EN World Short Story Smackdown - FINAL: Berandor vs Piratecat - The Judgment Is In!
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Round Three - Match Fourteen
Piratecat vs. Rodrigo Istalindir
Meme
by Kevin Kulp (Piratecat)
It was early morning and the birdsong was drowned out by the racket of my childhood being dismantled by chainsaws and bulldozers. I didn’t want to look.
“I’m sorry, Max. I don’t like it either.” I met his gaze, then guiltily dropped my eyes and checked my watch. “We’ll get you relocated as soon as we can. I have to go. I have a new candidate coming in for an interview this morning. I need to pick her up.”
I gave them all a quick hug, my nose tickling from the musty fur. Dignity is important, and it was difficult not to acknowledge that several of them were crying. I would have been, too. All six of them stayed behind on the ridge as I left, watching the rising sun while bulldozers dismantled their home.
Half an hour later I stood in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. I was leaning on the small mailbox when she came around the corner. You can tell a lot about a person from where they first arrive. I had flown out of Neverland, myself. I still bore some heavy guilt that we hadn’t closed it before the Worm arrived.
I took a look: older, no makeup, a little heavy, probably in her fifties. She looked ill. “Hey, Ria,” I said. “I’m your greeter. Call me Amy. Welcome.”
“Grues! There were grues!” She sounded more excited than scared. Breathing heavily, she looked back at the house as if unable to believe it was real. “Do you realize where I just came from?”
I checked my clipboard. “A Seattle hospital. Come on, let’s talk. You a coffee drinker or a tea drinker?”
That was an odd enough question that it got her attention for a minute. “A tea drinker?”
I took her hand and smiled. “Then let’s go get a cup of tea.” I led her to the car. She kept looking back, trying to lock in the visual memory of a place she’d only read about for twenty years.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Long story,” I answered. “I’ll try to tell you over tea.”
* * *
Soon uniformed waiters bustled around us with quiet precision. They served piping hot tea and fresh scones and those little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I never get tired of those. Gentle harp music filled the air. The napkins were thick white linen and the chairs were vaguely uncomfortable, designed to be beautiful and encourage good posture: just what you’d expect. We were underdressed for Palm Court and hadn’t had reservations, but no one noticed. Rita was watchful, her eyes taking in everything. It was a good sign.
I took a sip of tea, smiled, and said, “Okay, this is your chance to ask questions.”
“Who are you?” She didn’t mean my name.
“I used to be an explorer. Now I’m an engineer. I make sure that things go where they need to go, and that things get built and maintained correctly. Technically my job is all about allocation and control, but really it’s about keeping dreams alive. Today, it’s also about interviewing new staff.”
“New staff?” She frowned. “I already have a job.”
“Not any more.”
She looked at me sharply. “We’ll come back to that. We’re in London right now, at the Ritz?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Fifteen minutes ago I came out of a house somewhere in the US, and we didn’t drive over any oceans. We also didn’t fly.”
More’s the pity, I thought, but I stayed silent. I wanted to see how far she could get.
Her eyes looked past me. “I take that back. Fifteen minutes ago I came out of the twisty little passages from Zork. I know that game. Back in 1980 I played it non-stop. And I swear that’s where I just was.” She leaned back and looked at me over her tea cup. Her thinning grey hair fell into her eyes as she tilted her head. “How’d I walk out of a video game, Amy? I’m not dreaming. I’m not on drugs. I’m not using VR, and the Matrix was just one good movie in a crappy trilogy. I’m a 53 year old programmer who happens to be fighting breast cancer. You want to explain how it is that we’re here?”
“You’re in a coma,” I said.
“Bullsh*t,” she answered.
I just kept watching her. She waited me out, and I spoke first. “You wanted to know where we are. How many imaginary places can you picture in your head?”
“Dozens,” she said without hesitation. “Hundreds.”
“I’m responsible for upkeep on tens of thousands, and I’m having some logistical problems that I want advice on. All those imaginary places exist here. We’re where the story goes when you close the book, and where the video game lives when it isn’t being played. You’d be surprised what shared imagination can produce. For instance, what do you think of first when someone says ‘let’s go have tea’?”
She turned the question over slowly, looking for a trap. “Starbucks. Or the grocery store. Or…” She paused and looked around her more carefully. “No, I take that back. It’s a rhetorical question. Where do you go to have tea? You have tea here, at the Ritz. Little girls dream about this place when they have tea parties with their dolls. It’s iconic.”
I nodded.
She put a dollop of clotted cream on a scone and popped it into her mouth. “And here we are. It’s exactly what I always dreamed tea at the Ritz would be. Only…” She searched for the right word. “Idealized.”
“Well phrased. Yes, it’s idealized. Here, tea at the Ritz is exactly what everyone always dreams it will be.” I offered a half smile. “Don’t go to the iconic McDonalds, though. Peoples’ negative expectations carry through, too.”
“Uh huh.” She considered. “Where would we go if I was a coffee drinker?”
“Central Perk, most likely.”
“And if I drank beer?”
“Cheers. You’d like the place. Very homey. Everybody knows your name.”
“I can imagine.” She sounded wry as she popped another piece of the scone into her mouth. “This is where I decide if I’m crazy or dreaming. But it feels more complex than that. What do you need advice on?”
I leaned back. “I’ve been here over seventy years, but we’ve had a flood of new locations in the last thirty. I’m having trouble keeping up some of the old ones. Part of the problem is that I know what TV and video games are, but I’ve never actually seen or played one.”
“Seriously?” She seemed amused.
“Seriously. Please finish your tea first, though. I’ve blocked off my whole afternoon. When we’re done, we’ll walk and discuss it.”
“Fair enough. And you’ve been here seventy years?” Ria looked suspicious. “You don’t look a day over forty.” I gave her my best enigmatic smile, and sipped my tea.
* * *
We strolled down a European avenue that doesn’t show up on traditional maps, Ria moving slowly due to her illness. The hedges hid most of the surrounding landscape, but Ria sucked in breath when she saw the castle at the end of the promenade. It was everything you knew a fairy tale castle should be. Minarets with long fluttering pennants pierced the clouds, and knights wearing armor rode powerful chargers in an out of the gate. Honestly, I love this view. It makes Disney feel like a plastic embarrassment.
“That’s real,” Ria said.
“Yep.”
She shook her head, correcting me. “You don’t understand. It’s real. I know this place. It’s Cinderella’s castle, and Sleeping Beauty’s. It’s where I wanted to live. My mom read me to sleep every night with Grimm’s fairy tales! I can even smell her perfume after forty years. Seeing this is like coming home.”
“Dreams have power, Ria. Belief shapes the world. An old house will feel more like home than a brand new one because it changes over time to be what you expect from it. When people dream about a place, that place becomes real. They become the ideals from which everything else is based. And they come here.”
Ria nodded. “Sure. Platonic ideals.” I looked at her blankly. “Plato’s philosophy, the concept that all the reality we can see is nothing more than shadows being cast upon the wall of a cave. We never see the reality of what’s actually casting the shadows, so we have to guess as best we can. In this case, I’d guess the ideals are like a pearl forming around the irritant of belief. I like the idea.”
I grinned. “This is why I asked Dispatch to keep their eyes out for someone like you – educated, an independent woman like myself, only old enough to bridge the generations between stories and computers. My problem is that the old ways are no longer working right, and I don’t have the modern experience to know why. I’m probably condemning places that aren’t entirely ready to go as a result. Hell, just this morning I bulldozed the forest of the Wild Things to make room for some slum named Liberty City.”
She looked at me with disgust. “I really hope that was necessary.”
“Me too. But I’m afraid of the Worm. Before the computer age, places didn’t ever go away. If enough people forgot about them, they’d sort of fade and diminish. Eventually they’d be gone. Not now, though. About twenty years ago, old places stopped fading and started disappearing. They didn’t vanish quietly, either; something infested them, took control of them, and then ripped them screaming out of the world. We got our first hint when Green Gables got hit. Anne said she saw some sort of huge worm, a little like the things from Arrakis, huge and white and moist. It ate the whole house from below. She barely made it out.”
Ria was silent. “I loved those books,” she said, “but I haven’t thought of them in years. What went in where Anne’s house was?”
“Some dungeon complex, with a little elf-guy named Link.”
She sighed. “The computer era shouldn’t be your enemy. It’s just a new forum for imagining. I’d guess its biggest problem is that TV shows or computer games are more insistent. When everyone sees the same landscape, everyone is going to imagine it the same way. That’ll drive out less formed visualizations of other places from literature or folklore.” she stopped to consider. “What’s your biggest problem right now?”
“Nebraska.”
She turned to stare at me. “Seriously? Nebraska?”
“Yep. We can’t grow corn.” I could see she didn’t understand. “Look, what does everyone say about Nebraska, or any of those starts-with-a-vowel states in America’s breadbasket? ‘The corn goes on forever. You keep driving and driving, and it seems like the corn is never going to stop.’ I flew over it before a long time ago, and it’s true. Turns out that we’re responsible for that. When enough people believe it, the corn really does go on forever.”
“But why now?”
“Faster cars, higher gas prices, more cynical kids? I don’t know. Maybe we’ve stopped doing the rituals right. But my farmers can’t grow the eternal corn any more, and we’re worried about the Worm. The situation is reaching crisis. I have to decide whether to evacuate everyone and just call it a loss.”
She reached out for my arm. “Let’s go there. Now.”
“You sure?” I said. “I’m seeing how you’d fit in here, but that doesn’t require field work.”
She nodded. “My cancer hasn’t hurt much since I got here, and I’m still trying not to think about that coma comment you made, thankyouverymuch. Maybe I can help. Let’s go see.”
