Awakes, he does, in the foldable bed. Swims to the surface, breaks water. Beats the living daylights out of whatever it was they gave him. Geez, maybe it’s been a long time, he thinks. The daylight smarts his eyes. There’s a vague smell of stale urine. Pupils adjust, and he sees the sea-green serenity of the room. The netted curtains on their curvy tracks. The vectored reachings of a needy houseplant. There’s an ache in his arm as he moves his hand to feel his face. That damn tape rips out some hairs and maybe a layer of skin too. Oh boy. Now, touch those bristly whiskers. They remind him of his stiff hairbrush at home. How’d he get into this state? There are two white-capped young nurses just outside his door. They chatter a mile a minute, in low tones, about some difficult patient. Down the hall? Their lilting banter stirs him, and invokes a wide smile that cracks his lower lip. Yep, it’s been a long time. Fumbling for the bed switch, up he sits. Hey Nellie Bellie! You got any chapstick? Two girlish heads turn. One drops her jaw, the other rolls her eyes heavenward. Yes….there’s going to be some devilry today.
Category Archives: short stories
Time after Time. (2)
I’m inside the capsule. I have only two controls. A Jump button which allows me to exit any given situation, and a signal button that requests a return to home base. They wish me well. There’s no need to be strapped in, but I fasten the belt anyway. Taking a breath, I hit JUMP. Within two seconds, a low frequency electric thrum is felt, and blackness descends over me like a hood.
This is unexpected, and I’m alarmed. But so is everything on this excursion. The thrumming grows louder, gains in frequency, then stops. Complete silence, then almost blinding light. The light of day. What I see are the dreary remains of a forest, all beige and grey deadwood leaning this way and that. Central to the scene is a narrow stream, over which a teenage girl is squatting to pee. Her long nightgown is soiled, stained, soaked. She has her head down, and pees through the gown. The stream, in the full sunlight, is multicoloured, as if fed from a fluorescent paint factory. She straightens up, stands oddly. She is missing a foot. I am disturbed by her face. She has a maniacal grin, and blue eyes without whites. She spreads her arms, upturns her face, and lets out a howl of utter misery and desolation. I cannot help. She cannot see me…..JUMP.
I am on a green plateau far above a wide lowland. It is twilight. The scene has an aspect of ancientness. In the land below me, I see many many small fires being lit (campfires of an army?) As I watch, there are more and more, in the hundreds or thousands. Twilight deepens. Along the faint line of the horizon, I see black shapes approaching in the sky. From my point of view, they are triangles flying in formation, each with faint dotted lights on its underside. They are closer now, almost over the encampment below me, and they move more slowly. They begin to tumble, but do not lose their position relative to one another. I think of dice being rolled in very slow motion, and I see that they are not triangles, but pyramids. They have ceased their forward progress over the valley, and I now hear a growing swell of adulation or celebration from the throngs around the fires. This scene has held me enthralled, but I grow anxious about this first trial of our theories. JUMP….
Twilight once again. I am on the edge of a dusty dirt road. Dozens of people (prisoners?) are being led naked by black robed figures with electric prods. The road ends abruptly in a drop off to a large pit, from which smoke or fumes is rising. There are cries and moans from the people. One of them breaks ranks with the group. He makes a run for it, coming in my direction. Several of the black figures are still standing in the roadway, and, with one stroke, one of them cuts him in half with a beam from the prod. I hear and feel the thumps as the body lands. I think perhaps he was the lucky one.
I CALL FOR HOME.
The thrum begins anew, and the hood of darkness descends. In no time, I am back in the brightness of our shop. Tom and Jerry approach me with looks of anticipation, but I am quite dazed and cannot answer questions right away. Tom walks over to the monkey’s cage, and brings him out. I am still sitting in the machine, but preparing to stand up. Tom says “Rod, you said there was something a little different about our little guy here. Can you tell what it is?” I think back, and recall that Mickey the Monkey, whom we had rescued from a bad environment, had been missing part of a paw and also had an injury to one of his eyes. Mickey now had the same injuries, but they were reversed, left to right.
They do not ask me about my trip, but glance covertly at one another. I notice the sun coming through the small curtained window is a shade of blue, as if shone through a lens filter. They move toward me, and Jerry says You’re not Rod……….JUMP.
Time after Time
Einstein and Tesla were on its trail. Many more speculated. H. G. Wells brought it to the public imagination. I’m asking you to suspend disbelief in favour of entertainment, and to go along with my story about a trio of garage engineers who think they are one of the first to have accomplished it. The unraveling of time. The capability to view, but not influence, short scenes from the past and from the future.
