Shards and Phractures

Friday Challenge: Reindeer to Remember Galore!

2011-12-16T03:06:00.000-08:00

Note: This blog post is an entry--well, actually, this is a Series of Entries--into the Friday Challenge, which can be found here:

http://thefridaychallenge.blogspot.com/2011/12/friday-challenge-12092011.html

This week’s Challenge? “A Reindeer to Remember.” Provide a 120 word character sketch of one of those OTHER reindeer--you know, the ones behind the scenes, that you never seem to hear about...the ones who live in the shadows of the Famous Nine that everyone does hear about, year in and year out.

Now, I made a minor mistake with this particular Challenge.

That mistake was to announce the details of the challenge to Lady Quill while there were munchkins within earshot.

The next thing I know, I am being bombarded with requests for rules, and details, and permission to post...and a heartfelt request to make this a homeschooling project...which, of course, was granted.

Yes, daddy is a sucker.

So, with no further fanfare, my kids would like to present their homework assignment, and their unique and individual attempts at meeting this, their first Friday Challenge.

First up...the six year old, as transcribed verbatim by a sibling, from the spoken word:

the 4 Leg reindeer is Artemus fowl .

He can fly. Well you no dasher and

dancer and prance and vixen Commet and cupid and Donner and Blizen, but do you recall the most famous reindeer of all? Artemus fowl? where is a fire in Santa’s workshop there is. There is a christmas tree in Santa’s workshop, and a elf reading, and Santa writing this story. Two elves are not at the workshop. The next elf is working on a story too, we are going to send these stories to Friday challenge,but she doesn’t know what she is going to write. she didn’t know what to write. And there was music playing. What should she write?

The nine year old has a thing for the name “Artemis” as well...

Do you know who Blitzens grandson is? Well, it’s Artemis Boomer! You know how Rudolph has a special nose? Well, Artemis Boomer has a special uncontrollable voice. If you’ve seen Sky High, then it’s like that gym teacher Arnold Boomer. Well yeah, his voice was like that. Anyway Artemis Boomer loved Blitzen he had always hoped that he would grow up to be one of Santa’s reindeer, but today was different for some reason he didn’t have any energy like he used to, and for some reason neither did any of the other reindeer.Somehow all the reindeer had gotten sick. When Santa looked into the ball of Christmas he saw that a strange plague was spreading there. They died!

The ten year old went a little further afield:

My reindeer name is school bus reindeer. He is a school bus with hooves. He runs everywhere. He has windows. He has no driver because if you talk into a microphone where you want to be . You’ll be there when you are done with your food. He has a family too. There names are Baby Reindeer,Papa reindeer,Mama Reindeer. He is different from the others. He looks like a school bus with a head of a reindeer and the hooves too.When he got back home he ate and ate. He goes to sleep instantly because he has to go to work . When he is awake he goes to work after breakfast. He is really fast when he has no people it the bus.

Lady Quill decided to invent The Mother of All Reindeer:

“Grandpa, tell us about Great Aunt Tonna.”

“Tonna was Santa's plow helper many generations ago. One year, on the day before Christmas Eve Tonna looked up and saw a bright light streakin' through the sky. Her hair stood up on end, and her antlers started glowing.”

“Then what happened, Grandpa?” asked Rudolph.

“A piece of starlight landed on Tonna. It burned a hole through her fur and into her skin. Her body started to tingle. Tonna started running. Her feet lifted off the ground. She was flying! Aunt Tonna went 'round to Santa and showed him what happened. That's when she realized that Santa could understand her. She was talking, like the humans do.”

And here is mine.

The reindeer glared across the table, bleary-eyed. “It’s all a scam, I tell you,” he said, before dropping his snout back into his feedbag. The scent of fermented oats and holly drifted out.

“How so?” I asked.

“Rudolph is cybernetic, don’t buy into that stupid song, and don’t even ask where he keeps the batteries. And the rest put on this big buff manly show, but come on, with names like Dasher and Prancer and Cupid? Even the antlers are fake!”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because they kicked me out!” the reindeer shouted, knocking his feedback loose. Alcoholic oats and holly berries flew across the room. “All because Santa couldn’t fit ‘Reynaldo’ into his stupid rhyme!”

-=ad=-

Days of Nano Past: From Nano 2009 - The Zombie Wrangler!

2010-12-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

So, what do you do when you write yourself into a corner...?

One of the characters in my Nano last year was...well...Prometheus. Or what's left of him, anyway, after all his worshippers died or forgot about him. Now, his name is Tesla. And his home base is an incredible museum:

Tesla turned from the storm lashing the window, and returned to his workshop.

And what a workshop it was. The building itself was massive, but Tesla's lab covered a full three floors, end to end, of the entire building. Two of the three floors had been almost completely removed to allow the room for display, flight, testing, or simply space to observe. In the center of the room stood the bulk of a Cray mainframe, constantly cranking away at variables that only Tesla knew or understood.

Centuries of oddities and curiousities inhabited the shelves, from frisbees to Tesla coils, V8 engines to perpetual motion machines, items ranging from the simple and basic but interesting like a Moebius strip to the impossibilities of a half-developed scalar levitation pod. MP3 music players shared shelves with Rennaisance instruments and Stradivarius violins. A Gutenberg Bible leaned awkwardly against an Apple II computer, and both were balanced precariously atop a carved stone tablet dating nearly to Hammurabi. Suspended by strings from the ceiling were a scale model of the Wright Brother's plane and a full-size model of a daVinci Ornithopter, and just between them, an artist's rendering of the fall of Icarus, complete with detached feathers drifting lazily in the air-conditioner-generated wind.

The entire room was a monument to human ingenuity and creativity, and the drive to create something new--the drive to apply science and move technology forward. The very concepts that Tesla excelled at.

I invented this museum knowing full well that I was very likely going to trash it later in the story. And when the time came for the fight, what other critter is a Necromancer going to send after the bad guys than a squad of zombies?

There was only one problem. I had placed the good guys' hideout seventy stories up, and during Nano, you don't have time to go back and rework something because it would be easier later in the story. You keep on going.

...so...how does one get a battalion of zombies to the good guys when they're hiding on the seventieth floor?

Easy.

Craigslist ad for "entry level management position" with non-disclosure agreement, couple of interviews, pick the best one...voila!

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to meet...the Zombie Wrangler.

-=ad=-

Jason had been monitoring the Machine, and called them all over. "You need to have a look at this," he said. In the distance view, there was nothing worth looking at, but as he zoomed the image in, closer and closer to Tesla's Museum, they could see a narrow band of black dots, looking like nothing less than a steady invasion of ants, slowly but steadily making their way to the building.

"He's finally sending out the zombies," Trevor said.

They barely had time to prepare for the zombies' arrival. From the same storage room where Tesla had found the net gun, he pulled out a collection of handguns and passed them out to everyone. They all filled their pockets with spare clips.

"Standard zombie rules apply?" Lewis said, expertly jacking a clip into the handle and cocking the pistol. Unfortunately, his attempt at bravado and expertise failed miserably, as the slide of the gun came off in his hand. He stood there for a moment, staring stupidly at the pieces of the gun, until Tesla came over and showed him how to put it back together.

"There are rules to zombies?" Tesla asked in confusion.

"Well, yeah," Lewis replied. "No points for anything but a headshot, keep your distance or you get infected and turn into a zombie yourself."

"I don't think we'll have to worry about that part," Trevor said. "This isn't a Resident Evil sequel. These are magically animated, so I don't think they'll be infectious."

"Guys!" Lewis shouted, pointing.

The elevator had risen to their location, and the doors were about to open.

"Maybe it's the lobby security guards?" Trevor said hopefully. The doors slid open, and a dozen animated corpses spilled out into the museum. As the group opened fire on the zombies, the doors slid shut, and returned to the lobby.

Tina opened fire on the lead zombie, missed with the first three shots, and blasted out another plate glass window, before finally landing a hit. The zombie staggered backwards two steps, half of its head missing, and collapsed.

"Cool!" Lewis shouted. "Standard Rules!" He pointed his gun at another zombie, pulled the trigger, and totally lost control of the recoil. The bullet took out a light fixture on the far end of the museum. He growled in frustration, held the gun with both hands, brought it to bear on a zombie, and fired, hitting it in the nose. He cheered in satisfaction as the zombie's head exploded in a shower of gore.

"Tesla," Trevor asked, "I thought zombies were...you know, really stupid...?" He gestured with his gun at the elevator display, which showed the car was rising again.

Tesla nodded grimly, stepped forward to point blank range, and fired, blasting two zombie heads apart simultaneously with a pistol in each hand. "They must have the security guard's key card."

Stan Trimbett had decided he hated his job.

He hadn't known what his job was going to be when he applied, of course. The Craigslist posting said "Entry Level Management" with opportunities to travel. As an out-of-work burger flipper, he had jumped at the chance, and it wasn't until after he had signed the non-disclosure agreement that he had found out that his REAL job title was "Zombie Herder."

"Zombies are really stupid," he had explained to his girlfriend one day, after just a few too many beers. "Oh, they're great in a fight; hack off body parts and they keep on fighting, blow out their kneecaps and they crawl after you. But, when it comes to, say, opening doorknobs, they're totally useless. So, every time the boss sends out a squad of zombies to take out the opposition, the squad has to have a babysitter along, someone who can open doorknobs as necessary." He held out the special skull-shaped medallion he always wore around his neck. "This says 'don't kill me, I'm on your side' to an angry zombie. Well, to a moving zombie. Zombies don't get angry. They don't get happy, or sad, they just move forward, and tear apart anyone who moves. Except me."

He still wasn't quite sure what he had done to end that relationship, but now that he was single, he was available for a bunch more zombie missions. Like this one. Somehow, the gang up on the seventieth floor had seriously ticked off the boss. Since the boss was supposed to be some hot-shot wizard with gobs and gobs of super magical powers, Stan wasn't quite sure why they didn't just, you know, snap their fingers and teleport the zombies up there.

No, this was a job for the zombie wrangler; and Stan, supposedly the best one there (actually, the only one who had survived more than the first four months since the job was created), was now standing in an elevator, watching as a dozen or so shambled in, all facing the back of the elevator. He hit the button, got it moving, and then started shouting orders, trying to get them all to turn around and face the door. Half of them still hadn't gotten the right idea by the time the elevator arrived, but they were dragged along by the rest of them when the doors opened. He delivered that load, and dropped back down to ground level for the next batch.

Yeah, Stan was pretty sure it was definitely approaching time for a career change. Granted, he'd probably have a really hard time putting "zombie herder" on his resume, but maybe if he exaggerated just a bit, he could still figure out a way to apply it. Camp counselor, maybe...? He was still debating possible fibs when the next load stepped on.

When he arrived with this batch, the doors opened, and people with guns began blasting away as soon as targets were visible. Stan dove to the floor, fingers in his ears, feeling a steadily deepening of layers upon layers of muck and gore piling up on him. Then the doors closed, and he reached a shaking hand up to take the car back to the ground floor.

Stan had just barely managed to stand back up again, on shakey knees, when the doors opened and another batch of ready zombies tried to pile in. About halfway through the load, though, he heard something land on the roof of the elevator car with a loud clunk. Without even stopping to think, he shouldered his way past the mindless zombies and dove for cover behind the security guard's desk. He was just in time; the elevator car exploded, shredding most of the remaining zombies, and splattering Stan with another layer of flying muck.

He strode to the door, dropped his skull medallion in a trash can just outside the revolving door, and headed for the local bus station. Camp counselor in Alaska, that sounded like a decent change of pace.

"I don't get it," Lewis said, as the elevator doors closed again. "I mean, if he's this super-hotshot wizard and all, why is he sending them up here in tiny batches like this?"

"Unless he's trying to keep our attention," Trevor said.

"A diversion?" Tesla asked. From what?"

With a horrible sinking feeling, Trevor dashed away from the elevator door.

Days of Nano Past: From Nano 2009 - Dragon Nightmare!

2010-11-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

Days of Nano Past

...in honor of Nano this year, he’s a clip from last year’s Nano, about an attack by an undead dragon.

-=ad=-

It took hours to fill them in on where he had been. He told them about the ball of foil, and the various scenes he had witnessed. Then, there was the Zen garden where Meroving had died, and after that, the separate garden that supposedly existed inside Trevor's head. He even told them the deep, dark secret that had so fooled the Necromancer.

"So, Meroving sent him on a wild goose chase," Lewis interjected.

"Exactly," Trevor agreed. "Meroving hoped it would keep him so busy hunting for a mythical item that he wouldn't have time for all the world-conquering stuff."

"You've learned a few mystical tricks, then?" Kiriana said with half a smile on her face.

"Oh, I'm looking forward to showing them to you," Trevor said.

"We're not going to have any time for that," Tesla said, his face serious.

"Why?" Dorian asked.

"Because the Necromancer is here," Tesla said, with a hard edge to his voice.

Across the room, standing exactly in Tesla's contemplation point at the plate-glass window, stood the Necromancer's puppet-figure. It was eight feet tall and appeared to be molded shadow, a cloak like dark mist hovering a few inches off the ground, eyes of fire blazing from the shadows of a hood that was itself shadow.

"Your time is up, boy," it said, in a voice from the grave. "You will bring it to me. NOW." The dark figure took a step towards the group.

Kiriana began chanting her defesive spells, and Tesla and Dorian both moved to interpose themselves between Trevor and the Necromancer, but Trevor shouldered his way between the two of them. He stood, thirty feet from the dark shadow that was the Necromancer's herald, and said simply, "No."

"You dare refuse me, child?" The shadow grew larger, nearly ten feet tall now, and the fires in the hood blazed white-hot. "There isn't an entity on this planet that would dare to challenge me. I could slay all of your defenders between blinks of your eyes. Do not defy me!"

"Of course I defy you!" Trevor shouted. "You're nothing, just a magical puppet sent out because you're too afraid to take us on yourself! If you had any guts at all, you'd be standing here in the flesh, challenging me to a duel in the aetherial instead of sending this stupid dime-store animated Halloween costume!"

Tesla, standing just slightly behind Trevor's left shoulder, muttered, "damn, I really hope you know what the hell you're doing..."

Trevor held up the crystal that had been Meroving's spell. "It's right here. In the words of 300, you want it? Come and take it."

The shadowy figure held up a finger, a long semitransparent digit that pointed at Trevor like an arrow of doom. "You...will die," the shadow said.

"You've been saying that for a long time, but I'm still standing right here," Trevor said.

The black shadow figure vanished, and they all started to breathe a sigh of relief. But barely a moment later, the plate-glass window smashed inward. Shards of bullet-proof glass scattered across the room, sending them all diving for cover. And from behind the glass, slithering its way into the room, coated with silvery shards of broken window, was an enormous black dragon's head, with one horn broken off, screaming in rage and fury.

Threosh circled the city, moving quickly, but he couldn't get a clear picture of where he was supposed to be. He had been charged with protecting the boy, but if the boy disappeared, how could he protect him then?

This task was getting harder by the moment.

He still had heard nothing through the aetherial from the other dragons, though that wasn't necessarily a bad sign. Elder dragons took forever to discuss and deliberate their plans; it sometimes took weeks for them to reach a consensus on what the best approach to a problem would be. Threosh, who was still centuries away from developing the exacting patience of an elder dragon, had to remind himself of that fact; he was fretting about word that may not come to him for days...perhaps even weeks.

Threosh was beginning to consider the various humans and beings he was forced to associate with as his friends, though, and he still couldn't understand why a friend would vanish like that. It left a very human hole in his draconic heart, and it was an unfamiliar pain to such a young being.

He went into a long, gentle arc, meaning to fly a third lap around the city. He knew Trevor was gone, probably to another realm; he had even considered the possibility that Trevor was dead, and his mission was an absolute failure. There was no way he was returning to the elders with that message, though, until he had seen Trevor's body for himself.

Would that be his curse, then, unable to return to the realm of his birth because he was unable to locate the body of the human he had been assigned to keep alive...?

Threosh wrinkled his nose in disgust. That scent--that horrific odor of diseased flesh, commingled with the stench of unbridled ambition and cruelty--that was the smell of the Necomancer. The monster was here, in the city. That meant that the humans and Tesla were under attack, and if the Necromancer was around, then...

...then Threosh heard the noise he had been dreading...the strangled, half-dead cry of a dragon that should have been laid to rest long ago.

The dragon rammed its entire head and neck into the museum, scattering heirlooms everywhere. Poisonous acid dripped from the burned patch on the side of its face; the Gutenberg bible caught a stray drizzle, and disappeared in a puff of flame and caustic smoke.

Lewis and Tina, both knowing they had no real chance, tried to dash for cover, but everywhere they ran, the dragon's thrashings threw wreckage in their path. Tina screamed as the Hammurabi tablets barely missed them.

Dorian leaped into action, jumping forward and striking the dragon across the snout with his practice sword. The blade shattered, and Dorian himself wound up being flung to the far end of the room when the dragon lunged at him in retaliation. The dead dragon screamed in pain and triumph.

But while Dorian had kept it occupied, Tesla had managed to unlock a specific cabinet. He pulled out a strange-looking firearm, sighted down the barrel, and fired. A net lashed forward, opened in flight, and wrapped itself around the monster's mouth. Several of the cables hooked over the dragon's horn. Mouth tied shut, the dragon growled, a deep-throated noise that would have terrified an enraged grizzly.

"That won't hold it long!" Tesla shouted. We need to do something!"

"I'm open to ideas!" Trevor shouted back. The dragon was lashing its head back and forth across the room, smashing more and more of the museum's exhibits into expensive fragments. Trevor caught sight of Kiriana launching a magical attack of some kind, but then dodging away from flying computer components, shattering her concentration and breaking the spell. He couldn't figure out how to attack it in the aetherial, either; his lessons with Meroving had not yet reached the point of dragging a being into the aetherial for combat, only defending oneself when they were pulled in.

The net snapped from the stress. The dragon opened its mouth, shrieked in triumph, and shoved a table off of Tina and Lewis. She screamed, he flinched and closed his eyes...

...and something small and greenish-brown latched onto the back of the dragon's neck.

Threosh followed the scent of the Necromancer all the way back to the god Tesla's home and museum.

There, he could see the dead dragon, claws hooked deeply into the facade of the building, head and neck buried to the shoulder through a hole in the wall. Threosh thought long and hard about what he needed to do, and as he reached the building, he came up with an answer. He stooped like a peregrine falcon, as fast as he could fly, trying to land his attack before his enemy could spot him.

But he couldn't do it. The soul-mind of the elder dragon spoke to him before he was halfway there. Little one, it said, I told you to run. Now I must slay you as well. The voice was morose, depressed beyond all measure, a mere passenger on a body that was no longer his to command.

Surprise lost, Threosh slowed down, rethinking his attack--and then hit on it. He redoubled his speed, diving between the dragon's slashing wings, and planted his claws deep in either side of the dragon's neck. Over the horns, he could just see the humans struggling to get out of the reach of the dragon, but it was no longer paying any attention to them; it was solely concerned with the interloper attached to the back of its head.

It lashed wildly to one side and the other, trying to flip him off. Threosh hung on, doggedly, refusing to allow himself to be thrown free. The dragon smashed Threosh against the ceiling, scattering light ceiling tiles all over the already wrecked museum, and still Threosh kept his grip, while cables and wires and bits of wreckage dangled from his wings.

I will get you eventually, the dragon's soul said to him. You cannot help me. I must do as my master commands.

No, Threosh answered. Your slavery is at an end, elder one. I will not allow the Necromancer to torture you any further.

Threosh allowed the flammable bile to lather up in his mouth, and mix with the acid-poison there. Without releasing his grip, he reared back, spat forward, and delivered a long, thin, napalm-stream of liquid fire directly to the hollow at the base of the dragon's skull. As it burned away the outer skin and the skull, Threosh fired again, and then again, though the heat and flames were beginning to recoil into his own face. Only when the dragon screamed in agony and began to thrash aimlessly did Threosh finally relent, and release his grip.

Threosh allowed himself to be flung across the museum, to safety; he rolled twice and came up beside Dorian, who was unconscious and lying still, body bent all in angles that did not appear to be natural for a human.

Thank you, little one, came the voice, one final, fading time.

The flame-poison had reached the brainstem, and severed the spinal cord. The dragon was losing all control of its extremities, and was thrashing about, slicing great rents of flesh out of the neck scraping against the sharp edges of the bullet-proof glass. Then, it lost it's grip on the wall of the building, and begain to slide backwards, out the hole. It thrashed sideways once, catching the neck against the edge of the window, slicing the head almost completely free; the half-decapitated head caught there, in the window, for a long moment, before the weight completed the task of breaking the window free. The dragon fell, and as it fell, the foul magic that had been keeping it alive and corporeal far past it's time began to fail. The fingers and toes began to crumble, to scatter into dust at the touch of the wind blasting by.

By the time the dragon had fallen twenty stories, the wings were gone. At forty, the ribs were visible. And at ground level, nothing remained, except a fine ash that smelled distinctly of gunpowder and brimstone, caught on the morning breeze and swept into drifts against the curbs and windshields of cars parked nearby.

Deep in his lair, the Necromancer screamed in rage and pain. Rage, because his best and most powerful weapon was now nothing but ashes in the wind, and pain, because he had invested a lot of power into animating that dragon, and its death was now causing a backlash effect that would have blown a lesser man into molecules.

But the Necromancer was no lesser man. He held his hands against his temples, as if keeping his head from exploding by sheer force of will.

They will pay, he screamed at the pain within his skull. Oh, yes, they will pay!

Zombies!

2010-08-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

...if you've never been to a Zombie Walk, you have no idea what you're missing.

Well over ONE THOUSAND zombies cruised downtown Lincoln Saturday night. They started at Pershing Center, wandered past the shops and mystified (and some terrified) onlookers, worked their way down UNL's Sorority Row, past the Broyhill Fountain, and then back to Pershing Center for a block party.

Yes, I was there, and yes, I survived the zombie onslaught...though it was close...

Many thanks to Randy and Pete, for doing the whole "combat journalism photography pool" thing; I can't claim credit for all of these pictures, there were way too many zombies to stand still and shoot!

-=ad=-

Hey, didn't you write for the Friday Challenge a couple months back...?

...you know, when a zombie baby is ready to be born, there's just no keeping him down...

...some zombies are as afraid of you as you are of them...

Preparing for the upcoming zombie-copalypse...

Sometimes you gotta be thankful for chain-link fences...

Hey, isn't that Wil Wheaton...?

Just strolling along...splashing blood all over the town...

I think she wanted to rewrite the ending to Carrie.

...sometimes...just sometimes...you get red-eye without a flash...

Hey, there's a zombie behind--oh, never mind.

Zombification. A Family Affair.

There's just nothing like the scent of fresh flowers from a freshly dug grave..

I turned into a zombie and I just didn't have a thing to wear...

The most popular zombie there.

Can't you see I'm having contractions here...?

BRAINZZZZZ...

...makes you wonder what's on her mind...

Keeping my EYE on YOU!

...hey, you, with the camera, lend us a hand here...?

...it's all about the attitude...oh, and the BRAINS!!

Friday Challenge: Road Trip to Heck

2010-07-09T02:33:00.000-07:00

This post is an entry into The Friday Challenge. This week's challenge: The Road Trip.

I. Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

"How would you like to take a photography trip? All by yourself?"

This was quite a surprise. I was actually speechless for a moment, and so shocked that I missed a chunk of the description. "...and he's going to sleep on our couch for a few weeks until he gets on his feet. I thought, just maybe, you'd like to take a day to drive out to meet him halfway, and bring me lots of nice pictures along the way."

"Are you sure we can do this? I mean, money is tight, and..."

"It's a three-day weekend," she said, "immediately followed by payday. We've got enough to get you to the Colorado Springs bus station, and he'll have enough to get you back. We can do this."

"I don't know..."

"Pack your camera," she said.

I packed my camera.

