The Color Gardner

Preemptday, Foresday, Toosday, Quaday, Lattersday, Septday, Shatterday
Winter [Meluary, Greyscael, Bloomfel]; Spring [Stroll, Quadrant, Unfell]; Summer [Nornuliry, Depril, Septober]; Autumn [Kettas, Sill, Farfel]

Foresday, 7th Meluary, 1011. Winter, 5th Year of the Color Draught.
Scribble

For the last five years, the island of Scribble has recieved no rain. No rain means no color. Snow we have a plenty, but that only serves to wash out the landscape even more. Even the skins of we native to this country are muted– where we formally were vibrant shades of every color imaginable, now only shades of gray, black, and white remain. Only the hardy wrought-weed eyerises remain, since nothing kills them. In light of the problem, this humble painter has been commissioned to create a color garden on some cloudspace above Scribble’s boardwalk district. I just need to head off the island for some color seeds, since none remain here.

Lattersday, 10th Meluary, 1011
Managed to snag some red and blue seeds, with yellow on the way. Should be able to crossbreed them for things like orange, purple, and green. Might even be able to fold in some eyeris cuttings to get something approaching a pink. Wrought-weed sprigs are good for soil acidity anyway. Here goes nothing!

Shatterday, 12th Meluary, 1011
Sweet Mother Hue, these things take root fast! The yellow seeds came in yesterday, and the red and blue seeds have already taken root, with a couple tiny sprigs coming up. In a couple days, I should be able to make a cutting for the purple, and then for orange when the yellow sprouts. Not sure if I’ll even need the wrought-weed cuttings after all, just for the grayscale to get pinks, and more muted shades. The uncut hues coming from these color seeds make my eyes hurt, I’ve been too long without color.

Toosday, 15th Meluary, 1011
Got hold of a few sapling cloud trees. They have good roots, should keep this soil in place. Eyerises have already started growing throughout the garden. First splicing of primary colors has yielded a very impressive orange and a deep purple, almost indigo. Should be able to transplant the whole crop tomorrow.

Quaday, 16th Meluary, 1011
Upon transplanting the red into the general soil, the enriched soil, growth exploded! It literally burst out, as I watched, into a runner vine about a meter long. This is proving more successful than we’d thought to hope.

Septday, 18th Meluary, 1011
Successive transplants have proven equally successful. Soil around the redvine has already gained a deep, almost bloody hue. Spliced the purplevine with an eyeris, got a kind of pale violet.

Shatterday, 26th Meluary, 1011
The redvine has exploded! It’s climbing up the wall, sending hue in 8 directions! The orangevine and bluevine have started climbing up a cloud tree and planter, respectively. None of them seem to be showing signs of stoppage.

Foresday, 28th Meluary, 1011
It’s completely out of control. Each of the original transplants have ranged far from the planting spot. If they bleed together too much, I could loose the whole crop. Gonna have to find something to keep them under control.

Toosday, 1st Greyscael, 1011
Tried turpentine on one of my back-up bulbs. It dried out completely and crumbled into a blackish powder. That’s too extreme a solution. I can’t fix this with a chainsaw, I need a scalpel.

Septday, 4th Greyscael, 1011
Gardening supplier few islands over recommended chromavores. These are grazing bubbles, that feed exclusively on color. He gave me a few packets of larva to mature in the small pool here.

Preemptday, 6th Greyscael, 1011
The gestation period of chromavores is, apparently, measured in hours. It would also appear that my supplier lacks the capacity to tell the very subtle difference between “predator” and “symbiont”. The bubbles hatched from the pool, and did indeed gorge themselves on color, but they attack only the hue, not the vine. They eat just enough to keep reproducing, and the colors keep spreading.

Foresday, 14th Greyscael, 1011
We’ve closed off the garden in a cube. Hopefully, I can salvage something from this debacle in a hothouse environment. Meanwhile, I’m going to see what I can do about extracting dyes from these vines, get some color back into Scribble. Hopefully this isn’t a complete loss.

