Zach MacDonald's Blog

All That We Know

Originally written March 1st, 2022

I’m not going to pretend I know a lot about Ukraine. I don’t. I possess no particularly deep or first-hand knowledge about its history, its culture, its geography or its people, outside of what I or anyone else can glean from fifteen minutes with my fingers on a keyboard and the cavern of cyberspace yawning in two dimensions across my monitor.

When I was young, I didn’t know much about China either. It’s where all the stuff with Made in China stamped on it came from, and where you’d emerge from the ground if you were a Canadian kid like me digging a hole straight through the earth. But I knew, one day, when I saw that black and white poster of a man standing firm in front of a line of tanks, that I wanted it on my wall. What was it that struck me? Some archetypical David and Goliath aspect? The bullied holding fast against the bullies? You know the image I’m talking about. We all know.

I didn’t know much about the place my grandpa came from in those days, even after I heard the stories of how he and his brother were put onto a ship as children to escape the Blitz—an Atlantic crossing, bound for Nova Scotia, as Germany rained bombs over the United Kingdom behind them. The ship that was following theirs, also filled with refugee British children, was torpedoed and sunk by an enemy submarine. That murderous decision from below the waves, the choice of one ship over the other, is the only reason I’m here to write these words. Of course, I didn’t put that together back then; I just tried to understand why someone would sink a ship full of children.

I was ignorant, too, on just about anything concerning Japan. I knew the US dropped atomic bombs on them in the Second World War. I remember a Japanese woman coming to my elementary school as a guest, telling us, we cheerful kids who had never been touched by massacre, of when she first caught sight of victims from Hiroshima fleeing the city. Her child-mind, certainly not so different from our child-minds, had perceived in that first instant that she was seeing giant roast chickens, because the people’s clothing and skin had all been burnt away, and they hobbled so that their raw thighs wouldn’t rub together. I never forgot that story. I never will. Years later, as a young man, I visited Hiroshima for myself. I tried to hold back tears at first, but wept at last in the peace park, staring up at the skeletal remains of the A-bomb dome, and at the museum, gazing at the tiniest of Sadako Sasaki’s paper cranes.

I knew nothing, really, about the atrocities committed by the Empire of Japan, but even years later, in Nagasaki, standing at the black pillar that marks the epicenter of the blast, that knowledge changed nothing. All those people didn’t deserve that death, that mutilation, that destruction, no more than the victims of the Empire had.

This is a story that humanity keeps telling itself, wrestling with, trying to parse together, debate, promote, deny, rip apart, patch back together with spit and dried blood: that it’s just the way things are, at the end of the day. So sad. So tragic. So historical, in the past, somewhere else, not here, not me, not right now, maybe not ever. Not my problem.

Why even go on with these stories? The world is rife with them. Where hasn’t human blood been shed by other humans? Where hasn’t aggression and slaughter occurred? At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, the walls are filled with black and white photographs that the Khmer Rouge army took of their civilian prisoners. Men, women, children. They look fearful, miserable, imploring. No one smiles. Their eyes stare into yours from across the decades—through a lens barrel as discarded and forgotten as their restless bones—frozen, begging you, anyone, anywhere, to save them, to help, to not let the men behind the camera do whatever they will next. And you can do nothing. Those people were gone before you ever set foot in that city, before you ever got off the plane in Cambodia, and possibly before you were even born. You will never know them. No one will. And they were robbed of knowing anything, forever. I still see those faces a decade later. Those eyes were seared into my memory, my being, and will persist as long as my mind does.

You, Writer, what does this have to do with Russia invading Ukraine? I get it if you’re asking that. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself all this time. But the thing I’m starting to see is that it all has to do with Russia invading Ukraine. Every act of violence, of domination, of terror and destruction wrought by one group of people upon another. We’re walking in circles, this species—coiling upward, technologically, while from the top looking down or the bottom looking up, yes, it’s all just circles.

Let’s not look at this coil of human history from the bottom or the top or the side right now. Let’s stand right on it, at our place and time, just like we usually do. What you may recall is something like this: foreboding stories in the media about Russian troops amassing at the Ukrainian border. More and more showed up. Not long ago, you checked the news and heard that Russia had invaded. Blasts were heard in Kyiv and other cities, then fighting began in the streets. You saw videos of missiles and explosions and tanks. Bloodied faces. Terrified people huddled in subway stations serving as bomb shelters. Volodymyr Zelensky defiant, taking up arms, ready to fight for his country. David to Goliath. The bullied standing up to the bullies. Tank man to the tanks.

You may have posted or considered posting the Ukrainian flag on social media. You may have expressed your views online about this mess. An unprecedented coalition of sanctions issued forth from much of the industrialized world, anything to avoid active military intervention from abroad, because presumably even the most eager war hawks know where that could lead. And then, when the talk began of Putin and his nuclear threats, your blood may have run cold. This is real. This is war, right before us, with a madman issuing orders and all the chance of it escalating to heights of destruction and untold misery not seen in our lifetimes. There’s the coil, when we look down. That coil along which, at some point behind and below, we split the atom. Not that it stopped there. Why, you ask yourself, does this species bend its mental prowess around shaping ways to slaughter its own?

I’ll stop pretending I’m in your head, because I’m not. I’m telling a story to you and to myself. That’s what I usually do: tell stories.

I don’t have an answer to the question that I just posed. I could put on my magical hypothesis hat and tap away at my keyboard right now about evolution and scarcity of resources and territoriality and nationalism, as if I know something about all this. But I don’t. Just like I don’t know a lot about Ukraine. But there’s a story there, and it’s the one that matters, because it’s a story that’s as real as the quality of hug you get from someone who loves you.

Let’s go back to the winding coil, zoomed in now to a fraction of it as small as a human life—the space that life occupies, in a tapestry as grand as all human civilization, and a blue marble waltzing in a dance of gravity around our star, on the spiral arm of a shimmering galaxy in a vast cosmos. We’re still watching that news about Ukraine. I see their eyes: sorrow, terror, desperation. A six-year-old girl, hit by mortar fire, dying, frantic chest compressions not working, skin bloodlessly pale, now dead, body shrouded by her own jacket, left on a hospital table. She was probably laughing and happy, carefree, all of life stretched out ahead of her only a week ago from the time of writing, about the same age as my grandfather on that Atlantic crossing from England, another ship of children just like him sinking into the cold implacable blue of history.