II. Choose your route very carefully.

My friend--I'll call him Paul, to protect him from vengeful commentary--lives near Flagstaff, but has family in Denver. He makes the trip several times a year. I told him what the plan was.

"Don't take Highway 40 across New Mexico," he said. "It's all under construction and will add a couple of hours to your trip. Take 70 across Utah instead, there's no construction there and the scenery is even better. The distance is about the same, too, about twelve hours total."

I trust Paul. If this is the best route for a photo journey, then it was the route for me.

Isn't there a fairly famous Klingon proverb that says, "Trust...but Verify...?"

III. Anyone want a good deal on a slightly used Mustang...?

Time to leave.

Checking the inventory, I had my laptop, several sets of batteries and camera chips; a quick store trip gave me a cooler full of road munchies. She handed me her "secret stash" of money just in case things got really tight. I napped for two or three hours after work, intending to drive through most of the night, and left home right around midnight.

Barely an hour out of Phoenix, I was passed by a speeding white Mustang. Here, the word "passed" is used in a generic sense to mean "nearly sideswiped and spun off into a ditch by an absolute lunatic who had no respect for the stripes down the middle of the road." But I kept my temper, and as my blood pressure returned to normal, I saw what looked like a small fireworks display up ahead.

The Mustang had taken the next exit, misjudged the turn, run off the road, and hit a lightpole. The pole was lying across the roof of the car, and the upper end was extending most of the way across the now-dark off-ramp.

I pulled over. I left my blinkers on, and went to see if everyone was okay, and found a couple wandering around in the dark. He was trying to talk to her, calm her down, while she shrieked and screamed in two languages. As I walked up, they went up over an embankment.

...and I was alone. With a dark, blocked, off-ramp.

I did the Good Samaritan thing. I stood near the pole, waving cars around it, wondering just how much of my trip time I was going to lose to this. The fourth car I waved at blinded me with the lights on top, and I explained everything to the cop inside; while we were talking, the couple from the Mustang drifted back into view.

They went to an ambulance, a wrecker was called, I went back to my car...and needed to ask the kindly policemen for a jump start, because an hour sitting idle with the blinkers going had killed the battery.

IV. Crossing the Border

Photo opportunities abounded as I neared the Utah border. The territory around Lake Pleasant is fascinating.

Just across the border, I found a place I can't recommend enough--a fenced off park that looks like nothing more than a pull-off beside the road. Two other cars were pulled off there, and one guy was getting camera gear out. That caught my attention. Something worth taking pictures of? I pulled off and grabbed my tripod.

I started shooting the hills near the highway, and was getting some okay shots. The guy with the camera saw me, and said "are you going to walk the whole trail? There are much better formations at the far end."
"Umm...trail...? I don't know, I'm on a schedule...maybe..."

He said "You don't know what you're missing," and headed back to his car.

I shot three more pictures, and a guy walking his dog went by. He also told me to walk the trail. Okay, I can take a hint. "How far?" I asked.

"Maybe a mile. Twenty minute walk, there and back, if you walk fast, plus time spent taking pictures." I threw the tripod over my shoulder, and started hiking.

I wish I had gone back to the car for spare filmchips and batteries.

It's called Paria Rim Rocks, and has some fantastic rock formations a mere two or three miles off the freeway. I killed at least an hour there. I could have blown several more hours if the batteries in the camera hadn't died--which reminded me that while the schedule was loose, it was still a schedule, and I needed to get back on the road.

The sights from the car all along that stretch of freeway were amazing, and it was all I could do to stay on the road and not waste the whole day wandering around with my camera.

Music was a problem. The radio stations in the middle of Utah must be fairly well scattered and remote, because all I could get was static. That was fixable, though. I propped open the lid if the laptop an inch, started up the DVD I had accidentally left in the drive, and cruised across Utah with the music from Fantasia blasting as loud as the little speakers could do.

The road stretched out ahead of me, and no matter how far I drove, it felt like I wasn't making any progress. I figured I should be nearing the Colorado border by now. I found this beautiful reflecting lake somewhere near that border, and stopped for a few pictures. Colorado was beautiful. I wondered to myself how far it would be to Denver...

...and something clicked. Paul had said "I drive from Flagstaff to Denver all the time, it's the same distance."

I didn't drive from Flagstaff. I drove from Phoenix. That's an extra two hours.

And I wasn't going to Denver, either. I was going to Colorado Springs. That's another two hours at the far end.

I was barely going to get there on time.

Here ends the visually-assisted portion of our tale.

V. Hell is a cold place...

I had told She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed that I would stop and call often. We didn't have a cell phone back then, so it was a trip to a pay phone at every fill-up or leg-stretching exercise.

Something bizarre happened when I crossed over into Colorado. The pay phones refused to dial all the way through to Arizona. Multiple phones at multiple stops. I couldn't call and explain that my schedule was shot because of my directions. There was no point in turning back, and I continued on.

(Note for those who do not believe in psychic abilities: My wife sent an email to a friend at about this point. It said "I haven't heard from him for a while, but he probably got sidetracked by a big field of flowers, or pulled off to take a nap and overslept. Everything is fine, and I'll hear from him when he's ready.")

Something else strange happened in Colorado. The road started rising.

Okay, so, maybe this wasn't so strange. Perhaps a better word would be "slightly unexpected."

Paul had neglected to tell me that my route would go up...and up...and over Vail Pass.

The drive up, of course, was completely uneventful. I reached the top with just barely enough time to reach Colorado Springs by my deadline, and barely enough gas, too.

The first snowflake hit the windshield at the very top of Vail Pass.

Within half a mile, visibility was reduced to a minimum. And by "minimum", I mean "can just barely make out the two red dots that are the taillights of the semi truck fifty feet ahead of me." And with the drop in visibility, there was also a slight reduction in speed...and by "slight reduction," I mean "if I push the gas pedal another millimeter past 21 miles per hour, the back wheels will fishtail and I'll get to the bottom of this freaking mountain a hell of a lot faster than I would really prefer."

I passed a sign. A very terrifying sign, for a guy who had lived in Phoenix for the last seven years and central California for ten years before that. The sign said "Steep downhill switchback curves...Next Eighteen Miles."

I stayed fifty feet behind that eighteen wheeler, barely noticing that my last chances for arriving at the bus station in time were rapidly disappearing, because my full and total attention was being paid to those two tiny little red lights that marked the road in front of me.

Finally, the road leveled out. Finally, I could break my hands free of the steering wheel...which was nearly impossible, I had gripped the wheel so tightly that the muscles cramped. I took a deep breath, and realized that I had been holding it for the last half hour.

...and I'm sure the trucker in front of me heard me when I passed a sign that said "Steep uphill switchback curves...Next Thirteen Miles."

(Note for those who do not believe in psychic abilities: It was about this time that my wife called every police station and highway patrol number in Utah and Colorado to see if anyone had reported a blue Taurus with out-of-state plates overturned at the bottom of a snow-covered mountain somewhere.)

I put the last of my cash in the gas tank in Denver, after sitting in the gas station parking lot for ten minutes waiting for my heart rate to sound a bit slower than a Def Leppard drum solo. I followed snowplows into Colorado Springs, and wasted half an hour hunting for the bus station, and finally pulled in at three o'clock in the morning...a full five or six hours after his bus arrived. The bus station itself closed at midnight, and they unceremoniously kicked him out into the snow; when I arrived, he was a miniature snow-covered mountain made of dark green sleeping bag. Twenty minutes after he jumped in, we were pulled into a gas station and dropping the seats back for a nap.

VI. Deer in the taillights

We woke with the sun, and brushed six inches of snow off the car before setting out.

My first inclination was to point the car towards Phoenix and not stop until I hit the garage door. But She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed had told me, specifically, that she wanted pictures of Garden of the Gods. That was the whole point of routing the trip through Colorado Springs in the first place. So, while he slept in the passenger seat, I took pictures of Garden of the Gods.

...and by "took pictures," I mean "I stepped out of the car in a Phoenix winter windbreaker, which was absolutely useless against a Colorado Springs spring snowstorm, giving me exactly seventy-two seconds to snap a picture before my hands started shaking so much my pictures would look like they were finger-painted, before jumping back into the car to spend ten minutes warming back up again."

I snapped twelve pictures before pointing the car towards Phoenix. But that twelfth picture became one of my wife's favorites.

That storm followed us. That blizzard stayed right behind us all the way out of Colorado Springs, becoming a huge dark thunderstorm down through New Mexico, and finally petering out as it tried to climb the mountains that ring Phoenix. And amazingly enough, though there was some construction, we didn't see any point along the way where the opposing traffic slowed down by more than a few seconds.

Once outside of Colorado, the phones started working again, and I was able to call and explain what happened. Though, when we finally pulled into the driveway, and she came running out of the house, I wasn't quite sure whether she was going to kiss me or kill me.

I'm not even sure she knew, either.

-=ad=-

The Girl, The Box, and Entropy

2010-04-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

This story is an entry in the Friday Challenge. This week's Challenge? Take a well-known fairy tale, and rewrite it as a science fiction story...

Jack held the ladder tightly, with his cold left hand, the box gripped in his right. He dangled over a hundred foot drop, while his opponent smirked against a backdrop of stars and raised the slugthrower. "You shouldn't have messed with me," he said, and Jack could see his finger tightening...

"You did WHAT?" Jack's mother's voice echoed around the small apartment.

Jack carefully peeled the synthskin back from his artificial left arm. The whine of micro servos, freed from the sound-deadening insulation, seemed awfully loud in the small kitchen. He wiggled his fingers, watching the lines pull back and forth for a few seconds, before rolling the skin back . The pressure and power lines were draped across the metal bones to appear like veins, but any close examination would reveal that the arm wasn't a real one. "Some rich dude in orbit got his sliced off in a vaccuum leak, and the chopshop offered me big bucks because I've got the same blood type and genetic markers."

"So, you sold an arm..."

"And a kidney, and spleen." His mother blinked at him, shocked into silence.

"...and what did you get for them?" This was Jack's brother pitching in, and the tone of his voice made it clear that Mick didn't like the idea any more than their mother. Jack didn't answer; he threw a handful of plastic chits on the table.

"That's three month's worth of food. Maybe." Mick turned a cold stare on Jack, the same stare his mother was giving him. Jack threw the ticket onto the table too, and Mick recognized it at once. "I know what that is," he said, with just a trace of excitement creeping into his voice. "Charlie showed me hers before she left. That's a ticket up the Stalk!"

"So, you swapped body parts for a one-way trip to Hell?" Jack tried really hard to ignore the tears in his mother's eyes.

"I'm going up there," he said, "to find my fortune. There's more than just gangsters and drug dealers up there. I'm going to hit it rich, come back here, and move you off to Luna." She sputtered, turned her back on him, walked into the bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

"Jack," Mick said, "hold on." Jack didn't answer; he picked up the ticket, stuffed it into his pocket, and shouldered his bag. "This is crazy," Mick continued. "Like the night you spent in the bar, blowing a week's wages buying whiskey for that spacer." Jack made it three steps to the door. "This isn't one of your stories," Mick said, in a last, desperate attempt to talk sense into him. "You aren't going to rescue the girl, kill the bad guy, and live happily ever after. That doesn't happen in the real world."

When he saw that Jack wasn't going to stop, he gave up, and offered him the traditional spacer's farewell: "Never gamble against a Vornock'kk."

Jack paused, and looked at his brother with half a smile and a raised eyebrow. Then he mumbled a farewell and headed out to face his destiny.

The Stalk beckoned.

The space elevator was the first stage in getting humanity off the planet, but that was decades ago. Most everyone rich enough to leave...had. Most of the planet was a high-priced slum, with few jobs and fewer prospects for the future. The lucky ones got into space, to hire on with a starliner or colony ship. The slightly less lucky went on to prospect in the asteroid belts, hoping for a huge strike of tungsten or uranium and settling for nickel and iron. How many people spent a life's savings on a ticket up the Stalk, to the orbital station that was the first stop--and the only escape--from Earth?

Lots of them.

It took Jack hours to work his way through the line, but he refused to allow discouragement to creep into his outlook. The line shuffled slowly forward, while the thick trunk of the elevator towered overhead, seeming to get thinner and thinner in the distance, until it finally vanished from view. It was hot, and humid, and uncomfortable, but the sight of that metal cable disappearing into the sky gave Jack hope for the future. Ahead of him, he watched as a family was turned away because of illness. They shuffled past him, discussing how long it would take to scrape together the reschedule fee. Still the line creeped forward.

When his turn came, Jack submitted to the various indignities required of a trip offworld. The station above their heads was a confined space, with recycled air and water, and the signs on the walls announced how certain germs and pathogens couldn't be allowed off-planet. He was scanned, walked through a decontamination unit, scanned again, and challenged when the metal alarm went off. He had to peel the entire covering from his arm before they would clear him to go on.

Finally, he was through. He stood with the crowd, having been counted, measured, weighed, screened, and approved, while the pod sank to the ground. The Stalk was so big he couldn't even tell if anyone stepped off. Very slowly, the car shifted, pivoting around the massive base of the Stalk, until the open hatch yawned wide in front of him.

He barely paid attention to the safety briefing; he knew if there was a disaster the odds of survival were slim, but he did buckle the safety harness. All around him other people did the same. The air went cold as the hatches were sealed and the car pressurised. The upward car was a bean-shaped elevator attached to the north side of the Stalk; the downward car was similarly attached on the south. The safety checks seemed to go on forever, but he paid no attention, and finally, the elevator leaped off the ground and headed for space.

Life on the station was not easy. Jack found a job, dirty, menial, and uncomfortable, pushing boxes onto departing ships, but it allowed him plenty of time between shifts--time he used in attempts to figure out how he could land his break. He found the perfect place to contemplate; it was an observation room, with a huge window looking out over the Earth. He would spend long hours here, watching the planet, spinning steadily below them. The room was circular, with the window taking up most of one side, and it had obviously been repurposed--because the old lift-shaft yawned wide behind him, with nothing but a small safety chain and signs warning people away. Perhaps that deep dark pit was the reason so few people ever intruded on his solitude.

It was during one of these quiet moments that he heard her voice.

There was no mistaking Charlie's--Charlotte's--voice. They had grown up together, and when she signed up for the planet-wide talent contest that had ultimately gotten her off-planet, she had decided that "Charlotte" was much more mature and professional than the "Charlie" they had always known her to be.

She had been barely sixteen when they waved good-bye to her, at the base of the Stalk, and they had both assumed she had made it to some distant planet, striking it rich. Obviously, she hadn't even made it past the top of the Stalk. She was singing in a nightclub, a very exclusive place at that, as Jack learned when he tried to enter. Two hulking bouncers stood beside the door and blocked his path with a raised arm.

"Members only," one grunted, with a glare that was meant to intimidate. Jack didn't push his luck, but he stayed nearby, and saw Charlie being escorted from the club by a squad of four bodyguards.

"Charlie!" he called. She saw him, and her eyes went wide, but the entourage kept her moving into the lift. The last bodyguard stayed behind, talking into his wrist. Moments later, Jack felt the crushing grip of the bouncers on his upper arms.

"Come on, kid," one of them mumbled, in a surprisingly squeaky voice. "Mr. G wants a word with you."

Jack was led into the club, and into an ornate--and overdecorated--office. Paintings decorated the walls, mere inches apart, and shelves around the room were cluttered with expensive knickknacks. The room felt like it was decorated by someone who had no clue how to show off and highlight treasures, but merely wanted to advertise how many treasures there were. Jack was roughly and unceremoniously helped into a rather uncomfortable hard wooden chair, facing the back of a very large and ugly padded one. The bouncers stood silent, behind Jack's shoulders, for several long minutes, until finally the chair slowly swung about.

The man in the chair wasn't that much taller than Jack, and dressed in a suit that was visibly worth four or five tickets up the Stalk. He sat there, staring at Jack, fingers steepled, and finally said "Have you got a problem, kid?"

"Charlotte," Jack said, grudgingly. "I just wanted to talk to her. We grew up tog--"

"Ain't gonna happen, kid." He stood up, walked around the desk, and sat on the corner, arms crossed, eyes drilling into Jack. "Do you know who I am?"

Jack shook his head.

"My name," he said, with a deep breath and a sigh, as if he was tired of repeating himsef, "is Anton Grossman. This is my club. In fact, you could say, this is my station. Nothing happens on it that I don't know about. You wanna listen to her sing, well, you go rake in some big money, pay the doorman, and come back as a customer."

"What if she wants to leave?"

Grossman laughed, an ugly, little bark. "Leave? No way. She's indentured to me for another five or six years. She's gonna be singing for me for a very long time."

"Indentured? That's illegal!"

"On Earth, maybe," the man answered. "Different rules here, kid." As Jack sat, and fumed, and chewed his inner lip, Grossman walked to his desk, and picked up a deck of cards. "I'll tell you what. I'm a gambler, that's how I got rich. Maybe you're a gambler too?" When Jack didn't say anything, he set the deck in front of him. "Here's the deal. We'll cut the cards, high card wins, you know how to play that game, right? You win, I let her out of her contract, she goes away with you, no bad feelings."

Grossman leaned in close. "But if I win...she stays with me. And if you ever set foot in here again, Brutus and Titus pitch you out an airlock. Oh...and they'll probably beat the snot out of you on the way out of here today, too."

Jack stared hard at the cards. "All or nothing, kid," Grossman said, with an evil grin on his face. "What's it gonna be?"

Jack reached out, moving quickly to keep from losing his nerve, grabbed a third of the deck, and flipped over the Queen of Diamonds. He couldn't help but smile a bit as he put the cards down.

Grossman reached down, squared up the cards, cut the deck, and held up his card, all without taking his eyes off of Jack. "I win," he said.

Jack glanced down, tearing his eyes off of Grossman's just long enough to see the Ace of Clubs in his hand. Grossman's laugh echoed in his ears as the two thugs dragged him out of the club.

In the weeks it took for the bruises to heal, Jack did his homework, and found out everything he could about Grossman. He had suspicions but nothing he could prove; he stayed away from the club, but still hung out in the observation deck where he could hear Charlie sing without being seen.

Then, one day, he heard the unmistakeable sounds of a struggle, and Charlie's voice the loudest one. He fought the urge, for just a moment, and then dashed out into the concourse. The bodyguards were obviously moving her against her will. But there were six of them, and anything he did would be suicidal.

As it was, he didn't have to do anything. The doormen saw him, and as Charlie went out of sight, his view of the lift she disappeared onto was blocked by the hulking bodies of the two doormen.

"You again?" said the larger.

The smaller one joined in. "I thought Mr. G made it clear you weren't welcome around these parts."

"It's a free station," Jack said, through gritted teeth.

"No, it's Mr. G's station," said the larger man, "and he said if we saw you to teach you a lesson." He punctuated the remark with a sweep of a ham-sized fist that knocked Jack against a wall. When he turned around, blood dripping from his mouth, the smaller one was closing in fast; Jack threw a wild punch with his mechanical left arm, landed it with an audible "clank", and watched as the thug went down.

The remaining goon raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. He caught Jack's arm, twisted it, and slammed him into the wall again. Two more punches, and Jack was on the ground, curling up, trying to hide from the flying boots that were pummeling his ribcage. The thug lifted his leg, aiming for Jack's face--and then collapsed, mumbling and foaming at the mouth. Jack had to scramble to get out of the way of the falling body.

Mick was standing there, with a shocker in his hand. He cast an expressionless gaze on his younger brother. "Taking good care of yourself, I see," he said, while offering a hand. "I've been hunting for you for two days."

Jack started searching the pockets of the two thugs while Mick kept talking. "Mom got worried about you, you know," he said. "She finally found an off-world collector who was interested in Dad's old antiques, and bought me a Ticket. Did you know Dad had battle-flags from the big wars back in the Twenty?"

Jack paused in his search, but only for a moment. He stared at the weapon in his hand. What idiot brings a slugthrower onto a space station?

"So, what's next?" Mick asked. "Oh...let me guess. Kill the bad guy, rescue the girl, and live happily ever after...?"

"Nope," Jack said. "Charlie always liked you better." He handed over a security key card from the pocket of the squeaky-voiced goon. "You rescue the girl."

They split up in the main concourse, Jack heading for the club, Mick heading for the lift and living quarters. Jack wished his brother luck and strode confidently into the unguarded club, the antique pistol leading the way.

He found Grossman in his office, but the man was waiting for him, hiding behind the door. Grossman grabbed the gun, and the two men wrestled for it, out the office doorway and across the club floor. The bigger man kicked and struggled while Jack tried to get the gun free, and they both lost their footing at the doorway of the club, rolling across the concourse. He lost his grip on the gun, but managed to grab hold of something more important, and then felt open space below him. Panicking, he reached out, blindly, and caught hold of something.

He was hanging over the open space in the observation deck, his mechanical arm and a ladder rung the only things saving him from a very long fall.

Grossman hadn't gone over the edge, but he did have the gun. He scrambled to his feet, chuckling, and walked around the pit. "I always win, kid," he said with a sneer. "The breaks always fall my way." He brought the gun up, lined it up with Jack's eyes.

"That would be because of this," Jack said, holding up the small box with his human hand. He knew he was right as soon as he saw Grossman's eyes widen with rage.

"How...?" The man was so furious he was speechless.

"Never gamble against a Vornock'kk, right? I found out why last year. Drunk old spaceman told me that Vornock'kk's carry these little boxes that tweak entropy. They always get the lucky breaks. When you pulled the ace, I knew you had to have one. You gonna risk losing it?"

"I'll pull it off your body," he said with a snarl. "You never should have messed with me!" He aimed, and fired before Jack could say another word.

The antique cartridge exploded, pushing the lead projectile out the front of the gun barrel. It blasted across the little room in a fraction of a second, and caught Jack in the left eye.

...in some other, parallel, reality, featuring a Jack that had lost his grip on the Vornock'kk box.

In this reality, the gases inside the barrel of the gun were stronger on the right side of the barrel, driving the bullet a fraction of a degree to the left. The surprisingly loud noise caused Grossman to flinch just a little bit, forcing the bullet even further to the left. The air molecules bent the bullet's flight just a bit more, and the slug missed Jack's face by a fraction of an inch, careening off a ladder rung with a loud SPANG! It rebounded off two more walls, missed Grossman by less than a foot, and embedded itself in the glass wall behind him.

Both men heard it at the same time; the high-pitched, sibilant whistle that every spacer recognizes...as a death sentence. Grossman turned, the gun falling from nerveless fingers, and saw cracks spreading from the bullet. He took one terrified step backwards.

Jack cursed, stuffed the box down his pants, and began tearing at the synthskin on his hand.

Three more cracks appeared. The whistling grew louder. Grossman finally broke through his panic, turned, and ran.

He made it two steps.

The glass shattered, and Grossman disappeared.

Jack tore through the synthskin, grabbed the micro-hydraulic line, and ripped it free. He felt the mechanical fingers clamp down on the rung; without pressure to counter, there was no way the hand was coming loose. As his body was stretched towards space, he fought to grab a rung with his other hand, trying to make sure that the artificial arm itself didn't rip from his shoulder. Luck was with him, though, as the blast doors inside the observation window slowly came down. It seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute or two, before the winds died down.

It took ten minutes and assistance from the station crew to force his hand to release itself.

Charlie and Mick were smiling as he stepped out into the concourse. Jack noticed that she was holding his hand.

"Can we go home now?" Mick was saying.

Jack felt the reassuring lump in his pocket, and allowed a smile to creep over his face. "Definitely," he said. "I think I found what I was looking for."

-=ad=-

Writer's Profile

2010-02-11T16:12:00.000-08:00

A writer's group made the mistake of asking me to write a profile piece...

-=ad=-

By day, Allan is a meek and mild-mannered database programmer.

