Andrew Sweet's Blog: Reality Gradient, page 5

Stranger and Stranger Things

A short high-level perspective on the Netflix series Stranger Things.

I’m an avid watcher of the Netflix series Stranger Things, but it wasn’t always that way. I’m one of those people who kind of trend opposite of what’s popular if that makes sense. So when everyone is trying to watch the newest Spiderman movie, I’m intentionally avoiding it because I think that in order to have such a huge fan base, probably there’s a lot of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Consequently, it took me a while to finally decide to watch Stranger Things, because when it came out there was a magnificent amount of buzz around it, and I didn’t want to like it.

But when I finally did, arriving late to the first season, I was blown away. The kids-on-bikes-save-the-world trope hadn’t been used in decades, even though there’s a strong tradition of that sort of thing in science fiction. Consider E.T., and how the children escape the government trying to lock E.T. up. Definitely a kids-on-bikes-save-the-world thing. I thought that I’d find flat acting and marginalized parents, just like most of the eighties movies that the walkie-talkies, bikes, and Dungeons and Dragons reminded me of.

I was surprised by the community. I mean, some parents were marginalized, sure (being a parent now, I’m less a fan of that than I probably was as a teenager watching movies like Halloween). But Will’s mother is definitely plugged into his life and goes to great lengths to help save him when he’s trapped within The Upside Down during the first season. One message that I love about the movie is how the community must work together to solve their problems, parents and children alike. Granted, it’s really the same subset of community members, but it’s not your typical children-must-survive-on-their-own concept.

I don’t know if you recall, but back in the eighties, there was a crossover genre of fantasy and science fiction that melded the two together. I would drop stories like Dune and Krull into that category. Though the original stories behind them were published nearly twenty years earlier, these both were made into movies in the 1980s. The distinction I make between these sorts of projects and strict fantasy is that there’s an attempt, however meek, to explain the more fantastical aspects using science. In Dune, for example, we have the spice, for example, only about a millimeter away from x-drugs (read Bad Monkey for a fun exploration of x-drugs about a time when even government scientists thought drugs could develop superpowers). Stranger Things definitely fits into that fantasy/sci-fi cross-over genre. The first few episodes of the entire series unfold as a more fantasy type of plot. A child goes missing on a dark and stormy night, things start making sounds in the walls, etc. Only later do we see the “spice” of Stranger Things — that dark parallel universe known as The Upside Down.

There’s another reason Stranger Things speaks to so many, myself included, and something that was also overlooked about the eighties science fiction movies that featured all of these children fending for themselves: and that’s that it exactly felt like that. Being a child of the eighties, whose parents worked usually 4-5 different jobs between them just to pay the bills, we were alone most of the time. This means that if anything happened while we weren’t being watched, we needed to handle that ourselves. This concept is just a little different for children growing up today. Now, the adults may be around, but escalating climate change, the degradation of law and order, school shootings, etc. — all these mean that children are on their own — with the exception of one or two adults who are trying to help, but without the children, would crash and burn. I find the strange dichotomy of a community coming together and yet still being outsiders while fighting in a struggle to save humanity very compelling, though that might be the dystopian author in me!

Stranger Things offers hope, and I think this may be one of its bigger appeals. It offers us a world that’s at least as chaotic and destructive as the world we currently inhabit, but with one firm, unbreakable rule: the good guys win. The children always come out on top. The super-giant monster that eats people and crushes trees as it passes? No problem! Demogorgons with insatiable appetites and mouths for heads? Again, no problem. Demonic possession by the Mind-Flayer? No problem. These kids have seen and overcome worst problems than (hopefully) the children of today and certainly those of yesterday (myself included) have come to. Stranger Things is hope.

Roll all the pieces together, and we have the ultimate cocktail of eighties nostalgia and the rebuilding of hope. In a way, Stranger Things is the series we want, and I would go so far as to say need, in a world that’s really making dystopian authors like myself work hard to compete for devastation to inflict upon our world’s citizens. I’m finally finished, and not at all disappointed, in Stranger Things 4: Volume 1. Now, on to Stranger Things 4: Volume 2!

Virtual Wars: Update

Virtual Wars - Background

Harper Rawls was born on a Thursday — October 29, 2161. Her son, Bodhi, was born on a Thursday also — April 21, 2185. Larken Marche, her brother Oliver, and the twenty-eight other models that made up the “Firsts” were “born” on a Monday — January 31, 2185, the same year but a bit earlier than Bodhi.

Bodhi Rising, the novel that covers Bodhi’s brief rise to power and then the consequences of his decisions along the way, covers a four-year period from when Bodhi nearly dies of his chronic disease, to when Bodhi develops his revolutionary virtual world, which paves the way for Libera, Goddess of Worlds.

One thing you might have noticed when reading Bodhi Rising is that Dr. Alexander “Torrent” Toussaint, core to Models and Citizens, doesn’t have much presence. For a novel in which his one natural son gets a brand new body and invents a new technology, Torrent is largely absent except at the very beginning as the story follows Bodhi and Christine’s toxic relationship. 

What is Torrent doing that entire time that keeps pulling him away from Bodhi? Well, one small explanation in Bodhi Rising has more to do with business commitments. But The First, the novel in my upcoming Virtual Wars series, explains a lot more of about what was happening during that time period. Larken and Oliver are coming of age at the same time that Bodhi is, and when Oliver is accused of a crime — a crime that one of the other Firsts likely committed — he and Larken, along with some friends and a few of the other Firsts collectively referred to as the Fourphans, seek out Torrent for help. As you may well have guessed having read Models and Citizens, Torrent’s ability to help anyone is severely limited by his selfish streak, so though he does try to help, he has trouble being all that helpful. But he tries, as you’ll see at the beginning of Virtual Wars.

There are a lot of holes that have to be filled in. Some of those are handled in Ordell. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, go sign up for my newsletter. (You could buy it on Amazon, but it isn’t actually intended to be sold, which is why it’s priced pretty high. You can get it for free by joining my mailing list.) Bodhi Rising ends in 2206 with Bodhi being trapped in the nascent Inferiere prison system, and Libera, Goddess of Worlds opens in 2237, years into Aida’s new job, and ends in 2258, after Qadesh emerges and puts the world on alert, kick-starting the Virtual Wars. From the beginning Bodhi Rising to the end of Libera, Goddess of Worlds covers about 52 years. In the Virtual Wars series, the breakdown is as follows (tentative, may grow or shrink — see previous blog posts about this upcoming series):

Book 1 — The Firsts (2201 - 2202) — Larken and Oliver flee from HPM, leaving their boarding school, Brighton, in Portland, Oregon to get help in Seattle from Torrent. Things get dangerous we begin to see the emergence of Vera Reverte, the major protagonist in the Virtual Wars series.

Book 2 — Imaginary Enemies (2202 - 2203) — Vera searches for the enemy that she thinks is coming, only to be wrong more often than right. After Sam is viciously attacked, Vera thinks she has a lead. Due to her help throughout The Firsts, Vera has some alliances already and builds others to help fight what many are beginning to believe is an imaginary enemy. Sam’s attack helps convince others that the enemy she thought she was to defend against is gaining strength.

Book 3 — Better than Dying (2203 - 2208) — Amanda Briggs, mother to Aida Lothian, struggles in the aftermath of Bodhi Rising and Imaginary Enemies. Aida Lothian is a protagonist from Libera, Goddess of Worlds. Meanwhile, Vera is finally gaining traction building her “army”, despite a change in modeling sentiment. Her enemy has grown stronger and become more apparent.

Book 4 — Libera, Goddess of Worlds (2237 - 2258) — takes Aida from her hiring at Paivana Thoughtforms to her contributions to the creation of the entity known as Qadesh. The ending event in Libera, Goddess of Worlds is the event that fuels the rise of her enemy from the fringes to the mainstream.

Book 5 — The Virtual Wars (2258 - 2264) — Vera, Bodhi, Lancaster, Ordell, and Qadesh forge an alliance to fight against Vera’s enemy, who has taken power in many parts of the world. This is a military novel and will be rich with tactics and strategy. Vera must make a critical decision about her future.

Book 6 — Resistance (~2298 - ~2299) — During what will become known as the Quiet Time, conflicts have ended, and when the world has to deal with the consequences of the results of the Virtual Wars.

Book 7 — Escape (~2299 - ~2301) — In the finale of the Virtual Wars series, the last stand happens as the good guys and the bad guys battle for the future. All the stakes are claimed as some old and some new heroes and villains battle across all of the Reality Gradient Universe.

Status Update

Okay so I’ve been giving you all updates, so here goes. I’m through with Book 1 (meaning written, not edited), and about a third through Book 2 (38k words, will be 100k). Book 3 is about 60k words so far, and I’ve got to weave in some plot changes from Books 1 and 2, so it’ll be about 40k words longer by the time I’m done. Once I get those three done, I’m going to reprint Libera with a new Virtual Wars cover and some additional information on how Libera ties in. Then I need to write the 100k Virtual Wars series namesake space-opera. After that, I’ll need to pull things back to the Earth in the Resistance novel (100k), and finally, the last book, Escape, will be another space opera to close the series.

By full count, I’m about 40% done with the series. But… when I get the first three books done, I’ll go ahead and rapid release those. Not to mention I’ve got my Southern Highlands coming out this summer, along with The Witch of the Isles (totally different - historical fantasy). So you won’t run out of reading material! Look for my rapid release at the beginning of 2023.

Birds Aren’t Real

Prose by Andrew Sweet.

The birds beyond my window call to me with their endless chirping and whistles. They call to me like lovers, inviting me to do the impossible, and to fly with them. Their promise is that if I fly, if I only take to the sky, then all of the world’s pains and hardships will be imperceptible from the vantage point of the sky. 

They promise that like the Sun I will hover above the world and feel nothing.

They promise that I won’t notice the world seems impossibly heavier with the absence of twenty-two souls in Uvalde. They suggest that if I close my eyes and whistle loudly enough, I won’t be bothered by the ten missing souls in Buffalo. They say that mass shootings are nothing — if I become a bird.

And I know how to be a bird. I’ve been a bird before. I’ve flitted from branch to branch in a birch tree, seeking out insects, obsessed only with my own existence. I’ve flitted away at any sign of violence or potential malady. I have avoided any semblance of responsibility, in the hopes that I can somehow deny the harshness of a reality over which I have only limited control.

I can be a fantastic bird.

And I want to be. 

My god, how I want to be a bird. I want to kiss the sky and sail through the clouds, feeling the suspended moisture dampening my wings as the sun warms my back from above. I want to dive down to the earth only for my sustenance, and then lift off again, leaving behind me any commitment to this world.

Another four souls gone.

Another corruption of life’s meaning as someone, somehow, interpreted their purpose as being a weapon. Their own life, turned against the lives of others, warped into an instrument of destruction. We say we cannot fathom the pain that it takes to destroy communities. We say we can’t understand the lack of empathy.

I can.

I’m not a bird. 

