Showing posts with label work-in-progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work-in-progress. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Caught in the rain

The clouds above the city blackened. Eubert Haische withdrew a collapsible umbrella from his trousers and hurried to the sidewalk, boots scattering concrete. The overcast blanketed the street in shadow. Then the rain began, sticky, fist-sized bolts that beat against the awning over his head and splashed resoundingly on the ruined tarmac. The few humans on the street ducked into gutted buildings with faded signs and labyrinthine facades of cracked neon, their umbrellas folding shut.

Eubert was almost at his apartment. He walked, rain pooling at his feet, fingers clenched on the handle of his umbrella. He felt it shuddering in his hand, a living thing governed by a Swarmer chipbrain. The parasol unfurled, a delicate amber membrane veined like a leaf from a tropical plant. Indecipherable Swarmer hieroglyphs blinked on its surface. Stung by sudden frustration, he let the umbrella fall to the ground, where it squirmed its way to the wet street. Rain sucked at his heels as he walked on, oblivious.

A man and a woman in unisex Ministry jumpers walked on the opposite sidewalk, holding hands. Eubert watched them from the corner of his eye as he reached an intersection; they turned a corner and disappeared into shadow.

A Swarmer van, long and segmented, came to a sudden stop in the middle of the intersection. The awning above hung in greasy, beaten rags, revealing the wire rungs beneath. He turned away and braced himself against a cracked concrete wall. Eubert narrowed his eyes, not daring to look into the van's single wan headlight or the thin forms of the emerging Swarmers. Rumors maintained the Swarmers killed eavesdroppers: the tainted rain, oozing through cracks in their exoskeletons, bonded with chemical receptors, inducing them to frenzy. He had watched samizdat footage of the Swarmers at their vicious worst. It was hard to judge how real it all was. Their bodies had the smooth, lean quality of twentieth century computer animation, easy to simulate onscreen.

He watched the Swarmers congregating outside their van, black armor glistening in the streetlights, which had begun to blink on one by one, throwing overlapping rungs of shadow over his hiding place beneath the awning. He heard the van's engine idling: a sloshing sound, like an enormous stomach having a particularly difficult time digesting a meal.

The Swarmers stretched their thin arms and thrust their pleated chests forward. The heavy drops clung to them like molten jewels before vanishing between the cracks in their armor, making their bodies swell. Their feet scrabbled on the tarmac, and Eubert thought he could make out the fluttering of vestigial wings.

Fragment

She inspected her sac, reassured to find three lamps still remaining. In the three days since departing the small city at the shaft's base, she had found herself increasingly forgetful of what she had taken with her. Running out of light halfway up the shaft might not seal her fate, but the prospect of climbing in darkness, navigating strictly by feel, filled her with a rare dread. Sometimes climbers never came back, and she'd set off fully expecting to find their remains littering the regularly spaces balconies that lined the shaft's interior. So far her trek had been mercifully lacking in macabre thrills; her life had taken on a monochrome aloneness even more pronounced that that in the city, where her only compatriots were the whimsical bioconstructs excreted by the factories and tweaked by human workers.

In the glum light of the lamp, Dep located the ladder: a dark tracing of cast iron that stretched vertiginously up and beyond, rungs caked in scruffy moss and pebbled with insect eggs. Her hands made contact with the rungs and she experienced an unexpected surge of energy. Teeth clenched against vertigo, she resumed climbing.

#

She reached the next balcony much later. Dep immediately collapsed, supply sac pressed against her side like a malignancy, limbs splayed like spokes in a senseless mandala. Her breath hissed dryly in her throat as she fumbled with her water bottle, wetting her lips and tongue before snacking on a handful of edible-looking larvae she found suspended from the bottom rung of the next ladder. Still chewing, she looked up and found a disc of salmon-colored light peering down at her, cyclopean and unheeding. Almost as suddenly, she noticed that the usually smooth concrete of the balcony had become gritty, soiled with dust and bits of unusual-looking rock that shone redly in the biofluorescence of her lamp.

The skeletons of small, unfamiliar creatures littered the balcony like grim talismans. Their contours reminded her of the pseudo-organisms harvested from the reclamation tanks so perilously far below. But her inner logic told her these were genuine, relics of whatever biology persisted above. On impulse, she scooped several of them up and dropped them into her sac, hoping to sell them to gene merchants upon her return. Perhaps having something tangible to show for her unannounced exploit would take the sting out of her homecoming, or at least dull the awkwardness that typically greeted those who had transcended the shaft's depths.