But...by night...he undergoes a bizarre metamorphosis, and without warning, creates worlds so the other people who live in his mind have somewhere to play. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror all come creeping out of the dark and twisted corners of his brain, with the occasional political essay or offbeat humorous work thrown in, just to keep people guessing at his true identity.

Although Allan's work has not been published for pay, he has won several writing contests, including several Friday Challenges (thefridaychallenge.blogspot.com), and the elusive annual Momwriter Halloween contest--not once but three times.

When he's not doing unspeakably horrible things to databases or playing in his fantasy worlds, Allan can be found hiding behind his camera, or chasing the kids around with fuzzy dice and air guitars.

And never, under any circumstances, allow him to sing after midnight. Or before midnight, for that matter.

Days of Nano Past 3: Undying 2007

2009-11-25T07:20:00.001-08:00

In honor of Nano this year, I'm posting a series of snippets from my past attempts at Nano. This one is the opening pages from 2007.

-=ad=-

He stepped onto the mountain top just as the first gleams of sunlight appeared on the horizon. He had hiked in the dark for nearly five hours to reach this point, to prove to himself that this was the spot he wanted; and for that, he had to see how it looked as the sun rose. He had barely made it.

Exhausted, he dropped his duffel, collapsed onto a rock, and let his eyes take in the surroundings as the dawn light illuminated them. There were rocks and boulders galore, with a few patches of snow decorating them, the last survivors of a long, cold winter. Further, beyond the cliff face, he could see for miles, and there wasn't a single sign of civilization.

A bright flash of color caught his eye. Not ten feet from where he sat, an early bird of a spring flower had forced it's way through a patch of snow.

Perfect, he thought, smiling at the bloom. He closed his eyes, letting his body soak in the dawn light, the spring chill, and the scent of the new flower. He was content, and in that moment he knew he had made the right decision.

This would be the perfect place to die.

-----

He had found the spot, and now time was short. There were trips to be made, preparations that had to be in place. Working his way back down the mountain was much easier in the light.

At the base of the mountain, as far as the road would allow, he had left his pickup truck. When he reached it, he put the keys on the driver's seat; he wouldn't need it anymore, and whoever found it might have a use for it. It had served him well for many a journey, and he patted the fender as he walked around it, almost like a cowboy saying goodbye to a tired old horse.

What he needed was the footlocker in the bed of the truck. Getting it to the top of the mountain was not going to be easy, but it had to be done. He caught the handle with his right hand, and dragged the box across the bed, almost dropping it on his foot. No sense smashing it open, he thought. It had to at least survive the hike. He avoided using his left hand, and tried to muscle the crate up the path, but barely made it a hundred yards before dropping it in disgust. At this rate, it would take a week to get it up there.

He sighed heavily, and closed his eyes, as if accepting a monstrous burden...or fighting internal monsters. He opened his eyes, and stared firmly at the deformed thing that had once been his left hand. It quivered, spasmed, almost fought.

Reaching down, he grasped the handle of the footlocker again, but with his left hand this time. Effortlessly, the box came off the ground, and he made his way back up the mountain.

-----

The circle was chalked, though it probably wasn't necessary for this particular ritual. All of the important magic would be inside his own head. He placed tall, thick candles all around, wherever he could find a rock to hold them. They probably wouldn't stay lit if the mountain kicked up even a slight breeze, and he knew that that probably didn't matter either. Still, it kept him focused on what he was doing, and helped to filter out distractions.

The preparations were done, and the sun was near to setting. The ceremony itself would involve sitting through the night, mostly silently, waiting for the next--the last--sunrise. He would have preferred to do it alone, but that wouldn't have been right. He wasn't even sure if the ceremony would work or not, but even if it would, it still would have been...wrong. No, he would have company on this long, cold night...and likely unfriendly, unwelcome company at that.

He turned to the footlocker, and kicked the lock open in disgust. He raised the lid, slowly and carefully, like a snake charmer dealing with an angry cobra, but nothing jumped out, everything was as he had left it.

With a grunt, he toppled the footlocker, scattering the contents across the mountain clearing. Leather bags, some as small as a baseball, some as large as a grown man's leg, rolled across the ground. He selected one, righted the footlocker, and emptied the bag on top of it.

The decapitated head that fell from the bag bounced and rolled a bit, and he reached out, and stood it aright. It sat there, leaning slightly to the right like a drunken sailor, oozing a stain onto the lid of the box.

He gazed at it for a few seconds, and then walked a few feet away. He settled himself in the dirt, crossing his legs Indian style, and waited.

After just a few moments of silence, the eyes opened in the bodiless head.

Days of Nano Past 2: Tangler 2005

2009-11-23T12:24:00.001-08:00

In honor of Nano 2009, here's another snippet, another dream scene from Tangler.

-=ad=-

...he was sitting in class, and the clock was frozen...fifteen minutes until the end of class, and the clock hand just didn't seem to be moving.

The teacher was droning on in his usual fashion, and Joey was trying desperately to take notes; the teacher was moving much too quickly for him to get everything, but he was at least trying to keep up. "Node line intersections are points of great power," he wrote. "Interstitial connection lines, conversely, are hazardous to traverse."

He let his pen travel across the page on its own, and let his eyes travel to the window. The drone of the teacher's voice faded as he looked out at the sun-swept playground. It would be so much nicer to be there than here, he thought. With a sigh, he turned back to his page.

He looked, but he couldn't find the sentence he had just written. What was on his paper now was "Man, this guy is incredibly boring, I wish he would just shut up."

...it wasn't even in his handwriting...

He reached to tear out the page, get rid of it, start taking notes again, but as he did, a shadow fell across the page.

The teacher was a short, ugly man, with a long face and greasy black hair. He was frowning in quiet fury at what he saw on the page. "Up!" He pointed to the chalkboard, and Joey walked the long trail to the front of the room, passing desk after desk after desk.

His fellow students were all in shadow; there was just the walk down the aisle, only thirty more rows to go. He could hear the tittering and murmuring behind him, though.

He finally got to the front of the room, and turned around, looking at the sea of desks and students he had just swam out of. There were bright lights in his face, so he couldn't see any of the students, but he could hear the teacher's voice above the low grumble of gossiping students.

"Now, Joey," the voice said. "Why don't you tell us the history of the intransigence vector trinomial factor?"

He shielded his eyes from the harsh glare, and tried to see into the gloom. "Huh?" The classroom chatter rose, and the teacher had to raise his voice just to be heard.

"Or can you explain the significance of the frammiz massive..." The rest of the sentence was lost in the noise.

Joey tried harder to pick out the teacher among the shaded ranks of desks, but couldn't find him. Just the mocking, insulting voice. "I'm sorry, I don't understand the question?"

"Of course you don't!" This was a new voice, his father's voice, and it came from the front row. A spotlight picked out his father, calmly sitting in a desk three sizes too small for him. He was glaring at Joey over the top of a newspaper with a headline 'Idiot kid in trouble in class!'

"You don't understand because you're not paying attention," his father continued. "Break out of your stupid fantasy world, and get to living in the here and now."

'But I'm not," Joey cried. "I'm...I..."

"You're goofing off and daydreaming, and I won't stand for it!" He stood up, the desk melting away as he did. Behind him, the teacher stood with a satisfied and triumphant grin on his face. The dark eyes bored into Joey's soul, making him feel small...and defeated.

Joey wanted to run away, to hide, but there was no where to go except back through the sea of desks--and that meant walking past his father and the sadistic teacher. He turned, left to right, left again, looking for a way to get away--and another pair of eyes met his. Sparkling emerald green, in the front row, on the far side of the classroom from his father. There was concern in them, worry; someone in this classroom did care about him.

His father was raging while the teacher egged him on. "Lazy, good for nothing, daydreaming, little..." But Joey didn't look at them...he didn't take his eyes off the green ones locked on his. And then he took a shaky step towards them, towards her, and then another step, and as he walked, she smiled at him.

There was a shriek of noise, "NO!" from the teacher. The world tilted around him, classroom, desks, all crumbling away to nothing. The last thing he remembered was that wonderful smile.

Joey sat up in bed, covered in sweat and trying to catch his breath. The dream had left him exhausted, and puzzled; he had never had that sort of dream before. Oh, sure, he had had the occasional 'oops, I went to school naked' dreams, but none of them had held the malevolence of this one. This had felt like a sadistic monster had spent an hour toying with him, like a kid pulling the wings off of butterflies just to watch them squirm. And die.

This wasn't the first bad dream he had had lately, either, he realized. There was a darkness to his dreams that had never been there before. He didn't always remember his dreams...but he remembered the feelings he had from them...and the feeling from this one was not good.

He turned off the alarm clock that was due to go off in twenty minutes, and headed to the bathroom for water. He drank a full glass, and then a second one; he splashed water on his face, and tried to get his heart to quit racing.

Days of Nano Past: Tangler (2005)

2009-11-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

In honor of Nano this year, I'd like to offer up a few tidbits...a random sampling of the random dribblings that trickle out of that word-generating subsection of the grey matter in the back of my head. This piece is from the beginning of my very first shot at a Nano challenge.

-=ad=-

There was blood on his knuckles, but not on his face.

The school bully was on the ground in front of him, eye already swollen shut, blood running from his nose and lip and tears streaming from his eyes.

Beyond the bully, Joey's little brother Mick was getting to his feet, brushing the dirt from his clothes and face. He looked up adoringly to his brother. And beyond him--

...beyond him was the green-eyed girl, and the look she gave when their eyes met was electric.

The bully got to hands and knees, and looked up at Joey with raw, undisguised hatred. His face was long and narrow, with thin lips below ice-grey eyes and greasy curly black hair. He got to one foot, and Joey put his hands on his hips, ready to square off for round two.

The bully opened his mouth to hurl some insults--the normal retreat of a defeated bully--but what came out of his mouth wasn't a voice. It was a shrill, high-pitched buzz, getting steadily louder and more annoying...

Joey smacked the alarm clock in disgust. It took three whacks to finally hit the snooze button, and he angrily rolled away from it in the dark, burrowing into the covers.

Why did he have to wake up anyway?

He tried to return to the dream...tried to find his way back to the ugly bully...and the green-eyed girl...and failed miserably. That was the problem with dreams...they only seemed to come when they wanted, not when he wanted.

The alarm went off again--was it actually louder and more obnoxious this time, or was that his imagination?--and he hit the snooze button...a bit less forcefully and a bit more resigned to the inevitable.

He lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, as the pre-dawn light slowly lit up the room. He was mostly covered by the ugly checked bedspread knitted for him by his aunt.

Above, more than a dozen airplane and starship models hung from lines attached to the ceiling. Some were even shooting at each other, with red and yellow yarn playing the part of tracer rounds and laser beam fire. Many of the models showed extensive battle damage...or, rather, many of them had been used as toys, and broken, before Joey's father came up with the idea of hanging them out of reach. He had gotten tired of gluing small parts back onto them when they broke. So, as they went up, Joey and Mick had painted red and black combat scars on the worst breaks, and even had two going "down in flames" with a wing hanging from a second thread. It had seemed really cool to look at three months ago, but now, he just missed their mock dogfights, chasing each other and screaming sound effects, even if it did leave sharp plastic booby-traps in the living room carpet for his parents to find.

Now it was bright enough to see the poster on the far wall, past his feet, just to the left of the window. It was a cute, cuddly kitten, dangling from a branch by its paws, with the old familiar "Hang in There!" caption at the bottom. That was his mother's contribution to the room's decor. He had much preferred his older poster--the cutaway view of a starship, showing the decks and levels and stations and their scale--but his mother, following the advice of some book supposedly written by some child psychiatrist, had found the humor and cuteness to be more "inspirational" somehow.

He thought a starship, and the idea of unlimited travel that a starship implied, was a lot more inspirational than some kitten that was too stupid to let go and drop the three feet to the ground. He stuck his tongue out at the poster, as he had done every morning for the last month.

The sun peeked over the horizon, spilling golden light across the sky and into his room...and his eyes. He flinched away from the brightness, squinting his eyes shut until they adjusted to the light. He had to blink a dozen painful times until it was bearable.

He stuck his tongue out at the sun, too, just on general principles.

The alarm went off again, and this time, he fumbled around and shut it off. He hopped out of bed, slipped on his glasses from the nightstand, found his slippers under the edge of the bed, pulled the blankets up into a semblance of a "made" bed, and headed off for the bathroom.

The glare from the lights over the sink was even worse than the rising sun, and he frowned painfully at them. Then he looked down into the sink, to avoid looking in the mirror. He brushed his teeth that way, and tried to run a comb through his hair without looking, too, but he couldn't do it. He finally gave in to the inevitable, and looked in the mirror.

The shiner was a glaring ugly purple, with the eye not quite swollen shut. The lip wasn't fat anymore, but there was a major scab where it had been cut.

At least the nosebleed hadn't lasted too long.

He hadn't yet decided which was worse; the fact that Eddie, the school bully, had decided to beat him up, or that Mick had come to the rescue. Mick--big for his age, almost as big as Joey. Mick, the athlete and brain and over-achiever...where Joey was the skinny dreamer, more interested in a book than a ball.

He finished combing his hair, and went back to his room to get dressed.

Nicky Weird: Harvest Moon

2009-10-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge, which can be found here. I've written about Nicky Weird before. The challenge for this week? Write the Climactic Battle scene.

Xarathon's rage grew as he stalked the halls of the abandoned high school, eight lesser vampires surrounding him.

It's the Harvest Moon, he thought savagely, one of the most magically potent nights of the year. I should be sacrificing virgins, not hunting children. Indeed, it was forty years to the day since the Harvest Moon where he had cursed the entire Earth, covering up the appearance of vampires and magic once and for all. He should be ripping the still-beating heart from the chest of the leader of these savages, that Nicky woman, not wasting his time looking in closets and stalking empty corridors.

Up ahead, movement, a fleeting blur as a teenager dashed across the lobby and into the gymnasium. With snarls of impatience, his troops dashed ahead, pursuing the youngster through the open doors and onto the hardwood floor.

When they reached the mid-court line, hundred of water balloons fell from the ceiling. He had hung back, suspicious of a trap; four of his troops were hit and soaked. One other was fast enough to avoid all but a few splashes.

There were no children in the gymnasium, though, and the far doors were locked. The vampires stumbled sheepishly back out into the lobby.

"These children have never gone to such lengths before," Xarathon growled. "What are they up to?"

Vincent shrugged, absent-mindedly scratching at his face. His talon came away dripping blood, and the vampire stared at his hand, mystified. Small sparks began shooting off from his skin, and he screamed in terror.

Silver.

In moments, Vincent's body was engulfed in flames, and Xarathon backed away from the inferno. Hector ran screaming down the hallway, erupting into a fireball outside the principal's office and collapsing into ash. The other two who had been soaked by the balloons caught fire and collapsed as well.

One trap had cut his forces in half.

These children had figured out how to dissolve silver in water!

"Get them!"

Nicky outlined the chalk circle and sprinkled it with salt and other powders. Just outside of the circle was the stool upon which the statue stood. The hole in the ceiling would bring the moonlight onto the statue shortly, and she needed to have read from the scroll by then.

She hoped the rest of the team was all right. Mitch would have said "it's for the greater good, and they know what they're sacrificing themselves for," but that didn't make things any easier. The counter-curse had to be cast here, where the original spell had been cast, and the vampires had to be kept busy while she did it.

Nicky didn't have much time, she knew. The vampires could get bored of the game and come home before she was done. She could mis-read a magical word, and totally hose the spell.

...or she could fall victim to it.

She was 17, a year past the point when most other Guardians had lost the ability to see vampires and magic. Nicky knew she was living on borrowed time, and often caught herself daydreaming of things that just were not in character for her.

All of the preparations were complete. She lit the tall black candles, and began to read the words of a long-dead necromancer.

She didn't--couldn't--sense the other presence in the room, an intangible sentry-spirit whose mission it was to prevent just what she was doing. It wasn't corporeal, could not harm her or even communicate with her. The master must be informed, it thought, and left it's post for the first time in forty years.

This has got to be a diversion, Xarathon thought.

Another of his troops had fallen to the children's traps, though three of the children hadn't run fast enough and were now nothing more than bloody smears on the floors and walls of the cafeteria. Ahead, a horrible racket was coming from the band room, but the vampires were wary of stepping through the doors.

"Get in there!" he growled, shoving them through the doors, and then stepping through himself.

The children had piled chairs and instruments all around the room, forming a maze. The low ceiling kept the vampires from leaping over the walls of brass and wood.

A boy, no older than 14, stepped out from behind the mess and hurled a water balloon. It splashed harmlessly off the door, and Bruce took off after the kid--who disappeared into the maze before the balloon even hit.

There was a scream. Bruce staggered back, holding his head in his hands; he actually made it three steps before collapsing into dust. Xarathon walked forward a few steps, and found the piano wire stretched across the maze. In the dimly lit room, there could be hundreds of these little tricks.

Only two minions left, and they headed for the exit as a rain of water balloons flew over the maze. He went out with them.

Master, came the tickling at his ear, She is here.

It was a diversion. The children were supposed to keep him occupied while the girl did something.

She has the figure, the voice continued, and he screamed in rage. He grabbed Mendoza, the smarter of the two surviving vampires, and shoved him against the wall.

"I don't care if you need to burn this hell-hole to the ground," he said, teeth clenched. "Get the rest of the pack here, now. No one gets out of here alive."

Then he was gone.

Mitch turned to Steve, sitting in a closet near the principal's office. He was listening to a headset plugged into the school intercom system. "Someone get on the phone to Nicky, and tell her she's got company coming. And there are more vamps on their way, so everyone get ready."

Nicky stood in her circle, waiting. The spell had been read. Hopefully she hadn't screwed it up.

She needed to wait until the light from the moon shone full on the statue, and then she could finish the spell. She stood, silently, impatiently, absently swinging a stake.

Shouldn't you be doing something else, came a whisper in her ear. As a matter of fact, there was something else, wasn't there...? She looked at the stake in her hand, but it wasn't a stake, it was a tennis racket.

That's what she had forgotten, today was her tennis lesson.

She gave the racket a few practice swings, and spun it around her finger. Yeah, that's what she needed, go whack a couple of balls over the net, burn off this frustration over...over...what had she been frustrated and impatient with, just moments ago...? Her brain was fuzzy, she was supposed to be doing something, not thinking about tennis...

She looked closely at the racket, and noticed the logo--a golden hand holding a tennis racket.

A tear rolled slowly down her cheek. Arik, she thought. How could I forget Arik?

She spun the tennis racket a few more times, and then reversed it in her hand.

Then she jammed it backwards, under her left arm, outside the circle--below the spot from whence the whisper had come. The shriek of pain and terror told her she had hit her target.

Xarathon staggered back two steps, screaming. The stake had been perfectly on target; he was dying. He could feel his insides filling with sand and dust. But thirteen hundred years of evil wouldn't die in an instant. He could still keep her from breaking the spell. He reached through the circle at her, felt his arm catch fire for breaking the protective barrier, caught her shirt in his decaying talons, dragged her away from the statue.

"You won't break the curse!" he spat, as the moonlight fell on the horrific little statue. She fought, struggled, tried to get away--and then froze. He had her! It was time and she was too far away!

She reached under her shirt, pulled off a pendant, and held it up--a feather, five inches long, solid gold. "This is for you, Arik," she whispered. She threw it, knife-style, at the figurine, while he screamed in impotent anger.

The heavy feather caught the statue high, knocking it off balance. It wobbled, rocked, finally toppled off the stool.

His last sight, as he crumbled into dust, was the statue shattering into a million pieces too.

Nicky stepped carefully out of the crypt, and made her way through the quiet streets back to the school. She was amazed at what she saw when she arrived.

The school principal, two teachers, and seven parents were taking on a vampire on the front lawn.

Mitch was standing on the statue in the front of the school, shouting orders, and amazingly enough, the adults were actually listening to him. Clumps of adults were taking down vampires all around the school grounds. Steve was helpfully and cheerfully handing out stakes, spears, and crossbows from the tailgate of his family's station wagon.

Mitch jumped down to stand next to her. "Not bad, for a girl," he said.

They watched the chaos in silence for a few minutes. "So, what now?"

"I don't know about you," she said, "but I know what I'm doing."

She turned her back on the adults and vampires, and walked home. There was no one there; odds are her parents and brother were out stomping vampires now too. She ignored the empty house, went straight up the steps, and slammed the door behind her.

Several minutes later, the door opened again, for just a moment. When it closed, there was a sign hanging on it, freshly painted in fingernail polish the color of blood, some of the letters dripping slightly.

It said Getting caught up on sleep for the next week. If you wake me up for anything less than the end of the world, you're risking instant painful death. Consider yourself warned.

Luis Came Back

2009-09-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

This is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge. This week? Come up with a thousand words to tell the story behind the picture.

It was someone's sick idea of a joke, calling Luis "Lucky." I think maybe it was Raul.

The man was already missing an eye and a hand when he signed on with us. He didn't say much about his family for the longest time; it was only after Raul got him good and drunk that we found out they had died in a fire--the same fire that had scarred his back, and taken his eye and his hand.

You would think that a man with only one hand wouldn't make a very good soldier, but Luis did okay. Our assignment was to wipe out the bandit packs near the American border, and it was hard to turn anyone away if they could fight. Luis could fight. Instead of taking the time to reload during a battle, he actually carried two extra pistols. He was vicious, and fearless, always the first one over the wall.

Then we went up against the the bandits in Nogales, and "Lucky" Luis took a bullet in his good arm. Now he was totally useless.

Back at camp, he started drinking. Hard. He let slip that it was bandits that burned his farm and his family. He kept shouting about vengeance, and how he was going to get it no matter what it took. He had heard of this doctor in the mountains, Doctor Brouha, who could almost bring a dead man back to life, and he was going to go and see him.

Everyone had heard of Doctor Brouha, of course, but no one went to see him. Well...no one sane, anyway. They said half the men who went to see him died, and the other half never came back.

Lucky Luis came back.

Three weeks after he set out on foot, with one useless arm and a hook for a hand, he came back into the camp.

He had a new eye and new arms. The eye was a brass tube that stuck out of his skull and moved around like a snail's eyestalk. And his arms...they weren't human arms. They were black metal, with a ball where the elbow would be.

Luis could fire a big rifle like a derringer, haul crates like a horse, and shoot a fly off a horse's tail at fifty paces. "The eye," he told me. "It lets me see up close. Doctor Brouha did good."

The rest of us weren't quite so sure.

A month later, Luis got "lucky" again. The cannonball missed him by inches, but threw him twenty feet.

The bloody mangled thing on the stretcher was barely human. I could see teeth through cheeks and shattered ribs sticking out of his chest, but the black metal arms were still shiny, and that one good eye found mine. "D...D...Doc..." he wheezed.

"Doctor Brouha," I said. The eye closed. I picked two walking wounded to carry the stretcher; they wouldn't be any good for fighting for a couple of weeks, anyway.

The two soldiers came back two weeks later. They said the last they saw, Doctor Brouha was standing over Luis with a saw in his hand. He would lean down to whisper "do you want it bad enough?" in his ear, again and again, until Luis screamed "YES!" through his shattered face. Then the doctor stood up with a smile and went to cut off a leg. That's when they left.

Luis came back a month later.

At least, it wore Luis' bandana, and it stood in his old spot in formation. But it didn't look like Luis. It was all metal, all shiny black. It now had two of the brass eyes on stalks, and it fought like a demon. It was faster than a horse, never ate, never slept.

And it never talked.

We wondered if there was even any of Lucky Luis left inside.

It wiped out the gringos in Sonora all by itself, before we even got close enough to see who was shooting.

The Captain worked out a way to take out the bandit fort at Huachuca. We had to sneak down the hill, to the back of the fort, while the rest of the men pretended to attack the front. Lucky Luis was with us, so we knew we would win; it would probably tear down the whole wall for us.

We slipped and skidded down the muddy hill, and lined up for the attack, the metal man leading the way.

