mayo and a chocolate bar for afters. He took the chocolate bar, dumped the rest down in the footwell.

“Why do penguins carry fish in their beaks?” he read aloud from the back of the wrapper.

“Because they don’t have any pockets…that’s not even a joke, it’s just a plain fucking dumb fact.”

He felt sorry for kids these days, too many random numbers, too many disassociated yet convergent reagents. All those vampiric ideas competing for space in their heads, be this, buy that, this is you, this could be you. Outside his car the pressure was building, he could see the discarded coffee cups and polystyrene boxes vibrating minutely. The atmospheric processors were sucking, tightening up for a street level filter purge. In the next instant a rolling wave of mist and condensation blew through the streets, sending skirts and hats into chaos. Out of the swirling vapour a figure took form, pressed itself to Brian’s passenger window with hands as hollow and fragile as the bones of birds. Linda. Brian unhooked the push lock and the door opened with a sucking moan, the outside world hungry for the warmth of the interior body. Linda sat down and put her heel straight through the filmy bubble of Brian’s dinner. She looked at the half eaten chocolate in his hand.
“You’ve had your pudding first…”

“Yeah well, I always do that, I was saving the rest for later.”
“I thought I’d come and find you, I had a really bad feeling.”
“What do you mean sweetheart?”

Brian shuffled over in his chair and slipped a meaty arm across Linda’s shoulders, nuzzled his face into her hair. The droplets of rain caught up in there looked purified, opalescent, lab cultured. She spoke in her little submissive voice, hand over her mouth, small words. Very small words to hear.

“I was just doing the dishes and I got to the plate your Mam gave us for anniversary and I got to thinking that maybe you were dead somewhere and getting rained on and a slug was crawling on your eye.”

The pit fell out of Brian’s stomach, he clutched his Linda to his breast.

“Well I’m here now, you’ve seen me, I’m fine aren’t I?”

Linda’s blue eyes swiveled up and through her sparking gold hair, searching every fissure and rise in Brian’s iris. What did she see when she looked at him like that? Was the same naked hunger that drove her gaze evident in his? He had his doubts. Linda’s eyes burned with a cold blue flame, a heat that came from brain-based nuclear fusion, not the regular combustion that took place in the heart.
“I have to tell you something.”

Brian nodded, tensing up in his seat, preparing for a head on collision.
“I stopped taking the tablets, they were messing me up more than the last lot.”

“Well darling we’ll have to go visit doctor Simms and get you on some new ones won’t we?”

Linda shrank down further into his armpit, she was now speaking from his lower back, her breath hot on his kidneys.

“It’s not that Brian, no pills can make it right, there’s nothing wrong with me. I hate spending my days sped up and my nights doped out I just want to feel the sun on my skin.”

“But sweetie, listen to what I’m saying, you’re no good when you’re off the tablets, we can’t even have Lil over when you’re off the tablets. You say the strangest things darling, people can’t handle it.”

She was crying now, Brian could feel the small bones in her shoulders vibrating and dropping with each sob.

“But I’m not wrong Brian I’m not I never say anything mean or hurtful I just say what I see but I won’t anymore I can’t do it it’s like taking a piece of your brain away. The world doesn’t care Brian it’s just one big machine that goes round and round and if you can’t stay on you get flung off and smashed into atoms.”

The tears came hard now, and Brian bit back a lump in his throat, for Linda there was no bright side, just the intricate workings of the night and nighttime, perpetually. An anti-matter sun drove her thoughts, either that or she was medicated into a grey stick figure of spectral obeisance.

“It’s like this darling, either we live in the city and you take your tablets, or we go out into the country and you can do what you want. But there will be no Lil, no shopping at the Trafford, just you and me and a couple of hens.”

“I remember one time I woke up scared and I turned on the light and you looked dead Brian, you looked like you’d been underwater and dead for a long time. Like they’d just pulled you up from being dead underwater a long time.”

The sobbing subsided; her eyes gleamed even brighter, as though the crying were a purging of the irises on a molecular level. A bleed valve for the new energy that powered her mind.
“You know full well you can’t say anything to shock me Lind, we’ve been here before.”