Hugging her scabbed knees to her chin, Dep studied the gently curving wall. She recognized glyphs etched in the flowing, organic style of her native vocabulary and other, decidedly alien markings that might have predated her fellow travelers by millennia. She spent indeterminable minutes attempting to decipher them, frowning in disgust when her efforts met only failure.

She turned to the vast black pool and chanced a look down. The abyss wasn't as frightening as she had expected. Instead, it filled her with a perverse confidence and sense of giddy infallibility. She stood on the balls of her feet and let her face expand into a feral smile, imagining her lithe form superimposed against rapturous darkness. Dep closed her eyes, concentrating on the tickle of her lank hair and the welcome ache of her muscles.

#

When she awoke, the lamp had burned itself into a pile of vaguely luminous ash, which she brushed aside with her palm. She watched it descend, wraithlike, until consumed in night. For a moment she longed for the nebular lights of the city below, the familiar rhythms of the life-giving machines, the antics of the chimeras that roosted among the derelict towers and rotting gardens.

And then she was climbing, and she knew this would be the last tier. The pink light above ebbed and flickered as she ascended, toying with her shadow. Within a few hours she could feel a foreign breeze circulating. Migrant insects and pale, nameless organisms with pliant skeletons and mottled wings thrashed, shrieking, amidst tendrils of orange dust.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Wake-up time

The suckerpads must have retracted, because he was awake, snagged in the barrier that separated induced dream from reality. He pulled the helmet off and glanced instinctively at his watch. He had one hour to make it to work.

He shaved, cutting himself. The restorative lotion stung, turning his face into a constellation of pain.

He dressed and walked into the hallway, greeted by psychoactive mists and chirping electronics. Children had tethered utility drones to lengths of thread, leaving them to spin themselves into exhaustion. They appealed to him with silver eyes, appendages flashing in in apprehension, appraising him. Their buzzing formed an odd music: the synaptic hiss that heralds sleep. The walls offered confused visions of cracked cement, fiberglass, holographic graffiti laser-etched into a background of fading brick.

In the lobby, he donned the virtuality gear and burned time wrestling naked Amazons. Their skin had the sheen of obsidian basted with Vaseline; his reconstructed hands slipped from his lithe quarry as he ducked and stabbed and punched with delirious abandon. The Amazons retaliated with flying elbows and jabs from archaic spears that went largely unfelt; he had set the rig to minimum pain settings.

He nursed stigmatic aches as he relinquished the greasy rubber mitts and peeled the oculars from his head. He wiped ghost images from his eyes and shouldered his way through the front door. Morning traffic roared, threatening. A hearse passed, trailed by old-fashioned automated cars with porous tires and tapered stun-guns mounted on their roofs. Brown slush vomited from their dual exhaust pipes.

He began walking, quickly losing himself in unfamiliar streets. He watched a bus pass, oval windows cataract-blank. He found a gutted telephone booth and dialed up the girl's address on his watch, surprised how close he was, how far he had come simply by wandering, committing himself to the anarchy of the pavement.

Glancing periodically at his watch, he approached a stall of public bicycles: skeletal machines of lurid yellow chitin. The bike trembled as he down, odorless sap bleeding from rivets in its spindly frame. Eubert unwound a set of earbuds from the handlebars and listened to Swarmer muzak as he pedaled. The sound turned looming buildings into a psychotronic dream, offices and apartments rising and cascading like the waves and toughs on an EEG reading.

His tires hissed through shallow slush-piles where machines had died and melted under their own obsolete weight. Dirigibles scraped the overcast into a frost-colored pane.

He double-checked his watch, pedaled faster.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Indulge me.

The city vanished at his periphery as sleep descended.

Abandoned suburbs eaten by moss, yards quilted with voracious Swarmer lichen. Chimneys like broken pencils holding the sky in condemnation. The Arc overhead, faintly visible in the daytime, ringed in greasy clouds.

Then came the fields, derelict and overrun. Ancient machines crouched in knee-high moss like the remnants of a prehistoric herd. Yellow, clanging metal trucking through the emptiness, a tide of soiled turbines and wheels gooey with spores. Rust-red moss creeping like melanoma across unattended dashboards . . .

