Friday, March 26, 2010

Solomon McAveny



S
olomon McAveny was a vampire. Everyone knew it. No one had ever seen him do anything, so to speak, or heard him speak of it, but nobody needed to. It was one of those things that was simply understood.

No one knew how old he actually was. He looked, for the most part, like a clean-cut man of about thirty, but somehow, at the same time, there was something about him that felt like it belonged a hundred or so years back. It was difficult to tell what it was—something about the way he held himself, maybe, or the way his smooth voice was so precisely articulated. In any other person it would have been charming. In him it was charming. But it was also vaguely unsettling, and at the same time as you felt yourself being drawn to him in conversation you had an odd feeling that something was terribly out of place.

He was not the kind of person one would call friendly, but he was polite and careful and civil to a degree that, in this day and age, was almost shocking. He had lived in the same city for twenty-four years and nobody had once heard him raise his voice. He was calm and composed to a fault. He was gentle.

Children were terrified of him.

It was one of those things that everyone figured out without really realizing it. There were signals that everyone just got used to before they put them together, like the odd fact that the front window to his bookstore was covered with a heavy velvet curtain. The sign on the other side of the curtain, the one that could be flipped over to show whether the store was "closed" or "open," was rigged with a chain and a pulley so that, when he wanted to flip it over, he only had to pull the chain and the mechanics would turn the sign over in the bright window. There were the slightly strange hours of the store, which ended shortly after dark, even in the winter when it got dark before five o'clock.

Morgan had seen him a few times. The first time was when she was quite young, and in the way of a young child all she had really noticed was that he was wearing a suit. This was not really unusual at all, when she thought about it later, but at the time it struck her as odd because it was a saturday night and he was obviously nowhere near a church, and in her small mind suits and church were somehow synonymous.

The whole event was largely unimportant, and the only reason it had any significance was that she remembered it years later when she saw him for the second time. This time was even more forgettable, and forget it she did, but the third time she saw Solomon McAveny she was fifteen years old, and she turned to the friend standing nearest to her and said, "You know, every time I see that guy he looks exactly the same. I swear he's been in his thirties since I was two years old."

"Duh," said the friend, who would be just as forgotten in ten years, and she snapped her gum to punctuate the word. "That's Mr. McAveny, from that bookstore. He's a frickin' vampire."

"Oh," said Morgan, a little taken aback but growing less and less so the more she thought about it. "Huh."

Years later she thought back on this event and was a little embarrassed, felt a little stupid for having been so stupid herself. She pushed the event into her memory and told herself she wouldn't think of it again.

---------------

Just an oldish fragment. I had a middle school art teacher who was a vampire, you know.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Shiny

He is carrying his umbrella, because it is raining. It's always raining. In a way it's no wonder so many of the city's inhabitants are so unhappy, considering that they only see the sun every ten days or so. But he doesn't mind the rain. With the umbrella, and wearing his black suit, he can hardly feel it, though he can tell from the steadily sliding temperature that he is becoming a little damp despite all the protection, deflected droplets and upward splashes from the deeper puddles grabbing onto the cuffs of his pant legs and making their way upward.

He is walking steadily, not exactly eager but certainly looking forward to the door of his apartment, the gentle light, the soft give of the bed under him. There is no one waiting for him, and this does not really bother him. It is late, after all, and the only people on the street are running home from the rain now, holding coats or plastic bags of cereal and batteries over their heads, or else just straightening their damp collars and giving themselves shamelessly to the weather. Every now and then he passes a police officer in glistening bad-weather gear, the streetlights reflecting blue and starry off their coats and hats and leaving the rest of them in shadow.

He rarely ever sees police-programmed androids in this town, though they could certainly use them. It's hard to tell why. Possibly it's the rain again, so adept at forcing its way into the kind of miniscule cracks and hinges the human body learned to move without. Certainly it would seem a little unnecessary to churn out all those regulation waterproof uniforms only to put them on rows of tin soldiers instead of men, and there is the fact that what can make a man seem stolid and indestructible can do exactly the opposite to a machine. It would be a shame, he admits to himself, to cover all those gleaming, symmetrical steel bodies with wet, creased oilcloth and canvas, not to mention the faint undertones of deceit. Even he, in his wet cotton suit, cannot help to think of it like that—computers masquerading as men, as if the public wouldn't know the difference.

And that brings him to the next possible reason, which rears its head just so as he passes under the shallow ledge of a convenience shop, sidestepping a few figures silhouetted against a window.

"Hey," one of the figures calls sharply. "Watch your space."

