Rick Wayne's Blog, page 4

(Art) The Deeply Human Fantasy of Ausonia

Blending the classical Italian style (including quite a bit of portraiture) with modern and fantasy themes, Florentine artist Ausonia — the ancient Greek name for lower Italy — imbues his creations with stunning depth and life. His portrait of three drunk Gnolls in a tavern, for example, adds mirth and humanity to characters that are typically only antagonists. We see ourselves in their bestial faces. Similarly, his eerie, black-eyed midwife is at once unnerving and wise, tired and unceasing. His stiff teacup knight is pressured and proud. But my favorite is undoubtedly his pregnant warrior, half out of armor that depicts her child in the womb.

Most of his monsters are part of a numbered bestiary. You can find more by the artist here.

(Sunday Thought) The Midas Mustache, or Death and the Rapture of Life

An old college buddy, now a lawyer, called me circa 2006 to tell me that the prop plane out of which I had jumped a few years earlier had crashed, killing two people. There was a wicked undertow to his voice, a mocking “I told you so,” mixed with righteous validation, spread thickly over a derision for the deceased. Stupid assholes deserved it, apparently.

I said it was too bad.

Flashback to 2003 and said lawyer was watching from the ground as I flailed–literally, like an exaggerated swimmer–in midair as I fell unhindered through clear sky. 6,500 feet, straight down.

From that height you can see the crosshatching of farms. You can see cars moving and tiny people, just dots. But it’s far enough away that they don’t immediately seem to get any closer.

My chute deployed, and the nice man on the radio told me when to pull right, when to pull left, and what followed was arguably the most exhilaratingly raw five-minute chunk of my life.

I have been in multiple car accidents. I have felt the electric awareness that follows any great shock. I have felt the delicious rush an illicit substance. I even damn-near shat myself as someone died right in front of me.

It was 1996, and I was in London with friends, including my lawyer buddy, who was calling home from a payphone. (This was in the days before affordable international plans.) As it happens, England was playing Scotland in the European Cup. The city was insane, and Trafalgar Square was the burning heart of the insanity.

A blue-faced reveler stumbled off the curb as he tried to make his way around the phone booth, and the crowd, and was struck by a car and died. I saw it. He wasn’t even hit that hard.

Hitting the ground after skydiving was not like that. I had panicked in the air and completely forgotten the entirety of the day’s training. In full-on fear for my life, my glands leaked adrenaline. The world had never been so vivid. I was aware of everything. It was as if I had suddenly been pressed so close to the source of life that I could feel it pulse and throb.

I told my girlfriend, who landed right after me, “I feel like I can do anything.” And it wasn’t hyperbole. I felt supernaturally strong, like a superhero. Every sensation surged with intensity, from the green of the grass to the caress of the breeze.

But more amazing than that, if you can believe it, was the come-down. I realized that we’re bombarded by all that every moment of our life, but our dull senses dull it. Our dullard brain filters most of it out. It’s like we live every day wrapped in a cocoon we can’t feel, our faces covered in gauze.

At the post-jump debriefing, the hunky instructor scolded me for my failure. I hadn’t turned into a human shuttlecock like I was supposed to. I had flailed and put myself in danger. If I had twisted the wrong way, my chute might not have caught the air, or worse, I may have gotten tangled in the lines, rendering the secondary chute inoperable and almost certainly ending my life (and his career).

After telling me off for my own good, he praised my girlfriend and asked her out right in front of me.

It was an effective warning. At that moment, I felt so good that I was seriously considering skydiving as a hobby — until I saw what an adrenaline junkie is really like. He’d clearly jumped out of a plane one too many times. He had not only lost all fear, he’d lost all boundaries as well. Like a syphilis poster, he was an effective discouragement. I didn’t want to become him.

I’m not sure if he died in the crash, but it seems likely.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the mythologist Joseph Campbell:

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.

Standing on terra firma after a free fall is the closest I’ve come to the pure rapture of being alive (although the first time I saw the Milky Way is a close second).