Here and there, Eubert saw streets abraded into meandering canals, sluggish algal waters destined for Swarmer facilities. Limber, chitinous biomachines as large as sedans tended the flow with sieves and bacterial tinctures, unruly liquid blossoms like short-lived flowers, petals subsumed by the undertow and dragged away in shreds.

Farther. Now even the clouds had taken on mottled Swarmer color-schemes, oozing through the sky like psychedelic phlegm. Intermittent rains; sour fogs rose to engulf the twin moons.

Flashback

A blimp had fallen somewhere downtown. Tenants gestured from their windows as the last of the bioluminous ash settled to the streets. The air smelled of smoldering chitin. Above, threads of exhaust traced a doomed rainbow over the skyline.

Eubert's father gripped his hand and hurried him across the street, kicking up ash as they walked. Eubert delighted in the orange-yellow plumes, brief nebulae that vanished in a mob of would-be onlookers. Someone's electronic siren howled from a rooftop, ushering people out of their buildings and into the streets, where entomobiles waited with perked antennae. A handful of tenants unclasped the doors to their decayed Twen-Cen cars, leaving trails of fecal rust as they sputtered down the main street, ringed in dormant neon and faded billboards.

Eubert's father pushed him gently into a vacant entomobile. The thin black door hissed shut and they strapped themselves intro pale, resinous seats.

The streets flashed by, a forest of mirages, gray and dripping. Eubert watched the pedestrian traffic in ill-concealed fascination, prying the ento's passenger window farther open until his fingertips were embedded in warm resin.

He wondered to himself -- though he dared not speak it aloud -- if the Swarmers staged events like this as testaments to their fallibility. Assuming they were fallible.

The glowing ash grew thicker, until at last the entomobile waded through it on its thin legs, leaving short-lived ruts on the surface of dunes.

The blimp, a gelatinous construct studded with instrumentation, had fallen into an intersection, its snub-nosed copula crashing through a storefront. Sprays of tinted plastic darkened the concrete.

A crowd had already gathered to take in the wreckage. Hovering over the mob's heads was a cloud of Swarmer utility drones, cicada wings flickering. Heedless, Eubert's father disembarked, his hands on Eubert's shoulders as they pushed through the onlookers. The drones blocked out the sun and the pale crescent of the Arc. Eubert moved closer, tromping through heaps of cooling orange ash.

A Swarmer VTOL emerged from behind the ruined store, scaly chitin turbofans scattering drones. Eubert and his father put their hands to their faces to block the sudden curtain of ash. Some of it got into Eubert's mouth anyway: it tasted sour, earthy, inexplicably delicious. His heart beat faster.

The VTOL settled onto the blimp's dying bladder. Its fans baked the downed craft's sleek veneer like twin hair-dryers held against a membrane of gelatin. Slime beaded the onlookers' faces.

Three Swarmers emerged from the VTOL's carapace, dressed in snug flannel suits and old bowler hats cinched low over faceted eyes. Eubert could make out the contours of their mouthless faces, their exterior mandibles snug around their pointed chins. His father squeezed his shoulders as if to keep him from bolting forward. Eubert resigned himself to passive observation, not daring to move closer, painfully aware of the teeming human bodies to his right and left.

The Swarmers approached the storefront, leather shoes gooey with the blimp's excretions. Then Eubert saw the body -- a human body -- lying amidst the crushed plastic: an ungainly, bulky-looking thing with skin the color of wax. Threads of paranoia and dread uncoiled in the base of his neck and spine.

The corpse's head was caked in blood and poked obscenely from behind the copula, seeming small and somehow artificial: a demented bauble.

Utility drones began descending in waves, inundating the air with piezoelectric babble. They swarmed and glinted like metallic rain, alighting on bystanders with tiny outstretched cameras and wire-thin legs. Eubert noticed with a start that they were in his hair, fussing with his scalp as they positioned themselves for on-site EEG readings. He yelled and brushed them away, his palms bloody where they had wielded microscopic scythes.

His father steered him closer to the body, though Eubert gathered this wasn't his intention. The throng had begun to shift with a kind of Brownian listlessness, taking them with it. He wondered why the Swarmers, as efficient as they supposedly were, hadn't tried to disperse the crowd -- out of simple embarrassment, if nothing else. Mechanical malfunctions were exceedingly rare, and the downed blimp seemed little more than a monument to waste.