I can understand hurting so much that you can’t breath. I understand wanting others to hurt with you, because of you. So many call this desire an insanity, as though we don’t hurt each other every single day. As though we didn’t create or participate in building a world where people see in it only pain, and become so numb to the possibility of happiness that they die inside. Like zombies, they walk among us, going through the motion of living, feeling their own engagement fade away until, unsure if they are real or not, they perform an act of violence. This confirms them, fulfills them, and gives them a cause. 

I know what the absence of community means.

I am not a bird.

I try to flit to another branch, but as it turns out, my bird-friends were lying with their seductive whistles. Their claims of joy require more of me than remaining a man. They don’t just deny, but they practice their denial. Each magpie, mockingbird, and whippoorwill calls louder and louder to block out the sounds of bullets below. They fly to escape the world, but what they don’t say in their calls is that no matter how high you fly, or how much you whistle, the screams still break through. The people flee the buildings and we can see them, we pretend-birds, hovering high. The agony reaches up into the sky like a talon, scratching us back to earth.

I’m no longer tempted by birds. I open my eyes wide to see the pain, the suffering, and the horrifying deaths. And I fight about them. I remind myself and the other pretend birds that those sweet innocents, those pure souls, didn’t have to die. They say its unavoidable and flap their wings to put distance between us. I shout that no, we don’t have to be complacent.

I follow.

I get bruised as they beat against me. Their beaks rip out my feathers and reveal the raw, bleeding human skin beneath. I feel my wings lose their power. 

I fall sometimes.

Sometimes, I have to slink away. But I come back with my partially-healed wounds, and I tell them again. Because they have to know. We all have to know. We must come to understand the truth of things — the absolute reality of things.

Nobody can fly high enough to be free of the violence. Nobody. And unless we birds come land, and engage, and force things to change, mutating our bird calls back into human voices — unless that happens, then nothing changes. 

The birds practice screaming more loudly, and fly higher, and pretend harder to be birds, flapping their clunky human arms in a mad pretense and denial of gravity.

But I know better. I haven’t always known, but I do more than ever know now. A lifetime of flying has revealed to me one fundamental truth.

Birds aren’t real.

Raw Fiction: The Clump

A raw, unedited, short story by Andrew Sweet.

“What do you mean there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“It’s a life, John,” the doctor said, shoving his falsely-apologetic glasses up on the bridge of his nose. John felt the rage growing under his skin, first in his face, and then in the large bump that protruded from behind his shoulder blade. White-hot fire flitted its way into fear as the doctor continued. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Can I — I know this is strange to ask — but can I write about it? I bet that paper would make it into Nature!”

The doctor didn’t even try to hide the glee in his eyes. John scowled at the man, who, even behind the mask, John could tell was still smiling, regardless of that he tried to frown with his eyebrows.

“This thing is killing me,” John said. “It’s grown an inch over the last month.”

“That’s what’s so remarkable about it. If it wasn’t for being on your shoulder, this thing you have is developing exactly like a fetus in the womb.”

That didn’t help John’s feelings about it. He ground his teeth together and rubbed with his hand over the protrusion. He’d always had the bump, but it had been just that. He even knew the story of its origin: autosite twin, merged before birth. And for his entire life, it’d just hung out back there.

But that’s before he threw up last Wednesday. Hunched over the toilet after only a single beer, and his girlfriend Megan rubbed his back as she had many times before when he’d legitimately drunk too much. It had hurt when her fingers moved across it, for the first time in his life. And she’d been the one to comment on how it seemed larger.

That was a week ago. Now there was no denying its size, although he still had some reservations about the doctor’s judgment.

“Blastocyst,” the old man had said, with glee that only someone whose feet didn’t throb every waking moment could issue forth. John Landry wasn’t gleeful. He wasn’t happy. And he hadn’t slept on his left side in over a week.

“John, I can’t operate on it,” the doctor reminded him. “And… what about that paper?”

“Fuck the paper. Why can’t you operate?”

“Senate Bill Eight,” the doctor said. “This is Texas after all. And that thing on your back — that’s a fetus.”

“W-what?!”

“I thought you realized that when I said ‘blastocyst’. Do you know what that is?”

John shook his head, partially to deny and partially because his muscles had tensed in his neck so much that his head had little choice but to shake.

“Do I look like I know what a blastocyst is?”

“In a pregnant woman, it’s the cage that protects a fetus while it develops. That’s the first thing to express, then lactation follows a developmental path. Have your breasts felt tender?”

“Breasts? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“How do I say this so that you’ll understand?” The doctor shoved his glasses hard up his nose again. “Let’s see. You’re pregnant John.”

The guys at the construction site would have a field day. Not to mention the guys at the Local 44. And Megan would probably laugh her fucking ass off at this. He could already hear her harpy-like too-many-cigarettes rasping degenerate into a coughing fit. She really should get that checked out. That was another fucking conversation though.

“Men don’t get pregnant.”

“So this is interesting,” was the doctor’s response as he pulled out a tablet. “You’re actually an XXY.”

“What the hell is an XXY?”

John could feel the vein popping out on the side of his neck.

“You have two x-chromosomes and one y-chromosome. You’re what we call a textbook case. I’m not sure how your womb made it all the way to your back, but …”

“Doc, if you say anything about me and ‘womb’ again, I might punch you,” John assured the doctor in no uncertain terms.

“Whatever it is, it’s on your back. And there’s a child developing inside. According to Senate Bill Eight, you are pregnant. So if you try to get rid of that thing, you’ll be ending a life. And that will cost me my medical license, so you’re just going to have to go somewhere else… or…”

“No paper.”

“Well damn, John. I came back to this town after graduate school and gave up being a big city doctor so I could look after you assholes. The least you could do is let me write a paper on this. You’ve got to be literally the only one in the world with this situation happening.”

“Karl, if you ask me again, the answer will still be no. And can I get you to promise to keep this under wraps please?”

“Can’t. Texas law. I have to let the Abortion Advisory Board know at the very least. This is going to get out, John.”

“Just a couple of days, Karl. A couple of days and I’ll head over to —“

“Nah, nah, nah, nah! I can’t hear that, John. If I hear it I’ll have to report it. Keep it to yourself, and if I were you, I would make whatever trip you're going to make happen tonight. Word is out as soon as we close up today — I’ll give you that long. But that’s the best I can do.”

“You are a shit friend, Karl.”

“We’re not friends, John. You used to kick my ass in 4-H, remember?”

“Well, then you’re just a shit, Karl.”

“Don’t make me change my mind.”

Megan. What the fuck was he supposed to tell Megan? The more he thought about it, as he threw his shirt back on and headed out the door of the tiny doctor’s office, he figured he could just stick to the science of it. What was it the doctor had said? Blastocyst. Yeah, that. She wouldn’t know what that was, maybe.

“Ha ha ha, ha ha…”

She’d been laughing since he’d gotten home and used the word “blastocyst”.

“And you didn’t think that I’d know what that is? I’m a woman, John. We all, well most of us, know some things about pregnancy. Of course, I know what that is, and now I know why you've been throwing up in the mornings. You, my love, are pregnant.”

“Stop saying that,” John said and held up his hand like he might hit her, but he never actually would hit her any more than she would actually ever be able to stop talking.

“It’s serious, Megan. Doc won’t operate. He says that it’s a fetus and he can’t do anything about it without breaking …”

“Senate Bill Eight?”

“How’d you know?”

“A better question would be why didn’t you?”

John had never even heard of Senate Bill Eight.

“I told you about it last year when it came out. Remember? We were going to vote somebody in who would help overturn it, but you decided you liked that Abbot guy, remember?”

Oh.

“Well I didn’t know Senate Bill Eight would…”

“What? Be your problem?” She smirked at him. “Yes, it’s your problem now, isn’t it. So, mommy. You carrying that baby to term or what?”

“To… term? No. Hell no. This isn’t a baby. It’s an auto…something twin.”

“Don’t make a difference to the law. You know, you could make Karl’s career if you let him…”

“Stop. Did Karl put you up to that?”

“He might have offered a hundred dollars to do the paper. Can’t we use a hundred dollars?”

Actually, yes. They could. Like everyone else in America, they’d never met a paycheck that wasn’t gone in a few days. A hundred dollars could pay for a lot. But he wasn’t going to parade his shame around in some god damn medical journal that he wouldn’t even be able to decipher.

“Louisiana?”

“Just enacted the new law, only in their case, no abortion. Period.”

“Oklahoma is six weeks. And I’d say after nearly forty years, you blew past that one without even slowing down.”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Then why are you looking for a place to give you an abortion?”

She was right. He ground his teeth some more and wished silently that he’d actually paid attention when she was talking about that bill. It just didn’t seem important. It wasn’t as though he thought abortion should or shouldn’t be legal. One bill seemed like a lot to base an entire vote on.

At least, it did a week ago. Now he’d damn sure have taken his vote and reconsidered.

“We’ll name him Baker,” Megan said, “after my dad.”

“We already named the outhouse after your dad, remember?”

 Her dad was an abusive prick. Megan sometimes pointed out that women marry their fathers but that was usually in the heat of whatever argument they happened to be in. John had never, ever laid a finger on Megan — even if he did tell her what to do more than he probably should. He was just made that way though.

“California,” Megan said.

“I’m not going to California.”

“Then we’ll have to wait out Baker.”

“I’m not going to some liberal enclave. Isn’t there a decent god-fearing community that’ll take care of this for me?”

“Arizona?”

“Now you’re just fucking with me. Okay fine. Oregon, but not California. And we leave now.”

The phone rang. John picked up, knowing who it would be.

“John, you there?”

“Yeah Karl. What?”

“Don’t leave the state. A new bill just passed. If you try to leave the state, you’ll get arrested. Pregnant people,” he snickered, “can’t leave the state.”

“You just made that up.”

“I swear to God. Abbot signed the legislation just now.”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“If that’s a blastocyst, then you certainly are. How’s blood getting to that thing, though?”

The heat evaporated from his face. As though Megan had issued forth some word holding the power of the universe, he felt the entire force of the stars collide with his chest. His heart stopped, and he fell to the ground.

“Here he comes. Step back, give him some space.”

It was a strange voice and one that he didn’t know. John lifted his groggy head from a … pillow? He’d been transferred to the bed in their little two-bedroom apartment. Pillows had been wedged under his stomach and into his back. Megan’s hazel-blue eyes were the first thing he saw when he opened his own.

“Don’t say anything,” she mouthed. The look in her eyes widened with tiny pupils and high arching eyebrows, read panic. She shook her head as he tried to roll over onto his back. “Don’t do that.”

“W-what happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” came a distant voice. It wasn’t the same doctor he’d had before, but he could definitely read “doctor” from the same condescending tone that Karl had picked up after he finally earned his M.D.

“Well?”

“You fainted.”

“Fainted?”

“Yep. It happens. You see, your child requires nutrition to grow. Have you been taking your prenatal?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Don’t say anything, John. Just listen. The doctor’s going to give us some advice, and then he’s going to leave. He’s a busy man with many other stops to make today.”

Her tone was like talking to a five-year-old, and John knew what that meant. It meant that he needed to do what she wanted or else he would pay for it for the next week — as though he wasn’t the one with this growth on his shoulder.

