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.

Anti-healthcare reform People

Your tactics are fucking disgusting and treasonous. Fuck you.

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.

Brain attack

It just sort of happened.  The gun was still smoking, and cordite burned his nostrils.  At least, what he assumed was cordite, it’s not as if he’d ever fired a fucking pistol before.  He stared down at the heavy, smoldering thing in his hand– tarnished silver, black where the grip met his hands and in the moving parts, the hammer, the trigger.  Oh Christ, the trigger.  When I hold you in my arms, and  I feel my finger on your trigger, I know nobody can do me no harm… What a load of bullshit.  There’d be plenty of harm, and more to go around.  Of course, he’d be the only one catching that heat, because there was no one else to take it.  He’d acted alone, that was absolutely true.  It wasn’t as if he’d had a motive, even.  Picked up the gun, and decided to see what it would do to someone.  The curiosity was overwhelming.  Curiosity killed this fucking guy right here.

Now it was just a matter of handling the body.  The two-hundred and eighty-seven pounds of human compost.  He was very afraid he might need an axe.

Thomas Fugit

First off, a disclaimer.  A Google search shows several time-traveling adventurers named “Thomas Fugit”. This Tom is in no way associated or inspired by any of these others, the pun is just too good to pass up.  The combination of electricity-based power (Thomas Edison) and time travel, or fleeing through time, a spin on the phrase Tempus Fugit.  It really works well for this concept.

Thomas Fugit is an electrokinetic.  That is, he controls the eletrical by thought alone.  He doesn’t actually create electricity whole cloth per se, but rather controls the eletricity around him.  This source can be static electricity, 60Hz mains currents, or even the eletrical fields generated by living organisms.

But that’s not even the cool part.

Fugit is also a time traveller.  His ability to skip through time is enabled through a device he recieved from Nikola Tesla– the Temporal Capacitor.  The TC is composed of two pieces– a pocket-watch item of incredible complexity that detects weak points in space/time known as rifts, and an iron-core copper rod nicknamed the Lighting Rod that amplifies Fugit’s power and focuses it into a rift in order to blast it open.  This process is not subtle.  Tesla was unable to make the Capacitor practical, as it requires a ridiculous amount of electrical power to operate.  Being a human dynamo, Thomas Fugit is capable of using the Temporal Capacitor.

Fugit is an adventurer, meaning essentially that he is equal parts thief, crime-fighter, conman, and explorer.  He dresses as one might expect a time traveler to dress– an amalgum of clothes from different eras.  He’s currently quite fond of slim, custom, two-button suits in gray or blue, embroidered waistcoats, Doc Martins, and a snap-brim fedora.

Max Silver pt 2

The Skin, Border Net, Skin Net. The augmented reality network stretched over normal reality.

Borderware. Software involving the Skin, especially the core Graphical User Interfaces.

The plastic hut of the bus stop is acned with epoxy-stuck RFID tags, that would, were Max plugged-in, appear to him as anything from glowing, animated graffitti to full movies projected in three dimensions.  Even the faceless shells jostling around him project their little personal networks onto the Skin.  As it is, Max is lind to all this, and without the panoply of a Bordeware GUI orbiting him, Max is good as invisible to the Crowd.

CP setting brainstorms

2155, 15 billion population. In the City-State of Atlanta, 75 thousand per the square mile. The result of medical advancements in cancer and autoimmune disease treatments and cures. Likewise gene-washing. Seventy years of relative peace. Made-to-order offspring. Age reversal. Human cloning. That old bugaboo, the replicant. Most of the “organic android” sent, as Dick foretold, into the Vastness for exploration and colonization. Some are unfit for transport, and remain on Earth. They are not welcome. Defective replicants constitute a gross 2% of human population, and are considered an unwanted strain on our resources. They live mostly in squalor, third-class citizens. Untouchable.

Gene-washing and genetic tampering in general have brought other legacies. We have unwittingly unlocked the full capacity of mind-over-matter. Telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, clairvoyance, and even pre- and post-cognition. These abilities come at a price– overwhelming power and physical illness. Untreatable strains of the old cancers and autoimmune diseases unfailingly accompany these “blessings”. Psychics, like replicants, are considered in many ways anathema. They often exhibit very little control over their abilities, and express symptoms of diseases that remind people far too well of the vicissitudes of the past.

With conflict between governments at a minimum, most violence is at street-level. When one considers that 75% of the population lives well below the poverty line ($150,000/annum after inflation), life at ground-level is harsh, dirty, and mean. Not because the poor are naturally corse and violent, but because resources are in no way plentiful. While healthcare is at an all time peak of availability comparatively, the population spike brings us back to the standards of the late Twentieth Century. Even so, few people die of natural causes any more. The technical average life span is 150 years, but few people at ground level see that.

The super-wealthy .5% live, at the very least, in mile-high tower-cities. 1% of the rich live in sky hooks– incredible sky cities in low orbit, tethered to Earth by space elevators. There’s is the life promised by the most optimistic of the speculative fiction of the last 200 years.

New Egg

Now, this is entirely anecdotal, but apparently beloved Internet retail outlet New Egg is involved in the domination of Tibet. Seriously disconcerting, this. Terribly like Wal-Mart and supposedly Whole Foods. Big Bad Corp. for the bottom dollar, even so far as squeezing pacifists. Protection money? Is this extortion?
Just capitalism. Effective functioning in the Free Market. Sweet nimble amebas, how long will it last?

WordPress

Have to say I love the new WordPress. Used it back in the days of straight ftp, and that was, comparatively, hellish. Been playing with plugins and FeedBurner for the last hour.