Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 55

Work Lingo and Writing

The current issue of Harper's has some great stuff in it, including an excerpt from Mark Kingwell's introduction to The Wage Slave's Glossary by Joshua Glenn, out next month from Biblioasis. Kingwell's intro codifies certain things I believe about the world in general, particularly the idea of "collective delusions" that we almost all buy into, perhaps so the world won't seem so scary or perhaps because it's necessary to have a functioning society. Money clearly is becoming ever more of a collective delusion, especially in a dysfunctional U.S. system. There are also delusions that come over us temporarily like viruses, infected the majority and leaving the minority out in the cold: believe or you suck, basically. Luckily, these tend to be temporary or contained to certain subcultures or communities.

Kingwell talks about a number of delusions we buy into with regard to the workplace, chief among them the sanctity of work itself. A short excerpt:

The routine collection of credentials, promotions, and employee-of-the-month honors in exchange for company loyalty masks a deeper existential conundrum–which is precisely what it is meant to do. Consider: It is an axium of status anxiety that the competition for position has no end—save, temporarily, when a scapegoat is found. The scapegoat reaffirms everyone's status, however uneven, because he is beneath all. Hence many work narratives are miniature blame-quests. We come together as a company to fix guilt on one of our number, who is then publicly shamed and expelled. Jones filed a report filled with errors! Smith placed an absurdly large order and the company is taking a bath! This makes us all feel better and enhances our sense of mission, even if it produces nothing other than its own spectacle.

Sounds like a few places I worked at before I became a full-time writer, one of which I wrote about in my novelette "The Situation," which you can read here. (What's the collective delusion of writers, you might ask? That this crazy career is sustainable indefinitely and that the right words matter…and sometimes buying into those delusions is enough.)

Interestingly he also name-checks three office novels: Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, and Ed Park's Personal Days. Kingwell calls all three hilarious, but believes their humor is a sign of doom, not liberation. "Indeed, the laughs render the facts more palatable by mixing diversion into the scene of domination—a willing capitulation, consumed under the false sign of resistance." That's a pretty sick reading of the uses of satire, but point taken. Perhaps it takes a horror writer with the sensibilities of Kafka to make satire a tertiary purpose, since I find Thomas Ligotti's office stories not a capitulation but a clear embodiment of doom in which humor occurs almost as part of a natural process, like steam off of the head of a just-benched football player in winter.

References to philosopher Harry Frankfurt and his use of the term "bullshit" satisfy on a very gleeful level. In the workplace, bullshit can be defined as "Jargon, slogans, euphemisms, and terms of art" used as weapons. Bullshit is an evasion of normativity that "produces a kind of ordure, a dissemination of garbage, the scattering of shit. This is why, Frankfurt argue, bullshit is far more threatening, and politically evil, than lying." The bullshitter doesn't oppose truth–s/he ignores it entirely. (Cue: footage of certain political candidates, bloggers on the internet, etc.)

The victory of work bullshit is that, in addition to having no regard for the truth, it passes itself off as innocuous or even beneficial. Especially in clever hands, the controlling elements of work are repackaged as liberatory, counter-cultural, subversive: you're a skatepunk rebel because you work seventy hours a week beta-testing videogames. This, we might say, is meta-bullshit.

In writing, bullshit, meta and otherwise, manifests as cliches in its most basic form, but complex forms of writing-related bullshit manifest as precepts that wound a story before it is finished, an inability to closely observe and report on the details of the world, and, well, too many other ways to list here.

You could read Kingwell's introduction as a discourse on corrupted narrative—like a story with no center that is nonetheless told in a clever or convincing way, the equivalent of the worst type of escapist fiction. If everything human-made around us, including our stories, once existed as an idea or thought from someone's imagination, then Kingwell's saying we need to be better storytellers, better dreamers, at both the micro and the macro level. Waking up like the guy in the first Matrix movie to find you're just a pod dangling among a million other generic pods can be depressing, but at least it's real…maybe. Or it might just be superior CGI. Perhaps bullshit has no hidden core. Perhaps collective delusions are the point.

Work Lingo and Writing originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 26, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #10

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

It has been three days since I wrote in this journal. The incident with the damaged angel confused and disturbed me. I had seen Gabriel's impassiveness in response to stimuli before, his seemingly innate distance from empathy. But the lack of concern for one of his own kind, especially an angel pushed to such an extremity of response, worried me. Somehow the angels' reaction to the devouring of my avatar had been what I expected, but in this case Gabriel had surprised me. What then might move Gabriel to concern, sympathy, or comfort of another soul.

I had always told myself that our surveillance and our experiments served the cause of Order in the universes, that this required a kind of clinical detachment on the part of the angels. A smile is a cultural response, a learned behavior, I knew from my many hours of observing alt-Earths. It could mean many things. That it meant nothing sympathetic when Gabriel smiled did not hint at some sinister purpose. Yet his demeanor after the angel's death I read as barely hiding some secret satisfaction that would otherwise burst out, envelop the world in sharp laughter. Why was such utter cruelty required?

I realized that much about the angels I had taken on face value, possibly because without them I would be totally alone on this planet—there is no other sentient life here—and with no real way to leave except by proxy, ejecting my seedlings and avatars into space. They told me they studied the alt-Earths because their instruments had caught the vibrations of a horrific catastrophe farther up the time stream, across all of the Earths, and that it would affect all other worlds as well. For this reason, they had set up outposts on the outside, as on my planet, and were engaged in surveillance and experimentation to reach a decision on what action to undertake.

Their experiments never involved human beings—the items brought back were either animal, plant, or mineral in nature, along with human-made artifacts. Even though I participated in the tests, I was a glorified lab assistant and didn't truly understand the purpose of the experiments. Parts of the laboratory, too, were off-limits to me. Gabriel never told me I couldn't go somewhere, but in certain areas my sensors simply didn't work and if my avatar entered them, the avatar became stripped of all sensory perception. This, too, I had not thought to question…until now.

These are the thoughts that came to me as I settled uncomfortably into my new assignment, which I called "The Lighthouse" because I was to monitor the comings and goings from a lighthouse on the stormy coast of a country called Scotland, facing the North Sea. Not only was I spying on an alt-Earth where the industrial revolution had not happened, but the essential borders of nations, and the nations themselves often deviated radically from the norm. Scotland, for example, encompassed all of the British Isles. On the mainland of Europe, what was Spain, France, and Italy in most alt-realities was ruled by the peoples the Spanish had called the Moors. Czechoslovakia sprawled across almost all of Eastern Europe, and so on. I was told that although the business at the lighthouse had regional significance politically, it also resonated in some way across the worlds. I was to surveil based on this context.

But I had decided to surveil on a slightly different basis: that the angels had not told me the full truth, and that studying the lighthouse might help reveal what they had hidden from me.

I admit, too, that my thoughts may have gone in this direction to avoid another direction: namely, wondering what had happened to my avatar.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #10 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 26, 2011.

Omni Interviews: Mira Grant and A. Lee Martinez (with novel excerpt)

In case you missed them, I had a couple of interviews posted on the Amazon book blog, both really interesting.

Mira Grant

"I try to approach characterization as honestly as possible. Sometimes I don't like my own protagonists. They do things I don't approve of, they make choices I wouldn't make, they have beliefs I don't share. And unless that would actively damage the story, I let them go their own way. They're only going to be real to you if they're also real to me. I write pages of dialog that no one ever sees, just to feel out the way different characters use words and phrases. It's a fascinating exercise."

A. Lee Martinez

"I usually consider humor to be secondary to the plot and characters. I know I have a reputation as a comic writer, but the humor elements usually fall into place naturally. In the end, I don't think humor is the opposite of serious storytelling. We tend to think of humor as light and inconsequential, but great humor is often founded on observation and commentary."