“Take prenatal vitamins. They’ll help keep your system under control. Don’t forget to eat, more than you think you need. You’re eating for two now.”

John ground his teeth. He intentionally ignored the remainder of what the doctor had to say, and only after the man had left and taken with him his annoyed-looking assistant did Megan begin to explain.

“Your friend Karl’s a dick.”

“I know that. But he’s a damn good doctor.”

“And a dick. He reported you up to the Abortion Advisory Board. That guy who just left was from there. The governor has been informed of your condition.”

“So? It’s a twin that should have been subsumed thirty years ago. I’m not pregnant.”

“But you are, by the technical definition. And the governor has been getting a lot of heat for his war on women. So he’s decided,” she started, then stopped and shook her head. Tears formed in her eyes. “He’s decided to use you as proof that he’s not a misogynist. He says that a pregnant person is a pregnant person. The police are watching our house now, to make sure you don’t escape.”

“Escape? I didn’t do anything wrong. I just have this growth thing — how am I supposed to get rid of it?”

“You can’t, John. The governor wants to see how this thing goes.”

“But you remember the reason I went to see Karl in the first place is that it’s getting bigger. I have no energy. Even he said that this thing is going to need blood like a parasite, and where it’s at, it’s going to steal blood from the rest of my body. This thing could kill me.”

“I know,” Megan said, waving her arms over her head. “I know. And there’s nothing we can do about it. If we try to run, then they’ll put you in jail and monitor you there.”

John felt the color drain from his face.

“This thing might kill me.” 

“There’s no exception in the law for this, John. Nobody’s seen it before and nobody ever imagined it. The governor has made a statement saying that this tests what our values are as a state. He says that if we make an exception for this, we may as well not even call ourselves a pro-life state.”

“And people are buying that? This isn’t a pregnancy.”

Megan shook her head, tears falling from her eyes and splattering on the bed before her. Her reddish-brown hair swirled from side to side, reminding him about the way they used to dance at the Dance Barn when they were childhood sweethearts. He could feel his heart racing in his chest at her being so close, and the clammy palms of his pre-teen hormones.

“We have to do something, Meg.”

“I’ve got a friend in Portland, Oregon who will take us in,” Meg said. “Remember JoAnn from my premed class? She’s an abortion provider in Portland, and she says that they can get us out of the state. But they can’t do it with the governor making you a poster child. If they come anywhere near us, it will tip off the governor of what we’re trying to do.”

“Wait. The governor made a statement about my growth? Did he use my name?”

Her eyebrows furrowed and a misty film collected between her eyelids. Her pupils darted away from him as she nodded.

“Your mother and father called. Your mother might come by, but your father…”

“What about him?”

“He said he always knew you were a Nancy.”

“Nothing new there. As helpful as always.”

“Afraid so. How are you doing?”

“You mean aside from being the only pregnant man in the world?”

Megan smiled at that. If it was supposed to be an indication of her empathy, she’d missed the mark. Her grin was just a bit too wide and he could see by the glee in her eyes that she still thought the entire situation was hilarious on some level.

“It’s not funny.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“It’s not funny at all. This is life-threatening for me. The doctor said the blastocyst is acting as a tumor. It’s rerouted my blood vessels in my back to funnel more blood to it, and that’s why I’m tired all the time. It’s also sending hormones into my body. Something called oestrogen? Progestrone? Those are girl hormones, aren’t they? That’s why my chest hurts.”

“You’re right, John. It’s not funny,” Megan said. “And this is life-threatening. I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. Yes, those are girl hormones. They’re for making your body receptive to the baby.”

He felt his lower lip begin to shake as the heat behind his eyes rose again. The fury that he wanted to feel was supplanted by the hopelessness that the armed guard outside of his home presented. He couldn’t leave if he wanted to, even if someone were willing to operate.

“You know you’re changing the law,” Megan said. “They’re making men take pregnancy tests too when they leave the state. The law has been handed up to Abbott’s desk already.”

“Why do they care so god damn much about what happens to this clump of cells on my back?”

“They don’t. It’s a smokescreen for the obvious misogynist laws about regulating uteruses….uteri? Not sure what plural of uterus is, now that I think about it.”

“What do we do, Megan?” he asked, his eyes beginning to water as he met her eyes. She shook her head.

“There’s nothing to do,” Megan said. “They’re not going to let you go.”

She lowered her voice and leaned in.

“But I’ve got something you can try. Now that you’re part of the sisterhood, listen carefully. We don’t know that it will work, or what happens when the fetus dies, but you can try some pennyroyal tea suffused with parsley.”

“Sounds disgusting.”

“Maybe. It may not work. You don’t exactly have a uterus, which is what the tea usually does. If we mix in some mandrake, then it might amplify the effects…”

“Mandrake? I know that’s poisonous.”

“Not in the amounts we’ll use. Now, don’t tell anyone about this. If anyone finds out that we’re trying to kill the baby, you could get the death penalty since you’re not in the exceptions clause.”

“Wait, what? They’re going to kill me if I try to get rid of this clump of cells on my shoulder?”

“They’re going to make you have to baby first, John — although I’m not sure what that would look like. After that, they’ll kill you, yes. Remember JoAnn Ritz? She tried to run to California last year. They stopped her at the Oklahoma border?”

He vaguely remembered. John hadn’t paid much attention to it though — that or the law that had started all of this: Senate Bill Eight. He hadn’t because at the time, he hadn’t been pregnant, nor had the opportunity to become pregnant. Things had certainly changed since then. Now he was paying full attention.

“Tomorrow night, John. I’ll bring the tea — got to pick it up in a few minutes but we don’t want to try right now. Too many people around still. Tomorrow night we’ll see what works and what doesn’t.”

Hours seemed like days as he lay there on his right side. There was an occasional twinge from the growth on his shoulder telling him that the thing was still there. Bouts of lightheadedness told him that the growth was sucking away his life. His shoulder started to go numb, and he assumed that to be from lack of blood. John held both hands out before him for comparison. His right arm refused to budge from under him at first, but with a shift of weight, he freed it. Then his left. Both, side by side, looked completely different from one another. The right arm, despite having been pressed under his body, had taken on a reddish-pink tint. The left was nearly devoid of color and those fingers, though they still obeyed him, had begun to tingle as though he’d slammed his elbow into the table hard enough for the sensation to make it to the edges of his hands.

And he waited. The police outside cleared his throat and he heard the packing of cigarettes, the swish of one coming out of the pack, and the unmistakable sound of a windproof lighter being flicked to life. A second later, the smell of burning tobacco wafted in under the door. A former smoker, John usually craved a cigarette when accosted in such a manner, but he found himself repulsed by it to the point of his stomach churning on itself, threatening to spill its contents.

He tried to raise himself off of his side to go confront the person but found that his left leg tingled as much as his left arm, and both had slowed in their response. When he slipped himself off of the bed where he lay, he collapsed to the floor. Using his right arm and leg only, he was able to get himself back up to the bed, but there was no chance he could make it far enough to tell the person outside to put out their cigarette. Instead, he lay there, and pulled his sheet over his nose, trying to keep the odor at bay as best he could.

The door to his room burst open and two people flowed through the entrance. One was his girlfriend, Megan. Her look at him told him everything he needed to know about his situation. She had the same look on her face that she’d had when they’d flipped a Sea-Doo over off the shores of Saint Martin Island and nearly drowned in the deep waves. Terror mixed with a defiant will to survive. They’d managed, the two of them, to pull the vehicle to shore — which was a good thing because otherwise they’d have had to pay for it and every single last cent they’d saved over several years had gone into financing the only trip out of the country he’d ever been on in his life. But that’s what Megan looked like: as though death were just around the corner but she intended to fight it.

“Oh it’s bad,” said the woman she’d brought with her.

“Don’t say that,” Megan said.

“Turn him over,” the other woman’s voice said. “I want to have a look at the growth.”

John’s eyes slid shut on their own before the woman came into focus and refused to open despite his attempts. Clammy hands clutched at his body and forced him over — at least he thought they were clammy hands until he realized that two sets of hands were groping him, so the slick damp sensation under their pressure was more likely his body. He hadn’t realized he was sweating so badly. His body swung back over onto his stomach.

“Well shit,” the woman, who he now believed to be some sort of medical person, said.

“It’s gotten bigger.”

“I mean, it looks exactly the right size for where he should be along in pregnancy. It’s pretty fucking amazing. How on earth did he get pregnant on his shoulder?”

“He’s not pregnant. It’s a growth.”

“Well,” not-Megan said, accompanying the uncomfortable pressure of her fingers pressing the bulge of his shoulder, “it certainly feels like a blastocyst. Did anyone do an ultrasound?”

Silence from Megan. John tried to remember, but he’d been poked and prodded so much that he couldn’t figure out what all of the devices he’d seen were for. His fuzzy memory couldn’t piece it together, and for some reason, he suddenly could focus on nothing but an intense craving for pecan pie.

“Pie,” he muttered. Though when it reached his ears, it came out more like “puh”, so it was no wonder neither Megan nor the doctor responded.

“Yes,” Megan admitted finally. A little shuffling, and he heard someone leafing through papers.

“My god. It’s true.”

“But we’re trying to make it not true, remember?”

Waves crashed on the ocean shore in John’s mind. He was on the beach, walking barefoot across the waves. Megan walked hand in hand with him.

“John, do you want to get rid of the baby?”

He looked down to find that she had a baby bump that her swimsuit revealed as a clear outline against the whiteness of the sand beyond.

“When…” he began, staring at her as she rested her delicate fingers across the top.

“Just now,” Megan said, smiling at him with her eyes reflecting the reddish-blue of the sunset beyond. She leaned in close. 

“We can get rid of it if we want to,” she said, her eyes taking on a mischievous glint. “I brought a doctor.”

“Former doctor,” a voice said. “I can’t technically practice anymore since they took away my license.”

“She says that it’s such an unusual medical condition that nobody would expect you to be able to actually take that thing to term.”

“And it’s killing him,” the voice now rippled down through the clouds. John tried to focus.

“This isn’t real?” he asked.

“John, it is real,” Megan replied, her eyes half-closing in that angry glare she sometimes got when he just wasn’t listening. “Very real. This thing is a blastocyst, yeah. But your shoulder isn’t designed for one. The doctor says…”

“I’ll tell him,” the sky-voice said. “You will die. From your body’s perspective, this is a cancer. It’s sucking away resources from every other part of your body. That’s why you’re weak and bedridden right now. If you don’t excise this thing, you will die. There’s no other way to say it.”

“But…” he said, looking down at his girlfriend’s bump. “But we tried so hard.”

“He’s delirious,” the sky-voice said. “We need to do something now before it’s too late. I’m glad you came to get me.”

“What can you do?”

“Normally I’d give him a pill and the whole thing would be over on its own in a couple of days. That way is safe and pretty effective.”

“And illegal.”

“Anything we do here is illegal, Megan. That’s why I lost my license in the first place. I’m just laying out the illegal options. I don’t think a pill will work in this case. Your husband…”

“Boyfriend.”