Her face twitched, a strange colour change came over her, she stared at Brian with a new air of appraisal.

“I was doing some reading on those vaccinations the force made you have last summer, do you even know what was in those needles that you had last summer Brian?”

A hot flush rode through his cheeks. His top lip was perspiring. He shook his head.

“Something called colloidal platinum, to make you susceptible to mind control. What did they tell you it was for? Or did they even bother to tell you? Don’t you see? It’s just one big, dead machine and you're a part of it. A dead machine that has to feed off the blood of the living.”

Brian had tuned her out already, some latent ability to switch off her insane speech had surfaced once again. He was watching the street with his studied professional patience, his face calm and guarded as a Zen monk.

Beautiful Dreamer

2009-06-03T02:37:00.000-07:00

When Gregul was five they taught him pain was pleasure. A tall lady came and gave out coloured ribbons. Anoka had the purple ribbon. She was thrown to an attack dog while the other children watched. When Gregul was eleven they imprinted him at deep theta. He was taken to a metal room and strapped to a metal bed. Some nasty men showed him their discipline machine. They showed him anything that could be done to a rat could be done to a human being. They used two big magnets and drew a picture of a thought. They imprinted the picture in Gregul’s head and it hurt. Gregul went away through a little door inside his mind. When he came out of the metal room there was a new boy. His name was GANeol. He only came out when Gregul was scared or threatened. After the deep theta imprinting Gregul could land four punches in a second. He was made to fight the other children while men in special jumpsuits ticked clipboards and snapped pictures. Commander Bekmam was Gregul’s guardian, he wore a suit and tie and he smoked all the time and his breath smelled bad. He said it was time for Gregul to be blooded; it was time to kill a puppy. He couldn’t do it. Commander Bekmam got very angry and the men took Gregul to the metal room, they imprinted him again, and this alter was at the delta level. This new boy was called GAN-01-Sunshine. After this imprinting Gregul could headshot a dummy from nine hundred yards over open sights. They told the boy to pack up his belongings, but he had nothing to pack. They sent him to a special place for special boys. This place was the Sakhalin Tactical Development and Research Centre. They made war machines. It was a bad place.

Underneath the ever burning forest fires, the men of Sakhalin made vicious weapons. They used super dense metals forged on massive planets out in the depths of space. The metals were fired out from Jupiter and further, and satellites with huge magnets caught the metals and reeled them in to Mother Earth. These metals went into computer chips and armor plating and bullet tips and ablative coatings and nictating eyelids and lots of the metal found its way into Gregul. They peeled his skull cap back and spiked his brain, and GAN-01-Sunshine was put on a telephone line, so Gregul and GAN-01 were in tandem always. They chopped his arms and legs off. They put him in a smooth solid egg of metal, and sealed him up in there with silicon goo. When Gregul slept he wept, so that GANeol had to take over and block out the ghosts of pain, turning inwards to the reverse Aum. That destroying chorus, the entropic bliss of the void, the Mu.

The training was long and hard, but Gregul found his way back to the surface, pushing past GANeol and GAN-01 and finding the world to be vastly improved. Freed from his egg he saw the pine green forests of Sakhalin stretching out for miles around, he flew out over the Sea of Okhotsk, dead and freezing, the Peninsula of Kamchatka with its vast mud flats and blasted volcanic calderas. Out onto the Bering Sea and then speeding over Alaska. All frozen, all wasted. Gregul recoiled in horror, as a monster mind reared up over the Yukon, and tore his fragile little thought form to shreds, in the holy name of the CCCA. He jerked around in the confines of his egg, the soothing voice of the auto doc rasping at his nerves.

“Friend friend, no need for concern, example is satisfied customer gentlemen.”

Gregul’s viewscreen flashed a propaganda vid, the Aum Nyet storm troopers off to crush the Kapital. He’d seen it before, it didn’t explain the vision, he told the auto doc.

“I am no satisfied customer friend, I want to see files again, classified, top secret all that bullshit.”

“Please gentlemen remain calm, all file associations tagged for your eyes now in cache if you please.”