I see human forms in the streets, in those subway tunnel shelters, in tanks, burned to death at roadsides. They all look the same once they’re burned like that. Russian or Ukrainian, you could never tell. Yemeni or Ethiopian, Burmese or Afghani; let your eyes relax, blur out the fine details, and you’re left with bodies. Human forms. They are us and we are them. Ukraine is where we are and where we are is Ukraine, if not now than later, if not later than before—probably both. Each of us inhabits some speck on the coil: the coil that is only circles from above or below, ever rounding back on itself from violence to peace to violence. It doesn’t take a madman. Putin didn’t exist 70 years ago, and yet humanity knew war time and again. We knew slaughter. We knew of our inhumanity and tried to hide from it, cover it up, bury it beneath the goodness in our nature. It’s something inside of us, a capacity, as much as love and hope and friendship.

The story that matters, then, is the story of each of us. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, happening before our eyes, is what happens when we collectively lose, and when we lose I look at those eyes of the victimized, those stiffened bodies of the dead, and I realize how impossibly much each of their stories mattered, for they were everything. Their lives were everything they knew, just like mine is all is know. All any of us know. They are us and we are them, billions of candle flames in the darkness of the unknown. How is it, then, that we cannot escape this circle, cannot straighten this coil? How is it we snuff out life again and again, destroy childhoods, maim, rape, uglify all which was beautiful by mere virtue of its peace?  

In the novel Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières writes (via his character Carlo Piero Guercio) of Mussolini’s invasion of Greece: “I know that the Duce has made it clear that the Greek campaign was a resounding victory for Italy. But he was not there. He does not know what happened. He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it.”

At the scale of a life, we are all the little people, each and every one of us. Together we stand ever on the upper precipice of that winding coil, always at the forefront of our species’ technological trajectory, and at any moment, with the push of a button, that could be far as we get. The stars will twinkle above us, forever beyond our reach, never to know of us because we failed to know ourselves.

The post All That We Know appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Amber

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
you die at the age of ninety-five years. Having been dead for two months, you wake up in your coffin and see a screen saying: “Your free trial version has ended. Would you like to purchase the full version and unlock additional functionality ?”

Response:
The only tangible thing that pierced through my confusion was that the rot had set it. A lot of it. I had to make a decision before the dissolution of my brain’s synapses was complete–if it was indeed my brain doing the thinking at all.

In fact, based on what I was seeing before me, that emergent and materialist view of consciousness seemed somewhat unlikely.

There were two simple buttons on the screen below the message: Yes and No.

I lifted my left arm experimentally–terribly heavy. As I watched my hand float upward in the screen’s soft blue glow, there was a wet, sucking snap, and my forearm fell off the liquifying remnants of my elbow, thudding damply to the bottom of the casket.

I inhaled a shallow, whistling breath into my corrupted lungs, realizing that I wasn’t even sure which option I’d take.

Had the free trial really sold it for me? Would paying the price of continued existence in this world be worth it for some added features?

It’s not like I hadn’t gotten to the end, at least. No one sees the cancer coming, but at 95 years of age it was going to be either that or something else in the near future. It took me so fast. It shut me down.

I hadn’t had much to live for anyway, admittedly–not for decades before learning of the tumors. Not only was my body pretty much out of commission, but because I’d been alone for 64 years.

I was one of those people that marries their high school sweetheart. Young people in the throes of love often think it’ll last forever, but we all know it usually doesn’t. For me it was different, and that’s why I’ve always kind of wondered about reincarnation–our spirit reborn into another body in another time. When I first saw Amber, first looked into her eyes, first spoke with her, during each of those moments I felt that I had known her before, somehow. I felt so strongly that we had loved and fought and laughed and explored the mysteries of existence together. I felt that we were halves of the same soul.

We married at 22, as soon as we were out of college. We didn’t have real jobs yet, and were poor and in debt, but goddamnit did we love each other. We curled up together at night, knowing without speaking that we could take on the world.

She wasn’t drinking at all the night of the crash, nine years later. She was a careful driver. The cops said it was quick, that she died at the scene. They had to put her together again before they’d let me see the body. The drunk died too, flung through his windshield. There’s no justice in life. He’s probably enjoying additional functionality somewhere.

I never remarried. I dated, yes. I drifted around the country, from job to job. I travelled the world. I experimented with psychoactive drugs, but never in the wandering of my consciousness did I find the love that would be at my side when I returned to the grind of Earth. I never found another that I loved like I loved Amber. And I couldn’t bear to marry someone only to dispel my loneliness. My body aged. People stopped paying attention to me. I became invisible.

If I hit No, I thought, then that’d probably be it. I’d lay in the coffin until I disintegrated completely and became soil. Game over, perhaps for all eternity. The universe is full of mysteries, but those mysteries are empty without the love of the other half. My spirit was chipped away at long before the disease did its work on my organs.

I lifted my right arm next, but the forearm didn’t even rise from it’s resting place. Another sucking snap, and the meat above my elbow was levered disgustingly into the air through the tenacity of some lingering ligaments.

Slowly, I bend at the waste, forcing my upper body–my face–toward the screen. My nose will do the trick.

I hit Yes, and the screen melted away, replaced by what seemed to be the side of a great and complex wheel, revolving slowly before me, even through me. Within it saw scenes from my life–not of myself, but images of all I had seen through my own eyes, like mental snapshots. The understanding came to me immediately, with the same surety with which foreknowledge comes to us in dreams, that I was meant to choose any place to jump back in.

I waited as the images scrolled with the turning of the great wheel, until at last I saw Amber, as clear as life itself, for the first time outside of photographs in all those 64 empty years of my existence.

The wheel turned, back, back, back through time, to that day when we were 17. So simple. The school hallway. She was two lockers down. I was a gangly teenager with acne, and shouldn’t have been worth looking at, I thought–but then she turned to me, and I met her eyes, and I knew.

How often do the two halves of a soul end up in the same time period, let alone two lockers apart in high school?

I wondered if that additional functionality would allow me to save her, on the worst night of my life, and the final one of hers, years later. Or would I have to stand by helplessly as she was taken from me again?

I imagined myself diving, and then I was actually doing it–diving toward that moment at the lockers: My God, to be able to start again . . .

Everything froze, and the image dimmed slightly. A message lit up across it in orange.

CHECKING…

A spinning wheel appeared.

Checking what??

It spun. And spun.

CHECKING IS TAKING LONGER THAN USUAL…

All the cosmos, it seemed, held their breath along with me.

Suddenly a bright green checkmark appeared within the circle, and text of the same color bloomed on the screen.