“… boyfriend. Anyway, a pill may not work at all. And I don’t know if we have time to do it. I did bring my kit though.”

A second later, or it could have been a minute, or days — John wouldn’t have known the difference — he felt a sharp pain on his shoulder. His delirium broke long enough to hear frantic scrambling sounds and something loud shatter his ears.

“In the name of Texas, stop!”

He didn’t recognize the voice, but he did recognize the person who responded.

“Stop shooting at us.”

“Nobody’s shooting at you.”

Another loud bang.

“Stop shooting near us. I need to complete,” came the sky-voice. “He will die.”

“You’re under arrest for violation of SB-8. By authority of the governor, I place you under arrest. What the hell is going on here?”

“It’s too late, officer. He’s losing blood by the second. If I don’t sew him up now, he’s going to bleed out. Then you lose the child and the man too.”

“Keep your hands up.”

“No.”

He felt a tugging at his shoulder and something needlelike pierce his skin. His eyes fluttered open briefly but none of what he saw made sense. A man seemed to be pointing a gun at him and someone was working on his shoulder though he couldn’t remember why anymore. The light faded slowly and a shot rang out — he was positive. It was Texas. He knew what a gunshot sounded like.

Then all went silent. The world went black, and he felt the breath leave his body. The upside was that his shoulder no longer hurt.  Nothing hurt. Nothing felt like anything.

And then even the idea of nothing vanished. In that last second, before all thought ceased, John regained clarity as everything came back. The growth, the law, the guards. All of it. Yet it still made no sense. 

His last thought was of Megan and the mess that he’d left behind.

Models? Replicants? …Donors?

In the BladeRunner franchise, replicants are clones which have been modified to have heightened strength, ability, speed, stamina, depending on the job to which they’ve been assigned. In my series Reality Gradient,  the models stem from a similar concept, in that they are genetically-altered clones. There are a few other significant differences between replicants and models, although I was not thinking about BladeRunner as I wrote my series.

Replicants are often stronger and larger than other humans and are well-disposed to do the jobs that other humans simply won’t do. Replicant women are strikingly beautiful, something that’s pretty consistent through all BladeRunner movies. Models can be, though this is far from a prerequisite. Certain models engineered for sex work — like Monica Caldwell and her “sister” Kiera Caldwell in Bodhi Rising — are both impossibly beautiful because they’re engineered that way. Others, like Amanda Briggs in my written-but-not-edited WIP Better than Dying isn’t attractive in the breathtaking way that they are. Briggs are engineered for fighting or entertainment and not the sex trades.

Another commonality stems from the universes and not just the models. There are mechanisms of control that exist for both replicants and models. Institutions spend significant resources controlling both groups. In BladeRunner, the Tyrell Corporation goes as far as implanting false memories, which is a significant premise in the movies. In Reality Gradient, the controls are not as subtle. I “modeled” the model slave class and their relationship with society on the slave class and treatment that we’ve had in the United States in the past. For my models, similar to slave treatment in the United States pre-civil war, behavior modification is used more than deception. Models go into “reprogramming” if they misbehave — a round of torture used for behavioral conditioning, similar to the United States in the past. Models are beaten, cut, put in boxes with barely enough room to move, and undergo many other abuses under the guise of “fixing” them.

Unlike Emergent Biotechnology in the Reality Gradient series, The Tyrell Corporation implements a draconian 4-year lifespan after which replicants are retired. In Reality Gradient, models are reclaimed instead of retired. There exist massive factories set up across the United States where models can be quickly dissolved in vats of chemicals to re-use their constituent proteins and save companies like Emergent Biotechnology money on production costs.

The similarities don’t stop there. Just like BladeRunner replicants, models are predominantly ignored by most humans in the Reality Gradient universe. Most non-replicants, who in my universe would be called polli, go through life completely comfortable and even ignorant of how many models operate in their midst.

There are many differences too. In BladeRunner, the Tyrell Corporation spends a lot of time cleaning up their own mess — being almost a supra-governmental entity. No such corresponding entity exists in the Reality Gradient universe. For example, in Models and Citizens, there is an “evil” corporation, but they don’t have the reach and power that the Tyrell Corporation do. They aren’t even the only corporation making clones. So when it comes to retrieving models who have gone missing, multiple bounty hunters and police forces are involved in the chase since Emergent, like most corporations today, don’t have their own security branch.

In Reality Gradient, the social interaction of models and society are based on history, as I’ve mentioned before. When slaves went missing, the entire community worked to retrieve them, from police forces to bounty hunters to local, state, and federal governments. There really was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. The cost of models (and slaves) made the loss of one big news. This differs a bit from BladeRunner, in which the Tyrell Corporation has so much power that they can keep things like escapes secret from much of society and work on their own to bring in their captor quietly and without (too much) fuss — at least without so much fuss that it stands out from the rest of the chaos in this very noir universe.

In that, we see entirely different futures between the two universes. The Reality Gradient future is one of startling normalcy for most of the United States population. The slave class is kept the slave class through laws, and for the most part models conform. There’s some hint of a rebellion there, and movements to help models, but just like in the United States in the 1840s, there’s no recourse for people in the slave class to petition for their freedom — though it doesn’t stop Ordell from trying in Models and Citizens. The world in Reality Gradient hasn’t degraded into a series of graphic sex ads and overwhelming consumer culture. It’s a world that focuses on normal people and real life. Even the models don’t try that hard to change things, because they’ve been socially engineered and conditioned to accept their place. In Models and Citizens, for example, Ordell doesn’t flee captivity for the vague concept of freedom. He runs to save his own life and the life of his lover. Only very slowly does he come to the realization that freedom is even a possibility.

There is one more way that the two worlds collide. K is a new breed and can never fight against the will of authority. In fact, he doesn’t even want to for most of the movie BladeRunner 2049. It’s only through a series of accidents that he even discovers how important a role he might be able to play in the brewing rebellion of replicants versus those who would control them. Toward the end of the movie, however, the viewers believe that there’s a way replicants might one day be free. This vein of hope rings true in Reality Gradient also, as by the time the series ends, we do see real progress being made in polli-model interactions.

My Reality Gradient series differs significantly from the BladeRunner franchise on one final key way that may grate some people: replicants are the central focus throughout the latter, but the former is about humanity in many forms. Models are only one type of non-traditional humanity. The series also ventures into artificial intelligence and simply human relationships. The series is an exploration of what it means to be human, and the various forms that humanity can express itself.

My next series (I’m about 2 books in) is called Virtual Wars, and is due to release starting in 2023. This one is 6 books (planned) that cover the struggle for model rights in more detail. The series dovetails nicely with Reality Gradient, and models will find some intriguing allies as they try to assert their independence against a social backlash that threatens to undo all of the achievements of models seen throughout the Reality Gradient series. Look for it in 2023!

It’s important to understand that I didn’t seek to make anything like BladeRunner when I started Reality Gradient. When I wrote the first book, Models and Citizens, the story was originally not even about clones. That concept came from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (great novel, you should read if you haven’t yet). The ideas about slavery and how society functioned all came from our very real history with it here int he United States, right down to the Fugitive Slave Act. That the series came out similar to BladeRunner in many ways is more of a testament to the fact that the struggle for freedom and to be recognized as equal is universal. Those who choose to engage with this subject have some common elements to consider: what social structures are necessary to perpetuate oppression, why haven’t the oppressed raised up (i.e. what controls are in place to prevent it), and how do the controlling class rationalize the oppression. These questions must be answered — even in Ishiguro’s compelling more literary novel. Most class-based dystopian novels must answer these questions to some extent.

Raw Fiction: Bad Pet

A raw, unedited, short story by Andrew Sweet.

The air conditioner was broken, and it’s because of the literal wrench that someone had thrown into it. Why someone would throw a wrench into the air conditioning unit — a device that provided breathable air to an entire sector of the city — was something Hendrich Bay was there to figure out. He inhaled a deep breath of oxygen-deprived air only to cough it back out again. Normally he was better prepared, but his morning yaupon hadn’t materialized when his favorite yaupon shop was closed up because of — unbreathable air.

It was a shitty way to find out that your day was about to become torturous and frustrating. Shallow breaths — that was all. Hendrich was a descendant of an earther and a hiller. The combination, aside from depriving him of any potential sense of fashion as these two worlds were miles apart in that regard to both altitude and personal style, gave him the lungs to handle the sparse oxygen environment. But if he didn’t breathe right, then he could sabotage himself. Slow, easy breaths and don’t get too excited no matter how — fuck! 

His hand catapulted into the machine just as it breathed to life. The fan blades clipped the back as he closed his fist quickly, but he could tell that the back of his knuckles had been skinned. At least two of them throbbed now with an ache that seemed to permeate up to his elbow. Hendrich sucked in quickly and regretted it as another coughing fit overtook him. He dripped blood across his clothes as he pulled the exact wrong hand up to block his cough. 

The fan blades, slowly becoming invisible as they picked up speed, could have just as easily taken his hand off. Here, on the top of the Eucanda building in the city center, way above the heads of anyone in who might be looking for him, nobody would have even noticed if he’s been screaming at the top of his lungs. Not that he could in the limited air. A shudder went through him as he imagined himself, in earther tannish-brown overalls and a bright fluorescent-green hiller coat, clutching his gushing stump of a hand and screaming uselessly into the sky.

Eventually they would have found him, dead from blood loss. Sometimes his choice of professions startled even him if he thought too long about it. To stop himself, he counted the rotations. The fan should move at thirty-two hundred cubic feet per minute. He’d been doing it long enough to be able to determine the speed from the pitch noise that the fan made. He guessed about twenty-eight hundred. It was close, and he wasn’t that sure how much of a difference it would make. He turned over the wrench in his hand. The device wouldn’t even help fix the broken machine. The size was far too small for any bolt on the industrial tech, and even if the wrench was big enough, the torque on the bolts meant that only machine tools could remove them, and the wrench was the standard grab-and-yank. From personal experience, he knew that no amount of yanking would open those stubborn bolts.

No. The only way that wrench got in here was through a deliberate act of sabotage. He chewed on that for about five seconds before he decided that he was glad his job wasn’t to figure that part out. He fixed what needed fixing — that was his job. Fan? Fixed. The millions in cost savings and hundreds of thousands of lives potentially saved more than compensated for the hefty paycheck he would get for climbing up here and finding the wrench in the first place. Yeah, he thought, it’s a shit job, but at least it pays well.

A rattle and the machine quit, just as he had gained the confidence to ease himself to his feet. It wasn’t the wrench.

He looked inside the tube, past the slowing blades, and down into the bowels of the machine. Then he checked his timer. Thirty minutes. That’s how long the machine hadn’t worked and so how long he’d been breathing the unprocessed air. Hendrich was trained for low-oxygen environments — as was part of the job. But that training couldn’t cope with the ever-increasing amount of Carbon Monoxide accumulating around him. He leaned back and then kicked the machine with a left boot. It sputtered and stopped again. This time as he looked in, a shape seemed to strafe by deep down the tube where it hit a T-joint.

“The fuck?”

