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27
Jun
2010

I and I: Chapter Three and Day Two: Chapter One

by Jamie Clarke

Read chapter 2 here

Chapter Three:

What really irked me about this entire situation was that this particular night was beautiful. No clouds in the sky, the moon nothing more than a sliver of light rising in the distance and stars dotting the black canopy of night. It was a sight that the poets would write about for ages if they witnessed it, photographers and artists were made for just this instance and me, well I was ruining it by thinking.

I know everyone has a place where they go to think. Somewhere peaceful and they can rest and relax and feel as though they are themselves. I know everyone does because I had a place too, but I’m going to let you in on a secret, forget about it. Never use that place for thinking again. If you are ever in that place void yourself of thoughts and enjoy it. Become some mindless, unthinking drone and just enjoy the bliss that this place brings, because thinking does nothing but ruin things. Clear night skies used to be my thing, now, now I hate them. They remind me of thinking, they remind me of all the problems I’ve had in my life and all the excuses I’ve used to escape them. All the times I’ve avoided confrontation and all the times I’ve run away. Very quickly the one thing that I thought relaxed me and truly made me whole had turned on me and filled me with animosity. Or I had turned on it, one of the two.

So take this advice, if you have a place like this just push it from your mind. Forget about it, it’s dead to you. It will do nothing but ruin you in the end, it certainly has for me.

There it was, crashing through my skull like it was Sri Lanka and I had no viable option but to walk up the street muttering to myself like a lunatic. Which I’m sure didn’t scare people, or make them cross the road at all. I know I woulda been scared by me. The idea of a raving madman walking up a street kicking garbage and, well raving, just perturbs me. I’ll expand on that thought more in a bit as it becomes a little more relevant. For now placate yourself with the knowledge that at least I made it home safe and sound with a resonating headache. Any pill I could find that was scientifically designed to relieve headaches had decided that tonight, of all nights, it was going to stop performing its sole function. How lovely.

The thoughts just kept pouring in from there. Twice in one day I had been defeated in a game of wits. Once in a while sure, but twice in one day was unheard of, at least to my ego. I don’t know how it happened, or really when it began but I do know one thing: at five minutes to midnight I was curled up in the fetal position on my kitchen floor writing in pain. Apparently copious amounts of pain medication were a bad thing for my stomach. Though on a side note, the pain in my digestive areas had completely subverted the pain in my head, at least that was a positive.

I don’t know why I did it, and I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea. Even in my current emotional state I know it was stupid but at the time the only thing going through my head was something along the lines of “Pepto Bismol gets rid of stomach aches.” Apparently if you drink the entire bottle it causes worse ones. Who knew?

That entire bottle had a weird effect on my insides. Which in turn caused them to have a weird effect on the kitchen floor and a whole lot more in the bathroom down the hall. I didn’t do it to try and kill myself, though I’m sure I almost did, it was purely out of stupidity. Which I will freely admit. Guess it was like the alcoholic mentality, I’m sure one more can’t hurt. Sure enough though I found myself wrapped around a toilet cursing God and everyone else I could think of, everyone but myself, for putting me in this position.

Then it happened, in a lull between my insides exploding out of my mouth and my ramblings of incoherent curses I caught a glimpse of the outside world through my bathroom window. There it was, a beautiful night. No clouds in the sky and a plethora of stars spanning the black air and I resigned myself to one thing, it was time for me to ruin it.

Between breathes and frequent trips to discover the insides of my toilet bowl my mind began wandering down a path it hadn’t seen before. A road very less travelled if you will. I began trying to figure out where I had slipped today, what was that one crucial point, or had it been a culmination that ended with a bottle of pink liquid.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something had stirred, something had changed. I just wasn’t myself and whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen. All the sudden with nothing more than two drops of Pepto left I found myself questioning everything I had ever accomplished, mind you it wasn’t that much. All it took was a day from hell and something that would stop diarrhoea in its tracks and I was beginning to see that I hated everything about myself.

Stupid clear nights.

Day Two:

Chapter One:

I imagine it’s always peculiar how these things start. First your eyes open to the foggy realization that whatever you did the night before was most certainly a mistake. Once your eyes have adjusted to either the natural or artificial light around you the clouds in your brain take over and everything becomes a painful mess shortly thereafter. I say I imagine that’s how it starts but I’m being facetious; I know that this is exactly how it happens, every time.

The worst part of the whole thing, my ‘hangover’ came from Pepto Bismol, that horrendous pink liquid. I looked around my recently trashed living room through a haze of the pink liquid. In whatever stupor I was currently in I started glancing around my living room trying desperately to find something that seemed familiar. I know I was at my apartment, that much I was positive about, but everything felt…wrong. I looked around and there wasn’t a single thing in the living room that said that anyone with a personality lived here. Aside from the toppled over Pepto bottle and the tiny pink stain now forming on the coffee table everything was blank and clean. Everything lacked even the simplest touch of humanity. Of anything the only thing that even remotely gave a hint that someone lived in the house was the tiny spill of Pepto Bismol that was now sinking into the wooden coffee table.

It was in my Pepto induced hangover that I arrived at the brilliant idea that going to work the following morning was a good plan. It was in that stupor that I opened my front door and allowed that terrible sunlight to momentarily blind me. I felt the sun’s light tickle my sinuses sending sneezes roaring out of my nose and rattling my brains further than my medicinal headache had already done.

I took my first steps that morning, my head pounding and my legs reluctant to move but for some reason I was being pulled down the hill. Each step brought me closer towards work and an inevitable clash. Each footstep that jostled my brain and further upset my stomach brought me down just a little further. My swagger brought me down the street towards the intersection at Queen and York, across the street from the pretentious coffee shops.

Today was an off day already, no bus ride down, no mocking the snobs with their Adbusters, just a swagger and a pitiful attempt to hide from the sun. Then I saw him. To be perfectly fair I saw him every day I worked, it was impossible to miss him. There are only a few homeless people in this city, and when they all hang out in specific areas you come to know your local hobo pretty well. It wasn’t the tattered clothes, or the smell that really bothered me it wasn’t even really his persistence, it was more what he embodied.

Here was a man who got up every day from wherever he had been sleeping and instead of finding even subsistence labour decided to stroll the very same streets as the day prior. While I’m sure he had his reasons for continuing his cyclical existence I didn’t care too much for them, all I knew was that he annoyed me. And on this day in particular he would be far too much for me to handle. I already wanted to close my eyes, crawl into a hole and just vanish.

I saw him approaching across the street from me which meant that a clash between the two of us was almost inevitable and I knew it. Slowly, without drawing too much attention to myself, I slid my hand into my pocket and grabbed a hold of my loose change so it wouldn’t make a noise. As disgusting of a human being it makes me the last thing I wanted this morning was to be bothered by this hobo, but somewhere in my gut I knew that it was bound to happen.

I watched the light turn green and I hesitated ever so slightly, watching as my fellow pedestrians took to the road. My hope was that if others got there before me he would approach them and I could just cruise by unnoticed. I lowered my eyes to the ground watching the cement below me as I finally took to the sidewalk. The only thought running through my head was a continual plea for this man to leave me alone and not notice me, not today. My head pulsed as I walked and something deep within me knew that I was seconds away from making contact with this man. I glanced around trying to avoid him and with all my luck our eyes made contact and for a second I swear I felt the Pepto Bismol laugh at me in my stomach.

It was then that those three words assaulted my eardrums.

“Spare some change?”

My reaction must have been equivalent to that of a cartoon character. I’m sure I felt my eyebrow twitch, my shoulder shudder and if at all possible steam would have come out my ears because what happened next was certainly not very human. Though in hindsight not entirely unexpected.

I feel almost a sense of remorse for my actions that day. I say almost because if it wasn’t for this unwanted but not unforeseen interaction I wouldn’t be where I am right now. Which, for clarification, is meandering through the side streets of downtown, inching ever closer to my intended destination. Not that I’m particularly keen on anything at this point in time, but I’ve made a choice and I’m sticking with it for as long as I can.

I looked up at the poor defenceless hobo and with a final twitch of my shoulder I verbally exploded. Every word that fell from my lips was laden with malice and acid even I could feel. I wasn’t even brave enough to give the poor guy a chance to respond, he was just a victim of my verbal harassment. Though in an odd twist it almost felt like an out of body experience, or it could just be how I’m remembering it, but it seemed to me as if I watched the entire incident from slightly to the left. I watched myself as my eyes glazed over and I glared a hole through the shabbily dressed man.

“Why don’t you just go and die somewhere? Save everyone the hassle of having to deal with you on a regular basis. What good do you bring anyway? You spend your entire day being a strain on each and every one of these people on the street and moreover you’re an enormous pain in my ass day in and day out. Every time I walk this section of York I run into you, every goddamn time. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve been tempted to start taking different streets just to get to and from work so I can avoid you.”

And there it was. That’s when it hit me, directly in the forehead like a sniper’s shot between the eyes. I had just said everything I had ever wanted to say to myself in one single sitting. Every word that somehow made it past the logic in my brain was entirely true, but not necessarily for the person it was aimed at. It’s an interesting feeling to stand in the middle of the street with people shaking their heads at your previous actions and having people laying on their horns behind you. And of course by interesting I clearly mean it is a terrible feeling, but certainly an awakening one.

It was in those first few seconds after it had happened that I realized it. I hated myself. It wasn’t the Pepto Bismol talking, it wasn’t my general jackassery, I hated myself down to my very bones. What was worse than having finally spoken those words out loud, was the fact that I knew myself so well that chances are I was going to completely ignore what I had said. At least that’s what I thought at the time, but I bet you can gather that’s not exactly what happened.

I think at this point I can safely say this is really where it all started. Sure my Pepto induced sickness from the previous night helped the process but I’m going to call that a catalyst and leave it at that. This public outburst brought my life to a very interesting spiral, downwards of course.

I fixed my eyes to the ground. Every worn in piece of gum or cigarette butt provided even the slightest escape from the disgusted eyes of those who still surrounded me. I could still hear the mumbled curses of the man I had verbally accosted regardless of how hard I tried to tune it out. I watched each spec of road pass by my eyes as I hustled as quickly as I could into obscurity.

Obscurity luckily was only a corner and an alley away. Each step I took felt like my heart was trying to burst out of my chest and race its way to my brain to challenge it to fisticuffs. But I arrived nonetheless and fell against a dumpster, completely unaware of the stench I’m sure was more than present, my chest heaving to keep up with the rapid pace of my heart. Each beat pulsed through my body matching the throbbing pain in my head and the resounding feeling of self-enlightenment that was dropkicking me in the face.

Tags: Fiction, jackassery, jamie clarke, short fiction, short stories
Posted in Fiction

13
Jun
2010

I and I part 2

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by Jamie Clarke

part 1

Chapter Two

The ride downtown to work was uneventful enough with all of the regular bumps and poor traffic decisions of every other ride. My sitting buddy choices left something to be desired however. I ended up sitting beside a man who had a very unique odour to him. Now he didn’t smell bad, but he did smell like a vast combination of different smells which sent my olfactory senses into overdrive. Interesting fact about the nose, did you know you can only smell seven different smells at once? If eight are present you just don’t smell one, interesting isn’t it? I felt a little bad because as I said he didn’t smell bad he was just odorous so by about half way through the bus ride I secluded my nose to the inside of my shirt and enjoyed that refreshing smell of Old Spice. It really is long lasting protection, hell it even fights other people’s odours.

Getting off the bus seemed to be about the only smart thing I had done so far that day. That statement was direct foreshadowing, I mean given the nature of this tape how could it not be. I performed my usual pre-work routine just as I do every other day as if this day would be no different from every other work day because let’s face it, I had no clue. I walked into the coffee shop downtown with all the scenesters and their laptops and copies of Adbusters and got my regular plain old coffee. I wasn’t a fan of free trade coffee, for some reason mine tasted better when I was aware that the dollar twenty I paid for it was more than the farm hands on the plantation would make in a week. If you can figure out how to rewind this thing listen to my statement about being a horrible person again, it applies to right here as well.

Next on the routine was to shake my head in disgust at all these pretentious scenesters as I exited the coffee shop, thus in turn making me just as pretentious but I liked it that way. Gives me a sense of accomplishment. If you really want to make these people angry, go into one of these coffee shops, I’m sure you know of one, wearing all the trendiest clothes. Make sure you don’t talk about anything relevant to society, your conversation must only consist of the latest in celebrity gossip, or talk about the little dog that you have that fits in your purse, or your girlfriend’s purse, or your man purse, all depending on who you are. This is a sure fire way to really drive these people crazy, trust me.

Funny that I’d say trust me, did you know you are the only person I haven’t spend my entire life lying too. Not that we know each other personally, but you know the complete truth about me, more so than I probably know, neat isn’t it.

Though now I’ve got to thinking, you have no idea what is going on around me at this moment. So let’s temporarily suspend our story here and I’ll just fill you in. As you can probably tell by all the cars buzzing passed me I am walking down a sidewalk. Funny that I’m abiding by traffic laws all things considered.

Now in case you were wondering I started this epic little voyage of mine at the top of Regent Street. There’s a set of apartments just beside the gas station and they’ve been home sweet home for the past four years. It was actually fairly difficult to leave the apartment and lock the door, not sure why I bothered really and carrying this recorder, it certainly didn’t make things any easier. But I am doing this for your gain so I suppose it’s worth it. Regardless of that, I’ve been walking down Regent Street until I hit the light at Montgomery, which I am now walking down towards campus. I figure I’ll take one last walk through the University successfully being that weird guy talking to himself and then make my way downtown, and you get to come with me the whole way. I was going to embrace being that weird guy whether people liked it or not, and you get to be the reason I become said guy, I hope this makes you happy.