* * *
Nothing takes long to get to if you know the right short cuts. Ria kept herself amused by calling out the ones she knew as we drove. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road when we got close. Two policemen were blocking the road with one of the modern signs we use before evacuation.
I rolled down the window. “What’s the problem, officer?”
He sauntered over. “I’m sorry, ma’am, you can’t...” He took off his sunglasses and recognized me. “Oh, hi, Amelia. The rituals are failing. I’ve been told to prepare for evacuation. We’re erasing the access road.”
“Not yet, we aren’t. Keep everyone else out, please.” I drove around his sign and left him in the dust.
Ria seemed amused. “Error 404: Road not Found?” she asked.
“Keeps GoogleMaps from accidentally noticing. Another five minutes and we’re there.” The woods had turned from stands of trees to endless rows of corn. No, not endless. We drove over a hillock and the fields became a ruin of dying crops. We motored in silence until we reached the location of the ritual.
“What the hell are they doing?” asked Ria.
I remembered how surprised I’d been, too. “Ancient Roman fertility ritual. Involves, well, fertility. Seed and furrows and traditional blue robes. And lots and lots of sex. We get a lot of volunteers for this.” I shrugged. “Fertilizer doesn’t work here, and there’ve been enough adherents to the ancient way in the world to make this effective. No one wants to give it up until we have to.”
“You have to,” said Ria. She gestured at the dead corn stalks. “Let’s find a modern alternative.” Then she was out of the car, her cancer hardly bothering her at all as she strode towards the robed priest in charge of the ceremony.
I got out as well. “You want a hand?” I called.
Ria paused. “No,” she decided. “Let’s see what I can do.”
She spent almost an hour talking to the priest and staring at the crops. People were watching her closely by now. When a huge smile passed across her face, I knew she’d thought of something, but her list mystified me.
“These?” I asked. “You want me to order these?”
“Right now,” she concurred. “Immediately. We’ll need tables, at least ten delivery trucks of soda, and fifty cases of the candy. Thread and needles.”
“Can you explain this?”
“YouTube,” she answered, leaving me just as confused. “People believe in YouTube, Amy, but it’s the shadows on the wall that are important. We’re dealing with symbology here. And don’t waste any time.” She frowned. “All these people truly believe the Worm is coming. And you know what that means.”
I made the call.
With that many workers relieved of their previous fertilization duty, we had enough hands to process the materials quickly. No one understood why, though. It was dusk by the time that my workers were prepared. The tables had been set up in the field’s furrows. Ria stalked the rows like the perfectionist she was, making sure everyone understood their role in what was about to happen. “You will see a sign,” she told them as the setting sun filled the sky with radiant clouds. “And when you see that sign, you will know what it means, and you will believe.” She spoke with absolute conviction. “The Worm...”
Mentioning it was a mistake, because enough people must have thought of it at once. The soil at the east end of the field erupted in a glistening geyser.
The noise was horrible. Anne hadn’t mentioned the noise. It was a high pitched screech, a caterwaul of pain and electronics. Ria didn’t seem to be fazed at all. “A modem?” she asked, scoffing. “You sound like a modem?” The worm rose over her, stretching into the darkening sky with its pinchers ready to consume, and Ria turned our blue sea of belief that lined the rows of the corn field. “NOW!” she thundered, and a thousand caps of Diet Coke were loosened as one. Two thousand Mentos dropped into the two liter bottles. And a thousand plumes of soda reached into the sky.
But in the light of the sunset, they didn’t look like plumes of foaming soda. For the life of me, they looked like stalks of corn.
They were stalks of corn.
“Do you see?” shouted Ria at the Worm. It had turned its blind head towards her and paused, swaying. “There is no prey for you here. You are not a virus that we fear! There is nothing for you to devour! We have made the sacrifice using the modern tools, and these fields are reborn!” The plumes of soda were starting to droop now, the blue robes of the Believers soaked with foaming brown fluid, but somehow the stalks of corn still remained. They rippled out from where we stood, the power of the internet’s belief concentrated on us for one brief second, but that was all it took. Shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, the appearance of corn actually creating the real thing? I don’t understand it the same way Ria does. But the worm withdrew, screaming its high-pitched howl as it slid down into its hole, and we all stood in the lushest field of corn I had ever seen. A single crow circled delightedly overhead
I’d made the right choice.
* * *
It was full dark by the time we got to the forest of the Wild Things. Demolition wasn’t entirely complete, but they were preparing to lay the foundations of Liberty City for some time tomorrow. Max and the monsters had found somewhere else to sleep for the night.
“The job’s yours if you want it,” I said in the darkness. The air smelled of wood chips and diesel. “People are starting to forget about me, and I’m getting less effective as a result. You don’t have the infamy I had...”
“I’m a nobody,” she laughed. She was sitting on one of the few remaining trees, swinging her legs. Her body was heavy and her grey hair was straggly, but she looked blissfully serene.
“...but you know how the modern world works. You know how to harness it, and you still love and respect the classics. The job needs you.”
“What will happen to me in the real world?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I made my decision on a round-the-world flight. They never found my body. I imagine that you’ll slip away, too.”
She looked down at her dumpy form and chuckled, then glanced up at me slyly. “You know, Amy,” she said, “if there’s one thing the internet has taught us to believe in it’s that images can be manipulated. I wonder...” She trailed off as she concentrated. Then Ria transformed before my eyes as if she’d been kissed by a handsome prince. Her new form was not that of an air-headed storybook princess, I’d say; she was regal and healthy and young, and she wore a dress in the same deep blue as the robes from the fertility ceremony. It was clear she belonged.
“I accept,” she said as she hopped down from the tree limb. We linked arms as we headed back towards the car. “Tomorrow we do something about restoring the Wild Forest. There are a few internet memes that might help. I already have some ideas.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, and held open the door for her.
Piratecat vs. Rodrigo Istalindir
Meme
by Kevin Kulp (Piratecat)
It was early morning and the birdsong was drowned out by the racket of my childhood being dismantled by chainsaws and bulldozers. I didn’t want to look.
“I’m sorry, Max. I don’t like it either.” I met his gaze, then guiltily dropped my eyes and checked my watch. “We’ll get you relocated as soon as we can. I have to go. I have a new candidate coming in for an interview this morning. I need to pick her up.”
I gave them all a quick hug, my nose tickling from the musty fur. Dignity is important, and it was difficult not to acknowledge that several of them were crying. I would have been, too. All six of them stayed behind on the ridge as I left, watching the rising sun while bulldozers dismantled their home.
Half an hour later I stood in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. I was leaning on the small mailbox when she came around the corner. You can tell a lot about a person from where they first arrive. I had flown out of Neverland, myself. I still bore some heavy guilt that we hadn’t closed it before the Worm arrived.
I took a look: older, no makeup, a little heavy, probably in her fifties. She looked ill. “Hey, Ria,” I said. “I’m your greeter. Call me Amy. Welcome.”
“Grues! There were grues!” She sounded more excited than scared. Breathing heavily, she looked back at the house as if unable to believe it was real. “Do you realize where I just came from?”
I checked my clipboard. “A Seattle hospital. Come on, let’s talk. You a coffee drinker or a tea drinker?”
That was an odd enough question that it got her attention for a minute. “A tea drinker?”
I took her hand and smiled. “Then let’s go get a cup of tea.” I led her to the car. She kept looking back, trying to lock in the visual memory of a place she’d only read about for twenty years.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Long story,” I answered. “I’ll try to tell you over tea.”
* * *
Soon uniformed waiters bustled around us with quiet precision. They served piping hot tea and fresh scones and those little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I never get tired of those. Gentle harp music filled the air. The napkins were thick white linen and the chairs were vaguely uncomfortable, designed to be beautiful and encourage good posture: just what you’d expect. We were underdressed for Palm Court and hadn’t had reservations, but no one noticed. Rita was watchful, her eyes taking in everything. It was a good sign.
I took a sip of tea, smiled, and said, “Okay, this is your chance to ask questions.”
“Who are you?” She didn’t mean my name.
“I used to be an explorer. Now I’m an engineer. I make sure that things go where they need to go, and that things get built and maintained correctly. Technically my job is all about allocation and control, but really it’s about keeping dreams alive. Today, it’s also about interviewing new staff.”
“New staff?” She frowned. “I already have a job.”
“Not any more.”
She looked at me sharply. “We’ll come back to that. We’re in London right now, at the Ritz?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Fifteen minutes ago I came out of a house somewhere in the US, and we didn’t drive over any oceans. We also didn’t fly.”
More’s the pity, I thought, but I stayed silent. I wanted to see how far she could get.
Her eyes looked past me. “I take that back. Fifteen minutes ago I came out of the twisty little passages from Zork. I know that game. Back in 1980 I played it non-stop. And I swear that’s where I just was.” She leaned back and looked at me over her tea cup. Her thinning grey hair fell into her eyes as she tilted her head. “How’d I walk out of a video game, Amy? I’m not dreaming. I’m not on drugs. I’m not using VR, and the Matrix was just one good movie in a crappy trilogy. I’m a 53 year old programmer who happens to be fighting breast cancer. You want to explain how it is that we’re here?”
“You’re in a coma,” I said.
“Bullsh*t,” she answered.
I just kept watching her. She waited me out, and I spoke first. “You wanted to know where we are. How many imaginary places can you picture in your head?”
“Dozens,” she said without hesitation. “Hundreds.”