He leaned forward, keeping one eye on the blades and staying at least an inch away. It could be the monoxide messing with his head. Hendrich tried to recall his training: slow, steady breaths and discard anything that he couldn’t touch as a hallucination. Too far away? Hallucination. Fuzzy elephant creatures with tentacle-like trunks? Also hallucinations (he’d seen those when working on the recycler in Brazil). Here in United Africa, towering above the world, he looked again down the tube.

It wasn’t a mistake, though he still couldn’t write off hallucination. It looked like — maybe — a cat person? He squinted his eyes to peek through the blades again and leaned even farther forward. No, not a cat person. A cat-woman, covered with fur and licking her palms. Wide, green eyes with vertical slits stared back through the blades at him. She sat up, chest out, leaning against the back of the intersection.

He leaned closer.

The fan kicked on again, jolting him backward nearly fast enough to defeat the slow slope of the building’s roof and slide to his doom. A funny way to die, he thought, as his magnetized boots caught hold. At least if he died that way, he wouldn’t have to worry about the jokes people made at his funeral or explaining to anyone that they had a cat-woman in their pipes.

Hallucination. Had to be. He gathered up his courage as he heard the machine come to a slow stop again. He picked himself up. So what if there was a cat-woman in the pipes? This thing was breaking in a mechanical way, someway he should be able to fix. He approached the fan slowly and leaned back over the outcropping to examine the blades, only to jump again, this time more carefully staying on his feet so the boots could latch properly to the domed building. Three steps covered five yards.

An arm poked through the stalled blades, followed by another, and then a torso wiggled through, sliding hips up over the lip of the fan. Even though the woman was covered in a fine down of fur, hiding most of her nudity, he averted his eyes — mostly. He watched through his peripheral vision as she cleared the fan box and then stood before him, her head cocked and those green eyes locked on him as if to ask what exactly he was. A fine question, when she was the cat-woman.

“W-what are you?” he asked.

“What are you?” she asked back, as though she hadn’t fully understood. He blinked once and then summoned the courage to look directly at her. It wasn’t as though she was a real woman anyway, he decided. Two pointed triangular ears poked out of the top of the orange fur that covered her head, twitching toward him and then back toward the city. The green eyes stared from too-human a face. Less fur covered her face and front than head and back as he continued to stare. He might have felt bad about how long he lingered on her torso, catching her down-covered breasts and to her submerged belly button and below, had it not been for the fact that she did the same as he. She seemed to be soaking him in as much as he was.

“Hendrich,” she said, her voice thinner than the last time, and tinny.

“How…?”

“Hendrich,” she said again, pointing to his nametag. So she could read.

“Did you do this?”

She nodded. She could read and understand him.

“What’s the problem then? Is that your wrench?”

She nodded again, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile on her face as two canines peeked out of her mouth at the corners.

“Fixing it,” she said, pointing to the machine. “Broken.”

“Did you break it?”

She shook her head and pointed. 

“Creatures,” she said. “Creatures in the pipes.”

Her body seemed to shake as she let the words out. She took a step toward him, and he instinctually stepped backward again, aware that the slope of the dome increased with every backward step.

“There are more of you?”

She said nothing. Instead, she made a noise that was a cross between a tabby’s meek meow and a wild lion’s roar. He backed up again but stopped after just sliding his left foot back. She hadn’t done anything to him — yet. Though her claws, he now noticed, would make short work of his suit. His environmental regulation suit, which he didn’t think he’d for this journey, and for which he’d left his helmet… in the elevator shaft on the way up.

He examined his hallucination for a moment and admired his imagination’s ability to completely morph a cat with a woman that vaguely reminded him of one of his ex-girlfriends. Hendrich gulped down some air and took a couple of steps toward her. It was her turn to back up, only instead of going back into the tube as he’d expected, she side-stepped the vent and hid behind it.

“Creatures,” she said. 

“Sure,” he muttered. Hallucinations. He worked his way back to the edge and peered over, expecting to possibly see more of the same. He peered back through the blades and something new moved. Impossibly fast, a tentacle the girth of a sapling shot between the blades. In the corner of his eye, he saw the cat woman jump back first, then sprint forward. She lowered her hand into the opening as he felt the tentacle closing around his neck. A second later, his vision began to fade and her fur went a bright pink-yellow color.

The fan spun back to life and he felt the tentacle tighten at first, then fall loosely to the ground. There, the slimy thing writhed like the discarded extremity of a long-extinct skink lizard.

“Creatures,” she said, pointing to it and then to the pipes. The fan stayed on this time. Whatever she’d done seemed to have fixed it. Perhaps the creature had been what kept breaking the fan.

“Creatures,” he replied, nodding to her and rubbing his neck with one hand.

A beep caught his attention. The pager inside his uniform was going off, and that brought a smile to his face. He’d surpassed the one-hour mark, and since he billed by the hour, that meant another huge lump of money in his account. His eyes fell back to the veiny thing working its way down the dome, and he couldn’t help smiling one more time. There had to be more of those creatures, and that meant a lot of the machines would start failing, and he would be effectively rolling in it.

Hendrich held a vague curiosity about what the creature might have been, having only seen a tentacle. Maybe he’d need some new equipment, but first, he reached into the pocket of his uniform and pulled out the air sampler. Needed to verify that the machine was working now. Hendrich tapped the face of the flat dongle that he held in his hand. It lit up green — no more monoxide. He sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, expecting the cat-woman to evaporate as the chemicals worked their way out of his system.

She didn’t.

She only stood staring at him and back at the fan and back at him again.

“Home?”

“You’re real?”

“Real? Home?”

She pointed toward the fan, and he looked at the blades that moved so quickly they’d become nearly transparent. It occurred to him, finally, what she meant. The fan that she’d fixed had blocked her way back into the tunnels, where somehow she lived even though they were infested by those things. And she wanted to return.

“Fine. If that’s what you want.”

He tapped twice on his device and the fan slowed to a stop. She slinked over the edge with all the grace of the feline she resembled, and just a second later had disappeared. He poked his head over the edge in time to see her round the corner at the T intersection. There was no sign of whatever else had been in there or where the tentacle had come from.

Not his problem, he decided. A button click later and the air flowed again. He smiled as he thought about all of the credits that he’d just accumulated and the upswing in business he expected as he made his way across the dome toward the access panel to the elevator. It would be a good day. No, a great day. A quick whistle escaped his lips as he clanked his magnetic boots around the edge of the building. Clank. Clank. Clank.

Squish.

His boot slipped on the remains of the creature’s tentacle, and in less than a second, he found himself sliding toward the edge of the dome, cursing himself for not paying enough attention. As he slid over the edge, he wrapped himself in the imaginings of all the ways that he would spend the credits he now knew he would never collect. As he glanced back toward the fan shaft, he saw one tentacle, then two, then three more emerge through the opening. The fan was off again — even that much had been denied to him. A faint warning shot through is gut as he saw bright red clumpy fluid dripping from the tentacled arms.

Whatever had happened in that shaft, he thought, the cat-woman had lost as much as he had. The wind around his head cocooned him in white noise as he plummeted. For the few seconds he spent cutting through the air, he felt the most at peace as he ever had. There was nothing to be done about the situation, and in a second, he wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. Then he stopped, suspended there by something that had grabbed onto his leg. He looked up to see the cat woman, suspended from one of the creature’s tentacles. Confused, he watched as the pair of strange creatures worked to bring him back to the edge of the dome.

“Creature,” she said, as his magnetic boots locked back onto the dome. She seemed to think as she looked up and to the right. She shook her head. “Not Creature. Pet.” He looked at the tentacle on the surface where he’d slipped and her green eyes followed. She shrugged. “Bad Pet.”

Bad Pet

A raw, unedited, short story by Andrew Sweet.

The air conditioner was broken, and it’s because of the literal wrench that someone had thrown into it. Why someone would throw a wrench into the air conditioning unit — a device that provided breathable air to an entire sector of the city — was something Hendrich Bay was there to figure out. He inhaled a deep breath of oxygen-deprived air only to cough it back out again. Normally he was better prepared, but his morning yaupon hadn’t materialized when his favorite yaupon shop was closed up because of — unbreathable air.

It was a shitty way to find out that your day was about to become torturous and frustrating. Shallow breaths — that was all. Hendrich was a descendant of an earther and a hiller. The combination, aside from depriving him of any potential sense of fashion as these two worlds were miles apart in that regard to both altitude and personal style, gave him the lungs to handle the sparse oxygen environment. But if he didn’t breathe right, then he could sabotage himself. Slow, easy breaths and don’t get too excited no matter how — fuck! 

His hand catapulted into the machine just as it breathed to life. The fan blades clipped the back as he closed his fist quickly, but he could tell that the back of his knuckles had been skinned. At least two of them throbbed now with an ache that seemed to permeate up to his elbow. Hendrich sucked in quickly and regretted it as another coughing fit overtook him. He dripped blood across his clothes as he pulled the exact wrong hand up to block his cough. 

The fan blades, slowly becoming invisible as they picked up speed, could have just as easily taken his hand off. Here, on the top of the Eucanda building in the city center, way above the heads of anyone in who might be looking for him, nobody would have even noticed if he’s been screaming at the top of his lungs. Not that he could in the limited air. A shudder went through him as he imagined himself, in earther tannish-brown overalls and a bright fluorescent-green hiller coat, clutching his gushing stump of a hand and screaming uselessly into the sky.

Eventually they would have found him, dead from blood loss. Sometimes his choice of professions startled even him if he thought too long about it. To stop himself, he counted the rotations. The fan should move at thirty-two hundred cubic feet per minute. He’d been doing it long enough to be able to determine the speed from the pitch noise that the fan made. He guessed about twenty-eight hundred. It was close, and he wasn’t that sure how much of a difference it would make. He turned over the wrench in his hand. The device wouldn’t even help fix the broken machine. The size was far too small for any bolt on the industrial tech, and even if the wrench was big enough, the torque on the bolts meant that only machine tools could remove them, and the wrench was the standard grab-and-yank. From personal experience, he knew that no amount of yanking would open those stubborn bolts.

No. The only way that wrench got in here was through a deliberate act of sabotage. He chewed on that for about five seconds before he decided that he was glad his job wasn’t to figure that part out. He fixed what needed fixing — that was his job. Fan? Fixed. The millions in cost savings and hundreds of thousands of lives potentially saved more than compensated for the hefty paycheck he would get for climbing up here and finding the wrench in the first place. Yeah, he thought, it’s a shit job, but at least it pays well.

A rattle and the machine quit, just as he had gained the confidence to ease himself to his feet. It wasn’t the wrench.

He looked inside the tube, past the slowing blades, and down into the bowels of the machine. Then he checked his timer. Thirty minutes. That’s how long the machine hadn’t worked and so how long he’d been breathing the unprocessed air. Hendrich was trained for low-oxygen environments — as was part of the job. But that training couldn’t cope with the ever-increasing amount of Carbon Monoxide accumulating around him. He leaned back and then kicked the machine with a left boot. It sputtered and stopped again. This time as he looked in, a shape seemed to strafe by deep down the tube where it hit a T-joint.

