Incompleat Iconoclast » Science fiction

Exercise #22: Lead Line: “I was so tired that night, I fell asleep with my clothes on…”

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:15:48 +0000

Contrary to every science fiction or horror movie stereotype, they came at about 11:30 in the morning, not in the dead of night. I guess, strictly speaking, it was the dead of night somewhere, because they touched down simultaneously in at least three dozen places around the globe. But it was 11:30 a.m. here, and the last thought I remember having before I heard the shriek of something very large braking in the atmosphere was, “I should think about lunch.”

And then, like everyone else, I raced out of the building to find out what was making that awful noise, and I saw a huge gray cylinder streak across the sky pushing a wave of white heat ahead of it, trailing a stream of white vapor. It slowed noticeably as I watched. The sound of its passage diminished until all that was left was the whoosh of its maneuvering jets as it came to hover over somewhere just west of downtown, then settled toward the ground, where I lost sight of it behind the treeline.

Then silence for a moment, and then a lot more noise of a more chaotic variety—many smaller engines as the tactical craft spewed out of ports on the top of the mother ship. I only know some of these details because Dennis was close enough to see it, and he told me about it later when I met him scavenging in the ruins of a shopping center near my house. I only heard the noise, the rising and falling whines of the small scout ships and fighters whizzing in all directions, criss-crossing the sky and taking out the utility and communications systems with their strange weapons. I hadn’t had a clear moment to try my cell phone, and now that I thought to do so, it showed “No signal.” I thought of Jana, somewhere on the far side of where the big ship had landed, out of contact and alone with the baby.

The nimble flying machines raced back and forth in no discernible pattern, firing staccato pulses of a pale golden light in all directions. Occasionally, a larger craft would emit a pulse that rattled the windows of my office building. I ran back inside. The receptionist had abandoned her desk like everyone else. I picked up the handset of her phone, but the line was dead. The power was out. Even the second hand of the battery-operated clock on the wall behind her desk was stopped. I raced back to my own office and grabbed my car keys, then ran back out to where my car was parked by the curb. I hopped in, shoved the key in the ignition, and turned it, but as I feared, nothing happened.

As I’d been watching the arrival of the invaders and the first wave of their assault, I’d been dimly aware of activity all around me. The other inhabitants of the office suite I shared had been running back and forth in a noisy panic, in and out of the building, back and forth to their cars. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the screams and shouts, but now I suddenly noticed the silence as the assault force moved off in another direction. I was surprised to find I was alone on the street. I suppose that most of my co-workers had gone to find hiding places, or run off to look for help.

I thought for a moment. I went back into the building. Under the sink in the kitchen, there were some empty plastic gallon jugs. I was glad to see that there was still enough water pressure to fill them; with the electricity out, that wouldn’t last for long. I filled all five, but could only reasonably plan to carry two. I left the other three on the counter next to the sink.

To be continued….

Note: Today’s assignment was to use the line “I was so tired that night, I fell asleep with my clothes on….” This story is headed toward a place where that line would fit, but it didn’t make it there before my allotted time for the assignment ran out.

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #5: Windfall

Edward F. Gumnick — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:25:27 +0000

I showed up for my appointment at four o’clock. They kept me in the waiting room a little longer than usual. My favorite nurse looked apprehensive when she came to escort me back to an examining room.

“Mr. Raymond, I’ll need you to strip down to your underwear and put on this gown,” she said. She made no eye contact.

“What’s with the ‘Mister Raymond,’ Jennifer? I thought we were on a first-name basis.”

“I’m sorry, Mister— I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I have a lot on my mind today.”

Before I could reply, she was out the door and pulling it shut behind her. I stripped to my boxers and socks. I had been through this routine enough times that I knew I needed protection against the icy tile floor. I was willing to give up my privacy and most of my dignity, but there was no reason to put up with cold feet.

The chipper intern, Dr. Kaladjian, entered the exam room a few moments later. Was I imagining it, or did he look as if he’d just received some bad news?