For space considerations a snippet from the new novel Mira Grant is working on got lopped off of the interview, so I'm reproducing it below.

The piece that follows is from a novel in progress, Ashes of Honor, writing under her real name, Seanan McGuire, and "finds Toby in a place she really doesn't like being: the police station"…

***

This is my life: clinging to the back of a furiously bellowing Swamp Troll who's decided to rampage through the mortal world, hoping I can choke the wind out of him before he manages to yank me loose and rip my legs off.

This is also my life: sitting in the back of the Valencia Street police station almost two hours later, wearing an illusion to let me pass for human while I waited for the policeman assigned to take my statement to decide that he was done, and I could go.

I wasn't expecting that to happen any time soon.

"Let's go over this again," said the policeman.

"Okay," I said.

Not fast enough, or maybe not enthusiastically enough. The policeman looked up from his copy of my statement, eyes narrowing. "Unless you had somewhere else you wanted to be tonight?"

"I'm fine with going over my statement again," I said, and smiled.

He didn't. "Good. Now, you were picked up at approximately ten thirty-seven PM, on the private beach belonging to—"

He kept droning on. I kept smiling and nodding, trying to look like I was practicing attentive listening and truly paying attention to every word that he said. Very little could have been further from the truth, but hey. Sometimes you have to play by the rules, even if they're the rules of somebody else's game.

My name is October Daye. I'm a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills, one of the secret fiefdoms Faerie has hidden in the mortal state of California. All of which adds up to mean that the only reason the San Francisco Police Department had been able to hold me for questioning was the part where most of the time, I try to play human. I used to be pretty good at it. These days…not so much.

Omni Interviews: Mira Grant and A. Lee Martinez (with novel excerpt) originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 26, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #3

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Keep me writing it—paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that may or may not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict…

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck. and a compilation of the full story through the entry before this one can be found here.

When you are born from a Mountain, no matter how Mormeckian, no matter how bipedal an avatar of that mountain, you carry that ponderousness with you, always. You learn to accept your new-found agility and separate personhood, but your legs still seem sometimes made of pendulous iron and your thoughts switch from quicksilver to quicksand from minute to minute. There are advantages to being an old soul in a new body, but mostly you are two things at once, which can be wearying.

Transforming myself into a King Komodo lifted much of the Mountain from me. My new body, invisible to humans, was a wonder of engineering that could stop quick as thought and reverse itself, flow across a courtyard like water, but also rippled with muscles. Every part of me was muscle, and I had a control as I ran that satisfied on an aesthetic and aerodynamic level. My senses too were enhanced so that I could hear a mouse fart underground from a hundred yards. I could see across far distances, but if I allowed a membrane to close across my eye, I suddenly saw heat signatures, too. My sense of smell was exceptional as well, and changed in this body so that nothing smelled bad, not even rotting bodies. Snow smelled fresh no matter how dirty. The pads of my feet were picked up minute vibrations and allowed me to triangulate the source of sounds. They also conveyed more than texture, but something more than I cannot articulate because it constituted some sixth sense. Those pads also allowed me, along with my rock-climber's claws, to run across any surface, even upside down. My scales, meanwhile, responded to my thoughts: I could be invisible, translucent, or drop these disguises and manifest with my scales in their natural color, a sea-green shade. I could even ripple colors across my body like a squid.

One thing only I couldn't inherit from my contact with the King Komodos: I could not stitch my way in and out of dimensions and realities. If someone had shot me and autopsied me, I would have been all King Komodo, but my brain was still just mimicking theirs and that essential functionality did not transfer, which made me wonder too how much sheer will and belief factored into their ability.

The question became, what should I do as a King Komodo that would enhance the success of my mission to bring back intel on the Presence? As the war heated up again, Hitler having had his old general shot and another take his place in a rare moment of focus on the Eastern Front. Hitler's new order was to advance, and so I roamed streets littered with bodies or the scene of desperate close-quarters urban fighting between infantrymen. Air support still lagged behind.

In the midst of this renewed chaos, so at odds with the ice-choked slow flow of the Volga, one landmark stood out: Pavlov's House, as it came to be nicknamed, or in some realities where Pavlov died in the initial German assault, Afanasiev's House. Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov was a sergeant in the Soviet army tasked with holding a half-destroyed four-story building in the center of Stalingrad with only a few dozen soldiers. Ivan F. Afansiev was his lieutenant. I knew this from the histories the angels had inserted into my cells.

But in this reality, it was early days yet. Pavlov's House was just another building being defended by desperate hungry, dirty Soviet soldiers, a PTRS-41 tank gun on the roof and a one-kilometer line of sight in all directions an advantage augmented by a secret tunnel dug from the building back to secure Soviet positions. German tanks could not raise their turrets high enough to take out the tank gun. The barricades, mines, and fortified machine gun positions made the area beyond the building a kill zone sometimes strewn with many dozens of German dead. Pavlov was determine to hold on with his depleted platoon and the new German general was determined to make the taking of Pavlov's position a strategic and symbolic necessity.

I saw several advantages to enlisting Pavlov's help. First, there weren't many men in the house so my chances of meeting with him undetected seemed high. Second, Pavlov had political capital due to his spirited defense. With so many commanders being turned in for supposed ideological crimes by Soviet political officers, this meant something tangible. Third, evidence in the histories suggested that in some realities Pavlov's defense had been aided by "outside forces". Might a Mountain become a Komodo be considered an "outside force"? And this outside force needed help. If the King Komodos had been able to somehow sense my connection to the angels, might not the Presence also sense that connection? Human resources on the ground seeking clues might be more vulnerable, but they would not be seen as linked to players outside of the conflict.

I chose a night clear and cold when the hostilities had ceased for an hour or two. From a nearby street, I lurked until the path seemed clear. Then I shot across the street in invisible mode, my tail leaving its signature in the snow. When I approached the barricades, I made myself small, then medium-sized once clear, then small again to slip past the guards undetected. I had an image of Sergeant Pavlov in my head that I checked against each human I passed. Once inside the building, I switched back to the size of a samoyed, crept silent past several groups of men, piles of weapons, up and down stairs, until in the underground, before the tunnel, I discovered a group of rooms with closed doors. The walls were hasty patch-work concrete but the doors had been brought from somewhere more elegant and were made of dark polished wood, decorated with flourishes and paneling. I let the membrane fall over my eyes and used heat-sensing to find Pavlov's office. He was alone.

Then I made myself gecko-small and slid through the keyhole, but poured out of it as I changed to my normal size and allowed my scales to return to their normal color. To Sergeant Pavlov, sitting under a lamp's glow at a table in the far corner, examining maps with his back against the wall, it must have seemed as if a gigantic sea-green lizard had magically appeared in the room, filling it up, because in truth my head nearly knocked against the ceiling.

But Pavlov surprised me. He expressed no fear. He did not draw back in terror. He did not cry out for help. He didn't reach for his gun.

Instead, his expression unreadable, he pushed out the chair opposite him with his leg and indicated for me to sit, a ludicrous proposition but sincere. His black hair had been very carefully combed back. He wore the gray camouflage fatigues common for sergeants in that war. One eye opened wider than the other, which could have given him a comical look but instead made him seem somehow ironic or quizzical, especially set off by thick eyebrows. A kind of subdued but laughing intelligence inhabited the slightly off-center quality of his features.

When I made no move toward the chair, just made a kind of muted growl in the back of my throat, he reached over to the desk near him and retrieved two small glasses, set one in front of him, the other across from him. He carefully poured an amber-colored liquid into each glass, gestured again for me to sit.