SUCCESS! AMBER HAS SELECTED THE SAME ORIGIN POINT! HURRY, SHE’S BEEN WAITING TO EXPLORE THE FULL VERSION WITH YOU!

The post Amber appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Harvest Day

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
You were a bit confused why a local farmer recruited so many people for “Harvest Day” but the pay was good so you signed up. Your concern grew when you arrived and saw the farmer handing out rifles and body armor.

Response:
“I…I…uh…” I stared at the assault rifle that had just been placed into my hands. It felt as heavy as a bar of lead.

“You what?” asked Jenkins.

“Was kinda expecting a sickle is all.”

“A sickle?” From his lined, weather-beaten face I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or spit into the dirt in disgust. “Haven’t used those for harvestin’ in decades. Ain’t you harvested before? Thought you said you did when you called ’bout my ad.”

“I mean, I have worked the fields in harvest season, Mr. Jenkins. I wasn’t lying.”

“It’s Farmer Jenkins, son. I don’t go by Mister round here, okay? Just Jenkins is better. Or Al.”

“Sure, but–“

“Yo Albert! You want ’em in these now?”

“Yeah, get em suited up,” said Jenkins with a wave. The grizzled, wiry farmhand who’d just spoken, Stoopy–that’s what everyone called him–tossed me a concave, torso-sized object, pitted with curious round indents and hung with thick straps. It almost knocked me off my feet as I caught it. Thing weighed a ton.

“You know how to get that on?” asked Stoopy, his face grave, cold. “You said you been harvestin’ right? Heard you tellin’ these boys you got lotsa experience from when you was a teen. That right?”

“I…I’ve harvested–“

Stoopy’s eyes shot over to a young guy a stone’s throw from us, the latter absorbed in a video call on his phone. “Oy, Billy Boy, get your fuckin’ Kevlar on, yeah? No more tongue waggin’.” He tossed another bundle of breast plates, along with arm shields, shin guards and helmets onto the ground, unloading the back of the pickup truck as fast he could.

“Mr. Jenki–er, Al!” I cried, running up to the farmer. He tossed me a magazine as I approached him, which I nearly dropped my rifle in the process of catching.

“Those things’ll take down a charging grizzly, they will. Blow a hole right through its skull. Ain’t grizzly bears we’re going up against, though. You just try to get ’em in the head. Neck’ll work too. Wanna preserve the innards, understand? It’s for nothing if we can’t get the innards out intact and all. Wasting the crops iff’n you do that, boy.”

“The crops? What?”

“Big buyers, kid. Big big buyers. Ain’t like your daddy and granddaddy’s day when we just shipped the parts down to Boston. Nuh uh. These overseas buyers ain’t so picky, and they pay. Couple more harvest seasons after this one and I’ll be retirin’ for good. Find myself on a nice beach down where the water’s clear as glass.”

“Are you saying we–“

“I say a lotta things don’ I? This is my farm and I say whatever I want. Now git yer fuckin’ armor on and load that gun. Don’t know how to load it, get Stoopy or one of the other boys. You know how to point the damn thing I’m sure. Pull a trigger? You can do it. Just like your video games. But don’t you take any belly or chest shots, boy. Leg’s fine. Take ’em down, then a bullet in the head. Rest of ’em back there’ll do the cutting, and you just move on and take more–“

“Albert Jenkins,” I said, leveling the gun at him. “You tell me right goddamn now what we’re going to be killing with these things.”

“That ain’t loaded you idiot.”

“Sure as hell is. Brought my own bullets to this party.”

“I ain’t gonna try callin’ your bluff, boy, ’cause there’s no bluff to call. Jesus. You’re pretending you don’t know what all this here is about?”

“Are we hunting people? Are you telling me we’re going to hunt people for…for their organs?”

Jenkin’s regarded me coldly for a moment, then a smile broke across his ancient features, the wrinkles running across his face by the dozens.

“Stoopy!” he called “Hey Stoopy! Kid thinks we’re hunting those guys. Ah ha ha ha!”

I didn’t know what I was hearing in that first instant, when there was a sharp crackle from the top of the hill, the one with the one dead tree that loomed atop it like a skeletal hand bursting from the weedy earth. The hill that divided us from Ferndale. I only comprehended that they were gunshots when the first bullets kicked up the earth around us. Suddenly the crowd, all fifty or more of the hired harvesters, erupted into chaos.

“Armor on now, now!” roared Jenkins, and jabbed a gnarled finger at me. “Load your empty fuckin’ gun you asshole.”

“What is this!” I screamed, barely able to hear myself in the blasts of gunfire now coming from all around me. Our harvesters fired back at the figures charging over the crest of the hill–from the Ferndale side–and down toward us, guns blazing.

“Every year someone’s gotta get harvested,” shouted Stoopy. “And we make sure there’s less of those someones on our side than theirs. Those overseas markets, they don’t care where the lungs n’ kidneys come from. You understand? It’s us that gotta make sure that shipment is Ferndale gut–“

He never finished what he was saying. A bullet from the hillside blew half his head off, painting the lawn with his brains.

I stared, mind going blank for only a split second before the panic took over. I had no idea how to load the weapon in my hands.

But Stoopy’s looked ready to go.

I ran over and tore the assault rifle from his death grip. His hands still warm. His body still warm. And then I knew I’d never let Ferndale get his heart.

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The House That Jack Built

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
In an attempt to combat the global deforestation an inventor found a way to restore the earth. The catch? Every single piece of timber, all the processed wood everywhere slowly started living again.

Response:
We call it the House That Jack Built. Giving it that innocuous monicker helped us cope with what happened over the course of the decade, and what it led us to. We thought they’d be the years of rejuvenation, but they weren’t. They were the years of unnatural, mutant growth. Wood of the living dead. Misshapen zombie forests metastasizing out of every former human structure on the planet.

The chemtrail conspiracy theorists were a bit ahead of their time, but wrong on the fundamental points: for one thing, Xylem-28 wasn’t poison, nor designed to mess with the human mind, at least not as far as individuals were concerned. Secondly, it wasn’t a conspiracy when the solution was dusted across the face of the earth by retrofitted jet aircraft. It was planned, approved, executed and observed by all. Jack Bearing, the biochemist who discovered Xylem-28, was televised aboard the inaugural flight, watching proudly as the faint red dust of promised renewal was released over the ashen scar that had been the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

Xylem-28 was supposed to spur and supercharge the development of tree seeds, even ones that were in the earliest cellular stages of development, as these latter were often blown into clear-cuts and other deforested areas in greater numbers than their mature counterparts. Dying trees would likewise have their cells strengthened enough to gradually be restored. The theory was that this would lead to the beginnings of a restoration of the world’s lost forests in just a matter of years, especially if the Xylem-28 solution were sprayed over swaths of land in conjunction with new seeds.