“Doctor K., what is it? Jennifer’s on edge, and you look like you’re getting ready to tell me I’m dying of cancer. But I know that can’t be right, because we’ve already taken care of that one. So what is it? I’m not new to this stuff. What is it that you don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s…. I….” He let out a slow breath. “Jack, I’m not sure I can in good conscience let you go through with the next treatment.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve had the briefing. I’m looking forward to this.”

He took off his glasses, folded them, and tucked them in the breast pocket of his lab coat. “There’s more to this treatment than they’ve told you in the briefing.”

I had read the treatment plan four times, and I recited what I could remember: “Rejuvenation therapy, phase VIIIa, entails introducing additional nanodiagnostic and nanosurgical probes that will examine the patient’s brain for damage due to a variety of organic causes, then make the appropriate repairs.”

“That’s what it says, Jack, and that’s what it does,” said Dr. Kaladjian. “But I don’t know if you’ve thought of everything that it could mean. We’re going to turn loose a fresh batch of nanobots that will scour your brain looking for anything that might be impeding performance. They’ll repair faulty neurons, build new connections where old ones can’t be fixed, and carry out a dozen other tasks that would take me all day to explain to you.

“But the net result is that memories start coming back. The literature says that the effect can be disorienting for some people, but the literature wasn’t written by a subject who’s undergone the treatment. Patients tell us that the memories come fast and furious. One man called it a windfall of memories, a blessing of more recollections than you’ll know what to do with.

“But you can’t stop them coming, Jack. See, they don’t just flow in, they come flooding in, they pour in over the floodgates, they leak in under the barriers and around the walls we put up a long time ago to contain them, because nanobots don’t know the difference, really, between memories that we’ve lost by accident and the ones that we’ve chosen to bury deep in recesses of the mind somewhere. And so they unleash them all, and suddenly, the patient has to deal not only with everything that he never wanted to forget, but also with everything he never wanted to remember.

“Don’t you see? It’s an enormous risk, Jack, because you can’t know what it is that you’re digging up until it’s too late. Are you sure you want this? Are you sure you won’t just quit while you’re ahead?”

I thought for a second, and I said, “Thanks for the warning, Doctor K. Let’s get this thing started.”

Note: The assignment was to write about a windfall. This piece is another take on the character whose point of view we heard in 50/50 Spring 2008 Exercise #3: An Eternal Flame.

50/50 Exercise #38: Threshold

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:18:55 +0000

Your Lordship, Madame President, my esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: You have by now read the report of the field team assigned to observe Species 287B, and I do not wish to take up the valuable time of this conclave in further discussion of the recommendations of that report. I ask indulgence, however, to draw your attention to some of my own observations of the subject species and to ask you to consider the broader question of the relevance of our Charter to this particular case.

As you are aware, our evolutionary anthropologists theorize that every race of beings that approaches sentience does so by developing, through well-understood evolutionary processes, a primary feature that distinguishes it from its competitors in the environment, creating an advantage for its survival. Our field team observed the evolutionary advantage of Species 287B to be a keen ability to recognize patterns. Over the course of our study, we watched as 287B leveraged its capacity for pattern recognition into an awareness of its surroundings that hadn’t existed among its competitors. In the relatively short timeframe of a few thousand generations, it moved up the food chain to dominate all other predator species in the environment. In typical evolutionary fashion, it developed a large and adaptable brain capable of language, abstract thinking, and all of the other higher cognitive and cultural processes we expect to find in sentient races.

What we didn’t expect to find, however, was that in this instance, the same evolutionary advantage that led to the development of sentience contained the seeds of the species’ destruction. In short, Species 287B, besides having an extraordinary capacity to accurately recognize patterns in nature, in mathematics, in technological development, and in its own history, possesses a disturbing tendency to see patterns where none exist. We have never before monitored a subject species so plagued with wishful thinking, flawed belief systems, irrational fears, and superstitions as those that torment 287B. We are concerned, frankly, that this species’ distinctive and acute imagination may one day soon bring its development to a cataclysmic end.