“The fuck?”

He leaned forward, keeping one eye on the blades and staying at least an inch away. It could be the monoxide messing with his head. Hendrich tried to recall his training: slow, steady breaths and discard anything that he couldn’t touch as a hallucination. Too far away? Hallucination. Fuzzy elephant creatures with tentacle-like trunks? Also hallucinations (he’d seen those when working on the recycler in Brazil). Here in United Africa, towering above the world, he looked again down the tube.

It wasn’t a mistake, though he still couldn’t write off hallucination. It looked like — maybe — a cat person? He squinted his eyes to peek through the blades again and leaned even farther forward. No, not a cat person. A cat-woman, covered with fur and licking her palms. Wide, green eyes with vertical slits stared back through the blades at him. She sat up, chest out, leaning against the back of the intersection.

He leaned closer.

The fan kicked on again, jolting him backward nearly fast enough to defeat the slow slope of the building’s roof and slide to his doom. A funny way to die, he thought, as his magnetized boots caught hold. At least if he died that way, he wouldn’t have to worry about the jokes people made at his funeral or explaining to anyone that they had a cat-woman in their pipes.

Hallucination. Had to be. He gathered up his courage as he heard the machine come to a slow stop again. He picked himself up. So what if there was a cat-woman in the pipes? This thing was breaking in a mechanical way, someway he should be able to fix. He approached the fan slowly and leaned back over the outcropping to examine the blades, only to jump again, this time more carefully staying on his feet so the boots could latch properly to the domed building. Three steps covered five yards.

An arm poked through the stalled blades, followed by another, and then a torso wiggled through, sliding hips up over the lip of the fan. Even though the woman was covered in a fine down of fur, hiding most of her nudity, he averted his eyes — mostly. He watched through his peripheral vision as she cleared the fan box and then stood before him, her head cocked and those green eyes locked on him as if to ask what exactly he was. A fine question, when she was the cat-woman.

“W-what are you?” he asked.

“What are you?” she asked back, as though she hadn’t fully understood. He blinked once and then summoned the courage to look directly at her. It wasn’t as though she was a real woman anyway, he decided. Two pointed triangular ears poked out of the top of the orange fur that covered her head, twitching toward him and then back toward the city. The green eyes stared from too-human a face. Less fur covered her face and front than head and back as he continued to stare. He might have felt bad about how long he lingered on her torso, catching her down-covered breasts and to her submerged belly button and below, had it not been for the fact that she did the same as he. She seemed to be soaking him in as much as he was.

“Hendrich,” she said, her voice thinner than the last time, and tinny.

“How…?”

“Hendrich,” she said again, pointing to his nametag. So she could read.

“Did you do this?”

She nodded. She could read and understand him.

“What’s the problem then? Is that your wrench?”

She nodded again, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile on her face as two canines peeked out of her mouth at the corners.

“Fixing it,” she said, pointing to the machine. “Broken.”

“Did you break it?”

She shook her head and pointed. 

“Creatures,” she said. “Creatures in the pipes.”

Her body seemed to shake as she let the words out. She took a step toward him, and he instinctually stepped backward again, aware that the slope of the dome increased with every backward step.

“There are more of you?”

She said nothing. Instead, she made a noise that was a cross between a tabby’s meek meow and a wild lion’s roar. He backed up again but stopped after just sliding his left foot back. She hadn’t done anything to him — yet. Though her claws, he now noticed, would make short work of his suit. His environmental regulation suit, which he didn’t think he’d for this journey, and for which he’d left his helmet… in the elevator shaft on the way up.

He examined his hallucination for a moment and admired his imagination’s ability to completely morph a cat with a woman that vaguely reminded him of one of his ex-girlfriends. Hendrich gulped down some air and took a couple of steps toward her. It was her turn to back up, only instead of going back into the tube as he’d expected, she side-stepped the vent and hid behind it.

“Creatures,” she said. 

“Sure,” he muttered. Hallucinations. He worked his way back to the edge and peered over, expecting to possibly see more of the same. He peered back through the blades and something new moved. Impossibly fast, a tentacle the girth of a sapling shot between the blades. In the corner of his eye, he saw the cat woman jump back first, then sprint forward. She lowered her hand into the opening as he felt the tentacle closing around his neck. A second later, his vision began to fade and her fur went a bright pink-yellow color.

The fan spun back to life and he felt the tentacle tighten at first, then fall loosely to the ground. There, the slimy thing writhed like the discarded extremity of a long-extinct skink lizard.

“Creatures,” she said, pointing to it and then to the pipes. The fan stayed on this time. Whatever she’d done seemed to have fixed it. Perhaps the creature had been what kept breaking the fan.

“Creatures,” he replied, nodding to her and rubbing his neck with one hand.

A beep caught his attention. The pager inside his uniform was going off, and that brought a smile to his face. He’d surpassed the one-hour mark, and since he billed by the hour, that meant another huge lump of money in his account. His eyes fell back to the veiny thing working its way down the dome, and he couldn’t help smiling one more time. There had to be more of those creatures, and that meant a lot of the machines would start failing, and he would be effectively rolling in it.

Hendrich held a vague curiosity about what the creature might have been, having only seen a tentacle. Maybe he’d need some new equipment, but first, he reached into the pocket of his uniform and pulled out the air sampler. Needed to verify that the machine was working now. Hendrich tapped the face of the flat dongle that he held in his hand. It lit up green — no more monoxide. He sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, expecting the cat-woman to evaporate as the chemicals worked their way out of his system.

She didn’t.

She only stood staring at him and back at the fan and back at him again.

“Home?”

“You’re real?”

“Real? Home?”

She pointed toward the fan, and he looked at the blades that moved so quickly they’d become nearly transparent. It occurred to him, finally, what she meant. The fan that she’d fixed had blocked her way back into the tunnels, where somehow she lived even though they were infested by those things. And she wanted to return.

“Fine. If that’s what you want.”

He tapped twice on his device and the fan slowed to a stop. She slinked over the edge with all the grace of the feline she resembled, and just a second later had disappeared. He poked his head over the edge in time to see her round the corner at the T intersection. There was no sign of whatever else had been in there or where the tentacle had come from.

Not his problem, he decided. A button click later and the air flowed again. He smiled as he thought about all of the credits that he’d just accumulated and the upswing in business he expected as he made his way across the dome toward the access panel to the elevator. It would be a good day. No, a great day. A quick whistle escaped his lips as he clanked his magnetic boots around the edge of the building. Clank. Clank. Clank.

Squish.

His boot slipped on the remains of the creature’s tentacle, and in less than a second, he found himself sliding toward the edge of the dome, cursing himself for not paying enough attention. As he slid over the edge, he wrapped himself in the imaginings of all the ways that he would spend the credits he now knew he would never collect. As he glanced back toward the fan shaft, he saw one tentacle, then two, then three more emerge through the opening. The fan was off again — even that much had been denied to him. A faint warning shot through is gut as he saw bright red clumpy fluid dripping from the tentacled arms.

Whatever had happened in that shaft, he thought, the cat-woman had lost as much as he had. The wind around his head cocooned him in white noise as he plummeted. For the few seconds he spent cutting through the air, he felt the most at peace as he ever had. There was nothing to be done about the situation, and in a second, he wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. Then he stopped, suspended there by something that had grabbed onto his leg. He looked up to see the cat woman, suspended from one of the creature’s tentacles. Confused, he watched as the pair of strange creatures worked to bring him back to the edge of the dome.

“Creature,” she said, as his magnetic boots locked back onto the dome. She seemed to think as she looked up and to the right. She shook her head. “Not Creature. Pet.” He looked at the tentacle on the surface where he’d slipped and her green eyes followed. She shrugged. “Bad Pet.”

Raw Fiction: Petr and the Monster

A short story by Andrew Sweet. This story was also published in response to a Reedsy Writing Prompt and if you prefer, you can also see it there.

“It’s in your head, Petr. You always let your mind run away with you. They’re not monsters, not really. They’re just men.”

Maybe Vera was right, Petr thought. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been told that. But would men do what these men had been doing to their homes? Their friends? He missed Aleksandr, ten years old like him, now gone and never going to return. Aleksandr and his family had joined the caravan the first day, when the invasion began. 

Petr Melnyk made himself as small as possible and shoved himself back into the corner of the hidden room. 

Somewhere else in the house the monsters stirred. 

His mother had told them that Petr and Vera would be safe in the room. It hadn’t been used for almost a century. Before the bombs began to fall, turning his school playground into a minefield of unexploded munitions, his family had all but forgotten about it. Access to the room was through a secret panel in the back of a closet — much too inconvenient to even use for storage. That’s what his mother told him, in her calm voice that soothed his nerves as she pulled the vacuum cleaner from the closet. Several boxes blocked the two-foot-square panel in the back — she moved those too.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “Nobody found this room when your grandmother hid from the Nazis. Nobody will find it now either. You and your sister will be safe, and I will try to peek in when I can.”

The monsters were in the city by that time. His father had squeezed him so tightly that night that Petr could still feel the man’s prickly beard pressed against his temple.

“Be brave, son,” his father had said. “Protect your sister and mother. Stay safe and don’t leave this room, whatever you hear.”

At first, the sounds from outside of the room were normal. Father and mother, going about their days doing what they had done as a family only a week before. The Melnyk’s had a habit since before the announcement was made about the invasion of packing food to send to those less fortunate. It was the Christian thing to do, his father had always said. And they continued doing it even once the city was “occupied” as the local news said. The monsters called it “liberated” as they ate people.

“We help each other. Christ would have, so we do too.”

Sundays they went to market after church sometimes, or they used to before. The women from church would go with them and tell Petr how cute he looked. He glanced down at his clothing, soiled and dirty and ripped. They wouldn’t think him cute now. They would think that he was homeless.

“Stop. Leave me alone,” his mother’s voice came through the wall. The sound of a man’s rumbling tones were too low for him to make out words, but he did hear a small acquiescence whisper after the tones ended. “Okay.”

“Cover your ears, Petr,” Vera told him, but he’d already beaten her to it. Next would be the sobbing and crying and pleading. He bit down on his bottom lip and hummed quietly to keep the sounds out.

The low voice wasn’t his father, however much Petr wanted it to be. The voice was that of a monster. They had somehow disguised their voices to sound human. Petr didn’t know how they did it. And he was convinced they’d sunk their claws into his father, who hadn’t been back for over a week since he left to get food and check in on a neighbor. 

Not their next door neighbors. The monsters had already been next door. All the gunshots in the world didn’t stop the monsters from hushing the neighbors house, just like they’d hushed the Melnyks. 

The monsters had come the same day his father had left, almost the same hour. And when they’d arrived, that was the first time Petr heard his mother cry since the invasion began. And that’s when her “peeks” stopped.

“It’s not doing you any good to hide there,” his older sister said, during a break in the crying. She pointed to the entrance. “The only way in and out is there, and if someone gets in, there is nowhere to hide.”

It didn’t make him feel better to know the monsters could corner them so easily. Scrunching down into a ball made him feel better. The security of being almost invisible gave him the strength to listen to the clanging and occasional breaking of their dishes, and the scraping of food into fang-riddled mouths he’d never seen, without screaming in terror.