It is not the same as facing death. I’d seen death a lot during my stint as an emergency room volunteer. (I was heading to medical school, and that looked good on the application.) Friday nights were best, although there was no night that didn’t involve lots and lots of waiting. Nothing unfolds slower than an emergency, apparently, which you know if you’ve ever been to the ER.

This was in Oklahoma City, and one of my first nights fell during the Red Earth Festival. Because of the legacies of history, Native Americans are disproportionately poor, even compared to other minorities, and it’s not uncommon for them to get high by huffing paint. Gold paint apparently gives the best highs, so during the Red Earth Festival, people would come into the ER with a Midas mustache.

One such man was strapped to a body board. The paramedics were worried he might have a spinal injury since he couldn’t feel anything. But then, he was still very high. He also reported trouble moving, which wasn’t surprising considering that his friend had run him over with a car.

Twice.

They were all high, and this poor fellow lost his balance and fell to the ground just as his friend was backing out. The car rolled over his body. The nearby crowd shouted at the driver, who got confused and thought he was still on his friend, so he shifted gears and, like something out of a comedy skit, drove forward, running over the man a second time.

Badump, badump.

In the emergency room, strapped immobile to a board, the guy was freaking out. The docs didn’t want to keep moving him, so he had been left alone in the X-ray room while his films were developed. (If inconclusive, they would need to take more.) But since the nurses all had other patients, they asked if I would go “calm him down.”

I walked into the spartan, tile-walled room wearing my ridiculous, hospital-issued red shirt and white pants. He asked as soon as he heard me if he was going to die. I said I didn’t think so. He asked if he was paralyzed. I said I didn’t know. He had the Midas mustache. The paint was dry, and it probably itched, but since his hands were strapped to his sides, he couldn’t scratch it, and he kept licking his upper lip and asking me if he was going to be okay. I felt so inadequate.

As it happens, he wasn’t paralyzed. His muscles had been crushed and were locked from shock, but amazingly his x-rays were clear. I was told he walked out of there on crutches the next day.

What he faced in that tile room, what the Scottish reveler faced in Trafalgar Square, what the adrenaline jockeys faced when their plane fell, is not the same as the rapture of being alive.

But then, neither is sitting comfortably at home earning a reasonable rate of return on your savings.

Facing death makes you appreciate your life, that it is yours and that it will run out. But appreciating life isn’t the same as living it.

(Art) I’ve got big balls

No, it’s true. Sixty-one of them, in fact, by nearly as many artists, which is why this is one of those rare times I won’t credit them all. (If you want to know the origin of any of the images, ask in the comments.)

I can barely speculate as to why giant balls have suddenly become a thing in speculative art, but I suppose it has something to do with their geometry. They look simple, and the heavens are full of them — planets and stars and black holes — and yet, creating a sphere is harder than, say, creating a cube, whose parts fit neatly at right angles. Hence, the sphere becomes a visual metaphor for super-advanced technology, or anything we don’t quite understand.

As for why now, perhaps we have become more aware these last few years that we are already living in the future. But who knows?

(Fiction) Oh No

After making my friends something to eat and leaving it on a tray outside their closed door, I followed Martin’s gracious suggestion and went up to the attic, a wide A-framed space from which one reached the cupola, the same cupola I’d been asked to keep close and locked, the same cupola from which the spire had broken just as his nose came free. The house and the man, it seemed, were somehow linked. The cupola was accessible only by a slat staircase that rose so steeply it seemed more like a broad ladder. At the top was a trap door, shut tight. The rest of the attic was very much as one might expect. Two bare electric lights, one at each end, hung precariously at head height. Under them were boxes and old chests with a gaggle of loose items tossed on top with the best intentions of being properly ordered “one day.”

It didn’t take long to see why “one day” never came. I’m not sure any of the clothes I found were properly wearable—in any century. I found a faux fur mantelet with a mother-of-pearl clasp and a gaudy flower-print vest that both looked and felt as if it had been cut from sofa upholstering. There was a child’s seersucker suit with a brown stain around a knife cut in the chest, a pair of orange tweed pants, and so much plaid that one could’ve easily assumed the family was not of Welsh ancestry but Scotch. And there were hats. So many hats. Head wear, it seems, doesn’t follow you to the grave any more than it follows you to bed.