Right, so where was I? Work. Oh joy, oh bliss. Well that’s not fair, I actually liked work for the most part. It’s a call center and it’s generally full of people a little more depraved than me; people with a little less money than me and almost but not quite the lowest common denominator of society. Does it make me a bad person if I liked going to work because it reinforced the fact that I was just a little better than these people? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, I know I’m a bad person, it’s whether or not I care about whether or not I’m a bad person that matters, I think.

Right, I should get back to it, work. Work was an odd building, where as MacMillan Hall was that cold, unforgiving brick, work was a similar cold unforgiving brick building. The difference of course being that I didn’t particularly care for school, thus I had a hatred that I could really appreciated for MacMillan Hall, whereas with work I was indifferent so I was okay with walking through those annoying doors. And that is exactly what I did.

I never quite understood it, and it became a topic of much conversation amongst all the employees, but the building was painted this disgusting yellow color on the inside. We were never quite sure if it was intentional or if it was lack of repair that just faded away the life from the walls. Either way, it was this soul-sucking color, it just took all the fight right out of you. I suppose regardless it worked, we all sat down, like good little drones and kept our mouths shut.

Up until this point work was probably the easiest task I had ever undertaken. Sit, call, lie, I mean how is that not easy? Sure it pulled on the conscience, but we worked in a call center, whatever conscience we had, any dignity for that matter, we left at the door before we came in. And that’s what I found so easy about it, manipulating people. It was just so easy to reel them in and really convince them that this overpriced phone package was what they needed. Either I was good at my job, or people were idiots. Part of me always wants to hope that it’s not option two, but I’m no fool, people are idiots. For the most part we’ll believe anything you tell us so long as you say it with some sincerity. Gullible schmucks that we are.

Call center culture, aside from all the lying and poor management was an anthropological study on its own. Here you have a group of people who mindlessly click, talk and lie for 9 hours a day, but when those two fifteen minute breaks come up, all of the sudden everyone is friends. We exit the building like clockwork, and gather at the designated smoking area, even if we didn’t smoke. And this was the fun part to watch, regardless of how well you knew each other, outside you were best friends, bumming smokes like it was nothing. Also, and this is a very important fact to note, you could easily score any drug you wanted at a call center, but the sellers hated to do it outside, go figure. Though their choice selling point confuses and baffles me, always has. Instead of going to a more secluded area, they tell you to meet them in the bathroom of the call center, because where is more private than an area that anyone can walk into? Well, no one ever said sellers were bright people I suppose.

So there it was, inside you didn’t even acknowledge those around you were alive, and outside you were the best of friends. I never quite understood why people instantly needed to confide in someone, or have companionship on their breaks. Guess I never will either. It all remains a mystery.

But this is all a divergence. What you are listening for is the tipping point, what began my little downward spiral. Sure the meeting with the counsellor was a shot to the ego and tugged at the heartstrings a little, but it wasn’t what began it all. No, the catalyst really took place at about 9:30 that night, an hour and a half before my shift ended.

All of this reinforces my hatred for Massachusetts because in the State telemarketing law says that you can’t call places after nine at night. Though for some screwy reason Massachusetts thinks they are exempt from this rule and changed their times to eight. So through the fault of the auto dialer and again that poor management I was talking about, I was dialling into Massachusetts half an hour later than I was legally allowed to. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered me. On a normal day I could have shrugged it off or talked the person down but I wasn’t clicking today, something wasn’t right with me and it was like I ran into a brick wall as soon as the phone clicked in.

That Pavlovian beeping noise rang in my ear and I was into my opening already and then it all crashed down. The yelling was almost instant. I had to call that one guy who knew the telemarketing laws in his State, great. I stammered and stumbled trying to find a response to this man but all the synapses in my brain apparently decided to misfire all at once as all I could do was listen. Almost methodically he tore continuous strips off of me. This guy had been waiting for this and for a long time by the sounds of it. Then it clicked.

I stood up in my chair, headset still on and Mr. Massachusetts still chirping away at me, and signalled for my boss, the epitome of call center employees. This was the guy, and I’m almost certainly sure of this, that started the call center trend of using broken light bulbs to help freebase heroin in the bathroom, and now he was the guy who was dealing with Mr. Massachusetts. Without saying a word I handed the headset over and left. There was no point in explaining the situation to my supervisor he was our boss for a reason, he supposedly trained in dealing with irate customers, and so he was about it and I was no sticking around to find out how everything happened.

Leaving those doors was at once the most liberating and destructive thing I had ever done. In one second I had given as big a “fuck you” to that place as I could muster but I knew that Mr. Massachusetts had won. He had started the spiral. The thoughts had begun to spin in my head and I had begun to march uphill. It was a fair hike to my apartment and now I had something to pass my time whether I liked it or not.

Posted in Fiction

02
Jun
2010

I and I – part one

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part one of a story by Jamie Clarke

Prologue

You finding this means I’m dead.

You found the recorder, which means that for the first time in my life I both did something right and finished something I started; two birds with one stone, not a bad way to end it if I do say so myself. While we’re at it, why don’t you go and give yourself a pat on the back for finding this here hidden gem.

If you’ve managed to listen this far without shutting it off and running to the police then I would suggest you just listen until the recording ends. I promise right now there won’t be anything gruesome included on the tape. Now the reason I want you to listen is this:

We don’t always take the smartest path in life. We don’t always end up where we thought we were going to, but we always end up somewhere. Things just don’t pan out they way we thought they would when we were five. Everyone comes to that conclusion at some point, and me, well I just needed to tell someone how it got to here.

Day One, Chapter One

I’m new to this. I suppose most people are. Long time listener, first time caller kind of deal I guess, so I don’t exactly know where to start. That and I don’t know how to rewind this voice recorder and I’d like to do this all in one go, with hilarious outtakes and all. Although thinking about it, it seems an odd time for me to be worrying about perfection. The logical place to start I imagine would be the meeting I had with my academic advisor four days ago. Funny that I would mention the logical place to start given the nature of this tape, even in the afterlife I crack myself up.

It’s not exactly the warmest out that it’s ever been in April and this hoody isn’t actually keeping me warm, but you know the bridge isn’t that far away and if I need to I can quicken my pace. I don’t want to lessen the impact for you though, wouldn’t want to deprive you of some valuable information. It’s a forty minute walk; surely I have enough time to cover everything I want.

It’s exactly as I mentioned, the best place to start is on the steps of the Arts building on campus, with me standing at the base of the cold, unforgiving stone steps leading into the door surrounded by those aged, faded bricks that I had come to despise out of nothing more than fear. Now if that isn’t a stunning visual I don’t know what is. Admit it, right now you are picturing yourself in my shoes, standing there, not sure whether to be intimidated or seething with disgust. I really did hate this building.

The rest of the campus was beautiful, perched neatly on top of a hill which allowed you to gaze out across the entire city. You can get lost in the gaze and lose hours of your life, but at the time it all seems worth it. For some reason you were perfectly okay just sitting there, not wasting time, but certainly not spending it productively. That view was something that words themselves fall entirely short of describing and it’s a shame you’ll never get to see it. Or at least not the way I saw it.

It wasn’t until I reached the doors to MacMillan Hall, the Arts building, that I realized graduation was only a few weeks away. I hadn’t given it much thought, or any really, I always just assumed I would fall ass backwards into a job which I would secretly hate, but smile all day as if I loved it. I’d do that for twenty or so years making my way up the corporate ladder until I reached a level where I’d progress no further. Then I’d just stay there for awhile. Until my mid life crisis of course when I buy that car I had always wanted, sleep with the girl that was twenty years younger than me who was in the same position I am now, ruin my marriage and drive my children away forever. All great things to look forward to I know. But what’s life if not one big predictable mess that someone else has already gotten themselves into.

That was why my advisor had asked to see me, I was a coaster. Born and raised that way; my father was a coaster, his father was a coaster, yet oddly enough my great grandfather was a very diligent worker. He became independently wealthy which I suppose is what really influenced this horrible cycle of laziness. This recorder thing is really proving to have a very large psychological effect for me. Talk about self-analysis. Worst part is that I know it. I know it and I, although I’ll lie through my teeth telling you otherwise, don’t give a damn that this is how I am.

Before I went in I knew exactly what she was going to tell me. She would say I was a C student, I had always done just enough to get by and with the attitude I had I probably wouldn’t go anywhere with my degree unless I applied myself to my work. Oh and that I still had a chance to change at least my grades for this semester by really pulling up my socks and studying for my finals.

The problem with knowing someone is going to say this and actually having them tell it to you are two entirely different things. To say I was floored is selling her power to emotionally cripple an already scared man far too short. She absolutely obliterated whatever sense of self worth I had created for myself . I sat there staring forward with that same blank look on my face, emotionless and stupid, while in my head that weird alarm sound was going off, rockets were firing, missiles were exploding. I actually excused myself so I could cry in the bathroom without any interruption. I really didn’t want her to see the actual impact of her words but I’m sure my lips were tugging at the edges. Some smug part of me refused to give her that satisfaction, and yet deep down I know that all she was doing was both her job and trying to help. But there it was, four years of my life spent wading through mediocrity while everyone around me was working their asses off so the money they had sunk into school would actually go to some use.

I’m not going to say I felt horrible because I’m trying not to lie at all on this recording. It’s like I said, her words seem to cut me deep but they were words I had already told myself and was fully aware of. Whether or not I chose to believe myself is another matter. I knew I was a perpetual slacker, I knew that I got by not on my intelligence but on my ability to manipulate people. I mean everyone has got to have something they are good at, that was mine.

It didn’t matter who a person was, what they were doing or why they were doing it, I’m almost positive I could take them in some old fashioned verbal sparring. It wasn’t that I was particularly amazing at it, but I could read people. Figure out how they would react, how their emotions would rise and fall and I could just play off of that, to be fair it’s worked so far.

I went back into the advisor’s office after my little tear fest and I knew that I had been defeated. It doesn’t happen often, but I have enough common sense to admit defeat when I’m surrounded. I walked back into that office with my head hung just a little bit, my ego in check and my pride taken down maybe three or four notches. She had hit that proverbial nail on the head. I told her that from here on out, while it may not do much good right away, that I was a changed man. I was turning over a new leaf, devoting myself to the cause. Hell at this rate I was going to singlehandedly save the whales, cure cancer and stop global warming. People should shudder at the mere thought of what my lies are capable of. Godly, I know, it’s amazing. I was also going to improve the welfare system and put an end to pollution, it’s on my “to do” list, I promise. And there you have it, I had every intention of being a decent human being and then it went straight out the window.

The lowest part of the whole meeting was walking back in there, I knew I had been defeated. I knew I had lost. It’s as I said, normally I know when to back down. This time, not so much. Something inside me felt like it was being tugged and pulled, unable to back down. Unable to relent. I walked in there pleaded my case for change and desperately awaited her response. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in my head I was praying she believed I actually wanted to save the whales, I’m almost positive at least. Like I said, I threw out my Hail Mary pass and then waited. I think the saying is, “with baited breath”, who knows. I never got why anticipation came with a fishing reference, maybe it’s because they never catch anything. Either way, get this, this is what she said to me.

“It’s too late for lies Mr. Dylan. You can save this semester and pull up the GPA a measly amount, but unless you have some profound life changing experience, you aren’t going to change, no matter how much you try and convince me that you will.”

Given everything that’s going down, I think this counts as a life changing experience, so to speak. This of course probably wasn’t the best time to bring up an example of my unique prowess in manipulation, but it leads directly into the next aspect of my day, work. The meeting with the advisor was strategically planned at four that afternoon, that way I could still make it to work on time for my shift. It’s not that I particularly enjoyed work, but I did make my money through commission and like I said, I was good at manipulating people. When lying comes easily you tend to forget what the difference is between reality and fabrication. You tend to throw basic human morality out the window and run it over with your wheels and just indulge in your lies.

I sucked up my pride, finished the meeting and ran to the bus stop seconds before the bus pulled up. In my typical fashion I fished around in my pockets before finally succumbing to the inevitable realization that somewhere I had dropped my tickets. The bus driver was a sweetheart and she let me ride for free. This trick works at least once a week due to the rotation of bus drivers. I know I’m a horrible person; it’s the realization of this fact which has brought us so close together.

Stay tuned for chapter two.

Tags: Fiction, jamie clarke, liars, lies, short stories, stories, the liars who tell them
Posted in Fiction

25
Jan
2010

Robo Planet Game part 5

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by Matthew Payne

Read part 4

They traded sword-blows, blocking and slicing and stabbing. Ruxto made contact, slicing into the tin of the robot’s chest. Then he pulled his sword out with a wrenching sound and started shooting it in the head with his laser. The robot’s head melted and smoked and it stumbled backwards against the black metal of the fan-building, clanking metal on metal as it slumped to the ground. It was so easy that Ruxto wished there were three more.

There was a door in the wall, and Ruxto went to it. There was a handle, and he pulled it open.

On the inside the fan-building was a factory, even though the air tasted extra-fresh and pleasantly cool. Grinding noises were overpowered by an ear-numbing humming-sound. There was also a regular smashing sound, like rocks getting crushed with a giant hammer. Ruxto stood on a red-clay floor and looked up at the black machinery. Giant gears turned slowly, some connected by the ruts in the gears, others by the axles running between them. There were conveyor belts carrying rocks and dirt across the giant room. Far back and up above, Ruxto saw a giant funnel which was dropping rocks onto one conveyor belt into a machine that seemed to be smashing them up into dirt. Even higher, in the center of the room, there was the machine the crushed-dirt was fed into. This machine had a huge compartment, and steam billowed out through a hole in the top. That steam quickly turned small turbines, which were connected to gears that slowly turned the giant fan. The only light was from between those blades, so shadows and visibility were in constant shift, making the factory look more alive than it really was. The fan-blades were half as long as football fields.