He looked up. The sky rippled with cybernetic purpose, an unnerving tangle of beating wings. The utility drones descended upon the crumpled human body in a silver tide. In seconds the corpse had been reduced to a vague suggestion of itself, the drones feasting on its DNA, palpating the crushed limbs in an elaborately choreographed autopsy. They lifted into the sky in a noisy migration that briefly maintained human form.

In the meantime, the Swarmers had unsealed the door to the copula. Eubert caught a glimpse of crushed exoskeleton and stringy Swarmer guts thrown against uneven gunmetal walls. A single plasma screen stammered alien calligraphy.

By the time he looked up at the second VTOL, he had already started to faint. For a sick moment he stood dizzily in the balmy summer heat, looking out at a landscape of collapsed, comatose bodies. His father had landed on his back, bloodshot eyes gazing sightlessly as the second wave of pheromone rolled over the crowd. His hands, callused from endless back-engineering of Swarmer machinery, fell to his sides before Eubert could fall into them.

Crushed, wet Swarmer flesh. The air seething, displaced by chrome wings. One of the Swarmers stood looking down at him as the pheromone set to work. Eyes like dirty gemstone. Outcroppings of stiff black flesh that gave the fleeting impression of cheekbones.

The creature's suit fluttered as the last of the drones took to the sky. It extended a gloved hand that wasn't a hand -- not exactly -- and pushed his eyelids shut.

He could feel the chill from the Swarmer's fingertips even through the gloveleather.

One-way street

The car swerved madly to the left, pounding over a mossy concrete island that separated the street into two narrow lanes. The undercarriage rasped and clunked; I floundered in my seat, my seatbelt biting into my shoulder, scenery reeling outside. I stared vapidly at the partition, now alive with meaningless animated graphics. We scudded past the far side of the island, tires groping for purchase, chunks of wet asphalt and scorched metal rattling against the windows.

The woman -- it occurred to me with absurd clarity that I still didn't know her name -- was barking commands into the suddenly stuffy air and grappling with the toggle that controlled her door's germicide seal. "We've been hacked," she said, calm infusing her voice.

"But we've got a human driver . . ."

"It found a way in."

I leaned back and uncertainly elevated my legs, ready to kick the partition. The cushions had stopped their hypnotic massage; I felt them clutching at my neck like mittened hands, the metal digits beneath the fake leather poking and straining. I rocked back and kicked the display screen. The veneer of plastic cracked noisily; my boots came away bloody with liquid crystal. The car swerved, accelerated. I kicked again, tucking my head forward to avoid the seat's questing musculature.

The woman had withdrawn a wedge-shaped gun from the folds of her suit. I watched as it telescoped to its maximum length like the proboscis of some grotesquely overgrown insect. The trigger extended from the barrel with a pneumatic sigh and she squeezed it repeatedly, filling the backseat with the lethal clatter of mirror-bright shells. The door exploded, ragged flaps of metal swaying against a kinetic backdrop of decaying stackmalls and defunct machinery. I suddenly realized that the car was taking us toward the base of the nearest skyscraper. I kicked again at the partition, feeling something give. The impact sent waves of pain through my shins and knees.

The woman removed her seatbelt. "We have to jump."

I huddled, staring furiously at the partition. Rivulets of crystal formed a brackish calligraphy, mocking and ever-changing, morbidly hypnotic. I slipped out of my harness and managed a sickened nod. The sliver's graffiti-covered ramparts swelled outside my window.

With insect-like swiftness, she poised herself at the edge of the ruined door, suddenly ominous against the flux of pitted concrete. As an afterthought, she leveled the gun at the partition in front of her, roughly where the head of the driver would be. She fired, jumped; I caught a glimpse of her lithe body hitting the pavement and rolling as the partition dissolved into plastic ash and fissured circuitboard. Through the chest-sized hole left by the blast, I saw something vaguely suggesting humanity hovering, headless, over a luminous dashboard. Then I was on the ground, tumbling, arms smacking against the street in painful rhythm, the roar of the car's engine dopplering like something heard in a dream.

Stillness. And then the visceral slam as the car impacted the building, engine imploding into an indecipherable knot of metal and plastic, hood springing open and detaching like a crumpled sail, gleaming silver through the haze of rain and smoke. A figure dropped from the wreck, limbs scrabbling weakly, the fibrous stump where its head had been wavering like a blunt antenna. Its skin was a uniform flow of dark rain and even darker blood.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Dystopian interlude

Eubert slouched in his chair. Its thin organic frame accordion deftly, adapting to the curve of his back. "I don't dream," he said. "I use an enceph."