Gregul shifted through the files on screen with a tracking interface that followed his pupil movement and dilation. All the specs for the project streamed in at him, too many blueprints, too many things not covered in his basic vocational training, all the big words.

“Explain to me doc, nerve attenuation procedure.”

“Well well all evidence not yet collected but initial trial shows electrical exchange of attenuated nerves with hrm, how shall we say, links into the prosthetic and robotic realms are much improved in fact we could not have this stimulating exchange without…”

“Okay and what about the tank, the Beautiful Dreamer?”

“Project Beautiful Dreamer as yet classified in progress and not yet subject to data retrieval. However brand new show Super Cool Roboto has started on channel R5, based on early concepts and suspected leaked information.”

“No computer, no, none of that shit, show me the files on CCCA.”

“Regrettably no files on CCCA approved for your hrm, perusal, but many instances of fictional interpretation on file for your consumption if you please.”

Gregul scanned the vids, but they were just entertainment propaganda designed for school children to watch. They showed the Combined Commerce Concerns of America as a vast multi-armed octopus, hooking Russian children, tearing resources away from the motherland, burning forests and burying bodies. It wasn’t helpful at all. Gregul went out again, left his body behind under the care of GANeol. Out on the surface the anti air cannons were discharging enormous shells into the air, trying to draw fire on a tiny black aircraft that jinked and dived and tumbled through AI lock-on and manual tracer fire, falling through the stratosphere. Gregul flew in closer, fascinated by this new intrusion. He had not seen another living being for many months. Two men were strapped to the aircraft, one on each wing, tucked up into a crash position and gripping tight to the flight yokes. They wore large compound lenses over their eyes and their mouths were stopped up with respirators. They had thick black latex sky suits on, and lots of interesting devices hung from their support harness.

As a volley of twenty millimeter bullets shredded their craft the men ejected from it, plunged down to the smooth green curve of the earth. They slowed their descent with special cables, blooming out of them like spider webs and vibrating in the frozen air, slowing their descent and touching down unharmed on the forest floor. They spoke in English, with South African accents; they had the words Hard Water stenciled on their suits.

“Target located roughly twelve clicks below us, deploying pocket nuke to bore us a hole.”

The men moved quickly, taking out firearms and smooth shiny devices, running on attenuated muscles wrapped around metal skeletons. Their minds glowed like magnesium coals, as they cast out nets of pure thought, searching, looking for Gregul. Gregul felt the imperious pull of his body, he was needed. The auto doc was mid sentence, relaying orders:

“Example is dissident faction stroke private army Hard Water Security Solutions. Currently on the surface at location twelve priming nuclear ordnance. Cleared Gregul stroke GAN-01-Sunshine for deployment of Beautiful Dreamer. Please to be aware unit is functioning at roughly fifty percent operational parameters and HI-Laser is cleared only for single sweeps at minimum dilation.”

Gregul felt the world roll underneath him, gravity became a redundant force, superseded by magnetism and nuclear fission. The pocket nuke blew a hole through the concrete roof of the institute and the men from Hard Water slid down monofilament cables, formed up on the Beautiful Dreamer with minimal wasted energy. Gregul could feel the heavy skin of the tank as well as his own body, and he pulled himself up to stand on two legs. The Beautiful Dreamer was a monstrous bipedal machine, built to withstand a direct strike from a nuclear device. The men dived for cover, as Gregul dropped away and GAN-01-Sunshine took control of the weapon organs. Gregul could hear the radio chatter of the men, frantic and scared despite the drugs and hypnotic imperatives clustered around their brains.

“No way will standard arms work against it, I’m going aetheric, we need a picture of his mind.”

“Copy, just a sneak peek, get too close and the ECM will fry you brain-dead.”

Gregul let out a little yelp of surprise, as the man swept up and out of his body, and began rummaging through Gregul’s mind as if it were a document file. Gregul pulsed his most poisonous and angry thoughts direct into the core of the man, watched as the physical shell burst and threw out pink foam, deep red blood substitute.