I pulled a brown fedora with a white sash off a sewing mannequin and looked at myself in an antique dressing mirror. I turned once and replaced it with a white baker boy, followed by a purple turban.

“I could be a woman of many hats,” I told myself.

But Annie was right. There wasn’t much for me. I did, however, find a stunning almond blossom silk shawl that had absolutely no business rotting away in an attic, not to mention an equally beautiful turquoise velvet dinner jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves and braided honey-yellow tassels at the shoulders, cuff, and tail. I took it out and held it up. The tassels would have to go, as would the tail, but I decided it would be very easy to cut a third from the bottom and to take a V shape from the back and resew it all to make a nice fitted coat in a shape more appropriate for a modern woman. And it would pair beautifully with the pair of black jeans I had also found, although those also needed to be hemmed—a skill I had so long ago acquired that I was no longer sure I possessed it.

I passed by my hosts’ bedroom once, but the door remained shut. Part of me knew that was to keep me from worrying needlessly, but it also isolated me and amplified my guilt—not just over the day’s events but in how poorly I had treated my friend. I had been so wrapped up with my own problems that I hadn’t seen how much Annie had been suffering since Martin’s death, a suffering that had its roots many years in the past, in the trauma of our first encounter. Adolescence is hard on Harrowood girls. It’s when their powers manifest. Every generation loses one. Annie had told me about it that first summer in Amalfi. Her mother was getting older and pressuring her to marry and have children. Annie always said she wasn’t like her mother, and that was true. She was a sensitive girl. Her older sister, Anewellyn, had been the strong one. But Anewellyn had been the one the spirits took to honor the family’s centuries-old bargain. Annie witnessed the whole thing from her sister’s bedside. By the time I met her, she was just old enough to have children herself and couldn’t bear the thought of losing one like that. So she put it off.

And off.

And off.

I’m sure her and Martin talked about it often, especially into middle age. But it never happened. When I met her, Annie said her family’s bargain was a terrible thing and she wanted to see it ended. I think as she got older and then finally aged, she had second thoughts. She had seen, as her mothers had at a much younger age, what can happen to the community of the living if a necromancer isn’t there to keep back the dead. It was indeed a terrible bargain. But perhaps—just perhaps—it was worth it.

But now there was nothing to be done. Annewyn Harrowood was an old woman. The last of her line. I expect that’s why she’d raised Martin. His death signaled the inevitability of hers—and since she was the last, her end also meant the end of her storied family as well. The specter of facing that alone was too much to bear.

I was re-stacking boxes in the attic, feeling furious and disappointed with myself at all the ways I had failed my friend, when I noticed that the trap door to the cupola was wide open. I went right to close it, the same as you would go to switch off a light that had been accidentally left on. I don’t know that I gave a single thought to why. When I reached the top of the ladderlike steps, I discovered I would have to ascend halfway into the octagonal room, which was barely large enough for three people to stand, in order to reach the handle to the trap door, which lay flat against the floor. There was a conical roof overhead rimmed in slat windows. Small pagan statues, no more than two feet tall, rested in the concave nooks at the center of each of the eight walls, with the exception of one, whose figure had fallen to the floor. It wasn’t until I stepped into the space and lifted it that I realized I could see everything clearly despite that it was night and there were no electric lights above me. The windows let in a hazy orange glow, as if it were dusk in a sand storm. I looked down at the statue in my hand, a prancing satyr who grinned at me as if he knew something terrible was about to happen. I replaced him in his nook and turned his face toward the wall, which is how all of the other statues rested, before quickly descending and locking the trap door behind me.

My feet reached the floor of the attic and I turned in the direction of an old chest where I had before noticed a torn satin dressing gown only to find that the chest was missing. I turned slowly. The room in which I stood was different. It was still an attic and it was still appointed with stacked chests and clutter, but it was different clutter, and the stacks were higher. There was a filing cabinet that hadn’t been there before. And the room itself was longer and L-shaped, as if in descending from the cupola, I had entered the attic of a different house.