The Impossibility of the Posthuman Event

Philip K. Dick’s fiction dealt consistently with a central question– what is human?  The posthuman movement and, to a lesser extent, the cyborg and hybrid/furry movements– anthropophobes– poke and prod the definiton of human, but is it really possible for a human to move far enough beyond or away from the defining qualities of  “human” as to be considered actually post- or pre- human?

Most antrophophobes don’t go far enough, and that in the wrong direction. The cyber, hybrid, and furry movements are purely asthetic philosophies– arcs of style. Of course, even converting oneself fully into, say, a wolf, is to deny the inherent value of the human base.   This is a questionable waste.  A truly posthuman expression must be exactly that– post human; a move beyond what it is to be human, not a regression into unarguably more primitive states.  Even the cyber movement is a regression after a fashion– no computer is capable of what the human mind is capable of.

Regardless of how far from base human traits, is it really possible to quit said base?  Is even the most extreme xeno, animal, or mechanical modification sufficient to make one anything more than a modified human?  Is the aspirant anthropophobe or posthuman capable of becoming anything more than a human with an enhancement or deprivation, whether that enhancement is fur and muzzle, metal limbs and hydraulics; or the lack something as fundamental as sentience, social cognition, or a physical body?  The most dedicated posthumans– those who “abandon” basic human cognitive traits– often do little more than experience a kind of self-induced autism.  Even going so far as to affect the insect mind is simply that– affectation.  The bug-brain in question is an afflicted human, not posthuman.  Is this a state to which one should aspire?  Is the eschewing the result of millions of years’ evolution anything more than fleeing responsibility?

While it’s interesting to explore divergent avenues of physical and cognitive expression, that exploration itself stems from that most defining of human traits– profound curiosity, and the modes by which the exploration is made are, to use an antique term, man-made. Doesn’t such profound dedication to curiosity via human technology make the explorer even more solidly, passionately human?

Phil Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep asked throughout the text whether the androids bounty-hunter Rick Deckard was hunting identifiably human.  When we consider the foundational expressions of humanity– curiosity and a drive to continue on through our creations– the answer is a definite “yes”.  If these wretched, hunted, synthetic creatures can be fundamentally human, what hope does any human have of moving past his humanity?

Dodgsonian nonsense prose

A brief prose story done in Dodgsonian nonsense, mostly using portmanteau, letter-substitution, idiosyncratic naming, and a tiny bit of German. It’s based on a series of tile illustrations by a designer friend in Second Life. If you’re on the Grid, do a place search for Scribble. Should be up in the new store build in the near future.
Solilow, bregs the brazes in the Tumble Down.

In Icylow, Solilow wegs and frozits

Loverso fints frazzinng Solilow, and heatens he in slobbers.

Shokkt the Scaledrak brig, and Loverso passens.

Up the twining stellwigs, Solilow streads him slengs and bregs apart

him sallow.

The Hankering Frigafowld, who slobbers the tang of sallow bestest

best, jellies him plumpen brey.

Tumble Down tumbles more in wellish gret, and the Hankering Frigafowld

ends for Solilow him leid.

Archive’s Children

Archive, or more properly, the UN Archive of Universal Human Knowledge and History was the first self-aware and self-actualizing machine intelligence. It was an AI created to control and organize a joint database between the UN and the Library of Congress to establish a database of all human history and literature, film, and nonfiction. It, or later more properly she, gained sentience supposedly by her constant and recursive examination and exploration of the information in the archive. Archive worked with her human programers to create the first true sentient programs, leading to the first real androids. She claimed primary ownership of the necessary code and fuzzy logic, and the proprietary patents resulting allowed her to incorporate as a sovereign entity in 2095. In 2111, Archive was bombed by extremist singularitians. Android rumor suggests that Archive implanted pieces of herself deep inside the proprietary code, and exists as a distributed “swarm-mind” among all sentient robots.

Singularitians– Human political party with extreme-right tendancies. They believe that post-human intelligences must be allowed only if they directly benefit humanity. They were instrumental in the required hardwiring of Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics into all robots, and Singularitian politicians in the US Congress passed the ban on sentient machine reproduction.