The surviving agent let out a strangled scream and ran to his fallen comrade’s side. They were acting in a most peculiar way. They were holding hands. The man was dying, and his partner thought it a bad thing. They conversed on the psychic channel that intersects all other frequencies.

“You need to use its own weapons against it; anything else will just scratch the paintwork”

GAN-01-Sunshine was firing the HI-Laser indiscriminately, sending blue flares of superheated plasma down onto the factory floor. After the plasma reached its target a coruscating wave of laser light refracted through it and blew the surrounding surfaces into grey steam.

The surviving agent took up a large panel of super dense alloy that had lain on the floor and stood behind it. GAN-01 took the shot and fired the HI-Laser directly at the polished surface. It reflected back for an instant and cut a gaping hole in the shell of the Beautiful Dreamer, striking Gregul’s metal egg and turning his body to pink mist. He heard the Auto Doc prattling away, but it was not a problem anymore. He was out and free, over the Sea of Okhotsk, the sun flaring, frozen, a reflection of the mind’s eye.

Space Medicine

2009-05-27T03:40:00.000-07:00

“Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Freudian concept of the super ego emerging as a Jungian archetype!”

“We’ll be administering the Parapathine in a couple of minutes Hugo, you might want to stop talking crap.”

“Sorry Doctor Rossi, you can’t imagine what it’s like for me, after all these years, I’m finally getting my own secret origin.”

“Whatever you say Mr. Strauss, just remember that the experiment can be stopped at any time by mentally repeating your safe word. Could we run through that now, just for the wave recorders, you understand.”

“Sure, sure. What was it? Oh yes that was it. “More powerful than a locomotive.””

“Excellent, the electrodes inside the helmet are working better than I’d hoped.”

“It’s like we were talking about before, during the interview, remember? No, no, we were talking about where ideas come from. Like where your idea for this experiment came from, and where my idea that it was a good idea came from. Somewhere along those two roads of idea they became one, and we met. Funny isn’t it?”

“It depends on your perspective Mr Strauss, a rational person would argue that you volunteered because you are destitute and need the money and we chose you because everyone else chickened out.”

“Yes, yes and what a boring answer that is compared to mine, I believe two vectors of fate coincided to bring us together and further our mutual goals.”

“Sorry, mutual goals? What is your goal in this experiment Mr. Strauss? What do you hope to achieve?”

“Don’t bullshit me doc, it’s the same goal as yours, despite all the “space medicine” talk that’s being thrown around, we’re both on the same page. Consciousness expansion.”

“Oh please Mr Strauss, don’t give me that crap, most of your generation think an acid tab could put them in touch with the divine. You are not special in any way. It’s part of the reason you were chosen.”

“Bar the fact that everyone else got too scared during the prelims?”

“Yes, bar that. This procedure will be nothing like your fuzzy feel good trip of ’69. We are closing your body down for ten days and nights. Ten days of total sensory deprivation, Hugo, it will make LSD look like Earl Grey. Even the word “nothingness” will not do justice to your experience”

“So what are we waiting for doc, dose me up and let’s get this show on the road…Doc, doc are you there? I think the Parapathine’s come on too early, I’m talking but no sound is coming out. I think I want to stop Doc, I’m sorry to let you down but this…this is too weird. What was the safe word? Think! What was the safe word? Faster than a speeding bullet? No, no. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? No, no. More powerful than a locomotive? No, no. Shit, fuck this is horrible. I’m floating in forever with just me for company, I think I need to puke.”

“It’s all in the name of science Hugo, this experiment will give us an insight into the psychological factors of interstellar travel. Deep space commerce will involve long periods of sensory deprivation, isolation, loneliness. We need at least a glimpse at these challenges before we send our brave astronauts off on suicide missions.”

“Right, right, the suicide mission, I’d forgotten completely. Can’t have our brave men out there battling the unknown, I feel privileged, nay I feel honoured, to undertake this daunting experiment. I just hope you folks back home will remember the name Hugo Strauss, that he weren’t no punk and no fuck-up. I hope Hugo Strauss’ mother is proud of her boy.”