“I’m responsible for upkeep on tens of thousands, and I’m having some logistical problems that I want advice on. All those imaginary places exist here. We’re where the story goes when you close the book, and where the video game lives when it isn’t being played. You’d be surprised what shared imagination can produce. For instance, what do you think of first when someone says ‘let’s go have tea’?”
She turned the question over slowly, looking for a trap. “Starbucks. Or the grocery store. Or…” She paused and looked around her more carefully. “No, I take that back. It’s a rhetorical question. Where do you go to have tea? You have tea here, at the Ritz. Little girls dream about this place when they have tea parties with their dolls. It’s iconic.”
I nodded.
She put a dollop of clotted cream on a scone and popped it into her mouth. “And here we are. It’s exactly what I always dreamed tea at the Ritz would be. Only…” She searched for the right word. “Idealized.”
“Well phrased. Yes, it’s idealized. Here, tea at the Ritz is exactly what everyone always dreams it will be.” I offered a half smile. “Don’t go to the iconic McDonalds, though. Peoples’ negative expectations carry through, too.”
“Uh huh.” She considered. “Where would we go if I was a coffee drinker?”
“Central Perk, most likely.”
“And if I drank beer?”
“Cheers. You’d like the place. Very homey. Everybody knows your name.”
“I can imagine.” She sounded wry as she popped another piece of the scone into her mouth. “This is where I decide if I’m crazy or dreaming. But it feels more complex than that. What do you need advice on?”
I leaned back. “I’ve been here over seventy years, but we’ve had a flood of new locations in the last thirty. I’m having trouble keeping up some of the old ones. Part of the problem is that I know what TV and video games are, but I’ve never actually seen or played one.”
“Seriously?” She seemed amused.
“Seriously. Please finish your tea first, though. I’ve blocked off my whole afternoon. When we’re done, we’ll walk and discuss it.”
“Fair enough. And you’ve been here seventy years?” Ria looked suspicious. “You don’t look a day over forty.” I gave her my best enigmatic smile, and sipped my tea.
* * *
We strolled down a European avenue that doesn’t show up on traditional maps, Ria moving slowly due to her illness. The hedges hid most of the surrounding landscape, but Ria sucked in breath when she saw the castle at the end of the promenade. It was everything you knew a fairy tale castle should be. Minarets with long fluttering pennants pierced the clouds, and knights wearing armor rode powerful chargers in an out of the gate. Honestly, I love this view. It makes Disney feel like a plastic embarrassment.
“That’s real,” Ria said.
“Yep.”
She shook her head, correcting me. “You don’t understand. It’s real. I know this place. It’s Cinderella’s castle, and Sleeping Beauty’s. It’s where I wanted to live. My mom read me to sleep every night with Grimm’s fairy tales! I can even smell her perfume after forty years. Seeing this is like coming home.”
“Dreams have power, Ria. Belief shapes the world. An old house will feel more like home than a brand new one because it changes over time to be what you expect from it. When people dream about a place, that place becomes real. They become the ideals from which everything else is based. And they come here.”
Ria nodded. “Sure. Platonic ideals.” I looked at her blankly. “Plato’s philosophy, the concept that all the reality we can see is nothing more than shadows being cast upon the wall of a cave. We never see the reality of what’s actually casting the shadows, so we have to guess as best we can. In this case, I’d guess the ideals are like a pearl forming around the irritant of belief. I like the idea.”
I grinned. “This is why I asked Dispatch to keep their eyes out for someone like you – educated, an independent woman like myself, only old enough to bridge the generations between stories and computers. My problem is that the old ways are no longer working right, and I don’t have the modern experience to know why. I’m probably condemning places that aren’t entirely ready to go as a result. Hell, just this morning I bulldozed the forest of the Wild Things to make room for some slum named Liberty City.”
She looked at me with disgust. “I really hope that was necessary.”
“Me too. But I’m afraid of the Worm. Before the computer age, places didn’t ever go away. If enough people forgot about them, they’d sort of fade and diminish. Eventually they’d be gone. Not now, though. About twenty years ago, old places stopped fading and started disappearing. They didn’t vanish quietly, either; something infested them, took control of them, and then ripped them screaming out of the world. We got our first hint when Green Gables got hit. Anne said she saw some sort of huge worm, a little like the things from Arrakis, huge and white and moist. It ate the whole house from below. She barely made it out.”
Ria was silent. “I loved those books,” she said, “but I haven’t thought of them in years. What went in where Anne’s house was?”
“Some dungeon complex, with a little elf-guy named Link.”
She sighed. “The computer era shouldn’t be your enemy. It’s just a new forum for imagining. I’d guess its biggest problem is that TV shows or computer games are more insistent. When everyone sees the same landscape, everyone is going to imagine it the same way. That’ll drive out less formed visualizations of other places from literature or folklore.” she stopped to consider. “What’s your biggest problem right now?”
“Nebraska.”
She turned to stare at me. “Seriously? Nebraska?”
“Yep. We can’t grow corn.” I could see she didn’t understand. “Look, what does everyone say about Nebraska, or any of those starts-with-a-vowel states in America’s breadbasket? ‘The corn goes on forever. You keep driving and driving, and it seems like the corn is never going to stop.’ I flew over it before a long time ago, and it’s true. Turns out that we’re responsible for that. When enough people believe it, the corn really does go on forever.”
“But why now?”
“Faster cars, higher gas prices, more cynical kids? I don’t know. Maybe we’ve stopped doing the rituals right. But my farmers can’t grow the eternal corn any more, and we’re worried about the Worm. The situation is reaching crisis. I have to decide whether to evacuate everyone and just call it a loss.”
She reached out for my arm. “Let’s go there. Now.”
“You sure?” I said. “I’m seeing how you’d fit in here, but that doesn’t require field work.”
She nodded. “My cancer hasn’t hurt much since I got here, and I’m still trying not to think about that coma comment you made, thankyouverymuch. Maybe I can help. Let’s go see.”
* * *
Nothing takes long to get to if you know the right short cuts. Ria kept herself amused by calling out the ones she knew as we drove. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road when we got close. Two policemen were blocking the road with one of the modern signs we use before evacuation.
I rolled down the window. “What’s the problem, officer?”
He sauntered over. “I’m sorry, ma’am, you can’t...” He took off his sunglasses and recognized me. “Oh, hi, Amelia. The rituals are failing. I’ve been told to prepare for evacuation. We’re erasing the access road.”
“Not yet, we aren’t. Keep everyone else out, please.” I drove around his sign and left him in the dust.
Ria seemed amused. “Error 404: Road not Found?” she asked.
“Keeps GoogleMaps from accidentally noticing. Another five minutes and we’re there.” The woods had turned from stands of trees to endless rows of corn. No, not endless. We drove over a hillock and the fields became a ruin of dying crops. We motored in silence until we reached the location of the ritual.
“What the hell are they doing?” asked Ria.
I remembered how surprised I’d been, too. “Ancient Roman fertility ritual. Involves, well, fertility. Seed and furrows and traditional blue robes. And lots and lots of sex. We get a lot of volunteers for this.” I shrugged. “Fertilizer doesn’t work here, and there’ve been enough adherents to the ancient way in the world to make this effective. No one wants to give it up until we have to.”
“You have to,” said Ria. She gestured at the dead corn stalks. “Let’s find a modern alternative.” Then she was out of the car, her cancer hardly bothering her at all as she strode towards the robed priest in charge of the ceremony.
I got out as well. “You want a hand?” I called.
Ria paused. “No,” she decided. “Let’s see what I can do.”
She spent almost an hour talking to the priest and staring at the crops. People were watching her closely by now. When a huge smile passed across her face, I knew she’d thought of something, but her list mystified me.
“These?” I asked. “You want me to order these?”
“Right now,” she concurred. “Immediately. We’ll need tables, at least ten delivery trucks of soda, and fifty cases of the candy. Thread and needles.”
“Can you explain this?”
“YouTube,” she answered, leaving me just as confused. “People believe in YouTube, Amy, but it’s the shadows on the wall that are important. We’re dealing with symbology here. And don’t waste any time.” She frowned. “All these people truly believe the Worm is coming. And you know what that means.”
I made the call.
With that many workers relieved of their previous fertilization duty, we had enough hands to process the materials quickly. No one understood why, though. It was dusk by the time that my workers were prepared. The tables had been set up in the field’s furrows. Ria stalked the rows like the perfectionist she was, making sure everyone understood their role in what was about to happen. “You will see a sign,” she told them as the setting sun filled the sky with radiant clouds. “And when you see that sign, you will know what it means, and you will believe.” She spoke with absolute conviction. “The Worm...”
Mentioning it was a mistake, because enough people must have thought of it at once. The soil at the east end of the field erupted in a glistening geyser.
The noise was horrible. Anne hadn’t mentioned the noise. It was a high pitched screech, a caterwaul of pain and electronics. Ria didn’t seem to be fazed at all. “A modem?” she asked, scoffing. “You sound like a modem?” The worm rose over her, stretching into the darkening sky with its pinchers ready to consume, and Ria turned our blue sea of belief that lined the rows of the corn field. “NOW!” she thundered, and a thousand caps of Diet Coke were loosened as one. Two thousand Mentos dropped into the two liter bottles. And a thousand plumes of soda reached into the sky.
But in the light of the sunset, they didn’t look like plumes of foaming soda. For the life of me, they looked like stalks of corn.
They were stalks of corn.