I draw your attention to Figure 14. The red line represents Species 287B’s technological capability, as a function of time, with particular attention to those technologies with the potential to destroy the ecosystem, the health of the race, and the macrocultural conditions of the planet. The blue line is a complex function representing the continuing evolutionary progress of the subject species. It takes many factors into account, including the manifestation of advanced philosophies, the emergence of quantum-mechanical theory, and development of the integrated psyche—trends we have seen in every species that survived such a period in its evolution toward what we regard as “true sentience.”

As is apparent, the two functions are on a collision course. Barring some leap forward in consciousness that our calculus cannot foresee, the subject species will not survive this period of perturbation. With its unparalleled imagination, Species 287B lives in fear of a thousand demons, creatures of its own invention. It has dreamed of and made real a thousand ways to kill itself. Can it probe its imagination more deeply to find one compelling reason why it shouldn’t do so? I fear that it will not.

I implore you to contemplate Species 287B as if it were a child trapped in a terrible nightmare. I ask you to set aside, for a moment, the first precept of our Charter, and to imagine yourself the parent of this childlike creature. What is our responsibility to Species 287B? Do we remain detached and mute while the child aims a loaded weapon at the ghosts of its imagination? Or is it time to lay a gentle hand on its shoulder and say, “Wake up! There is nothing to fear!”?

Note: The assignment was to consider one of the many meanings of the word threshold. It seems to me that we are approaching—or perhaps already standing on—a critical threshold in our history as a species.

50/50 Exercise #12: A Letter to the World

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:33:35 +0000

Dear Dad,

I have about 30 minutes left to tell you everything I need to say, and there’s no way it’s enough. God, I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just dive in with a couple of minutes of background information, how I got to be typing this letter right now, and then I’d better get straight to the message I’m supposed to deliver. That’s the important part, but it also seems pretty important (to me, anyway), that you have some reason to believe that I haven’t gone completely out of my mind and run off to Belize like I always talked about doing.

This symbol means negation. This isn’t part of the message per se, but they say it’s important for you to know this if you’re going to understand all the rest.

No time for the whole story, so here it is in a nutshell: I was sitting on the picnic table on the patio, and I heard a noise down in the woods, a kind of crackling sound. Yeah, okay, I was smoking a joint. I don’t have time to clean my room, so that’s not the worst thing you’re going to find out about me soon. (Let’s leave it at, “Sorry! I’m only human!” I think you’ll understand.)

Here’s the first part of the message:

This symbol (as near as I can remember) means skein, but they also want you to understand it to mean origin, seed, river, and memory.

As soon as I got up and started walking down to the fence at the bottom of the yard, that brutal floodlight on the Meltons’ deck came on. It lit up the woods so you could see the silver of the birch trees and the shadows of the trees, and more silver where the leaves on the ground were wet, and some other strange shadows I couldn’t sort out to make sense of what was casting them. And all of a sudden I knew (without exactly knowing what I was seeing) that there was someone coming through the woods toward me.

This symbol means star as well as grain/sand, fullness, and desire.

All I can tell you about what happened after that is a bunch of impressions, a lot of words that don’t make a whole lot of sense, and then these symbols that I can’t get out of my head. I’m sure it was 9:30 when I turned off the TV and went out back to get high. Next thing I knew, I was in my room again, and it was 6:30—right after supper, the moment you closed the garage door on the way to your meeting. I spent an hour and a half lying on my bed listening to Pink Floyd, just like I’d done the first time. Then the phone rang, and I had a hunch it was going to be Jalene, and it was. As soon as I picked up the phone I knew she was going to say, “Hi Jim, what’s cooking?” And then I knew the next thing she was going to say, and the one after that, and then I told her I’d have to call her back later. And I got off the phone and went out in the backyard, but there was nothing to see. And then I frittered away an hour I couldn’t afford to waste—taking a shower, eating some butter pecan out of the carton, staring at the glass in the sliding glass doors to the patio, with a feeling somewhere between déjà vû and those dreams you have before you’re 100 percent asleep.