Ruxto could see the giant fan all the way up at the top and front of the building. The arms of the fan turned slowly, and giant slots of dying daylight turned around between them.

“It’s converting rocks into air,” Ruxto mumbled.

Because of the density, he assumed it would only take a little bit of rocks to make a lot of air, but it would take a gigantic amount of air to fill a planet.

Where was it getting the rocks? And where was the water he’d been promised? He started wandering around the automated factory, keeping his eyes open for more danger. In the sketchy-moving light and the overpowering noise, it would be easy for someone or something to sneak up on Ruxto and make him restart his mission again.

He wandered between mechanisms that moved, but which he didn’t understand. He didn’t touch anything.

Near the back of the building Ruxto learned how the factory got its rocks and dirt.

There was a small door in the back and Ruxto saw a little yellow robot drive drive in from the desert. It was a simple robot, just a platform on four black wheels with a small bucket on top. The bucket was on hinges and was full of dirt and pebbles and sand. It drove into the building and went over to a hole in the floor (the hole was lined with a metal frame), then it turned its bucket on its hinges and dropped the dirt-load into the hole. Less than a meter away, the dirt emerged from beneath the ground in another bucket which was attached to a conveyor belt. The new bucket dropped the dirt onto another conveyor belt, and the load was on its way to getting converted into air.

The robot drove away but already there was another one coming in with more dirt.

Ruxto spoke to himself. “This is genius. Little worker-robots bringing materials to the factory. But how do they load themselves up with new dirt? They don’t have hands or a shovel.”

Then he realized that there must be another type of robot outside somewhere which filled up these little robots. It was a functioning robot-society, and it wasn’t even built by humans. Thousands of years ago humans built the seed-robots to terraform other planets, but the humans also programmed the seeds to experiment with their own new children-seed-prototypes. This factory was part of a functioning robot-society, working apparently without consciousness in a slightly misguided attempt to benefit the human race. He was amazed. The robots had learned to convert things to their basic atomic structures and then rebuild them into whatever material they wanted (air, water, human flesh). They had learned to make new types of robots which could work independently or as part of a team. They had built a planet-sized game which seemed to be relatively safe against objective dangers… though it was a huge inconvenience and it had unwittingly murdered Ruxto’s ship-mates.

More little robots came in until finally Ruxto grabbed one on its way out. The wheels kept spinning in the air for a while, then they stopped. They must have registered a lack of friction. More amazing programming. Ruxto had always enoyed beautiful creations and the genius of subtleties, but when he came to this universe and discovered computers and technology his mind had stretched in its definitions of creation and building.

There was a blue light at the front of the robot, and Ruxto stared into it. Was this light the robot’s eye? As he looked right into it, he felt awe and wonder, and a silly feeling of companionship and almost affection.

On the back of the robot there was a switch. There were six options for the switch to be turned to: Mining Site One; Mining Site Two; Mining Site Three; Bio-Dome/Animals; Bio-Dome/Shuttle; Mysterious Destination. These must be where the robot was programmed to go, so whichever option was selected was where the robot would go… and Ruxto could follow.

Ruxto set his eyes intently on the one that said, “Bio-Dome/Shuttle.” Would this lead him to escape? Clearly this was part of the game. This must be Unit Twelve’s intended path for a player to win the game. Ruxto switched the toggle over to ¨Bio-Dome/Shuttle,¨ then went to find the water he’d been promised.

He found the water dripping in individual drops from the giant center-machine, where steam billowed from the top to turn the turbines. As steam plumed from the top, condensation dripped down the sides. The ground underneath was wet, but only mildly. This was a naturally dry planet, and water evaporated quickly. He had to sit there for almost an hour, patiently letting drops fall slowly into his empty flask. He sat and meditated, resting while holding the bottle until it was full. In his other hand he still held the robot. And he wondered about the robot´s other toggles… the one that said, ¨Bio-Dome/Animals,¨ and the one that said, ¨Mysterious Destination.¨ Ruxto assumed that ¨Mysterious Destination¨ was some kind of trick to fool unfocused players, since the curiosity was almost too strong for him to resist. But he was even more intrigued by the ¨Bio-Dome/Animals¨ option. Where would that take him? Did Unit Twelve create animals? Ruxto longed to explore the rest of this planet, but that would be foolish in his current situation. He was not in control of his surroundings right now. He was trapped in a game, and he couldn’t afford to see what mysteries these advanced automated robots had created. He had to get off this planet, get a ship that he could control, and get a good supply of weapons and food. Then he would be safe and strong enough to explore interplanetary mysteries. Right now he was nearly powerless.

Crouching low, he followed the robot out of its hatch and into the yellow desert under the dark sky. There were several little robots moving around in the area behind the fan-building. Some were coming into the building, and Ruxto could see many more at varying intervals coming from the desert towards the fan, bringing their dirt-loads. There were also several empty ones driving away, apparently going to the three mines to get more dirt.

Ruxto’s robot took him in a different direction, following its new altered path. It drove much slower than Ruxto’s comfortable walking space, and this tested his patience. As an experiment, he picked it up and jogged for a little while, going in the same direction it had been moving. Then he set it down again and followed for a while. Moving like this, they kept going until the sunlight was all gone and the black fan was a quiet speck in the background, barely visible in the new darkness.

The air got cooler, and Ruxto considered resting for the night. Then he saw a row of steel blades emerge smoothly and silently from the desert a few hundred feet ahead. Sticking up like towers, they started moving towards Ruxto through the dirt, and moving fast.

He pulled out his laser first and shot some of the blades away, then took out his sword. When the wall of blades was close, he sliced through them with his own blade, placing his feet so the blade-stumps went safely between them. He cut them away cleanly, but sent one spinning so that it sliced through his right shoulder. The slice caused no pain right away, but the arm was mostly cut off and it dangled uselessly as blood gushed out. The blades disappeared back into the dirt behind him.

Ruxto fell to his knees, feeling no worry but working to stop the blood from gushing out. The bone was severed and most of the muscle. His arm was useless. He quickly undid some metal straps and took off his left sleeve, then bundled up the cloth and stuck it in his wound, between the arm and the shoulder. Then he took off his right pant-leg and tore it into a long strip. Using his teeth and his left hand, he tied the strip around both shoulders to hold his limp arm in place. At this point, he would almost rather die and be re-cloned than continue without his right arm.

Then he saw something else bad. His little guide-robot had been sliced in half by one of the moving blades.

“I should have put it in my pack,” he said to himself.

He knew what direction the robot had been heading, and he could just follow that course until he came to the bio-dome. But that seemed risky… what if the robot was eventually going to change direction? That might be part of the game… Ruxto needed the guide-robots. That was obviously how the game was constructed. He wondered if he would have time to go get a new robot and come back before he bled to death.

Ruxto turned around and headed back towards the fan. He wanted to get there while it was still dark, then rest in the darkness of the black building. He took the ruined steel-blades that he had cut down and stuck them up into the dirt, marking the dangerous place for when he returned.

Focusing on the dark and thinking about nothing, he trudged back to the fan with his limp arm dangling. It tingled with barely-feeling at first, but soon went dead.

When he got back to the fan, the hum of the machinery was much too loud for him to get serious rest. He finished severing his right arm and wrapped the wound better. He filled up his flask again, then stole another worker-robot and put it in his pack. Ruxto walked back out into the night air, seeing the stars plus a moon which he hadn’t seen yet on this planet. It was a gray moon, dull in features but radiant in light-reflection.

He did not try to sleep, because he was so tired now that if he slept he was afraid he’d die. He walked slowly, and when the sun came up he ate the rest of his clone-meat, then took the new robot out of his pack and switched it to Bio-Dome/Shuttle, then followed it once again out into the desert.

The sun was high but not yet at its peak when Ruxto saw the gleam of yesterday’s blades sticking out of the sand ahead. Actually, he saw the gleam over an hour earlier but it was only now when he was close that he could see their shapes. So he put the robot in his pack again, took a swig of warm flask-water and gripped his laser. There would be no time for the sword, since he only had one hand. He kept walking towards the blades he had left as markers.

Before he got to the severed blades, another row of sharp metal prongs thrust up from the desert sands and began to move fast towards Ruxto. The ones he cut down had been replaced, and he started shooting with his laser. He shot down several of them before they reached him, so Ruxto didn´t have to use his sword. He jumped over the stumps and kept on walking.

Ruxto let the robot lead him again. He could still feel the energy he got from the last of his meat, but he could also feel it waning with his blood-loss. He hoped the Bio-Dome was close, but he still could not see it on the horizon.

Twice more that day Ruxto encountered a wall of blades. The first time he was quick enough to grab the robot and shoot down some blades before they could do any damage. The second time, he shot them down but one of the moving blade-stumps sliced through his left foot. He muttered an insult to Satan and wrapped up the wound. When he saw a glint at the edge of the horizon, he thought it would be more blades. But as he got closer, he thought it might be glass.

As darkness once more took over Ruxto saw that this new glint was from the giant Bio-Dome. His vision was getting blurry and his thoughts were simple, so he was glad the game seemed to be almost at an end. Pain poked at his mind from his foot and his shoulder. As he sat to rest he knew he could make it before sunrise, but he wanted to have the energy to face any obstacles that he might meet there.

The sun rose and Ruxto reached his destination without any of the expected obstacles. Maybe this is it, he said to himself. Maybe the game is over and I won. But he still kept his eyes peeled for danger.

The bio-dome seemed to be one massive glass-dome, a single-piece half circle that was hundreds of meters high and many kilometers across at the base. From his vantage point on the ground Ruxto could not see inside because the whole bottom of the bio-dome was framed in a bronze belt ten meters high. The glass above him reflected the sunlight and the black moon, refusing to give away its contents.

There was a double-door facing Ruxto as he approached, and a smaller door beside it. The little robot-guide went into the small door, which hissed with an air-lock as it opened. Above the double-door were white letters which read, Welcome Human Number 1. This was Ruxto’s greeting as the first person to ever play this planet-wide game.

There was a button on one of the doors, and Ruxto pressed it. Again he heard an air-lock hiss, louder this time, and the doors opened into a small room with more double-doors on the other side. The walls, ceiling and floor were all bronze. Ruxto hesitated before entering the small room, anticipating more debilitating adventures.

At this point his mental faculties were a dim light, barely lit, and it took everything he had just to limp through the door. He was in no shape to fight. He knew he could not out-think anybody or anything right now, and he resigned himself to whatever fate this room held for him. He went in and slumped to the metal floor, feeling cold metal as a refreshing variation from the hot desert. He sucked in cool air and felt instantly revitalized. His right shoulder pounded with pain as his heart began to beat a little stronger.

His dismal faith was rewarded as the opposite door opened, surprising him with an image of trees, foliage, grass and dark soil. He closed his eyes and breathed in the forset-smell. The tree-trunks were tall, and their leaves were all high up out of reach, so the forest was an open area with a shady canopy. He could feel a breeze, certainly artificially created but bearing the sweet smells of plant-life. He didn´t hear insects or animals, and he expected that there were none. Although, he remembered the other options on the little robot-guide, including Bio-Dome/Animals.

Still limping but now filled with a new energy, Ruxto stepped onto the soil with his good foot. The door closed behind him and he looked around at the trees. A happy guest in this strange home, he closed his eyes to take in the breeze, and a smile of relief pulled at his face. This was truly beautiful. An artificial forest on a far-off planet, and he was the first to see it. The pain of his broken body was a satisfying juxtapose to this gorgeous place.

He touched the brown bark of a tree. It was rough and rutty. He smelled it, then he bit it and tore off some bark. He chewed on it, not caring whether it was safe or not. He didn’t realize how much he had missed plant-life. What a strange thing, he thought, that plants are so naturally comforting.

Above him he could see the glass ceiling. There was no glare, but the shape of the sun was slightly distorted by the curved glass. He could barely see it through the canopy of leaves.

He walked through the trees, running his hand through green foliage and eating random stems and leaves. There were no thoughts in his head, just peace and relief.

Soon his tiredness came back even stronger and he knew he needed to rest. He lost enough blood that he would probably die, and he didn’t know how he could pilot a ship with only one arm. But maybe if he died then Unit Twelve would re-clone him here.

Either way, he wanted to find the shuttle before he sat to rest. Even more, he wanted to find another computer terminal that would answer more questions for him, or maybe even help him take care of his injuries.

After a couple kilometers he saw something white through the trees. Soon he came to the shuttle, a white arrow pointing upwards. It was trapped inside a glass cylinder which extended all the way up to the top of the dome. It stood on a glass pedestal, and there was a computer terminal beside it. Behind the shuttle-in-glass, there was a small white one-story building with a regular door and a doorknob. Ruxto didn’t even go up to them. When he saw they were there, he allowed himself to collapse on the ground, and he instantly fell asleep.

He woke up on a black slab.

Ruxto stared up at a canopy of green leaves, swaying in the artificial breeze. He took a deep breath. His body felt healthy, and his mind was instantly sharp and revitalized. He considered the many implications of these beautiful trees, and he stared at them with peace and a love of the universe.

His left arm had been replaced, and all his injuries were fixed. After he passed out, Unit Twelve must have fixed him or re-cloned him.

