Jason Dias's Blog, page 4

Dedication to Values of Pain

This book is dedicated to my dog, Scooby Doo.
If that seems unusual, allow me to explain. I buried my friend today. He has been dying for a few weeks now, the good days growing ever less frequent, the bad days less tolerable. He was thirteen or fourteen - nobody rightly knows as he was a shelter rescue. He has been part of our family for twelve years, and you could not ever ask for a better dog or a more loyal, loving companion.
The last couple of years I have worked mostly from the couch where I'm sitting now, writing this dedication. Aside from a few classes a week at the community college, most of my students reside inside the computer. So I have been able to be here with Scooby as he slowly exited this world, bit by bit. He did not suffer much and I was able to fill his last weeks with fun, adventure, tasty snacks and companionship.
Dogs are not able to choose the extent to which they will suffer, or the causes for which they might suffer. They derive meaning, so far as we are able to guess, just from their relationships. When Scooby's last good days seemed to be behind him - Thursday, two days ago, he ate some raw meat from my hand and perked up for a couple of hours - we took him to the vet and pet him, the whole family, while an overdose of anesthesia took his final breath. The last thing he saw was everyone who loved him crying and smiling, making contact.
All the time I have been gamely tapping away at these keys, trying to discover and explore and explain something about pain and what it means to people, I have known this day was looming. And looming ever faster, at that. I can only hope some of that love and pain and yes, even hope, is somewhere between these pages.
Goodbye, Scoobs. You were a good friend.

Excerpt from To Bury Their Parents: Studies

Studies
"In the third century of the fourteenth dynasty, King Arionus was, we think, a woman. As does your mother, she wore a golden beard and a man's headdress. It is difficult to verify the assertion after so much time and following the loss of her tomb sometime in the middle fifteenth dynasty. Are you paying attention, Jul?"
Jul was a child of ten, with dark skin and hair, golden palms and soles. He wore a gold kilt as fitted his station. "Why should I?" he asked.
His teacher was a woman of indeterminate age, gray of skin, gray of hair, gray of eyes. Even her voice was gray. "Because the past predicts the future. That which has happened can show us what will happen, if we have eyes to see."
"When I am King I'll have the eyes torn out of all historians, then they can never see, and I will not have to hear it."
"Charming boy. And when might you be King?"
"When I am a man I will be King," he retorted.
"You have not been listening. I need fear no threat of your Kingship. I will be long dead if such a thing comes to pass. Your mother is King, not Queen. You know what that means?"
"It means there is no King to hold the throne."
The teacher smiled. "Good, Jul. It means she rules in her own right. And when does a ruler of Hitai give up the throne to his children?"
"When they die," he said.
"So unless you plan on killing your own mother - would you think such a thing? - she will rule until she dies. Is your family rich?"
"Richer than any person in the kingdom." He might have said in the world, only the kingdom was all the world he knew. Well, except for the village at Starfall, and they had little wealth.
"Tell me, who lives longer: the virtuous poor or the sinful rich?" asked the teacher in her droning, dull, detestable voice.
"There is no sin, only wealth. I am rich so I will live long and long."
"As will your mother, Jul, as will the King. Think on it."
"I choose not to. I hate this lesson, all these lessons. What good are they?"
"If there is no sin, there is no good. These lessons then are neither good nor ill and should curry no hate. Perhaps if I told you a story..."
Jul stood up then. He was tall for his age as the diet of a royal boy would predict. Handsome in a soft-featured, boyish sort of way. "If you wish to keep your tongue, tell me no stories. I am going to visit my puppies."
"Your mother..."
"My mother will have you beaten when she finds out that you threatened me."
The teacher's eyes widened. "What threat have I offered?"
"I have forgotten, but I am sure it will come to me if I am not distracted. Puppies will be just the thing."
All she could do really was watch him go, and sigh. Children did grow up so very fast. It was good for a boy his age to be sly, manipulative, crafty, and cruel. At least if he was going to survive long as a boy in the royal household, and gods forefend as King one day. Never mind being a good ruler, living long enough to be good required deeds worthy of demons from the myths of Old Hitai. An historian should know. So as she watched him go, it was more with wistfulness than with apprehension or disappointment.