He got up and crossed the room to his mattress. The enceph lay padlocked to a titanium ringlet sealed to the floor. He picked it up, hefted it on its length of tarnished chain. The enceph was flexible, barely; he pressed against its top until the electrodes inside caught the light like so many octopus sucker-pads.

"But that's not dreaming," Sterope said. "It's artificial. Like playing a game." She shook her head, disgusted with herself. "Well, that's not right either. You're not playing it; it plays you."

Eubert dropped the enceph to the mattress and walked back onto the dead lawn, grinding a weed under his heel. The sunlamps fixed to the ceiling threw his face into relief: thinning brown hair, large ears, a nearly lipless mouth touched by a congenital half-smile. He scratched mold from his cheek. "You're awfully cynical," he said.

"I'm not sure I know what that means."

Eubert shrugged. "I'm not sure you do either." He sat back down on the collapsible chair. "You mean to tell me you don't use an enceph?"

Sterope smiled awkwardly and hugged her knees to her chest. "That's what I'm saying."

"And the Ministry lets you get by with it."

Her smile faded. "They don't ask, I don't tell."

"Dreaming," Eubert said wonderingly.

"Maybe you should try it."

"I've tried it," he said.

"When you were a kid. Before you were fitted." She laughed dryly. "You're such a prude. Such a square. It's almost endearing." She stared into her empty vial and extended it to the robot.

"Thank you, madam," the robot said, plucking the vial from her fingers. It trudged off through the ankle-high grass. Weeds caught in its treads and dripped yellow spores that made both of them sneeze. It crossed the shallow fiberglass bunker that separated the garden from the rest of the apartment. Eubert almost hurried after it, decided not to at the last second.

"You think I live by the book," he said.

"I know you do."

He shook his head. "We all have vices. Even the Swarmers. Even me."

Sterope looked skeptical and watched the sun set through the apartment's panorama window. The city, crumbled and dirty, welcomed the night. In minutes the only outlines left were those of the Swarmer office towers, glowing blue in vigil. Scattered dirigibles coasted above, tentacles dangling like the legs of airborne wasps.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Found while rummaging my hard-drive for abortive original fiction:

The lobby was cramped and sad with decay, a fungal museum of twentieth century architectural tropes. The ceiling leaked slime and the overhead lights had been replaced with bare 40-watt bulbs. Ancient fans set them swaying; the room throbbed and writhed in misplaced shadow.

The elevator had been scavenged for its electronics. In its stead, the ad-hoc building administration had installed a frail spiral staircase, perennially wet, the grilled steps carpeted with gene-hacked Swarmer mold. Sensing body heat, the mold would light a psychedelic green that, though faint, left painful afterimages. Swarmer biotech asserted itself with belligerent intensity, borne on the air, taking up residence wherever possible until all that was terrestrial about a place -- all that was normal -- had been leeched, an implacable dampness left in its place.

Sterope Graff stood playing an arcade game in the corner, hands locked into mitts of rotting black rubber, a bowl-shaped virtuality helmet flattening her long black dreadlocks. She had pressed earbuds deep into her aural canals.

Eubert watched her as she gesticulated blindly, hips stiffening as she braced herself against unseen foes, head bobbing and weaving. Her 'locks thrashed behind her like the wake of a dark comet. Eubert found her movement funky and dreamily erotic. He sat down on a circular sofa with sagging acrylic cushions, aware of the stink of Nourishment clinging to his Bureau-issued worksuit. His skinny bar-coded necktie lay creased in his lap.

He looked at his watch, one of the awkward black affairs mandated by the Swarmers. He put it to his ear and listened to the malevolent clicking of its transponder. He nodded in rhythm, and saw with elation that Sterope moved in time. Somehow, the storm of electrons pouring from her rig corresponded to the device that invisibly governed his life.

Our lives intersect, he thought. At least on some level.
The global infrastructure had been in free-fall for over two decades, transforming the surface of the planet, eroding the fragile allegiances that kept the animate from mingling too intimately with the inanimate. Early 21st century academics had referred to it as the Singularity. Now we called it the Plague, the Spasm, the Big Malf. I supposed there was something transcendental beneath all of the leprous confusion, but it remained elusive, like the thin chemical smoke left after a defoliation attempt.