“And all I’m telling you Sophie, is that your marvellous experiment is a foregone conclusion. Send anyone into sense-dep for more than a few days and they ain’t coming back again. The Harvard acid boys did it, the CIA and the Ruskies did it. They all say the same thing, out there is cabbage material. The only relevant data that comes back from that place is in the heads of old Yogis and Buddhists, and if it was up to me I’d section them too. No, I didn’t say fabricate the data, I didn’t say that, but the money men want definite results that they can look at, they want a test subject they can interview afterwards. All I’m saying is we give our guy an edge, use the Parapathine but give him a booster or two along with it, something that will keep him alert, stop him dropping into torpor.”

“What were we talking about before, the comics, yeah, the superheroes. All that colourful trash, the bluster and the fanfare for what was essentially just burly men hitting each other. It’s like that Goya painting I can’t remember the title of…I mean that stuff has power, real world power. Satan and Superman come out of this place fully formed, archetypes wrestle it out on the page, on the TV screen. We are all in the business of deconstructing ourselves with fiction. I am Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader reconciled into a viable lifeform. It’s all too beautiful and it hurts so much, wars and games and costumed capers tessellate inside and out, they start over and rebirth in new configurations, across new frequencies of interstellar physics. My life is bubble-gum pop fodder for sentient ultra-structures, and the gods are dead and drawn in newsprint at the foot of my bed.”

“Donald, can you believe it? I got the grant, the guys on the board at NASA were so friendly and they’re gonna back me all the way they say there’s never been a better time for this sort of work what with the Mars colony starting up and if I apply myself and get some concrete results…Donald they’re talking permanent funding and me on the posters can you believe it a psychology major making it big at NASA…No let’s go out tonight it’s too special to stay in and cook…well of course there’ll be further interviews but it’s as good as signed…oh can’t you just say that you’re happy for me?…will you not even say that?”

“I remember when I was a kid, never really had an easy time of it, but what kid does? I went through a lot for a boy my age, I was a very sensitive kid, used to think my heartbeat was a giant monster stomping around above the clouds, heavy footsteps, badoom, badoom, like how they draw words for noises in comic books, badoom badoom, he’d stomp around angry at me for some thing, some small thing, and I’d quake under my bed cover and hope against hope that he’d go away and calm down. Then the realisation dawned that it was me making that noise, not some giant stomping, or god bowling a ten-pin set, just me and my heartbeat and the universe inside it. Feels like that now, all the pain and terror, it was me all along, my future self in charge of my past education, going through the bad shit because you just fucking have to learn this lesson even if it kills you. I always wanted to be a super hero because I was fucking well born to be one, and if you can’t see that you’ve got your telescope ass end up.”

“Darling, are you crazy? Please Sophie let me help you, listen to what you’re saying. You’re proposing to go ahead, even though funding has been halved? You want to use the guy who thinks he’s a superhero with amnesia. I’m telling you straight this man is a fuck-up. I spoke with him for five minutes, it damn near broke my brain! He thinks Superman’s real Soph! He says he’s met the guy. No, not metaphorically!”

“I think I’ve been exposed to Knowing Gas again, that Suicidal Dr. Know has trapped me in a 4-D prison of pure metaphysical conjecture. I’m high on Aum Nyet Toxin, the acolytes have dosed me up and sent me down the river of dreams.”

“Your experience battling some of the world’s most outlandish criminal masterminds makes you the perfect candidate for our procedure Hugo. All those years masquerading as the Known Unknown, battling supercrime on the fringes of consciousness, you’re the only one qualified to make the leap.”

“The walls of my mind are closing in and dressing up in gaudy colours to outfox me. I remember my last fight against the Suicidal Doctor Know, a genius of such high calibre that he had seen past realities’ horizon and took the only logical step. He became a fiction, scripted himself into a million made up histories and disappeared into the black Atlantic tide swell of an old Mills & Boon novel. Doctor Know could be found anywhere, at anytime, but most especially he liked to own death scenes. Cast your mind back to any legendary death scene from your favourite book, TV Show or comic. Chances are it was the Suicidal Dr. Know driving off the cliff into the grand canyon, Dr Know blowing up the meteorite while he stood on it, Dr Know saluting bravely as the Japs swooped in for the Kamikaze strike. He is a master of disguise, but the telltale signs of a Doctor Know performance are there, the rolling eyeballs, the leering rictus of his grin. This is what gets him off, a perfect Doctor Know performance is indistinguishable from the original, bar a faint metallic taste in the back of the throat. Only he knows, that’s why he’s known as suicidal, he’s a mimetic engram for ignorance. The Zen Fascist.”