Excerpt from To Bury Their Parents

Prologue
She stared at her thumb.
Once, the woman had had a name. It was lost now, forgotten. Her identity was secure, though: she was the emperor. Just Emperor now. She knew what she was and a name was not needed.
Her thumb contained some of her identity. It was dark on one side and light on the other, golden and warm. The nail was white like the inside of an oyster shell. The pad had lines that swirled and twisted like eddies in a tide-pool as the waves go out.
“Emperor, we have brought you a prisoner.”
Her guard-captain. He had a name also but, like Emperor, was reduced to a function. His function was to guard her person and follow her orders. Her function was to conquer.
“Who is it?” she said.
“A local resistance fighter. Militia, she calls herself, but her cell were armed with butcher knives.”
“Bring her.”
Emperor’s attention moved off of her thumb and into her room. The floor was tiled, the walls mosaics. She sat in a tall chair with its back to the single door. Her eyes skipped over scenes of conquest told in tiny stones of blue, silver, brown, all cemented together to make a greater whole.
One stone caught her attention. It was perfect. An ovoid of pleasing proportions, green just the hue of the deep sea at sunrise. One perfect stone in an array of perfect stones, each selected for their individual properties.
The door opened again and the prisoner shuffled in, alone. Emperor’s ears were keen. Everything about he was keen, sharpened, distilled down to its most basic essence. She stood, knowing the visitor could not see her yet, and came around the chair.
The woman looked down on her, feigning contempt through her fear. Her hauteur was shallow, though, and neither was fear her basic nature. Emperor knew it by looking.
“You are smaller than we imagined,” the prisoner said.
“Is your name Militia, or only your function?” Emperor asked.
“What?”
“So many flaws.” Emperor approached. She walked behind, viewing the prisoner from all sides. Once her circuit was done, she sat back in her chair.
“I could kill you,” the prisoner said.
“You could not kill the thing inside of me. Tell me your name.”
“Grund.”
“Sounds base. Are you base?” Emperor closed her eyes and let her other senses explore Grund. Inside of her, above her stomach but below her lungs, the blue thing shifted. It never slept and nevertheless it woke now. It moved out, grew, expanded. It reached her skin. It made tendrils, invisible to the prisoner, that reached out and covered the space between them.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I want to get to know you.”
“Why?”
“Some part of you is useful. I will find that part and discard the rest.”
Grund offered some complaint, some bit of hauture that still failed to conceal her terror. Meanwhile, blue tendrils crawled into her nostrils unnoticed. Through her pores. Into her heart and deeper, into the basic nature of her being.
Militia.
She plays at it but she could be it. Too many other concerns. Look here: love for her family. That will never do. Concern for her own safety. Cut it away and what is left? But here is love for what passes for a nation in this part of the world. Hatred for me and also admiration. Nurture both.
Half those thoughts were her own and half belonged to the blue thing that rode along inside of her. She had left many selves behind along the way to this moment and might leave more. But now was not the time to cut away at herself. Militia needed her attention.
She cut. The blue thing cut. Everything unneeded fell away.
“What have you done to me?”
That would be the left-over. The dross. “Captain.”
Emperor’s summons was obeyed at once. He stepped into the room with brisk feet. “My Lady?”
“Don’t call me that. I am Emperor and no lady. Take this one...” she pointed at the weak woman who had spoken. “Take her and put her in the arena for the next show. Let her fight for her family. Take this one and put a uniform on her. She will defend this city to her last breath. Isn’t that right, Militia?”
The new woman looked at her old self with open hatred in her eyes. “I didn’t know I was so weak,” she said.
To the eye, she seemed exactly as the one Emperor had cut her away from. Same build, same stance, same hands and hair and teeth. Any weakness of body both would have shared. But as the old version was led away, struggling and kicking at Captain, Emperor knew she had perfected what was left.
“Are you Militia, or is that only your role?”
“What’s the difference?” the new woman said.
Captain came back in a few moments to lead her away and Emperor returned to contemplating her thumb.