The problem, unbeknownst to Jack Bearing and the approval committees, was that even dry timber and processed wood still contained cells that were viable to be reanimated under the influence of Xylem-28. Once restored, and with only the slightest bit of moisture present, the growth of that wood, like the trees themselves, turned out to be uncontrollable. The division of the cells continued unabated. The world had been dusted with the harbinger of its demise before it became clear what was happening.

Villages and small towns across the world went first. People tried to stay, hacking back the forests that both approached the communities and sprung from within. Every piece of furniture, ever wooden building, every chopstick and rolling pin, every tree growing out of the sidewalk, all of them grew non-stop, exploding outward in all directions. In some cases, when cutting the forests back–as communities were choked to death on wood–the straggling die-hards doused the implacable cancerous growths in gasoline and ignited them. Many burned with the zombie wood, though unlike the zombie wood, there was no life-in-death for them.

Cities went next, in the same way. It took years for them to be swallowed, starting in the suburbs. Mass operations were performed early, when it became clear what was happening, to rid metropolitan centers of every wooden item as quickly as possible. Usually it worked, based on the competency of the populace and government, and sometimes it didn’t. Either way, the mutant forest always pushed in from outside, bulging and grinding across the earth, through buildings, though civilization itself, like a slow tsunami.

Some of us made it to the deserts. Even fewer dug sufficient wells before dehydration killed them. Fewer still, in our scattered tribes, cling to survival as yet. From our village of stone and mud, we can’t yet see the wooden zombie wilderness, but we know it’s only tens of kilometers away. The dryness slows it, but doesn’t halt its process: those twisted roots, like great snakes or burrowing worms, dig into the earth and find aquifers and hidden streams sooner or later.

The seeds, blown on the wind, will reach us first.

Spaceship Earth, it was often called by the conservationists. Our blue and green home, floating through the galaxy.

It’s indeed our home. In fact, it’s now a wooden house.

We live in the House That Jack Built.

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KNOCKER: A Short Film in the Works

I’m excited to finally talk about Knocker (our working–but likely final–title), a short horror film that my friend David Overmars and I have been developing since early this year. Last weekend marked the first days of shooting, with Nova Scotia now opening back up again, so I want to write about the process so far and share a sneak peak at some of the very first stills.

It’s quite serendipitous how this all got underway. Dave and I grew up together in St. Andrews, Antigonish County, during which time we both had a penchant for cooking up stories, and where, ironically, we did in fact once film some kind of wacky video for a Grade 5 social studies project (that was, of course, back in the camcorder and VHS days). In adulthood we’ve kept sporadically in touch throughout our individual endeavors and jobs all over the place, getting together during periods when we’ve ended up in the same locality. He’s been honing his skills as a videographer and building his portfolio over the years, while I focused on my writing.

We got back into regular communication in late 2020, and in January he expressed his ambition to make a short film, asking if I’d be interested in writing a script. That would be a first for me, and making a film a first for him as well, so I dove at this new opportunity. Of course, this was bound to be an “international” project of sorts, with me in Thailand and he in Nova Scotia. Travel restrictions and other Covid measures were all over the place, and at the time we only had a tentative idea of an indoor location he might be able to shoot at in the future. We decided to keep it simple, and I started writing a script based on the idea of people trapped in a room who are coping with a mysterious threat. It didn’t take long, therefore, for it to move in the direction of horror.

Weekly Zoom meetings became a thing (my morning to Dave’s evening or vice-versa) as the initial draft took shape, where we brainstormed and hashed out details about the story, characters, the technical limitations involved, and so forth. We later expanded on the first draft to make a second, with both of us firing it off to a selection of trial readers, who came back with valuable impressions and feedback. Additional versions followed, each one building on what we felt worked and discarding what didn’t, until we arrived at what we could comfortably call our final script. I think and hope our previous trial readers are going to be both delighted and surprised by the direction it takes–but there’ll be no spoilers here.

During all this, on top everything else he was bringing together for the production, Dave was finding our actors. Knocker‘s stars, Sarah O’Toole, Harriet Ritchie, and J.D. Fortune, came on board months ago, having initially received an earlier version of the script. They took to the project wholeheartedly, exploring the characters and working with every subsequent alteration and tweak we were making as we went. We started holding regular Zoom meetings where we did virtual table reads, broke down scenes beat by beat, and just had an overall swell time. Their immense talent and creativity opened up new ideas and helped truly bring this production to life.

And now here we are, in August of 2021, and the first weekend of shooting just wrapped in Antigonish, with more scheduled for next month. This is all coming together at last, and it’s a real thrill. Though it’ll be a while before the finished film is ready to share with the world, when it’s ready the announcement will be loud and clear here.

Though I can’t say whether all these will make it into the final cut, below are some of the first stills from Knocker. Hurrah!

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Govermon

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
The government is doing animal fusion experiments, and civilians have to take care of a special animal each. You have a Pufferfish Armadillo.

Response:
It didn’t take long for them to be considered Pokémon of sorts–after-all, we’d grown up pitting our virtual beasts against each other, or watching Ash Ketchum and co. do so on TV.

Of course, we didn’t coin them Pokémon, as the government didn’t distribute any pocket-sized housings, à la pokéballs, with which to store our pets as condensed energy signatures–though few people doubted they possessed at least an approximation of such technology. No, instead we coined them, rather unimaginatively, “Govermon.”

Today my Govermon, assigned to me by the newly constituted Department of Homeland Absurdity, is huffing and puffing and rolling around in agitation. It’s my legal responsibility to take care of it for the rest of its indeterminate natural life span.

“Bruce, would you chill?”

“Puffadillo!” it squeaks fretfully.

I haven’t yet accepted that it’s never going to accept the name Bruce, but I’m getting close.

“Okay, Puffadillo, calm down. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”

Outside a thunderous protest is taking place. The roads have been forced to close by the massive turnout, and thousands have been streaming past on the street all morning, bound for the city center. They hold huge signs reading things like GOVERmon Have The Right To self-GOVERnance! or Dolphipillar didn’t belong in water OR the trees! Now it’s DEAD! or The Government Gets Off On Fighting, But Govermon DON’T!