I had been prepared for any reaction but this one.

"I have come for you," I said with deliberate ambiguity and menace. I had thought that fear would be my ally, but fear must have fled into the snows outside.

Pavlov nodded as if not disputing this fact.

"Sit," he said in Russian. "Sit and have a drink. If you're here to kill me, I'll need one before I go, and if I'm going to live I will have a sudden and urgent need to celebrate."

I began to experience a grudging respect for Sergeant Pavlov.

I made myself somewhat smaller and flowed into the chair: a large green toothy dragon with opposable thumbs.

And I drank with Sergeant Pavlov in the basement of what would become as Pavlov's House.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #3 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 25, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck: The Story So Far (with art challenge)

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Keep me writing it—paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that may or may not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict…

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Thanks for reading and for your paypal donations that keep the engine running. I've compiled the story thus far in one handy post below for those who haven't read it yet or would like to revisit it. So far, the story already clocks in at 7,400 words, which means we're definitely headed toward novella length at the very least. I'll return with a new entry over the weekend. And, if you're an artist, send me a sketch of what you think Mormeck looks like, emailed to vanderworld at hotmail.com and I'll do a post featuring all of them.

***

THE JOURNALS OF DOCTOR MORMECK

Copyright 2011 Jeff VanderMeer

Entry #1

As the experiments continue across dimensions and across time, even I cannot escape the inevitable recognition that we are all animals, and in acquiring reason we paradoxically seem determined to continually undermine reason—destabilization as a coping mechanism because our brains really aren't ready for all of this yet. Systems we construct must therefore by definition fail. Their failure is a relief perversely. We willingly revert.

(What's not a relief or comforting is that no permutation of any humanoid sentient species yet discovered can be said to be any less self-destructive. Is a certain type of intelligence a kind of disease? Are opposable thumbs a harbinger of disaster?)

I was listening to the transmission from a luna moth in the Southern Hemisphere of Earth 2.7.5 yesterday and it's not as if this fact isn't understood in every-day life, for leaking through the banal conversation outside at dusk at a cafe or coffee house, caught up in our surveillance because of the key words "angels" and "other worlds," came this snippet rendered originally by a male voice, in Spanish: "If you notice how illogical, inconsistent, subjectively, just plan odd and off we all seem to act individually and collectively, how ideologies–which are usually a form of disease–infect us until we spout the most ridiculous generalities (whether those ideologies are on left or right), it sometimes seems Earth was created by gods or aliens to house billions of insane sentients."

I commandeered a passing fly to settle on this man's shoulder. He sat with a group of about ten people, middle class, clearly professionals of some sort. I listened in for a good five minutes, but the conversation turned away from the implications of what this man had said.

What I found unsettling is that the man, retreating to the bathroom to use a urinal, murmured "did you catch all of that?" at one point, and for a second I thought he somehow knew the fly camouflaged by his dark shirt was recording him…but, no, pulling out to diagnostic surveil I found he was himself "bugged" with a wire under his shirt, and clearly spying for someone's secret service. Who he was with, or why they should be of interest counted as merely regional politics—strategically unimportant. But it amused me to discover that he watched others as I watched him.

However, it also made me paranoid. Are we all watching each other? And if so, who is watching me?

So I shall, in the secret part of each night—or what functions as night here—begin to record, in the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper, how I came to be here and the results of our experiments. I shall use English, that most out-dated of languages, as a further impediment to interception. I will number but not date these entries. (Dates are a laughable proposition anyway, knowing what I know.)

It's possible that even though I am taking these precautions that I will be found out. I'm accepting of that possibility. The truth is, I am surrounded by people, and yet I have no confessor, no one with which I can share the inner-most thoughts that gather around me with a kind of flapping, glittery darkness. I trust no one, and they don't, I think, trust me.

It's not that kind of operation. I am not that kind of monster.

Entry #2

Before swooping down to the forest floor to write again, I pondered for awhile about what I should write first, what second, what third. The possibilities opening up before me seemed to contain multitudes. It was overwhelming, if I'm honest. A journal can include everything and nothing, and I am no expert at confessionals. But then I thought about someone finding the book, buried in a box in the dirt, possibly hundreds of years from now…and even though I'm writing it in a dead language, and for myself, there was a kind of tingle of anticipation of that far-future reader, an acknowledgment that some day I will have a reader.

And that reader will need to know who I am, because although raised by what might be termed "humans," I am not human. Indeed, there are no others like me anywhere nearby.

I came here, to this planet, this doorway, as the shooting seed of an adult of my species, and I might have originated galaxies away and centuries ago. Who knows? I don't.

I started polyp-small, and discovered by those who were here first, I was tended to in a laboratory devoted to experiments across time and space. None of them had seen anything like me, either. It soon became clear I was sentient, and growing. That is when they decided to truly take me in and make me one of them. That is when I gained a "father" and a "mother," although these terms have a different meaning to my species.

At first, I was like some cross between lab assistant and lab pet—it was difficult for them to choose how to treat me, and I don't blame them. I did not know my own capabilities, so how could I expect them to? But I continued to grow, and continued to learn, at a prodigious rate. It became clear I was their peer, and then, to some extent, meant to be their leader. Why not? I had no allegiance to my own species, and no aversion to theirs. Besides, their mission appealed to me, for so many reasons.

Yet I am vast, and no laboratory could contain me, ultimately. Now, as an adult, I look like a mountain, but also like a monster from the nightmares of humans. My four legs are enormously thick and rise some hundred feet, where they intersect at the base of what in a human would be my torso; each leg ends in a huge round foot, from which tendrils root into the ground. My torso is also my head and rises another hundred feet, with moth-like feelers protruding out in a feathery profusion. Each tendril is wider than a human being and stretches out a good fifty to seventy-five feet. I can elongate them as necessary.

Atop my head perches the laboratory and some outer buildings, and I have stood here still for so long that a small forest has grown up around the lab. I have no need to move, because from the eyeless crennelated sides of my "face"—my tendrils are my eyes—I can send out a winged probe that, alighting beside the lab, morphs into a vaguely humanoid remote replica. This replica interacts with my fellow researchers, some of whom are, with my blessing, devoted to studying me. This is also how I secretly come to the planet's surface to write these entries.

As I've said, I am the only one of my kind, but in accepting the mission of my fellow researchers, I also hope to one day discover another of me. We must exist, just so widely dispersed that the finding is the difficult part. And in the meantime, every week, from deep inside my body, self-fertilized polyps emerge, and—shot with incredible force, protected by vacuum-sealed pods—make their way out into space. I could keep some of them with me, I suppose, but instinctually I know they would die without their exposure to space. I would be killing my offspring just to have someone similar to talk to. And someday those I send out may come back.

So I talk to the people here, and cooperate with their mission. I monitor the surveillance transmissions from a hundred thousand worlds spread out across a a wide expanse of alternate universes. Earth and its duplicates, its mutants, are our primary concern for now, but not our only one. Some day Earth may fade from our awareness entirely, once the war there has been won.

In the meantime, for all of my size, I am afraid of what is unfolding in the sensory apparatus of the luna moths and our other spy-creatures, across all the Earths, and because that scares me, so too, more and more, my human colleagues scare me.

Although I have not been truly honest about these colleagues of mine. Nominally, they are human. Luminously, they are angels.

And that is enough writing for today. It takes a great effort to write any of these words, especially through a remote probe. Everything about the forest floor distracts me. I have too many senses to remain numb to…anything.