“Do you see?” shouted Ria at the Worm. It had turned its blind head towards her and paused, swaying. “There is no prey for you here. You are not a virus that we fear! There is nothing for you to devour! We have made the sacrifice using the modern tools, and these fields are reborn!” The plumes of soda were starting to droop now, the blue robes of the Believers soaked with foaming brown fluid, but somehow the stalks of corn still remained. They rippled out from where we stood, the power of the internet’s belief concentrated on us for one brief second, but that was all it took. Shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, the appearance of corn actually creating the real thing? I don’t understand it the same way Ria does. But the worm withdrew, screaming its high-pitched howl as it slid down into its hole, and we all stood in the lushest field of corn I had ever seen. A single crow circled delightedly overhead
I’d made the right choice.
* * *
It was full dark by the time we got to the forest of the Wild Things. Demolition wasn’t entirely complete, but they were preparing to lay the foundations of Liberty City for some time tomorrow. Max and the monsters had found somewhere else to sleep for the night.
“The job’s yours if you want it,” I said in the darkness. The air smelled of wood chips and diesel. “People are starting to forget about me, and I’m getting less effective as a result. You don’t have the infamy I had...”
“I’m a nobody,” she laughed. She was sitting on one of the few remaining trees, swinging her legs. Her body was heavy and her grey hair was straggly, but she looked blissfully serene.
“...but you know how the modern world works. You know how to harness it, and you still love and respect the classics. The job needs you.”
“What will happen to me in the real world?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I made my decision on a round-the-world flight. They never found my body. I imagine that you’ll slip away, too.”
She looked down at her dumpy form and chuckled, then glanced up at me slyly. “You know, Amy,” she said, “if there’s one thing the internet has taught us to believe in it’s that images can be manipulated. I wonder...” She trailed off as she concentrated. Then Ria transformed before my eyes as if she’d been kissed by a handsome prince. Her new form was not that of an air-headed storybook princess, I’d say; she was regal and healthy and young, and she wore a dress in the same deep blue as the robes from the fertility ceremony. It was clear she belonged.
“I accept,” she said as she hopped down from the tree limb. We linked arms as we headed back towards the car. “Tomorrow we do something about restoring the Wild Forest. There are a few internet memes that might help. I already have some ideas.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, and held open the door for her.
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
That's okay. The most important part of writing is cutting.Berandor said:
I swear, I've written double the needed verbiage for these last two stories. In this last one I think I rewrote the same section four times before I got it right. I like cutting, though; it makes the end story that much tighter.
The best example I've seen is in the end of Steven King's "On Writing," where he shows the same story (1426) both before and after he edits, along with his editing comments. It was really illuminating for me.
I really liked writing this last story. It was fun doing something that isn't horror.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Rodrigo - Match 14
Part 1
‘Radar Love’ was blasting on the stereo, my hands were tapping in time on the wheel, and all was right with the world when the onboard computer beeped and totally blew the mood. I spared a glance at the retrofitted display crammed where the 8-track used to be and cursed.
I took one hand off the wheel and hit the ‘mute’ button on the MP3 player. Golden Earring died mid-sentence, the feline growl of the V8 free to assault my ears unopposed. With the same hand I pushed the button at the bottom of the display.
Somewhere in my dust an RFID checkpoint had pinged me and not liked the response it had gotten. Not too surprising – the car was running on spoofed credentials, after all – but they were *good* spoofed credentials, and should have been enough to fool a routine roadside AI. I figured I had five minutes, tops, before a smokey saw the alert and tried to contact me.
And that would be a problem, because he wouldn’t end up talking to little ol’ me cruising down I15. No, he’d get Miss Rosa May Jefferson, age 80, who’d never been more than 50 miles from her home town of Ketchum, Idaho, and it wouldn’t take long for him to figure out that the car that had blown past the checkpoint wasn’t the glorified golf cart that she took to church every Sunday and the market on Wednesday.
Ooops.
I was still a good ten minutes from my exit, and a half-hour or more from the Utah border by the back roads I needed to take after I left the Interstate. It had been a gamble travelling by the main roads. They were monitored to hell and back, with every vehicle required by law to surrender to computer control that maintained a nice, orderly flow of traffic. But the thunderstorms the night before had brought flash floods, and washed out roadways had forced me to backtrack twice before breakfast. I was already running late, and my employer had promised me a hefty bonus for on-time delivery.
The console beeped again, this time reporting that IHP had contacted the car’s computer system and ordered to come to a gradual halt. Heh. Good luck with that, coppers. My system had been hacked to say all the right things in response to their queries, but I’d no more let a robot drive my car than I’d let one screw my girlfriend. Some things a guy wanted to do for himself.
Even if the computer probably could do it better.
A third beep, and now they were serious. I could see the lights in my rear-view mirror. I abandoned all pretense of being one of the good guys and floored it, the engine responding with a sense of glee that was completely unbecoming in an inanimate object. Shocked faces barely visible behind tinted glass looked on as I tore through the herd like a cheetah among the wildebeest. Overhead, a sign flashed by in a green blur. My exit was coming up.
I let up on the gas just a bit, letting the interceptor get a good sniff at my exhaust but keeping him just far enough back to keep him from tapping me in the fender. I could tell by the way his car handled that he wasn’t driving it himself, and that gave me an advantage. I drifted left, away from the exit lane, and watched as he matched.
The exit was coming up fast. When it was too late to make it across safely, I threw the car into a hard right, tires squealing, smoking, straining to hold the road. I felt the right side start to lose their grip on the tarmac, felt that side of the car start to rise, gravity losing out to momentum. Gravity won in a split decision, momentum screaming that it was robbed.
The car tore down the exit ramp as my pursuer flew on down the interstate. Sure, the computers *could* drive better than me, but they didn’t. They could make the car do things I couldn’t on the best driving day of my life, but the car wasn’t the problem, it was what was inside. And the computers weren’t allowed to risk the meat. I had no such limitation.
Momentum wasn’t the only thing screaming. A shriek from the passenger seat told me my cargo had awakened, and she didn’t seem as thrilled as I that the car was on manual. She had one hand braced on the dash, the other had a death grip on the ‘oh’ handle over the door, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she willed herself to sprout a third hand to grab something else. Some people didn’t handle excitement well.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. It would take them a few minutes to get someone on my tail, but the entry points into Utah were usually well monitored. The road we were on only went one place, and it wouldn’t take much time to get a roadblock up.
The Utah Enclave was an aberration, a technological backwater that was home to unlikely bedfellows. The Mormons, of course, and several more fundamentalist branches of that particular creed. But Utah had also become the refuge and a number of fire-and-brimstone Christian sects that were fighting a futile rear-guard action against secularism. Throw in a bunch of tree-hugging hippies that would have called themselves Luddites if they weren’t too stoned to think about it and you had yourself a 21st century melting pot. I didn’t know why the woman riding shotgun need to go there, but I’d been paid pretty well not to care.
The cloud of road dust the rose in my wake told me two things, both of them good. The first was that the rains up north hadn’t passed through here, so there was a good chance the road wouldn’t end in an abrupt and fatal manner. The second was that it was barely used, and so I probably didn’t have to worry about traffic. I let the car have its head, and watched the speedometer creep northwards of 100mph.
The twenty miles to the border flew by, and I was just starting to think we’d made it scot free when I spied blinking red-and-blue lights up ahead. Two IHP troopers were setting up a roadblock, dragging a smart-barrier across the center. The stupid thing was flashing an error, warning me that the traffic AIs were off-line. (Picture 3) No. The morons hadn’t even set up their vehicles to block the lanes.
I blew past them like a tornado. They didn’t even have time to drop the sign and leap for cover, which was just as well. They might have zigged instead of zagged, and that would have done a number on the grillwork. And then I realized what they’d been doing instead of moving their cars.
I hit the spiked strips at 90, blowing out both front tires in an instant. The car bucked and squealed as the metal rims bit into the pavement, sparks flying in an early 4th of July display. I wrestled with the wheel, trying to keep the vehicle straight and on the road.
We drifted towards the shoulder and the left front tire caught in the soft dirt. Momentum came back for a rematch, and this time went all Rocky on gravity’s Apollo Creed. It was all over except for the crashing and rolling and screaming. When the car finally came to a rest, I was hanging upside down, held in place by the seatbelt. My cargo was dead or unconscious, blood dripping from a nasty cut in her forehead.
Through the sliver of daylight visible through the crushed driver side window, I could see four booted feet approach, and I was resigned to being arrested and thrown in jail for a long time. They stopped a good distance away, and I wondered what they were waiting for.
“Welcome to Utah,” one of them laughed. “Enjoy your stay.”
They turned and walked back to their patrol cars. The flashing lights stopped spinning as they sped away, leaving us to bleed out like slaughtered lambs hung in the abattoir. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the darkness.
*
I awoke, head splitting, one eye refusing to open. The first thing I realized was that I wasn’t upside down. The second was that I was lying in a rather comfortable bed. I struggled to sit upright, and must have groaned, because a second or two later a door opened, the bright light from the hallway making my open eye water.
A blonde, medium-sized woman entered, dressed in a white nurse’s outfit. She approached the side of the bed and checked on an IV that I hadn’t noticed hanging from my arm.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Mister. That was some crash. You could hear it from miles away.”
“Where am I,” I croaked.
“Cornish, Utah,” she answered. “Now get some rest. You’ve got a concussion and lost a fair bit of blood.”
She fiddled with my IV some more, and a wave of apathy swept over me. I slept.
*
When I woke up the second time, both eyelids seemed to be function properly, and overall I felt better than I probably had a right to.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Charlie,” a voice to my right spoke.
I rolled over and saw my passenger sitting in a chair in the corner. A bandage covered half of her forehead.
“Glad you made it.”
“Because you’d be upset if I were dead, or just upset at not getting the other half of your money?”