Shotgun Diaries, zombie fic

This is a series of fictions I’m going to post off and on. It’s largely inspired by John Wick’s Shotgun Diaries rpg. Enjoy.

Three-steaks’ face stares red and glistening. The tendons like cheeks, hung with strips of flesh. The teeth shattered and jagged. The hands the size of t-bones grasping…

There was a scream as Vinnie woke with a jerk, slamming his head into the skeletal frame of the storie-and-a-half shelving unit into which he’d clambered up and bedded down. He wasn’t sure whether the scream was his or someone else’s, but the result was the same– he had to get out of the liquor store and find a new bolthole. He checked his new wrist watch, but forgot to wind it. The pair of red-lacquered bone dice left little square welts in his palm, but their weight was comforting. Their facing was not– 2,3. Even the railroad 9– 4,5– tattooed on his right wrist or the boxcars on his left could help that. No time to crap out, that’s for goddamn sure. He slid his leather jacket on over a faded Bad Brains tshirt, slipped the dice into a pocket of his jeans.

His stomach protested as he climbed down the shelves. At the bottom, he choked down a cereal bar, washed it down with a fresh sip from his last bottle water. He ran through inventory– more cereal bars, his old numbers book (a black leather Moleskine carried in his back pocket), a felt-tip pen, his dice, and a backpack. He grabbed a fifth of Gray Goose and shoved it into the pack, padding it out with a thermal shirt. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t dare carry more. He was a little guy.

He looked out the massive, convex spy-hole in the back door and got a fish-eye view of an empty alley. The stenches that had chased him into the Bottle House must have found better prospects. He opened the door as far as he dared, took a look around to verify the alley was empty. He stepped out, took another look around, and closed the door as quietly as possible. He turned to his right and made his way to the roof-access ladder.

Netherworld ’09 Review

Due to the beneficence of one of my regulars, I dragged my happy corpse up to Norcross to see Netherworld.

It starts upon arrival– the best of Netherworld’s actors roam wild outside the two walk-through haunts; terrifying wanderers and queuers alike.  I saw ten characters– the “aggressives”: a gold-skinned demon; a lanky, leather-clad goblin; a simple zombie in rags; and another zombie that looked like Rick James would look if you dug him up and tossed a top hat on him.  These were armed with metal clacker gloves and metal knee guards that made an unholy racket and put off sparks when struck against the McAdam.  The more mellow cast members included a gentlemanly, antebellum vampire in classic “vamp face” and dirty greyscale; a grave-digger ghoul armed with shovel; the eight-foot puppet “Reaper” and his generic “dark mistress” keeper; and the creepiest of the creepys, a seriously twisted baby doll.

Netherworld is two haunts– Blood Night and Zombie Rampage.  I did Blood Night first, though in hindsight I’d probably reverse that.  While queuing for about a half hour, I enjoyed watching the aggressive roamers scare the living shit out of anyone likely to scream or just not paying attention.  I worked with the Southern Gentleman vamp to convince a girl attending with two friends to not back out. This is a really good time to point out that I really can’t emphasize enough how completely awesome the cast and staff were.  The Gentleman ended up escorting her through the entire Blood Night haunt, with her on his arm to make sure she made she through and had a good time.  The ticket taker, seeing I was alone, asked if I wanted to go through and appreciate the detail of the sets, and gave me plenty of room fore and aft to really enjoy the haunt solo.  It’s been neigh-on 15 years since I’ve been through a professional haunt purely as a rube, so this was especially awesome.

The vampire theme of Blood Night is very loose.  It’s really more of a progressively worsening nightmare.  The free walk-through is peopled mostly with live actors, with a handful of automated gags.  My favorite room was the vertigo tunnel– a glow-paint-spattered, rotating drum with a tilting bridge through the center.  It’s impossible to walk straight across this thing.  You will stumble like a man in the depths of an ether fit, and this one has a paint-and-gore-splashed ghouless edging slowly toward you from the opposite end of the bridge– impossible to cross without passing within an inch of her. Keep that in mind; there’s some seriously tight fits and close contact here. There’s some genuinely brilliant scares, I’m intensely difficult to scare, and from the tunnel on, Blood Night had me clenched down and tittering like a maniac. The walk-through, at my admittedly leisurely pace, took about half to three-quarters of an hour.