I looked up to the trap door. Perhaps it was best to retrace my steps. I climbed the stairs only to find that the lock was no longer on the exterior of the door, which was immovable. The house groaned then, just as it had right before the spire fell, and the attic to my left seemed to stretch away from me. I ran around the corner, nearly striking a full suit of horse armor on a Trojan stand. I stepped around it and made my way down the stairs, which opened not into a room but into a kind of secret passageway. Joists stretched inches over my head. To my right and left were solid walls made of struts that oozed dried glue between them. Beyond, I assumed, was the house—or whatever version of the house existed in that place.

I heard sounds, voices. I couldn’t make out the words, but in the timbre and interplay I recognized Annie and Martin. They were awake and talking.

“Annie!” I called “Annie! Annie!” I pounded on the wall and repeated the name. “Annie!”

Her voice got louder then but still sounded as though she were yelling through a stack of pillows. There was a silent pause, and just as I raised my knuckles to knock again, I both heard and felt scraping.

I pulled my hand back from the wall.

“Mila?”

It was Annewyn’s voice. It rang clear, as if there were truly nothing but drywall and old slats between us.

“Mila? . . . hear me?” Her voice faded in and out as if someone was adjusting the sound on a radio.

“Yes! Annie, I can hear you! The cupola was open. I went to close it. I seem to be stuck.”

“You’re going to . . . your way out!” she yelled.

Already her voice sounded further away, as if she had stepped to the far side of the room. Whatever spell she had cast was fading—or was being countered.

“Do you . . . find your way. There’s nothing . . . to you. Okay?”

“Annie?” She seemed still further away then. “I hear you. But I don’t know the way!”

I paused.

“Annie!”

I heard more muttering, but this was as faint as before. Nor did it sound any clearer after several minutes of waiting. In fact, it seemed then that whatever was being said was no longer directed at me, that Annie and Martin had given up trying to contact me and were talking worriedly to each other. The fact that she was awake suggested that time had passed in the real world, whose relationship to and distance from the derivative dimensions was never constant.

I knew where I was—in the general sense, at least. I knew where I was in the same way that, when one is lost in a forest, one knows it’s a forest—perhaps even which forest—but I had no idea how to get out. I was on the other side, in the shadow realm, formed by the light of higher dimensions striking our thin film of reality.

Westminster chimes rang then, as if from a grandfather clock. But it wasn’t a clock. It was a recording of a clock. A vinyl record had started playing. I could faintly hear the scratches as the sound moved like a pale echo through the halls. After the chimes, the music started, but I had already recognized the recording, even though I hadn’t heard that song in ages—not since my time with the Winter Bureau. Music stays in our memory like that. But then, this song was all the more memorable for Hank Hunter and I having danced to it the one and only night we slept together. It was “Three O’Clock in the Morning” by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, recorded in the early 1920s. I listened as the gentle swinging horn section danced off the walls amid the crackle of the scratches. Since I could no longer see the staircase that had deposited me, I started again down the narrow passage behind the walls which, despite subtle changes in texture or appearance, remained basically the same. The path was straight and never-ending, and despite that I traversed it for some time, the song never seemed to end, nor did it start over or get louder or softer as I walked.

I stopped when the hairs on my neck stood. I was being watched. I thought for sure my earlier shouting had called something to me in the gloom. Instead, I spun and saw Anya and her stringy hair standing silently some ten paces behind, next to a door that hadn’t been there before. The door was open, and I heard the music louder, as if the space beyond held its source. After a pause, she went through, and I followed as quickly as I could lest the door disappear as fast as it had come. On the other side was a billiard room with an impossibly high ceiling. The walls were lined with bookshelves to a height of about eight feet. All of the books were backwards such that their spines faced the wall. A large Victrola, complete with wooden horn, turned in the corner, spewing Whiteman’s seemingly endless song. Four pool tables took up the rest of the space. Each was topped in red velvet. Only the table at the back was in use. Six figures stood silently behind, including little Mattie, the ghost who had come to see the stranger that invaded her home. A diagonal shadow hid her face. The adult figures around her held pool sticks. The long lamps that hung over the tables obscured their faces as the shadow did hers, but by their stance, and their silence, I was sure each was watching me—partly curious, partly impatient for me to leave them to their eternal reverie.