Amazon giveaway

To Bury Their Parents, the second book in Because of Her Shadow, is imminent. A little editing, a nice cover, and it's on the market.

To get you hooked - I mean, to celebrate - part one is free on Amazon Kindle for five days only and 99c thereafter. Check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Their-Chi...

The King Of...

Tennessee, 2016.
The motorcycle cooled off outside. I could see it from my seat in the truck stop window. It was a basic greasy sort of place, about half-full with long-haulers and road warriors, bikers and a few families in the midst of their road trips.
The waitress stopped by to fill my coffee and take away my empty plate. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, a decision I’d regret in a few more hours of highway wrangling. No matter. I was a middle-aged British man with a Harley Davidson Fat Boy and I was seeing America, one truck stop at a time.
“You want pie?” the waitress said. “We have apple or cherry or razzleberry.”
Nothing more American than apple pie, despite idiomatic statements to the contrary. “Apple,” I said. “A la mode, if you could.”
“Sure thing, sugar.”
She was away in a flash of yellow dress and dirty white apron and compression stockings. I returned my attention to the parking lot outside, a combination lot and refueling depot that fed customers into the convenience store that adjoined the restaurant.
Out there on the highway off-ramp, coming in rather to fast, was a rust-red Cadillac. I made it to be a ’58 or a ’59 but I really didn’t know enough to say definitively. All I could tell was that it was old and about a mile long. It drifted into the left lane and back into the right and swept into the lot, bypassing the gas pumps and coming straight into the lot outside my window. The driver expertly guided the car into a space between two giant pick-up trucks and stopped, the car rocking a moment on suspension as soft as watermelon flesh.
The door opened and the driver stepped out, long and lean as his Caddy. He had on tight black jeans and a beige plaid shirt with the collars turned up and pack of smokes in the breast pocket, a corduroy jacket held over one shoulder in the crook of one finger. His hair was long and swept back over his ears showing graying temples. I imagined he would smell of cheap cologne and Brylcreem and maybe a little of Bengay.
In this part of the Midwest, it seemed even little girls wore cowboy boots, but his were tooled, embroidered to within an inch of their lives. I didn’t recognize the leather – eel, maybe, but too pink to be any common skin. And as I watched him walk up to the front doors, it seemed that he left smoking footprints in his wake.
Indeed the whole man seemed to shimmer a little like a long road in the heat of the day. My imagination, surely.
He came in. A little bell rang over the door. The waitress breezed by him bringing my pie. “Sit wherever you like, honey,” she said.
“I’ll take a slice of that and your muddiest Joe,” he said, with a voice like silver coins clinking in a silk purse. I’d never heard silk and silver but I knew it would sound just like that. He walked by me, took the booth next to mine. I wanted to ask if he was a musician but I felt a strange thing: fear. A strange dread sat in my belly and, lower down, a weird attraction.
I watched the man eat his pie, taking my time over mine. I was here to see the country and he was a part of it, one more colorful character to describe to the family back home, maybe write about some day. He ate fast, almost mechanically, a lazy grin on his teeth between bites. The more I watched, rapt and spellbound, the more I became both fearful and paralyzed. I found I had a bite of pie on my fork, halfway to my mouth, having rather lost an appetite for it.
He was done in just a few minutes. He glanced up and saw me watching. “Gotta stoke those fires, fella,” he said, and chuckled. He produced a money clip in the shape of a dollar sign, peeled off a few singles and dropped them on the table. “See you soon.” Then he strode out, back to his rust-red Caddy. I stared after him long after he was gone from sight.
“Twelve-fifty.”
“Pardon?” I looked in from the window, still holding a forkful of pie halfway to my mouth.
“That’s twelve-fifty, sugar.” It was the waitress, looking perfectly ordinary, banal.
I didn’t have a money-clip, just an ordinary leather wallet in the inside pocket of my biker jacket. I handed over a twenty.
“I’ll get you some change,” she said.
“No, you keep it. Only, can you tell me who that man was? I had the strangest feeling I’d seen him before.”
“Him? He’s in and out of here all the time. Some people say he’s hell on the highway. Some call in Baal or Lucifer.”
“You’re saying he’s literally the devil?”
“No, sir,” she said. “He’s got a name, after all.”
“He does?” I took a deep breath, hoping to be returned then to normalcy.
“Of course he does. That man is Memphistopheles.”