Entry #3

I've forgotten what I wanted to relate, because I'm drunk, or "pissed" as one of the angels, the humans, says. It takes a lot to get a monster as big as a mountain drunk. It takes my rooting filaments tapping into sweet hallucinogenic sap of other plants. It takes my fellow observers pouring pint after pint of rotgut down a throat I created just for the purpose. But it can be done! Gloriously, riotously done!

I'm a happy drunk for the most part. I see sunbeams and novas. I relax and think everything across the universes is wonderful. I contain multitudes, but durnk, I am but one person, no different than my fellow experimenters, no different in my bleary rants and affirmations of solidarity. I'm not a monster at all. I'm your best friend, your confidante.

And yet…part of me is still sealed off from all of that. Part of me is monitoring information lightyears away, brought from luna moths and komodo dragons and from bears that rip open to reveal doors and much more horrific things that don't need thinking about, and which, luckily, you don't think about when durnk. No, durnk is a state of bliss when considering things like geo-political social situations across multiple alt-worlds. Or wars between species thought of as angels and demons but all too…human?…humanoid?

But that's too sad to bear thinking about. Time for another drink poured down the artificial throat. I think this one's a screwdriver! I think! The screwdriver to beat all screwdrivers!

Yes, I'm one of them. Finally. Forever. or until the morning hangover.

Big as a mountain. Small as mouse. Drunk as a louse.

Entry #4

Who can blame anyone for mistaking them for angels, these people I work for, these people who have taken me in? Who can blame anyone for creating the myth of angels, or the "angels" for using it?

On this outpost, "this backwater planet at the end of nowhere," as the bear-sentinel Seether calls it, the arrival of the angels from far-flung missions can be as dramatic as a sunrise or as stealthy as turning to discover a person sitting in a chair empty the moment before.

But it's for the dramatics that I love them, although I know it's a weakness. They dare to take chances, and so instead of riddling their way through the Rips to come home—really all the way home, safe—some of them will enter in the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it will take for their incredibly strong wings to burn up, and coming hurtling down, on fire, like fiery jewels. And I send the skein of my senses rushing up to meet them, to experience their fall. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careen down in droves at times, coordinating their descents.

Most of the time, they guess correctly, and make it to the laboratory grounds, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar but having performed almost like parachutes. The wings will grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

The ones not so lucky smash screaming into the lawns and smolder there until the medics come. I hear the impact above me, reverberating through my skull, and I send out my tendrils to investigate. They lie there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that's not just pain. They look like heaps of smoking, quivering tar but smell like honeysuckle. These cases take longer to heal, but their misfortune isn't seen as frivolous by the others. When you're almost immortal, your idea of play isn't the same as for other beings. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions you cross galaxies, decades, and dimensions to carry out.

Stationary mountain-sized monster that I am, I revel in their joy, their mobility, their risk-taking. I forgive everything because of it. They are so beautiful I might even be able to forgive the slaughter of hundreds, of thousands, for love of them. At least for a little while.

Entry #5

Intel from surveillance today has had a thready, inconsistent quality. More than ever, I've been unable to see the patterns, to understand how it all fits together. In quick succession, glimpses of: a strange library on the top of a mountain, men struggling against a storm in an antiquated ship with huge sails, three women consoling a forth in a graveyard, enormous floating creatures shooting bolts of lightning at one another while below shouting crowds of people like shoals of fish ran back and forth. An ant struggling to hold a blade of grass. The innards of a clock winding down. A man praying in a temple.

But then attention seemed to resolve upon a wintery city under siege, the wings of our luna moths dusted with snowflakes, a battle played out under gray skies. The mortar fire was like the shriek of birds—and became the shriek of birds, because the starlings began to mimic the sound after several days. Glue and water boiled with bay leaves to make a terrible soup. Belts with nettle and vinegar for another soup. Rats tossed whole into the fire to roast, with no time to put them on spits, desperate men and women in rags shooting from behind pitted, gouged walls at their enemies. A slow-motion war in the snow, even in the best boots…and some didn't even have shoes, wrapping pieces of cloth to protect blue-bruised feet. Stolid, sullen, broken architecture framing faces and bodies whose own architecture displayed the harsh lines and utility of starvation, even from under hats and layers of clothing.

But this war was not our observers' objective. A room in a deserted hospital with its roof blown off, the snow falling and coating the floors—that was where our luna moths congregated in this blighted city. The moths formed a living green cloud covering the walls and tables. If any of the combatants had seen this happening they would have thought it a hallucination: moths impervious to the weather killing so many human beings. And there, on the tables, frozen canisters containing the cremains of psychiatric patients. Old, old, old, much older than the concepts the two sides were killing each other over. Remains that had become ossified, spilling out from the rusted canisters. Strange shades of azure and amber and bronze and frothy white. Soon, under the analysis of the moths, the canisters came to reside in our laboratory, leaving facsimiles behind. And the moths rose in a swirling funnel and disappeared into the sky, leaving attackers and besieged to their bone-cold torment.

In the laboratory, we now have twelve canisters of human ashes. Tomorrow there will be twelve people in the laboratory not there before. The angels seem excited by this discovery. But I have no idea what it means. It makes me feel uneasy.

Entry #6

The first six of the twelve recovered in canisters from the war-torn winter city came back to us sane but with their memories wiped clean and their motor functional infantile. The seventh was insane at first. They resurrected him from his own ashes and he screamed with the first breath of air in his lungs. He was one of the angels, but still he screamed, as if he didn't remember. His name was given to me as "Kathar," and he had been tortured in the winter city.

After a time, Kathar stopped screaming and regained the preternatural confidence that marks all of these "angels." Kathar had been on surveillance elsewhere but something he had seen that now existed as a hole in his memory had sidetracked him. Before he had been taken, Kathar had destroyed his own wings, changed his eyes, created for himself a uniform of white-and-gray that matched the besiegers, who he thought were winning the war. Then the other side had found him, and brought him to a hospital that wasn't for sick people but for experiments. There, he was interrogated and tortured, and when he didn't talk they burned him alive, some inkling having formed in his captors' minds, Kathar said, that he was not entirely human.

This was all I knew because this was all I observed before the others took him someplace more private for a full debriefing. Some time afterwards, the leader of our laboratory, who calls himself Gabriel "but only as a joke" came to confer with my laboratorial avatar. Gabriel has my respect, but I think he likes his naming joke too much; a joke can grow into a truth, and a truth become someone's burden.

Gabriel came to recruit me in a new way, one that went beyond our agreement. "Kathar tells a story that disturbs us greatly." As his mouth curled upward in an almost-smile that his kind could not help. "He says he came into contact with a presence, and that this presence influenced his captors—first in the capture itself and then what happened afterwards. Kathar believes that under cover of the torture, this presence took something from him."

I knew that the angels had their enemies, that part of their purpose in establishing the laboratory was not simply to monitor for irregularities, for things that might naturally create instability, but also to combat interference from others. They had never named these "others" to me, and it had not mattered to me. For me, if I must be honest, just the opportunity to glimpse through surveillance a hundred different worlds was enough.

But when I questioned Gabriel on this point, he shook his head, and even the half-smiled seemed oddly tinged with doubt…even fear. "This is nothing we have encountered before. No one has watched us, the watchers, before without our knowledge. Those who know of us, know because we wish it."

Then he told me they needed my help, that someone needed to return to that winter war, in that particular reality, and investigate, report back. It could not be the remote surveillance of the luna moths. It could not be another angel, because this presence could track them "as if we have a recognizable heat signature" that registers on their instruments. Gabriel said they needed me to go. They needed my budded avatar to go because Mormeck Mountain could change not just Mormeck Outpost's appearance but also the cellular composition. "You will go, with our instructions," Gabriel said, "and as soon as you are there, you will alter yourself to perfectly mimic the humans there. The presence may sense your arrival, but then you will go dead to them."