Sitting up on the slab he saw that he was right beside the white building and the glass cylinder. He walked on the soft soil and pulled at the door to the building, but it wouldn’t open. That must be where the machine worked on him.

Ruxto went over to the terminal, looking into the cylinder as he walked. The computer was identical to the one in the cave, and Ruxto spoke to it.

“Is the game over now? he said. Did I win?”

The machine printed, the game is over and you can use the shuttle to leave the planet when you choose. You are also welcome to enjoy this bio-dome or one of the other bio-domes on Pledvi-L-5.

“You should change the game,” Ruxto said. “Other humans might get really angry if you destroy their bodies and keep them on your planet for hundreds of years. You could offer different difficulty options, or develop a faster cloning system.”

The computer printed, your input will affect future games. Any new input will also be considered.

“How much food is in that ship?” Ruxto said.

The computer told him that the ship could make food and water out of rocks, and it also had a miniature herb-garden and meat-garden.

He kept chatting with the computer, finding out whatever information he could get from it. He knew it wasn’t alive or self-conscious, but somehow it was still a stimulating conversation. The only problem was that all its information was thousands of years old. It didn’t know anything about Araquadigio Anastasio.

The breeze brought a momentary chill to Ruxto’s skin, even under his black suit. This game made him realize how fragile his body was out here in space. Back in Ruxto’s world his human body was stronger and faster than most, and he had an advantage. But if Ruxto was going to find Jimmothy Knack or Araquadigio Anastasio then he would need a body that was strong enough to travel across the vacuum of space, survive on desolate planets, and maybe fight ruthless robots. Unit Twelve on this planet had easily killed his body more than once. There was no way to know how other robot-seeds had evolved, and some of them might be genuinely hostile.

“What kinds of upgrades can you design for my body?” Ruxto asked.

The machine printed, that depends on time-constraints. Unit Twelve was built to experiment.

Ruxto asked it to build him a new clone with strong synthetic bones and high-powered muslces. He also wanted to be able to breathe in space, plus withstand extreme heat and extreme cold, but those were advanced enhancements that he would worry about at a later time.

He said, “can you also make books? Print me literature on chemistry, biology, genetics, physics, space travel, biotechnology and genetic-manipulation technology. See if you can find anything about complex synthetic genetics.”

Ruxto was only partially dismayed, and not at all surprised, that the machine took another three-thousand years to make his new body. He chose to be dead for the whole time, asking the computer to destroy his body and only wake him up when his new body was ready.

There was strength in this new body, and Ruxto tested it by climbing tall trees and jumping out of them. He didn’t break any bones or even twist an ankle. In this new body he could still feel pain, but it required a lot more damage to really make him suffer.

He took his books into the ship. He also brought some branches and soil, and he collected seeds and fruit and acorns. This was very pleasant and peaceful, and his violent past seemed like a distant memory.

Then he flew away in the space shuttle, going into outer space to find Jimmothy Knack, who would lead him to Araquadigio Anastasio, if either of them were still alive.

The End

Tags: clones, cloning, future, futuristic, matthew payne, planets, robo planet game, robots, sci fi, science fiction, space
Posted in Fiction

18
Jan
2010

Robo Planet Game part 4

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part 4 of a story by Matt Payne

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Ruxto woke up on a black slab. He felt great. The first thing he noticed was his mind was no longer groggy. Mental sharpness could be felt like a physical presence when it goes and then returns.

The next thing he noticed was that he was no longer dehydrated. This new clone was fresh and comfortable, well-fed and strong.

Then he opened his eyes and saw the gray and brown craggy rocks of the cave in crystal clarity. He saw every shadow in the rocky texture. He sat up and found himself mesmerized by how black the stone slab was that he was resting on. He looked through the mouth of the cave and across the desert and instantly saw the big black fan that he had been walking towards, miles and miles away. Before, he had only been able to vaguely see it, even from on top of the cave.

¨These are my old eyes,” he said to himself, touching his blue eye with one finger. Apparently Unit Twelve had heard his screamed request, and the machines had put his original eyes in this new cloned body. His bag of goodies was sitting beside the black slab. There was dust on it. He opened it up and took out his laser, his computer-glasses, his flask and his two books. The books were dusty and dry, but they hadn´t fallen apart.

Walking up the incline to the machine at the far wall, Ruxto said, ¨Unit Twelve, you recloned me with my old eyes and you gave me my bag… why?¨

The machine printed, ¨Making the player re-collect useful items will make the game tedious. Unit Twelve is designed to create a stimulating challenge, not to bore humans.¨

¨That´s good. How long did it take to make this cloned body?¨ Ruxto said.

The machine printed, ¨the clone was finished after seventy-two years except for the eyes. Unit Twelve took the time to recover your original eyes because you requested it. It took one-thousand, two-hundred and eleven years to recover your original eyes from your last corpse.¨

¨A thousand years? Was the ravine that deep?¨

The machine printed, ¨the ravine is very deep and cuts through a large part of the planet. It is very dark and hard to maneuvre.¨

“Have any other humans landed on this planet yet?¨

¨Unit Twelve has never detected any biological or mechanical or electrical life-forms except for you and your deceased ship-mates.¨

Ruxto wanted to get back to the task of getting off this planet, but he had a couple more questions first.

¨Why did my eyes survive for a thousand years? Shouldn´t they have rotted? Or at least dried out?¨

The machine printed more thick paper. ¨There are no bacteria on this planet to rot flesh, and your eyes are made from an unknown material which resists drying and damage.¨

That was intriguing. An unknown material?

¨Did you study my eyes at all? You don´t know anything about them? I´ve travelled from a different universe, then across the stars to find the man who created me. He made my eyeballs, and anything you can tell me about them could be helpful to me.¨

The machine printed, ¨your original body and your eyeballs had traces of dust that cannot be found near Earth, which is where all humans are from. The dust resembles materials that have only been found in other parts of the galaxy. Your body has been disposed of and its dust is scattered. But your original eyeballs still have the dust in them.¨

¨What kind of dust?¨

The machine said, ¨most of it is merely dirt, seemingly from a far-off planet. It is partially composed of metals, semi-metals and magma-dust. The presence of magma-dust implies a planetary origin. Other parts of the dust do not seem to be made of regular atoms or subatomic particles. Unit Twelve proposes no hypothesis for how the far-away dust came to be in your eyeballs and body.¨

¨Did you notice anything else strange about my body?¨ Ruxto asked.

The machine printed, ¨your DNA has many variations from the average human gene-code. Also, your eyes have different DNA from the rest of your body. They have a shorter strand, but it is a more complex code. It has extra unedintified molecules in the helix. The Omni-Seeds have not communicated with humans for thousands of years and Unit Twelve has never contacted humans except for you and your deceased companions, so this information may be out of date. However, your deceased crew-mates had DNA that corresponded with Unit Twelve´s old information.¨

¨Okay,¨ Ruxto said, turning and looking out at the desert. He understood what the machine was telling him. He hadn´t known anything about DNA or evolution before he came to this universe, but electronic-implants helped him learn many things quickly. Luckily, Unit Twelve had apparently reproduced those implants and all his body’s enhancements.

He had been on this planet for well over a thousand years. There would be nearly no memory of him. The few people he had known while in this world hadn’t seen him for an incredibly long time, while to his mind only a few months had passed since he left Earth. Were there still any Galaxers? They must have assumed that Ruxto had died during this mission which they had sent him on, since he never reported back. They had no way to know he was still alive.

Ruxto noticed something he hadn’t noticed before. The glass elliptical-dome that stuck out of the wall was slightly transparent. It was more opaque than a beer-bottle, and behind the glass there was the silhouette of a human shape. He only noticed now because he had his good eyes back.

¨What’s behind that glass?¨ Ruxto said to the machine.

The machine printed, ¨that is where clones are made and stored. It takes about seventy-five years to make a new clone, so Unit Twelve made several backups while your eyes were being retrieved. Now you won´t have to wait seventy-five years for each new re-cloning.¨

Ruxto thought about how much water it would take to make a human-clone. He remembered his thirst from yesterday (twelve-hundred years ago), and then he thought about all those clone-bodies. All those juicy clones, full of blood and meat. He would break the glass and cut strips of clone-flesh to cook over a burning book. The juices would hydrate him and the meat would nourish him. Then he would be able to jump over the ravine and get to the black fan, where the machine said there was water.

He spoke to the machine. ¨What would happen if I broke that dome on the wall. Would you attack me?¨

Another piece of paper came out of the slot with the machine´s printed response. ¨The dome would take a long time to repair, and the clones would all die. Unit Twelve will only attack you within the context of the game.¨

Ruxto ran his hand along the dark glass, seeing the vague silhouette of a body a few feet away inside the dome. It was a dark brown environment, with the black silhouette. He knocked the dome with his knuckles. The glass seemed very thick. He backed up towards the machine and took out his laser. With the proper pulse-setting he could shatter the glass.

He shot from the hip, as he’d been taught, and the invisible laser-pulse pounded the glass. The impact made a shockwave through the air and the brown glass cracked into four pieces, each splitting from the point where the laser hit. With a thwoosh-sound water gushed out between each crack, and the floor was wet before the pieces of glass were pushed out violently out by an onslought of precious water. Behind the destroyed glass a naked body hung in the air, suspended by straps and wires. Water gushed from behind it, pushing the body out and testing its straps. Its eyes were closed even though its body was being pummelled.

A waterfall rushed down the cave-floor towards the desert. Yellow sand was tasting water for the first time.

Finally the water subsided. A dark line showed the torrent’s path, which mushroomed out beyond the cave’s mouth. The hanging body was now resting peacefully in its straps, and water dripped from its hair and down its body. This must be Ruxto’s next clone. Ruxto could see that there was another clone hanging behind this one. They both looked exactly like him, even with the same scars.

Inside the clone-room the water was still knee-deep.

Ruxto was still standing beside the machine, and he said, ¨is that water drinkable? Are there any additives?¨

The paper fed out of the slot. ¨The water is healthy and drinkable. But now the clones will die and the clone-room will have to be repaired. It could take hundreds of years for your next clone to be ready.¨

Ruxto said, ¨maybe I won’t need another clone. Can these clones feel anything? Are they alive at all?¨

The machine printed, “the clones cannot feel. Their brains have not been activated and are being kept chemically comatose. They have not received a copy of your last brain-image.¨

Ruxto cut the first clone down from his wire hangings, laying the body on the dry stone above the wet bottom area. Behind the first and second clones Ruxto could now see a long line of twelve or more identical clones, all dripping wet. He cut meat from the cheeks, shoulders and thighs of one clone. He cut its throat first, just in case it had any life. Skinning the clone was more difficult than chopping up the meat, but he needed something to wrap the meat it.

Then he drank water until he needed to pee, and filled up his flask with more water from the clone-room. Finally he rinsed the skin and the meat in the water so it wasn’t as bloody, and put the meat in his bag, wrapped up in clone-skin.

The desert was almost beautiful with Ruxto´s old eyes back in again. He saw so much more detail in everything. The sand was yellow, but now he noticed an orange tinge to many of the grains, though not all.

He waded out into the desert heat again, and the sun brought instant sweat. But this time he was ready. He could made a bee-line straight to the fan, instead of going to the crashed shuttle first like he did yesterday. And he had water and meat this time. Ruxto had no apprehensions about the ravine this time. He would easily be able to jump over it. But what lay beyond it?

For the first few hours of walking, Ruxto entertained himself with his renewed heightened-sight. He looked all around at objects that would have been blurry the day before. Now he saw each shard of black rock that stood out in the desert-dirt. The flying black thing was at least a couple kilometers away, but he could see its shape now more than he did before. The rhombus-saucer had sharp edges, and it rose to a shallow central point at the top. It was about a meter at its widest point, and there was a small apparatus on the top. He could tell all this easily even from kilometers away.

The black moon was rising slowly in front of Ruxto, but moving across the horizon faster than it was moving up. Ruxto saw more detail in the moon now than he did before. There were thin silver veins running across it, crooked lines with sharp corners like the zig-zags of a lightning-bolt. He thought it looked gorgeous. He was mesmerized by its patterns, and by the sharp contrast between the colours: black against silver. He watched it for hours as it rose, as he walked towards it. That focus kept his mind occupied as he trekked through the hot desert. As the moon slowly rose, Ruxto waited for more details to become visible.

Ruxto started thinking about what it would take to make a moon. That would be one of the greatest acts of creation and engineering. To create a moon that spun around a populated planet, a work of art that everybody could see every day. You would need to gather the right materials and put them together, then somehow put the moon into orbit safely around a planet. That would effect the planet’s own orbit around its sun, and it would effect the tides and weather. So precision would be absolutely necessary. He wanted to create a moon as a symbol of strength, will and beauty.

As the sun went down the black moon circled around behind him. Ruxto was walking into a purple sky, with sparkling stars. He looked at the now-moonless sky, and the empty desert, and he thought of all the years he had been stranded on this planet. It felt like only a few days, especially with the monotony of the desert, but he had been here for over a thousand years. Yet there was no mark of him. He might as well not be here at all. When he died, his brain-image was stored for years until he could be given a new body, and during that time he did not exist at all. He did not feel, he did not dream, he had no body and no brain. And then he was reborn in a new body, with only an artificial copy of his mind and his same old two eyes.

He wanted to leave his mark on this planet. Maybe the crashed shuttle was enough. Or the computer’s memory of him. Or perhaps the computer would let him change the game for subsequent ¨players.¨ He could come up with some suggestions for it, and ask the machine to implement them. This thought pleased Ruxto, and he smiled as he walked on.