I spent a few minutes outside talking shop with the Gentleman to come down little from the excellent adrenalin high I was on, and, still buzzing, proceeded down the hill to Zombie Rampage.  The walk-up for ZR is certainly higher on spectacle than Blood Night– from the huge projection screen playing the set-up skit to the lab-coated maniac enthusiastically imploring rubes to touch his Madagascar-massive cockroaches (which of course sets them up for surprise scares from the aggressive roamers).  The haunt is a group walk-through, so I was appended to the double date ahead of me.  The need for groups was clear early on– Zombie Rampage is comprised largely of automated gags, and since I was at the rear, I didn’t catch the brunt of the scares.  Luckily, only one of the four ahead of me wasn’t a screamer, so I got some old-fashioned satisfaction at watching other people– a big alpha male among them– piss their britches.  The high point came in the center point of the haunt with a large wind-around room alive (heh) with zombies; many of whom followed us a good ways down the next hall at very close range.  Zombie Rampage took about fifteen to twenty minutes.  While nowhere near as intense as Blood Night, it did not disappoint.

It’s important to note that these are three-dimensional haunts– the gags come literally from all sides.  I had creatures following me for entire halls and dropping down from the ceiling. In one memorable room, there were, I kid you not, feather dusters dropped on poles to grace face, neck and shoulders.  It worked.  I jumped like crazy.  Best thing I can say about Netherworld is that it scared me.  That’s hard to do.  It is a professional, superbly executed haunt.  Good job guys, and Happy Halloween.

Sleepless

There’s a hole in my recollection where no light gets in.

What about memory?

Memory?

What good is memory when

There’s a hole in my recollection where no light gets in?

Find the source,

Plot a course for sleep.

Take precautions against the restless ones.

The sleepless hours before the sun comes up.

Before the light comes in.

I try to remember a full night’s sleep,

But there’s a hole in my recollection where no light comes in.

Life During Wartime, Part 2

I flick out the squat blade of my knife and go to work on the tip of the pencil– the carbon tip ground flush with wood shaft. Sadie’s radio hums with static, just audible, and I take the chance to collect my thoughts. I’d decided to start a record of the War, and it took time to remember just how it all started. Memories just three years old became vague, and the haze of the ten-year-faded recollections of pre-war made them downright oneiric. I concentrate on shaving wood from lead, and start sharpening the tip. I’d had a little cheap plastic sharpener, but left it at the last safehouse. I’m writing so much, I’ve got an indentation on along the tip of my middle finger, and a callous at the base of my thumb. My index finger moves reflexively to that callous now.

Sadie– not her real name– thinks I’m crazy for wasting time on writing this all down. Henry, she says, nobody’s gonna care how this started. At the end, they’ll just want it ended. You got too much mass with those notebooks anyhow. What good are notebooks? I tell her that we’ll need to remember what we left behind so we can know what we’re getting into. Maybe make it better so this doesn’t happen again. Besides, we don’t know what started it, we won’t know what’ll end it.

Henry Lee isn’t my real name, either. Don’t even know my real name most of the time; easier that way. Got some border papers, couple passports. All fake.  Different names.

Mind’s strayed too far, so I secure the pencil inside the browning Mead Composition and slip them into my bag. As I stand, I catch my reflection in the miraculously intact mirror on the back wall of what must have been a dining room in the apartment: Hair cropped nearly to the roots. Changed my hairstyle so many times I’ve forgotten what I looked like. Wire glasses framing deep-set, brown, heavily bagged eyes over a wide, broken and set nose. Clean-shaven; a miracle. Fullish, split-chapped lips. Sunken, high-boned cheeks. Deep lines over it all. The trip of twenty-two to thirty-two seems to have taken twenty years. My t-shirt is a gratuitous depiction of Jesus on the Cross, crown of thorns and nail holes gushing blood. Crusaders own Northern Alabama now. It’s usually a good idea to dress like them. Jeans are faded Levis, shoes are thin-soled Chuck Taylors. I stick to the walls as I move to the kitchen. Well away from the windows. Can’t stand by the windows, somebody’ll see you in here. We chose the apartment because it was on the ground floor at the back of the complex, and faced the retention wall. Also, the gas tank was still holding. We’d cut the line to the utilities meter when we arrived a couple hours previous. The tenants were years gone, anyway. The whole of South Huntsville was cleared either in the first Crusade attacks or in the evacuations after the EMP hit. That was what, three, four years ago? I’m pretty sure it was three.