Was this, perhaps, what Gabriel and his kind had been moving toward all along? That I become not just monitor, home, and house to their efforts, but also active spy? Part of me wanted to scream as Kathar had screamed, at the thought of the unknown, but the greater part felt a great upwelling of an emotion close to happiness. My avatar was me, yes, but also separate from me. Once embedded in the winter city, my avatar's bond with Mormeck Mountain would be broken, and we would have to synchronize our memories once I returned to myself, but I was as much me as Mountain as avatar, and vice versa. It was not even that my avatar would be a copy of me—we both were emissaries of a greater whole, a city, a host, that happened to appear as one creature. If Mormeck Mountain were to come to grief while Mormeck Mobile roamed a far-off place, then it would be Mobile that became Mountain, over time, lacking only a week or a few months of memory.

In a word, I said yes to Gabriel, and they prepared me for the journey today. I received four objects to take with me, all made very small. They briefed me on the specifics of the local conflict in a place "most commonly known across the alt-Earths as Stalingrad" and noted that in this particular iteration of that conflict "The forces of Adolf Hitler, a genocidal despot, have laid siege to the defenders, soldiers for the Soviet Union, an empire run by a autocrat named Trotsky." He hesitated then, as much as Gabriel ever hesitates. "Complicating matters slightly, a third force works in Stalingrad: a highly evolved carnivore not native to Earth, with supreme powers of camouflage and working without the knowledge of the human population. We call them Komodos after an Earth species, but that's not really what they are; and they are neither our enemies nor our friends. You can trust no one. Trade allegiances, even shape, as necessary."

"Where do I start?" I asked.

"In the hospital where we found the ashes," Gabriel said. "Any orthodoxy, any ideology, whether progressive or repressive, is a weakness, Mormeck. Anyone free of it can manipulate it, while anyone who is a true believer cannot be free of it, and will react in one of a limited number of ways. Use their ideology against them." He had uploaded into my avatar a complete knowledge of all factions, including the Komodos—their history, their beliefs, and the wider context. I was also equipped with new languages that felt itchy in my avatar's mind. I decided, too, to bring my "journal" with me, hidden within a sealed pouch of skin against my thigh. I could write in it without taking it out of my body.

"And what of the presence?"

"You will encounter proxies of the presence, and you will know them because in their speech and their actions they almost but not quite match the orthodoxies of which we have spoken. You will record all information about the presence that you can, and you will not engage the presence unless forced to."

"And if I am in danger?" After the seventh reconstituted from ash, the last five had been placed in a secure facility. All five had suffered psychotic breaks as soon as they'd regained consciousness.

"We will give you the coordinates for doors back."

Then it was just a matter of traveling to Stalingrad. Except the journey wasn't as easy for me as for the angels. They carried that power in their bodies, the knowledge of it, the ability for it. They were doors, in a sense. But only they could open those doors and go through.

For me, as for anyone else, the process was perilous and painful. My avatar would have to walk across the lawn outside of the laboratory, into the little forest, and there be devoured alive by the sentinel bear known as Seether. He would strip my flesh down to the bone with claw and fang, and feast on my remains…and when I was nothing but bones, he would crack the marrows and eat all of me…and then and only then would I travel across the alt-worlds to my destination, knit back together. I would not scream because I would suppress my nerve endings first, but it would not be a pleasant sensation. Seether too was a door—ancient and feral and containing worlds. He too was, in his way, as aesthetically pleasing as the luna moths or any other of the angels' discoveries, experiments, and inventions. But not to the traveler. To the traveler, he was the very experience of violent death, even though was no other way.

Of course, the angels came to watch. To them, it was funny, and their half-smiles became broad and merry even as my view of them dissolved in a sudden spray of my own blood and tissue.

Avaunt!

Entry #7

My kind cannot be killed—extinguished for a time, yes, but the truth of me lives in every cell, and were I ever treated more like a castle-keep than host and stormed and sacked and put to the torch…some small piece of unconquered me would survive, slip into a river, be picked up by the mud on an invader's boot, and over time, centuries perhaps, Mormeck would rise again, mountain-massive.

So when the angels told me I must leave my self in my avatar, sever the connection, exist in two places at once, I was at peace with this situation. But what I had not been told was that this must happen before my Outpost's dissolution by the bear Seether—that it was expected I would observe the beginning of my Outpost's passage to the winter city.

At first, this unexpected thing did not bother me, and I did my duty: I disengaged so that my avatar/Outpost was no longer me and yet we both were me. I, Mormeck Mountain, watched through the sensors in my skin as Mormeck Outpost was torn to pieces by Seether, the bear-door. Watched the busy work of claws and fangs haphazardly reduce me to slashed chunks of flesh, the blood pouring out onto the grass while the angels laughed.

I felt almost superior, reflecting on how mere humans on the whole—the intelligent species we spy on most throughout all the alt-Earths—do not understand their fellow animals. Their endearing but sad attempts at science have never understood that a luna moth is not just Actias luna (Linnaeus), a member of Lepidoptera, but also an intricate surveillance device that can transmit live images, sound, taste, smell, and feel across a million alt-worlds to a remote destination presided over by a living mountain. That a single komodo dragon might exist in multiple realities at once, its skin porous in a way that would be considered supernatural by the primitive. That certain bears might be a horrifically painful but efficient way of travel. Or even, switching to the science of religion, that angels might not just laugh at the human idea of God but cynically seek to reinforce it, too.

But, gradually, I was drawn to the spectacle in front of me. It was a strange sensation to see myself—even such a small part of me—die in such extreme and methodical a fashion without any connection, to not be experiencing it too. I had no time for admiration of Seether's killing efficiency. I was watching instead what should have been the face of pain on Mormeck Outpost, those features smeared with blood, offal, and ripped flesh, cheek ripped from the bone, orbital exposed…and yet still the expression, the eyes, screamed not of horror or discomfort but of release, of freedom, of anticipation…even as the remains sank in on themselves due to Seether's happy gorging and the bear slapped off the head and cracked open the skull, feasted on the brain, cracked the bones, slurped the marrows.

Just the price of passage, and Mormeck Outpost's expression no concern of mine, perhaps even beyond his control. But to me in that moment I thought, with a sense of loss, that he was glad to be rid of me, glad to be gone. And that, dear diary, was a revelation, and Seether only in that minute having licked the last of him off of the grass. A great fear, a great longing, a great envy rose within all of me, like some sort of revolt at the cellular level. For the first time in dealing with the angels, I felt as if I had made a colossal mistake.

Entry #1 (Mormeck's Avatar)

Returned to the winter city usually called Stalingrad but on this alt-Earth known as "Volgograd", Russian, German, and the subsonic language of the Komodos crammed into me. I appeared in a crush of snow, dropping reconstituted through five feet of air with none to see me. I tried to change my molecular structure immediately, but this was impossible. No one was around. Not even a rat. Without hesitation, I shed all but a tendril of myself and runneled into the substrata and found a sluggish worm, became a worm, found a rat, became a rat, tunneled up and found a dead human, thawed that, became that. All the time paranoid, afraid that some Presence might find me. But it didn't happen.

I don't know how long this process took—I was too engrossed in it—but long enough that I had gotten over the aftershocks from being devoured by Seether. There's a horror in being ripped at, being torn apart, that has nothing to do with pain—the pain had been deadened—and everything to do with the pulling, the ripping rendered numb. It felt to me as how it would feel to a human if peeling off the dead skin from a sunburn, but instead, with the same level of intensity, long swathes of flesh came with it. What had the humans felt so long ago when the angels had sent out their holy bears to bring back specimens.