As an anthropologist, part of me had welcomed the Malf. It had shattered the distribution curve that comprised the human race, warping and bending it into uncanny new shapes, some recognizable, others less so. And some -- the ones I sought out among the malleable, twitching guts of what had once been a populated human city, wreathed in smog and enlivened by the whirr of thousands of engines -- far beyond anything imagined.
Anime stepped from the recessed bed, cool recycled air playing against her bare skin. She glanced down into the shallow contoured basin that held the gel mattress; the man's sleeping body had curled into a fetal position beneath the randomly flickering translucent sheets. She was reminded of insect pupae, snug in cocoons of dried slime while the world progressed around them as if in time-lapse.

The buoyant lunar gravity seemed to caress her as she navigated the darkened bedroom. She had ever known the torturous pull of Earth or the chest-constricting push of take-off. Her bones, though augmented by supplements and periodically refreshed by nanomachines, were as temperamental as so many glass sticks.

The bedroom was cavernous: faceted walls, dormant flatscreens, polished lunar regolith that absorbed shadow like some vampirish sponge. Silicates extracted from lunar soil had been turned into walls of opaque glass inset with palm-sized newsfeeds and free-form holography. The screens bled light, illuminating transparent furniture, scattered components of virtuality workstations. A brain-link lay coiled on the floor between her feet, nasal studs encrusted with blood and mucus. The man she had slept with had used it before they had gone to bed, his eyes staring at nothing.

One side of the room featured a louvered window, shut to block the unfiltered glare of the Sun across the ash-gray plain. Invisible retinal scanners sensed the intent in her eyes and the louvers parted with a quick whispering sound. The man continued sleeping, chest heaving beneath the sheets. Mossy-green light played across his closed eyelids.

Standing naked in the dark, she wondered if she was something more than the moonbase's AI, a mere extension of its sensory embrace. She knew she was artificial; she had seen her own skin lifted from a frothing vat like a pinkish wetsuit, hands like empty gloves, facial features deflated into a thoroughly demeaning caricature. The techs had installed her sense of body-identity before adding the actual body; her abrupt adolescence had been spent in a grueling immersive dialogue with Turing auditors.

Her first vision of the world -- the real world, as opposed to the auditors' cybernetic fictions – had come when her body had achieved a semblance of womanhood. She remembered awakening in a scalding foam of nanomachines, gloved hands drawing her up into a haze of disembodied eyes and fluorescent strips that left rungs of purple light on her newborn retinas. She knew intuitively why the techs were wearing rebreather masks; she was an infestation in the form of a woman, to be handled with obsessive care.

Shortly thereafter, the first of her implanted memories had risen to the surface, as silently and impersonally as newsfeeds. She knew they weren't true memories -- her designers hadn't wanted to deceive her into adopting some phantom past. Not for her convenience, but for theirs: her sudden emergence on the Moon would have taxed any fictitious past, breaking its own narrative stability and quite likely her psyche in the process.

The Moon appeared behind the polarized glass: a tortured yet somehow peaceful surface of petrified dunes and hulking rocks that gleamed near-silver in the light from the landing beacons. The Earth was an anonymous crescent, defining features veiled by cloud.

Memories: episodic flashes of oceans overgrown with a gray, fibrous substrate, hordes of metal insects dripping their armored eggs over quarantined cities. A mushroom cloud seen from a great distance: as insubstantial as a cheap hologram -- not the incandescent orange she would have expected had the memory actually been hers, but a sickly luminous gray-brown . . . the unassuming color of a camouflaged moth.

She walked away from the window, a chill creeping up her legs as she headed for the bathroom and donned a thin white robe. Above the toilet -- little more than a streamlined bulge emerging from the yielding dun-colored tile -- was a mirror. She looked into it wincingly, bothered by the quizzical stare, lank black hair, pursed lips.

Anime wondered whose DNA was incubating beneath the unassuming olive of her custom-crafted skin. For some reason it seemed to matter, as acutely as if she carried some potent and uncategorized virus. Again, memories of Earth, leaving a taste like cheap plastic in her mouth.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Nerves took root as the liquid flesh congealed on her body, bonding with exposed muscle and stifling the flow of pus and blood that had persisted despite the application of bandages. Fresh nerves -- better than the charred originals and duly patented -- brought with them a sensory clarity that reminded her of purchasing her first HDTV flatscreen and quietly marveling at the resolution.