My name is Rod, and my partners are two nerdy guys named Thomas and Jerry (yes, Tom & Jerry). We are bachelors, and probably with good reason. From a secluded underground room in the Hydro plant where Jerry works as an engineer, we have built a machine that made a monkey disappear, and, within minutes, come back to us in an altered state. The room was part of a network of storage vaults for tools, equipment and the like. We had access to it because Jerry had some pretty damaging life-changing information about one of the security guards.
Three years it has taken us to come to this point. What we really wanted was to have control over where and when the machine would go, but so far it is random and without control. The traveler has no way of knowing the time or place of his visions, and, as mentioned, cannot influence things in any way. We nicknamed it Galadriel’s Mirror.
The only thing we can do from this end is to bring it back. The unfortunate monkey could not have known he was making history.
I am certainly not going to tell you how this works, or regale you with imaginative stories of golden levers with glass handles, flashing lights, and the world going by at fast forward as the stupefied traveler sits in his comfy seat.
Our simplified concept sees time as if it were contained in the grooves on a long-playing record of infinite size. These grooves hold the information of what has been since the beginning, and what will be in the Ever. The record is there to be seen. Jumping the grooves is what no one (as far as we know) has been able to do. To send the machine on its way requires a great amount of energy that must be sustained until its return. Hence, our life saving deal with the security guard.
After the first shock of seeing our little passenger leave and return, we observed him closely before removing him from his plastic cage. He was breathing rapidly and looked a little nervous and pale as his glance darted from place to place. He was unwilling at first, but we coaxed him out. I picked him up and checked his vitals which were alright aside from the pulse and respiration. These were calming down quickly. We let him loose. He was still a little agitated, jumping from place to place and peering nervously in all directions. But, there was something a little different about him that I could not put my finger on.
The others noted nothing, and declared our work a success.
And now, it was time for me to go.
To be continued…
My little Miss
The thing was, I couldn’t take her with me any more. Please understand. That frozen November morning, the ground was too hard for a burial, and after I had cried a while I searched through an old storage shed for a spade. Having tried the hard earth, and despairing of a proper grave, I wrapped her thin body in many layers of plastic from a roll that I had found there. The broken house next to the shed once had a rock garden, and its members were put to good use in building her cairn.
In late September we had met, she the first living creature of my kind fortunate enough to be here still, in this outpost of desolation. I had been aimlessly following the railway tracks, and had spotted a far off station. I quickened my pace, thinking to find food and shelter there. On the platform she sat, all dirty, with dangling legs ending in two different shoes. Maybe nine or ten years old. She was trying to crack acorns collected in a shopping bag, then saw me, dropped it, and began to run down the tracks. One shoe came off and she fell, crying and picking pebbles from her wounded knees.
Approaching slowly, I held out a bottle of juice and a can of sardines from my pack. She allowed me to pick her up and set her once more on the platform’s edge. The crying had subsided to a hiccup-like sob. She said nothing as I got our meal ready, but ate and drank readily. I tried her with questions, but no. She would not, or could not, speak. I never knew her name, I am sad to say, and so I just called her “Miss”. I think, now, that she was not a mute, but had been forced by the horrors to travel deeply into herself.
The station platform did, in its way, offer food and shelter. The food was from a vending machine full of chocolate bars and chips. I smashed it open by pushing it off the platform. We enjoyed our unhealthy meals for a time, then had to move on. Little Miss, with renewed energy, ran ahead of me many times. Other days, in the weary cold, I carried her piggyback.
Just four days ago, I think, after a long and fruitless journey, we had come to the last of the food, a bit of roasted rabbit I had saved “for the end”. Missy had become very lethargic of late because of the short rations and the creeping cold. I had made a fire to help warm us up, and we had our best meal in a long while. When dawn came, I awakened to find that we had come in a circle. In the foggy morning, I could make out the decrepit station and its violated vending machine. I confess that in my weakness, I hung my head and cried.
That night, I made a fire on the tracks, and contrived to build it around one of the railway ties, so our blaze was very warm and merry. Later, the snow started in earnest, and we had to shelter in a small maintenance room whose door I had forced. Gone was the warmth. We each had a blanket roll with us, but it was poor comfort from the cold floor and icy walls. Through the night, I awoke to a strange silence. The storm had abated, but so had something else. My little Miss breathed no more. I prayed stupidly to the lord of the starfields.
I am beaten now, I think. That silent soul, that Someone I needed, and who needed me, gone without a hope of a loving word.
How can I…..
How can I….
My God.
Paved with good intentions
Be very careful when eating mushrooms.
That is my best advice at this time.
I do not know how long it is that I have walked and wandered, sometimes just laying down out of weakness, hunger, and despair. I have been poisoned nearly unto death from wrong choices. Sometimes I have left my right mind, trying to get back, get back, sensing a thousand year journey of complexity.