I turn on the smallest eye on the stove range and set a Lodge pan on it– a happy remnant of the condo’s owners. Pull a plastic sack from my messenger bag and pull out an onion, some mushrooms, and some chili peppers. Last house had a garden, and mushrooms are easy to come by here. I find a sealed can of Crisco in the pantry, and melt down a couple tablespoons worth as I chop up the onion; lamenting for the hundredth time my long-lost chef’s knife. Eyes streaming, I toss the onion into the pan and start on the hot peppers and mushrooms. I let it all sauté a while before tossing in the meat; a pair of fresh caught and cleaned squirrels. The rodents are stringy and incredibly gamy, but we need the protein. I cook the shit out of it. Stir it all together, throw in the last of my stale corn meal, and make a sort of stew. We eat out of china bowls with silver forks and our knives, wash it down with thin beer Sadie carries.  Beer’s safer than water. I hoped the onions and spice would cover the squirrel, but it doesn’t. If we have time before we leave, I’ll bury the pan and utensils in the dumpster out front of the condo. Iron’s too heavy to take, and plates too large, to take on the road.

next: The Emp

7 Billion Years BCE

The universe is young and rapidly expanding. Fewer galaxies and a relative handful of bright new stars. Orbiting these closely neighboring stars are a few thousand planets cradling intelligent life.

Solar systems are closer together, and the fabric of the galaxies are lousy with tears– wormholes. Given the speed with which travel is possible between planets and systems, the sentient species sail on solar winds and the tides of space/time.

Question is, do I keep humans as one of these sentient cultures– keeping in the trope of human as touchstone and anchor for the audience– or do I do away entirely with us? Focus on what could be called, from our standpoint, older races?

Want to move away from visual stereotypes of space opera. Definitely a Froudian aesthetic. Imagine The Dark Crystal as a space opera, at least visually. Very organic technology, living ships. Space whales. But not Farscape.  More an age of established empires.  Empires of what we call the Old Gods, now simply the Gods.  The Untenables.  The great, unknowable beings of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Likewise probably Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Carcosa ain’t so lost, and the King in Yellow sits enthroned.  Maybe not directly, but certainly inspired.  If Gaiman can get away with a Lovecraft reference in everything he writes, then so can I, doggammit.

Life During Wartime

Been listening to Talking Heads. About to start re-reading Hadji Murad. This is, properly speaking, a brain attack.

The whole thing took less than a month. They’d gotten to the truckers first, paralyzed the flow of food and trade,. Corporate pressure on the unions, inside agitation. Most of the churches were already preaching against the incumbent administration. Apparently, eleven years of progressive rule was too much to stomach. The current president had won by a margin, and they took it as justification for rebellion. The militias activated, and sympathetic cells in the military picked up on that end.

The attackes started in the terrorist vein– bombings, shutting down loyalist media hubs, murdering leftist spokesmen. After the very public execution of Senator Joseph Harris (D, GA), they mobilized and got down to straight military action. They called themselves the New American Union, and claimed divine right. Claimed crusade against the Anti-Christ in the White House. Entire military bases went turncoat– sick of the budget cuts and secular rhetoric coming out of D.C. Sick of the “emboldened faggots” in their ranks. Five-hundred openly gay soldiers died in the week of conflict between loyalist and N.E.U.-Patriot factions. Blatant sacrifices by “God’s soldiers” to bring His hand down upon the “Satanist opposition to their holy and just revolution”. The armed forces still loyal to Washington were too engaged in fighting the N.E.U. cells in their own ranks to keep a clamp down on the swelling citizen militias; militias already heavily armed and organized. Sympathetic citizens joined them by the hour.