“Both, I guess. But I do expect to get paid. The deal was to get you from Calgary to Utah in one piece. Did that. “
“Barely. But never fear, I’ve already sent word to release the other half of the money to your Cayman Islands account.”
“Your unconventional border crossing aside, I do appreciate you’re getting me here on time. And I have another business proposal for you – I’ll need your services getting back to Canada,” she continued. “The doctor tells me you’ll be okay to drive day after tomorrow, if you’re up for it.”
“What’s the rush? We just drove eight hundred miles to get here.”
“Never mind, I don’t need to know,” I interrupted before she could answer.
*
I felt well enough that afternoon to get up and around. I left the small infirmary and ventured outside. The sunlight was blinding and the heat quickly sapped what little strength I’d regained. But my stomach was rumbling, and I wasn’t in the mood for hospital food. I dragged myself down the street, found a little café, and ordered a burger, rare. Nice thing about the Enclave is no one gave you about eating meat.
Something had been itching in the back of my mind since I’d woken up to find my passenger sitting in my room, and I finally realized what it was. I operate on a strict no-names basis, and yet she’d called me ‘Charlie’. That wasn’t good – ‘Charlie’ wasn’t even one of the pseudonyms I used when necessary, it was my real name. That meant she had contacts, good contacts. And it meant she knew a damn sight more about me than I knew about her.
I was just finishing my meal and considering ordering a milkshake when she found me.
“The foods good here, isn’t it? I miss the beef, especially. Soyburgers just aren’t the same,” she said wistfully.
“So,” I said, ignoring her culinary reminiscing, “You know who I am. Who the hell are you?”
She paused.
“I suppose that’s fair. My name is Dr. Kelly. I’m a biologist at the University of Calgary, specializing in parasites.”
“Come with me,” she said, tossing some real currency on the table to cover the meal.
*
“You look surprised,” she noticed.
We were a half-hour out of town, at some facility built into the side of Little Mountain. I was kind of nervous. There were a number of ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot’ signs posted, and we’d had to go through some sort of air lock before entering the labs. Whatever they were up to out here, it was serious.
“I didn’t think this kind of tech existed in the Enclave. Thought everyone here didn’t approve of such things.” I was surrounded by lots of expensive looking equipment whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess at, and white-clad technicians bustled around us.
“It’s not technology that’s the problem, Charlie. It’s the worship of technology. The world outside the Enclave has adopted it as its newest false god, placing it above all else. They see it as the cure for all their woes , never understanding that they’ve grabbed a tiger by the tail.”
“Come, let me show you something interesting.”
She led me to a fancy microscope. At least, I thought that’s what it was. Science hadn’t been my best subject. To tell the truth, no subject had been my best subject.
She gestured towards it, so I leaned forward and peered through the eyepieces. An evil, hook-toothed worm looked back at me. (Image 2)
“What is it?” I asked, standing back.
“It’s formal name is glyceridae sanctus. Colloquially referred to around here as the ‘Holy Worm’”
I gave her a blank look.
“So what does this have to do with me, and pissing off the good folks of the Idaho Highway Patrol?”
She smiled enigmatically.
“Let me show you something else, first.”
As we were leaving, a technician approached with a medical cooler like the ones used to transport bootleg organs.
“Dr. Kelly, I’ve got the samples you requested.”
“Put them on ice, Richardson. My driver needs a day or two to recover.”
On our way out, they took the white jumpsuits they’d loaned us and dumped them in a burn bag. Great.
*
We were hiking along a trail behind the facility. The heat was killer, but the sun had started to go down, and the elevation of the peaks blocked most of it, so at least I didn’t have to worry about sunburn on top of the skull fracture. Dr. Kelly stopped for a moment and handed me a bottle of water from her backpack.
“Have you ever wondered,” she asked as we walked, “Have you ever wondered why religions persist in the face of the secular onslaught of modern society?”
“Not really. I’m not the curious type. Not healthy in my business.” But I was lying. What I’d seen here had piqued my curiosity, and I was painfully aware of how that had ended up for the cat.
“I’d always just assumed there were people that couldn’t handle the chaos of modern life that wanted to retreat to a simpler life.”
“That’s true, to some extent, for some people. But I’m not talking the ‘Church on Sunday’ crowd. I’m talking about the true fanatics, the ones that flagellate themselves until they pass out from blood loss, or that can psych themselves into blowing themselves up on a crowded bus.”
I shrugged.
“It turns out there’s a definite, detectable, reproducible physiological response to religious rituals. Endorphins are released, heart rate accelerates, brain chemistry is altered. It’s short-lived, but not unlike the rush a drug addict gets from their fix. Not as addictive, usually, but the similarities are remarkable.”
We came to a high chain link fence. A padlocked gate barred our way. So did two men with M16s.
They obviously recognized the doctor, but checked her identification carefully and called back to the facility on walkie-talkies. Most people on guard duty in this kind of environment would get slack in a hurry, but these guys were disciplined. The butterflies in my stomach kicked it up a notch.
They unlocked the gate and let us through.
“Keep as quiet as you can from here on,” she whispered. “They’re harmless, but we’re trying to keep their contact with outsiders to a minimum while we study them.”
We crept down a threadbare trail concealed by heavy brush. Ahead, I could hear chanting and a strange gushing sound.
Dr. Kelly grabbed my arm and stopped me in my tracks. She hunkered down and crept forward. I followed silently. Science -- not so good. Sneaking – damn good.
In the clearing, blue-robed acolytes stood in long rows in front of what looked like scavenged picnic tables. The tables held two-liter bottles of soda. As we watched, one of them reached forward and dropped something in the bottle. Immediately a fountain of soda erupted in the air, and there was a long, almost orgasmic groan from the congregation. No sooner had one fountain collapsed they it was repeated by another, and another, until dozens of jets of soda were reaching skyward at the same time. (Image 1)
After several minutes of this, the bottles were emptied, and I could tell the worshippers were getting antsy. Already there were several fighting over the remains of a half-empty container.
“We dropped off a thousand two-liter bottles of soda four days ago. That’s the last of it,” she whispered. “Watch what happens next.”
She reached into her pack and pulled out a full bottle of soda. In one quick motion, she stood and hurled it into the crowd.
Chaos erupted. No one seemed to notice us, but they focused in on that bottle like a laser-guided bomb. The first one to reach it lasted about thirty seconds before the mob tore him apart. Within minutes, only a handful was left standing, a few rolling on the ground in pain, the rest dead or unconscious.
The survivors seemed to reach some sort of détente. One of them placed the bottle on one of the tables, and the remaining cultists began repeating their ritual.
Dr. Kelly tugged at my arm and indicated we should leave. We retreated back down the mountain. A half-hour later we were in a staff cafeteria in the medical facility.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“Ritual is ritual. It helps sell it if there’s dogma behind it, but we’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that under the right circumstances, you can make almost anyone a fanatic. The Holy Worm is a parasite. It takes up residence in the brain, and when stimulated, it releases chemicals that act to suppress certain brain functions.
“First, it suppresses the amygdala, the part of your brain that triggers fear response. Then it affects the parietal lobe, diminishing the sense of space and time. Finally, it hits specific regions of the frontal and temporal lobes that are responsible for the sense of self.”
“In essence, it lets us take use any ritualistic behavior as a trigger and the response of the parasite amplifies and prolongs the normal biological response. It’s a new discipline called ‘neurotheology’. We can make them feel God.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we are on our way to a new kind of holy warrior, one that knows no fear, never questions authority, and who is biochemically hardwired to believe.”
Part 1
‘Radar Love’ was blasting on the stereo, my hands were tapping in time on the wheel, and all was right with the world when the onboard computer beeped and totally blew the mood. I spared a glance at the retrofitted display crammed where the 8-track used to be and cursed.
I took one hand off the wheel and hit the ‘mute’ button on the MP3 player. Golden Earring died mid-sentence, the feline growl of the V8 free to assault my ears unopposed. With the same hand I pushed the button at the bottom of the display.
Somewhere in my dust an RFID checkpoint had pinged me and not liked the response it had gotten. Not too surprising – the car was running on spoofed credentials, after all – but they were *good* spoofed credentials, and should have been enough to fool a routine roadside AI. I figured I had five minutes, tops, before a smokey saw the alert and tried to contact me.
And that would be a problem, because he wouldn’t end up talking to little ol’ me cruising down I15. No, he’d get Miss Rosa May Jefferson, age 80, who’d never been more than 50 miles from her home town of Ketchum, Idaho, and it wouldn’t take long for him to figure out that the car that had blown past the checkpoint wasn’t the glorified golf cart that she took to church every Sunday and the market on Wednesday.
Ooops.
I was still a good ten minutes from my exit, and a half-hour or more from the Utah border by the back roads I needed to take after I left the Interstate. It had been a gamble travelling by the main roads. They were monitored to hell and back, with every vehicle required by law to surrender to computer control that maintained a nice, orderly flow of traffic. But the thunderstorms the night before had brought flash floods, and washed out roadways had forced me to backtrack twice before breakfast. I was already running late, and my employer had promised me a hefty bonus for on-time delivery.
The console beeped again, this time reporting that IHP had contacted the car’s computer system and ordered to come to a gradual halt. Heh. Good luck with that, coppers. My system had been hacked to say all the right things in response to their queries, but I’d no more let a robot drive my car than I’d let one screw my girlfriend. Some things a guy wanted to do for himself.
Even if the computer probably could do it better.
A third beep, and now they were serious. I could see the lights in my rear-view mirror. I abandoned all pretense of being one of the good guys and floored it, the engine responding with a sense of glee that was completely unbecoming in an inanimate object. Shocked faces barely visible behind tinted glass looked on as I tore through the herd like a cheetah among the wildebeest. Overhead, a sign flashed by in a green blur. My exit was coming up.