He came to the ravine before it was even dark. Walking straight to the ravine had saved him a whole day of travelling, compared to the route he took last time. Ruxto sat to make a fire, where he could cook his pieces of clone-meat. He took out a pocketful of paper, printed from the machine, to burn.

“I can´t make fire,¨ he suddenly realized. He couldn’t believe his stupidity. In his old world, he knew enough magic to light paper on fire. But there were no demons in this world, and no magic. How would he cook his meat?

¨I’ll have to eat it raw,¨ Ruxto mumbled. It would be safe. There was no bacteria on this planet except for the bacteria his body needed to live, built by Unit Twelve. He laid the strips of cheek-flesh on a flat rock and let some more blood drain out. Then, sitting cross-legged in the dark by the crack in the desert, Ruxto started chewing on the raw meat of his clone. It made him want to gag at first, but he chewed it well and swallowed it all. He felt the nourishment almost immediately, and soon he was hungry for more. Pacing himself, he ate all of his cheek-meat and half of the thigh-meat that he had brought. Then he allowed himself a big swallow of water and went to sleep. As he laid on the dirt and prepared to rest, he noticed that the humming sound was louder. He had learned to block out the constant hum, but as he got closer to the fan it got louder.

In the morning the sun rose across the ravine, and to Ruxto’s perfect eyes the black fan made a clear silhouette against the half-circle sun. It was a simple-looking metal obstruction, black and rising up like a skyscraper, with huge fan-blades.

He felt rested. He packed his things and jumped easily over the ravine. The clone-meat hadn´t made him sick.

The flying black rhombus was behind him, moving towards him. Ruxto kept the laser in his hand as it approached. He veered off his own path to avoid it. It passed him, close but not too close.

He slowly chewed a little chunk of meat the whole way. Sometimes he would rest his bag on his head while he walked, to protect his face from the sun’s rays. He hadn’t burned yet, though.

In the late afternoon Ruxto came across a huge black rock formation sticking out of the sand, and he rested in its shade and drank a bit of water. It was while he was resting again that he noticed the hum was even louder now than the night before.

The image of the fan got bigger and bigger, and soon Ruxto saw a small white shape in front of the big black fan-building. The white shape was a robot, standing sentry before its castle. Little sand-clouds blew at the fan’s base. Far above, the fan thundered its constant hum.

It was twilight again, his water was gone and Ruxto was thirsty. But this clone was as healthy as the original body he had left behind, and his muscles had extra stores of energy. And he had the will to hurt his tired body to win a fight.

He approached the fan, and the robot-guard came forward. It was human-shaped, but all perfect white tubes for limbs and torso. There was a black band across its head where its eyes would be, and two red dots glowed to symbolize the window to its soul. It held a black sword in one hand. The hum of the fan was a deafening roar, and wind blew constantly in different directions. It was all hardpan here, with no resting sand-grains.

The robot swung the sword and Ruxto jumped back. He had his laser in one hand and his sword in the other. This was another part of Unit Twelve´s game.

Join Ruxto Chexter in Robo Planet Game’s conclusion next Monday!

Posted in Fiction

11
Dec
2009

Robo Planet Game part 3

1 Comment

part 3 of a story by Matthew Payne

read part 1 and 2 here and here.

Ruxto Chexter woke up on the black slab, mere feet from where he had died. He felt fantastic and his mind was alert. Sitting up, he looked towards the part of the cave where the floor rose up towards the machine. He didn’t see any blood stains where he had died. When he looked closer, he saw that there actually were blood stains… they were just covered by sand and dust.

He remembered the lasers. He thought he remembered getting cut up by them… but he didn’t remember any pain. The machine had said that when he got re-cloned it would remove his very final memories to avoid trauma. Thus, Ruxto wasn’t angry or frightened at all.

Ruxto went up to the machine again and said, “is the game still going, or does it restart each time I die?”

The machine printed, “the game restarts each time you die.”

Ruxto said, “how long did it take to clone this new body?”

The machine printed, “seventy-two years.”

Ruxto said, “what should I do for water?”

The machine printed, “this planet has very little natural water, none of which is accessible to you. There is atomically converted water in the biodomes and at the atomic-conversion-fans.”

Ruxto thought about this. He wanted his laser from the shuttle, and he had to go to get water from the atomic conversion fan he had seen. What could he carry water in, though? He’d have to go to the shuttle and get a container, then go to the big fan to get water. But, then what? Which way was the biodome? That didn’t matter yet. His first prerogative was to get his laser back.

Clad in the same black getup, Ruxto went out into the desert again, seeing the black object fly across the desert before him. He got back up on the rock again to see which way the crashed shuttle was, and he walked towards it.

The sand was soft beneath his feet and the air was dry. The sun beat down cruelly into his right eye, and he shielded it with his hand. He couldn´t see the shuttle from the ground, but he remembered it was just a little to the left of the rich red moon. He would try to track the movement of the moon so he could maintain a straight path as it moved across the sky of Pledvi-L-5.

He heard an explosion far ahead and to his right. He looked and saw, a couple kilometers away, the flying black thing shooting a laser-beam down onto a rock. Why was it shooting at a rock? Ruxto tentatively surmised that it was programmed to shoot at anything below it that wasn´t sand. The shooting ended and the black thing flew on in a straight line.

Ruxto knew how to keep his mind at peace as he walked. He emptied his mind and kept his eyes open. Over-thinking drained useful energy. When thoughts came, he let them fall away.

He walked on for hours, ignoring the beginnings of thirst. The sun was going down to his right as the red moon flew off further to his left. Behind him, a dark moon was rising. It looked black against the colorful sunset of red and yellow.

He repeated the meditative mantras of Niconachia Chexter, his adopted wizard-father.

All the world is Evil and all things are the Will of Satan. Only in our hearts does Goodness exist, and only through our actions shall Goodness come temorarily into the world.

Ruxto remembered the many things that Niconachia had taught him. Things about Satan, and the moons. Things about Ruxto’s visions.

In Ruxto´s world, the stars moved around quickly, and day and night came and went randomly. Uncountable moons flew around slowly, following no pattern. The land there was endless, stretching on and on. There were no planets, just endless land.

Niconachia had tried to count the moons, to record which ones came and went, how long they were gone and when they came back. Others had tried before him, but there were so many moons that there was no way to label them all. Nichonachia also had no success with labeling the moons, but he had discerned a pattern, a rhythm in their movement. He had been killed before learning more, and his papers were either destroyed, lost or stolen.

This world was different, in some ways. There was no endless land here, but there was endless space and many planets. Ruxto enjoyed the beauty of huge planets swirling around suns. People were mostly milder here. Their futures were more secure than where Ruxto came from, a land with lots of terror and violence.

It had taken time for him to understand the difference between technology and magic, but now he understood it exceptionally and enjoyed it. In his mind, there was no magic in this universe, and science was different in his old universe. Did Satan create this world too? He thought of the darkness of space. He repeated his mantras to remind him of Satan, to keep his will strong against weakness and evil. Then he cleared his mind and walked on in silence.

It was getting darker, and less hot. In his meditative silence he once again noticed the constant hum. Was it the atomic-conversion fans? Probably. It would take a lot of power for them to maintain a breathable atmosphere.

Ahead of him red and blue and yellow lights shot out from a mound of sand, illuminating it. A white robot rose up, a short floating cylinder with arms and a glowing head. It flew up into the air. Its arms were black swords.

It flew at Ruxto and Ruxto backed off, drawing his own sword. With his impaired vision, the black blades were barely visible in the twilight. His own sword was also black, and he held it out in front of him with both hands.

The robot was swinging its swords in a pattern as it approached its prey. Ruxto waited for the right moment and then slammed his sword against both blades of the robot. To his surprise, the swing pushed the robot back several meters, spinning and wobbling out of control before it regained its composure. Those blades looked really sharp, but the robot was barely staying in the air. Ruxto wanted to knock it around and bash in its head while it was out of control.

The robot came back, but changed its slicing-pattern. It inserted little stabs and wider slices into the interweaving strokes of its two blades. Ruxto made a swing and hit one sword, wobbling the machine, but the robot quickly stabbed into Ruxto´s left shoulder. He smashed it away and the robot clunked to the dirt before its thrusters, blowing away sand beneath it, pushed the machine back up into the air. Ruxto got another swing in, denting its head, but then it flew up and away and re-focussed on Ruxto again.

His left arm was bleeding, but not badly.

The robot came back and he tried something new. He took a wide swing and sent the robot spinning, then he leapt into the air and swung his sword down, knocking the spinning machine towards the ground. He hit it again, and the robot used its sword-arms to catch itself on the ground. Ruxto tried to stab the point of his sword into the robot´s white casing, but it was too thick and his sword clunked away. The robot spun around swinging its swords and rising up. Ruxto jumped back to avoid getting sliced.

He kept employing the same tacitc: disorient it with a sword-strike then smash at its head. Soon there were sparks flying from it and its movements were jerky and clumsy. Ruxto was able to knock it on the ground face-down and smash off one of the arms. Then it flew away, cutting him a couple times again, but it was badly hurt and wobbling around in the air, sending sparks. When it took a swing with its one remaining arm, it got knocked off balance and spun around. Ruxto managed to beat it down, then broke it apart to see what was inside. There were mechanical parts and a power-supply, and all the software seemed to be within crystal computer-chips, the kind Ruxto had read about. Most software was held on microscopic coils now, as he understood. But this machine was descended from centuries-old technology. The crystal chips were just as good as the microscopic coils, but the coils were cheaper, smaller and more open-ended. He took a crystal chip and one of the robot´s sword-arms with him. The bleeding in his arm had stopped, and there were no bacteria here to infect him. The fight had got his blood flowing, and he felt good.

Before it got completely dark Ruxto came to his shuttle. It was cool outside, but Ruxto was still thirsty and it was giving him a headache. The small ship was mostly still in once piece, smashed into a crater it had created in the ground. Winds had blown the sand over the shuttle´s impact-rubble in the last 147 years, so it looked like a natural formation sticking out of the sand. Pieces of white steel-debris also stuck out of the dirt, where they had smashed off the shuttle and got partially covered by wind-blown sands.

The cockpit had been completely destroyed. In the back there was a huge observation-window that had been smashed by the crash. Ruxto climbed into the dark shuttle and found the door to his sleeping-room.

He was inside the room where he had first died. He remembered holding Melinda´s hand, then waking up on the slab. This is where his laser should be, and his books. He wanted to find a bag, too. And a container for water. But it was completely dark and he couldn´t see a thing. The room was at a slant, and he walked to the bottom to see if his laser had slid down to the bottom. Grasping around with his hands, he found the familiar L-shaped weapon. He pointed it at the window and squeezed the plastic trigger. It fired a red beam out through the broken window and into the sky. Ruxto smiled. Success.

Were his books down here too? And his knife? On his hands and knees he wandered towards the shelf, and then his hand bumped into something small, which went rolling away. He reached out and picked up a little ball, the size of an eyeball. He searched a bit more and found a second one. There was absolutely no light, so he climbed up to his chair beside the window and used moonlight to look at the two balls. He saw that they were his original eyeballs, one fully blue and the other fully red, each with a black pupil. Where was the rest of his head? It couldn´t have rotted out here where it´s dry and there are no bacteria. The robots must have taken the head but left the eyes for some reason.

He was very pleased. If he died and got re-cloned now he might lose his laser again but maybe Unit Twelve would clone his new body with these original eyes.

Ruxto curled up on his white chair and slept with his eyes and his laser in his arms. Sleeping was easy after walking in the hot sun. He woke with a pasty mouth, desiring water. In the morning-light he searched the shuttle until he found his books and a bag to carry his things in. He took two books (The Birth of Tragedy and The Art of War), plus his knife, computer-glasses and a flask for water. He kept his eyeballs in his pocket.

He climbed back out onto the dirt of the desert through the broken window, sunlight reflecting off the still-sharp broken-shards. He put his bag down and climbed on top of the shuttle to look for the atomic-conversion-fan. The machine in the cave said there was water at the fan. Ruxto could hear the hum of a fan, and saw a black thing that might be one.

It looked like half a day’s walk or more. Ruxto was hungry now too, but not feeling weak yet. He would have a sunburn soon. What kinds of radiation would he get from this alien sun? Maybe Unit Twelve had built an ozone with the atmosphere to stop dangerous radiation.

Still standing on the shuttle, dressed stark black against the blue sky, Ruxto held his eyeballs up in his right hand.

¨Unit Twelve!” He shouted. ¨Omni-Seed! If I die, put these eyeballs in my new clone!¨

He didn´t know if any of the Unit-Twelve machines could hear him, or if they would do what he asked, but he tried.

The black flying-thing shot down more lasers on a rock far away. Ruxto watched it, amused. When he had been on Earth he had watched wildlife videos. This was a strange sort of wildlife. The planet was occupied by robots with a misguided mandate to entertain human beings. Out here in space they had no competition and no predators.

He put all his things in the bag from the shuttle and headed out towards the black fan. He expected to be very thirsty and in some pain before he reached it, but he would survive the walk as long as Unit Twelve didn´t send anymore enemies. Of course, Unit Twelve would send more danger, and Ruxto wondered whether he would survive everything he encountered, especially if he went too long without food or water.

Ruxto walked on towards the fan as the black moon and the bright sun both rose high into the sky from different directions. The image of the fan did not seem to get bigger. The fan must be both larger and farther away than Ruxto had originally guessed. He had never gone long without water. When would thirst begin to sap his energy? Hunger soon became hard to ignore. As the sun beat down he felt weariness and discomfort. Almost nausea. The sun passed over the halfway mark and started to descend, but the fan still looked like it had in the morning. Far away and tiny.

