Shatter

You don’t really learn how to shatter someone’s skull – they tell you all about it, they give you all the information on where to hit, and how to hit, but at the end of the day it is something you find out for yourself. Some things are so close up and personal that you have to get your hands dirty. He got his hands dirty.

He stood there looking at her laid naked on the bed, her eyes REM-sleep ticking through Meme Dreams, slightly frothing at the mouth, her ident-mask on the bedside table. She was supposed to help him forget what he had done; some people liked drugs to blot it out, and some people liked women.

She didn’t come anywhere near scratching the colossal itch that was shivering through him. He dressed and he stepped outside, chameleon fractal camera projectors booting up and reparsing the environment around him so that no one could see him. Well, unless they were digging with the kind of spades that the people he knew were going to be using – still, it would slow them down at least.

Barron, his commander, circled around the block where he was stood, in out of the rain and the refraction index issues caused immeasurable stutters in the chameleon suit he wore. He smoked a cigarette while he waited for the rain to ease.

All of them were intimate with the act of fist fighting – they had names to match; they were intimate with shattering someone’s skull. Barron had sent Donkeypunch in after him because the man had had success before; for the lack of subtlety in the method of his kill-strike he was harder to see approaching than a cat in hunting mode.

That thump, that fist, that punch – that thing which you had worked so long to perfect, you always knew that some day you would end up on the end of a similarly fashioned blunt weapon.

‘Jerome,’ whispered the man, as his knuckles connected with the back of Jerome’s head.

Jerome thought of the girl again, and he wished he were sinking into the Meme Dream. But his sleep would be so much deeper than that.

A New Eden

Weedbed – he’d hacked in deep and left all the routes lying around. We’d bed down as the sun boiled the horizon orange, looking at half written scripts that unspooled into abstract matter. This was supposed to be a place for sunflowers – an abstraction bed, a metaphor chassis for running some larger system on.

Hackspace dug into the reality riptides, and hack-objects provided concrete interfaces through which one could manipulate the world. Some days after a hard day of trying to configure the space, ocular migraines misting at the edge of his perception, he’d activate the hack-plugs embedded in his own flesh, and he’d mess around with himself like he was a chemistry set.

Dandelions and ragwort, little seeds dusting the place, scent strangely strong, and for  moment he couldn’t remember the larger function they’d been assigned. Carlos was named as Chief Gardener, and he liked the littoral territory his job allowed him to occupy. A strange job for a strange man – all quantum entangled deep-ware – move it and write it on a larger scale. He could think with a garden; it was sometimes harder to think of a closely linked ideational space that would fructify with seeds for real world terraforming. It was like being God in denial.

The weeds tested the larger machinery for flaws, and as each diagnostic procedure was carried out, they had to be removed. Flowers were kept, separated off, and passed on to various diagnostic teams – this was harvest three, and with some of the tweaks and experiments he had been able to carry out, he was convinced that they had been able to build a very effective universal engine that they were going to be able to ship out to the edge of scripted space, and plug it in and start generating some deep beds for reality to grow in.

Carlos pressed the end cycle button on the mini-vironment, and watched on his screen as a reality was zipped down, and what physical matter couldn’t be zipped was ported out through the tesseract translation engines. It all looked so simple – building universes. Eden was a crucible – he believed that now; believed that they had developed something analogous to it. He was proud to be part of it.

Or Mr

Smiles. Through flames. Yes, he does. A picture develops under a skin of chemicals. Snap. The moments aren’t quite joined up, fragile like a baby’s skull; pressure distorts the shape. And he moves through images like someone bursting through one of those hoops with tissue paper they sometimes use in clown acts, he thought it was.

He knew that somewhere scripts were pushing the direction of his footfalls. He knew that somewhere edits were pushing back. He was not a sympathetic character – he knew this, but he hadn’t run across many heroes … they were few and far between as far as he could discern.

He pressed each finger against the glass carefully – he did not wish to smudge the prints. Treat every act in your life like it is a potential crime scene. Why was that important? He wanted to make an impact, always. He had a strange sense of the world around him and himself.

The newspaper talked of him – a constant chatter which he had to work hard to tune out. How could he be villain though, if there was nothing he was doing except following around? He circled the word thoughtcrime in his battered copy of 1984. He thought long and hard about many things.