A section of the wall fell towards us, revealing a squad of men, a burning torch, and a loaded cannon. The first shot scattered us, and we all tried to run back up the hill to get away from the second one.

The metal man wasn't running. It was looking at what used to be Raul, the prankster who had given him his nickname. It was looking at us running in terror, slipping and sliding through the muck and not getting out of the line of fire fast enough.

And then he started running, too. The wrong way.

Even as fast as he was, he couldn't get there before they loaded up the cannonball. But he ran right up to the barrel of the cannon as they brought the torch down. He plugged it with his own body--blocked it off with Doctor Brouha's shiny black metal. The explosion wiped out the cannon crew, knocked down the wall behind them, and wiped out enough of the troops on the other side of the wall that we took the fort with ease.

We gathered up the dead, and found most of the pieces of metal that had been Lucky Luis. When we looked inside the metal bucket that had once stood atop the black shoulders, there was nothing, not even a skull.

We buried him next to Raul.

Portrait of the Author as a Young Conspiracy Whacko

2009-09-17T23:20:00.000-07:00

Two posts in a row that aren't fiction and photography...?

Okay, this is an entry into the Friday Challenge. Bruce's challenge for this week: What did 9/11 do to your world?

I started writing this out as a set of notes to go with my story...but the more I wrote, the less fiction I could find. I eventually gave up on the story, polished this out into an essay, and I'm posting it as is.

-=ad=-

Some questions can't be answered.

More importantly, some questions should be answered.

I've always been fascinated by unanswered questions, and I've never been shy about poking them with a stick to see if they squirm. Secrets have a way of coming out eventually; they deserve to have light shined on them.

Lincoln assassination? Check. Why does the body of the assassin not quite match the description of John Wilkes Booth?

Kennedy assassination? Why couldn't military sharpshooters repeat Oswald's feat of three shots in just a couple of seconds?.

Oklahoma City. Read the works of General Partin, military demolitions expert: How could a fertilizer-oil bomb, which aren't all that powerful or reliable, do so much damage to parts of the building so far away from the explosion? And how did the investigators track the suspect based on a number found on the blasted wreckage of the rear axle of the rented truck that held the bomb?

Look into what Roosevelt knew in advance about Pearl Harbor; follow that up with the needless firebombing of cities in Germany and Japan, and something called "Operation Keelhaul" in Europe.

Ask what was formerly standing in the spot where Central Park now sits.

Back up even further in history, and whether or not evil King Richard was as bad as the history books lead us to believe.

I question the Shroud of Turin, because every single test on it--except the carbon dating test--has pointed to it's validity. The bloodstains on the Shroud are blood type AB.

I question the Sphynx, because it shows clear and obvious water damage--and the only other structure in Egypt that shows the same damage is the temple a few miles away from the Sphynx, built with the blocks dug out of the ground when the Sphynx was carved out of bedrock. I even question the history of the Giza Pyramids--because there aren't any "practice pyramids" before then, where the locals figured out how to build one, and all of the pyramids built after the Giza ones are crumbling piles of scrap rubble now--almost like the Egyptians mastered the art of pyramid building overnight and promptly forgot how they did it. And...if you can figure out how the Pyramid was built, building this huge pile of ten ton rocks...maybe, just maybe, you can figure out how the Sphynx was built--by moving HUNDRED ton bricks out of a big hole in the ground.

"The winners write the history books." Well, what if you want to know what the losers would have written? Hell, what if you want to know the truth, not the opinion of the winners OR the losers?

But I'm not a conspiracy nut. I'm a conspiracy researcher.

Yes, there's a difference, though odds are, not many see it that way. A conspiracy researcher asks questions, and the conspiracy nut answers them. I don't have the mindset to think I have the resources and the intelligence to answer my own questions...I just ask them.

That brings us around to 9/11, which leads to more questions than I can count.

9/11 started off bad for me. I had worked out an occasional carpooling deal with a friend, but we had crossed wires that day. I showed up at the truck stop just south of I-10 through Phoenix, where we always met--but he wasn't there. I had to call around, find a new ride in to work, and saw smoke coming out of the towers on a TV there at the truck stop. Finally made it in to work, over an hour late; suffered through the obligatory chewing-out session in silence, and went on to my desk...and spent the rest of the day poring over news and clips and posts and "what the hell is going on...?"

It's eight years later, and I still don't have answers to all of my questions. I still don't trust the official story, any more than I trust any OTHER official story.

How did burning aircraft fuel bring down the towers, when burning aircraft fuel isn't hot enough to melt steel?

What brought down building number 7?

How was it possible to find the passport of one of the dead terrorists on the streets of New York City, when so much was destroyed?

Why was there no real warning from the intelligence community?

Who tried to profit from 9/11 by betting on the stocks of the affected airline companies to fall on that day?

Is it possible that 9/11 is a response to meddling in Iran since the 50s...and instigating the Iran/Iraq war, then taking sides with Iraq...and blockading medical supplies into Iraq for so many years...and all of the other ways the US government interferes in the Middle East...?

But the two biggest questions of all are these:

Why was the military not scrambled? And, why was Bush allowed to keep reading to schoolchildren?

Three different military flights were rerouted to check on Payne Stewart's Leerjet flight. The plane apparently lost cabin pressure, and flew on autopilot for two or three hours before running out of fuel. National Guard F-16s even monitored the plane until it actually hit the ground. On 9/11, not only were the planes over much more populated areas (Stewart's plane crashed in South Dakota), there were so many MORE planes out of contact. I've been to Dover AFB, practically down the street from the Pentagon. There are military bases all up and down the coast. Surely some of those bases had planes in the air or available for a quick launch? Why were the rules changed that day? And what are the rules NOW?

Most important in my mind, though, was the President sitting in a classroom in Bradenton, Florida, while the country was being attacked. If these terrorists were organized and funded well enough to hijack not one, but FOUR airplanes from major airports...who could say that they weren't also hijacking a Leer or Cessna from "Bradenton Municipal," filling it full of the flammable material of choice, and crashing it into the roof of the school? (No, I don't know if there really is a Bradenton airport, but that's beside the point). Secret Service protocol should have involved hustling Bush out of that school in the first thirty seconds after the news hit the air.

I'm not suggesting anything at all, remember. I'm a conspiracy hobbyist, not a professional. I just ask questions, and I leave it to the more...serious and dedicated... conspiracy whackos to come up with the answers. But, in the "new and improved" post-9/11 world, just asking the questions is enough to get you into trouble. Bush's "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude means that anyone who dares to question the mainstream version of things is obviously a revisionist, a terrorist sympathizer, looking to get rich by flinging conspiracy garbage around to all of those "poor, misguided, uneducated rubes" out there who actually listen to talk radio.

It ALMOST feels like the people who want their questions answered are being marginalized and ignored. It seems like anyone who isn't being a good little drone, believing the official "winner's version" of the history books, just doesn't deserve to be recognized by polite company. It's almost like anyone who asks conspiratorial, traitorous questions like "how much is this going to cost?," "who's going to be covered?," "how much longer are we going to stay over there?" and "how did you visit Pakistan when Americans weren't allowed into the country?" are treated like full-on treasonous terrorists.

I wonder if anyone would consider it a badge of honor to be placed on the government's anti-terrorist no-fly list...?

If I were a full-blown conspiracy whacko, instead of just a conspiracy hobbyist, it would almost seem to me that 9/11 changed the way we look at our country and each other--that the slow but steady drift towards a police state that had been going on for years suddenly became a flash flood of lost freedoms. I've always felt that the country was on a leisurely drive from freedom to tyranny, and every president finds some excuse to push a little harder on the gas pedal. Just like the economic meltdown is Obama's excuse to floor it now, 9/11 was Bush's excuse them. Thirty years ago, would anyone have thought that the US would have the largest prison population of any country? Fifty years ago, would there have been any debate over what constitutes "torture" at the hands of Americans? I can just imagine the Congressional debates from 1800 over the constitutionality of giving tax money to people for their medical care, or to buy a horse and cart...

But what do I know? I'm just a guy who asks a lot of questions.

Vaccine Russian Roulette

2009-09-17T09:27:00.001-07:00

Very often, I seem to be catching flack from people who disagree with my opinions on vaccinating my kids.

The school seems to think I'm exposing my kids to dangerous germs. Other parents believe that by not vaccinating my kids I'm somehow endangering theirs--an argument that makes absolutely no sense, because if the vaccine works, and their kids are vaccinated, then vaccinating my kids would be completely irrelevant to the health of theirs.

Granted, there are quite a few disagreements over certain vaccines and their effects on people:

1. Thimerasol (mercury): Depending on who you ask, this is either a deadly toxin or "such a small dose as to be absolutely harmless." Many parents blame this additive for autism. I'm not taking sides in this debate, but I have a problem with injecting any amount of mercury into a child's body for any reason whatsoever.

2. Side effects (Swine Flu, 1976): How do you ensure that the vaccine you're providing doesn't kill more people than the disease it's supposed to be effective against?

3. Contaminants (Monkey virus in the Polio vaccine): What do you do when you discover--years after the vaccination--that it contained a virus or other contamination, and that you've exposed fifty million Americans to a substance that causes cancer?

4. Profit margin (Gardasil): I have a philosophical/moral/libertarian problem with government passing a law that requires citizens to buy a product from a company. Whether the vaccine works or not, ordering people to boost the vaccine maker's profit margin seems like a basic misuse of the law.

5. Risks versus Benefits: There have been 1500 cases of polio, annually, worldwide, and the WHO calls the entire Western Hemisphere "Polio Free." Every case of polio in the United States over the last twenty years is directly related to the polio vaccine itself. 90% of the people infected with polio brush it off like a case of the flu, and nearly 98% of the people infected with polio have a full and complete recovery. Do the dangers of the vaccine--five different doses for kids before they turn 12--outweigh the risks of even being exposed to the disease, let alone being harmed by it? The mortality rates for flu, measles, whooping cough, and chicken pox are negligible; are the side effects from the vaccinations worth it?

6. Expiration dates on vaccination immunity: The vast majority of the vaccinations children receive provide only temporary immunity. Only Tetanus antibodies survive in the body for thirty or forty years. The Hepatitis B shot? Gone in 7 to 12 years, at most.

7. Can we compare against non-vaccinated kids? For example, the Amish don't vaccinate, and strangely enough, there are no recorded cases of autism in Amish communities. And Dr. Eisenstein, a Chicago pediatrician, doesn't believe in vaccinations--and the 35,000 kids who have moved through his practice have remarkably low statistics when it comes to autism, asthma, diabetes, and other problems.

I'm sure other people can easily add to this quick list if they wished. But these are all side issues that don't touch on my real opposition to the concept of vaccination in and of itself.

Basic biology says that the heart pumps blood into the arteries; they carry it to the capillaries, which then feed the cells they touch with the oxygen in the red blood cells before sending the empties back up the veins. Capillaries in general are barely big enough to allow red blood cells to march through in single file. Call it a blood-cell bucket brigade to the cells.

A vaccination is meant to kick the body's immune system into overdrive--crank up white blood cell production, and "program" the body to recognize this particular virus and attack it with massive force, should it ever be encountered again. The needle contains millions or even billions of virus particles for the body to identify and destroy.

Here is a question, then. What would happen if the body ordered five hundred white blood cells to pursue a microbe into a capillary?

After the first dozen or so arrive, stuffing themselves like marshmallows into a garden hose, nothing else gets through. And after a very short while, whatever was supposed to be fed by that capillary...dies.

Now, granted, this might only be a handful of cells fed by this one capillary, and there are billions of capillaries. But at the same time, there are billions of virus particles in one injection; how many of those actually make it down to the capillaries? Two? Two hundred? More?

Perhaps the cells that die are the brain cells that would allow this person to learn to play Mozart. Or perhaps they are the ones that allow a kid to sit still and pay attention in class. What if those cells are involved in the processing of Vitamin D or insulin?

I will fully accept the risk that my child might spend a week in bed with measles--in return for their ability to learn to play Mozart. I would much rather risk exposing my child to chicken pox than chance destroying some critical cell in their body and ruining their future.

Every virus particle is a microscopic bullet, with the potential to kill something small but critically important in the body into which it's injected.

There are billions of these bullets in every needle.

And the average child gets, what, fifty needles before they turn 12...?

For more information, read the work of Drs. Andrew Moulden, Mayer Eisenstein, and Shari Tenpenny

Nicky Weird's Summer Vacation

2009-09-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge. The assignment: "What I Did on my Summer Vacation only make up something cool."

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Thirty years ago, an evil sorcerer cast a spell on the Earth. Under it's influence, humans can no longer recognize magic; vampire slayings become "teen runaways," magical storms and disasters are "freak unseasonal storms." Even history isn't immune; show a human a picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with the wizard robes and auto-writing quills moving, and they'll see a bunch of stuffy white men in the style of the 1700s standing around, powdered wigs and all.

Magic just doesn't register on human senses, and even if it does, it's instantly rationalized away.

But there was a glitch in the spell, a mis-spoken word in a long forgotten language...a loophole, if you will, in a spell that was supposed to be eternal law.

The spell only works on adults.

And so, the future of the world lies in the hands of children, like Nicky Ward, who try to fight the demons and vampires as best they can, hoping that some day, the spell will break...

Dear Mom and Dad,

...yeah, I know, when you read this, you'll see "I'm having a lot of fun on my summer vacation!" instead of what I'm really writing...

I'm really glad you agreed to let me come down to Florida with my Guardian group--um, I mean, my "church youth group." The bus ride down was nice and quiet; we had a close pass from a Kansas storm demon. The bus driver called it a small tornado, and we parked under an overpass until it went by. Good thing storm demons are stupid.

Once we got here, we hooked up with the local Guardian club, and started sharing notes. That's really big with the Guardians, you know. When you're twelve and decide to hunt vampires for a living, you've got a life expectancy of maybe six months. If we didn't get to be neurotic about writing down everything we know and sharing copies with everyone we know, then no one would remember how to go about killing vampires and demons, you know?

So, once all the braindraining was out of the way, we helped the local group clear out a vampire nest in the swamp. Bright sunshine, couple of kids go inside and make sure the coffins are full while the rest of the team pours gasoline on the outside...if you're really lucky, the coffins are bonfires before the bloodsuckers are done wiping the sleep out of their eyes...

...we weren't lucky. We lost two, both local kids, and they said we burned up at least six or seven vampires when the plantation went up. Some people might be happy with those numbers, but they can crank out new vampires by just biting someone, and we have to teach even more kids everything we know about staying alive...doesn't seem like a fair trade to me.

After that, we celebrated with carbonated cider, if you can call it a celebration and not a wake.

We spent the next two weeks researching some pretty gruesome murders. Finally, Jim hit on it; it was some kind of possessed-alligator-half-human-half-swamp monster...thing. Dunno, we never really had a name for it. It had an appetite for small pets, but when the supply of Yorkiesnacks ran out, it moved on to the main course--people.

We cornered it in an old warehouse downtown, and Jim hit it with a de-possession spell he found a couple of months ago. It worked; the thing turned into a two-foot long normal alligator, except that it was purple, and one of the local kids was going to keep it as a pet. At least we didn't lose anyone this time, though Bobby will be bringing home a big ugly scar on his leg.

Unfortunately, Jim messed up the spell, and his hair turned white. You get that when you try to do magic without years and years of training. He told me about a friend of his last year who tried to use a spell to burn up a trio of bloodsuckers--but stumbled over one of the magic words and melted into a puddle of goo, instead.

Jim said the worst part was hearing the voice from the bucket when they took the goo back to HQ, but I don't know if he was kidding or not. Jim's like that.
Anyway...

Tomorrow, we're going to try to chase down a possible were-something or other near Miami Beach. The adults think we're doing a community service project, and we're actually going to do some painting on an old house as a cover while Mitch sets up his wolfsbane trap.

Tonight, though, we're going to try to have a barbecue on the beach, if the storm demons will leave us alone. Seems like the hurricanes move in every time we light the bonfire.

We'll be hopping on the bus to head home in time for school next weekend, and I'll see you then.

Yeah, yeah, I know, that last sentence is probably the only one that will get through to your brain...that's okay, though.

Your daughter...

Nicky

Okay, a quick overview/introduction on this one.

I'm fascinated by this character because she defines herself.

I came up with this ridiculous, bizarre, black-humor story, "The Night of the Inflateables," where a kid's Halloween/birthday wish turns balloon animals in a mall into vicious monsters. The lead character, Nicky Ward, sets out to protect the people and kill the balloons; the fight spills out into the mall parking lot, where the inflated Sumo wrestler in front of the auto dealer next to the mall is wreaking havoc in the parking lot...

I hadn't even finished my notes for the story when the character of Nicky started letting me know who she was. And the one biggest character trait...was *jaded*. She's thirteen years old, but talks and acts like she's been doing this for a really long time. That one factoid led into the definition of the world she lives in--and sparked the ideas for more than a dozen (so far) short stories, chronicling her life from about age 10 to 18. Three stories are half done, some of the rest are nothing more than one-sentence ideas; I've also got notes on at least a half-dozen supporting characters...

So, when Bruce asked for "what did you do on your summer vacation," my brain threw a "...Nicky Weird?" on the end of the sentence, and this is what came out.

-=ad=-

The Ten Thousand Nickel Challenge

2009-09-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

It's all Jerri's fault.

Jerri read something I wrote , and declared "I'm impressed. You can write funny; I can't do that."

Now, Jerri is a "real" writer, with over a dozen tech books under her belt; I'm strictly amateur, with a handful of unpublished and mostly unread short stories and poems. To have impressed someone I admire as much as Jerri had an impact on me.

Thus was NickelAtATime born.

The concept is simple (and right there in the EULA, and everyone reads those, right...?). If you laugh at a joke, you pull up your Paypal account and send in a nickel. You can send more if you like, but the MSRP of these jokes is exactly five cents. It started out as a mailing list, but the job I was working at the time went away shortly after I sent out the first issue, and it...kinda died. Once life stabilized again, I turned it into a blog, and lately, I've been trying to bring it completely to life--and pack it full of fun and humor.

Why am I writing about another blog here on my fiction and photography blog? Easy. I'm trying to replace my broken camera. The one I want is still a ways away, and I'm asking for your help in getting there. Besides the Redbubble pictures that are up for sale, I'm also posting jokes and pictures to NickelAtATime, and many of those will be going up on CafePress as well. And with the economy the way it is, I figure not everyone will want to spend "the big bucks" on a photo print or poster...but I figure everyone can spare a few nickels here and there.

How many nickels do I need to get the camera I want...?

Um...well...

Ten thousand.

(Why am I having Star Wars flashbacks here...? "All in advance.")

Yes, between the money I've got stashed away, and the Redbubble sales I've had so far, and the nickels I've pulled in, I'm about ten thousand nickels away from my new camera. So, I would like to invite everyone I know, to invite everyone they know, and stop by NickelAtATime, pull up a rock, and (hopefully) have a good laugh.

And if you DO have a good laugh...kick in your nickel. Comments and criticisms are, of course, always welcome.

Thank you for your time.

See you in the funny papers!

-=ad=-

Southern Knights Rocks!

2009-09-04T04:34:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an entry in The Friday Challenge, which can be found here. This week's challenge? Explain how Hollywood would screw up a perfectly good comic book--the independent Southern Knights.

-=ad=-

Nickolas Geekzinski, NYT Movie Critic

Southern Knights Rocks.

Honestly, I can't say it any clearer than that. From the opening scene with the giant robots, to the final fight featuring magical lighting against superhero lightning, this movie keeps you on the edge of your seat. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there are so many cool things to say about this cool movie that some things are just going to leak out.

Whenever you take a book or comic book to the screen, there's a lot of baggage that comes with. Superhero movies have to acknowledge the things that came before. One of the funniest quotes in movies comes from Scott Summers/Cyclops in the first X-Men movie: "Would you prefer yellow spandex?" For a new Superman or Batman movie, there are years upon years of baggage to take into account, and a thousand nitpicking little details that the rabid fans of those franchises want to see. That's why the first words Superman speaks to Lois in "Superman Returns" are the same as the first line he says to her in the original "Superman: The Movie."

However...if you build your movie from something that doesn't have all that baggage--say, a lesser-known comic book, with a much smaller legion of rabid fans--then you have the chance to create your own baggage, and define these characters anew. So, let's take a look at the characters.

David Shenk/Electrode: The leader of the team, played to brooding perfection by Chris Pine, fresh from Trek. The comical moment where he works out a battle plan, calls out instructions to his teammates--and then watches them totally ignore his plan and rush off to do their own thing--is absolutely priceless.

Connie Ronnin: Rumor has it Paris Hilton offered to finance the movie for a shot at this role, but fortunately, it fell to Summer Glau instead. The intensity she brings to the role is astounding. It must have taken weeks of fencing practice to make her look that good.

Dragon: The one piece missing from the film is some kind of backstory on a man who can change into a dragon. I mean, did Shia Lebouf just suddenly wake up one morning and realize he could change into a dragon? And what's with all the anachronistic speech--he sounds like he learned to talk by watching Masterpiece Theater, for crying out loud.

Kristin Austin: This is the role every comic book fan knows about--because of Jessica Simpson storming off the set halfway through production. Scrambling for a last-minute replacement, all of her scenes were re-shot with Hayden Panattiere in record time.

Brian Daniels: And the show-stealer of the year award goes to...Jeff Foxworthy, for his portrayal of the robot-suit wearing comedy sidekick of the team. Purists may complain about the amount of screen time granted to what was essentially a minor character in the comic book, but his sub-plot--featuring him losing everything to his ex-wife (played to shrewish perfection by Drew Barrymore), then the commiserating drinking party with Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy, and finally figuring out the answer to all his problems--all of these things made the movie. And the final fight, seeing his battle suit covered with more corporate sponsor stickers than the average Nascar vehicle, just brought everything together.

And finally, Morrigan, the villain. Other reviewers have already sung her praises, so I don't need to go into any more depth here. Suffice it to say it's terrific to see a true, villainous villainESS for a change.

The action was stupendous; not even Michael Bey could have done it better. The robot battle at the beginning which totally destroyed the freeway into Atlanta? For the first time, really, audiences get a glimpse into just how much collateral damage superhero combat entails.

And it's really rare to see a superhero movie with as much humor. Having Kristin join the rednecks at the bar was a stroke of genius, and the barroom brawl to follow--while predictable, "when there's a scene in a bar, there will be a fight"--was one of the coolest scenes in the movie, as Kristin spun at least a dozen drunken men through the nearest available window...or wall...without once spilling her drink. The sex scene that followed, when she rushed off drunk into Dragon's apartment, was more touching and warm than even the one in Watchmen.

There are nitpicks, of course; you can't film a superhero movie without them. Why Connie's psychic lightsaber could cut through some things and not others is one. And Morrigan's lightning bolts--why didn't they short out Brian's sticker-encrusted battlesuit at the end of the movie, the way it did at the beginning when the enemy robot dropped power cables on it? Did the stickers give it protection against magical lightning or something?

All I've got to say is this. The Southern Knights movie may not have been true to the word of the original comic, but with the massive injection of Southern humor, it was very true to the spirit of the original, and adds a whole new chapter to what will eventually become a dynasty of...

...hey, what are you doing in here? Aren't you the guy who invented the Southern Knights? What do you think you're doing with that butter knife...?

The Disconnect

2009-08-28T00:52:00.000-07:00

This post is an entry in the Friday Challenge, which can be found here.