I let up on the gas just a bit, letting the interceptor get a good sniff at my exhaust but keeping him just far enough back to keep him from tapping me in the fender. I could tell by the way his car handled that he wasn’t driving it himself, and that gave me an advantage. I drifted left, away from the exit lane, and watched as he matched.
The exit was coming up fast. When it was too late to make it across safely, I threw the car into a hard right, tires squealing, smoking, straining to hold the road. I felt the right side start to lose their grip on the tarmac, felt that side of the car start to rise, gravity losing out to momentum. Gravity won in a split decision, momentum screaming that it was robbed.
The car tore down the exit ramp as my pursuer flew on down the interstate. Sure, the computers *could* drive better than me, but they didn’t. They could make the car do things I couldn’t on the best driving day of my life, but the car wasn’t the problem, it was what was inside. And the computers weren’t allowed to risk the meat. I had no such limitation.
Momentum wasn’t the only thing screaming. A shriek from the passenger seat told me my cargo had awakened, and she didn’t seem as thrilled as I that the car was on manual. She had one hand braced on the dash, the other had a death grip on the ‘oh
’ handle over the door, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she willed herself to sprout a third hand to grab something else. Some people didn’t handle excitement well. We weren’t out of the woods yet. It would take them a few minutes to get someone on my tail, but the entry points into Utah were usually well monitored. The road we were on only went one place, and it wouldn’t take much time to get a roadblock up.
The Utah Enclave was an aberration, a technological backwater that was home to unlikely bedfellows. The Mormons, of course, and several more fundamentalist branches of that particular creed. But Utah had also become the refuge and a number of fire-and-brimstone Christian sects that were fighting a futile rear-guard action against secularism. Throw in a bunch of tree-hugging hippies that would have called themselves Luddites if they weren’t too stoned to think about it and you had yourself a 21st century melting pot. I didn’t know why the woman riding shotgun need to go there, but I’d been paid pretty well not to care.
The cloud of road dust the rose in my wake told me two things, both of them good. The first was that the rains up north hadn’t passed through here, so there was a good chance the road wouldn’t end in an abrupt and fatal manner. The second was that it was barely used, and so I probably didn’t have to worry about traffic. I let the car have its head, and watched the speedometer creep northwards of 100mph.
The twenty miles to the border flew by, and I was just starting to think we’d made it scot free when I spied blinking red-and-blue lights up ahead. Two IHP troopers were setting up a roadblock, dragging a smart-barrier across the center. The stupid thing was flashing an error, warning me that the traffic AIs were off-line. (Picture 3) No
. The morons hadn’t even set up their vehicles to block the lanes.I blew past them like a tornado. They didn’t even have time to drop the sign and leap for cover, which was just as well. They might have zigged instead of zagged, and that would have done a number on the grillwork. And then I realized what they’d been doing instead of moving their cars.
I hit the spiked strips at 90, blowing out both front tires in an instant. The car bucked and squealed as the metal rims bit into the pavement, sparks flying in an early 4th of July display. I wrestled with the wheel, trying to keep the vehicle straight and on the road.
We drifted towards the shoulder and the left front tire caught in the soft dirt. Momentum came back for a rematch, and this time went all Rocky on gravity’s Apollo Creed. It was all over except for the crashing and rolling and screaming. When the car finally came to a rest, I was hanging upside down, held in place by the seatbelt. My cargo was dead or unconscious, blood dripping from a nasty cut in her forehead.
Through the sliver of daylight visible through the crushed driver side window, I could see four booted feet approach, and I was resigned to being arrested and thrown in jail for a long time. They stopped a good distance away, and I wondered what they were waiting for.
“Welcome to Utah,” one of them laughed. “Enjoy your stay.”
They turned and walked back to their patrol cars. The flashing lights stopped spinning as they sped away, leaving us to bleed out like slaughtered lambs hung in the abattoir. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the darkness.
*
I awoke, head splitting, one eye refusing to open. The first thing I realized was that I wasn’t upside down. The second was that I was lying in a rather comfortable bed. I struggled to sit upright, and must have groaned, because a second or two later a door opened, the bright light from the hallway making my open eye water.
A blonde, medium-sized woman entered, dressed in a white nurse’s outfit. She approached the side of the bed and checked on an IV that I hadn’t noticed hanging from my arm.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Mister. That was some crash. You could hear it from miles away.”
“Where am I,” I croaked.
“Cornish, Utah,” she answered. “Now get some rest. You’ve got a concussion and lost a fair bit of blood.”
She fiddled with my IV some more, and a wave of apathy swept over me. I slept.
*
When I woke up the second time, both eyelids seemed to be function properly, and overall I felt better than I probably had a right to.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Charlie,” a voice to my right spoke.
I rolled over and saw my passenger sitting in a chair in the corner. A bandage covered half of her forehead.
“Glad you made it.”
“Because you’d be upset if I were dead, or just upset at not getting the other half of your money?”
“Both, I guess. But I do expect to get paid. The deal was to get you from Calgary to Utah in one piece. Did that. “
“Barely. But never fear, I’ve already sent word to release the other half of the money to your Cayman Islands account.”
“Your unconventional border crossing aside, I do appreciate you’re getting me here on time. And I have another business proposal for you – I’ll need your services getting back to Canada,” she continued. “The doctor tells me you’ll be okay to drive day after tomorrow, if you’re up for it.”
“What’s the rush? We just drove eight hundred miles to get here.”
“Never mind, I don’t need to know,” I interrupted before she could answer.
*
I felt well enough that afternoon to get up and around. I left the small infirmary and ventured outside. The sunlight was blinding and the heat quickly sapped what little strength I’d regained. But my stomach was rumbling, and I wasn’t in the mood for hospital food. I dragged myself down the street, found a little café, and ordered a burger, rare. Nice thing about the Enclave is no one gave you
about eating meat.Something had been itching in the back of my mind since I’d woken up to find my passenger sitting in my room, and I finally realized what it was. I operate on a strict no-names basis, and yet she’d called me ‘Charlie’. That wasn’t good – ‘Charlie’ wasn’t even one of the pseudonyms I used when necessary, it was my real name. That meant she had contacts, good contacts. And it meant she knew a damn sight more about me than I knew about her.
I was just finishing my meal and considering ordering a milkshake when she found me.
“The foods good here, isn’t it? I miss the beef, especially. Soyburgers just aren’t the same,” she said wistfully.
“So,” I said, ignoring her culinary reminiscing, “You know who I am. Who the hell are you?”
She paused.
“I suppose that’s fair. My name is Dr. Kelly. I’m a biologist at the University of Calgary, specializing in parasites.”
“Come with me,” she said, tossing some real currency on the table to cover the meal.
*
“You look surprised,” she noticed.
We were a half-hour out of town, at some facility built into the side of Little Mountain. I was kind of nervous. There were a number of ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot’ signs posted, and we’d had to go through some sort of air lock before entering the labs. Whatever they were up to out here, it was serious.
“I didn’t think this kind of tech existed in the Enclave. Thought everyone here didn’t approve of such things.” I was surrounded by lots of expensive looking equipment whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess at, and white-clad technicians bustled around us.
“It’s not technology that’s the problem, Charlie. It’s the worship of technology. The world outside the Enclave has adopted it as its newest false god, placing it above all else. They see it as the cure for all their woes , never understanding that they’ve grabbed a tiger by the tail.”
“Come, let me show you something interesting.”
She led me to a fancy microscope. At least, I thought that’s what it was. Science hadn’t been my best subject. To tell the truth, no subject had been my best subject.
She gestured towards it, so I leaned forward and peered through the eyepieces. An evil, hook-toothed worm looked back at me. (Image 2)
“What is it?” I asked, standing back.
“It’s formal name is glyceridae sanctus. Colloquially referred to around here as the ‘Holy Worm’”
I gave her a blank look.
“So what does this have to do with me, and pissing off the good folks of the Idaho Highway Patrol?”
She smiled enigmatically.
“Let me show you something else, first.”
As we were leaving, a technician approached with a medical cooler like the ones used to transport bootleg organs.
“Dr. Kelly, I’ve got the samples you requested.”
“Put them on ice, Richardson. My driver needs a day or two to recover.”
On our way out, they took the white jumpsuits they’d loaned us and dumped them in a burn bag. Great.
*
We were hiking along a trail behind the facility. The heat was killer, but the sun had started to go down, and the elevation of the peaks blocked most of it, so at least I didn’t have to worry about sunburn on top of the skull fracture. Dr. Kelly stopped for a moment and handed me a bottle of water from her backpack.
“Have you ever wondered,” she asked as we walked, “Have you ever wondered why religions persist in the face of the secular onslaught of modern society?”
“Not really. I’m not the curious type. Not healthy in my business.” But I was lying. What I’d seen here had piqued my curiosity, and I was painfully aware of how that had ended up for the cat.
“I’d always just assumed there were people that couldn’t handle the chaos of modern life that wanted to retreat to a simpler life.”
“That’s true, to some extent, for some people. But I’m not talking the ‘Church on Sunday’ crowd. I’m talking about the true fanatics, the ones that flagellate themselves until they pass out from blood loss, or that can psych themselves into blowing themselves up on a crowded bus.”
I shrugged.
“It turns out there’s a definite, detectable, reproducible physiological response to religious rituals. Endorphins are released, heart rate accelerates, brain chemistry is altered. It’s short-lived, but not unlike the rush a drug addict gets from their fix. Not as addictive, usually, but the similarities are remarkable.”