Death came from a rumour. He wasn’t sure who spread it, but it pushed out of the cocoon of its quotation marked genesis, and flapped its chaos butterfly wings to push towards oblivion on eddies that became tsunami. Bang bang. His suit ignited. And he dreamed that he was a phoenix, in moments where he was bleeding out, and … and … back to the beginning. The worm swallowed its tale.

What had he been doing? Who was he? Fingerprints in a room where nothing happened.

His sister wrote a little story about him where he had learned to eat fire. He fell asleep every night in a bed full of ribbons. They had said that he had done things – stolen ideas, wrote them out as his own – but the truth was, his death was the only act of plagiarism he had ever been involved in. It was strange. It was strange.

The gun fires. The fires burning. He gets fired. He gets shot. A photograph.

 

 

Outlines

He was an Outline, some kind of reality glitch, where the continuum rejig hadn’t erased a non-person completely. Logically they shouldn’t have existed, but somehow there was residual data stored in the signalling part of some of the upper dimensional particles that had been quantum entangled with the individuals.

He could see others like him easily – he knew none of the non-Outlines could really do that, but where did that get him … unless there was some kind of quantum physicist genius who had been outlined as well, they weren’t going to be building any escape routes any time soon.

He knew his mother had christened him Christopher, but he felt that the fact he no longer technically had a mother meant his name seemed a little invalid too. Screw it, might as well call himself Christ – who was going to oppose it?

It was maybe his third year of trudging through this half-life. It seemed longer – relativity took hold of the experience and stretched it like taffy. It was depressing – reality was a vestigial limb of his perceptual apparatus that itched like hell, but which he couldn’t get in a position to scratch.

Christ sat down and wondered how this had come to pass – what thing had been bumped aside or erased from the continuum preceding his existence that had wiped him out? What if he could skirt back down the loop of infinity, through the eye of the needle singularity, and unstitch that event horizon slipslide drown into oblivion? There was something unphysical about him, so what if the logical constraints of the physical universe were not binding to him? He felt no concern about theoretical Hawking radiation or unilinear time. What did he care for the postulated universe of some quantum physicist? What if observer influence and intention had made the first time travel machine possible, and what if, here on the outskirts of the real, his own perceptual push could undo something … could unmake some newly minted absolute?

He had once listened to a cassette on the power of positive thought. He had once managed to get his foot behind his head after a particularly limber yoga class where he had spent over an hour sat in the vedic position doing circular breathing – so he could focus really hard … he was good at that shit. So he did it.

One man can make a change – he had been an author back before he was wiped out. He had ghost-written before, so he was used to working with outlines. He sat there and he reconfigured the localspace around him into a script, digging in down deep and dirty into the heart of reality, and he had started to fill in that outline. He sat there and smiled as he thought about how all works of art are, in some small way, a self portrait, and he wrote himself anew; he wrote himself back in.

He sat there writing, burying himself in the work, excavating himself from the shadow world he had slipped into, and when he felt the soft pressure of a hand on his shoulder, and when he smelt the familiar perfume that his mother always wore, he knew he had travelled back to reality … one he had put there, and he fell in love with his life and the world again. He knew it loved him back, because he was the one who was the beating heart at its center – he was the engine of this place, and as he drove it on it rewarded him back.

 

whine bottle

The airplane collapsed, A gravity wave swelled through the reality-pinch bottleneck and folded it up like it was made of origami. It was an ingress trigger point, but they had no frequency markers, so who knew who had pushed back through the chronological string?

Husker pulled long on the bottle of vodka, surfed his ambulance chaser stations, and sent out wide range pings to sound out any anachronistic objects. Julio was inhaling a bottle of red and his compadre Hinky was swallowing some Zinfandel.

Two hours into the situation it escalated beyond anything they had ever seen before. A wave crested and dropped solid into a heavily populated area, and smashed the people there like they were bugs. Husker knew that their visitor was having an anchoring issues, and that the ricochet was part of the partial manifestation problem.

Hinky had a great ear, and Julio was a great shot. Husker got them in the right place at the right time, and they did the job. More people ended up in the line of fire than ever, and more casualties resulted than he would have thought possible.