The end of us

The end of us

"Well," said George, "I suppose I am the last one, then." He put the rope around his neck, wondered briefly at how itchy it felt, and stepped off the chair. His neck snapped. He didn't die right away, but he stopped breathing, and there was no visible sign of life - not that there was anyone left to notice. After a few minutes, the last activity in his brain stopped, starved of oxygen.
Six months earlier, George had been just a regular guy driving to work on a Tuesday night. Something unusual was getting started though, far away, and George didn't seem very relevant to it.

***

"Amy?" said Steve.
"Hm?"
"Amy, I think I killed someone today."
"You can't know that," she said. Steve was a corrections officer. One of three men who pulled levers at the execution. Two pulled dummy switches, one threw the switch that energized the electric chair. Nobody knew which switch was which; nobody could say categorically that anyone had killed anyone. Amy said as much to Steve.
"Except that the man died," he replied, cool as milk.
Amy thought about it for a minute. "Hmm. You are still innocent, I think."
"I don't think so," he said. "I don't feel so, anyway. I feel guilty."
"Hm."
That was as far as the conversation went that night. But the next day, Steve had the same conversation with his boss. "We can't say who killed that man," his boss said.
"But we can't say who didn't," Steve replied.
"I see your point. What do you want to do about it?"
"Well, I think it's only fitting that I confess to murder."
And so he did. And it was a strange day, when the stars and planets were aligned just so, and the decisions people made had a certain consistency they usually lacked. Steve was Black, also, which made it much easier to find him guilty, and condemn him, and allow him to waive his mandatory appeals. His lawyer suggested that he might get even better, swifter justice if he were mentally retarded or very poor, but Steve was well enough satisfied. His execution was attended by many well-wishers. Amy wore a black dress and cried, and wondered how she might pay for the funeral.
The next week, the two men who had pulled the other two switches also confessed, as did the three men who executed Steve. They all got the same as he did. Two of the guards were White, so they had to appeal their life sentences, but eventually won their cases and were sentenced to death. By this time, though, things were really coming to a head. There were three executioners at each execution, and each of them had three executioners, and three more and three more and three more. Soon the corrections department had to hire more people.
Americans were poor folks overall. There were some rich ones, but mostly poor ones. Folks were more than willing to take the job openings, but they all felt unaccountably guilty and kept confessing en masse. And the cycle continued.
One day, the jurors started to confess also. Since they had found the executioners guilty of murder, were they not also guilty of the murders of those executioners? The judges had no recourse but to find in favor of the ex jurors, and sentence them also to die - but then the judges decided they were guilty, too. One day they agreed to find one another all guilty at one time.
New judges were appointed. They decided to save some time. They found all the rich people guilty of perpetuating poverty by being greedy. They found the government guilty of racism for the War on Drugs. They found fast-food workers guilty of covering their own asses and not striking for better conditions. And since racism and poverty and failure to make change were the foundations of all crime - or enough of it to go on with - everyone was guilty of everything.
That made things simpler. It saved a lot of time and money. They arranged a schedule of executions in a logical order reminiscent of a phone tree. Soon, there were only a few people left in each city, and they had to commute to central locations to execute one another, then to more central locations, and more central ones still.