Okay, now I have about 15 minutes, and I’ve only delivered half the message. Here’s some more:

This one means embrace. There’s also something in there about continuity, connectedness, and return.
Oh, and fear.

Long story short: I was kidnapped by someone or something. They took me away for what might have been days, maybe weeks. They gave me a message to give to everyone else in the world. They brought me back here, and they gave me three hours to put my affairs in order. Now I’ve pissed away two and three-quarters hours, and I need to deliver the message before they come back and take me away for good.

God, I can’t imagine why they gave this message to me, if it means as much as they seem to think it means. Why would they want a fat, lazy, asthmatic comic-book artist to transcribe a once-in-a-millennium postcard to the human race? Why didn’t they pick a real writer, or at least someone who fits the profile of a space adventurer—a mountain climber with a bestselling memoir, a base-jumping journalist, or maybe an astronaut who writes poetry?

This glyph means path, and sword, distant,
knowing, center/navel, and peace.

Believe it or not, that’s it, Dad. It was their idea that I should address this letter to you, by the way. They seem to have worked out that you’re the person who’s most likely to find it, and that you’ll know how to get it into the right hands.

The light is on again in the back yard. Tell Mom I love her, and even if the message doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, I know there’s nothing to be afraid of. I don’t know when we’ll see each other again, but I’m sure we will.

P.S. I feel certain that they are as far beyond us as we’re beyond the first creatures that crawled up on the beach. But they love us anyway! (That’s me talking, not them.)

Note: The assignment was to write a letter to the world. I have strayed a bit from Max’s intent, perhaps. This story came to me in flashes at 11:00 at night while I was walking at Memorial Park, completely hopped up on caffeine after dinner with two of my favorite readers at Latina Café. I couldn’t rest until I came home and wrote it. Weird, huh?

I posted this exercise out of sequence, then went back and finished Exercise #11. I had to get this one written down before I forgot what I had in mind. But it bugged me too much to have #11 after #12, so I went back and fudged the time-stamps to put them in the right order.

50/50 Exercise #9: Resistance

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:02:50 +0000

When I am 18, I will go up on the surface to fight beside my brothers. My mother says that she needs me too much to let me go sooner. She says that she cannot tend the plot of hydroponics beds by herself. Every day she tells me what a good worker I am. She wants me to believe that she could not produce our quota without my help.

I know what she is afraid of. She knows that most of our people who go out there never come back down below.

I cannot wait until I am 18, so I fight in the ways that I have found to fight. It is not much. But I have read about the ancient wars, when our people lived on the surface, when humans fought against other humans over resources and beliefs and economic systems. Sometimes one faction was so much stronger than another that the only option for the weaker faction was to hide, to break things. I have read that even women and children kept as slaves could steal power in tiny portions.

I want to be like those weak humans who gathered together many little victories. I try to remember that sometimes our ancestors won impossible wars that way.

Yesterday, when I was carrying water from the pump to our plot, I came upon an unattended vehicle loaded with jugs of chemicals. I knew that the foremen account for every bottle. I have seen them looking carefully over the paperwork when they bring us nutrients for the beds. Once I saw them beating the boy who unloads the truck when they thought that the count was wrong.

I knew I would not get away with stealing any chemicals. Where would I hide them? There is nowhere that the foremen are not allowed to go. Two or three times a week, they search the room that my mother and I share with 10 other women.

So when I found the vehicle unattended, I took out the nail that I keep inside the hem of the right leg of my pants. I got down on my knees, and I pressed the point of the nail against the base of the little stick where they put air in the tire. When I heard air hissing out, I pulled out the nail. I leaned close to the tire to make sure that the leak did not stop.

Then I put away the nail. I must be patient until my next battle.

Author’s note: The assignment was to write a story that emerges from consideration of the word “resistance.” My young freedom fighter is living on an Earth that’s fallen to alien invaders. (Is that obvious?)