“We need to escape,” his sister, Vera, told him later. Every day she peered out through a tiny hole the size of a pin that led out into what he thought must have been the alley between their room and the neighbor’s house.

“Not without Mom,” Petr said, not for the first time.

“Mom has been captured,” Vera told him, her hair stringy and unkempt from not having been washed or combed for days. He remembered the way she used to look. Having finally gotten permission to do her own make-up, she used to layer it on so thick that she didn’t even have the same complexion any longer. She lightened her face up at least three shades. Now, smudge-marks decorated her cheeks and forehead. The remnants of lipstick clung wearily to lips drawn too thin from a lack of any real food in two days. “She can’t help us.”

“We have to bring her with us.”

“We can’t, Petr. We’re just children.”

“Then we can’t go.”

Vera’s eyes filled with tears — also not for the first time. Petr knew Vera, and she would never leave without him. Guilt dripped through his veins at the idea that he kept her trapped. But where would they go if they did get out? His mind went back to the neighbors, who the monsters had purged in something they’d called “the cleansing.” Petr remembered his parents talking about it, and those arms that he kept wrapped around his knees shook like jackhammers. They hadn’t silenced the neighbors, he remembered. They’d killed them.

“All of them?” His mother had asked, still not crying. She’d let the children out of hiding, but only for the space of a meal. Then both would have to go back into the tiny room.

“Every single one,” his father had said, looking over both of the children. His big hands found their way into his sister’s hair. Once thoroughly tousled, it was Petr’s turn. The man’s arm passed by Petr’s nose, smelling of earth and gunpowder.

And that was it. They spoke no more of the house full of friends, now silenced by monsters.

“Go back,” Petr’s father had barked after the soup was all gone.

“I want a story,” Petr had demanded. At the time, he’d still been in the habit of demanding things. Not anymore.

“Not tonight, little one,” his father had told him with a fat sigh. “I have to go out.”

And Petr’s father was gone after that. One more added to the disappearing people all across the invaded territory. Petr was convinced the monsters herded them together and ate them, one by one.

“We have to leave,” Vera repeated, interrupting his thoughts. He looked up from his arms where his head was buried.

“Not without Mom,” he repeated, sternly.

“Then we need to get her,” Vera said, “because they’re going to find us here. Either that, or we’re going to die and nobody will even know until the stench of our rotting bodies fills the house.”

He bit his lip again — this time so hard that it drew a single drop of blood.

“Okay. Tonight. After it stops.”

He looked at her, his eyes imploring her to say that it was okay to wait. After it stops. The sobs started up again — always in the evenings, when the darkness fell and the little room went so black they couldn’t see each other. They had only their imaginations and the sounds of rusty springs and their mother’s muffled cries. He remembered the first time they’d heard the noises after the men came. His sister had shoved the solitary cushion of the room’s only chair into her mouth and bit down. Tears streamed out of her eyes and down her face. He’d asked Vera why their mother screamed, and she’d said nothing until the noises stopped. Then she’d turned her tear-streaked face to his own.

“She misses Dad,” Vera had said, although Petr suspected there was more to it. That first night the screams had filled the house. Now, only sobs were barely audible through the walls. Sobs and the grunts of monsters.

“After it stops,” she promised, nodding. Her bright blue eyes had already gone a little gray as what little light that found its way through cracks and crevices had started to fade. 

Night fell, and it was absolute. Vera moved first. Petr made his way toward her sounds in the darkness though he knew the path she would take by heart, and so following was a trivial matter even without light.

The panel was shut tight. Vera and Petr both had to shove on it with as much of their strength as they could must, and only then did it push open, and then only wide enough for Vera, on the smaller side like her brother, to wedge through sideways. As she did, Petr listened for signs of movement in the house. Nothing but the cacophonous snores of the monsters came to his ears. 

He hadn’t seen the monsters before, and Vera told him they were only ordinary men in uniforms nearly every day. Petr didn’t believe that ordinary men could silence the house next door, or keep his father away. He didn’t believe that ordinary men would drop invisible bombs on their playgrounds and kill their teachers.

They were monsters. They had to be — even if Vera didn’t believe him.

The door to the little closet creaked open. Light from the moon had worked its way through the window and shoved shadows into all of the crevices.

“This way,” Vera whispered. “She’ll be in the bedroom.”

She said it as though there were anywhere else for her to be at night. Petr followed, staying on the balls of his bare feet, toes so cold he could barely feel them. A monster moved on his left, and he froze. Then, gaining courage with every second after, he turned sideways to keep an eye on the mountainous shape as he followed Vera.

The door to their parents’ bedroom was wide open. It had never been that way when Petr’s father was there. The bedroom was off-limits for many reasons — one of which was the stash of toys that he and Vera weren’t supposed to know hid in the closet.

Snores. From the sounds of it, at least three monsters. Vera’s golden hair reflected too much light as they walked along toward the bed, one step after the other.

Vera stopped.

Then Petr bumped into her and sent her sprawling over a figure cloaked in darkness. Still standing, Petr sucked in his breath as she fell, and he waited for her collision with the floor to wake the monsters. Only a grumbling sound emanated from one of them. A pale arm reached up from the darkness and closed around Vera. Petr burst forward to knock the hand away, but then he recognized the French tip manicure that their mother had loved. It was her last treat before the fighting began in earnest again.

“My sweetheart,” his mother said, her voice strangely hoarse and weak. Then he saw her face, pockets under her eyes deepened by the shadow of moonlight. One eye seemed wrong, swollen and purple. “My sunshine.”

“Don’t talk, Momma. We’re leaving.”

She could barely walk. One arm slung over Vera’s shoulders and the other hand pressing down against Petr’s, and the trio managed a slow, noisy shuffle across the wooden floor. Petr’s toe jammed against an empty bottle that, from the size, Petr knew to be vodka. He held his breath as the bottle rolled then bumped against the leg of a table. The monsters still didn’t move.

“This way,” Vera said, pushing them through the doorway and out into the street. Petr shielded his eyes against the moonlight.

“Wait, child,” her mother said. She shoved the two of them to the side and, on energy he couldn’t have guessed she had, she shuffled back inside and emerged again, this time with another bottle of vodka and some rope. As she held the rope before her, he noticed red welts across her wrists.

“Momma, are you okay?”

“Child, I will be,” she assured him, as she tied the rope around the door knob and then around a bush that their father had planted fifteen years before, in the same place that their grandfather had planted a pear tree once. Vera looked at their mother, and something about the look that they shared scared him.

“This,” his mother said. Then he noticed that she’d brought a lighter. The vodka wasn’t just vodka, he realized. It was a magical weapon to fight the monsters off. In less than a second, it became a ball of fire and then she catapulted it through the window. In an instant, fire spread everywhere.

At first, the house stayed silent as it burned. After a second passed, Petr heard the sound of monster screams. He looked to Vera, furrowed up his eyebrows. The monsters screamed and made guttural noises like pigs.

“I told you they were monsters,” he said, as the monsters shrieked and banged and tried to leave. One hurled its flaming body through a window, only to convulse for a moment on the ground before it went silent, flames still burning.

The sound of a heavy footstep echoed behind him.

“They are monsters,” came a familiar voice. Petr turned and ran toward the sound. He flung his arms around the great man to discover that his arms made it around too easily. His father had lost his size. But still, the man’s hands made it into his hair. Petr’s mother made a whimpering sound and limped to him as well.

As the building burned, the Melnyk’s headed toward the woods that Petr’s father had always told them about playing in as a child.

“It’s easy to get lost,” the big man had said. “Learn them and learn them well. If you do, the forest will provide.”

Silhouetted against the fire, they left the screaming monsters to their deaths behind. Petr finally felt safe. Together, he suspected, they could beat the monsters. His mother had the magic in her. And when they did, the nights would be safe again — not just for them. Monsters, he knew, don’t care who they eat or destroy. Monsters take and break and hurt, and if they aren’t stopped in their village, then they will just keep hurting people. But fire, the power of his mother, was a force for good.

The monsters couldn’t withstand it forever.

Petr and the Monster

“It’s in your head, Petr. You always let your mind run away with you. They’re not monsters, not really. They’re just men.”

Maybe Vera was right, Petr thought. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been told that. But would men do what these men had been doing to their homes? Their friends? He missed Aleksandr, ten years old like him, now gone and never going to return. Aleksandr and his family had joined the caravan the first day, when the invasion began. 

Petr Melnyk made himself as small as possible and shoved himself back into the corner of the hidden room. 

Somewhere else in the house the monsters stirred. 

His mother had told them that Petr and Vera would be safe in the room. It hadn’t been used for almost a century. Before the bombs began to fall, turning his school playground into a minefield of unexploded munitions, his family had all but forgotten about it. Access to the room was through a secret panel in the back of a closet — much too inconvenient to even use for storage. That’s what his mother told him, in her calm voice that soothed his nerves as she pulled the vacuum cleaner from the closet. Several boxes blocked the two-foot-square panel in the back — she moved those too.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “Nobody found this room when your grandmother hid from the Nazis. Nobody will find it now either. You and your sister will be safe, and I will try to peek in when I can.”

The monsters were in the city by that time. His father had squeezed him so tightly that night that Petr could still feel the man’s prickly beard pressed against his temple.

“Be brave, son,” his father had said. “Protect your sister and mother. Stay safe and don’t leave this room, whatever you hear.”

At first, the sounds from outside of the room were normal. Father and mother, going about their days doing what they had done as a family only a week before. The Melnyk’s had a habit since before the announcement was made about the invasion of packing food to send to those less fortunate. It was the Christian thing to do, his father had always said. And they continued doing it even once the city was “occupied” as the local news said. The monsters called it “liberated” as they ate people.

“We help each other. Christ would have, so we do too.”

Sundays they went to market after church sometimes, or they used to before. The women from church would go with them and tell Petr how cute he looked. He glanced down at his clothing, soiled and dirty and ripped. They wouldn’t think him cute now. They would think that he was homeless.

“Stop. Leave me alone,” his mother’s voice came through the wall. The sound of a man’s rumbling tones were too low for him to make out words, but he did hear a small acquiescence whisper after the tones ended. “Okay.”

“Cover your ears, Petr,” Vera told him, but he’d already beaten her to it. Next would be the sobbing and crying and pleading. He bit down on his bottom lip and hummed quietly to keep the sounds out.

The low voice wasn’t his father, however much Petr wanted it to be. The voice was that of a monster. They had somehow disguised their voices to sound human. Petr didn’t know how they did it. And he was convinced they’d sunk their claws into his father, who hadn’t been back for over a week since he left to get food and check in on a neighbor. 

Not their next door neighbors. The monsters had already been next door. All the gunshots in the world didn’t stop the monsters from hushing the neighbors house, just like they’d hushed the Melnyks. 

The monsters had come the same day his father had left, almost the same hour. And when they’d arrived, that was the first time Petr heard his mother cry since the invasion began. And that’s when her “peeks” stopped.

