Manipulatable

Evolution

I am an animal. Deep down in the drum
of my heart I claw through forest mulch and

flesh. Rhythm dragging hooves counter-
beat the earth’s time. Knotted leather drags the

Celtic warrior kicking into me. Her
spear scrapes my shoulder. I bleed.

I snarl. Her spear is mine and there are
hoofbeats, drums shoving blood reverberating

in my veins. And now there is instinct.
I must kill. I must tear my way

to the surface of a dry plain rolling
an ocean of thick wheat, chaos,

truth-sweat. A scream splits my throat and across
time, separated by centuries, a thin fold of halfway air,

Boudicca, snarling red-haired wolf sinks teeth
into my heart, yellow fangs into the world

around me. Drag me screaming. I am an
animal. This world is mine.

Purple

You were always blue. Inevitably elements are discovered, by chance or by science, and it makes your fingertips tingle. At some point everyone blends into their backgrounds. Your background is blue. I trembled to see you. My anxious scarlet quivered, sensing something azure, tender and steadfast. Heartstrings struck a new chord. For so long we were water and oil. For so long we slipped past each other like a deep, gasping thermocline. Inevitably we made purple. At some point I blended into you.

Forever Glory, if you wish it

Do you
Ache?
Do you dream of
Breaking
souls like
bones of men?
Do you dream of
kings and gold?
Things you sold like
chattel
were small price
to pay for
one single sour
hold on me.
There we are, swirling
like soup, like
a dust bowl
in rotting sterling silver
and you
hurling
Power in
milliseconds
per hour.
Do you
Break?
Do you dream of
Chaining
your aching soul to
History,
and wake
to shake stained
shackles on your wrist,
wake to wish
it was a dream,
wake to find yourself
explaining
in words no one believes
that you made a mistake
and it won’t happen again.

New Short Story!

I lie beside my wife. It is always the same. She is going to have a baby and she is going to have a bad dream, a prophecy she says, that I will dismiss as her vivid imagination.

We live in a world with no imagination, which is not to say we are not creative. Science is science, a worthy exploit – the Noble Calling - that answers all questions, given proper time. Poetry and ghost stories are for the historians. We do not have Gods. We have learned from our mistakes, and the historians record them, a brief and filthy stain turned inside-out for shame on the sheer white fabric of our recent successes.

I am on the brink of a breakthrough. The theory is simple. Even our forebears knew of it, to a rudimentary extent. Time has a lesser hold on objects moving faster than light. What if we could free ourselves from time? Imagine what can be done when time is slowed, when one has an infinite amount of time to complete any number of tasks. I am close. It is simple. A vaccine, to rid like a disease the grudge of mortality.

My wife sleeps beside me to the tune of the soft humming of our station and the peace of the wide, empty plains. She hasn’t yet woken me with her terrible dream.
Ghost stories don’t exist. There’s no such thing as ghosts.

Junior woke with a beating, aching heart. He knew, before he woke. It wasn’t one of those things you forgot. He knew his wife was not beside him without even reaching to see if her side of the bed was warm.

Lysea.

That one word, the name, came as a silent prayer meant only for her every morning, the first thing he thought before he stretched and straightened out of bed. And then, for the day, he would forget her. It was as though he had never been married, and there was a kind of pleasant solitude in this life, the life of a bachelor.
It was healthier and more satisfying to eat real vacuum packed apples and freeze dried meats and yogurt cultures for breakfast. But it was faster and simpler to get the required nutrients from a syringe.

His holographic-reflected image told him he looked appropriate for work, although sometimes he suspected high conspiracy to tell him he looked better than he did, to tell him he did not have tired circles under his eyes or a receding, gray hairline.
Back to work.

“Hi, Junior.”

“What’s up, Jake?”

“I’ve got a big proposal to give today.” The broad man crossed his fingers, made a face. That man’s facial muscles could move in the most astonishing ways, like he had his own personal makeup designer for each moment of the year. Junior smiled appreciatively. “Wish me luck.”

“You won’t need it. But good luck.”

He nodded to his secretary, quite humorously named Ask, outside, earned only through years of work and research grants. The secretary smiled back, though it was a strained smile. He reached toward his computer and grabbed the page, scanning through it briefly before handing it to Junior. “Your schedule today. There’s a woman waiting inside who wants to talk to you.”

Junior raised a thick eyebrow. “In my lab? Who is she?”

“Patricia Skelling.”

“ID?”