Disconnect, The: (see also: "Great Disconnect, The;" "Alexandria 2;" or just "2319") As human lifespans extended past the two century mark (see also "LEX," "Life Extension Experiments"), a philosophical movement occurred in the 23d Century that sought to reshape the way the new generation of humanity viewed history. Since any human could live long enough to learn and accomplish anything they set out to do, the Disconnect movement sought to erase the negativity from human history--by erasing that history altogether. "History has become irrelevent," said one Disconnect supporter. "What we learn from history is that one group of humans always tries to dominate another group, leading certain people to believe that it's their destiny to rule. With everyone living so long, there shouldn't be anyone ruling anyone else--and the only way to ensure that one group doesn't try to use their history to dominate another group is to erase the history and forget about it. All that war and slavery stuff--that's not for us anymore." The Disconnect movement, in 2319, culminated in the destruction of the Internet, Google, and Wikipedia, though legend has it that the then-CEOs of both companies made multiple backups and hid them away for future generations to find (see also the action-adventure series "Quest for the Googleplex"). With the destruction of literally millions of terabytes of information, history and fact merged with mythology and legend, and the bulk of human knowledge about past centuries was lost. Many current historians believe that this destruction of historical and philosophical underpinnings of human thought was a major factor in the rise to power of Maddox (see also "God-King Maddox", "Two Hundred Year Reign"), who ruled over North and South America with an iron fist, and only left power because he was bored...

--Encyclopedia Humanica, 3243 edition

The members of the parole board looked around, sending sidelong glances, avoiding eye contact, shifting in their seats.

"Do you mean to tell me," the director of prisons said at last, "that we've lost this man's record? That we have no idea what he's serving a life sentence for?"

"He claims to have been here since the 20," the warden said. "He's also told us he was part of the original LEX."

"Ah. So, not only do we not know why he's here, but he says he's been here for something on the order of five hundred years. Excuse me, but LEX only extends life to about 250."

"You have to figure," said the director of Information, "that in the 20, their records would have been paper. So, those records would have had to have been moved to something electronic, maybe digital, back in the 20, to whatever they used in the 21st and 22nd, to the positronic records we keep now. Plus, there was the earthquake in 2149--"

"And don't forget 2319," piped in the prison psychiatrist. "There were lots of records lost then, too."

"Yeah, exactly," he nodded his agreement.

"I would be amazed that any of the original LEX test subjects are still alive," the Director said.

"The LEX project was remembered via word of mouth," the IT manager said. "It impacted everyone, so it really couldn't have been forgotten like so much else was in 2319. And according to Prisoner 67518, he actually caused it." Curious looks and raised eyebrows invited him to continue. "The researchers built a custom virus to change DNA and extend lifespan. The first tests were on volunteers serving life sentences--illegal at the time, according to 67518. Most of the other volunteers died horribly, but the virus somehow mutated in his system."

"LEX causes the body to produce a fraction of the free radicals it normally would," the Director said. "Every school child knows this. What makes 67518 any different?"

"Two factors. One, his body doesn't produce any free radicals at all." Gasps of shock and surprise went around the table.

"That would make him effectively immortal," the prison doctor said. "Barring accident or murder, he would just go on...well, until he got tired of it."

The warden continued, "Second, his body actually produces the LEX virus. Originally, it was designed to make the DNA changes and die off, but in his case, it mutated and became contagious. He says the scientists and guards caught the LEX virus from him, and spread it to their friends and family; by the time anyone realized it, most of the human race had been infected with LEX."

Babble and confusion went around the table, and finally the Director shouted them down. "Enough with the history. We don't even know if we can trust what this man says. He is a prisoner serving a life sentence, after all." When the group stayed silent, he went on. "So. What you're telling me is that we have an immortal prisoner. We have no idea why he's serving a life sentence. Don't you think that spending an eternity in a ten by ten cell is a bit...cruel and unusual?" There were murmurs of agreement around the table.

"Even if he killed someone back in the 20," the prison doctor interjected, "what's the worst he could do now? LEX makes the body heal so quickly it's nearly impossible to murder someone before they call for help."

"Even the mass murderers from the 21 were let out, eventually," said the prison psychiatrist. There were no voices of dissent.

"Very well. Bring the prisoner here, please." Several long minutes passed, and the prisoner stood, calmly meeting the gaze of the parole board.

"Prisoner 67518, I hereby declare your sentence fulfilled," the Director said, slamming a gavel on the table. "Congratulations, Charles Milles Maddox Manson. You are now a free man."

First Rule

2009-08-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

This is an entry into the Friday Challenge Annual Snowdog Contest, which can be found here.

For those who don't know, this annual Challenge allows you to take any past Friday Challenge, and write a fresh entry for it. And so, this entry is actually in response to *two* past Challenges. The first was written by Henry, the SuperHero Challenge. And the second--the one that originally inspired the story--was written by Vidad, in his First Rule Challenge: What exactly is Bruce *really* doing when he declares a First Rule situation? (First Rule: Paying work takes precedence over free--as in blogging--work.)

-=ad=-

Bruce crawled through the ventilation shaft, moving smoothly and silently towards his destination. The schematic readout of the facility glowed in front of his vision, provided by a cybernetic implant behind his left eyeball. The dot on the map showed him exactly where he was at all times, without forcing him to turn away. The map communicated with the gyroscopic GPS at the base of his skull, and he could zoom the map in or out as necessary.

He always hated taking time off from writing for these trips, but cybernetic implants and web hosting space get to be expensive.

Voices up ahead; he froze in the dim light of the shaft, and peered down through a grating into the corridor below. Two sentries, joking and insulting each other, passed below him.

With nothing to do until they passed out of range, Bruce slipped into cyber-time. Email inbox empty, no new comments on the Friday Challenge, nothing new in the news, with Michael Jackson's death still dominating every free nanosecond. The sentries still hadn't gone five paces, so he found a way around the security systems in the mountain complex, checked for security cameras and incorporated their locations into his map, shut down the security alarms between his target and himself, and slipped back into the comfort of his body as the guards went around the corner at the end of the hall.

The micro laser built into his left pinkie was perfect for slicing through the screws on ventilation shaft grates, and it was only a moment before he was dropping into the deserted hallway. He cycled his vision implant through UV, Infrared, and heat sensor modes, making sure there were no surprises nearby, and silently worked his way through the complex to his goal.

He checked the chrono readout, low and to the left in his visual field, and saw that he was perfectly on time. A quick cyber-time signal to Vidad, and then just wait in the shadows. A few minutes later, air raid sirens started sounding, people dashed in all directions, and the target was unguarded. Distant explosions rumbled through the facility. There's a reason he named his blog the way he did, Bruce thought with a smile. Then he was in. One other person was in the room, but he was watching a monitor, totally focused on the excitement aboveground.

Bruce walked up beside him, triggered the sonic stunner in his left middle finger, and watched in satisfaction as the man crumpled to the ground. Gotta love how the movies catch up to reality. Though I don't understand why the one they used in Iron Man was three times the size of the real one. Just like how they screwed up Johnny Mnemonic--if they had just stuck to the truth, instead of mucking it up and trying to make it Hollywood friendly, it would have been so much better.

Bruce smashed the glass, and the quiet alarm went unnoticed in the geneal chaos caused by Vidad's drone attack. He snagged the rolled-up paper, and headed for the door--just as four goons walked through it. All four blinked in confusion, then dove for cover and started shooting. Bruce cursed under his breath, hid behind the display case, and started shooting back.

The private alert went off, a blinking red light high and to the left in his vision. That was the "secret identity" alert that he had installed on the Friday Challenge. It went off any time anyone posted a message with any of the words "cyborg," "secret agent," "secret identity," or "mercenary." Or "superhero," though Henry set that one off so often he was considering pulling it out of the list. "Red-headed amazon with battle axe" was on the list, too, but for entirely different reasons.

As he drew a bead on the slowest of the four thugs, Bruce set the combat computer to autopilot, and slipped off into cyber-time. He drifted through the 'net, to the Friday Challenge site, and found that, yes, Henry had just posted a comment with the word "superhero" in it. A few virtual keystrokes, and "Sorry, gang, First Rule situation going on here. I should be available again in a couple of hours. ~crc~" appeared on the blog. CRC? Dammit, I thought I fixed that macro. He hacked into the Blogger system, went into the post itself, changed the "c" to a "b" in both places, and exited cyber-time.

The combat system was in "alert" mode, checking the hallway for more thugs. He switched off the combat computer, stepped over the four bodies, and headed for the exit.

It was a running battle to get out of the facility. At least twenty, possibly more, guards tried to keep him from leaving, and only two of them were quick enough to even slow him down. It wasn't anywhere near as hectic as that running battle out of Karachi a few years earlier, escorting the princess kidnapped into the sex slave trade. At least this time I'm not trying to sneak off into cyber-time and rewrite a movie novellization from scratch three days before deadline in the middle of a running firefight, he thought to himself, only to get home and find they had changed the script yet again, making the whole effort a waste of energy.

Finally, the last guard was down, and he stepped out into sunlight.

The complex was smoking and burning all around him. He headed for the edge of the complex, staying low, keeping out of sight. Once he was out of clear range, he leaned against a rock, and pulled out the target doc. He unrolled it--and it burst into flame in his hands. The only scrap left was the piece that had been between his thumb and finger, and it said "Birth Cer." He let it drop to the ground. There goes my paycheck, he thought. Vox is going to be seriously upset.

Half-Face Herman threw his flamer to the ground. The metal jaw that made up the left side of his face glinted in the dawn sunlight. "Let's see how good you really are, cyberpunk," he said, with a vile and nasty emphasis on the last syllable. He gestured at the gun on Bruce's hip, and then dropped into a gunfighter's stance.

Bruce stood, arms out, palms forward, and nodded. "On three," he said, and the human side of Herman's mouth twitched into a wry smile. Bruce ran his tongue across the switch behind his right canine, setting output power to maximum. "One," he said, and Herman's arm flashed to his gun.

It never reached it.

Bruce triggered the laser cannon mounted in his left arm and palm. When the dust settled, he moved forward, and looked down at the charred metal jawbone opening and closing on the ground, accompanied by the faint whirring noise of dying cybernetic micromechanical systems. Bracketing the jawbone were two smouldering boots. "Idiot," Bruce grumbled, triggering the recall signal.

Moments later, he stepped out of the shower in the master bedroom of Casa del Bethke. He settled into his desk chair, and alerted his client that the mission was a failure, details later. At least I get to keep my retainer. Of course, that meant having to choose, and braces for the Kid were going to have to take precedence over that new Cray terabyte memory upgrade module. Maybe another month or two.

He logged into the Friday Challenge, using the keyboard this time, and posted "Okay, emergency over. Gotta love those last-minute software upgrade delivery deadlines. Did I miss anything interesting?"

July 4, 2049: The Days

2009-07-09T21:45:00.000-07:00

This is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge, which can be found here. The challenge: Look back from the year 2049, and figure out what's being celebrated on July 4.

"Grampa! Grampa! Did you see the fireworks?"

The old man bent down, and handily scooped up his youngest grandson. "You bet I did. Were they good?"

"They were cool!" The boy hopped down, and ran off to get munchies. "Gramma! Gramma!"

"Pop," James said, "Jim's got a report coming up. July 4 essay. He's got all the ancient history in there, but the tutor wants him to cover the Days, too. Think you can help him out?"

"I'd be glad to. Where's he at?"

"Stuffing his face, where else...?"

An hour later, a well-fed child and his equally well-fed grandfather sat across from each other in the big overstuffed chairs by the fireplace. A video fire burned on the overlay screen, for the cheery appearance without the heat. The screen would roll down into the floor in winter when the heat would be welcome.

"So, your dad wants me to tell you about the Days, is that it?"

"Yeah. I know from my reading that the people got tired of the government, but they don't go into much detail..." The boy's voice faded off.

"I'm not surprised," the man said. "History books have a bad habit of expecting you to already know some things and glossing over some others. Tell me what you know so far."

"Well...after 2000, the government was getting big and scary--not like now, when the whole government is a hundred people. Some people were actually afraid of the government."

"And with good reason," Grampa added. "Here's what happened. After 2000, the government decided it was going to get a lot bigger a lot faster. They kept people afraid as much as they could. That way, people would be too busy being afraid to notice how big the government got--and the people who complained, well, then they could just say 'we need this to protect you.' But everyone was afraid, and everyone was upset with the government, and all it took to set off the Days was a spark."

Jim grabbed his notepad and stylus, and started taking notes furiously. The notepad would grab an audio capture, of course, but he was highlighting the important parts.

"The men in charge of the government started passing lots and lots of new laws. 'You're not allowed to own this,' they would say. 'You're not allowed to eat that.' They kept taking more and more power from the people and kept it for themselves, and the people were so afraid that they just sorta went along with it. Even when the government said 'no one is allowed to own guns,' most of the people grumbled and complained and went along with it. It just wasn't big enough to set off the spark."

"Well, something must have set it off," the boy asked, glancing up from his pad.

"You'd be surprised what sparks things sometimes," he said. "And that's probably why it got left out of your history book. The spark that set off the Days...was a television show. National Idol, where people would compete to see who was the best singer. That year, right from the beginning, everyone knew it was either going to be Nikto, or Barada, right from the beginning.

"When it came down to the finale, one of the judges was out sick--and the vote was a tie. I mean, two judges each in the studio, AND the call-in voting from around the country was dead even, too. They did a recount, and came up with a tie. It became this national feud--you were either for Nikto, or you were for Barada. There was a no-ties-allowed clause in the Idol contract, and the show couldn't figure out how to break the tie."

Grampa let out a huge sigh. "Lots of people wanted to give it to Barada. He was this black kid from the East Coast, single father with a cute little kid at home. But just as many thought that Nikto should win, because she was an Asian from California. The feud went on long enough that the government decided to step in."

"It was a TV show, Grampa. What does the government have to do with TV?"

"Good point, and you already understand. See, there was this one Senator who was running for election that year. In one of his speeches, he said something about 'passing a law that gives the Idol win to Barada, where it should be.' As he was getting ready to leave, his microphone was turned back on accidentally, and the audience heard him mumble something about "bumpkins and rubes" under his breath. People started talking, and before you knew it, someone had posted to Youtube where he had given the same speech the day before--rooting for Nikto!"

"He didn't care what the people really wanted?"

"That's right. Government doesn't care what people want. The people in government just want more power." Grampa sat back in his chair with a smile. "Anyway, that was the spark. People who normally sat around watching TV suddenly sat up and realized that their government didn't care a whit about what they wanted, or thought, or needed. Enough people finally woke up. The government tried to quiet things down, but they didn't understand what they were dealing with. They still thought they were dealing with a National Idol feud, and tried to get the two into the Supreme Court to settle things. But that only made things worse, because a hundred thousand protestors gathered outside complaining about how the government was trying to meddle with things they shouldn't. And once enough people realized that that's all government does, well, everyone sorta...quit listening to the government. There were...riots. The government tried to call out the military, but a bunch of the soldiers agreed with the people and not the government.

"Finally, things started quieting down when a new president was in charge. He at least understood what the people were upset about, and he set out to repeal a bunch of the laws that had everyone mad. And when enough people called for a new Constitutional Convention, we got a new government. One Senator per state, one representative per 10 million people, only specific things the government can pass laws about, and any law can be vetoed by a national referendum vote among the people."

"My instructor says this will only hold back the government for a few years, they'll find ways around it."

Grampa chuckled. "You've got a good teacher. Yes, governments always find ways around their limits."

"So...what happened to Barada and Nikto?"

"They agreed to split the difference. Barada took the official win and the prize money, Nikto got the recording contract, they both retired with more money than they could ever spend."

"Thanks, Grampa! I think I've got everything I need now."

Three Movie Trailers

2009-07-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

Please note that this is NOT an entry into the Friday Challenge, which can be found Here. Due to the demons of Otogu (that's "other things of greater urgency"), this entry is well over twelve hours past the deadline, so it is not eligible for this week's Challenge. However...that's not an excuse to not share it.

Trailer One:

Camera pans across Italian countryside, with voice-over, "...in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, two star-crossed lovers..."

Sunset, with camera pausing on Italian village. Sunset. Fade to black. Text: "The legendary love story, retold..."

Fade in on brick wall. Voice-over screams. Blood sprays across the wall.

Text: "...with a modern twist."

Juliet is in the tub in her chambers, with bubbles all around. She's speaking to the nurse, behind her, across the room and over her shoulder. The nurse has her back to both Juliet and the camera.

Juliet: ad-libbing, and ending with "...so, how do you know when it really is love?"

While she talks, the camera pans across the room, and the nurse's face slowly drifts into focus in the mirror. She has a zombie face, with steel gray eyes and skin missing, and she's gnawing on a woman's severed hand.

Cut to: Swordfight, Romeo vs. Tybalt. Romeo lops off Tybalt's arm.

Romeo: "Tybalt, how many times do I have to kill you?"

Cut to: Juliet, trying to get away from the zombies. She appears cornered, swinging a torch.

Juliet: "Where the hell are you, Romeo?!?"

Black screen with text: Megan Fox as Juliet

Cut to: Romeo and Juliet vs. Zombie. Juliet chops off the head of a zombie while Romeo stares open-mouthed.

Juliet: "What, you think I'm just going to stand around and be eaten waiting for you to finally show up and rescue me?

Black screen with text: Nicholas Brendan as Romeo

Cut to: Romeo and Juliet on the run from zombies, pausing to catch their breath.

Romeo: "One hell of a first date, huh?"

Black screen with text: Michael Clarke Duncan as Tybalt

Cut to: Big terrifying zombie face smile.

Black screen with text: And featuring Bruce Campbell as the King of the Zombies

A film by Quentin Tarantino

Romeo and Juliet and Zombies

Trailer Two:

Black screen with text: Prophecy and Ambition are a bad combination, but when you add in zombies...

Cut to: Macbeth's chambers.

Lady Macbeth: "I'd have done it myself, if he hadn't looked so much like my father while he slept."

Macbeth walks in, blood on his hands.

Macbeth: "It's done."

Lady Macbeth stares in terror as a dark figure comes stumbling into the room behind Macbeth.

Cut to: Macbeth with the Witches

Witch: "You shall be King, until the very dead of Birnam do rise and march on Dunsinane."

Cut to: Zombies crawling out of the ground, working their way towards the castle.

Cut to: Macbeth, on a balcony. Camera rises behind him so the audience can see what he sees--thousands of zombies like a scene from Lord of the Rings moving in his direction.

Cut to: Lackey reporting Lady Macbeth's death.

Lackey: "Highness! Lady Macbeth has killed hers--"

The rest of the line is cut off as Zombie Lady Macbeth rips the lackey's head off.

Black screen with text: Jack Black, as Macbeth

Cut to: Macbeth vs Macduff

Macbeth: "How many times do I have to kill you, Macduff?" Plunges his sword through Macduff's chest and out the back.

Black screen with text: Gwyneth Paltrow as Lady Macbeth

Cut to: Zombie Lady Macbeth

Zombie grin close-up, while she licks blood and gore from her fingers.

Black screen with text: And Bruce Campbell as the King of the Zombies

A film by Don Coscarelli

Macbeth versus the Undead

Trailer Three:

Camera pans across flowers, with voiceover: "A new version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew."

Quick scenes, each a few seconds long, depicting scenes from the play.

--"Bianca can't wed until Katherine does."
--Petruchio boasting that he can tame her.
--Petruchio blowing a trumpet over Kate's bed.
--Petruchio, ripping an incredibly expensive dress off of Kate's body.

Cut to: Petruchio, at the end of the play, declaring that he has completely tamed Kate.

Petruchio: "We'll each send a messenger for our wives, and whichever bride arrives first will win the wager."

Camera follows Kate as she walks up behind Petruchio. The other wedding guests see her and run in horror. Petruchio starts talking before he turns around.

Petruchio: "How many times do I have to--"

Petruchio screams in terror as the zombie Kate attacks him.

Black screen with text: Hayden Panattiere as Bianca

Cut to: Bianca, looking at the camera with her head tilted to one side and a bright and cheerful smile on her face. With it is a smear of blood, and blood is trickling out of her mouth.

Black screen with text: Jennifer Aniston as Kate

Cut to: Kate, zombie, with an evil grin on her face, shaking a severed hand at the camera.

Black screen with text: and Bruce Campbell as Petruchio

Cut to: Petruchio screaming in terror as Kate bites his hand off.

Black screen with text: A film by Ron Howard

The Taming of the Zombie

Shakespeare...And Zombies

Coming next summer

-=ad=-

Wizard and Wing - Hatchling

2009-06-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

Note: This story is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge, which can be found here. The challenge: Get the fifth chapter out of the way--after your world has been defined, your major characters introduced, the basics of the general plot laid out--you know, all that stuff that gets rewritten and thrown out sixteen times before you actually get on with the actual story. So, we join our plotline, already in progress...

Trage settled into his new home.

He had no idea if he was doing the same thing that other wizard's apprentices did. His duties mostly involved cleaning up after the wizard and his friends. He cleaned up after the animals, swept out the house, and cleaned and dusted the entire place, every day. Most days, the wizard sat in his room, poring over books and carrying on odd and mysterious experiments. There were strange-shaped boxes and other things stacked in one corner, and every time he dusted them, he noticed Midge was right there watching.

The wizard had caught him trying to steal something, so obviously this was a trial period to see if he really could be trusted or not. He set out to prove himself by doing the best he could, without a complaint.

His days settled into a kind of routine.

In the morning, breakfast. Eggs for the humans, fruit and vegetables for the lizard, and whatever animal the bird brought back for herself. Sometimes she only ate a little bit of a large rabbit, and Trage would take the rest to put in stew for the evening. Dishes, dusting, then lunch, which seemed to be more of an "eat if you're hungry" break than an actual meal. After lunch, sweeping, and any specific projects the wizard set him to do. After dinner, the wizard went back to study his books by candle light, and Trage was left to himself.

One evening, the wizard walked out of his study, and heard Trage halfway through a lesson. "Mack..."

"Silent 'E'," Midge said.

"Oh," Trage answered. "Make?" That got him a nod of approval from Beck.

"You're teaching him to read?" Steve asked.

"Why not?" Beck answered. "You're sure not teaching him very much." He stammered, stumbled his way through an apology, and went back to his study.

No, Trage did not understand the wizard and his friends.

The argument came out of nowhere.

Trage had been there for nearly four tendays. He seemed to be reading the wizard's language quite well, though many of the words they gave him to read didn't seem to translate. He was seated in the big comfortable chair with Midge nearby when Steve walked past Beck's room--and froze. He didn't say a word, he just stood there, and his mouth slowly opened. Beck looked up at him.

"Something you want to say?" she said.

"That's...that's an EGG," he said.

"Well, duh," she answered.

"...I thought you were MY girlfriend...?" he said quietly.

She made a rude noise. "Do you have feathers?" She stood up, so he could get a good look at the egg; it was mostly white, mottled with some darker brown spots, about twice the size of the hen's eggs they had for breakfast every morning.

His mouth moved a few times, but no sound came out.

"Or have you figured out how to change me back? Or how to get us back HOME?" she said sharply.

"Becka, I..."

"Don't 'Becka' ME!" she said. "I want my life back. I want my make-up and jewelry and shopping malls!" Her wings were out, and the feathers on her neck were sticking out. "I want a spa treatment, manicure, pedicure, mud mask, and a massage. And most of all, I want an apartment that doesn't smell like the cows up the street!"

Trage looked over at Midge. "Malls, Midge?"

He blinked a few times, and then said "Church. Women go there to worship gold, silver, and furs."

"Ah," Trage said, still confused.

"And it's 'Mitch,' not 'Midge,'" he added. "Short for 'Mitchell.'"

"Midge-elle?" Trage said, fighting the unusual syllables.

"Never mind."

Becka was just getting warmed up. "So, if you can't figure out a way to undo what you screwed up, I figure I'm on my own here. There's this hunk of a condor two mountains over. Totally useless for conversation, of course, but that's not really what I was looking for."

"Hey!" They both paused, and turned to look at Mitch. "Does that condor know any female Komodo Dragons, maybe an iguana...?"

He shrank away from the dual glare of sheer fury, and stepped away mumbling. "...aren't any other lizards on this freaking planet..."