Their hearts seem in the right place, but it’s a discombobulated protest. They don’t have a clear mission or list of demands. In general, they’re all angry that Govermon were even created, unbeknownst to any ethics councils at the time–but now that the pets that have been foisted on us are here to stay, there are some that believe they shouldn’t be considered pets at all and instead have the right to self-determination, while others, probably the majority, are protesting around the incredibly widespread culture of Govermon fights.

Blame in on Pokemon, I guess. It wasn’t long before people started pitting their adopted fusion beasts against each other in brutal, sometimes confused and grimly hilarious, oft-lethal battles. There are whole websites dedicated to it, where the fights are streamed live with semi-professional settings reminiscent of underground cockfights, and anyone tuning in to stream from around the world can place bets on the blockchain using crypto.

Speaking of which…

“Puffadillo, let’s go. It’ll be quieter in your crate.”

Puffadillo regards me with his small beady eyes–luckily those of an armadillo rather than a pufferfish, the former being the cuter of the two in my opinion. His flattish, Squirtle-esque face, divided by the slowly opening and closing mouth of a pufferfish, seems momentarily confused as I drag his “Govercube” (i.e. a wooden crate) out from behind the sofa.

“Puffadillo!” it squeals again, with an air of uncertainty.

“Puff your way right over, bud.”

The way Puffadillo walks is weird, to put it lightly. It has the little feet of an armadillo, but lacks an armadillo’s claws at the end of them, possessing instead thin little flaps of nearly translucent skin with a morphology slightly like of that of fins, but which I’ve read is constituted entirely of mammalian flesh. This means that Puffadillo’s feet are like cute little pegs or stumps with flaps of pointless flesh adorning their ends that flop about when it walks, and overall it can’t really keep up much of a balancing act on its own legs. It opts instead to curl into a perfect ball, free from any bothersome tail, and roll blindly toward its destination.

Instead of its rolling act, Puffadillo now rises up on its back stumps and waves its fleshy front appendages at me. It’s belly, beautifully mottled with the skin patterns of certain Japanese pufferfish, is fully exposed. “Puffadilloooo!”

“I’m not picking you up. Into the crate.”

I wouldn’t mind scooping the little guy up, with that innocent face staring up at me and all, but I know for a fact that those skin flaps are far from harmless, as is most of the rest of its body. In fact, it’s potentially deadly.

Seeing that I’m not going to give, Puffadillo curls up up last, launching itself with his back flappy-stumps before reaching full circularity of form, and rolls forward directly into the box, like a well aimed bowling ball.

“Nice,” I say, tipping it up and closing the lid. I remember to lift with my legs as I pick it up and stumble awkwardly to the basement stairs.

The lights are on down there, of course, and the smell of cigarette smoke and fruity vape steam rises to greet me as I descend. The door shuts and locks automatically behind me. The laughter and conversations fill the space of the stairwell, but quiet a bit as my approach is heard.

“Ah, the man of the hour!”

“Guess so,” I chuckle, coming into the huge concrete-walled room–or huge at least for the basement of a private residence. Everyone else has been waiting for me to go up and coax my Govermon into the crate. “Camera’s on? We live?”

“We’re live.”

“What’s the audience?”

“Just over 10k.”

“Good enough.”

I set the crate down while my opponent strikes an idiotic pose for audience and makes a show of turning his baseball cap around backward. “All right Mr. Undefeated, let’s see what this Hufflepuff can do against my Iguanant.”

The shiny puke-green exoskeleton of his disgusting Iguana-Ant hybrid trundles forth on six scaly legs.

“His name,” I say defiantly, playing it up a bit for the cameras, “is Bruce.”

“Puffadillo!” my Govermon cries happily from inside the crate.

There’s a chorus of laughter from those gathered around the fighting space, and I can’t help the mild blush that rises to my cheeks.

“Puffadillo, yeah, fine.”

I lift the cover off the crate and tip it gently to it’s slide, allowing Puffadillo to roll out and unfurl in the center of the space. Iguanant, sensing within its insecto-reptilian cortex the desire for combat from the surrounding humans, continues to trundle forth, antennae waving madly.

“Puffadillo,” I say softly, “you know what to do.”

My loyal Govermon, too, senses the atmosphere of the room, and eyes its foe straight on. There is a whistling as it draws a great breath through its puffer-mouth. It’s armored plates separate as its body expands, and the spikes come out.

The post Govermon appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

The Lynx and the Sparrow

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
Wherever you go, the birds fall silent and watch. They stare at you with red, glowing eyes. The only exception are Red Robins, which cover their face with their left wing.

Response:
They have a legend of their origin, and we have ours.

The Red Robins speak to each other in the fanned branches of oaks, in the towering maples, in the fragrant depths of the lilac bush. They tell of how they got their mark.

The robins know they were once sparrows, distant cousins to those that exist alongside them today. This was before the Great Flood, when the ice sheet still pushed down from the north, blanketing the land.

At the far southern terminus of the ice sheet, where it towered jaggedly above the last and greatest of the northern forests, the robins’ drab grey ancestors flitted among the tops of those towering trees, discussing the advance of the ice and the the grinding of once-verdant land beneath its implacable bulk.

In that antediluvian wilderness there lived another animal, which claimed the ground as its territory. These were the lynxes, who typically preyed on bird and rodent alike. The grey sparrows and the lynxes reached an agreement: the lynxes would not climb the trees to hunt the sparrows, and the sparrows would not bother the lynxes by descending to the earth.

As a chilly spring set in, however, and the ice sheet continued its advance unabated, freezing the trees of the frontier to ice and then shattering them under its weight, the sparrows grew hungry. They realized they had been tricked by the lynxes, for though they had survived the winter eating berries, now they were in need of worm meat. They knew, however, that they risked doom in the lynxes’ claws, and perhaps a war, if they were to descend to the ground to dig up the fat worms that writhed beneath the soil.

The sparrows knew that the other birds were more accustomed to eating berries, seeds and nuts all year round. They were adept at catching flying insects in the air, without ever needing to land on the forest floor. Thus they went to the other birds to request their help, as their feathered cousins.

The sparrows asked the other birds to post a watch, keeping an eye on the location of all lynxes, in order to coordinate times when it would be safe for the sparrows to secretly land on the ground and pluck juicy worms out of the earth. They agreed upon special calls they would make to communicate this, which would sound like mellifluous nonsense to the big cats.