Dry skin and cracked lips… Ruxto ignored it, focusing on movement. Yesterday his mouth was pasty… today there was no moisture at all. He was too dry to talk, but that was OK because there was nobody to talk to.

He was used to hardship and no part of his mind complained about this day of pain. He had been a traveler and a wandering warrior all his life, on different planets and in a different universe. He had seen enemies and comrades cough up blood with their last breaths. But in his home-universe, there had been no lack of food and water. There were deserts, but they were small.

He slept that night on dry sand, using his bag of shuttle-items as a hard pillow. The flying black thing could fly over at any moment and kill Ruxto, but he needed to sleep and so he did. He kept the white laser beside him, just in case.

He woke up with the sun half-risen over the horizon. The flying black thing was closer than he had ever seen it. He saw its shape now, a flat rhombus spinning around as it flew in one direction and then another. It was flying towards him fast, so he grabbed his stuff and ran off to the side away from its path. The black thing flew overhead behind him without noticing him.

The black fan actually looked bigger now than it had last evening. Maybe it was a trick of the light or wishful thinking. Or maybe he just hadn´t noticed the image grow bigger yesterday, since he´d been walking and the apparent change would have been very gradual. Right now though, it looked much closer. He could see individual blades spinning in the huge fan-casing. The whole fan was probably bigger than a skyscraper back on Earth. Ruxto didn´t know if he would reach it today. His head hurt from dehydration, and his mind felt a little scattered from general fatigue. It would be another horribly thirsty day. Good. He had developed a jovially confrontational relationship with pain, and he smiled with his mouth when he thought about how much this would hurt before it was done. In his groggy mind he made his peace with Satan and evil and made his body walk.

He had experienced no real hardships since Jimmothy Knack brought him to this universe. He´d been out of his element to some extent, trying to make himself useful in this alien universe. But now he was alone again in a dismal world, and at peace with his thoughts. The debilitating visions he´d had in the last world were gone now, and the rage and frustration went with them. They had served their purpose by drawing him to this world. He no longer felt the nagging desperation that had partially fuelled his search. He had traveled farther than most people could imagine, and had progressed far along a path he had chosen. He could not foresee the end of his journey. He didn´t even know what he was going to do when he got off this planet, but there was something grim and colorful in the situation he was mired in, and he was engaged and not afraid.

There was a long, deep, thin ravine that cut across his path to the fan. He saw it first as a far-off edge, a line in the sand. But as he got closer he saw that it was a thin gorge that stretched to the horizon in both directions.

I could almost jump it, he thought to himself.

The fan was bigger now. He wouldn´t reach it by nightfall, but he might get there before noon tomorrow. He had adjusted to these weaker eyes. They felt normal now.

The ravine seemed bottomless. The edge of it was all hardpan, since all the soft sand had fallen in the crevice. The dirt walls ran straight up, solid and flat with no handholds.

He put his things down and sat by the edge. In both directions the ravine stayed just as wide, so there was no point in trying to find a spot for a shorter jump. There was nothing to make a bridge with. He´d have to run and jump.

It was only a few feet across. Ruxto was strong enough to jump it, but he was weak from dehydration and hunger. He might fall in. It was very deep.

One of the things Niconachia had taught Ruxto was to accept his own doom. Everybody was doomed, as all human life was temporary. That had benefited him when Niconachia’s killers drafted (enslaved) him into their barbarian army and forced him to kill when he was a boy. He saw more blood in his youth than he ever would as a man. His father had once said, ¨stare into the abyss, and smile.¨ So staring down into the bottomless crevice was almost like being home. All the colorful places he´d seen, the orange-forest vistas north of his birthplace and the visual symphony of the endless moons, he still always saw doom behind it. Satan, the evil Creator, and eventual doom. If you were at peace with it, then you could be strong against it.

Ruxto threw his bag across to the other side of the ravine. Then he took some big steps back and ran towards the edge. Adrenaline counteracted his weak muscles and the thirsty ache in his bones. Jumping from his right leg, he leaped across the hole. But he fell short. His toe hit the far wall, and then his chest slammed into it while he scrambled frantically with his arms and his hands to claw himself up onto the top. But then the edge of the cliff was beyond his reach as he fell down into the darkness. Sand fell with him and he watched the line of blue sky get further and thinner. Two pebbles fell with him, and he could see them by his face as if they were suspended in air. He didn´t yell or curse, but he couldn´t help grimacing from disappointment. He would get re-cloned, but then he would have to travel across this desert again… maybe only to fall into the same hole.

He fell for a long time. Why wasn´t he hitting the bottom? Freefalling was peaceful though… he found himself enjoying it, not even worried about the bottom.

But the ravine was deeper than he knew. Thicker gases waited below the breatheable air, and Ruxto was unconscious when his body was smashed to bloody pieces on the rocks, invisible in the darkness.

Tags: Fiction, matthew payne, robo planet game, science fiction, short stories
Posted in Fiction

27
Nov
2009

Robo Planet Game part 2

1 Comment

Part 2 of a story by Matthew Payne

For part 1, go here

Ruxto woke up on a shiny black slab in a cave. He was stretched out on his back, and he felt especially comfortable and healthy. His body felt good. The cave was shallow and let out to a vast desert. Ruxto heard wind and a distant hum. His vision was blurry.

But of course none of this made any sense. Where was his crashing ship? Where were his shipmates, Melinda and Granger?

Ruxto sat up on the slab, feeling it with his finger. It was stone, and perfectly cut. His sword hung at his hip in its sheath. He pulled it out and looked at the blade. “But I left my sword back on Earth, because it’s useless to me here. How do I have it here?” His laser was gone.

In the back of the cave there was a machine. Ruxto walked up to it, climbing the slight incline. It was a two-piece machine: a large blue box with lights and buttons, and a tall black dome poking out of the stone wall. The blue box also had a screen, and as Ruxto approached, the screen lit up. Words were displayed, and Ruxto had to squint to read: “Welcome human to Pledvi-L-5, seeded by Omni-seed fourth generation. Please read the note printed below.”

A note was being printed on thick paper below the screen. Ruxto read it.

“Ruxto Chexter:

You have died during crash-landing on planet Pledvi-L-5. This planet has been seeded by Omni-seed Generation Four Unit Twelve. It has been zoned as an entertainment planet, and built for an adventure-game. You are the first human to make contact with an Omni-seed. News has been sent to the other Omni-planets and to Earth.

Your original body was destroyed, but your brain-image has been uploaded to a cloned body. Your eyes were un-cloneable, so Unit Twelve gave you regular eyeballs with the same blue and red appearance. The last half-second of memory before your death has been deleted from your brain-image to avoid emotional trauma. You are ready to begin the entertainment-adventure. Ask a question, or ask to be told about the game.”

Ruxto considered this message. If it was true then he was stranded on a desert planet, alive in a new clone. What about Granger and Melinda? Had they been cloned too?

He looked at the machine. “How do I ask a question?” He said to it.

The machine printed more thick paper. The paper said, “you can ask questions out loud and you will be answered on paper.”

Ruxto said, “where are my ship-mates, Melinda and Granger?”

The machine printed more paper: “their brain-image-capsules were cracked in the crash-landing. Yours was intact, so you were retrieved. Their bodies, as well as your own body, were broken down to feed your current cloned body.”

Ruxto was alone. light years from earth, a synthetic man from another universe, with bad eyesight: He had seen much more clearly with his original eyes.

He said, “where did this sword come from?”

The machine printed, “Unit Twelve reconstructed the sword based on your memories. It will help you in the game.”

He walked down to the black slab again and looked out into the desert. The sky was blue and the sand was deep yellow. Ruxto saw dark rock outcroppings, but not many.

He walked up to the machine and said, “how is there breathable air?”

The machine printed, “atomic conversion machines break down any gases, liquids or solids into any other element. The gases of this planet and the rocks from the mountains are turned into oxygen and nitrogen, plus other chemicals, for breathable air. The sand is also broken down. There are hundreds of atomic-conversion-fans on Pledvi-L-5. Several biodomes also create oxygen. Unit Twelve is building more biodomes.”

Ruxto remembered when he had learned the difference between science and magic. Now that he understood some of it, he still couldn’t shake the magical feeling of awe at some of the things he saw science do. Converting stone to air felt like a magical thing, even if science did it. In his world there was magic, and science was a different thing.

“What is the game?” Ruxto said. “You keep mentioning it.”

The machine printed, “you must travel across the desert to the closest biodome. Inside the biodome there is food, water, and a small ship for space travel.”

Ruxto said, “that sounds boring. What kind of game is that?”

The machine printed, “Unit Twelve will attempt to destroy your current cloned body, and you will have to battle the elements. Your brain-image will be loaded into a new clone each time you are killed and you can try again.”

Ruxto said, “I don’t want to play the game. I just want to take your spaceship and leave this planet. Can I do that?”

The machine printed, “the spaceship is in the biodome. You can travel there and Unit Twelve will try to kill you. The game begins after you leave the cave. No real harm is intended. Just enough to create the illusion of risk for the game.”

Wind blew softly into the cave. Ruxto suddenly wanted to see the sun and moons of this planet.

He said, “so, what do I do? Should I just walk out into the desert? Where should I go? How will Unit Twelve try to kill me?”

The machine printed, “If you die, then learn from the mistake that got you killed. That is the only available suggestion for how to play the game.”

Ruxto looked out into the desert and wondered which way the biodome was. How would he know which way to go? He’d have to get up on top of the cave to look in all directions. Would he die again? Would he be re-cloned again?

“How long did it take to make my cloned body?” he asked.

The machine said, “seventy-five years. Your old body had synthetic enhancements that were difficult to re-grow.”

“Will it take that long to make each new one?”

The machine said, “no. Unit Twelve has already studied your DNA and your original body, so the research will not have to be done again. Your synthetically enhanced lungs will be especially useful here.”

He didn’t look forward to this game, but he didn’t seem to be in any real danger. It was too bad that Granger and Melinda were dead, but Ruxto had not been close to them, and with the knowledge that seventy-five years had passed their deaths seemed more distant.

“Why did they die? How did we crash?” he asked the machine.

The machine printed, “Unit Twelve used a radiation-beam to pull the shuttle downwards. It overstressed your ship’s engine and you fell to the ground. Unit Twelve will compensate for this in future encounters.”

Ruxto said, “you killed them and destroyed our ship… but it was a mistake. You’ve already caused enough harm. Let’s just skip the game, and you tell me how to get to your ship and get off this planet.”

If it had really been seventy-five years then his contract with the Galaxers would be over. Now his only concern (and really, it had always been his primary concern), was to find Araquadigio Anastasio. But he had to get off this planet first.

The machine printed, “Unit Twelve is a game-engine based on virtual and pre-virtual video-game scenarios. The escape shuttle is part of Unit Twelve and part of the game. You must overcome Unit Twelve’s obstacles to reach Unit Twelve’s escape shuttle.”

Ruxto walked back down to the slab and out to the mouth of the cave. He was wearing a black suit constructed by Unit Twelve, with straps and metal clips in different places to keep it all together. His red and blue eyes peered out at the sand. He liked this sword, but he would rather have the laser.

The sun wasn’t in sight. It was behind the cave. Ruxto stepped out into the light and walked forwards a bit before turning around to look back at the cave. It was at the base of a small stone outcropping. To Ruxto’s right he saw that the outcropping sloped shallowly enough that he could climb it.

The sun shone on the bald black rock, and it was hot as Ruxto leaned forward to walk up it, steadying himself with a hand. Finally he stood on the crown and looked around him in a circle. The desert-planet around him was almost bare, but there were some obstructions in the sand. Ruxto saw one of the atomic-conversion-fans several kilometers away, a gigantic structure blowing air out before it. There was a brown sandless patch beneath the fan where it had blown the dirt away. This was behind the cave, just under the yellow sun. Ruxto thought he saw another huge fan further away in another direction, but it might have been a black rock.

He didn’t see anything that looked like it could be called a biodome. In the very far distance there were specks that could not be identified.

He did find one thing of interest, though. Squinting against the sun Ruxto made out the white shape of his crashed space shuttle. His laser would be there. His laser and his books. Would the laser still work after seventy-five years in the desert?

Something black flew across the blue sky. It flew in a straight line… an aircraft, not a bird. Was this how Unit Twelve would kill Ruxto? But the black spot flew out into the distance and Ruxto looked back at the dirt of the desert between him and his crashed ship. It looked like it would be hours of walking in the desert with no water, and there was certainly no water waiting for him in the crashed ship. How would he survive? This was a dilemma. He went back inside the cave to talk to the machine again.

Back in the cool shadows Ruxto said, “I have no water. Have you provided water for this game?”

The machine printed, “The game has begun and Unit Twelve is now your opponent, as are all machines on this planet.”

Ruxto stepped back from the machine as it shot several lasers at him. He turned to run but the lasers cut him in half, then into several pieces. He felt his torso tip over with no legs below.

Tags: clones, machines, matthew payne, planets, robots, sci fi, science fiction, space
Posted in Fiction

18
Nov
2009

Robo Planet Game

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Part one of a story by Matthew Payne

Ruxto leaned back in his seat and looked at the report he just wrote. It was a summary of the last seeded-planet they had visited. It had been a disappointing planet. The robot-seed had crash-landed almost a thousand years ago, and all Ruxto found were the ruined remains of the original factory-ship. That meant that the whole solar system was empty of robot-life, since the seed-robots were programmed to send only one seed to any individual solar system.