Did those hunted down think that after their savage deaths they had been to Heaven? Did they misinterpret the smiles of the angels?

Not me. I knew I had been brought to a kind of hell. Under siege. On this alt-Earth, the date was December 14, 1942. The Germans and Russians had fought themselves to a stand-still for over a year, and both sides barely existed as coherent fighting forces in the city despite the reflexive sending of more reinforcements and supplies. Air support had become almost non-existent. Trotsky was plagued in the Far East by an all-out Japanese assault upon his borders. Hitler had launched an attack against the East Coast of the country known as the United States, after a failed revolt by his generals, and spending much of his time keeping his supply lines safe and ruling Europe and part of Africa.

This winter city was now forgotten and full of corpses, almost equally divided between the two sides, but poorly ruled. Into that lawlessness had come spies and profiteers and, oddly, an area scooped out of the boundaries near the Volga that now served as a kind of neutral zone. And everywhere, too, the komodos roamed, silent and invisible, their brand of life-taking unnoticed amongst so much carnage.

I became human hidden behind a ruined, frozen wall, hearing the soft crunch of a patrol across an ice field that once been a courtyard, and the sound of mortar shells, and a low clear moan somewhere distant, and a gasoline-blood smell that had soaked into the snow. The shouts of men and women accompanied by machine gun fire. The sun was a blood-orange at the horizon, but it had been that way for hours.

Dusk, and I'd stolen the dead man's clothes, his boots, his gun, and his face. I discovered I was cold but I could freeze through and it wouldn't matter. I was now part of the Russian side: Trotsky's White Army, stalemated with the German Christo-Fascists…the information dissolving into my brain like a painkiller, each new fact bringing me calm. I would always have a map in my head, always know exactly where I was, and thus how far away from home.

Mormeck Mountain rarely knew outright fear, but I was an Outpost—I could as good as die before being saved, and the Mountain would remain if I disappeared to my last cell. From the first, then, in that new and tactile place I found I had become autonomous and through rebirth as worm-rat become my own person. A dead person. I looked like a dead person. I had to.

The dead man had had a name; I didn't want to know it. I had to know only that he'd been on patrol and a sniper's bullet had taken him, and now he would lurch up and find another patrol or wander, seeking others, seeking a certain…Presence.

But the swift-shifting komodos that found me first.

Entry #8 (Mormeck)

I was not rid of my avatar once he traveled to the winter city under siege. I thought I might be, and I was glad of this, for he still troubled me. But the angels had their luna moths in the city, and they wanted me to use them for surveillance. "Only you," said Gabriel, "will know what might be odd and what might be normal for your avatar. If your avatar is subverted by the Komodos or a presence, the evidence of this may be imperceptible to anyone else."

So I watched my Outpost performing his mission in the city. First, his disappearance into the soil, which I knew was to acquire the right molecular structure, and then his reappearance as a member of one side in the conflict. I knew where to look, knew the signs, for where he might arise.

In those first moments after he once again registered in the surveillance of the luna moths, my avatar was a stranger to me—more even than when he had stared at me while Seether destroyed him to rebuild him. This sense of something wrong grew stronger. I was here, but I was also there, with no connection between the two. He wasn't my doppelganger or my brother. He was me, but now different. On the one hand there was my sense of loss, of a need to communicate with my avatar. On the other, there was a growing dislike, as if I watched someone else pretending to be me and not behaving as I would behave, but being taken as me by those around him. This feeling was bizarre to have, I know, and yet it seemed encoded in my DNA.

It did not take long, watching him run from shadow to shadow, sometimes hiding in plain sight by joining members of the same army and sometimes leaving them to wander in the most deserted places, that I began to want him dead. My avatar. Me, in a sense. Most of me rebelled against this idea—found it perverse and distressing—but underneath like some constant, distant drum beat, I still had the thought.

By the time he encountered the komodos on the second day, I had become too embedded in the situation, too fixated on my avatar, and it took awhile to realize that within thirty-six hours of my Outpost entering the city, a third of my luna moths had winked out, just disappeared into the snow.

And I had no idea who had done it.

Entry #2 (Mormeck's Avatar)

Komodo dragons have a strange history across the universe. They exist in two basic forms. The first is the seemingly normal large-sized lizard version found across most alt-Earths. This version is actually a trans-dimensional creature that exists in several places at once. A gland that imbues its saliva with a slow-acting toxin also provides the creature with its ability to populate so many realities simultaneously. The saliva can be used to travel across dimensions by anyone, but your travel will only last a few weeks, and then you will die unless you have the exceedingly rare antidote. As you lie in paralysis somewhere far from where you originated, the komodo will catch up to you and feast upon you. And you will wonder why you thought you could outrun what no one can outrun.

The komodos that found me taking shelter by leaning against a supporting wall in an abandoned, roofless warehouse were not this first variety. The normal variety isn't intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid, and operates by instinct alone. But the second kind, the King Komodos as they're called by some, are intelligent, and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time, although with a somewhat more chaotic agenda than the angels. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might someone living in a cabin. You don't take it personally.

But I took it personally. King Komodos are huge and like their distant cousins they too exist many places simultaneously. Unlike those cousins, the King Komodos are invisible due to an incredibly sophisticated camouflage feature. So at first I thought they were just the beginnings of a storm, except that the waves of invisibility that surged across where the ceiling should have been became too regular, rippled too closely to a reptilian shape. Clearly, in many other realities, this warehouse had a ceiling; they weren't flying across air. Soon, the half-dozen King Komodos roiling around the warehouse became more visible to me—like long, wave-wide quick-silver tongues of water flashing through the air, with a hint of scales at times, a quick flash of claw, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye. I could hear the sound of their scuttling gallop, which unnerved me more than anything. They sounded like they were the size of small elephants, with the sticky toes of geckoes. There was a kind of clean heat of a stink, too—it was odd and full of spice but it needled through your nostrils and was gone before returning a few minutes later.

I stayed there, leaning against the wall, pretending not to notice them, because if I had been truly human, I wouldn't have sensed them at all, unless they'd chosen to manifest. But something about my very ability to sense them drew them to me, made the Komodos realize I wasn't human. A horrific breath scalded the side of my face and a scaly transparent snout as big as a battering ram smashed against me, make me fall to the floor. The snout again, flinging me to the center of the warehouse. I was dazed, scared for the first time since coming to the winter city.

A circle of translucent lizard flesh roiled and seethed around me like a whirlpool, and in the language of the angels they used for my benefit I began to hear their guttural yet sibbilant cursing.

"It's with the angels."

"Yes, it is."

"It thinks we can't see it, that we don't know what it is."

"But we know what it is, don't we?"

"A thing of the angels."

"An angel-thing. Angel filth."

"Angel-fucker. Angel-shitter. Angel-pisser."

I panicked—I tried to run out of the circle, but it was like trying to run through a wall of pure muscle that smelled like spice. I fell back, bruised, and heard the weird huffing-chuckle that is the King Komodo's most bloodthirsty expression of humor.

It wasn't long after that. That circle spasmed close and closer and the great green-gold eyes became visible all around me and the snouts opened and the fangs pierced and I dampened my pain centers and the King Komodos lovingly rendered me down to bits of thrown-about and fought over flesh-and-blood. It didn't take long. I might as well have jumped into the center of a half-dozen buzz saws.

When they were done, they quickly became distracted by something in another reality, and scuttle-galloped off, hissing and cursing.

Leaving me as just a foot in a shoe, with a little bit of ankle. I could regrow me from less than a scrap of that.