George was one of the last ones. He had never really noticed the population shrinking and shrinking. The situation was on the news, but George didn't watch the news. The news was mostly all politics, and George tried to avoid being involved in politics. He'd caught something a few days ago about Russia and China having trouble finding enough corrections officers to meet their execution needs, but didn't worry about it. Foreign politics was even less interesting than local politics. None of it really mattered, especially voting.
But then a woman named Ethel came to his office, and said, "I need you to shoot me."
He looked through his window, expecting to see Jessica sitting outside screening his calls and visitors, but of course Jess had gone off to jury duty last week and never came back. Nobody had come back. But he didn't have any phone calls or visitors, at least until now, and his boss wasn't there to notice if George stayed out on lunch an extra five minutes or left work a few minutes early. Lunch was weird; none of the local restaurants were open, none of the stores, nothing at all really. He’d broken into a local Arby's and got chips and pickles from the fridge, and left a note of apology and an offer to pay for any damages, but there was no evidence anybody would ever come back to read it.
"Come again?" he asked Ethel.
"I need you to shoot me," she said. "There isn't anybody else left."
"Why not?"
"Don't you watch the news? Because everyone is guilty, and everyone is condemned to die. You will have to shoot me. It's justice. You will have to shoot me and then kill yourself - there won't be anyone left to carry out your sentence. Or I suppose I could kill you first and then myself, but I am guilty of a capital crime and therefore not eligible for corrections work."
"Are you crazy?" asked George, but he was mostly wondering if he could get the deep-fat fryer at the Arby's to work. He was getting tired of chips and pickles, and lunch was not far off.
"No, I don't think so," Ethel said. "It's in the Bible. Thou shalt not kill. I killed someone, so I need to be punished. You need to kill me."
"Interesting. But if the Bible says not to kill, and then I kill you, then I am a killer. I don't want to kill anybody."
She laughed at him. "It's too late, really, fellow." She hadn't asked his name, and he wasn't important enough for it be on his door. "You see, we decided we were all guilty of all the murders. You never did anything to stop climate change or poverty or racism. Did you know virtually all the people executed until now in America were really poor, and that almost all of them were Black? You didn't try to stop that. Equally, you let poor Black people die and rich White people get off and called it justice. You let us kill all the fish, too. They're not all dead yet, but by 2048 they will be. You are guilty, through inaction, of the mass extinction of millions of species in the ocean alone."
"That's a lot to process."
"You don't have to process it, hon. The judges processed it for us. All we have to do is carry out the sentences. Sign here, here and here. We'll waive the background check, on account of there is nobody left to process it or to answer questions about you."
"What am I signing?" George was used to signing things, so he was already half done before he had finished the sentence.
"You have to be hired on as corrections personnel. Then you can carry out my sentence."
"I still don't understand," he said. "If we are going with 'thou shalt not kill,' and don't get me wrong, I think that is an admirable rule, why should I kill you?"
"Well, killing is wrong, and I killed someone. So I need to be executed. Indeed I insist on it."
"It is wrong to kill, you killed someone who killed someone, and so someone else has to kill you?"
"Yep."
"Well, I suppose if that's the law. Did you bring a pistol? Oh - would you like a last meal? It will have to be pickles and chips, unless you know how to work a fryer."
"No no, I had gum on the way over. Let's just get it out of the way."
And so George shot Ethel with the pistol she’d brought with her. They did it in the bathroom where it would be easy to clean up the mess. There wasn't anybody to clean up the mess or, indeed, anyone to see it, but the forms had to be observed. Then, after lunch, he found a good place for a hanging. Ethel had been efficient in virtually every way except she had brought only one bullet, so hanging it would have to be.
But before he did it, he made sure to have all his paperwork completed. It wouldn't do, after all, to upset his employer.