"Sorry," he says. He lowers his head and tries to get by quickly, knowing it's all up to luck, but still hoping a little, maybe futilely. And for a moment it looks as if luck has taken the ball, but there is a fumble, then, and the man, no longer a silhouette, has stepped in front of him.

He is tall. He is wearing a white nylon jacket, with the skin of a smoker and a fine layer of the kind of grime you get in cities only. His face has the thinness of someone who spent the last of his paycheck a few days ago and the remains of yesterdays unshaven beard, and he smiles a humorless smile. "Hey," he says again. "Look at this. Found ourselves a shiny."

Devon does not run. To run would be to abandon even luck, and so instead he stands as still as he can, holds his head down, waits for an opportunity. Hopes for one. He gives the response he has been taught: “I’m not looking for any trouble.”

The man smiles down at him. “Not lookin’ for trouble? Heh. Not the kind of thing you go lookin’ for, is it?” He looks first to one side and then the other, and the other two silhouettes have appeared around him, now the sorry shapes of people, shadowed black and blue in the streetlight and watching with the alertness that comes from waiting too long to sleep. They are smiling grimly—not laughing at him, just watching, just enjoying the suspense of the moment.

“Hey,” says the tall one, a third time. He tilts his head as if he’s speaking to a child, and puts on a mocking imitation of civility. “Whose’re you, anyway? Who d’you belong to, huh?” He waits for a response, and when nothing comes he tries again, a dangerous note in his voice this time. “Where you come from, shiny?”

Devon thinks of lying. It wouldn’t help, and he can’t do it anyway, so he hesitates for a second more and decides to tell the truth. “I’m-“

And this is when the bottle hits his head, swinging, from the left and into his temple, sending a jolt through him and snapping his neck to the side. He does not lose his balance, but the vision in his left eye goes rapidly bright and then dark, the other eye brightening to compensate so that the whole picture in front of him flickers like a broken projection, a little sideways and reeling when the second hit sends him to his knees.

The tall man is still smiling, just a little, but he loses this in a second or two, pulls back his foot and sends out a kick that catches Devon in the soft space where his hip hits the front of his body. Someone else aims a blow at a point on his back that makes him let out an involuntary noise like a stuck typewriter, and someone snickers. “Call for your mother,” says a flat voice, devoid even of the emotion to really tease him, and a boot presses down, hard and abrupt, on his shoulder, wrenching it away from his body with such force that above the sound of his shirt ripping he can hear the wires ripping inside him.

And then there is a new voice. It comes out of the darkness with a sureness that stops all of them, and it says, “Excuse me.”

In the ensuing pause Devon is able to turn his head enough to look up, to see the tall figure of a man in a hat and a long raincoat standing over him. His unnamed assailants back up warily, and the voice comes again from the seemingly empty space under the brim of the newcomer’s hat. “I believe you have something of mine,” it says. “And you appear to have broken it.”

There is a moment, as the four men on the other side of Devon seem to weigh their options, and then one of them spits a stilted “Sorry,” less in resignation than disdain, and they turn and go. Devon waits for a second, allows himself to regain a little equilibrium, and when a thin white hand comes into his field of vision from above he lets go of his umbrella and takes it, letting it pull him into an unsteady standing position. “Thanks,” he says. “I would’ve been in some trouble if you hadn’t shown up like that.”

“No problem,” says the man in the long coat, and when he tilts back his hat to let Devon see his face, there is the shock of finding not the face of a man but the flat white mask and empty eyes of something that sounds like one but is fundamentally not. “I’m Kay,” he says.

“You’re-“ says Devon, and a second later after the realization has fully set in, “I thought you were human. They thought you were... Well. My name’s Devon.”

“No offense taken,” says Kay. “You’re actually the first mec I’ve seen here. I suppose I see why, now. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” says Devon. “One of them got my arm pretty hard, though.” He tries, experimentally, to lift it, but it remains as lifeless as a doll’s. “I think it’s disconnected.”

“I can fix that if you want,” says Kay. “Your left eye’s still flickering a little too. Is there somewhere we can go around here to get out of the rain? A bridge, maybe?”

“Yeah,” Devon says again. “I know somewhere.”

And this is how, after a short walk, they find themselves in the shelter of an overpass, Devon’s torn shirt and jacket set aside as Kay works over the exposed machinery of his shoulder, filaments and wires fraying out of the open seam between metal and thin black plastic. “This is some clever work,” says Kay. “I take it you’re pretty new?”

Devon nods, indicates the lettering etched into his chest: DEV1. “For the International Robotics Summit,” he says. “I’m team D’s experimental version one.”