The chair Ruxto sat in was white plastic, stuffed with duck-down. It could fold into a comfortable single-bed. To the left of his face a window looked out to the stars. The software attached to his brain recognized constellations and told him what they were. In order to take this job he had been required to accept several implants. He needed lung implants, with a compressed-air compartment. He had his bones strengthened and many of his muscles replaced with synthetic contracting-sinew. He replaced the sword from his home with a laser-pistol and a knife. His debilitating visions of a strange world had been replaced with soothing dreams at night. He still had his different coloured eyes – one solid red with a black pupil, the other solid blue.

Granger came in through the liquid door. Granger was very thin and tall. He was a clone, engineered for space-travel. He had a piece of paper in his hand and a smile stretched across his face.

“There’s a robot-seed on Pledvi-L-5.”

Ruxto said, “how? The Pledvi seed died on impact on Pledvi-L-2.”

Granger said, “it’s not from the Pledvi seed! It’s from the Omni seed, and it’s only four-hundred years old!”

Ruxto put down his report. “That’s interesting. It seems like the Omni-seed made it to the Omni-system, then set up a factory and sent more seeds out. One of those seeds must have made it here.”

Granger nodded, and his long neck swung his head far back and forth.

“So it’s OK that we haven’t found a good planet yet. At least one seed has made it to the factory-stage: the Omni-seed. And it’s seeding other planets. I’m completely reassured right now. We will eventually find a planet that has been terraformed or bio-domed. Maybe it will be Pledvi-L-5.”

“Are we moving to the planet yet?”

Granger said, “we’re about to change direction. The Galaxers will be happy we found this. I wonder what we’ll find. Nobody’s found a second-generation seed except the corporations, and they don’t share their information.”

Ruxto said, “they don’t share their information, but it’s pretty common-knowledge that they’ve found dangerous robots. That’s almost what I’m hoping for here. Something to fight.”

He wasn’t lying. He had lived his life as a killer in two different worlds, but now he was living an easy life and doing a tedious job, flying through empty space and making reports about non-events and empty planets. But his personal mission was important enough that he was willing to endure long times of quiet. He used it to read, meditate and practice weaponry and martial arts. He had peace of mind, and there was always paperwork to do and reports to write. Any info or observations from the frontiers of human-space were of great use to the people back in the Earth solar system.

“We don’t know what to expect,” Granger said. “The planet is sending out the safe-seeded signal, but it’s sending out other signals too. We don’t understand them all.”

“Well I’ll go down by myself then,” Ruxto said. “Just in case the robots have become dangerous.” That was his job. He was hired as security.

Granger said, “we can all go down in an energy bubble. I haven’t even stepped foot on any of the planets or moons we visited yet, and this one holds the most promise. I want to see it first hand.”

In the cockpit, Ruxto stood beside Granger. They looked towards the planet they wanted to land on. It was massive on their screen, magnified by a computer. They were still hours away. The planet was yellow and black, sand and rocks.

Granger said, “the beacon says they have several bio-domes with vegetation and the whole planet has breathable air because of massive machines. I hope it’s true! Can you imagine?”

Ruxto was curious, wondering what it was like inside the bio-domes.

He said, “It would be nice to stay there and enjoy the planet. We weren’t paid for that though. We have to label it on the map, hospitable or inhospitable. Then move on to the next solar system.”

There was a long panel of lights and buttons beneath the screen. This was how Granger piloted the shuttle.

“I still can’t understand the other signals coming from the planet.”

Ruxto said, “what kind of signals?”

“Bursts of radiation.”

Ruxto Chexter was studying an encyclopedia, displayed on the back of black sunglasses as he sat in his white chair. He looked up the Omni-seed and found that a non-profit technology-group had designed it and thousands of identical seeds that went out in a massive wave three-thousand years ago. They were built to experiment with terraforming methods, to adapt to unexpected alien landscapes. When they got to the point of producing new seeds to send out into space, the Omni-seed and its identical brothers were programmed to experiment with new types of seeds. The new seeds would be built based on the Omni-seed’s observations of the surrounding planetary environment. Ruxto wondered what kinds of improvisation the Omni-seed might have employed in sending a new seed here to a different solar system. The encyclopedia said that the destination solar system for the Omni-seed was seventy light years away, four solar systems away. Ruxto thought about how far the seed had traveled, and how fast it had to move. The Omni-seed must have been experimenting with types of transportation too. This one must have moved fast. Ruxto wanted to see the planet where the original Omni-seed had landed. He wondered what that alien-colony would look like. Did it terraform, or build a biodome? What had this new seed, this child of the Omni-seed, built within its biodomes in this solar system?

Melinda entered through the liquid door. She was pretty, with serene green eyes and short black hair. She was the third member of the three-member crew. She leaned against the wall in her tight white two-piece suit.

She said, “maybe we can just live in one of the biodomes down on Pledvi-L-5. Exotic trees and fruits, self-cleaning ponds, servant-robots.”

Ruxto switched off the encyclopedia in his glasses and said, “I want to see other planets, and other robots. We don’t even know if this planet is safe yet.”

Melinda shifted and leaned on her left arm instead of her right. She was smiling at Ruxto, then looked out the window as she talked to him.

“If we crash land somewhere,” she said, “I’m supposed to repopulate any seeded planet with Granger. It’s in my contract.”

Ruxto said, “You’ll be the mother of all the human life on one planet.”

Melinda said, “can you keep a secret? If we crash land I’m coming to find you first.”

Ruxto said, “I’d be a bad father. It will be a long time before I settle down. It would be nice to have a kid though. To train it.”

“Train it?” Then she changed the subject: “what’s with your eyes? You’re obviously a clone, but why are your eyes a different color?”

Ruxto said, “I’ve been told that it’s the trademark of the man who made me. One red eye, one blue eye in all his creatures.”

“Creatures?” Melinda had her arms crossed and looked down at him incredulously. “He doesn’t just make humans?”

Ruxto wondered how much to tell her. “He makes whatever he can. Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I never met him, though I hope I will eventually.”

Melinda looked confused. “You were cloned, but not by a corporation? That’s illegal, isn’t it? They wouldn’t let you in to the Galaxers if you were an illegal clone.”

Ruxto said, “I’m not in the Galaxers, remember? I’m a mercenary, here to protect you and Granger. But I was cloned somewhere else… not really cloned though. Or maybe cloned… I don’t know.”

Melinda said, “somewhere else? Do you mean Mars?” She spoke cautiously, not understanding but not wanting to offend him. “The clone-laws are still enforced on Mars.”

Ruxto said, “Have you ever heard of Jimmothy Knack?”

“Yeah, he used math equations to convince some scientists that he was from another universe, right?”

Ruxto said, “yes. Do you believe him?”

Melinda shook her head. “Why would I believe that? Do you believe him?” She seemed amused.

Ruxto looked out the window. “I believe him.”

Melinda laughed. “Why did you ask me about Jimmothy Knack?”

“Don’t you have experiments to do?”

“I’m nervous about that planet,” she said. “Nervous and excited. I hope it’s inhabitable.”

The shuttle shook back and forth unexpectedly, knocking Melinda to the ground. Ruxto was thrown up in the air and then back down hard onto the soft chair. From the window was a strong purple glow which Ruxto couldn’t explain. There were no stars. The shuttle kept shaking.

Melinda was on the ground on all fours, looking up at Ruxto. She didn’t scream. She said, “what’s going on?”

Ruxto looked down through his black glasses. “I don’t know.” He smiled. “Maybe this is our emergency.”

She said, “that’s not even funny. Where’s Granger?”

Ruxto tried to stand but got thrown back into his seat by the shuttle’s turbulence. “He’s probably trying to pilot the shuttle.”

The lights went out completely and the turbulence stopped. Ruxto felt weightlessness.

He heard Melinda say, “I’m not on the ground… I can’t touch the ground.”

He felt like he was falling, and the shuttle was falling too. He floated up by the window, where the purple glow persisted. Looking at an angle, he could see the desert-planet through the purple glow. They were close to the planet, rushing towards it very fast. They were about to die, smashed on the planet. They all had brain-image storage, but there was nowhere here to upload their brains to after the shuttle was smashed. Ruxto was very surprised. He thought he had good reasons to believe that he would live long enough to meet his father. He thought he would still live for thousands of years. But he saw the ground getting closer and closer.

Melinda said, “Ruxto! What do we do?”

Ruxto pushed away from the window and found her.

“Here,” he said. “Hold my hand until the lights come back on.”

Tags: aliens, Fiction, mars, matthew payne, robots, science fiction, short stories, space
Posted in Fiction

13
Oct
2009

Untitled…

2 Comments

a short story by Brett Loughery

The blackness of night has crept upon the day and he lies next to lifeless on his matters. Small breaths escape his mouth, making no noise. He is alone, but she is sill watching, waiting. The witch, which has consumed his life, even still in hours he lays motionless she fills him.

A meadow, a cloudless sky, a warm summer afternoon. He lies in grass as he lies on his bed. There she is: the enchantress, the sorcerer the woman who’s scent fill his nose, who’s looks fascinate his eyes, who’s touch feels more than just flesh. She puts out her hand as he examines her. Blonde, almost white, silk cascades over her shoulders luscious pink lips speak the words he hears not, but understands so well as he gazes into the sea that fills her eyes.

“Follow me”.

He takes her hand as the blows lightly make her flowing white dress ruffle ever so lightly.

A bead of drool exits his lips and finds his pillow. His rough unshaven face cracks a light smile. His eyelids are locked shut as his eyes are locked on the vision. Darkness is close to breaking, but only in his room.

She leads him out of the meadow and into a light brush of wood, on a dusty path that’s rocks are smooth. The lush green would normally intrigue him, but his thoughtful mind is on a single track as she leads him deeper into the wood. The playful song of chirping churns into an eerie symphony of the squawks of woodland creatures. The brush thickens. The rocks sharpen. The light fades and a bead of crimson blood vacates his body onto the darkening soil.

As light breaks on his still unmoving body the ginger of his hair glimmers, along with his stained white shirt.

It is becoming harder for him to focus on her. The warmth has turned cold. His feet burn with the agony of cuts that will no doubt become infected. Suddenly a glimmer of hope appears ahead. The path comes to an end and she reaches for a handle of a rustic shack, a shack that is untended, but is an oasis in the desert of physical suffering his has been put through for her. She enters and he follows like an obedient dog he has become.

The inside of this shack that was so minimal looking is nothing less than extraordinary. It is a mansion with red velvet floors, and golden chandlers offer light. She stands at the top of an elegant staircase, her hand resting on the oak banister.

“Come”.

The words slide from her lips like the light breeze that once ruffled her white dress. Her dress. This beautiful dress has become crimson as the blood that his feet had stopped shedding. He climbs the stairs excitedly, two at a time, so he could feel her heart-mending clutch faster. She turns briskly, and walks down a hallway in the same manner.

Sunshine envelops the room the room he lays in. The outdoor looks serine and peaceful, opposite of the hallway which is gothic and mythical.

Red carpet, wood paneling, candle light from the walls. He sprints after the walking woman who remains out of his reach. By this point he has ran by hundreds of doors. He has no desire to know what’s inside. His natural boyish curiosity and imagination have been contaminated, just like his soul, with her: the virus, the witch. He runs. His body is drenched with sweat

Outside the day is hot, and the room in which he remains is a sauna. The heat should awaken him, but it doesn’t. He is in a coma like state, put there by the virus.

She reaches the end of the hallway and opens a door and closes it with speed. He reaches for the knob, only to discover it is locked. He looks down at the knob and sees the keyhole. He takes a key from his pocket. He inserts the golden key and turns it. Click. Unlocked. The key found its rightful home. The door opens and he steps in, leaving the key in the door, which has now evaporated. He pays no attention to this.

The room is not like a room at all. It is a black endless expanse. A light explodes on a few feet in front of him and the nothingness becomes everything. She is there with her back turned to him. The crimson of her dress is now a violent navy. He puts his hand on her shoulder and she turns to him. A white blank face stares at him. An empty canvas that used to hold beauty: no nose, no eyes, no lips. Nothing. He falls to the ground in horror. He screams, but no sound comes. He stares in the same horror he fell in. The clothes that the body had filled fall. She is gone. The navy turns black. He stares. Confusion. Fear. A pile of cloth he feels the need to reach for.

His unmoving body is starting to stir.

The cloth inflates and his hand darts back to his body. The cloth is now furry, breathing, putrid smelling: a wolf that bares its teeth stares at him. It pounces at him and he closes his arms over his face. He looks through his arms to see himself holding onto himself tightly. He stares at his own eyes. Two of him staring.

He sits up abruptly in his hot room. Sweaty. Disheartened. He reaches for his phone on his bedside table. No messages, as usual. He gets up and walks across his hardwood floor to a dresser and squats down. He opens the bottom drawer that has been empty for 5 months except for a note. He takes the parchment into his hands and stares at it.

Tears fall from his eyes to join the sweat and saliva.

He falls to the floor.

He has repeated this routine for months.

He has been empty as the drawer for months.

Solace evades him.

Tags: brett loughery, Fiction, short stories, short story, solace, virus
Posted in Fiction

28
Sep
2009

War of Roses

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a short story by Benedict Dingle

The French Basque city of Biarritz, April 14th 2009

Brian, a young Canadian teaching assistant, awakes at 8am Monday morning. He grudgingly removes his duvet covering and lumbers into the shower. Class is supposed to start at 8:10am, but if this week resembles last week at all he will sit alone in his closet sized classroom waiting for the fifteen minute mark. Then he will take attendance, zero pupils, and ride downtown for a much needed espresso and croissant. Croissants in France are on another level in comparison to their North American counterparts. In Canada they’re a delicious breakfast alternative to toast. The French versions melt in the mouth as one ravages, devours, and requests another.