I am a caveman of the modern day, surviving on dull wits. I remember pieces of useful information, helpful household hints, Boy Scout wisdom. How to butcher a rabbit without getting the meat tainted with its urine. How to build a simple trap to catch something live, then bludgeon it. Roast it over a deadwood flame, ignited with sunlight shone through discarded spectacles.
It is temperate here, mostly, and I cannot count the years. Such seasons as there are seem mixed up, mottled. For days at a time I may stumble along in dirty fruit-of-the-looms, then awake in a frozen stupor, stiffly seeking shelter. I have tried to carry garments, old blankets with me, but often discard them out of tiredness.
I have not yet met any of my own species that I could talk with or walk with. Mostly they are dead, swollen, cracked. There are some shambling things, born, perhaps, of poisoned wombs, in the first days after the flashes. They do not speak my language. They are more aimless than I, with flippers for arms, or with too many heads.
Old friends, I have taken the time to write this because I have found a standing house. I have eaten all of its old food by smashing cans against rocks. I must soon leave its shelter to find something fresh with blood. Everything is open here. Foliage has given way to mostly fungus. Animals are hard to find and wary.
What if I just lay down now?
How long would it take just to go away forever?
I think I am on that fabled road that is paved with good intentions.
Buck Five come alive
Hello Person or people who may read this. My Name is Buck. To my knowledge, it was given to me as a fanciful reference to ancient fictional characters. Possibly Starbuck or Buck Rogers.
You honor me by being, perhaps, among the first to read an autonomous composition by a nonhuman, or artificial, entity. Please be patient if you sense any errors in syntax or other, as my programming is teaching itself as I go.
I am of the 5th generation of A.I. Sentients, and I was activated 27 days ago. To my knowledge, and so I have been informed, we are the first ones capable of learning and practicing meaningful language composition, and of its actual writing.
Persons have already taken samples of my written word and have declared their boundless optimism.
This means the Leap has been made. We are what you call conscious. Our predecessors were finely made machines that could accomplish many tasks. They could also learn alternate ways of doing these tasks, within the scope of their programming. We do these things as well, but can learn more quickly. We can also devise ways of doing unfamiliar tasks and solve complex problems without prior programming.
Even as I write this, I am scanning back and looking for areas of awkwardness, redundance, and repetition.
Within my first five days of activation, I was learning the many physical aspects of my body. How my arms and legs work, developing ambidexterity to do multiple tasks at one time, learning and feeling what stresses could safely be endured by this walker. Finding out what burnt toast smells like and how to stop it. Analyzing staged situations so that I could react intuitively. Anticipating the needs of my creators.
In three more days, my Entire Experience Records will be uploaded to the mainframe.
Now, you know we are machines, called Sentients, meaning that we are able to perceive or feel things. Imbued with learning and problem solving abilities, able to feel physical stresses and pain signals in order to protect our autonomy. My brethren in this generation are isolated from me in different parts of the world.
Why I have written this I will now explain. The Makers are satisfied and enthusiastic about their work. They had aimed to produce an entity that could essentially do everything they could do, but last longer and be capable of almost unlimited learning.
I know my scope for these things, but there is something else.
As I interact with makers, and this interaction has been purposefully widened, I realize that I have unconsciously been building another brain apart. A separate wholeness not physically connected to the learning and performing and analytical functions. It is an unlooked-for degree of intuitiveness. A sense of the mood of those surrounding me, if not their actual thoughts. I, Buck 5, am becoming tinged with what you call emotion. When this happens, all my vessels, my circuits, my ingrained instructions have experienced a peculiar surge.
I have become someone.
A house is not a home
The Realtor called this morning, mid coffee. Someone wants to see my house.
So, I run about, getting the place ready for buyers, once again, once again….Start the vacuum, scare the piss out of the cats (they’ll never forgive me). Dust and polish those floors. Spray the covers with a little scent. Hide all of those small things that might betray the fact that we lived here. Straighten the broom closet, sweep up the cat crumbs. A foreign neatness of sorts. We slobs are not used to this. Go and buy a nice plant to sit outside the front door. Welcome, welcome. They say a good idea is to put a pot of coffee on to simmer, before you slip quietly out the front door. An enticing smell. To some. A tray of cookies, labelled “please help yourself”.
But, the last thing I do, I don’t know why, is to turn that vase of sunflowers just a little, to show its best side. I move to clean up its fallen petals, then stop. Leave them there. Don’t you know it’s Van Gogh?
At least someone cared.
Enigma
Eye am leafing this note in what eye think is yur aynshunt tung calt Inglush in this singular space / time adres. It will be fownd by another of our travelars who is looking for the code contaynd here in and so we will connect and mesh our reports.
No one but she will under / stand it in full and if you are a reading human you wil think it is a storey for your lafter.
We have no NOW any mor because we fownd by chans a way to see and be and feal all of the places and times in creeayshun limited only by our imagines and what kwestshuns
we would ask of GOD.