This was getting to be a habit.

…Except their ungentle touch had left me knowing how to take on the form of a King Komodo.

Entry #9 (Mormeck)

On the third day after my avatar's departure, my last luna moth winked out of existence. I was blind. I had observed my Outpost regenerate and transform into a King Komodo and go scuttling invisible away, but not much more. It felt like a severing of a connection. As much as I had begun to dislike my avatar, he had still been me, and being blind to his journey left a strange wound. I resented being concerned. I resented feeling this sense of loss that I hadn't expected. Gabriel tried to comfort me by reminding me that my Outpost had the coordinates for the return portal, the return bear, but this did not much soothe me.

"There's nothing you can do until he returns," Gabriel told me. "We can try to bring other surveillance into play, but it may not work. It may not be advisable to do so. It might just expose your avatar's position even more."

I agreed that he was right and asked for two things: to be put on another assignment to take my mind off of my avatar, and if I could talk to one of the angels that had returned insane from the winter city: resurrected from ashes only to succumb to some horror or some trauma it could barely articulate. He agreed to both, although only reluctantly to the second.

I do not know why I asked to see the insane angel. I don't know what I expected to find out, except that this angel had been in the city my avatar now roamed. We sat there in the white room with the angel sitting on a white chair and my emissary standing in front of him. His wings hadn't come back right; they were twisty and thatched in a way that suggested the chrysalis-wet wings of an emerging butterfly. He twitched regularly, could not stop himself, and his gaze could not alight on any one place, even though there was little enough to look at. His eyes were utterly black and without reflection. His mouth did not lilt upward in the half-smile chiseled into the other angels' faces. He smelled like ashes, as was only proper, I suppose.

"What happened to you in the city?" I asked.

"They asked that already," he replied.

He had a voice like pieces of ice splintering against each other. It made me not want to ever hear that voice again, but I persevered: "Tell me again."

"The things came. They knew us. They took us. They unmade us…after a time."

"The King Komodos."

"No."

"The humans."

"No."

"Then what?"

"The things," the angel replied. And then, unexpectedly, "They did not find funny what we found funny." And I thought of the angels laughing as my avatar was torn apart by the bear Seether.

"And for this they…unmade…you?"

"No," the angel said. "They unmade us because we had unmade something first."

I started to ask what the angels had unmade but some shiver in the ice-crunch of his voice made me stop and become wary. There was no reason why Gabriel or the others couldn't listen in, and something in the implication of "unmade something first" frightened me. I know it may be difficult to believe a Mountain like me could be afraid, but in that blindingly white room talking to the mad angel with the black eyes I began to experience something that might even be known as terror. I could suddenly feel, all of the foot-treads of the angels upon my surface and feel the hot breath of Seether and in a kind of wrenching dislocation everything living on me was suddenly alien, so alien that I wanted to just shake and shake until I'd shaken it all off of me. It took an act of supreme will not to give in to the impulse.

When I'd mastered it, I asked the angel, "How would you describe these…things?"

Now the mad angel stared right at my avatar with those strange eyes, opened his mouth, and out came an avalanche of a roar, like a glacier suddenly shuddering and exploding into the water, like something gigantic and half-crazed being slaughtered by thousands. Eventually, it deformed his face. Eventually, ashes like flecks of snow poured out of his mouth. Eventually, his eyes turned white. Eventually, I stood in front of a dead husk toppled over in front of me like an offering.

Gabriel came up behind me. "I should have warned you not to ask that," he said. "That's happened to two others."

He was grinning ear-to-ear as he said it.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck: The Story So Far (with art challenge) originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 24, 2011.

42: A Stonewall Perspective, Bass Museum of Art in Miami

Our rather awesome nephew Pioneer Winter has put together "42: A Stonewall Perspective" with Jared Sharon. Pioneer is an amazing dancer and if you're in Miami June 28th, check it out.

From the description: "The mindset of many gays and lesbians turned away from oppression and toward freedom of expression [as a result of Stonewall]. Winter and Sharon's art honors progressive predecessors who broke the ground on which the artists are building.

(Pioneer during a prior performance.)

42: A Stonewall Perspective, Bass Museum of Art in Miami originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 23, 2011.

Writing Mormeck

Tomorrow I'm going to post one blog entry that has the entire text of The Journals of Mormeck, my serialized story project, to date, before picking up the story on Saturday.

It's been an interesting experience, and I can't even really tell you where I got the idea for Mormeck, except that I'd been wanting to use the name for awhile and a still-born story with a character named that had gone nowhere. But suddenly I was looking at some random notes for a new fictional universe and I remembered the name Mormeck and then this Japanese comics character popped into my brain and I knew Mormeck was a huge, mountain-large creature with a laboratory resting atop his head. On a distant planet. Observing a hundred or more alt-Earths.

How I got it into my head to post the entries here, I'm not sure, but the diary form has been instrumental to doing it as a rough draft serial on my blog. It creates a kind of closed-vessel situation where even though I know the parts have to fit together, I can just concentrate on what's right in front of me, compartmentalize the task at hand.

One result is that you're seeing the kind of questing stop-start common to a rough draft but not usually in evidence in public. Granted, there is progression but the pacing is not quite what I'd do for the final and story-wise it's two steps forward, one back, and repeat. While each section on the micro level screams for some kind of miniaturized closure…giving the illusion of a more standard progression. Still, the diary entries also allow for a certain amount of acceptable digression that might stick out in a more traditional structure.

But in terms of sitting butt in chair to write it, I've set aside any idea of doing much research on Stalingrad, with the result that the specificity of detail about the "winter city" will be lacking until the rewrite. I actually studied the Siege of Stalingrad extensively a few years ago, but I have to brush up on the city itself before I can fully imagine the alt-world Stalingrad I'm positing here. It's also less densely populated with human characters than it will be in final. There needs to be someone for the avatar to talk to, and frankly that will probably be inserted prior to the avatar's encounter with the King Komodos, and then carried forward.

What I am interested in maintaining through this rough draft is some sense of the inner life of Mormeck (Mountain) and, to a lesser extent, Mormeck (Avatar)—after all, what else is a diary for? Mormeck Central/Mountain in particular is going off in unexpected directions with his introspection and his reactions to things. Which led to some nice brainstorming today about the plot.

Unexpectedly, too, reading Moominpapa at Sea renewed my interest in lighthouses—I've been searching forever to write a story centered around one. The odder moments in Tove Jansson's book have sparked an idea, and Mormeck (Mountain)'s next assignment will involve a lighthouse.

I'm also not caring much about hoarding ideas. I'm just throwing them all in there. Inter-dimensional komodos. Sure. Luna moth surveillance devices. No problem. Being devoured by blood-thirsty bears as a way to travel between alternative realities. Yeah, baby! Angels resurrected from their own ashes. Absolutely! I'll worry later if it gets too crunchy and not people-y enough. That's easily adjusted, at the same time as the pacing.

The images I'm picking are helping a bit, too, in terms of deciding on the final style for the story, which looks to be somewhere between practical and lush. Creating ever more distinction between Mountain and Outpost entries will also be a function of revision.

I don't think that every story would benefit from being created in public at the rough draft level—most definitely not—but something's working because not only am I scribbling down, every day, all of those little bits of image and detail that mean the story's alive in your head, but today up popped the ending, and the ending in this particular case clarifies some of the rest of what's ahead.

Normally I wouldn't talk about a story as I was writing it, but something about the compartmentalization of the entries also allows me to cordon off the bloodless analysis of process from the passionate pursuit of the rough draft.