The lynxes were especially cunning, however, and had anticipated such a plan from the birds, thus they regularly patrolled the grounds of the great forest in such a way that they, too, knew the whereabouts of all sparrows, and gave them no chance to land.

The other birds waited patiently, loyal to the grey sparrows. Grosbeaks, bluejays, chickadees, woodpeckers and more all stared from the branches at the lynxes, waiting. The lynxes left no ground unseen for enough time for the birds to alert the sparrows to their chance, but still they watched. They watched until blood pooled behind their eyes, turning them red, then leaked out. Their red eyes glowed with anger as they slowly realized that the lynxes, so arrogant and clever, had outsmarted them.

The bravest of the sparrows, admired by all its fellows, decided in its hunger that it had no choice but to risk landing. It knew that if it succeeded, it might inspire all the other sparrows to do the same, and they would eat at last.

At what it determined to be the safest moment, it flew down to the ground, plucked a fat worm from the soil, and lifted off, just as a lynx caught sight of it and came flying at it with claws outstretched. In its rush to reach the higher branches, the brave sparrow scrapped its underside raw against the trunk of a tree, its belly feathers becoming soaked in blood.

“I have robbed your precious soil!” it cried in triumph from the trees, its blood stain growing all the while. That stain stayed forever, but the other sparrows were inspired, and stole from the lynxes until the ice sheets were melted and the Great Flood consumed the forest. That was how the robins came to be.

My legend of their origin is mostly the same, except for the most important part. The brave and foolhardy sparrow was caught by the lynx before it could escape. Already in the lynx’s jaws, it begged, “Spare me! I couldn’t live on berries alone!”

The lynx released it from its mouth and held it between its claws, snarling down at it. “You have tried to rob us, little sparrow. I will let you live, but let this forever be a reminder of your mischief.” And with that, the lynx raked its claws across the sparrow’s belly, spreading a great blood stain there, and released it back into the trees, where it would become the first Red Robin.

On that day in the ancient wood, the eyes of the other birds glowed blood red with their anger and judgment as they watched the lynx mete out its justice. They look at me with such eyes, still, as I prowl the land–always silent, with nothing to report or speak to each other. We lynxes are forever observed.

I know, beyond doubt, that our version of the legend is true. Our ancestor, that cunning lynx, caught and shredded the breast of the foolish sparrow. That is why Red Robins lift their left wing in our presence, and hide their faces in shame.

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The Seraph

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
In the not too distant future, neural/computer interfaces are powerful enough and advanced enough to interact with our nerves to make us feel, see, touch, taste and smell. You are a therapist that helps people that have lost the ability to tell the difference between reality and “wetware.”

Response:
From the Phorians to the Seraphs, all of them are on the verge of becoming permanently lost when they come to me, their grey matter grown wild in unnatural layers that resists any hope of non-surgical separation. I win them back, though. Usually. With the proper therapy, delivered regularly and at proper intensity, combined with complete removal of neural/computer interface hardware, a neurological wedge can be driven between the nervous system’s process centers and the higher-thinking components of the human brain from which arise our spatial awareness, desires, fears…our interpretation of reality itself.

I call the first group the “Phorians” after the most popular of the neuro-psy VR games, which 90%+ of them have been corrupted by: Phoria Vale. It’s an open world game with optional quests. Within its parameters and physical laws, however, there is little a player can not try or accomplish. They can be just about anyone. They feel the leaves of Phoria, its grass, its water. They can even breathe its air, smell it, sense it filling their lungs. They can caress and kill, eat and bed down in the wild–all in the game. For those who develop the illness of dis-separation from the game, the first key is to convince them that they are indeed on Earth, not in Phoria, and that Phoria had never existed anywhere outside of software and the wetware of their own psyches.

The “Seraphs” are harder cases. Some are unrecoverable, so corrupted and misshapen their synapse networks become, and even great swathes of their brain matter. For the unrecoverable, at some point all we can do, if the patient or their family has available funds, is to set them up on life support and let them live out the rest of their lives in their never-ending, open-eyed, full-sensory lucid dream.

The Dreamscape program they’ve become addicted to is in a sense a dream. The software simply triggers a continuous lucid dreaming state, and the neuro-psy implants make them feel everything, to a level beyond what the human mind can actually trick itself into believing during a regular lucid dream. Whereas the Phorians are limited by a comprehensive game world, the Seraphs are limited by nothing except their own imaginations and certain physical limitations of the human body outside of the which the brain has not evolved cognitive capacity to dream itself away from. They can imagine they are an octopus, for example, but never will they truly be able to experience the world in the exact manner of those eight-armed chromatophore-manipulating cephalopods.

The Seraphs scare me more than the Phorians could ever do. Some dream themselves as serial killers. Some, harboring a life of hatred against many antagonists, dream themselves to be dictators, commanding mass purges of their enemies, if not outright genocides. Still scarier are the metaphysical or occult Seraphs, that imagine themselves to be demons, underworld gods, extra-cosmic eldritch horrors, or even angels. Those with the angel complex, in fact, inspired the name Seraphs among me and my colleagues in the first place.

“Miguel” – Case B-453, is in my chair today. I have reclined him, and bound his hands to the arms of the chair with nylon constraints. His eyes are open, and he’s looking straight at me. Miguel is my greatest challenge yet, and I am determined to win his mind back to reality, at least enough to make him once again functional and cognizant of his true self. He terrifies me more, I admit, than any other patient I’ve had.

“I see you, demon,” he says coldly. He has somehow managed to access a lower set of vocal cords–not unprecedented, but a phenomenon still being studied. His voice is deep, like the low, bone-jarring hum of an earthquake miles below the surface.

“I am your doctor,” I inform him, as I always do. “I am here to help you, Miguel. You are dreaming, and I will wake you up.”

Miguel’s laughter booms. His eyes are terribly bloodshot, constantly streaming tears, because he has either forgotten to blink or the parasympathetic nerves that would normally do so have been crushed or incorporated into the neuron clusters that constitute his perceived ego as the Angel.

“I am tearing your hair out, demon,” he says.

“Doctor,” I correct him again. “And you are not physically interacting with me at all.”

Miguel smiles. His teeth are yellow, broken, apparently due to him having chewed on metal screws and nails before he was recovered from his home for care.

“But I am,” laughs Miguel. “I interact with all. It’s you who are dreaming. You have dreamed yourself into my world.”

For a moment–though it can only be my imagination–I feel my hair flicked atop my head, as though fingers have quickly run through it. At most, it must be the breeze from the air conditioner.