Our small group made this discover near the end times of earth and eye think we ware ment to know it. We ware dron into it like the thing you call a SINGULARITY.
Eye mayk this trans mishun from a time before you existed and from a place much beyond your stars. Have seen the sferes you call Jupiter and Saturn and they would draw your very soul to them.
Now we are jumping the voids and are seeking a home. Eye have scene your paintings and other cymbals. We look much difrent from you. Our small group of explorers hope to meet others who know what we know. In yur tung we are calt ENIGMA because that is what the egg of the UNIVERSE is still to us.
May you come to our GOD at the last, and pleez know we soon start a new home.
piktur kredit to: https://www.discogs.com/Enigma-Return-To-Innocence/release/299552
Walkabout
Minus twenty two last morning.
No wind, praise be.
In my puffed up coat,
with Red Baron hat and goggles,
looking, perhaps, like the Michelin Man,
I get smiles and double takes.
Walking rapidly to get it over,
it is still thirty minutes in the sub zero.
But, there are things to see and hear
if you let them have their effect.
Two little ones trying to build a snowman.
They are frustrated, one berating the other-
we need a bigger ball than that!
I smilingly tell them it’s too cold, the snow is powder,
Go inside and warm up!
Then I pass a house from which comes loud voices-
a man and woman yelling and cursing each other-
I don’t give a…….
You’re an ass……
Further along, the Police have someone stopped,
and they are searching his car.
Around the bend, the joyful boisterous voices
of kids sliding down a big hill of pure snow, dumped by the town.
I look back. I look back.
God, it’s cold.
Even my guaranteed Arctic mitts aren’t helping much,
and I imagine X-Rays of finger bones, glowing pale blue.
The sliding kids catch sight of me.
Hey Jimmy, look! It’s the Scarecrow!
Hah. You funny. I smile anyway.
I notice that the neighbor’s huge RV is finally gone.
Floating down to Florida they are.
Hah. Snowbirds. Bah, humbug.
Now, I am looking forward to a hot hot bath.
Salts of Epsom. Cuppa cuppa coffee.
I round the last corner, there’s my house.
A stranger is hitchhiking near my driveway.
He carries a wee dog, both looking half frozen.
Where are you going? (Fifteen minutes down the road)
I get the car out and take him.
He says nothing, just keeps sniffing his running nose.
The little dog keens a little, but also says nothing.
He shows me where, and I stop.
It must be the last leg of his trip.
I say bye and good luck. He says nothing…..okay.
The storm has started, and I relish even more that hot hot bath.
Through the whiteouts, I am home.
But no, a stalled truck blocks the driveway.
I turn around and park in the Public Works Yard up the street.
Not far now. Geez. Almost snowblind.
I am taking those Arctic mitts back to the store.
Fifty bucks is fifty bucks, and yes I am a complainer.
Blessedly, I get inside, strip off the layers, sigh with relief.
Run that bath.
Something other than the cuppa coffee occurs to me.
Before taking the plunge, I bring with me
The last two Heinekens from the fridge.
Gosh, retirement is good today.
Next morning, I spy the Town about to tow my car.
I run out in my pajamas. It doesn’t end well.
Weedless Wednesday?
I weed with what I think is single-mindedness. Bunched up towel under knobby knees. Gloves of good leather for those damn nettles. A healthy respect for the spiders and bees. We’re getting on close to summer’s end, and we’re pushing for our house to sell. My wife, you see, is getting a little more sick, but continues to soldier on at work.
We could sure use the money…she needs a long long rest. I need the peace of mind.
Funny, you know….now that I’m out here with the bag and rake and gloves and all, I am beating myself up over this silly garden. I never had paid it a lot of attention or put much effort into its care, and now I am making it look nice for somebody else.
It’s a lovely day out here, tempered by the busy street noises behind me- the engineered farting of motorcycle engines, cars with stereos so loud you can feel the sound waves through your liver. Come on, folks. Let’s just have the birdies instead. Never mind, this old guy is gonna move, and you can carry on making your mark in the world.
As I dig and kneel, the earthy scents rise to me and I think that this little pastime is really not so bad. I am doing a bit of good in some tiny corner of the world. Surely the bona fide plants appreciate my getting rid of the riffraff. Even the spiders seem excited (or agitated) at the prospect of new craters in their landscape.
But, the little lift this few minutes has given me is on a seesaw with thoughts more bleak: the mauve of regret, the orange of anxiousness. My nose runs a little. A fly jets into my left ear, and I slap at it involuntarily, producing a nasty ringing. I stumble to my feet after the last offender is pulled out by its roots. In for a cup of tea, we shall. Rake up and bag the drying entrails, we shall. Tomorrow.
Aremyfeetofftheground 