Excerpt from the latest project: To Bury Their Parents.

Korina sat in the long hall. An ingot rested in front of her, and a heavy hammer. A girl sat on the edge of the hearth with her.
Fourteen. Tall, pretty, good teeth. She had big hands, which was a good sign.
“Take the hammer,” Korina said. “Use it to flatten out this bar.”
The girl picked up the hammer and pushed the ingot around into a position she liked. “Is it very hot in the forge?” she said.
“Very. And smoky. Loud. Lonely.”
The girl frowned, jabbed half-heartedly at the metal. The hammer clinked and bounced. The whole bar, not held in place, also bounced. It flipped over with a clatter. “A profession,” she said. “A calling.”
“For the right person.”
“A home. Maybe a family.”
What boy would want you? Now you are young and succulent. Soon all your nails will be broken and your hair full of soot. Soon you will have eyes only for the fires and no time to dandle a child on your hip.
“Try again.” Korina did not know if she meant the girl’s answer or her hammering.
But the girl held the bar still and beat at it once more. She used her strength this time. The hammer bounced, sending a shock up her arm. Korina had felt it enough times to know it when the girl dropped the hammer. “Ow.”
“Too hard,” Korina said. “Hit it just hard enough. Firmly. When it bounces, work with it. The bounce saves your energy.”
“I’m not strong enough,” the girl said.
So I fear. “You could be. Here, watch me.”
Korina took the hammer. She began to beat the ingot. A small crowd gathered, youngsters mostly, those not assigned yet to apprentice. Nearly all had already failed this test. Her arm rose and fell fast, tapping more than beating, warming the metal. “The strength is not in the force of the blows but in keeping them up. This is a long march, not a sprint to the finish. The work takes patience. Determination.” Slowly, as it warmed, the metal grew more malleable. It began to distort. “Enough,” she said. “Here. You do it.”
The girl tried. Korina gave her that much. In the end, though, she only bruised her knuckles. The steel grew cool under her ministrations, cold and stubborn. And the noise it made was wrong. It should have rang out, chimed, sang with her. But the note was sour.
Korina had tried every day but found no candidates.
Later, back at the forge that was her real home, she let herself despair.
I need an apprentice. None here can make the metal sing the right note.
There was only one answer to such a question and she hated it. Even the long hall was too far from home, even a bath in the lake too much time away from her work. The fires were not her friends but her lovers. The molten metal was not a thing to be worked but her blood.
I am not strong enough to go away from this place.
She had a bag, a canvas thing left as a gift one morning from some grateful villager. They had even dyed it. Black and heavy, stitched well enough to carry tools without breaking. It sat unused at the bottom of a toolbin under hammers and awls and shapers, under a file and a rasp.
I am not strong enough.
But she dug out the bag, because such a question really had just one answer.
The forge had more than enough tools for working bronze and those she left. She had spent the past months making new tools. Tools for working steel. Those she packed with care into the canvas bag. They clinked as she hefted it. A heavy thing. Too heavy. But the forge needed an apprentice. She was not strong enough to leave this place in search of one.
But I could be.