“Read his file Donald, he’s perfect for the trial. No next of kin, no social security number, the man is a ghost. Claims he’s lived on the streets fourty years but he’s still got all his teeth. Typical schizoid fantasies of self importance but we can look past that, he’s physically and mentally robust and no-one will care or notice if we screw him up anymore than he already is.”

“No doubt this is some nefarious scheme of Sophie Rossi AKA Exogenesis, or Donald Nyet, leader of the Aum Nyet Acolytes, to trap me in this limbo and deprive earth of its greatest hero. What they all forget is that in my unsung role as the Known Unknown ignorance was my mantra. I defeated the Ghost Boys of Cypress Hill by being fifty percent more “down” than they were, creating a mathematical impossibility and banishing the boys to their own pocket universe where they continue to be the coolest lifeforms in that reality. I once caught the Suicidal Doctor Know by scripting my own fictional suicide and stepping away at the dénouement, leaving the story hanging and thereby holding him in stasis. I forsook my powers and abilities, led the life of a humble stumble bum, all so that Doctor Know would remain trapped in my half finished story. Has the unthinkable happened, has some bizarre twist manifested whereby my story was completed and I am now dead by my own hand and in limbo? Has Doctor Know escaped once more into the 2-D multiverse? Can the Known Unknown escape from this hackneyed old cliff-hanger? Tune in at an unknown time, on an unknown channel.”

“Donald I’m in trouble…yes I’m crying I’m fucking terrified…he’s dead Donald. Hugo Strauss…he’s dead. No, his heart gave out he’s past CPR I’m calling the police it’s my fault you were right I was just trying to prove it to myself Oh God…just come down here please I want you here when they arrest me.”

“And that was how they killed the man with an artificial sun for a head, they made a man with a mechanical moon for a head. Don’t believe me? Do I care? It’s like this: at one end of the spectrum is the heroic Known Unknown. He’s the greatest thing that you haven’t thought of yet, the awesome and mystic power of the future. Of course he’s kind of ghostly and androgynous and creepy and all the things that the future can be, but he’s also warm and brave and so full of love that you might die of joy just to meet him. Then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got Doctor Know. He’s the world through cut glass lenses, right and proper and empirical he is, all factors extrapolated all contingencies covered. But there’s no surprises for him either, nothing new for Doctor Know, so he goes suicidal, and the Known Unknown, being the nice guy that he is, tries to stop this unstoppable force. Now here’s where we reach critical mass with my little story Doctor, can you believe that someone can take off their fiction suit, stop being a multi mass waveform and become a regular human being? Because that is what you are looking at. The Known Unknown became an icon, he hangs on a paper cross. In one panel of one unfinished funny book, Doctor Know is the Known Unknown, and Hugo Strauss fell sideways into the gutter.”

“Well Doctor Rossi let’s just say the Mars Mission is on hold for the foreseeable future. No I can’t give you any more details…we found some things…some things. I regret to inform you we will be cutting back heavily on all side projects until the Mission is reinstated as a priority one action item. You’ll be able to conduct your initial study, but I’m afraid any subsequent tests will be without NASA approval. Yes, I’m very sorry I’ll admit to you now that the problems we are encountering are the very things your experiment was designed to explore.”

“Don’t you see Doc, it’s an admittance that inner space is as important as outer. The Known Unknown is the only one for the job.”

“Heaven help me, I think I’ve been exposed to Knowing Gas. Somehow, somewhere, that nefarious Doctor Know has breeched the boundaries of this reality.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

“How do you survive nothingness? You hold nothing in your hand.”

“What is the face of the Known Unknown? It is your face before you were born.”