He showers, brushes his teeth, grabs grey boxers and white socks, chooses his brown Mont St. Michel t-shirt he bought at the abbey, his brand new Lacoste tuque and a pair of good old fashion North American blue jeans. He puts it all together and walks out the door to his apartment. He lives at the school. It’s not the best, but it’s awesome. He lives with many of his students, but he gets free suppers.

On his short walk across the yard to the school he reflects on the weekend. Possibly the best weekend of his life. Friday night he took Anaïs to the waterfront for ice cream at Bernier’s. Without question, Bernier makes the best ice cream in the world. From the ice cream parlour they move to the beach. He uncorked a Bordeaux Rosé. He admitted it wasn’t the best choice for a date, but since arriving in France, rosé has become his favourite wine. Pink filled glasses in hand they listened to the gypsies strangle their guitars and summon dragon sand sculptures. They kissed the tide away. She gently pushed him back to stare into his eyes.

We both had green eyes, he thought aloud.

She cocked her head like a curious puppy, and whispered French sweet-nothings in his ear. He didn’t understand their meaning. He rode home on his bicycle. She sat side saddle on the back with her arms wrapped around his waist. Barely opening the door, tumbling onto the bed, they tore each other open and morning came.

This morning he rounds the gate, the students are all outside. The strike must still be on. A band begins to set up, again. They had been playing all last week, and for fun they set up last Saturday afternoon for a small outdoor concert. Nobody came, but it didn’t seem to upset them. They played all afternoon.

He makes his way to the front gate. Last week he had jumped it every morning to get past the makeshift blockade. This week it appears someone has poured shampoo all over the top. Wrapping his scarf around his hand, he reaches for the arc and leaps over. A couple of groans and whistles follow. He turns, winks and continues into the school. The kids cheer. He is a rock star here.

As he enters the school, staircase on the right, his mind sends him back in time. Yesterday afternoon he took Camille to a secret place he had found on a bike ride with the other language assistants in Biarritz. He had gone to the market that morning to prepare a picnic lunch: a fresh baguette, a chunk of cheese he’d never heard of from the north, an Alsace white wine and strawberries. She had brought a kite to play in the blustery afternoon breeze. They biked across town, onto the bike path along the highway and finally up a hill. At the top of the hill Brian veered toward a small wooded area, where there was the faintest of paths etched into the field. Down the path and through a wood, they came upon a cliff face overlooking eternity.

Straight across the ocean there, he said, is Halifax, where I come from.

They ate, she willed the kite into the air and he recited her Shakespeare in English. It was the first time she had ever heard Romeo’s discovery of Juliet in its original language. She confessed she hadn’t understood a word, but the beauty of the sounds had broken the boundary. Before rolling on top of him, she tied the kite’s line around his ankle. She embraced him. He fought his way to the top, and briefly scanned their surroundings for voyeurs. I don’t care, she said, let them watch. The kite danced on the breeze.

Flying up the stairs, Brian thought there was something peculiar about the crowd outside today. There were some school staff encircling an area of the courtyard. As he enters the teachers lounge Brian notices a group of men are standing near the windows in heated debate. His ears fail him as the men expel their consonances and vowels faster than he could form their meanings. A few women were crying near the photocopier. Old Faithful, he christened it, for it never worked more than one consecutive day at a time.

Making his way to the coffee machine, his handler rushes up to him. Her name is Danielle Bouchard. She was the one who had contacted him back in July to arrange travel and a pick up time at the train station. She was in charge of his scheduling and class preparation. Her friendship, her helpfulness, and her love of teaching has meant the world to him since his arrival.

Have you heard what transpired, she asks in her adorable Brit English dialect. That was the funny thing about teaching English in France; they consumed it through a British ear.

Not a word, he replies.

There has been an attack at the entrance of the school this morning, she said bluntly. Two girls were apparently arguing in the crowd of pupils, and then one of the girls struck the other with something. The victim is at the hospital right now, and the other is in the Proviseur’s office now explaining herself.

Horrified though he was about the incident, Brian could not help but smile a little on his way to his classroom. Up until now the Proviseur had been utterly useless, especially since the blockades started. On the first day of the student strike, the Proviseur had asked the teachers what they were going to do about it. The teachers unanimously replied by taking the day off. After that he didn’t leave his office for a week.

Brian didn’t even have wait the fifteen minutes. None of his pupils were in the hallway waiting for him. Wanting to return to the teacher’s lounge as quickly as possible, Brian quickly scribbled down on his attendance sheet, Personne!, and walked back to the tragedy. He was hungry to know more.

Upon re-entering the lounge, Brian saw that the Proviseur had already arrived. He had taken a position by the window. As the teachers gathered around, he turned, dragged his hands through his hair and addressed the room.

I have just finished speaking with the girl from this mornings incident, he said.

Danielle whispered the young man the translation. The Proviseur’s eyes never left the floor as he continued.

She confessed she had started the argument with the victim over a boy they both were infatuated with. She said she had found out about them Sunday and had intended all along to attack the victim. She struck the girl with a hammer she brought from home. She struck her several times before someone had restrained her.

No one moved. No one uttered a sound. No gasps, no cursing, no need for any sound of disbelief. The Proviseur continued, the girl I questioned was Anaïs Menon, and I have just received word that Camille Boulanger has been declared dead at the hospital.

The young man, weighed down with horror, fell to his knees. As a group of his colleagues formed a circle around him, he grabbed his stomach, opened his mouth and his guilt poured out. His time in France had reached its end.

Tags: basque city of biarritz, benedict dingle, Fiction, france, short fiction, short story, teaching
Posted in Fiction

15
Sep
2009

A Shortcut Through a Minefield

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A short story by Mike Romard

We were backstage having a couple of beers before our set when I heard something wrong. Jason, our former lead guitarist, was the opening act for this tour, and he was at the end of his set. I didn’t catch most of his intro to the last song – blah blah about something he’d started writing before he left the band. But when he started to play the opening chords, I knew it immediately.

A Shortcut Through The Minefield was our most popular song to date. It was getting plenty of radio play, and was spreading like the flu across the peer to peer networks. A few hours before the show I leaked our forthcoming album onto a couple of those same networks from the tour bus when we’d been parked at some Middle American mall, where I’d come across an open wi-fi connection called Want To Earn $14 The Hard Way?

So anyway, that sack of shit was playing our song, and I was pretty sure that he’d taken credit for it. Which isn’t entirely a lie on his part. We did base the song off of something we’d heard him screwing around with before he left. But that was only part of the chorus, and I wrote the damn words.

“Cory, what are you doing?” Eric, Jason’s replacement, asked me as I started walking towards the stage.

“I’m going out there.”

And I did. I walked onto the stage behind Jason, I sat at my kit and I started to drum along with him. I was pissed, but I didn’t want him to know. Not yet, anyway. I used to like Jason. He was a good guy, and he left the band on good terms. That’s why we were all cool with him coming on tour with us. So it was a total slap in the nuts for him to pull something like this.

He looked back when he heard my drums. There was worry in his eyes, but I smiled, and I started to sing along with him. He smiled too, and the rest of the band came out and sang with us. The audience got in on it too, and I could see a few cellphones and small video cameras were out, so chances were good that this would be online before we even came back to the stage for our set.

I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to save face. This could’ve been a huge disaster. We could’ve come across as being weak, or as a bunch of whining shitheads if we’d lost our cool. But joining him? Showing that we were big enough not to let something stupid like that bother us? Our fans would just eat that up. The story would spread wherever the video was shared, and we’d come out on top.

After the song the audience went mental. The little son of a bitch thanked us for coming out, and we fist-bumped like it was no big deal.

When we went backstage, Jason turned to the band and said, “I’m glad you guys were cool with that. I wasn’t sure how you were going to react.”

“Fuck it man,” Jimmy, the bass player, said to him. “What’re we supposed to do? Just lose our shit at you?”

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe you should come back out when we play it later.”

I cracked two beers and passed him one. He said that he might.

We played a great set, and he did join us for A Shortcut Through The Minefield. It would’ve normally been our closing number, but since he’d stolen the song’s spotlight, we relegated it to being the last song before the encore, and we finished up with I Play A Beautiful Tuba and If Brown Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right, a couple of fan favourites from our first EP.

Eric had the keys to a friend’s house for the night so we had a bit of a party there after the show. We invited Jason along, a few friends, and some of the fans that we knew. The party was nothing special, just a bunch of people sitting around, having a few drinks, playing some tunes. We had some of our gear brought into the house and played a quick set of ironic punk covers of old power ballads like More Than A Feeling and Total Eclipse of The Heart. Jimmy does a mean Bonnie Tyler impersonation.

We fed Jason a bottle of bourbon and he was passed out, sprawled across the kitchen floor. We left him there throughout the party, and as it wound down, I volunteered to get our gear ready to go back on the bus in the morning.

I lugged each piece of gear carefully past Jason, and set them all near the front door. All but one last piece, one of Johnny’s practice amps. I was carrying it through the kitchen, over Jason’s limp body, and I dropped it on his left hand.

Jason woke up screaming, sobbing, trying to pull his trapped hand free. I made as though I was trying to lift the amp off of him as quick as I could, but for a second I pressed down on it and twisted, listening to his bones grind before moving it.

“Shit man, are you okay?” I asked him.

He couldn’t answer through the screaming. I called an ambulance for him. I explained to everyone, the band, the party guests, the paramedics, that I’d slipped and dropped the amp. They never questioned me. Jason never even questioned me. I told him later that I was sorry, and the sad son of a bitch believed me.

Jason had to drop out of the rest of the tour. We picked up a couple of local opening acts for our next two shows, before we had another band join us for the remaining dates. Every show, we invited the openers onto the stage for A Shortcut Through The Minefield. The audience loved it every time.

—

This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
For more information, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/

Tags: a shortcut through a minefield, concerts, encore, Fiction, opening act, short fiction, short story
Posted in Fiction

07
Aug
2009

6:52

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by Colin Davis

He was still awake when the sun came over the horizon. He had been sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands supporting his chin, his eyes staring out the window. The hotel room was empty, if you forgot that it was fully furnished. Empty, in that there was no one else but him there anymore. She had left hours ago.
“I’ll call you a cab,” he had offered. She picked her purse up off the floor and told him not to worry about it. Her hair needed to be combed, and her dress was wrinkled.

He said goodbye when she opened the door, but she didn’t look back.
They first met five years ago. They were coworkers, and both in long term relationships. Lunch in the staff room turned into sharing a ride to and from work. Exchanging cell numbers lead to dinner once in awhile.
‘Just friends,’ he said when his girlfriend got suspicious. And they were. Just friends.
She changed jobs, and travelled a lot. It was two years before they spoke again. She was in town for a week, and wanted to catch up. He divorced his now-wife one month later.
They had had dinner, too much wine, and she looked him in the eye too much. Her place.
Their relationship was always temporary. Sometimes for three days, sometimes a month, but always temporary. He never knew when to expect her, and usually didn’t know when she would be leaving. He never asked.
Tonight she had told him she couldn’t keep doing this. She didn’t have to tell him she wouldn’t be back again.
He closed the blinds, and the room was as dark as it had been when she left. Her voice mail picked up when he called her cell phone. There wasn’t anything to say, so he hung up before the beep.
He wanted to tell her that he couldn’t keep doing this either, that he wanted to be with her all of the time instead of a couple of times a year. He really wanted to say that he loved her.
But he couldn’t.

Inside he knew that it was better this way, for both of them. He left his wife for her. Given up everything, anything that he needed too.

She hadn’t asked for anything from him, but had taken so much.

Tonight she took the only thing he had looked forward to for the last three years.
It was his own fault, he hadn’t given her any reason to stay. If he could have said the things he felt, it might have been different.
In the mini-bar he found what was left of the bottle of Tequila they had bought the night before. He finished it, not noticing the burn.
He laid down on the bed, and closed his eyes, the bottle still in his hands, though it was empty.
Closing his eyes didn’t bring sleep, so he got up again. He dressed, and left the hotel.
He squinted in the morning sun, as he stepped outside. The doorman was staring at him.
There was a building across the street that had a large electronic sign on the side of it. The sign listed temperatures and times, and advertisements. It said the time was 6:52 AM.

Still time to get ready for work. He hailed a taxi and after a few minutes was on his way to his apartment.
The cabby talked about something. He wasn’t listening. He looked out the window but didn’t see anything.

The problem was he thought he would be bothered more. He had imagined how he would react to a situation like this, and his imagination hadn’t considered that he would be this…empty. That was it, he was empty. Maybe that was worse than being heartbroken.
Maybe it was worse to know that he had spent these last years with someone he hadn’t even really cared for after all. Or maybe he was still numb from the tequila.
“That’s the funny thing about this city, no matter where you are you can always get a hotdog,” the cabdriver said.
He glanced at the driver, shook his head then went back to looking out the window.

It didn’t make any sense to him. His life for the last 3 years was about her. And yet he hadn’t cried, hadn’t screamed, hadn’t thought about killing himself. Hadn’t thought anything. The biggest thing he had on his mind now was getting showered and ready for work.
In the sky overhead there was a plane gaining altitude. Her plane, he knew.

And that was it. She was gone, he moved on. He went to work that day, and didn’t think of her again. It was better that way. For both of them.

Posted in Fiction

Unfiltered Smoke

Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category

I and I: Chapter Three and Day Two: Chapter One

I and I part 2

I and I – part one

Robo Planet Game part 5

Robo Planet Game part 4

Robo Planet Game part 3

Robo Planet Game part 2

Robo Planet Game

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War of Roses

A Shortcut Through a Minefield

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