“Clean. Looks to be. She knows your work well in any case.” The secretary shrugged. “I thought you had an appointment with you.”

Junior quelled words he was about to spit at the secretary before it was too late. He couldn’t afford to fire another one. He wouldn’t get a replacement next time.
“Thanks.” He couldn’t, however, hide the sarcasm in his voice. He stuffed the schedule copy in his pocket. “Lock.” The doors locked behind him as he studied the woman. Her back was too him, red hair locked in a lackluster bun. His heart gave an excited leap – but no. Foolish, how the mind plays tricks on you. It wasn’t her. Upon further examination her shoulder blades stuck out a little in her dark blue jacket coat. Fingers tufted with the dominant hair trait almost delicately held in one hand a computer and in the other hand a vial. One of his vials. His work.

“Can I help you?”

She turned to him, eyebrows raised as she set down the vial. She wasn’t ugly by any means, but otherwise was quite unremarkable. “Junior.” Her voice was inappropriately fond.

He shifted, unused to being dressed so informally. “Dr. Korsev.”

The woman hesitated, and glanced down again at the handheld. “Of course. Excuse me. I’m… Dr. Skelling.” There was too much hesitation, as though she had briefly forgot her own name. Junior gestured to a desk and chairs in the corner.

“Sit down, since you’re already inside.” She didn’t seem deterred by his passive aggressive tone, but held out her hand to shake. Junior politely pretended he hadn’t seen it – who knows what world of disease she’d just come from – and turned to his desk, brushing fingertips over the carefully kept and polished presswood.

She sat. She stared at him.

“Is there a reason you’re here?” He had work to do. He could not sit around to entertain unannounced strangers.

Patricia Skelling met his gaze, but not exactly. It met all the standards for gaze-meeting technically, but with the certainty that she was actually trying to look at him. “I’ve read much of your work,” she said, and the room absolutely did not echo that hollow voice. “But I noticed, for all your work on immortality, you have only briefly, and quite without credit, touched on soul regeneration.”
Junior repeated her words in his head and knew already it was going to be a long day.

“That’s because it’s not scientifically viable,” he answered with as much calm as he could muster. “There is no evidence to support that any life exists outside the brain, or body at all for that matter.”

“There’s no evidence against it, either.”

Junior pressed his fingertips to his temple, but still did not want to seem rude. This woman had a doctorate, a professed doctor of science, and yet she came to him asking the simplest questions freshmen in college found it simple to grasp. “There is quite a bit of evidence, if we take all the research done on it to have been conducted in good faith.” He need not mention Gratz’s famous work on transplant lobotomies or Yen’s historical ‘Death Experiment.’ “And if there was no evidence against it, Dr. Skelling, there would still be no reason to believe in its possibility. Just because something could possibly exist is no reason to believe it does.”

Skelling pursed her lips, her fingertips turning white against each other. “There is no need to patronize me, Dr. Korsev. I know the theories as well as you.”
“Then there is no need to waste my valuable time with these questions when a high school professor could answer them.” His voice was pleasant as he could make it, as usual. He tried. As much as he preferred solitude, he tried.

It was a dismissal, plain and clear. But Skelling did not move to get up. She clutched the computer in her hand, glanced down at it, and then met his gaze again in that carefully technical way. “I’m your new assistant.”

Junior stared. “What?”

“Your new assistant. Kilgan Companies transferred me here.” Her tongue ran over her pale lips, angry or nervous he did not know.

He narrowed his eyes. Kilgan Companies often worked hand-in-hand with Transec Corp., but he should have known about any employee transfer to his division, let along his own lab. Ask should have told him. Somebody should have damn well told him.

“I trust you have papers of recommendation?” He kept his voice cool, like ice just waiting to break.

Skelling reached into her handheld and pulled the papers from it, handing them over. She crossed one leg over the other, and he was a man of logic so he didn’t know what that meant.

Decoy Heroics: Chapter 1

(An unfinished chapter of the new book)

“The king is sick.”

The gathered nobles glanced at any spot on the wall but the speaker. Glanced at each other, uncertainly finding the look in the opposite man’s eyes that echoed, for once, the thoughts creeping into all of their minds.

They felt him move around the table, and when his dark, sure eyes found theirs they looked away, unwilling to commit to the treasonous demand he was about to speak.