"I'm TRYING to figure it out!" Steve shouted. "I can't get anyone to teach me, and I don't know how to make it work. Nothing I try actually does anything!"

She completely ignored him. "Did you even notice when I started building my nest?"

He blinked in confusion. "You're a bird. Birds build nests. What was I supposed to think?"

"Hello! Birds only build nests for one reason!"

He closed his eyes, and made a very visible effort to calm down. She straightened her ruffled feathers, and settled down on the egg.

"Beck," he said finally, "you're not a bird. You're a human who's been changed into one. I have no idea what that means for your DNA. What's inside that egg could..."

"Could what?" she said.

"Could be something you don't expect. We have no idea how magical cross-breeding is going to work out."

"So, if there's something wrong with it, you'd want to get rid of it? What if it had Down's Syndrome, like your cousin?"

"No, not like that," he said. "I mean, it could be human with a bird head, or..."

"Or, whatever. Doesn't matter. Something wrong with it, we deal with it. Or I deal with it, since it's my egg." She turned her back and started preening herself; it was obvious to everyone that the conversation was over.

The wizard stood there, silent, for a long moment, and then strode back to his library. He closed the door behind him.

-=ad=-

Follow Your Dreams!

2009-06-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

...even if no one else can see what you see...

Merchandise is available!

-=ad=-

The Nightmare Begins

2009-06-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an entry into the Friday Challenge, which can be found here.

"Doctor!" the nurse shouted. "His eyes are open!"

A flurry of activity, lights in his eyes, hammer to his knees. Blood pressure cuff tightened and removed. Where was he? Why was he here? Thinking was fuzzy.

"You've been in a coma," the doctor said at last. "But you're going to be all right now. Your nightmare is over."

He was wrong.

Cassidy stood by the corner of the building, peering around. He thought he had lost his pursuers, but he wasn't quite sure. He had ducked into a doorway, turned his reversible jacket inside-out, and put on a baseball cap to cover his eyes, and now he was trying to see if any of them had caught on.

There.

Two guys in business suits and shades, standing in front of the laundromat. They were talking quietly, turning their heads from side to side. Looking for him.

Cassidy took a step back, and a deep breath. Then he stepped boldly into the street, walking like he owned the place, walking right past them.

It worked. He turned the corner and ran four blocks, turned two random corners and walked five more, and finally started breathing easily again.

Okay, he thought. You've lost them. Again. But they always seem to home in on you. How do you get away and stay away?

Cassidy didn't have an answer to that question, but he wished he could meet someone who did.

He paid cash for a motel room, and flopped on the bed without getting undressed. He had called his mom to let her know he was all right, and seen the first shades within an hour. That had to be it. Government agents, perhaps, didn't they run around in suits and shades, or was that just in the movies...?

They had first appeared after he posted his...vision? Prophecy? Whacked out dream?

Whatever you wanted to call it, he had posted it on his blog, and the next day, he was running and hiding. He was running out of time, though. Cash was getting harder and harder to come by, and using a credit card would be a sure way to call them to him. He couldn't risk contacting friends, and didn't have anyone to turn to.

Slowly, with many twitches and panic moments, he drifted off to sleep.

Cities burn.

Cassidy stood on a tall hill overlooking San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge was gone, fallen into the bay; what little was left was burned and melted. Lights flickered in the sky, and a moment later, a tremendous lightning bolt crashed from the sky, hitting a skyscraper thirty floors up. Above the damage, the rest of the building toppled.

"Remember." The voice was deep, and echoed through his skull.

Cassidy knew this wasn't the only city under attack. This wasn't a dream, it was a memory.

One of the soldiers marched up the hill towards him. He couldn't move, couldn't run; he was only a spectator in this vision. The creature stopped in front of him. Humanoid, at least six feet tall, it carried a bloody sword in one hand--a hand that had far too many fingers. It had no eyes or sockets.

"Fear."

The soldier strode away in search of victims. Behind it, a man approached, much shorter. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet with a silver face screen, and in his hand was a lightning bolt, nearly as tall as he was.

"Trust," came the voice.

The motorcycle helmet came closer and closer. When he was standing right in front of Cassidy, he could see his own face reflected back at him. The man reached up with both hands to remove the helmet, and the vision went away, before he could see the face behind the helmet.

"Hold your freedom!" echoed in his ears.

Cassidy came awake instantly. He was up and packed and ready to leave in moments.

His blog post had attracted the attention of someone, that was certain. Except for a couple of downloaded songs, he had never done anything illegal in his life--certainly nothing worth the chase these suits were giving him. Maybe changing cities would put some more distance between them, give him some breathing room. He wandered the city for hours, doubling back on his trail, watching for shades, and finally felt safe enough to walk into the bus station.

It was a mistake.

The suit was hiding in the crowd near the ticket counter, and Cassidy didn't see him until he was within arm's reach. He froze, eye to glasses, panic rising; he thought he could feel the sheer hatred emanating from the man. Then he turned and ran, shoving people out of his way, heading for the exit. There was another suit there, blocking his way out, so he doubled back and went out one of the doors to the loading bay, then down to the end, where the bus drivers would stand and smoke their cigarettes. He stopped there, waiting for his heart to stop pounding, knowing he couldn't have lost them that easily.

A hand covered his mouth and dragged him backwards. He fought, bit the hand, struggled--and froze when a suit came around the corner. The shades blocked his eyes, but he knew the man was looking right at him. The agent reached into his pocket--

...and collapsed to the ground.

Cassidy stared at the woman who had been standing behind him. She gave him a wink, knelt down, and put her taser to the chest of the man on the ground. He jerked and spasmed and made noises that couldn't have come from a human throat. The hand over his mouth loosened, and then released him. "Go, take a look," he heard whispered in his ear.

He walked up to the suit, lying motionless on the ground. The glasses were out of place, and what was behind them looked...odd. He reached down with a trembling hand and flicked them away from the face. The eyes behind them weren't even human; they were red, and faceted like a gemstone, or a bug's eye.

"They can almost look like us," the woman said, "except for the eyes." She held up one of his hands, pointing to the scar along the bottom. "Extra thumb removed." She stood up, brushing dirt off her knees, and zipped up her leather jacket. "They have a weakness for electricity, though. Zap 'em enough, and they melt into goo."

The man who had pulled him aside was nursing a bleeding hand, but he didn't seem upset with Cassidy. "Come on," he said, "let's get him to safety."

The bus headed into the night, far from city lights.

"I went out with some friends," he heard himself say. He hadn't told this story to anyone. Well, not the full story, anyway. Marnie, the woman with the leather jacket, was listening intently.

"Ken was driving, Jay was riding shotgun. I was in the back. Ken lost control on an icy bridge. Well, that's what they tell me, anyway, I remember getting in. The car went into the drink, Ken and Jay washed away; they fished me out of the ice about two hours later. I closed my eyes, lost two friends, three months of my life, and woke up...into a nightmare."

"You had a near-death experience," she said. She didn't make it a question.

"Yeah," Cassidy sighed. "Cities destroyed, people under attack." He still shuddered at the memory. "Prophecy? Warning? I didn't know what to make of it, so I wrote it up and put it out on my blog for anyone to comment on. And that's when the agents showed up."

"They're advance scouts. They know that psychics will warn people that their main attack force is coming, so their job is to scan the 'net and find people trying to give warning."

"Not that it matters," Victor said. He turned around, putting his bandaged hand over the seat. "The human race is pretty much made up of sheep who don't care who's in charge as long as the beer keeps flowing. Giving the warning would get you labelled a crackpot at best--and if the warning was true, you'd get blamed for the disaster when it was all over."

"Get some sleep," he said. "We'll be home in the morning.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let me be the first to welcome you to..."

Cassidy struggled awake, yawning over the rest of the sentence. They were somewhere in the middle of nowhere, flat land all around. Victor was still talking.

"...on an abandoned missile silo, giving us one hell of a basement. The buildings are concrete domes, six or seven inches thick--which keeps down the utility bills, letting us live off the grid, and hopefully playing hell with any thermal scans." Cassidy could see the dome now, painted to look like the surrounding scrubland. "Over there, we've got a nice big bank of solar cells, also camouflaged. We've got food, weapons, whatever we need to last quite a while, and we're far enough away from any cities that we probably won't even notice the war."

"I'm sorry," Cassidy said, "I was just waking up. What did you say the name of this place is?"

Victor smiled at him. "Welcome to Freehold," he said.

Wizard's Reunion

2009-05-14T16:26:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an entry into The Friday Challenge.

The man was short, wearing gray robes with a wizard's cap. He was chewing on a cigar. He muscled the cart into the ballroom, swearing under his breath. Once it was through the door, he pulled a wand from his pocket. One quick flourish, and the tables and chairs scattered themselves across the room. A banner floated up the wall and hung itself from hooks--"Welcome! Reunion! Class of 204!" it proclaimed.

His work done, he snapped his fingers; a flame appeared at his fingertips, and he lit the cigar from it. He let out a deep sigh, knowing the kind of mess he'd have to clean up when this was all over...

Albus frowned at him over the top of his brandy snifter. "You changed your name?"

"That's right," Emrys said. "Too many legends and conflicting reports. Everyone wanted to know where the damn sword ended up at. I didn't have the heart to tell them the kid traded it for a night with that Irish redhead."

"Ah," the old wizard nodded. "Believe me, I know how kids can get carried away. Some of the stories I could tell you..." He glanced around the ballroom. "Do you know if any of the other wizards will make it? G, maybe, or Dubya?"

"Gandalf? I don't think he'll be able to make it. The last message I got from him was really garbled, but it sounded like he was running a business on a white cruise ship selling magical jewelry to the Elves. Way too busy being successful for this. And I haven't heard from Dubya since...um...late eighties, I think." Emrys glanced across the room. "Is that who I think it is...?"

The evening had barely started, but the man slumped in the chair looked like he had already had more than enough to drink. Emrys strode over, pulled up a chair, and sat quietly. "Everything okay with you, Vermithrax?"

He looked human, but the oversized, slitted eyes gave him away when he looked up. "Peachy," the dragon said, taking another drink.

"And how's Mel...?" Emrys asked, though he was pretty sure he knew what the answer was going to be.

"Maleficent dumped me," he said. "Workaholic. She just wanted to run things, no matter who she had to step on to get there."

"Damn, man, that's too bad," Emrys said. "I always thought you two were the perfect couple--dragon who could turn into a man, woman who could turn into a dragon, just totally beats all that inter-species thing, you know...?"

Vermithrax sighed. "Yeah, I know. I thought so, too."

Emrys tried to change the subject. "I always wondered why dragons and wizards didn't get along better back in the day."

The dragon raised one oversized eyebrow. "How so?"

"The enemy of my enemy," Emrys said. He gestured towards the far side of the ballroom, where Beowulf was telling a story about killing a dragon with one arm tied behind his back. They heard women giggle as he hit on a particularly gruesome point. "The whole geek vs jock--I mean, hero vs wizard thing. You'd think dragons and wizards would get along better."

"If we had it to do over again," Vermithrax said, "maybe things might go a little differently...?" He took another long drink, and Emrys wondered if he'd still be conscious by the time they closed the hall. He shook the proffered hand, and strode back over to sit by Albus again.

"The more things change," Emrys said, watching Hercules and Thor put on a juggling show involving flaming swords, barbells, three battle axes, two bowling balls, and a running chainsaw. They were attracting a crowd, mostly giggly young (appearing) women, who made a big deal out of dodging the various flying implements.

"...the more things stay the same," Albus finished, with a flourish of his cup. He pointed to the juggling act, and the blonde ponytail bouncing in time. "Do you remember when Thor was a redhead?"

Emrys chuckled. "Yeah, that was a blast, watching him rage around campus with curly blonde locks! He obviously never got it to go back to red, but he did get rid of the curls. Who pulled that prank? Avatar? Loki?"

"Nah, that was Dubya! He accidentally let it slip to me one day about a year after, and then told me how he did it Two part curse--one ingredient in his private mead stash, another in his shampoo." Albus couldn't help but laugh at the memory. "Dubya found it hilarious that Aphrodite refused to go on a date with a guy with better hair than she had."

Theseus walked by, Arwen on one arm, Liv on the other, babbling something about fighting an army of minotaurs. "Do you envy them?"

"Nope. Got over anything like that a long time ago. Happily married for years; I'll take Milady over any of these superficial, plasticine, zombie-proof--"

"Hi, Guys! Sorry I'm late, did I miss anything?"

"Dubya!" Albus exclaimed. "Glad you could make it!"

Steve Wozniak pulled out a chair, reached for a drink, and smiled across the table at old friends.

-=ad=-

Emissary

2009-04-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is an entry into this week's Friday Challenge, which can be found here. The challenge: What happens after "The Day the Earth Stood Still?" (The remake version, that is.)

Riley was waiting for her at the airlock, with a bucket of paint in his hand for some strange reason. Of course, Riley would be the one to see her off. He gave her a wink and a smile, and she nodded back.

"Knock 'em dead," he added. "After all, what can go wrong?" With that, all of the tension leaked out of her body, and she found herself laughing in spite of herself.

He stepped aside, and Carrie saw what he had painted on the airlock door. "Fitting and appropriate," she said, as the door opened.

The laughter was gone before she cycled through the airlock, and she stepped out into the alien space station. Two aliens waited to escort her to the conference room. On her left was a heavy worlder, built like a Sumo but with tufts of green fuzz in odd places. The other alien looked like an oversized predatory bird, and the glare from those large eyes made her feel like it was sizing her up as prey. But they didn't threaten her directly, or even speak; they just turned and flanked her as they crossed the station.

The door to the conference chamber was guarded by a Gort. Towering, motionless, its very presence made her skin crawl. She pretended not to notice it as they passed within touching distance. Then she was through the door and looking out over the conclave. This was a "conference room?"

The room was huge. Semi-spherical, with a dome ceiling and level floor, the seats sloped up in the distance. There were several hundred representatives of the hundred or so worlds that made up the alliance. She couldn't recognize more than a handful of alien species, but she thought that nearly every planet had sent several representatives to hear the message she brought from Earth.

Either podiums were the same in any species, or they had studied enough Earth customs to understand the concept, because one awaited her. She stepped up to it, and the buzz of conversation grew louder. She stood silently, not demanding silence, but refusing to speak without it. After a few moments, the noise died away.

"I bring you greetings, from Earth," she began. She clasped her hands on the podium in front of her, but decided it was a sign of nervousness, and forced herself to leave them hanging at her sides. "My name is Carrie." She did the triple-blink that activated the chronometer in her contact lens; the numbers appeared in her vision, low and to the left, "5:00."

"Thirty years ago, an emissary from this council visited Earth. He brought death and destruction to our world. In my homeland, the cities of Philadelphia and New York were devastated, but the worst destruction came from an electromagnetic pulse that shut down most of the planet's power grid. Within days, the largest cities on the planet were smoldering wastelands. The death toll numbered in the millions...perhaps even billions.

"But humans are a resourceful people. Within a few short months, we had restored a small percentage of our power generation, and could actually start to rebuild. And some deep, shielded bases weren't destroyed by the pulse; they became beacons of civilization, the centers of new towns and even cities.

"We are grateful for the two gifts your emissary left us." There is a murmur through the crowd.

"First, the nanobots that destroyed New York and Philadelphia were collected and analyzed. With the devastation, it took years before we could even begin to pry their secrets free, and several years beyond that before we finally managed to bring one back to life." Carrie saw several of the crowd exchange nervous glances, so she moved quickly to allay their nervousness. "We were able to train the bugs to restore our environment."

She smiled. "You'll have to forgive me," she said. "Thanks to an inside joke a dozen years ago, our nano-robot programmers have taken to calling themselves 'Bug Wranglers.' And they don't 'program robots'--they 'train and teach bugs' to do things." The crowd seemed to relax a bit at the shared joke. Carrie hoped the humor made it through the translator, at least.

Less than four minutes remained on the timer.

"We were able to teach the bugs things that would repair our world," she said. "Robots could be trained to tunnel underground like worms, eating away at anything that would pollute the plants above. Others were trained to crawl through a human bloodstream, eating cancers, tumors, radioactive particles, anything that would harm that person.

"But the real benefit of training bugs came when we created a new generation--one that could not only eat, but deposit materials, too. One breed was designed to skim floating oil off the surface of water, and deposit it in a waiting tank. Another was taught to ingest carbon, but lay down carbon nanotubes. These bugs improved our world tremendously; bug wranglers were able to produce spider-silk threads that could support tons of weight, room-temperature semiconductor cables, and clothing that could withstand bullet impacts yet were as light as paper." She didn't mention that those same bugs had lined her bones with carbon nanotubes surrounding molecular titanium, making them practically unbreakable.

"With the advances the bug wranglers created in materials, we were able to restart our space program, making quantum leaps in technology every year. Our spacecraft are easily ten times the size of our old Space Shuttle, yet weigh a tenth as much and are hundreds of times more sturdy. One even survived a crash on our moon with no loss of life. The bugs gave us the ability to apply advances we already knew, but in the molecular world."

Two minutes left on the timer. Carrie gripped the podium with both hands. "The second gift was the 'space suit' the emissary arrived in. Most of it was placed in a supercooled deep-freeze before the disaster, and as our technology returned, we were able to thaw out portions of it and clone it. The healing properties of this material saved countless lives, and the things we learned from it have extended the average human lifespan by more than fifty years." Including mine, she added silently, but she didn't let the words escape her lips.

"And so, I am here today to thank this federation for the gifts delivered by your emissary, and to deliver a message from my people." There was still a minute left on the timer, so she would have to ad-lib a bit.

"Our people split into two factions. One wanted nothing more than to build an army, and lash out at the aliens who attacked us, while the other wished to take a more pacifist approach--heal our planet, improve our lives, make our world better--which is what we did." She took a step back from the podium. "When an entire species focus their will on the same goal, anything is possible. And the human race has been focused on one goal--this meeting--for a very long time.

"You might think I'm here to ask for membership in your federation, but my people do not wish to join." A surprised gasp is the same in any language, Carrie thought.

"You might think I'm here to ask for forgiveness for our very existence--but you couldn't be more wrong." The aliens began shifting in their seats; this was not the humble and humiliated speaker they had been led to expect.

"We weren't bothering you," she said, with a hard edge to her voice. "Your emissary attacked us without provocation. This federation launched an attack on our planet that left millions dead, and left millions more to starve and freeze...and bleed...and die. I watched my father vaporized, eaten by the bugs." There was a murmuring of discomfort and nervousness in the crowd, and several of the aliens were standing now. 10...9...8...read the timer.

"I am here to deliver a very clear message from my people," she said, as the timer reached 3. "And that message is this: DON'T F**K WITH THE HUMANS!"

The conference room erupted in total pandemonium.

"Look," Riley was saying. "They would scan for active nanobugs, so you're not going to take any active ones in with you."

"But if they're not active, then how are they going to do anything?"

"Easy. You're going to activate them. The ring on your left hand holds a dozen offensive bugs. They won't activate until you feed them, and their food source is in the ring on your right hand. Got it?"

"So, I just clap my hands or something and they wake up?"

"Exactly. And everything I just said? Flip it around for the defensive bugs in the ring on your right hand. Same rules." Carrie stared at the two rings.

"Then what?"

"Then you wait, five full minutes. All of the bugs are programmed with an inheritable stealth timer. Mommy bug will drop to the ground and start multiplying. The time left on her timer will be passed on to the munchkin bugs, so they'll all end at the same time. They will not fly, and they will avoid organic material until the alarm clock wakes them up.

"That's when the fun begins."

A cloud of millions of angry nanobugs swarmed up from the ground. The front row of the audience disappeared almost instantly, while the aliens in the rows behind that screamed in fifty languages and scattered in all directions. Carrie calmly began working her way back to the door.

One of her escort guards--the hunting bird--moved to block her path. It held some vicious looking combat blades and glared at her like an owl contemplating a mouse. She gritted her teeth, and stepped forward.

"Offensive bugs go after targets. They're programmed to recognize human DNA, so you shouldn't have to worry about them. They will prefer a moving target to an immobile one, and an organic target to an inorganic one. After 12 hours with no organic targets, they'll go into sleep mode."

"How the hell do you tell the difference between an offensive and a defensive bug? They're just microscopic robots."

"Well, the defensive bugs take their job seriously," he said. "Once they identify human DNA, they'll take up a holding pattern in orbit, ten to fifteen feet away. They'll hold this orbit until destroyed, or until the human DNA source is the same temperature as the surrounding environment--at which point they'll revert to offensive bugs."

"That's an encouraging thought," she said.

Her orbiting bodyguards encountered a target--and dissolved it into its component molecules. A few stray feathers floated to the floor. Four other aliens made the same mistake of coming between her and the doorway, and then she was through.

...and the Gort blocked her path. Her heart in her throat, she found herself looking right into that gleaming red eye.

"Now, the Gorts will be the real challenge," Riley said. "Assuming they don't just try to disintegrate you with a laser, anyway. We think..."

"You're not sure?"

"Well, based on what we've been able to piece together, the Gort in New York always preferred to take control of attacking craft remotely as a first option, and actually attacking something personally as a final option. Think of it as alien judo--better to turn the attacker's strength back against it. We think," he repeated, over-emphasizing the word, "that any Gort would try to take control of your bugs.

"We told the bugs to check their parity bits every tenth cycle, and reload their operating instructions if it didn't match."

"That didn't make any sense. English, Riley, English!"

"Okay, okay, the bugs will recognize when their programming has been changed, and try to change it back. If they find that they're changing it back more than once, then they start calling for help."

"Huh?"

"They will send out an alert to all of the other bugs in the area that something is changing bug programming. The chance of a bug answering that call is based on distance. The actual equation is distance over a hundred as a percentage chance, modified by the number of times the alert--" The look in her eyes could have melted nanosteel.

"Look, if a Gort tries to take over your swarm, nearby bugs will join it. The harder the Gort tries, the more bugs will arrive."

Carrie dove for cover as the Gort launched a laser bolt at the spot she had been standing. So much for taking control first, she thought. As the giant stepped forward, it encountered the edges of her swarm in the conference room, and focused its attention on them. The beam from its eye scattered into dozens of tiny pinpoint beams.

...then hundreds of pinpoint beams.

More and more bugs swarmed out of the room to join in the attack on the Gort. It raised one massive hand, the huge head swivelling back and forth, and took a step backwards--and broke apart into its own swarm. The air was alive with nanobugs fighting for air superiority.

Carrie made a dash for the airlock.

"And thank you for playing! We have a lovely parting gift to take home with you! One bug in a thousand will go into assassin mode," Riley said. "It will find organic material, hook on, and go to sleep for thirty to three hundred days. Then it will go into stealth mode, crawling around and multiplying, for anywhere from ten minutes to ten days, and then it will go on the attack. That way, any survivors from the station will still carry your 'message' even if they didn't get a chance to hear it in person."

Carrie dove through the airlock, pounded on the button to get the door to close, and signalled the bridge to disconnect and get moving. Riley was still there, waiting for her with a gun in his hand. He holstered it, pulled out a remote control, and deactivated any nanobugs that had made it onto the ship. They felt the thump of docking connections clearing and the press of acceleration as the ship rocketed away from the station.

"You realize you just declared war on the entire galaxy," he said, with half a smile.

"No," she answered. "They declared war on us thirty years ago. But they made the mistake of not finishing us off like they should have."

The two of them headed for the bridge, stepping away from the letters he had scribbled on the airlock. The words "Enola Gay" shone bright and clear behind them.

Icehawk's Destiny

2009-04-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This post is an entry into The Friday Challenge, which can be found here!

For this challenge, Bruce gave the start of the story, which is included for the sake of completeness.

Icehawk the Barbarian would never admit to feeling fear, but his mood as he traced the ancient, rock-strewn path through the barren wilderness was...unsettled. Once again, his wanderings had brought him back to this place: to the domain of the Seer, the Prophetess, the Mad Spinner of Fate. And once again he would rather be walking this path as a warrior, with a sword in one hand and an ax in the other, than like a peddler, with a large black box under one arm and a small white sack thrown over the other shoulder.