He plugged all the data into his prediction crucible and he waited. They arrived an hour before the wave was due to hit. Husker watched. Hinky listened. Julio aimed. It appeared, preceded by a faint buzz. Hinky span and pointed north north east, Julio followed his direction and, whump, fired one of their special patented bullets right into the heart of the distortion, and bang, the time machine and the time travellers exploded. A balance was restored. That faint whine, from the aftermath of one of these events, it disappeared, when you lifted a bottle. Husker always got drunk after something like this.

Block

He sits there with a tiny block – his artistic spirit was sacrificed upon it. He needed a larger one for his integrity. Above his bed he had a picture of the sainted Gordon Comstock. The aspidistras were wilted.

He pissed on a toilet block. Piss on his writer’s block. He lifted a cinder block and hefted it over the edge of the building. Someone walking around the block looked up and had their block knocked off. Sitting in Cell Block W he would have plenty of time to write.

Marvin was a blockhead. Carin hated him – his bunkmate sat there and listened to Jenny from the block. His agent had put a block on his calls. But hey, he didn’t have the block anymore, and diminished responsibility meant he could block in a release date on his calendar; block in a release date for his book.

He looked at the illustration of some kids ABC blocks – that simple, eh? He smiled.

 

Note To Self

He left notes everywhere. There is found sound and there is lost sound. The melodious and the disharmonic. He felt so broken and had done for a long time. He would pick up the various instruments which once upon a time had made sense, but which he now talked of in terms of investment; which he now looked at wistfully. How had his life drifted so far off the course he had imagined it following?

Did it all really tie back to one bum note? Had it all gone wrong with that one time he corpsed on stage? Maybe it was so – that was where the doubt set in; that was where he began to feel that the perfect run of playing that he had had, had come to an end, and that was an immensely sad thing. What use is a broken musician to anyone? When the edge is blunted what kind of new territory can you saw into? None. All the maps were old in that moment – there was no undiscovered country for him, and he was scared that never would be again. He had seen people in this situation who had never come back from it.

Pinned under the fridge magnet was some poor excuse for mundane magic – a regular cheer up that Chip the chipper housemate tried to float his way … it didn’t work. His other housemate Billie would sing at him; would sing tunes that he had played that she had learned especially to cheer him up; it was a nice thing for her to do but it bummed him out more than anything.

What could resurrect him? What could give him the heart that would make his tin ear disappear and his innate sense of rhythm return? He didn’t think there was a thing in the world that could do it. He was surely lost in the wilderness, and the world of music was a world away from him now.

He liked kids, and he had a new nephew so he got invited to a few kids parties because his nephew loved him. The first time they asked him to play music for the kids he refused and made excuses and was confronted by enough crestfallen looks from the parents and the children that he felt like the biggest party-pooper in the world. The second time he was asked and refused his nephew cried and his sister got really angry at him. The third time was the charm – even he couldn’t mess up Chopsticks. He had an appreciative audience, and he had fun. And that was it – that was the simple magic that got him playing again. Fun. Who would have thought it? Not him. He had never associated what he did with fun, and maybe that was the hole where the magic leaked out. The music in a child’s laughter plugged that whole, and the music came back …. he heard it again. He was inspired, and he knew what he had to hold onto. He held onto it fiercely.

The Cure For What Ails You

Some people can find more ways to fuck up than you would believe. He was a hobbled nothing now – oh, hadn’t it all been so bright! He was in the league of cure for cancer – that bright and sunny and full of possibility. And now? Now he wasn’t worth shit. He deserved it. He had to deserve it, didn’t he? For it to be happening to him there had to be some effect he was pushing into the universe? He was so unsure of himself that he was even less certain about the environment around him, and how it might be impacting upon him. He sat down at the bar and ordered the house whiskey. The guy was genuine Irish, which surprised him. Wasn’t it an odd world when being served by an Irish man in a so-called Irish Bar was enough to cause some dissonance and psychic stress. The whiskey wasn’t Irish though; it wasn’t good either – the warmth almost disguised it, but not quite. Did any of the bar staff drink here? Probably not. That wasn’t a good sign.

He was looking for some kind of job; some kind of work that a low rent scumfuck like him would be able to hold down. There were certain kinds of job that he went for and they took one look at him and they didn’t even have to ask him a question – they knew that they didn’t want him; it was all conveyed in the momentary sneer that soured their whole face. When he was being entertained by employers who were a small half-step above him in the pondscum rankings they were a little less judgmental. Why? Because they knew what it was like to be coming from where he was coming – they had visited that very location themselves only recently.