“I am playing with your heart,” says Miguel. “It’s not such a strong heart. I’m squeezing it.”

I see his hand, bound to the chair at the wrist, opening and closing.

“You are n–“

My heart has started to palpitate, my pulse suddenly increasing. There is a pain growing in my chest. Blood thunders in a torrent through the arteries in my chest and neck.

“Miguel,” I say, frightened now, sweating profusely, “I want you to stop this…th-this talk.”

“But not my hand?” says Miguel, smiling toothily. His bloodshot eyes leak, holding laughter in their depths. “If I spread my wings, I shall fly away with your heart on my palm, demon.”

“Miguel!”

The pain is increasing, spreading to my shoulder. Numbness floods my left arm.

“Miguel! Angel! Angel, stop!”

“So you know who I am,” says Miguel. He opens his hand wide, and the pain coursing through the entire left side of my body begins to subside. I fight to hold back tears. My heart still pounds–but slowly, to my immense relief, I can feel it fighting to recover its normal pace and strength. My head grows light as my blood pressure subsides.

“Angel…”

“You know who I am now,” says Miguel. “You have felt my strength and my mercy.”

“You believe you have evolved,” I choke out, barely able to speak, rising to flee the room. My head swoons again.

“Not belief,” he laughs wildly, ripping his arms from the constraints. “You are in my reality. All of you are. This demonic planet is now the domain of the Angel. All will feel me soon–feel my justice rain upon them.”

I run out of the room, screaming for my secretary, security, anyone. Miguel’s laughter echoes in my ears. Too far within. His laughter is beating at my mind.

I feel my hair flicked with playfully, as the Angel toys with his subject.

The post The Seraph appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Halifax Haunt

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
You are alone and haven’t been able to find another human for years. Starved for interaction, you now travel to haunted houses and locations because at least at one point, these spirits were once human too.

Response:
I’d walked the earth for years before the idea came to me. The roads no longer had vehicles upon them. The cities were empty buildings. In all my wandering and searching, drinking from streams and foraging for food in the wild, forgetting to eat for days at a time, I only happened upon the idea when I came across that face-down book on the musty floor of a souvenir shop for tourists on the Atlantic Coast.

The book was called Maritime Haunts, and, true enough to its name, it featured a collection of folklore and semi-journalistic accounts about haunted locations across the region–hotels, hospitals, graveyards, and houses that were long gone, marked only by their old stone foundations in forgotten groves and meadows.

I examined the table of contents, finding the name of an old hotel in the city of Halifax, whose curious desolation I was currently exploring.

The city itself was resilient, I’d found. The public gardens, by some fluke of nature, gave the impression of still being manicured. The treated lumber of the boardwalk along the harbor waterfront, which I’d expected to be moldering, still somehow held strong. I wondered, too, if the story I’d found was correct, and if the spirits of this place were resilient as well.

I found the historic Lord Nelson Hotel and Suites without much trouble, as the city’s downtown was not as sprawling as others I’d been through in my lonely journey. Room 504 was said to be haunted, with a good deal of lore surrounding it.

The front door of the hotel swung opened and closed, as though by some immense draft within the structure that pushed and pulled.

The lobby was still immaculate, with little sign of degradation. Knowing the elevators would probably be long out of order, I didn’t even try them, and instead located the stairs, tromping my way up to the fifth floor.

The door to 504 was cracked open, and I felt a strange otherworldliness emanating from it. I thought it was my imagination, but as I opened the door all the way and stepped through into that room, a potent, eerie feeling, almost of a connection to some other dimension, assailed me.

I closed the door behind me and seated myself on the soft bed. There was a chocolate on each pillow and towels folded at the foot of it, as though it had just recently been made up.

I waited there, speaking aloud to the room a bit, asking for any presences to make themselves known–telling them, even, that I searched only for company. Connection. A simple chat. I wanted only some semblance of togetherness, to be able to share the contents of my mind, my experience, and to hear that of another’s.

For a long time, despite that eerie sensation I felt, of being in a place where some veil between worlds was worn thin, there was no response.

A sound came from the door, and I looked to see the doorknob turning.

Suddenly petrified, I couldn’t bring myself to move. My shock gave way to anticipation, as the door slowly opened and a man and a woman, looking entirely corporeal, entirely present, stepped in from the hall.

They somehow took no notice of me, and I supposed that ghosts, even ones repeating some eternal cycle that marked a portion of their bygone lives, were not always able to observe the living.

The woman dropped her bags with a thud that was weirdly tangible, and then she flopped, exhausted, onto the bed. She stayed reclined like that for a moment while the man removed his jacket, and then she shivered.

“Brrr, babe, it’s freezing in here.”

“Is it?” He frowned. “Seems warm enough to me.”

“No, it’s cold, really.”

The man glanced at the antiquated wall thermometer. “Says here it’s 26 degrees.”

“Come here,” said the woman, ushering him over with her hands.

The man came to the bed, hovering right beside me–both ghosts still not catching so much of a glimpse of yours truly–and a look of bafflement came across his features.

“It is cold here. What the…”

I stood up.

“I don’t mean to disturb you, but I came here to–“

“What was that?” cried the woman. “I heard something.”

“I heard that too. Like a voice.”

“Yes, it was me,” I said more loudly, feeling myself draw strength, in a way I couldn’t explain, from the presence of the couple. “I know you are long dead, but I came here to connect with your spiri–“

“Jesus!” cried the man, as they both jumped away from the bed.

“Don, there’s something wrong in here,” said the woman worriedly. “Where’s that voice coming from?”

They backed up to the door.

The man grumbled bitterly. “I knew we should’ve gone somewhere else when they said this was the last available room. The concierge said those ghost stories were just a silly legend.”

“I’m not staying here,” said the woman, pulling on her shoes. “Absolutely no way.”

“Listen!” I called. “I just want to talk with you, for god’s sake! Please!”

They both bolted, the man sweeping up his jacket in one smooth motion. They didn’t even close the door behind them.

Though I felt deflated, I still sensed that mysterious strength in myself, as though I’d pulled it out of them, fortifying my being like it were hot food. I felt more there somehow. I saw more details in the room, heard more. I…

…I heard voices. Noises. Out there on the street.

Those couldn’t be engines. That couldn’t be a horn…

I rushed to the window, throwing open the curtains to look down upon the bustling street, filled with the creeping dread of true understanding.

I looked upon the world of the living that, at some point, my soul had left behind.