For long hours she immersed herself in the sheer amniotic newness of her body, aware of its patient coagulation, its inexorable stiffening into something that, ultimately, would serve her in her new life. The gloved hands of the biotechnicians slowly receded and she found herself in succulent darkness, a creature of transition.
Another work-in-progress:

1.

The creatures appeared during the summer. We'd already managed to acclimate ourselves to the Object that had coincided with the first sightings. Their eventual mass appearance shouldn't have been a surprise; some, privileged with hindsight, would doubtlessly argue that we should have been expecting them.

The Object -- no one had ever coined a more satisfying alternative to the term heard so often in those initial newscasts three years ago -- had seemed innocuous, a skyborne bauble that almost could have passed for some natural phenomenon if not for its conspicuous, burnished surface. Or the circular pits -- dubbed "portals" by the backyard astronomers who had posted the original images to the Web. I suppose we'd secretly expected the Object to remain as mute and implacable as it had since it had appeared in orbit.

The creatures shocked everyone. Not necessarily because of their appearance, about which little or nothing could be determined at first, but because of their numbers. They took to our streets like a tide of insects, a crush of unyielding alien flesh. It took all of three days for infrastructure to succumb; we knew people were dying even before the telecom grid crashed.

The Web shuddered and fell silent. And then they came for us in earnest.

2.

The abrupt isolation came as a welcome respite. Most Midwesterners had vanished in the first wave of attacks, although I now wondered if the visitors' bid for supremacy qualified as an "attack" in the normal sense. What little I'd seen firsthand resembled nothing less that a serial execution, bodies fastidiously cremated in the invasion's wake.

Friday, January 16, 2009

A story fragment from my fiction blog, which I'm considering deleting:

The device looked like a pitchfork, and served the same basic function. Only the keypad -- contoured to fit the bright red ergonomic handle -- gave it away. In the dim evening light, Kris couldn't help but keep her eyes on the steady lambent green of its readout. Unmistakable verdant clusters showed her where the next bodies were, already scoped out and tagged by the sleek, cheerfully stickered aerostats that had arrived yesterday in a blur of skyborne polymer. She walked slowly through the thickening marsh, anonymous chemicals leaving scabrous rings on her haz-mat boots. The reflected glow from the pitchfork's keyboard regarded her from below, a strange second moon that swelled and rippled in synch with her movements.

She saw the next body a moment later. A civilian, just as the tags had indicated. Face-down, arms splayed like spokes in a senseless mandala. Just barely visible through a tangle of weeds and styrofoam.

She gritted her teeth and raised the pitchfork. Icons blinked like eager green eyes. Visored face averted, she lowered the fork's tines in a single practiced movement, only vaguely aware of the sudden yielding of flesh as the device swarmed into the corpse's increasingly porous confines. The tines extruded sensors and barely visible nanotech spores: gear beyond the carrying capacity of the aerostats, the tutorials had made a point to remind her, lest she yield to the sense of obsolescence that had characterized her stay in Florida. Over the last three months her initial paranoid suspicion that she was redundant -- a human face amidst the coastal blight -- had festered into an equally paranoid certainty. She'd come to view the omnipresent drones, airborne and otherwise, with ill-defined suspicion.

It was the clean-up, of course. The bodies. Especially the bodies. She tried not to look anymore; the pitchfork (she'd already tried and failed to quit calling it that, and it didn't help that the other members of her crew insisted on the same grisly anachronism) did most of the work, after all. The Consortium needed volunteers because it needed muscle to bear its gear -- to say nothing of the PR benefit of dispatching flesh-and-bone humans when sending in robotic surrogates couldn't have been that much more difficult.

A timer chimed. She withdrew the fork with a wince of mingled reluctance and nausea. She'd taken her day's dose of neuroinhibitors, of course; medically speaking, she shouldn't be able to conscience nausea, let alone feel it stirring in her gut.

Some things never changed.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

From a work-in-progress:

A journeyman ufologist's introduction to the abduction phenomenon usually begins with a recounting of the capture of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire in 1961. Believed at the time to be the first kidnapping of humans by UFO occupants, the Hills' account contains virtually all of the elements contained in later narratives (which reached a near-fever pitch in the mid-1990s, stoked by an obliging media and the success of several influential books).