“Emancipated, I assume.”

“Yes. I’ve got an apartment on thirty-third and a job in data entry for Seisma Manufacturing.”

Kay slides a few connectors into place, and the arm comes back to life with a twitch. Devon looks down at it and flexes his fingers gently. “Thanks again. I really owe you. You know, that was a real risk you took, lying for me back there. If they’d seen you…”

“Oh, I doubt I would have had any problems with them,” says Kay, and though there is nothing in his voice that should indicate more than what he has said, Devon is struck with the uncomfortable feeling that there are things not being said.

“Why not?”

Kay does a subtle tilt of his head, one that turns the light on his maskish face and makes it almost look as if he’s smiling. “I’ve had a few modifications done,” he says. “You could say I can take care of myself.”

Devon is no good at figurative language, at implications, but this has a kind of finality that can only be one thing. “Your hippocratics,” he says quietly. “You had your hippocratics removed?” The thought makes him feel weak, deeply, vitally wrong. “That’s illegal. They could have you burned out for that.”

“Only if they catch me,” says Kay. “Hey, your patterns are reading strange. Are you okay? Hey, it’s not like I’ve done anything. It’s just a precaution.”

And this is true, even if Devon has seen him lie before, but the thought of breaking that first rule—the impossible option of fighting back—feels like ending some deep-seated law of reality. But he overrides the feeling, holds himself steady, and stands up. “Yes, I’m all right,” he says. “Listen, Kay, if you need somewhere to stay, you’re welcome to come with me for the night. I’ve got room.” He picks up his shirt and jacket from the cool ground, puts them on as one, and shakes his battered umbrella back into shape.

“Thanks,” says Kay. “That sounds good.”

They walk out, into the rain again, into the lamplight and the reflections off the surface of the canal and the puddles still draining out of the cracks in the sidewalk. It is later now, and most of those who were running home from the weather have gotten there by now. Devon holds his umbrella. It is seven blocks until his apartment, and though now he can feel the resistance and the reaction of the water seeping between the plates of his side, and though the left edge of his vision still sometimes goes momentarily pixilated when he comes down too hard on his feet, he is glad to be headed home.

---------------

An oldish one. Some of you have seen this one already, I think, but I figured I'd put it up.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Death on the Sandbar



This was a project from my drawing class--it's the dream I had in which I met Death. You probably have to click through to see it big enough to read the text. Inkwash!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Legend of Poor John Terrace



J
ohn Terrace was maybe twenty years old, almost unnaturally serious, the son of a family of wealthy investors who entrusted their money to a company of undeniably brilliant scientists who had dreams, and even a bit of physical progress, in the area of great giant machines designed to be operated by the human mind. He was strong, solid, and famously taciturn, with the kind of smooth-edged face that made him look younger and maybe stupider than he was. He was soft-spoken and soft-handed, and this is how the legend starts, no matter who happens to be telling it.

The legend is vague, of course, as every good legend should be, and though the story is more specific than the legend, both come to the same point through the kind of accident horrific enough to be censored by the passage of time, the kind that can tear the arms and legs off someone as strong and solid as poor John Terrace. And this, of course, is what happened to poor John Terrace, his shoulders turned to gaping, red sockets and the near-indestructible bones in his thighs snapped like sugar glass, leaving him unable to do anything but stare at the rafters above the concrete floor where he lay, the shouts of the people panicking around him growing fainter and the lights dimmer with every spinning, passing second.

"Jesus Christ!" shouted John Terrace's incredibly wealthy parents to the team of overworked scientists who stood about in their white lab coats. "Do something!"

"What do you mean?" said the scientists, who honestly didn't know.

"Our son's been ripped apart!" cried the Terraces, understandably hysterical. "You've got to do something!"

(“Oh God," said John, quietly, from across the room where he lay on a table, a hastily rigged machine pouring his blood back into his body. No one heard him.)

The scientists looked uncomfortable. "Well," they said, shifting nervously and looking at each other, giving each other the kind of looks that make it clear that There Are No Guarantees. "We can try."

And when John woke up he had new arms and legs, ones that were five times stronger than his old ones, and sized in proportion to their strength but not to his bruised, mended little body, having been taken from a machine that was made to do all the things people are too small to do. And they were wired into the torn ends of the nerves of his shoulders and hips so that he could move them with the remainders of his battered musculature, and so that every single time he did he would get blinding, searing, excruciating pains that went all the way up his spine.

"Oh God," he said again, and like the last time his parents didn't really hear--this was the first time he had been awake in two days, of course, and all they heard was the sound of him being alive, and instead of particularly listening they cried and hugged the little bit of him that wasn't made of chrome tubing and thanked God for not taking him from them.