Parmenter had a bad reputation as an individual, but he was supposedly a good employer – he paid what he promised and he paid it on time, and that was good in anyone’s book. Joel sat down opposite him and when Parmenter offered a smoke he took it – the brand was Zero Skull, which he liked because they were high tar.

‘So, what’s the gig?’

‘Something noble, Galahad. I know you like the Robin Hood shit, so what I have for you, come to me from a very reliable source, is that some bastard has a cure for cancer but is holding it hostage.’

‘What, and we’re gonna break in and steal it?’

‘In one, my friend.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Eight Gates Laboratory.’

Eight Gates was notorious for the way that it dealt with people who tried to break into it, and people tried to break into it on a regular frequency. Why? Because they had things like cures for cancer held there, that was why. This couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? That a man who had once stood alongside those scientists was now given an opportunity to liberate something that would help as much as the inventions which he had failed to deliver when he had worked there. How the mighty have fallen, and how those broken crippled phoenixes might rise.

They picked him for his inside knowledge, and he did not fail to deliver. He had to admit that until he saw it – until he read the specs and the lab results on the screen he had though that they were on a wild goose chase. When he read that report though he was so happy – it was real, and the best thing was was that he discovered some small part of what he had done when he had worked here had proved useful – he may not have made the intuitive leap necessary to formulate the cure but he had surely built part of the launch platform. In that moment it was fair to say that some of the fight went out of him – that he felt a satisfaction he had never known before. As the guard moved in on him, weapons hot, his knowledge that there was a cure for cancer cured something in him that had been broken long ago. He died a happy man.

Mr Shuffle

For Bram

The cold was biting, breath in the air, making him think of the cigarettes he had given up. The romance of the thought spiced his saliva with a wonderful analogue of nicotine – fuck the vapour from the electronic dick he had to suck to get his fix … it reminded of everything else that had gone south in his life. Synthetic alcohol that gave him a half-hour kick before the government sanctioned nano-purge rendered all that wonderful buzz generating drug out of his system. How long before even the vapour was kiboshed? You had to be a fucking miracle worker to tie one in Glasgow anymore.

Man, some people were dicks; some people were dicks in private; other people were private dicks. He was the latter, wondered lately with the nicotine cravings if he was being the second to his long suffering cohabit fuck-buddy, and feared he might be becoming the first just by default.

So, what was he digging into today? What pile of shit had his assistant floated across his desk this week? He breathed into the little tube on his hand-held and the screen flashed into life.

‘Fuck the Maskbook updates, skip the Shitter-feed, and just give me the work-notes.’

A face popped up – not the fresh-faced poppet he was expecting or wanting – nope, not even close … this dude looked like he’d sell crack to kindergarteners. Who the fuck wanted this bastard found? Everyone is someone’s dad always seemed such a lame cliche but if he didn’t find something to hook his interest on then he’d be about as much use as an e-cigarette to a nicotine addict. And there he went – reach in pocket, pull out Thomas The Tank Engine’s Tiny Inadequate Penis as he had come to think of it, and puffed on it. It wasn’t working properly. Shit, maybe gum was better after all, he’d looked like a freak wearing all the patches.

He clicked the tab that came in the document about old stony face and accepted the job, got a new message that told him the money had already dropped, then got a second one that gave him a meeting place for the contact. It wasn’t far to walk – a brisk walk … how fucking jolly.

He sat down in the snug and he waited. What sat down opposite him was not what he had been expecting. His hope for some kind of cute female presence in this story, of whatever kind, seemed to be on a hiding to nothing. A bloody artificial clunked itself down – some pre-war rust-bucket that he was surprised was still working. He didn’t like it – an old man as his quarry, a meeting with an artie piece of shit; didn’t bode well; made him tink that first money drop was a fluke and the rest of the case would be as dry as a nun’s snatch.

‘So, what’s this all about?’

‘I, Mr Shuffle, am Centurion, and my owner, Mr Clavicle has gone missing, as you might say, and his daughter provided me with the funding to ensure he is found. She loves him very much.’

‘I’m sure she does. What, if I may ask, does Mr Clavicle do? If you don’t mind me saying, your appearance, and his both lead me to believe he is not necessarily kosher.’