We came to a high chain link fence. A padlocked gate barred our way. So did two men with M16s.
They obviously recognized the doctor, but checked her identification carefully and called back to the facility on walkie-talkies. Most people on guard duty in this kind of environment would get slack in a hurry, but these guys were disciplined. The butterflies in my stomach kicked it up a notch.
They unlocked the gate and let us through.
“Keep as quiet as you can from here on,” she whispered. “They’re harmless, but we’re trying to keep their contact with outsiders to a minimum while we study them.”
We crept down a threadbare trail concealed by heavy brush. Ahead, I could hear chanting and a strange gushing sound.
Dr. Kelly grabbed my arm and stopped me in my tracks. She hunkered down and crept forward. I followed silently. Science -- not so good. Sneaking – damn good.
In the clearing, blue-robed acolytes stood in long rows in front of what looked like scavenged picnic tables. The tables held two-liter bottles of soda. As we watched, one of them reached forward and dropped something in the bottle. Immediately a fountain of soda erupted in the air, and there was a long, almost orgasmic groan from the congregation. No sooner had one fountain collapsed they it was repeated by another, and another, until dozens of jets of soda were reaching skyward at the same time. (Image 1)
After several minutes of this, the bottles were emptied, and I could tell the worshippers were getting antsy. Already there were several fighting over the remains of a half-empty container.
“We dropped off a thousand two-liter bottles of soda four days ago. That’s the last of it,” she whispered. “Watch what happens next.”
She reached into her pack and pulled out a full bottle of soda. In one quick motion, she stood and hurled it into the crowd.
Chaos erupted. No one seemed to notice us, but they focused in on that bottle like a laser-guided bomb. The first one to reach it lasted about thirty seconds before the mob tore him apart. Within minutes, only a handful was left standing, a few rolling on the ground in pain, the rest dead or unconscious.
The survivors seemed to reach some sort of détente. One of them placed the bottle on one of the tables, and the remaining cultists began repeating their ritual.
Dr. Kelly tugged at my arm and indicated we should leave. We retreated back down the mountain. A half-hour later we were in a staff cafeteria in the medical facility.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“Ritual is ritual. It helps sell it if there’s dogma behind it, but we’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that under the right circumstances, you can make almost anyone a fanatic. The Holy Worm is a parasite. It takes up residence in the brain, and when stimulated, it releases chemicals that act to suppress certain brain functions.
“First, it suppresses the amygdala, the part of your brain that triggers fear response. Then it affects the parietal lobe, diminishing the sense of space and time. Finally, it hits specific regions of the frontal and temporal lobes that are responsible for the sense of self.”
“In essence, it lets us take use any ritualistic behavior as a trigger and the response of the parasite amplifies and prolongs the normal biological response. It’s a new discipline called ‘neurotheology’. We can make them feel God.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we are on our way to a new kind of holy warrior, one that knows no fear, never questions authority, and who is biochemically hardwired to believe.”
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Rodrigo -- Match 14
Part 2
That night, I lay awake on the bed in the infirmary back in Cornish. My thoughts were chaotic. With that technique, they could create a whole new generation of holy warriors. They’d be fearless, controllable, and if she was right and they could infect anyone with the parasite, they could infiltrate st about anywhere. This was a damn sight more than I’d agreed to when I signed on as her courier. And if I judged correctly, she was going to take some of her pets back to Canada with her. I couldn’t let that happen.
I dressed quietly, and pressed my ear against the door. I could hear faint movement and the sound of steady, regular breathing. They’d posted a guard. Smart. Only one guard. Not so smart.
I eased the door open, reached out, and broke his neck.
*
I may be a techno-tard when it comes to math and science, but computers and technology I know, and I’m a pretty damned good hacker. The security system at the facility was functional, but the Enclave was still a backwater, and the stuff in the real world was light-years ahead of them. I barely even broke a sweat.
I didn’t have much of a plan. I was outnumbered and out gunned, so I figured my best bet was to grab some proof and get it to the authorities as anonymously as possible. Escape should be easy; all the vehicles in the Enclave were old-school non-AI models, so it would be trivial to hotwire one and get to the border.
I snuck through the darkened laboratories, which were mercifully deserted this late at night. Professional habit had made me memorize the way in on my earlier visit, so I managed to get to the worm lab without getting lost more than once or twice.
I searched until I found the refrigerator, but it was empty. No sign of the cooler. Crap. I felt the first stirrings of panic and suppressed them. The sudden burst of adrenaline must have helped, because it made me remember the microscope. I crossed the lab, making my way back to the bench where she’d showed me the worm.
The area had been cleaned, but on the table next to the scope was a row of test tubes, with ‘G. Sanctus’ written on white labels. I pocketed the samples and left the lab.
*
Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, or maybe I just wasn’t used to working on older systems, but I must have missed something on my way in. Outside the facility I could hear cars and shouting, and flashlights played over the windows.
I juggled the odds in my head, realized I had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out the front way, and decided to head for the hills. Hopefully the soda freaks were tuckered out after a long day of making Mentos fountains.
It was a moonless night, which helped, but this time of year the nights were short, and I knew I wouldn’t have long before daybreak. I made my way up the path, hoping to put some fast distance between me and my pursuers before looking for another way down the mountain.
The fence was unlocked, which worried me, but I could hear the security team moving up the hill, and didn’t want to waste time backtracking to find a way around the compound. I pulled the gate closed behind me and snapped the lock shut. It wouldn’t slow them for a second, but maybe if they saw it was locked they’d waste a few minutes wondering if I’d come that way.
I scurried past the clearing, seeing now that there were little Quonset huts set back a little ways where the Coke-cultists presumably lived. Beyond that, the trail continued. Mentally crossing my fingers, I dashed past the dorms and back into the brush. So far, so good.
Dawn was just breaking when I came to a large tree. One huge limb stretched out across the path, and a solitary figure sat perched upon it, motionless, facing away from me. (Image 4) I realized it was Dr. Kelly. I couldn’t tell what she was watching, but it certainly had her attention. There was no way I could sneak past her, though. The tree stood atop a rocky hill, and to either side of the path I was on the foliage was thick and brittle. No matter how careful I was, I’d sound like an infantry battalion trying to get through that way. That left the path, or backtracking.
If I had to kill her, I wouldn’t lose any sleep, but I figured I could take her out before she could alert anyone. I figured my best shot was to sneak underneath the limb, grab her feet and yank her off her roost. A quick thump to the head, and she’d be out of it long enough for me to get away.
I was ten feet away when she whirled and pointed the gun at me. I started to doubt I was as good as I’d thought I was.
“No sudden moves, Charlie,” she said, pointing a small but lethal handgun at my gut.
She touched the side of her head and whispered something. In the early light I saw a Bluetooth headset stuck in her ear. I didn’t think, I just moved.
She got off one shot before I got underneath her, the bullet tearing a furrow along my side. I snagged one dangling foot and pulled hard. She screamed and fell to the ground, still clutching the pistol. I dove on her, scrambling to keep the gun away from me. I grabbed her forearm and slammed her hand into the dirt until she dropped the weapon. Rolling across her, I got her in a headlock and started to squeeze.
The sound of shattering glass caught me by surprise, and a second later she started to shriek. At least one of the test tubes in my pocket had shattered, and a long spear of glass was embedded in her cheek. I pushed her away, momentarily more interested in making sure I hadn’t gotten cut by one of the tubes than in incapacitating her.
I gingerly opened the cargo pocket on my pants. All but one of the tubes had broken, but it looked like the inside lining was tougher than the outside, and I didn’t think any of the glass had broken through. I didn’t know for sure how the parasite entered the body, but I figured open wounds were a good start.
Like someone had thrown a switch, the shrieking stopped. I looked at Dr. Kelly as she calmly removed the glass dagger from her cheek. She showed no signs of panic, or fear. I picked the gun up off the ground and started to leave.
When I turned back to the path, I saw what she had been watching. There was a large cave at the base of the hill that supported the tree. In a clearing in front of the cave stood a clan of black bears, gazing into the rising sun. They began to what I can only describe as chant, their throaty roars rising and falling in an eerie semblance of human singing. They seemed oblivious to me, so I cautiously made my way around behind them.
I reached the far side without incident, the bears still fixated on the rising sun. I saw movement back from the way I’d come. Dr. Kelly walked slowly into the clearing, stood next to the tallest of the ursine worshippers, and opened her mouth. (Image 5)
Her pleasant contralto was a nice complement to the bears’ baritone.
Off in the distance, I heard the approaching security team. I looked back at Dr. Kelly, and thought about the remaining test tube.
Kelly wasn’t going to doing much lab work from here on out, I didn’t think. And sending the sample to the Feds wouldn’t stop someone in the Enclave from trying to take her place, it would just give the bio-geeks that worked in the Federal labs a head-start on their own formula.
I carefully took it from my pocket, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it beneath my boot.
From my hidden vantage point, I saw one of the security guards try to pull Dr. Kelly from the bear circle. They didn’t much like having their sun ritual disturbed. While the remaining guards debated whether or not to shoot the bears or leave them alone, I made my escape.
Part 2
That night, I lay awake on the bed in the infirmary back in Cornish. My thoughts were chaotic. With that technique, they could create a whole new generation of holy warriors. They’d be fearless, controllable, and if she was right and they could infect anyone with the parasite, they could infiltrate st about anywhere. This was a damn sight more than I’d agreed to when I signed on as her courier. And if I judged correctly, she was going to take some of her pets back to Canada with her. I couldn’t let that happen.