“You must have noticed him, in the months following our beloved queen’s death. The rage. The bloodshed.” He didn’t have to mention the incident at Carvelwall. The heads bloodying the block in the bare courtyard, where once flowers had grown. The red, uncontrolled face of their ruler and the signs of slow and inevitable mindloss. The nobles knew all of those things. “The king is unfit to rule. He has quite clearly gone mad.” And after a well-placed pause, the noble whose only voice the chamber had heard this evening spoke again. “I recognize the signs of dark magiks at work.”

The mood shifted. They felt it, and looked to him directly for perhaps the first time. He was smiling. The curve of his thin, cracked lips, the delicately shaded crow’s feet, and the combed dark hair, graying appropriately at the temples: all made him look serious, professional. A man who looked like that always knew what he was talking about.

But dark magiks? Magik of any kind was forbidden on penalty of death, in any case except those of the most desire, solicited under council of law.

And nobody had solicited magikal aid for the king.

Finally, an old, retired knight, given titles by the king himself, broke the icy silence. “How can you be so sure, Rezor?”

Rezor’s fingertips pressed against the table, leaning in to the small gathered group. Begging the challenge. “I have seen it before.”

“Impossible!” the man said gruffly over several surprised and uncomfortable murmurs. He sat forward in his chair. This, too, was a man not to be dealt with lightly. He had seen more battles than the number of years most of these men – and one woman, who had wisely said nothing yet - had been alive. “If you had seen it, you must have irradiated it. Or,” he added, the old battered blue eyes narrowing and making his face a mass of leathery skin and white hair, “taken part in it.”

Rezor straightened at this. The corner of his lip twitched. A smile, or irritation? He more than anyone was aware of the rumors. His comforting brown eyes met the narrowed ones around the table, the raised chins. No one else would have openly accused him, because as much as it seemed improbable – impossible – that (name), a personally appointed member of the Council, was practicing magik under everyone’s noses… All the same. On the slim chance he did… Well. Nobody wanted to take that chance.

“I have seen it before,” he repeated, more firmly, no longer smiling. “Trust me, my lords. My lady.” She in question sniffed, and pretended she wasn’t listening. The pearls on her headpiece glinted dully. “The king is not in his right mind. It is our obligation and our duty to see to the safety of the country.”

“What you are proposing is treason.” A young man with short, fashionably cut hair and a thin, fashionable face and a strong fashionable chin laced with a goatee turned sharp eyes on the man, his back stiff and straight. “What you are proposing is beyond any of us to grant. He is watched too closely. There are laws. There are guards. There is god…”

Yes. Treason and murder. The two laws that must never be broken.

March of the Retreating World

(An unfinished story idea)

Brave men, all. They fought when they should sleep, they fought when they should eat, they fought when they should pray. I was once told that bravery is not the absence of fear, but the facing of it anyway. Whether that’s true or not, didn’t really matter to them. They were brave no matter how you defined it.
It was when the machines replaced them that they were broken.
At first they called themselves Puppets. It was a joke, anything to keep them sane, keep them fighting. It rallied them together, to get the job done they had to get done.
“You’re a goddamn Puppet.”
“We all are.”
And the game became to see whichever Puppet could stretch their strings the furthest without their limbs snapping.
“Hey, Puppet, you’re gonna snap that twine around your wrist.”
“Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing.”
They didn’t.
The population took on the names, and some underground rebellion which never amounted to more than a single great battle at the end – which they lost – called themselves Puppets. They were extremists. Terrorists.
They were snapping strings all over the place.

And when the population grew fed up with them the government took advantage of it. The term “Pup” was always a derogatory curse, and the very sound of it could make mothers bring their children in from playing in the streets. Kids were afraid to call their small dogs by their traditional terms. It had become much like the word used for a female dog. Truly a correct term, but not socially acceptable.
Something was changing.

When the Puppet terrorists had been defeated, and the Puppet soldiers came home, a new connotation became associated with the word. The soldiers had said they were being controlled, like puppets. And those who did the government’s bidding – who refused to stand up for themselves, for anything they believed in – was a Puppet.
It was a vague uneasiness in everyone, even if they couldn’t name it. On a Friday someone threw a brick into a window, hitting the side of a girl’s head and killing her instantly. The note on it read “Leave the neighborhood, damn Puppies.” On Halloween a group of teenagers dressed as puppets in uniforms, parading themselves down the street where children dropped bags of candy and ran home, terrified of the sight and the droning chant they sang. The day the President died someone managed to spray paint in big red letters on the White House – PUP.

Things like this had happened before. The Civil Rights Movement. World War II. World War III. The Civil War. Slavery.