‘Hence coming to you, Mr Shuffle, with your not so sterling reputation. That aside – his business? The finest Cuban cigars, Marlboros, and whiskey.’

‘Now, I know you have to be kidding.’

‘I haven’t used my sense of humour since before the war. Here is more pertinent data that you might need.’

He was glad to bid goodbye to the hunk of rust, and then he dug into the file. Ten seconds of synthetic alcohol buzz, a puff or two of vapour, and a vague glimmer of interest. This case should not take too long to work out. Clavicle had to be discreet – there weren’t too many places where he could talk about his wares, let alone sell them. Narrow it down further by the fact that there were not that many people with the pocket change to buy any of it. Shuffle knew a doorman at the Hilton and it would get him in long enough to speak to someone before the inertia of a shit-heel being in a rarefied atmosphere crashed into him and some unfriendly fucker showed him the door.

Gary was glad of the funds. Shuffle was glad of the Irn Bru he decided to drink instead of wasting his time for once. It cost a bit but it tasted good; gave him faith in something at least. Shawn the barman didn’t give a fuck what he said or he said it to – he was gossiping in the ten minutes before Shuffle approached him. Shuffle showed him the picture of Clavicle.

‘Oh yeah, I seen him.’

‘In here?’

‘Yeah, two nights ago with some big cheese.’

‘You have 360 cams in this place?’

‘It’s a bar, what do you think?’

So, then, the question was, how does someone pull off a deal with contraband in even this place?’

‘Can you get me a print of this guy and his guests?’

‘Sure, it’ll cost you.’

‘Doesn’t it always?’

The print was one of those pictures that is worth way more than a thousand words. Clavicle looking uncomfortable, Government Contraband Enforcer Smythe looking unctious and eager to please the third man in the picture, and who was that? Why – none other than Belsley Tincture, E-Cigarette and synth-hol magnate. He smiled. What fucking use was this data? Who was going to prosecute these bastards? It was obvious Clavicle met a sticky end.

He scanned the picture into his hand-held, dictated a long illustrative piece which he attached to it, sent one copy to Centurion and his owner’s daughter, explaining what he was doing, and one copy to Bump his editor friend. Bump would run the story as a speculation dot-the-dot provocateur piece, and it would do what it needed to do – get the right people looking in the right direction. Shuffle hoped it might sink the whole synth-hol and E-Cigarette business too.

He reached in his pocket, pulled out his least favorite thing in the world, and launched it into the cold night. Know what he was going to do? Find a pack of real cigarettes and inhale deep.

Kernel Pop

The future screams. It is not a comforting sound. Tap tap tap at the side of the head – his TV-eye has bad reception. He watches as the group scoping him to see whether he might be plunder-worthy are bringing their tech to bear on breaking through his nano-baffle. The dispersal pattern, his dress, and his general demeanour might suggest to most that he is not a vulture-worthy pick-over, but these wolves are a little smarter than your average bears.

A car pulls up in the parking lot. A Texas steps out and moves towards the building – people part and let him through. He’s holstered and a strong and silent type that invites no kind of close quarters consideration. Is he here to reload though? That’s what they are wondering. Why is he so far out of his jurisdiction? That is what they are wondering.

Pointer doesn’t like these bastards getting so close. He unleashes a low level meme-loop to crash their poke and prod routines. Is he going to get home safe? He thinks about calling Piecer Delivery whose motto is “Twelves Inches and Six Shots to Take You Home!”. He doesn’t want to have to kill anyone but he is a getting a little desperate as they follow him around.

He sets all of his weapon systems to stand-by with heat and proximity triggered decision making capabilities. This is the last time he comes out this late to the supermarket. How stupid is he? Popcorn does not balance out very well when you weight it against your life. They are prodding him and playing with his security to test its limits, but his security isn’t that stupid; it acts when it needs to.

When the right hook swings in, tiger in his tank roars and bites back harder than any of them were expecting. And then all of them are on the back foot. Too late. His defensive has gone offensive to handle this issue. He is firing heavy duty body shots at them while his locked in and locked on exo-skeleton is moving him towards home at a rapid clip.

Over his should Pointer sees Texas get in the middle of their mess, twigging immediately to what they were doing, and he cleans up. What a mess. Still, now he has his popcorn and can watch his movie in peace.