Dusk had fallen by the time he crested the last ridge. The rock-strewn valley below was already in deep shadow, but a weird, flickering light emanated from within the ruins of the Temple of Otogu. The unearthly light was as nothing, though, compared to the stench that assailed his nostrils as his footsteps drew him closer. It was a complex, many-layered, ever-shifting reek composed of a great many foul and unspeakable things: of rot, and corruption; of scorched flesh, and burnt offerings; of bitter potions, and vile philters; and of many, many, cats, badly housebroken.

Icehawk paused a moment, at the foot of the great ruined stone staircase—

But it was already too late. She stood there, at the top of the stairs, in tattered rags and long, greasy, tangled gray hair, smiling at him with blackened stubs of teeth. "Welcome, Icehawk, great warrior of the north!"

"You—you knew I was coming?"

"Of course. I'm a Seer. And you have brought my price?"

"I thought you were a Seer."

"It's more fun this way. Have you brought my price?"

Icehawk juggled the black box and the white sack awkwardly, then held forth the black box. "Oh Great Priestess of Otogu!" he cried. "Behold, I bring you a flawless black kitten, without a single white hair, sealed for seven days within a black box without a single hole!"

The Seer nodded, smiling. "I see. And is the kitten alive or dead?"

Icehawk considered the box nervously. "I, er—"

"Is the kitten alive or dead?"

Icehawk grimmaced. "Well, it stopped yowling about four days ago, but without air holes—"

The Seer grinned that ghastly, gummy, black-stubbed grin again. "The point is, you don't know for certain, do you?"

"Well, not as such..."

"Perfect!" She pointed to the sack. "And in the sack?"

Icehawk juggled the black box and white sack again, and then held forth the white sack. "Oh Great Priestess of Otogu!" he cried again. "Behold, I bring you a flawless white dove, without a single dark feather, whose feet have never touched the ground!"

"Perfect!" She darted down the stairs, snatched the sack from Icehawk's hand, and started back up. "Come along!" Halfway up the stairs she paused, to turn and look back at Icehawk, who still stood at the foot of the stairs with the black box in his hands and a puzzled expression on his face. "Oh, just dump it over there with the other ones." She pointed to the stack of reeking black boxes that Icehawk hadn't noticed before off to the side of the stairs. He tossed the box on the heap and followed her.

The interior of the ruined temple was thick with smoke and stink, lit by many guttering candles and a small fireplace, and crawling with cats. The Seer set the white sack on the altar, thrust her hand inside, and pulled out the white dove. "Ooh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as she examined the struggling, blinking bird. "Not a flaw, not a mark on it!" She held the bird high before the fire, as if reenacting some ancient and forgotten ritual.

"Look, my pretties! Mommy's got dinner!" And in one swift motion she twisted the dove's head off, slapped the carcass down on the altar, and disemboweled it with a small stone knife. With no further regard for the bird she cast the small feathered corpse aside, where it was immediately seized upon and fought over by a gathering crowd of cats.

Icehawk was dumbfounded. "I went through all that just to feed your cats? What about my destiny?"

"Oh, that's clear enough," said the Seer, as she prodded the entrails on the altar with a grimy finger. "You must slay the princess, rescue the dragon, and—"

Icehawk found an expression beyond dumbfounded. "Excuse me?"

The Seer looked up. "What?"

"Don't you mean, 'slay the dragon, rescue the princess?'"

"If I'd meant that, I'd have said it. No, it's all right here." She turned back to the entrails. "Slay the princess, rescue the dragon, and—"

"Are you sure you're reading that right?"

"Read it yourself. Plain as day." The seer tapped the pancreas. "Slay the princess." She batted a cat away from the liver. "Rescue the dragon." She stirred the intestines with her finger. "And—"

...and ten minutes later, Icehawk was climbing atop Abantu, his trusty steed, and aiming him for the mountains, his mind awhirl with confusion and puzzlement.

After a few weeks of travelling, Icehawk came down from the mountains and into the kingdom of Frobozz. No one met him on the dusty road to the castle; all of the people hid in their homes. He saw no one, but heard shutters slam and doors shut in every hamlet he passed.

Finally, a guard at the castle gate had the nerve to look him in the eye. "The entire town is under an evil spell," he said. "Goblins have taken the Gemstone Tower, and until we take it back, no one will be happy." Directions were forthcoming, and Icehawk was more than happy to vent weeks of travel and confusion by beating the snot out of a band of goblins.

He was only sorry the battle was so short. Surely the king could have solved this with a score of guards...?

He could hear the sounds of celebration from the castle long before it came into sight. The people were happy again...but they still wouldn't look him in the eye. They all appeared to be wandering around, looking into their hands, and mumbling to themselves. One almost walked right in front of Abantu; if the horse had been any less intelligent, the clumsy oaf would have been ground into the mud like an insect. Icehawk went back to the guard at the gate.

With a distracted, almost glazed look in his eyes, the guard distractedly waved Icehawk through the gate. Abantu followed the scent of hay to the stables, and Icehawk left a stableboy quaking in fear for his life if he found even a flea on the horse's tail. Then he made his way to the throne room, amazed at the number of people who were distracted and confused. He had to ask for directions from three different people, who all waved in a general direction rather than accompany him.

Finally, he found the throne room. King Meldarrin the 17th dozed on his throne. His daughter sprawled across the throne next to the King's, staring into her palm, like all the rest in her kingdom. A servant looked up long enough to realize who was there--and suddenly Icehawk found himself surrounded with dozens of fawning courtiers, congratulating him on his battle skills and thanking him for restoring their tower.

The king--who was looking into the distance and drooling--waved a hand, and his chief advisor told Icehawk that he was now a Protector of the Realm, and could have any treasure he wanted--up to and including the hand of the Princess, who finally looked up enough to notice. She sidled up to the brawny barbarian, her eyes tracing the outlines of the shoulder muscles, and winked. And without a word between them, the servants hustled him off to a chamber, where he was bathed and robed and placed totally out of his element.

"It was just a puny band of goblins," Icehawk said.

"No matter, the advisor said. "Your intention was to free us and that's what counts." He looked into his palm and listened to nothing for a few moments. "Come, your feast is ready."

"What did you just do?" Icehawk asked.

"I informed the kitchen that you were ready to eat," he answered.

"How?"

"By Snittering, of course. Don't your people Snitter?"

Icehawk had never heard of such a thing. The advisor, with a look of pained pity on his face, held out a pair of small jewels. He helped Icehawk put one in his ear, and told him to stare into the other. After a few moments of silence, he heard...whispers...and as he focused on them, they became louder and clearer.

"I'm taking the horse to water," he heard. "Getting firewood," was another voice. And the more he listened, the more of these meaningless tedious sentences he heard. It was...it was like listening in on the technical conversations of a pair of bean-counters, and he handed the gems back to the advisor.

"The king is old and in failing health," he said. "Marrying the princess now would grant you the crown, probably in a matter of days, and there's no one else in the kingdom anywhere near as qualified."

Icehawk enjoyed a huge feast, but quite possibly the strangest meal he had eaten. It was mostly silent, with everyone staring into their palms and giggling at voices he couldn't hear.

"I'm COLD!" the princess snapped, and at once, a servant pulled a chain hanging in the corner of the room. Moments later, a blast of warmth came through the room.

The princess announced she was going to bed, and she curtsied before Icehawk with another wink. The rest of the attendees took that as a cue to leave, and Icehawk found himself led to an ornate bedroom to sleep off the feast. He noticed there was another of the heating chains in the corner of the room, but he didn't pull it. It was already uncomfortably warm in the castle.

The next morning, he was roused by servants throwing open the curtains, who announced that the princess had invited him to ride with her. And so, after a hearty--but again, quiet--breakfast, Icehawk found himself astride Abantu and moving about the town.

Icehawk would have preferred the silent Snittering breakfast.

The princess had declared to all of her giggly friends that he was her "BFF", whatever in the 17 hells that was, and talked about those friends. And boy friends. And shopping. And anything else. She talked constantly, and as soon as they returned to the castle, Icehawk excused himself from her company by stating that Abantu needed a special food after a ride like that.

That's how he found himself wandering the depths of the castle--just trying to find some peace and quiet. And the door he found--big enough for a phalanx of ten soldiers to march through--was so out of place, deep beneath the castle. He pushed the door open with a quiet creak.

There was a dragon dozing on the other side. A young dragon, to be sure, only twenty or thirty feet long. It wore a collar, attached to a chain, attached to the wall. There was another chain, too, leading from the wall.

And it was looking at him through one sleepy eye.

"Get it over with," the dragon mumbled.

"Huh?"

"You're a mighty hero, and they kill dragons, right? Get it over with." He put his head back down.

Suddenly he let out a roar of pain and surprise, and belched a blast of flame against a huge pot of water. The water bubbled, steam rose. Icehawk could see where the other chain led, and it looked very painful.

He let himself out.

At dinner that night, the princess was again regaling him with stories of her life within the castle--which seemed to consist entirely of shopping, gossip, admiring men, and giggling. Icehawk was pretty sure he understood why the King was a drooling idiot.

The King's Accountant came through, scowling, trying to get the attention of the King and his advisors. Icehawk noticed him, because he was the first person he had seen that day without the Snittering gems. The Princess saw him looking.

"Don't mind him," she said. "He's not worthy of attention." At Icehawk's questioning glance, she continued "He thinks the kingdom would be richer and more productive if we shattered the Gemstone Tower and sold it, and completely gave up on Snittering. The man's a fool!"

And, in that moment, Icehawk finally understood what he was there to do.

Several weeks of travel later, Icehawk found himself seated across from the seer, high in a room in the Temple of Otogu. She had offered him a cup of something vile and warm, which she called either Starbugs or Chava, he wasn't entirely sure which.

"And so you freed the dragon?"

"Yes, I did," he said. "It was so surprised when I cut the chains it didn't even stay to say thank you."

"And did you slay the princess?"

"Well..." Icehawk hesitated.

"Is she alive or dead?" the Seer pressed.

"I don't know," Icehawk answered. "I threw her down the midden-pit behind the castle. It will take her days to climb back out of the slime.

"And then..."

"And then I gave the crown to the fool," Icehawk said proudly.

"You could have had a kingdom of your very own," the Seer said.

"No, not that one," Icehawk answered.

As he approached Abantu, the horse skittered, and Icehawk turned around. The rescued dragon was settling to the ground behind him. It took a force of will to keep from drawing his sword.

"I never thanked you," the dragon said. "But I visited my parents, and they told me there is a human custom called Gratitude, and I'm here to fulfill that custom." He dropped a chest at Icehawk's feet. "From my father's hoard," he said.

The barbarian opened the chest, finding hundreds of gold coins, and a finely wrought gold and silver crown. With the delicate design, there was only one crown it could be. "That's the legendary crown of the Queen of the Amazons!" he said. The dragon lifted a curious eyebrow. "Legend has it that whoever returns the crown will enjoy amazing--" He looked at the dragon. "Gratitude," he finished.

"Come, Dragon! There are maidens to be rescued and a kingdom to be won!" He climbed aboard Abantu, and rode off into the setting sun, with the dragon--and the cheery cackle of the Seer--overhead.

-=ad=-

Child of the Storm: Redemption

2009-04-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an entry into the Friday Challenge, which can be found here.

Damien sat still while the interviewer set up his recorder at the far end of the table. The device was a lot smaller than he had expected.

"Okay. We're rolling. You ready for this?"

Damien gave the man a grim smile. "No," he said. "The real question is, are YOU ready?" The man frowned back at him, but Damien ignored it. He gestured to the newspaper in the center of the table.

"What, you mean you had something to do with that?" The cover headline scrolled across the electronic paper. A local big-name celebrity businessman had gone nuts, shot and killed one of his partners, and claimed to have shot someone else, though the body had not been found. The other partner had completely disappeared, and the animated video on the page showed grim-faced cops hauling boxes upon boxes of evidence out of the man's home.

He took a long, deep breath. "If you were offered immortality, would you take it?"

The interviewer shook his head emphatically. "Don't lie!" Damien said. The shaking stopped. "Of course you would. Most anyone would. The chance to live history instead of just reading about it?"

"Now...what if that immortality came with a price? A price too big to pay? Still interested? Exactly. Just how big is 'too big.'

"What if gaining immortality required you to torture a child to death? Anyone interested then? Yeah, exactly. Only a handful of sick psychopaths would still be interested at that point."

Damien walked around the room, working himself up, launching into a rant.

"Okay, last question. What if someone ELSE tortured the kid...created the magic potion...and GAVE it to you...WITHOUT your knowledge...?" He was nearly screaming by the end of the question. The interviewer stayed quiet, resting his chin on his hands.

"I was in the hospital, with this fast-moving cancer. Docs said I had days to live, if not hours. My...friend...came in, late at night, in the middle of the biggest storm anyone could remember. I was so lost in pain drugs I missed most of what he said...but he put something in my IV...and the cancer burned itself away. Three days later, they were calling me a miracle of modern medicine, though none of them could figure out what it was they had done. I didn't know what had happened until...later. A lot later.

I accidentally cut off my finger...and it grew back." The stifled laugh dragged Damien out of his reverie.

"You don't believe me." He stood, went to the kitchen, came back. "Fine." He spread his left hand out on the table, brandished a cleaver, and lopped off the first two fingers.

"See?" He held up the index finger, showing the cut end. The finger was the same color as the skin, all the way through. "No bones, no ligaments, nothing. Hell, there's barely any blood, and it's the wrong color. Don't ask me how it works, I don't know." He held the finger against the stump, and after a minute, the finger bulged and fused together. He reattached the second finger. "Not even a scar." The interviewer let go of the door handle and gingerly stepped back to the table.

"...so...you've been around...a while...?"

"Read up on the Arizona 'Storm of the Century,' and you'll have a pretty good idea. Reagan was in office when I was in the hospital." He ignored the sputtering from the far side of the table.

"That's...that's like forty years ago. You look 30. Maybe even 25."

"Yep."

"And you regret it?"

"Every damn day," he sighed. "How do you live that life, knowing how you got there? How do you repay that freaking debt? I lost count of the number of suicide attempts in the first ten years or so."

He settled back into his chair, resigned. "You just try to make amends, as best you can. It's never enough, of course." He tossed an envelope onto the newspaper. "I'd like you to donate this, anonymously, to the Trevor Kline foundation. The Kline family lost a son, years ago, and set up this foundation to help prevent it from happening again. There's over half a million dollars in that envelope, and the child-porn ring that used to own it...won't be needing it any more." He glared at the newspaper. "There's just one loose end to tie up."

The rising sun came in through the window, and intruded upon his fantasy. The interviewer disappeared, along with the recorder. The newspaper and the envelope stayed.

Hours later, he was sitting aboard a stolen yacht, floating so far out at sea that land couldn't be seen. He killed the engine, and let the boat rock quietly on the waves for long moments. Finally, he walked across the deck, and kicked over a footlocker. A bound man rolled out of it, the owner of the boat, and Damien ripped the tape off of his mouth. Half the man's moustache came off with the tape, and he screamed.

Damien then went to the back of the boat, and threw an empty oil drum into the water. It was attached to the boat by a chain, which clanked and clattered a bit as the barrel drifted away from the boat. The man's eyes widened in fear when Damien drew a gun, but he turned, and fired shot after shot at the barrel until it had a decent sized hole in the side. He threw the gun overboard.

He continued to ignore the man's screams and curses, and knelt down beside him, with a hypodermic needle in his hand. While the man glared at him, he shoved the needle into his own arm, and filled it with blood. The blood was the wrong color, more of an angry orange than red. Without a word, he stuck the needle into the man's neck, and emptied it.

Finally, he spoke. "You're a monster, Nate." He reached out, sliced open the ropes holding the man's hands, and stepped back out of reach. "The other two, it was just business. They just wanted the money. But you...you enjoyed kidnapping kids and watching them squirm."

"That burning you feel? I've just given you a gift. The chemicals in my blood make me live for a really long time....a REALLY long time. You won't get the full effect, because your body won't make more...it'll get used up eventually. But I figure you should get at least five years. Maybe even ten."

The barrel went underwater, and the chain started moving off the end of the boat at a much faster speed. Panicked, Nate now realized the chain wasn't attached to the boat...it was attached to his feet.

"I'm the monster that monsters like you should be afraid of," Damien said calmly.

The chain pulled tight, and Nate was dragged, slowly, towards the back of the boat. He caught a handrail, hung on with all his strength. "I've got money!" he screamed. "I can get you anything you want!" Damien didn't say a word.

"What do you WANT??!!" Nate screamed, as his hands gave way. His fingernails scraped the deck as he was dragged off the back of the boat.

"Redemption," Damien said simply, to a quiet and empty ocean.

-=ad=-

Deus Ex Mickina

2009-03-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This is an entry for The Friday Challenge, which can be found Here.

Rick leaned on the balcony overlooking the bay, and took a long pull on his cigar. Behind him, inside the house, the raucous noises of a birthday party were still blasting. His party. But at his age, he felt the need for a little quiet.

The quiet didn't last long.

"Grampa Rick! Grampa! Come on, tell us a story!"

"Yeah! You always tell good stories! Tell us how you made all your money!"

"Story! Story!"

Nine grandkids--plus a handful of their friends--makes for a very intimidating, albeit small, army. So, Rick reluctantly put out the cigar, but he refused to abandon the brandy snifter, and allowed himself to be led back inside, to the fireplace.

"Come ON, Grampa! How did you get to be rich?"

He looked over to the table, where the remaining adults were cleaning away the mess and lost in their own conversations. This was just him, and the munchkins...not that anyone would believe him anyway. It had been over sixty years ago, after all. He settled into his big overstuffed chair, took a sip, and started the story.

"You refused to take a fall." Big D was a giant of a man, and even sitting behind a desk, he still dominated the large office. His figure was partially hidden by the stacks of money on the desk--his take of the gambling proceeds from today's fights. But he hadn't received much from Rick's fight. "All my fighters know that sometimes it's their turn to lose. You won when you weren't supposed to. What, exactly, were you trying to do?"

Rick could only glare at him in cold fury. This was the man who had driven his father out of business--the man he had gone into boxing to take down. Every time he hit the bag, he pictured this face in front of his fist. "To get here," he said, quietly, through clenched teeth. He slowly stood. "I wanted to get HERE. To take you down. To get even with you for what you did to my father."

The four thugs in the room reached hands inside their jackets and moved closer, but Big D waved them off with a smile. "I'm not afraid of a punk kid," he said. "You really want a piece of me?" He shrugged off his jacket, and popped ten knuckles, making a sound like machine gun fire on a Normandy beach.

This was the fight he had been waiting for all his life, and he didn't intend to waste the opportunity. He launched himself across the desk, and started a brawl. The two men wrestled all around the office, kicking papers, kicking the cash into the air. Rick fought like a man possessed--but he was losing.

He grabbed an arm, and jammed it painfully behind the man's back. He was trying to break it, dislocate it, anything that would slow the bigger man down. And, beneath his fingers, it felt like the arm turned rubbery, boneless, and Big D easily squirmed free. A tree trunk of an arm caught him across the chest, and Rick was sent sprawling over the desk and tumbling against the far wall.

Rick got up slowly, nursing an injured shoulder. What was it going to take to stop him, dropping a piano on his head...?

"Is that all you've got, kid?" the big man taunted. He crossed his arms and laughed.

At that moment, the door to the office burst open, and two other men stepped inside. Rick recognized them as two nondescript men in suits who had been ringside at the fights earlier. The thugs reached for their guns again, but they weren't fast enough; the shorter man whipped out some bizarre kind of ray gun, and the four goons...just...disappeared. Big D's eyes got wide.

"Okay, it's time to come home," said the shorter one. The taller one simply nodded.

"Do I gotta...?" Big D looked at Rick, and then back to the weapon. He breathed a long, slow sigh. Then he reached up, over his head, back to his neck, and pulled. The face of Big D split in half, like a man removing a jacket, and the skin fell to the floor. Where Big D had been standing...there was now...

...a duck. A five foot tall duck, wearing a sailor hat, grumbling something unintelligible under his breath.

The shorter man went through the same motions, and revealed a four foot tall mouse, with huge, round, black ears on top of his head. The taller one, too, dropped his costume, and looked like nothing more than a seven foot tall dog. He said "a-hielk."

Without a further glance at Rick, they all headed out the doorway and disappeared down the hall, leaving Rick with cuts, contusions, a dislocated shoulder...and a room full of ownerless cash.

"Cool story, Pop," Jimmy said. "You never told us that one."

"You never asked," Rick said, lighting a fresh cigar. And you wouldn't have believed it anyway.

Everyone started saying their goodbyes and trickling out. When he was alone, he stepped into the library, and found the book on the shelf. Conrad, Heart of Darkness. He tilted it out, and the bookcase slid open. He moved inside, allowing the secret door to close behind him.

There, on the wall, behind a sheet of glass, were three human skins, hung up for display. The empty eye sockets of Big D glared lifelessly down at him. And he thought of those words again--"the horror...the horror."

Pix of the Day: Pumba, is that You?

2009-03-19T12:52:00.001-07:00

Okay, let's see if we can bring the ol' Pix of the Day thing back to life here.

She-who-must-be-obeyed signed me up for a photography class at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha a few months back, before I broke my camera. The instructor, Pasquale Mingarelli, or "Pat," was laid back, very knowledgeable, and made sure we got a lot out of the class. Make sure to drop by and check out his pictures, too, at
www.wildheartphotography.com

Hope everyone is enjoying the rising temperatures, vanishing snow, and increased rain...*grin*

-=ad=-

Waking the Dead

2009-03-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This post is an entry to the Friday Challenge, which can be found here.

The shooting star arced across the sky, leaving a trail that must have been miles long, shooting sparks in all directions. It was easily the longest shooting star he had ever seen, awake or dreaming.

He was dreaming, wasn't he...? He looked around, seeing the children playing basketball with an inflated frog next door. Across the street, there was a horse and carriage in the driveway, instead of the Honda that was usually parked there. And he was getting ready to leave for work with bright, fluffy pink bunny slippers on his feet.

Yes, he was pretty sure he was dreaming.

He let the dream carry him across the street and around the block, and where there should have been an elementary school, he instead found the quiet neighborhood where his grandmother lived. If he hadn't already known he was dreaming, this would have cinched it, because her home was a forty-five minute drive away--more during rush hour--and he had just walked the distance in thirty seconds.

There was grandmother, tending her roses. As he walked closer, he could see that roses were blooming every time she touched her the plant. She was surrounded in red, white, orange, and purple roses, and more were blooming all around her; in fact, it was getting harder and harder to see her amidst the colors of the flowers.

Off in the distance, a bell chimed. One...two...three...four.

As he walked up to the gate, she stood, and waved a greeting. He waved back, and stepped into the yard, but behind her there was a sudden rustling in the bushes, like a crowd of children getting ready to burst out of school at the sound of the bell. He paused, not sure what was going on, and an immense flock of birds exploded out of the undergrowth. They were small, like finches or sparrows, and they were all the colors of the rainbow, plus a few that weren't in the rainbow, and they were arrowing directly for...grandmother.

As she smiled and waved, the first few birds reached her, and blasted through her hand. The first bird took her index finger as it passed. The second took a bloodless bite out of her wrist. The flock blasted through, each taking another small chunk while she continued to smile, and continued to wave for as long as she had a limb to wave.

The smile remained hovering in the air long after the mass of birds had flown through. Finally, the last three birds, flying in a "V" formation, snapped that out of the air as well, and there was nothing left where his grandmother had been except the explosion of roses.