Excerpt from Half-Lives

Today's project was to wonder if some of the strange quantum behaviors of photons and electrons might be reproduced at a larger scale. Say, at the level of an atom or even a molecule. Just as he had all his books open to the right pages, the phone rang again.
"Hello?" he said, shoving the receiver into the space between his head and shoulder, trapping it there with his ear.
"Timothy?"
He did not recognize the voice. "Yes. Who's speaking?"
A burst of static confused the answer. He was sure he heard the name of an unfamiliar woman. Then the rest came in clear. "Are you there? I'm sorry to bother you again, but..."
"Yvonne?"
"Yes, it's me."
"That's funny," Timothy said. "For a moment I thought it was someone else."
"Who?"
"I don't know, there was static on the line. Just my imagination, probably."
"I don't think so," said Yvonne in that tinny, tiny voice, far away. "That's why I'm calling back. I've been so nervous to tell anyone about this, but if I can't tell you, who can I tell?"
"Tell me what?"
"I think I was supposed to die in that accident, Timothy."
"Oh, you can't know that," Timothy said. "There is no such thing as determinism at the middle scale."
"I know, I know all that. You know, those days of hanging around smoking weed, I learned so much from you, and it did a great deal to help me with losing Valery. I feel so close to you. If I was only your age, we might have married."
"But you were old then and older now," Timothy laughed.
"Yes," Yvonne agreed, and Timothy could hear a strained smile. "But something is going on right now, and I need help to understand it. Wherever I go I am not expected. Someone has been there ahead of me, living my life and having my relationships. Sometimes I see Valery's reflection in glass or in mirrors and at first I thought it was just my imagination, wishful thinking, but now I'm sure I'm seeing something real. And some other doctor... people remember her when I'm not around and forget her when I show up. She has a name, and I can't remember it. I wrote it down but the writing disappeared.
"Timmy, Timothy, I'm frightened. Something very strange is going on around me."
"You know how you sound, don't you?"
"Yes," Yvonne said. "I sound crazy."
"You sound scared," Timothy corrected. "Hey, do you have any time off coming? Maybe after Christmas?"
The holiday season was always busy at the hospital and Yvonne preferred to work, giving other people time with their families. "New Year’s?"
"Fine, fine. Do you want to come visit? Stay with me a few days, I'll make room somehow. Visit your brother a little, and tell me more about what's going on. I'll do some reading between now and then, see what I come up with."
"All right, Timothy. I'll think about it. Hey, thanks for listening."
"You got it," he said, and listened as she disappeared from the line for a second time.
Timothy looked back at his work, at the nearest open book. Wheeler, however, does not endorse the hypothesis that the state of the photons is affected by the observation prior to the observation but, rather, that any sort of measurement annihilates the photon itself. As we know, measurement affects the particles being measured, a well-known observation effect sometimes confused with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Equations for the wave form instability...
Those were the equations he wanted, useful even though the book that contained them was written for undergraduate students. "An introduction to quantum uncertainty," was the title.
Something about that passage tickled in the light of the phone call. A simple coincidence? Anxiety?
"No middle-scale determinism," Timothy reminded himself. But somehow his own voice echoing off the bare walls in this drab, lonely apartment was more unsettling than comforting.

Except from Half-Lives, forthcoming

She laughed now, the tension broken as if it were never there. "Why are we pointing this thing at that box of smoke to begin with?" Jill asked.
"You know about cesium beam clocks?"
"Oh, wow - is this one?"
"Almost. There is a cesium atom in there, and we're going to measure it constantly. We won't count the vibrations, though, not for the sake of time. We are measuring its vibrations so we know it's still cesium."
"Is it entangled?" she asked.
"Good job, yes, yes it is. What leads you to that conclusion?"
"Could it decay if it were entangled with another atom that decayed? If you had entangled a subatomic particle, say a quark, with one of the quarks in the cesium atom, if it changed some characteristic then the other would change to match, the hadron would change in some way, the atom would lose one neutron or positron. Then it would no longer be cesium, would vibrate at a different rate."
"Brilliant," Raul said.
"Just one problem: how do you entangle quarks?"
"Not published yet. Probably not ever. This is a secret, a great secret. When this is all up and running, it will get more complicated. A lot more complicated. The last thing we need to do is irradiate a cat."
"Tell me," she said.
"I will. Just as soon as I figure it all out. For now, let's get this laser calibrated."
Jill picked up the little screwdriver again, wondering at how much it was like the one she used to fix her glasses when the screw worked its way out of the hinge that held the arm to the frame. Such a mundane item to be part of so weird an experiment.
"Wait a second," she said suddenly. "If it isn't going to be published, what's the point of it? What happened to publish or perish?"
"There's more to life," Raul said, "than trying not to perish."