Writing Mormeck originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 23, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #9

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

On the third day after my avatar's departure, my last luna moth winked out of existence. I was blind. I had observed my Outpost regenerate and transform into a King Komodo and go scuttling invisible away, but not much more. It felt like a severing of a connection. As much as I had begun to dislike my avatar, he had still been me, and being blind to his journey left a strange wound. I resented being concerned. I resented feeling this sense of loss that I hadn't expected. Gabriel tried to comfort me by reminding me that my Outpost had the coordinates for the return portal, the return bear, but this did not much soothe me.

"There's nothing you can do until he returns," Gabriel told me. "We can try to bring other surveillance into play, but it may not work. It may not be advisable to do so. It might just expose your avatar's position even more."

I agreed that he was right and asked for two things: to be put on another assignment to take my mind off of my avatar, and if I could talk to one of the angels that had returned insane from the winter city: resurrected from ashes only to succumb to some horror or some trauma it could barely articulate. He agreed to both, although only reluctantly to the second.

I do not know why I asked to see the insane angel. I don't know what I expected to find out, except that this angel had been in the city my avatar now roamed. We sat there in the white room with the angel sitting on a white chair and my emissary standing in front of him. His wings hadn't come back right; they were twisty and thatched in a way that suggested the chrysalis-wet wings of an emerging butterfly. He twitched regularly, could not stop himself, and his gaze could not alight on any one place, even though there was little enough to look at. His eyes were utterly black and without reflection. His mouth did not lilt upward in the half-smile chiseled into the other angels' faces. He smelled like ashes, as was only proper, I suppose.

"What happened to you in the city?" I asked.

"They asked that already," he replied.

He had a voice like pieces of ice splintering against each other. It made me not want to ever hear that voice again, but I persevered: "Tell me again."

"The things came. They knew us. They took us. They unmade us…after a time."

"The King Komodos."

"No."

"The humans."

"No."

"Then what?"

"The things," the angel replied. And then, unexpectedly, "They did not find funny what we found funny." And I thought of the angels laughing as my avatar was torn apart by the bear Seether.

"And for this they…unmade…you?"

"No," the angel said. "They unmade us because we had unmade something first."

I started to ask what the angels had unmade but some shiver in the ice-crunch of his voice made me stop and become wary. There was no reason why Gabriel or the others couldn't listen in, and something in the implication of "unmade something first" frightened me. I know it may be difficult to believe a Mountain like me could be afraid, but in that blindingly white room talking to the mad angel with the black eyes I began to experience something that might even be known as terror. I could suddenly feel, all of the foot-treads of the angels upon my surface and feel the hot breath of Seether and in a kind of wrenching dislocation everything living on me was suddenly alien, so alien that I wanted to just shake and shake until I'd shaken it all off of me. It took an act of supreme will not to give in to the impulse.

When I'd mastered it, I asked the angel, "How would you describe these…things?"

Now the mad angel stared right at my avatar with those strange eyes, opened his mouth, and out came an avalanche of a roar, like a glacier suddenly shuddering and exploding into the water, like something gigantic and half-crazed being slaughtered by thousands. Eventually, it deformed his face. Eventually, ashes like flecks of snow poured out of his mouth. Eventually, his eyes turned white. Eventually, I stood in front of a dead husk toppled over in front of me like an offering.

Gabriel came up behind me. "I should have warned you not to ask that," he said. "That's happened to two others."

He was grinning ear-to-ear as he said it.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #9 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 23, 2011.

Weird Tales Editor Ann VanderMeer, GoH at Apollocon This Weekend

Apollocon is this weekend in Houston! Martha Wells is the writer guest of honor and my wife Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales, is the editor guest of honor. She'll be participating in panels, doing a visual presentation on her current projects, and no doubt having a lot of fun. She'll also be getting a tour of NASA, which is way cool. If you're in the area, consider stopping by—you can buy memberships at the door.

Can you afford to missing seeing Ann in fierce mode?

Weird Tales Editor Ann VanderMeer, GoH at Apollocon This Weekend originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 23, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #2

Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

Komodo dragons have a strange history across the universe. They exist in two basic forms. The first is the seemingly normal large-sized lizard version found across most alt-Earths. This version is actually a trans-dimensional creature that exists in several places at once. A gland that imbues its saliva with a slow-acting toxin also provides the creature with its ability to populate so many realities simultaneously. The saliva can be used to travel across dimensions by anyone, but your travel will only last a few weeks, and then you will die unless you have the exceedingly rare antidote. As you lie in paralysis somewhere far from where you originated, the komodo will catch up to you and feast upon you. And you will wonder why you thought you could outrun what no one can outrun.

The komodos that found me taking shelter by leaning against a supporting wall in an abandoned, roofless warehouse were not this first variety. The normal variety isn't intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid, and operates by instinct alone. But the second kind, the King Komodos as they're called by some, are intelligent, and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time, although with a somewhat more chaotic agenda than the angels. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might someone living in a cabin. You don't take it personally.

But I took it personally. King Komodos are huge and like their distant cousins they too exist many places simultaneously. Unlike those cousins, the King Komodos are invisible due to an incredibly sophisticated camouflage feature. So at first I thought they were just the beginnings of a storm, except that the waves of invisibility that surged across where the ceiling should have been became too regular, rippled too closely to a reptilian shape. Clearly, in many other realities, this warehouse had a ceiling; they weren't flying across air. Soon, the half-dozen King Komodos roiling around the warehouse became more visible to me—like long, wave-wide quick-silver tongues of water flashing through the air, with a hint of scales at times, a quick flash of claw, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye. I could hear the sound of their scuttling gallop, which unnerved me more than anything. They sounded like they were the size of small elephants, with the sticky toes of geckoes. There was a kind of clean heat of a stink, too—it was odd and full of spice but it needled through your nostrils and was gone before returning a few minutes later.

I stayed there, leaning against the wall, pretending not to notice them, because if I had been truly human, I wouldn't have sensed them at all, unless they'd chosen to manifest. But something about my very ability to sense them drew them to me, made the Komodos realize I wasn't human. A horrific breath scalded the side of my face and a scaly transparent snout as big as a battering ram smashed against me, make me fall to the floor. The snout again, flinging me to the center of the warehouse. I was dazed, scared for the first time since coming to the winter city.

A circle of translucent lizard flesh roiled and seethed around me like a whirlpool, and in the language of the angels they used for my benefit I began to hear their guttural yet sibbilant cursing.

It's with the angels."

"Yes, it is."

"It thinks we can't see it, that we don't know what it is."

"But we know what it is, don't we?"

"A thing of the angels."

"An angel-thing. Angel filth."

"Angel-fucker. Angel-shitter. Angel-pisser."

I panicked—I tried to run out of the circle, but it was like trying to run through a wall of pure muscle that smelled like spice. I fell back, bruised, and heard the weird huffing-chuckle that is the King Komodo's most bloodthirsty expression of humor.

It wasn't long after that. That circle spasmed close and closer and the great green-gold eyes became visible all around me and the snouts opened and the fangs pierced and I dampened my pain centers and the King Komodos lovingly rendered me down to bits of thrown-about and fought over flesh-and-blood. It didn't take long. I might as well have jumped into the center of a half-dozen buzz saws.

When they were done, they quickly became distracted by something in another reality, and scuttle-galloped off, hissing and cursing.

Leaving me as just a foot in a shoe, with a little bit of ankle.

This was getting to be a habit.

…Except they did not know the true measure of me, Mormeck Outpost, whose every cell contains all of him. Who can regrow a body from a mote in god's eye.

…Except their ungentle touch had left me knowing how to take on the form of a King Komodo.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #2 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 22, 2011.