I dressed quietly, and pressed my ear against the door. I could hear faint movement and the sound of steady, regular breathing. They’d posted a guard. Smart. Only one guard. Not so smart.
I eased the door open, reached out, and broke his neck.
*
I may be a techno-tard when it comes to math and science, but computers and technology I know, and I’m a pretty damned good hacker. The security system at the facility was functional, but the Enclave was still a backwater, and the stuff in the real world was light-years ahead of them. I barely even broke a sweat.
I didn’t have much of a plan. I was outnumbered and out gunned, so I figured my best bet was to grab some proof and get it to the authorities as anonymously as possible. Escape should be easy; all the vehicles in the Enclave were old-school non-AI models, so it would be trivial to hotwire one and get to the border.
I snuck through the darkened laboratories, which were mercifully deserted this late at night. Professional habit had made me memorize the way in on my earlier visit, so I managed to get to the worm lab without getting lost more than once or twice.
I searched until I found the refrigerator, but it was empty. No sign of the cooler. Crap. I felt the first stirrings of panic and suppressed them. The sudden burst of adrenaline must have helped, because it made me remember the microscope. I crossed the lab, making my way back to the bench where she’d showed me the worm.
The area had been cleaned, but on the table next to the scope was a row of test tubes, with ‘G. Sanctus’ written on white labels. I pocketed the samples and left the lab.
*
Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, or maybe I just wasn’t used to working on older systems, but I must have missed something on my way in. Outside the facility I could hear cars and shouting, and flashlights played over the windows.
I juggled the odds in my head, realized I had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out the front way, and decided to head for the hills. Hopefully the soda freaks were tuckered out after a long day of making Mentos fountains.
It was a moonless night, which helped, but this time of year the nights were short, and I knew I wouldn’t have long before daybreak. I made my way up the path, hoping to put some fast distance between me and my pursuers before looking for another way down the mountain.
The fence was unlocked, which worried me, but I could hear the security team moving up the hill, and didn’t want to waste time backtracking to find a way around the compound. I pulled the gate closed behind me and snapped the lock shut. It wouldn’t slow them for a second, but maybe if they saw it was locked they’d waste a few minutes wondering if I’d come that way.
I scurried past the clearing, seeing now that there were little Quonset huts set back a little ways where the Coke-cultists presumably lived. Beyond that, the trail continued. Mentally crossing my fingers, I dashed past the dorms and back into the brush. So far, so good.
Dawn was just breaking when I came to a large tree. One huge limb stretched out across the path, and a solitary figure sat perched upon it, motionless, facing away from me. (Image 4) I realized it was Dr. Kelly. I couldn’t tell what she was watching, but it certainly had her attention. There was no way I could sneak past her, though. The tree stood atop a rocky hill, and to either side of the path I was on the foliage was thick and brittle. No matter how careful I was, I’d sound like an infantry battalion trying to get through that way. That left the path, or backtracking.
If I had to kill her, I wouldn’t lose any sleep, but I figured I could take her out before she could alert anyone. I figured my best shot was to sneak underneath the limb, grab her feet and yank her off her roost. A quick thump to the head, and she’d be out of it long enough for me to get away.
I was ten feet away when she whirled and pointed the gun at me. I started to doubt I was as good as I’d thought I was.
“No sudden moves, Charlie,” she said, pointing a small but lethal handgun at my gut.
She touched the side of her head and whispered something. In the early light I saw a Bluetooth headset stuck in her ear. I didn’t think, I just moved.
She got off one shot before I got underneath her, the bullet tearing a furrow along my side. I snagged one dangling foot and pulled hard. She screamed and fell to the ground, still clutching the pistol. I dove on her, scrambling to keep the gun away from me. I grabbed her forearm and slammed her hand into the dirt until she dropped the weapon. Rolling across her, I got her in a headlock and started to squeeze.
The sound of shattering glass caught me by surprise, and a second later she started to shriek. At least one of the test tubes in my pocket had shattered, and a long spear of glass was embedded in her cheek. I pushed her away, momentarily more interested in making sure I hadn’t gotten cut by one of the tubes than in incapacitating her.
I gingerly opened the cargo pocket on my pants. All but one of the tubes had broken, but it looked like the inside lining was tougher than the outside, and I didn’t think any of the glass had broken through. I didn’t know for sure how the parasite entered the body, but I figured open wounds were a good start.
Like someone had thrown a switch, the shrieking stopped. I looked at Dr. Kelly as she calmly removed the glass dagger from her cheek. She showed no signs of panic, or fear. I picked the gun up off the ground and started to leave.
When I turned back to the path, I saw what she had been watching. There was a large cave at the base of the hill that supported the tree. In a clearing in front of the cave stood a clan of black bears, gazing into the rising sun. They began to what I can only describe as chant, their throaty roars rising and falling in an eerie semblance of human singing. They seemed oblivious to me, so I cautiously made my way around behind them.
I reached the far side without incident, the bears still fixated on the rising sun. I saw movement back from the way I’d come. Dr. Kelly walked slowly into the clearing, stood next to the tallest of the ursine worshippers, and opened her mouth. (Image 5)
Her pleasant contralto was a nice complement to the bears’ baritone.
Off in the distance, I heard the approaching security team. I looked back at Dr. Kelly, and thought about the remaining test tube.
Kelly wasn’t going to doing much lab work from here on out, I didn’t think. And sending the sample to the Feds wouldn’t stop someone in the Enclave from trying to take her place, it would just give the bio-geeks that worked in the Federal labs a head-start on their own formula.
I carefully took it from my pocket, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it beneath my boot.
From my hidden vantage point, I saw one of the security guards try to pull Dr. Kelly from the bear circle. They didn’t much like having their sun ritual disturbed. While the remaining guards debated whether or not to shoot the bears or leave them alone, I made my escape.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Good luck, PC.
I gotta run to dinner, but I'll read yours when I get back tonight. Looking at your title, I wonder if any of our ideas overlap.
I gotta run to dinner, but I'll read yours when I get back tonight. Looking at your title, I wonder if any of our ideas overlap.
Berandor
lunatic
Awesome book.Piratecat said:That's okay. The most important part of writing is cutting.
I swear, I've written double the needed verbiage for these last two stories. In this last one I think I rewrote the same section four times before I got it right. I like cutting, though; it makes the end story that much tighter.
The best example I've seen is in the end of Steven King's "On Writing," where he shows the same story (1426) both before and after he edits, along with his editing comments. It was really illuminating for me.
Edit: End of first draft, 4,400 words. Going to sleep now. I’m not sure what to cut, but I will find something.
Good night.
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maxfieldjadenfox
First Post
Piratecat said:That's okay. The most important part of writing is cutting.
I swear, I've written double the needed verbiage for these last two stories. In this last one I think I rewrote the same section four times before I got it right. I like cutting, though; it makes the end story that much tighter.
The best example I've seen is in the end of Steven King's "On Writing," where he shows the same story (1426) both before and after he edits, along with his editing comments. It was really illuminating for me.
I really liked writing this last story. It was fun doing something that isn't horror.
Hey PC,
I spent the day doing algebra, and found that you had started your story nearly exactly the way I would have started mine... I didn't read any farther yet, in case I have time to write something. Just for grins, I'd like to see how much all of our ideas overlap. The set of pictures was pretty evocative.
I love Stephen King's On Writing. One of the best books on craft I've ever come across. Good luck to you and to Rodrigo!
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Nope, nothing in common!Rodrigo Istalindir said:
Fun story, Rodrigo. There are portions of this story that are as good as anything I've ever seen you write. You kicked my butt last time we went head to head in one of these, so it's fun to have another chance. Detailed comments about your story under the cut.
[sblock=No judges, please.]There are some things you do really really well, and in the first half of the story you're at the top of your game. That one line... "...felt that side of the car start to rise, gravity losing out to momentum. Gravity won in a split decision, momentum screaming that it was robbed." That, my friend, is just beautiful. Same with "Her pleasant contralto was a nice complement to the bears’ baritone." And you get mondo bonus points for using "complement" correctly.
In fact, I think the whole first half of the story is extremely strong. You're good with action, clear and concise and powerful, and your comparison of technological vs. human advantages really worked well. You introduced the problem and showed us it was a bad, bad thing. I was a little confused about the Diet Coke picture, but it made the point about absurdity in forced worship.
Note one technical error. If a character is speaking over two paragraphs, don't end the first paragraph with a close quotes. So
[bq]“I suppose that’s fair. My name is Dr. Kelly. I’m a biologist at the University of Calgary, specializing in parasites.”
“Come with me,” she said, tossing some real currency on the table to cover the meal.[/bq]
would be...
[bq]“I suppose that’s fair. My name is Dr. Kelly. I’m a biologist at the University of Calgary, specializing in parasites.
“Come with me,” she said, tossing some real currency on the table to cover the meal.[/bq]
The second half of the story didn't seem as strong as the lead-in. The first part was largely dialog and the second part had none, and that felt jarring; I like how you write dialog a lot, so I missed it. Also, you started telling the action (such as the breaking and entering) instead of showing it.
Picture-wise, that last photo was rough. Of course, your earlier use of the 404 sign picture was just brilliant, so it probably balances out.
I'm left with some questions. The doctor knew he was mercenary scum; why show him this top secret project? It seems very out of character for someone in her position, especially with that much security. Other than to be conveniently in our narrator's way, why was a parasite doctor studying bears in the middle of the night while wearing a dress, even if they were infected?
Overall I think this is good but your "Hell Freezes Over" story in round 2 is stronger. I'll be interested to see how the judging goes, since our stories are in different genres.
Good job. I love Ceramic DM, and you're one of the reasons why.
[/sblock]
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