If you have heard the legend of John Terrace, you will know already that he had a girlfriend. In the legend she is never given a name, being at most a sympathetic minor character. In the real story her name was Poloma. Her parents, as one would expect, called her Polly, but John had always called her by her full name, making him sound oddly serious in a way that sometimes made her laugh. And in both stories, after two days of tearful waiting, she was brought into a weirdly sterile room, and after a moment the door opened and John's father led him in by the hand, and she took one look at him and screamed.

And when he stepped toward her she screamed again, even though she didn't want to, and backed up until her back was against the wall and she had to lean her head back as far as it could go just to look him in the eye.

"Poloma," said John, very seriously, and very, very quietly. "It hurts."

"Get away from me, John," she said. She said it calmly, but the truth was that there wasn't much of John left between all those wires and pistons, and what was even more horrifying was that he was crying, plainly and openly as if he wasn't even aware of it, the tears just streaming down his face even though it was as blank as ever.

"Poloma," he said again. "It's hurting me. It hurts so bad."

"Stop saying my name!" she said, and she covered her face and sobbed.

John watched her for a few seconds. "Poloma," he said finally, "I want you to kill me."

And she screamed again.

"Kill me," said John Terrace.

"No," said Poloma. "Don't you dare tell me that. I won't."

"Kill me," said John.

"No!" Poloma screamed.

And then something sudden happened, like something that had been stretched too tight had suddenly reached its breaking point, and by the time the police got there there was nothing left but broken beams and broken bones and a lingering haze of pulverized concrete, fragments of glass tubing that crunched underfoot and dark smears on what was left of the walls. They didn’t even find poor John Terrace.

It was cleaned up well, of course, not least for the benefit of the poor scientists and their unfinished machine that had made its unknowing and unfortunate sacrifice, because despite what some may say there is nothing quite so devastating to a business than having its name connected to a vague and mindless rampage. And that was how he became a legend—not even a proper legend, but the sort that parents use to idly threaten disobedient children. “You close that window, or John Terrace’s going to come in in the middle of the night and get you!”

He never did, obviously. By the time most children were old enough to have heard the legend they knew that John Terrace had never existed anyway. But there were always a few odd characters who claimed otherwise; who maintained that they had seen him in the ruins of the old mansion that everyone called the Terrace estate, despite their knowing that there had almost certainly never been any such family. They went out there on dares and with young delusions of adventure and came back slightly quieter, scraped up and covered in dust and rambling about that monster John Terrace. They said he was nearly twice the height of the average man, with legs like stone columns and arms like tarnished silver tree trunks stitched into shoulders far too small. They said he never spoke, but there were tracks down the cheeks of his empty face from crying and he could deal out destruction to brick walls and windows and the brittle inner framework of the fearful and fragile human body without blinking, without hesitation, without change of expression or bringing one awful hand up to wipe the thin skin under his eyes.

No one ever tried to kill John Terrace. One can only make so many sacrifices, I suppose.

---------------

A rather old one. Thinking about legends, the kind of things where the story finishes and you just sort of stare and go, "Was that supposed to teach me something?" And the person telling the story look confused and says, "What? I don't know, it's just a story."

Friday, March 5, 2010

it was ten years

One year the Japanese beetles came like prisms,
oil-slick beauty crowding over the thistles like dark pearls
at the edges of our property.
They dug out the unused field--
bulldozers, not beetles,
though the effect could have been the same--
and red dirt came from under the alfalfa and dried in the sun,
studded with all those glass-backed beetles,
blue-green and violet and voracious.
(I was ten years old.)

I watched them as I dug stones out of the earth
barefoot and reddish, crouching in the open dust,
and they wove over and around each other
with immunity and iridescence.
And here is what I knew:
that this was only once.
Years would come and there would be plagues,
blue beads settling over our property.
They would devour our tomato plants and cluster over the peaches,
and we would kill them by the thousands
in those plastic bags on the clothesline.
But now was only once,
in new deserts with cement curing and nails scattered
and nothing planted yet,
and this time they lived
so we could see them.
(It was ten years ago now.)

Monday, March 1, 2010

oh hey guys

This here is a blog. Done mainly for the sake of the Cee Dub (no, that doesn't make sense unless you're in it), but I guess if you happen to know me and have some odd interest in reading Things With Robots In Them and whatnot this is here so I can just gently pat you in this direction and be done with it.

So here we go my friends!
Hold on tight, the ride will be uneventful.