The post Halifax Haunt appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Zero

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
 Everyone is born with a number over their head that shows your chances of dying. For most people it hovers at a certain number for the most of their lives, and the older you get the higher the number goes. One day you wake up and see your number has gone to zero.

Response:
I swiped at the fog on the mirror in disbelief, trying to get a full view of the air above my head, feeling a chill creep down my spine. This was unnatural, nothing I’d ever seen or heard of.

The 0 hovered there clearly, unmistakable, nothing before it and nothing after it. I moved around the bathroom to examine myself from different angles, and checked myself in the front camera of my phone, just to make sure.

I called Temir, even though I knew he’d just be getting out of bed.

“Dude, what is it?” he answered blearily from the other end.

“My number is zero,” I almost shouted.

“What?”

“I just woke up and it’s zero! I’m not joking.”

“That can’t be possible. Let me turn on video just quick.”

His unshaved face appeared on the screen, and I saw his tired eyes go wide as I held the phone at arm’s length so he could get a good look.

“Holy shit,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “No way.”

On the screen I could only see the bottom half of his number, but it was enough to show me that it remained at 17–pretty much the average for those in their mid-thirties like us.

I was lost in thought already on what this could mean for me, when Temir spoke again, pretty much speaking what was on my mind.

“Does this mean…you can’t die? Not a chance? I thought there were no absolutes. Even perfectly healthy children held under observation in labs hover between 2-3…”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t seem, y’know, fair…”

I detected something in Temir’s voice that made me profoundly uncomfortable, and in a way it chilled me as much as the abnormality above my head: jealousy.

“Why should you get that?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

I was silent for a moment, lost for words. “Can I call you back later? I’ve gotta, uh, get ready and everything. For work.”

“Yeah, man, yeah. Go for it.” Temir’s face was strangely sullen, conflicted looking.

We hung up.

I couldn’t just call up work and say I’d woken with a zero and therefore wouldn’t be coming in. On what grounds? It could be gone by tomorrow, or the end of the day, or even in an hour. It could be a cosmic glitch, if that made any sense.

But the staring began the moment I left the house, making for the train on foot.

The grandmotherly old woman who ran a newspaper and tabloid stall near the entrance to the underground, chatting with a customer, stopped immediately when she spotted me. Both she and the middle-aged man’s mouths cracked open in confusion. 134 and 57 hung over their respective heads.

They looked back to each other and then to me again. The man spoke first, seeming to want to leap into my path on the sidewalk and grab me.

“Hey, how’d you get that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not right. That’s impossible. What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

I kept going, wanting desperately to be off the street now.

“What did you do?” asked the old woman behind me, her voice shrill. “What did he do!” she cried, louder, trying to attract more attention from others on the street.

Muffled conversation and even sounds of alarm broke out behind me, at first a trickle and then a storm.

I stepped onto the escalator, and as I hurried down it at a quick pace, passing those who rode it stationary, I realized that the underground, compact as it was, would be much worse than the street. Everyone I passed–those on the way down with me, and those coming up the other way on the adjacent escalator, were gasping as they took notice of me, calling other people’s attention to the zero.

Down the hall at the bottom of the escalator I strode at the fastest walk I could manage without running, fumbling my pass out of my wallet. I pressed the card to the sensor at the gate and slipped through quickly as the barriers swung open. There was now a chorus of voices around me, a sea of staring faces, and I finally looked back to see a crowd following me, piling through the gates as fast as they could open them.

The faces of the crowd were frightening. There were no smiles. Instead there were looks of suspicion, and where there was no suspicion there was a mix of strange desperation, like one sees in the eyes of wild animals. Finally–and worst of all, it seemed–were faces that matched the voice of Temir on the phone that morning: ones contorted with sheer jealousy, as though I were bearing immortality in a bag that could be swiped from my arms.

There were roars from the crowd for me to stop by the time I reached the platform, alerting all others waiting for the train.

One group of men walked quickly toward me, eyeing me predatorily. They looked somewhat malnourished, pale, with unkept hair. There was aggressiveness and secrecy in their stride.

“Looky here, wassis now?” one said, stumps of teeth visible beneath a ratty mustache. “Never seen a zero before. Any you boys seen such a thing?”

“Nuh uh.”

I hadn’t looked at their numbers at first, more aware of their posturing. Now I could see that they were dangerously high, especially for men that couldn’t be more than 45 years old: 128, 146, 151.

“You got some trick for us, Superman?”

“Yeah, what the fuck!” The voice came from somewhere in the arriving crowd. In fact, this was a mob.

“Dude, believe me, I woke up like this and don’t know what’s going on. It’s probably just a glitch.”

Stump-tooth’s mouth pulled into a mean-spirited grin, his beady eyes remaining frozen on mind. Fox eyes. Snake eyes.

“A fuckin’ glitch he says! Like we’re in the, uh, the matrix or sumthin. Like a fuckin’ movie.”

Suddenly the other two leapt to my side, grabbing my arms forcefully and locking them behind my back.

“Now Hollywood, you tell us where you got this zero from, so I don’t need to cut the truth outta ya.”

A knife appeared from beneath his jacket.

Rather than come to my rescue, the crowd roared with him in agreement.

“Out with it, you little shit!”

“I said I don’t know!” I tried to holler, but my voice was small and frightened in my ears. I struggled against the men holding my arms. “Let me go! Let me GO!”

“All right, Superman. Hollywood.” Stump-tooth’s face formed an ugly, cruel rictus.

Dimly, I was aware of the sound of the approaching train.

“Show us how this zero here works then, why doncha?”

Laughing, he punched me hard in the stomach, and as I folded, winded, his thugs threw me off the platform into the tracks. At last, cries of outrage and horror erupted from the crowd, but it was too late.

I looked up as the lights of the subway bore down on me. There was no time to get my feet under me and scramble to the shelter at the side of the tracks.

I raised my hand, as though it could protect my body from destruction, and even as a scream tore out of my lungs, I heard Stump-tooth announce, almost as though he was carrying out an experiment, “Still zero.”

It was like the train hit an invisible wall. The screech and tearing of metal was deafening as the entire thing crumpled like an accordion, its small windshield and yellow headlights bursting and peppering me with shards of glass.

The blood had not even begun to seep from my superficial lacerations as I stood. Screams of horror erupted from a hundred throats, with just as many pairs of eyes bulging in horror at both me and mangled train.

And even if they could not comprehend me, I knew who I was in that moment.

I was invincible. I was Zero.

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