“It’s not doing you any good to hide there,” his older sister said, during a break in the crying. She pointed to the entrance. “The only way in and out is there, and if someone gets in, there is nowhere to hide.”

It didn’t make him feel better to know the monsters could corner them so easily. Scrunching down into a ball made him feel better. The security of being almost invisible gave him the strength to listen to the clanging and occasional breaking of their dishes, and the scraping of food into fang-riddled mouths he’d never seen, without screaming in terror.

“We need to escape,” his sister, Vera, told him later. Every day she peered out through a tiny hole the size of a pin that led out into what he thought must have been the alley between their room and the neighbor’s house.

“Not without Mom,” Petr said, not for the first time.

“Mom has been captured,” Vera told him, her hair stringy and unkempt from not having been washed or combed for days. He remembered the way she used to look. Having finally gotten permission to do her own make-up, she used to layer it on so thick that she didn’t even have the same complexion any longer. She lightened her face up at least three shades. Now, smudge-marks decorated her cheeks and forehead. The remnants of lipstick clung wearily to lips drawn too thin from a lack of any real food in two days. “She can’t help us.”

“We have to bring her with us.”

“We can’t, Petr. We’re just children.”

“Then we can’t go.”

Vera’s eyes filled with tears — also not for the first time. Petr knew Vera, and she would never leave without him. Guilt dripped through his veins at the idea that he kept her trapped. But where would they go if they did get out? His mind went back to the neighbors, who the monsters had purged in something they’d called “the cleansing.” Petr remembered his parents talking about it, and those arms that he kept wrapped around his knees shook like jackhammers. They hadn’t silenced the neighbors, he remembered. They’d killed them.

“All of them?” His mother had asked, still not crying. She’d let the children out of hiding, but only for the space of a meal. Then both would have to go back into the tiny room.

“Every single one,” his father had said, looking over both of the children. His big hands found their way into his sister’s hair. Once thoroughly tousled, it was Petr’s turn. The man’s arm passed by Petr’s nose, smelling of earth and gunpowder.

And that was it. They spoke no more of the house full of friends, now silenced by monsters.

“Go back,” Petr’s father had barked after the soup was all gone.

“I want a story,” Petr had demanded. At the time, he’d still been in the habit of demanding things. Not anymore.

“Not tonight, little one,” his father had told him with a fat sigh. “I have to go out.”

And Petr’s father was gone after that. One more added to the disappearing people all across the invaded territory. Petr was convinced the monsters herded them together and ate them, one by one.

“We have to leave,” Vera repeated, interrupting his thoughts. He looked up from his arms where his head was buried.

“Not without Mom,” he repeated, sternly.

“Then we need to get her,” Vera said, “because they’re going to find us here. Either that, or we’re going to die and nobody will even know until the stench of our rotting bodies fills the house.”

He bit his lip again — this time so hard that it drew a single drop of blood.

“Okay. Tonight. After it stops.”

He looked at her, his eyes imploring her to say that it was okay to wait. After it stops. The sobs started up again — always in the evenings, when the darkness fell and the little room went so black they couldn’t see each other. They had only their imaginations and the sounds of rusty springs and their mother’s muffled cries. He remembered the first time they’d heard the noises after the men came. His sister had shoved the solitary cushion of the room’s only chair into her mouth and bit down. Tears streamed out of her eyes and down her face. He’d asked Vera why their mother screamed, and she’d said nothing until the noises stopped. Then she’d turned her tear-streaked face to his own.

“She misses Dad,” Vera had said, although Petr suspected there was more to it. That first night the screams had filled the house. Now, only sobs were barely audible through the walls. Sobs and the grunts of monsters.

“After it stops,” she promised, nodding. Her bright blue eyes had already gone a little gray as what little light that found its way through cracks and crevices had started to fade. 

Night fell, and it was absolute. Vera moved first. Petr made his way toward her sounds in the darkness though he knew the path she would take by heart, and so following was a trivial matter even without light.

The panel was shut tight. Vera and Petr both had to shove on it with as much of their strength as they could must, and only then did it push open, and then only wide enough for Vera, on the smaller side like her brother, to wedge through sideways. As she did, Petr listened for signs of movement in the house. Nothing but the cacophonous snores of the monsters came to his ears. 

He hadn’t seen the monsters before, and Vera told him they were only ordinary men in uniforms nearly every day. Petr didn’t believe that ordinary men could silence the house next door, or keep his father away. He didn’t believe that ordinary men would drop invisible bombs on their playgrounds and kill their teachers.

They were monsters. They had to be — even if Vera didn’t believe him.

The door to the little closet creaked open. Light from the moon had worked its way through the window and shoved shadows into all of the crevices.

“This way,” Vera whispered. “She’ll be in the bedroom.”

She said it as though there were anywhere else for her to be at night. Petr followed, staying on the balls of his bare feet, toes so cold he could barely feel them. A monster moved on his left, and he froze. Then, gaining courage with every second after, he turned sideways to keep an eye on the mountainous shape as he followed Vera.

The door to their parents’ bedroom was wide open. It had never been that way when Petr’s father was there. The bedroom was off-limits for many reasons — one of which was the stash of toys that he and Vera weren’t supposed to know hid in the closet.

Snores. From the sounds of it, at least three monsters. Vera’s golden hair reflected too much light as they walked along toward the bed, one step after the other.

Vera stopped.

Then Petr bumped into her and sent her sprawling over a figure cloaked in darkness. Still standing, Petr sucked in his breath as she fell, and he waited for her collision with the floor to wake the monsters. Only a grumbling sound emanated from one of them. A pale arm reached up from the darkness and closed around Vera. Petr burst forward to knock the hand away, but then he recognized the French tip manicure that their mother had loved. It was her last treat before the fighting began in earnest again.

“My sweetheart,” his mother said, her voice strangely hoarse and weak. Then he saw her face, pockets under her eyes deepened by the shadow of moonlight. One eye seemed wrong, swollen and purple. “My sunshine.”

“Don’t talk, Momma. We’re leaving.”

She could barely walk. One arm slung over Vera’s shoulders and the other hand pressing down against Petr’s, and the trio managed a slow, noisy shuffle across the wooden floor. Petr’s toe jammed against an empty bottle that, from the size, Petr knew to be vodka. He held his breath as the bottle rolled then bumped against the leg of a table. The monsters still didn’t move.

“This way,” Vera said, pushing them through the doorway and out into the street. Petr shielded his eyes against the moonlight.

“Wait, child,” her mother said. She shoved the two of them to the side and, on energy he couldn’t have guessed she had, she shuffled back inside and emerged again, this time with another bottle of vodka and some rope. As she held the rope before her, he noticed red welts across her wrists.

“Momma, are you okay?”

“Child, I will be,” she assured him, as she tied the rope around the door knob and then around a bush that their father had planted fifteen years before, in the same place that their grandfather had planted a pear tree once. Vera looked at their mother, and something about the look that they shared scared him.

“This,” his mother said. Then he noticed that she’d brought a lighter. The vodka wasn’t just vodka, he realized. It was a magical weapon to fight the monsters off. In less than a second, it became a ball of fire and then she catapulted it through the window. In an instant, fire spread everywhere.

At first, the house stayed silent as it burned. After a second passed, Petr heard the sound of monster screams. He looked to Vera, furrowed up his eyebrows. The monsters screamed and made guttural noises like pigs.

“I told you they were monsters,” he said, as the monsters shrieked and banged and tried to leave. One hurled its flaming body through a window, only to convulse for a moment on the ground before it went silent, flames still burning.

The sound of a heavy footstep echoed behind him.

“They are monsters,” came a familiar voice. Petr turned and ran toward the sound. He flung his arms around the great man to discover that his arms made it around too easily. His father had lost his size. But still, the man’s hands made it into his hair. Petr’s mother made a whimpering sound and limped to him as well.

As the building burned, the Melnyk’s headed toward the woods that Petr’s father had always told them about playing in as a child.

“It’s easy to get lost,” the big man had said. “Learn them and learn them well. If you do, the forest will provide.”

Silhouetted against the fire, they left the screaming monsters to their deaths behind. Petr finally felt safe. Together, he suspected, they could beat the monsters. His mother had the magic in her. And when they did, the nights would be safe again — not just for them. Monsters, he knew, don’t care who they eat or destroy. Monsters take and break and hurt, and if they aren’t stopped in their village, then they will just keep hurting people. But fire, the power of his mother, was a force for good.

The monsters couldn’t withstand it forever.

Brother, Can You Spare…a Credit

One of the issues that’s often side-stepped in science fiction, or just kind of assumed to happen, is the issue of food. Even in the dystopian literature — for example, the Knife of Never Letting Go — the food or lack of food is mentioned in passing almost. Once Todd and the girl collect food from the ship, and then live off of the land for the remainder. Otherwise food is more of passed-over concept. In Planetfall (no not that one — the one by Emma Newman), food is readily available through something like replicators. This is also true in my novels in the Reality Gradient series.

But this is one way in which science fiction typically deviates from reality. The dregs, even in those dystopian futures, don’t leave people hungry and dying in the streets. Instead, they leave people with enough energy to fight against their oppressors, which anyone who’s ever been really hungry to the point of exhaustion knows is much, much more difficult when you haven’t eaten for days. No matter what, the person can think clearly enough to resist whatever is happening to them, and eventually the will of the protagonist allows them to overcome. Unless… brainwashing.

I think this is something we can do better in science fiction. Our dystopian societies tend to focus on the middle class, and not the poor, but there’s so much material there to mine for stories. I would know — growing up, there were plenty of times that our cabinet, in a house of seven, was completely bereft of food. We often had to draw our water from a pond. Yes, in twentieth-century America. And we weren’t the worst off in our community. That level of destitution changes a person, and has impacts to how they think (including their ability to think). Unless you’ve really worried about whether a pocket full of change will give you enough gas to get home — if your car makes it that far — then you don’t really get the severity of what poverty looks like.

In part, the nature of science fiction itself is part of the problem. In science fiction, if we focus on the science part, then we need scientists (who make obscene amounts of money in sci-fi by the way, and are way more connected than actual real-world scientists). We need engineers, programmers, and the like in order to explain these technologies so that people can understand them. These, as poorly paid as scientists often are, are not the impoverished classes. Coincidentally, I think that’s one thing that sets Asimov’s I, Robot apart. Though mostly about robots, his stories aren’t built around scientists, but around blue-collar fields in futuristic settings. I wouldn’t even call his futures dystopian in that book, more of an exploration of different possible futures, but I digress a bit.

If I’m making a point (and it’s a blog entry, so I may not be), the point must be this: I think that poverty is often glossed over in science fiction, even within those dystopian stories. The impacts of poverty on the human decision making process and ability to think — these are things that make for fantastically unreliable first-person characters.

An example of an urban fantasy book that does a great job of incorporating poverty, if I may step outside of science fiction for a moment, is Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm. In that, we definitely get an up-close view of Wizard and how he directly is impacted by the lack of food and lack of really anything as he struggles to survive in the city that he loves. In it, we get the contradiction of a protagonist upon whom everyone might depend.