There's little doubt that something unusual happened to the Hills. At the very least, both Betty and Barney recalled seeing an unidentified object apparently trailing their car. The account becomes more explicit upon Barney's attempt to view the object through binoculars; upon magnification, he witnessed a "pancake"-shaped vehicle sporting triangular fins and red lights. More startling yet, he could discern occupants behind a row of windows, including one raptly staring humanoid he found especially threatening. The ensuing abduction has become the stuff of ufological legend, as has the Hills bout with "missing time," an element that recurs throughout later accounts.

Under hypnosis by Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, Betty recalled a conspicuously chatty alien "leader" whose human demeanor was only slightly less outlandish than his bizarre questions. (Ironically, the Hill abduction -- widely cited as one of the best cases to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs -- is at least as amenable to indigenous beings engaged in deliberate psychodrama. The "leader's" presentation, complete with 3-D star map showing alien trade routes -- seems staged, his queries sampled from "B"-movie science fiction.

Nevertheless, one comes away from the Hill episode forced to confront what was almost certainly a "real" encounter. But the reigning interpretation -- that the Hills were the victims of a chance run-in with ET interlopers -- owes more of its appeal to the mythological syntax at our disposal than any particular piece of evidence. (Barney's testimony, while deemed sincere by Simon, is notably less explicit than Betty's, and may well betray unwitting contamination from his wife.)





Inquiry into the nascent abduction phenomenon was forced to adapt to the now-familiar reproductive overtones upon the rediscovery of the Antonio Villas Boas case of 1957. Boas, a farmer, claimed a forcible encounter with a UFO in which he had sex with a fair-skinned female. Like today's "Grays," Boas described his seductress as short and large-eyed, with a lipless mouth and pointed chin that suggest the cover painting for Whitley Strieber's best-selling "Communion," not published until 1987. Though exotic, she was far from the specimen expected from mere erotic fantasy; Boas himself described her as paradoxically repellent and desirable. Reading his account (initially censored by the UFO community), one wonders in what ways Boas might have been coerced into his sexual encounter: an ordeal that left him oddly emasculated, resigned to having served as mere breeding stock. (Although critics are quick to point out his possibly self-aggrandizing reference to himself as a "prize stud.")

Before Boas was escorted off the "spaceship," the woman pointed significantly to her abdomen and in the direction of the sky. Advocates of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis have interpreted this as a reference to the woman's ET heritage, but at the same time they've effectively ignored the troublesome prospect of genetic compatibility. Granted that Boas had intercourse with an extraterrestrial, what are the chances that two independently evolved humanoid species could "mate" in any viable sense?

In "Revelations," Jacques Vallee compares the feasibility of conceiving a human-alien hybrid to that of a human attempting to breed with an insect. Certainly, if Boas encountered a genuine ET, then "they" have achieved a most remarkable degree of impersonation -- not an altogether impossible achievement for a civilization capable of traveling between stars but one that arouses substantial skepticism. The law of parsimony begs the speculation that the beings who abducted Boas were human in at least some essential respects.





Contemporary abduction reports are fraught with much of the same ambiguity. While an abductee's surroundings may seem bizarre enough to an addled witness, evidence of extrasolar origin is at best superficial. Occasionally an abductee reports visionary episodes (apparently instigated by the abductors with the assistance of audio-visual technology that recalls Betty Hill's famous star map). Abduction researchers like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs are forever on the lookout for hypnotically derived alien symbols, perhaps glimpsed on walls or uniforms, in hopes of finding validating tools for future research.

But what too often passes unmentioned is the relative dearth of reports involving transport from the abductee's normal environment to that of the supposed ETs. In many cases, no mention is made of a UFO or "spaceship"; the transition from "here" to "there" proceeds with unnerving haste, often accompanied by partial amnesia and a wordless certainty of having been taken vast distances. (Reports of actually visiting otherworldly locales, common fare in the heyday of the contactees, are seldom encountered in the abduction literature.)





The quintessential alien environment is spartan, unencumbered by decor. The aliens are characterized as colorless, dispassionate creatures whose behavior resembles that of hive-dwelling insects or even machines. As in the Hill case, there's sometimes a "leader" in attendance, although the tone of the abduction is far from conversational. Any "wisdom" imparted by the aliens is predominantly vague or philosophically obstinate. And while the beings can seem terrifically unearthly in the flesh, they avoid explicit references that might shed light on their origin or purpose.

Debunkers have pounced on the endlessly elusive nature of the abduction experience in order to expediently dismiss it. In "The Demon-Haunted World," for example, Carl Sagan laments the fact that abductees have yet to emerge with artifacts that would demonstrate the physical reality of their experiences.