Mick woke, kicking and thrashing, finally tumbling out of bed tangled in sheets. The dream stayed with him, all through breakfast; he couldn't get that image of the birds out of his head. Or the smile. As he was finishing off his coffee, his daughter--all of four years old--came to the table, still in pink pajamas. She poured her own cereal, added milk, grabbed a rag and cleaned up the splashover, and then sat crunching contentedly, swinging her feet--

Mick choked on the last swallow of his coffee. She was wearing the pink bunny slippers from his dream. "You like my slippers, Daddy?" she asked.

Was he dreaming? Still?

He looked around, but everything seemed real. No clues that this was still a dream. He blinked away the confusion, and headed off to work.

As he walked up to the glass door, a sonic boom rattled the windows and triggered car alarms all around him. He spun, looking for the jet--and instead, saw a massive shooting star. It left a trail of sparks and smoke in the air before disappearing over the horizon. It was all anyone could talk about all around the office; no one was getting any work done, least of all Mick. He tried to lose himself in the code he was working on, but his thoughts kept coming back to that smile, floating in the air, and the monster swarm of color...

At ten, he dialed his grandmother, and it rang...and rang. Hadn't she heard of voicemail...?

At noon, he dialed again, still, no answer. At two, he blew off the rest of the day; not that he had been getting much done anyway. He headed for the freeway, but became stuck in traffic less than three miles out. An accident had this entire stretch of highway bottled up; the cars were inching along, backed up for miles, squeezing between a flipped semi and the concrete barricade under the careful supervision of a motorcycle cop. It took more than an hour to creep along two miles, and Mick's temper got shorter every time he jammed on the brakes. The temperature outside wasn't helping any, either.

Finally, he was allowed to merge right, and get in ahead of a minivan full of school kids, and it was finally his turn to squeeze through the gap. Why did it take so long to clear a wreck from the highway? He was finally moving again, but he wasn't going to get there until--

...until nearly four o'clock.

Mick shoved the accelerator down, pushing well past the speed limit, dodging around cars. He wasn't sure what was going to happen at four, but he knew he had to be there. It was ten minutes before four when he found the off-ramp, and pulled out into the neighborhood. It was three minutes before four when he shut off the engine and stepped out onto his grandmother's driveway.

There were no vicious flocks of birds in the yard, or multicolored roses either, for that matter. He pounded on the door, but no one answered, so he let himself in.

The living room was clean and tidy, just as she always kept it. The television was playing with no sound; it was showing news footage of a disaster site, a helicopter view of a battered and burned building. He stared at it for a few moments, and then wandered deeper into the house.

He found her in the kitchen. The floral wallpaper seemed to surround her with flowers, just like the last time he had seen her. She smiled, and offered him a plate of hot chocolate cookies. "It's about time you found your way here," she said.

Mick froze. Slowly, the pieces started to fit together. The images spilled into his mind--the coffin, the flowers all around her, three years ago.

And the television...and the twisted hunk of rock and metal that fell out of the sky. A meteor collided with a satellite, and the combined lump of tons of steel and rock had come hurtling to the ground, landing on his desk as he was getting ready to leave...precisely at four o'clock. Three days earlier.

-=ad=-

Gravity Works...and gravity SUCKS!

2009-02-20T14:44:00.000-08:00

I got my first paying gig here in Nebraska.

My client wanted "lifestyle" stuff...sunset over the lake, kids playing, shoppers outside a store...

I knew from last year that there was snow coming, and I wanted to get some of these pictures before everything was frozen and white. So, I went off to shoot the neighborhoods the client suggested...in 35 or so degree weather.

On the seventh, or maybe eighth stop, I saw these two guys in a rowboat, with this brilliant red sunset behind them. Great lifestyle shot, if I could get it, so I leaped out of the car with the tripod in one hand and the camera in the other. Well, you can't adjust a tripod with a hand full of camera, so I decided to loop the strap around my neck.

I missed. The strap passed over my head, and my fingers were so cold I lost my grip on the camera.

It fell...from, oh, head height or so...landed on the (cheap kit) lens...on concrete. I found shattered pieces of plastic inside the camera body from the lens body.

It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't pop the mirror out of the way, so all I get is totally black pictures. Oh, and an "error 99" message.

I haven't shot any new pictures in...um...two months...? Talk about your withdrawal symptoms.

I can't afford to replace the camera any time soon. There's just no room in the budget for the next couple of months. And I would have to lay odds that a replacement Digital Rebel 300d is cheaper than repairing the same model, considering it's seven or eight years old.

Yes, this is all leading up to something. This is all pointing towards the new widget up top right in my blog--the one labeled "The Camera Replacement Fund." That gadget is attached to Redbubble, where you can purchase prints and posters of a variety of my best shots. And the proceeds of every purchase go right into the cute little piggy bank on my desk with the words "Al's New Camera" marked on the side in purple crayon.

Anyway...enjoy the slideshow...and if you'd like to sling a few sheckels into the Camera Replacement Fund, and help bring the withdrawal symptoms to an end, please drop by Redbubble and pick out a good one.

-=ad=-

Pikers and Rikers and Jazz, Oh My...

2009-02-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

Note: This post is an entry into the Friday Challenge, which can be found here.

Deep inside the bowels of the Starfleet Personnel Division, Ensign Quackenbush bounces his head in time with the Martian speed metal blasting through his Ipod 2e37. The cybernetically implanted music station allows him to listen to any music he likes, without disturbing his neighbors, and his assignment is so tedious that he needs the jams just to get through the day.

His printer ("printer" was a misnomer, since it didn't actually print anything; what it did was use transporter and replicator technology to create a full blown paper report from raw molecules) spit out a fresh set of orders, and he pulled it to read while another set was printing. Temporary duty assignment, he read, for someone named "Piker."

The music in his head reached a crescendo, and in his chair-dancing escapades, he dumped coffee in his lap. Cursing in Romulan, he dashed off to the head, cleaned up the mess, and returned to his duties. He grabbed Riker's transfer orders off the printer, stamped them with all of the proper military approvals, and delivered the stack to the transporter that would then deliver them to the admiral's desk for a signature.

"Stupid way of doing things," he mumbled. Most would agree with him, but that was "the way things were done" in a military organization, and probably would always be the way they were done.

He then grabbed Piker's paperwork, quashing a sudden sense of deja vu, and stamped the approval for his assignment to the Rachmaninoff, a deep space research vessel.

William T. Riker strode purposefully through the long curving corridors of Deep Space 17, working his way to the transfer to his temporary post. Lieutenant Schmidts, a short, blonde man from Deneb 3, struggled to keep up while waving a sheaf of important looking papers in the air.

"So, you see, Commander, there's been some kind of mixup..."

"Yeah, I got that part," Riker said, without slowing down. The ship that had gotten him this far has been a rickety Altairian transport, with nothing on the menu except Altairian stew and Klingon chili, and the chili was threatening to make a re-appearance, so Riker was moving at a pretty fast clip.

"You know Starfleet uses a personality test to help staff ships, right?" Schmidts said, dodging around a crowd going the other way.

"Yes," Riker growled. "Since the ships are away from base for so long, finding shipmates with something in common just makes sense. You use the Captain's profile as a starting point, and assign the rest of the crew with that in mind. Basic personnel stuff there."

"Um...yes. Exactly. That's my point. Someone screwed up your results, and you've been assigned to...um..."

"Spit it out. Get to the point."

"Um. Yessir, you're assigned to the Van Halen."

"Van Halen? You mean the guy who found the radiation belts around the Earth?"

"No, sir, um, that's Van Allen." Schmidts dodged around another cluster of people. "You see, this ship, it's...well...it's ROCK MUSICIANS. Plus some Country, they seem to fit in."

Riker came to a dead stop, and gave the man a glare that would have melted the rings off of Saturn. "Excuse me?" Schmidts handed over the stack of paper and swallowed hard.

Looking at the signatures that made everything official, Riker sighed. "I think I'd rather do another month with the Klingons."

Riker's sense of dread increased with each step. The docking bay to the Van Halen was just ahead, and the closer he got, the further away he wanted to be.

ROCK musicians? How in the name of W. Maynard Ferguson was he going to function aboard a ship full of fans of...of...he could barely bring himself to say it.

This was going to be the most miserable month of his life, he knew that.

Captain Simmons met him at the door with a firm handshake, and before Riker could get past the traditional "permission to come aboard, sir" Simmons was already talking about the situation. "You can dispense with the false pleasantries, Commander. Schmidts called ahead; I know you're not where you want to be. Let's get your gear stowed and see if we can make this visit as painless as we can manage."

Two hours later, after making the rounds and eating a light dinner by himself in the mess hall, Riker stretched out on a barely comfortable bed. The Van Halen was an old ship, recently refitted but still with the thin walls of its generation. As Riker closed his eyes and drifted, he was jolted by what sounded like a screaming baby. After a few moments, Riker identified the sound as an over-amplified guitar, screeching and whining like a scalded Tiberian feline.

...then the room on the other side added a discordant bass drum beat to the mix. Riker's com badge bounced a bit closer to the edge of the nightstand with every beat. He reached under the bed for the spare pillow, and clutched it over his head. After three minutes, the main pillow joined it. Still the shrill whine of vibrating strings made his teeth rattle against each other and the heavy drum beat bounced his head from one side to the other.

Finally, he gave up. He threw on civilian clothes and went for a walk.

The New Orleans bar wasn't the same as the one he had customized on the Enterprise, but it would do. He added a small audience and a band, and ordered the computer to change out the bandmembers with historic figures on a frequent basis.

One of his strengths was his ability to "fit in." He had carved a niche for himself on a Klingon cruiser. He would do it again on this ship.

...he had no clue HOW to do that...perhaps he could replicate himself some earplugs...? Or, better yet, a sensory deprivation tank...

There had to be some common ground.

Riker dozed off in a booth, with the computer alerting him an hour before his shift was due to begin.

That became his habit for the first week of his assignment--leaving for the holo New Orleans every time the evening serenades began. There had to be a way find his niche in this...gaggle.

Captain Simmons went out of his way to assign Riker solo tasks--stuff that would allow him to stay away from the general crew. Riker understood the sentiment, but he also knew that this wasn't the way to fit in.

Finally, he ordered the computer to replicate his trombone, a Bach Stradivarius. And, with two minutes to go before his neighbors started their traditional evening noise, Riker started his. He started off with some Miles Davis, drifted into Maynard Ferguson, and threw in some T'Krell flourishes for good measure. Then he paused for a moment or three, and started up again with some blues--straightforward stuff.

After ten minutes of solo playing, Riker noticed the bass beat was keeping time with the blues. And three minutes later, the guitar started improvising on the same beat.

Not once on the entire cruise did Riker ever meet his bandmates, but every night became a blues/jazz improv session among the three of them. And the attitudes from the crewmen around him slowly changed, to the point where Riker almost felt like he might actually be able to fit in there.

...then the Andorrian science officer broke out with the refrain from "I know she's out there somewhere" during dinner, and Riker knew he would never really fit in among this crew.

After his tour was over, he was almost sorry to leave.

Almost.

Riker was back where he belonged, on the Bridge of the Enterprise, right next to Captain Picard.

"Captain," Worf announced, "we are receiving a request for assistance. It's from the Rachmaninoff."

"Yes, Mr. Worf? What's the nature of the emergency?"

Worf's voice was filled with surprise and puzzlement. "Sir, the text of the message is 'come and get this idiot off of my ship before I throw him out the airlock."

Intervention

2009-02-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

Note: This post is an entry into The Friday Challenge, which can be found Here.

The retro rockets made for a barely serviceable landing, albeit a rough one. The fuel cut out, completely spent, just a few feet from the surface, and the resulting drop crumpled the landing gear. The scoutship was left stranded on the tarmac, leaning at a drunken angle. Twenty seven missions, all but two without a scratch, only to drop it like an empty beer dispenser on this airless pebble six million light years from nowhere.

Honey, I'm home, Flix thought, as he prepared to leave the ship. He gathered up all of the nutrient bars he could find, his blaster, medkit, and personal bag. He hesitated on the bag, knowing how much it would slow him down--but then slung it over his shoulder. He couldn't bear the thought of leaving it behind, because if something happened to his survival suit, he might never make it back out to the ship.

Everything he could carry was attached to the suit or slung over shoulders. It was time to make the hike--nearly a mile from the ship to the airlock, with nothing to hide behind if Kelmari troops were around. Walking across a long flat plain in a war zone was bad enough, but making that same hike in a bulky space suit, loaded down with gear, in bright sunshine, in vaccuum...his heart was in his throat when he opened the hatch, and he was practically hyperventilating from the halfway point to the moment the interior airlock door opened in front of him, revealing an empty corridor.

Fortunately, he didn't find any evidence of Kelmari inside the station. Unfortunately, he didn't find much evidence of any humans, either. According to his mission briefing, this had been as much a research station as a distant outpost, and sparsely populated; the people may have evacuated the base--and the solar system--when the Kelmari arrived.

Priorities, he thought. Air, water, food, living space. This is going to be home for a while...probably a LONG while...best to see if room service was awake.

He followed the airlock access corridor to a cross-path, one of the main concentric corridors that connected every branch of the station, and turned left, still hauling all of his gear. He refused to let any of it out of his sight until he could find a place to lock it down or hide it away...or until he was satisfied there were no other life forms in the entire station.

He found a workroom that would make a serviceable bedroom, complete with a locking door. All of the gear stacked neatly in a corner, with the bag in another. He thought about the bag and its contents; some relaxation right now would probably help...no, not without securing the station. The bag went into the corner with the rest, with a deep sigh. On his way out, he activated the computerized door lock, and set it to voice authorization only. Blaster in hand, he made a full sweep of the entire ring.

Hydroponics...check. There would be plenty to eat, provided he didn't mind vegetarianism. Air...check. Communications, weapons, crew quarters...no chance. There was hard vaccuum behind that door, and no amount of finagling with the computer could re-pressurize the sector.

...but that gave him an idea.

He went around to each of the 14 corridors that branched off. At each one, he activated the computer terminal nearest the door, sealed off the corridor, and purged the air from the section. Any hidden Kelmari would be suffocated, and the base would be secure. Eight corridors cleared without a hitch.

At the ninth, the computer balked. "Unable to comply," it said. He argued, and tried a dozen times, but the computer absolutely refused to vent that particular sector. Ultimately, he moved on to the next. Thirteen sections cleared, one held up by a computer glitch. Still, the odds were good that he was the only person there.

He returned to his room, opened his personal bag, and totally lost all track of time.

The next day, he started researching the computer issue, and found an old meeting log.

"Status update," one voice asked.

"The logic functions are upgraded, just like I laid out in my proposal," a voice answered.

"What, just like that?"

"Well, yes, just like that. The bulk of the research was done back on Earth, this is just the prototype design."

"You mean to tell me you've programmed morality into a computer?"

"Yes. This computer will recognize life and won't perform an action that will cause the death of a person."

With this, Flix's blood ran cold. He grabbed his blaster and dashed out of the room, cursing in five languages--only two of which were native to his home planet.

The meeting log continued, playing to empty air. "So, how will you know if your program is successful? How will you know if the computer has learned?"

"Well, you can program a computer to NOT do something. It will refuse an order to kill, that's just inaction. But the real test of whether or not a computer has developed sentience is if it acts on its own initiative--if it devises a solution to something in a way it wasn't programmed for."

Flix headed for the section the computer wouldn't space, and accessed the voice controls at that terminal. "Computer, expose this sector to space," he said.

"Unable to comply," the female voice responded, just like yesterday.

"Computer, return number of life forms within sensor range."

"Two life forms detected," it answered almost immediately, but Flix was already moving by the time it finished the sentence.

The warehouse appeared to be deserted, but he still moved cautiously, blaster ready. He was closing and locking doors as he went, trying to narrow down the places someone could hide. The odds of the other being human were vanishingly small; it was much more likely the other life form arrived the same way he did--from a crippled starship.

Laser fire rang out from across the warehouse, stitching a line of burnt carbon against the bulkhead, a foot above his head, a warning shot. Flix returned fire, slinging half a dozen shots randomly in the direction the bolt came from as he ducked behind boxes.

For the next ten minutes, they stalked each other through the deserted warehouse dome. His eyes were burning from the carbonized air and the blaster was tingling in his palm--the warning that he was nearly out of ammunition. He hoped he had one shot left, because he had the Kelmari cornered. Working up his courage, he took a deep breath, broke cover, rolled across the floor, and came up with the blaster pointed at the enemy's face.

Unfortunately, he couldn't see that face, around the blaster it was pointing at him.

He held his breath, and pulled the trigger. The buzzing in his palm stopped, and the blaster emitted a quiet "beep." The Kelmari, too, fired--and his laser went "MERP". Both of them brought their weapons down, and looked at them, Flix with a sheepish look on his face.

The Kelmari screamed at him, and the minor tentacles around it's neck flared with rage. Then it was gone, dashing deep into the station. Damn, that squid is fast, he thought.

Life settled down into a routine after that. Flix and the Kelmari developed a sort of detente--he would hit the hydroponics bay during the morning, and it would gather its' own food in the evening. He made sure to lock every door as he passed through it, but the Kelmari seemed content to stay on that half of the station. Flix would hunt through the warehouse for an ammo pack or comm gear or something, with no luck...and then he would return to his room, and reach for his bag.

"You're addicted," his roommate had told him once.

"Nah, it's not like that," he would say, only half-believing himself.

Somewhere, deep in the circuitry of the station, decisions were being made. Somehow, the situation had to change. And a computer programmed to think for itself finally started to fulfill it's design. One evening, while Flix was lost in his addiction, the computer opened a comm circuit from one end of the station to the other, allowing the Kelmari to hear what was going on in Flix's room.

Flix gave up on another fruitless day of searching, and retired to his room. He opened the bag, and balanced the antique across his knees, making sure it was still tuned. Then, he put his fingers on the strings of the ancient Stratocaster, and launched into some Martian speed metal to get his fingers warmed up. After that, some "Hotel California," smoothly leading into "Pinball Wizard"...he played, lost in the sound...letting his fingers find the music automatically, enjoying the rhythm, feeling the music roll over him...

...the drummer was out of time; that cymbal shot was half a beat behind, they were going to have to practice more...

...drummer...?

His fingers froze on the strings, but the percussion didn't stop; the rhythm kept moving, continuing the Who's beat. He stepped to the doorway, and looked out to see the squid playing...well, with every tentacle. Each of the four "fingers" had a rhythm pad beneath it; the "pinky tentacle" was cranking out something that sounded remarkably like a snare drum, while the "index tentacle" was hammering out a bass beat. The minor neck tentacles each had a bell or cymbal setup going, and all of it was amplified through a set of speakers the alien wore at his throat.

It--he?--continued playing, tilting his head to one side as if to say "hey, you missed your cue."

Two weeks later, Flix and Oxar were best of friends. The squid had introduced him to several versions of alien music, while Flix had tried his best to get the alien to understand twentieth century rock. Stupid squid kept playing bells too loud during "Don't Fear the Reaper," but other than that, he made for a dynamite percussion section. Just maybe, after the fighting stopped, they might find a couple of vocalists, maybe some horns, and go on tour. Hey, stranger things had happened.

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Trip to the Zoo

2008-07-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, that is.

We picked the worst possible day to go, unfortunately--during the NCAA College World Series, which happened to be playing right across the street from the zoo. We were stuck in stop-and-go traffic, moving at something less than 1 mile an hour, for nearly two hours...just trying to get from the freeway to the zoo entrance...only to discover the zoo parking lot was full. We finally ended up parking almost a mile away and walking back to the entrance.

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Balloon Glow

2008-04-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

October 21, 2006, there was an airshow out west of Phoenix. They had all kinds of things worth looking at, but the part that fascinated me most was the last thing they did before packing it all away--the Balloon Glow.

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Visiting Neighbors

2008-04-25T09:23:00.001-07:00

Nothing like some home-made treats (glazed popcorn) to bring all the local neighbors over for a taste.

...and of course, I couldn't resist dragging out the camera.

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Teeth!

2008-04-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

...continuing with the battered antiques at Jerome theme...

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Shack

2008-04-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

Found this dilapidated shack in Jerome, Arizona. It's located at an old mine that's been revamped by the owner, and it's surrounded by antique cars. I don't much like the white, blown-out sky, but it was overcast and I had no idea at the time what to do about it.

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Bees at Work

2008-04-08T11:13:00.001-07:00

...we never did get any seeds out of this sunflower...probably because the insects beat us to it...

-=ad=-

Pix of the Day: Widow's Web

2008-04-04T08:33:00.001-07:00

...I've said it before...I generally make it a point to not murder my models after the photoshoot is done, but in this case, I had to make an exception...

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Pix of the Day: Beauty in the Dark

2008-04-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

Flowers for the wife...

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Pix of the Day: Reflections

2008-03-27T08:41:00.001-07:00

Cool looking reflective building in downtown Phoenix.

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Pix of the Day: Is that thing edible...?

2008-03-25T09:54:00.001-07:00

...he kept watching my camera, and then ate the button off of a jacket when we got too close...

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Pix of the Day: Spinning some more fire

2008-03-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

Double-ended fire staff.

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Pix of the Day: Up Close and Personal

2008-03-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

Mantises (Manti?) are so much fun to shoot...and it definitely helps to have a not-so-squamish assistant, too.

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Pix of the Day: Fireworks!

2008-03-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Pix of the Day: Sunflower

2008-03-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

...very soon now, I'll be uploading pictures from my new camera...*grin*

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Pix of the Day: Greetings!

2008-03-13T12:05:00.000-07:00

Pix of the Day: Curves and Reflections

2008-03-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Curved building in downtown Phoenix.

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Pix of the Day: Petrified

2008-03-10T08:26:00.001-07:00

Petrified Forest, Arizona.

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Pix of the Day: Break!

2008-03-07T08:54:00.001-08:00

...what do you get when you cross a camera with a pool table...? Lots of motion blur!

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Pix of the Day: Long Exposure

2008-03-06T09:22:00.001-08:00

...it may look like mid-morning, but this was actually taken at least a half hour after sunset, on a breezy day. The extra-long exposure smoothed out the ripples in the water, and brought back the reflection. Not as rich or vibrant as the London Bridge shot, but I still like how it turned out.

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Pix of the Day: Firey Sunset

2008-03-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

...and we move from fire in the hands to fire in the sky...

I actually shot this out of a car window, because I loved the texture in the clouds. But when I pulled it from the camera, it didn't look like I remembered...so, I used Photoshop to darken it until it looked like I remembered.

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Pix of the Day: More Fire

2008-03-04T06:55:00.001-08:00

...gotta love the swirls and shapes of a fire-spinner pic...

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Pix of the Day: Fire is HOT

2008-03-03T09:06:00.001-08:00

...used Photoshop to bring out the color and sharpen a bit. This was part of a fire-spinning performance by the Wizards of AZ, a troupe in Phoenix.

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...it's about time...?

2008-02-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to creating my Flickr account.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/allandavisjr/

Looking forward to meeting everyone there...

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Pix of the Day: ...somewhere...

2008-02-29T07:15:00.000-08:00

...no, I'm not even sure where this was...

I snapped this on a cross-country drive from Phoenix to Colorado Springs--the same trip as the Paria Rimrocks visit, the same trip where I went over Vail Pass in a blizzard...all of which is a story much too long for one of these quickie Pix of the Day posts. Anyway, this was somewhere in the Utah/Colorado area, and I neglected to write down the name of this particular hill and body of water. If anyone recognizes the place, feel free to let me know; I'd love to add a clearer label to this picture besides "...um...some lake...near some mountain...somewhere near Colorado."

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Pix of the Day: ...that's a rock...?

2008-02-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

One more from Paria Rimrocks, though I'm not going to add any more commentary to this one...I'll leave that to your imagination.

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Pix of the Day: Paria Rimrocks

2008-02-27T09:23:00.000-08:00

Same rock formation, different view. The Fist of the Gods is the tall skinny rock on the right.

...if you're stuck with contrails in your picture, make them part of the composition...

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