Excerpt from What Hope Wrought, coming Feb 2016

Admiral Vikensa had a private galley above the mess. He had adopted a pose for me: he faced away, at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. The sun was going down in a storm of orange and red. When I came in, he turned to face me, leaned against the plate glass.
I hate posers.
I popped a salute and he returned it casually. “At ease,” he said.
“Thank you, Admiral.”
“I think you want me to help find you a boat.” His accent was slick, sexy. Spanish, maybe. He seemed to know it, too.
“How do you know that, Admiral?”
“Why else would soldiers risk getting their feet wet?” he said.
“Good question. We were just looking for a safe harbor, so to speak. The boat thing came up as my lieutenant analyzed some data. We need all the nuclear vessels not registered with the fleet.”
He gestured, indicating the table between us. “Perhaps you will join me for some decent food. The Wizard says you have been in the field for some time.”
He was creeping me out. I wanted to say ‘no.’
“Thank you, Admiral,” I said instead. Mission first.
“Call me Umiel,” he said. He sat, took covers off a pair of dishes. “Chicken a la king, broccoli florets, potatoes au gratin.”
“Beats jellyfish,” I said.
“That it does.” He spooned some food onto the plate in front of me as I sat.
“Are you eating?” I said.
“Rank has privileges, as they say, but I think if my crew eats processed jellyfish, I eat processed jellyfish. But for special guests, I put on this little show. Go ahead, eat.”
“Special guests?” I sniffed at the food, wary because he wasn’t going to have any.
“The Wizard sent you, yes? Directly? That makes you special.”
“What do you know about him?”
He picked up a heavy glass, poured water from a carafe. “Glacial ice runoff, from the last of the glaciers around the North Pole. This water is a million years old or more. All Earth’s water is so old, in essence, or even older. Did you know most of the water you drink came here from space, riding in comets?”
“Nothing, then?” I said.
“Oh, much more than nothing. But what can I say? What he chooses to reveal... A man should be permitted his discretions.”
“What about indiscretions?”
“I prefer,” he said, “not to indulge in them.”
“Then what is all this about?” I set down my fork, having tasted none of the food.
“Have you composed a poem?”
“You’re confusing me,” I said. “Are you able to find the ship we want? Are you willing to do so? And am I free to go, Admiral?”
“Yes, and yes, and yes. And this: before going into battle, the ancient Samurai would compose their death poem. A few lines only, usually, to express their hopes for a noble death, that they might die well. And to accept that the outcome of the battle might be dissolution. The acceptance helped them perform legendary feats of heroism and courage, such as cutting out their own entrails in ritual seppuku. Noble nihilism in a barbaric era.”
“That’s what this dinner is for, then.”
“Yes.”
I picked up the fork, tasted the chicken. After years of artificial food and processed jellyfish, it was an amazing flavor, texture, temperature. Warm and creamy, sweet and savory at once. It tasted like a spring long past, a gathering with family passed an age ago. Like youth. I was almost getting used to such luxuries.
“This vessel’s captain is sending coordinates and a transponder frequency to your lieutenant now.”
“Thank you, Admiral.”
“I said, call me Umiel,” he said.
He stood, turned back into the window. The sun was almost gone now but the riot of sunset continued, augmented now by a literal storm on the horizon: lightning stroked the sea from a low sky while the sunburst colors faded into purple. The Admiral slowly became a silhouette, then just a shadow as the room darkened. No lights came on.
When my plate was empty, flavors clinging to my teeth and tongue, I stood slowly to attention. And said:
“Once, when I was young,
“I tasted fine things, green things.
“But tonight is dark.”
Umiel didn’t move, didn’t say anything, didn’t turn around. If he could see my reflection in the plate glass I could not tell. I turned and left, eight strides to the door. Turned and saluted the dark, closed the door behind me.