In any normal world, Anya would’ve been just in front of me as I entered the room, but as I turned through the door, I saw her waiting for me in another door on the far side. She was leading me past the ghosts the warlocks had woken in the attack, who seemed to be celebrating their waking, deeper into whatever realm I had entered. Annie’s weakness, it seemed, was letting all manner of beings push in, including whatever had been imprisoned in the cupola. As I walked to Anya, the green-glass lamps hid the faces of the others, who never moved. Not wishing to press my luck, I stepped through the far door swiftly but without seeming afraid, and it shut behind me on its own.

The music stopped abruptly. There was only a distant hollow breeze. I was in a long, narrow hallway, as in a mansion, but without doors or windows. As before, it stretched as far as I could see in either direction. The walls rose so high that the ceiling was completely obscured by shadow. Whether it was fifteen feet tall or fifty, I couldn’t tell. The brown wainscoting on the walls was heavily scuffed while the wallpaper above it was pale tan with faded brown pinstripes. On it hung a myriad of framed pictures. Thousands and thousands of them—more even, each hung close to its neighbors, filling the walls to their distant height. No two frames were the same, although most were rectangular. A few were round or oval. Even fewer still were oddly-shaped. I saw a cast-iron frame in the shape of a fleur-de-lis and a wooden one in the shape of a sitting cat. Inside each was a still photo captured from a memory—my memories. The hall was my life. I stood at the point of my previous parting, when Beltran and I decided we could no longer live as husband and wife. Behind me was the past. Somewhere ahead was my first meeting with the young shaman who would change my life forever.

I lifted a round frame, like a wooden plate, from the wall. It hung from a nail on a loop of yellow ribbon. The border was seemingly hand-painted in a repeating floral pattern. Inside the circular window, Beltran and I posed for a picture that had never been taken. He was wearing his high fur hat with the mighty buckle. I was in a wool coat with a high collar. The sun shone. The mountain wind blew. We looked so happy, but our eyes were tinged with sadness. He had then begun asking me for that which I could not give.

My finger traced the firm line of his jaw. It had been years since I’d seen his face. Decades, even. Not a single picture of him had survived the adventure that separated us, and it took every ounce of strength not to cry at the sight of this one. My lip quivered as I smiled.

“Hello, darling . . .” I breathed.

I replaced the picture on the wall and turned my eyes over the others nearby. I began walking forward. As much as I would’ve loved to see my father one last time—or even my mother, whose face I only knew from a single painting that hung over the hearth in the great room of our house—I knew that there were no surprises in the past. Whatever I was there to discover, I was sure it lay forward in the wastes of the unknown, and I took up a brisk pace. I saw Istanbul and Little Village and a ceramic terrine in my kitchen of which I used to be quite fond. I have no idea what happened to it and realized then that I would’ve liked it back. Odd that we attach ourselves to such small things.

Still I walked, and there came the gaps, spaces where many of the pictures were missing, frame and all. The only evidence of their prior existence was the slight discoloration on the pinstriped wallpaper. In a few steps, the walls were all but bare. Only a few pictures remained. I saw the derelict train station in the woods and the cafe where I tasted the Nectar of Death. I saw a cemetery grown with trees and a grave filled with books. And I saw Etude. Younger. Skinnier. Softer. With a sheepish grin under that great bald head that contained the world.

Then, just like that, the gaps ended and the walls were full again. So many pictures, so many frames. I saw the library in the Keep of Solomon, I saw the friend I made there, I saw the garden and the grand hall of The Masters. I saw the Great Eye shattered into ten thousand shards. I saw Beltran sipping tea as a very old man. I saw a fantastic coat and the Safari Gastronomique and a jaguar-man and the towering horns of a long-dead beast, stretching to a height of five stories. I saw the Great Wall and a voodoo woman jumping into a pyre and Granny Tuesday and a fight in The Barrows. I saw my first night with Benjamin and our first visit from Oliver Waxman. I saw poor Dr. Alexander hanging in the poison garden. I saw Cerise’s dead body curled in a pot and the detective woman and the tree in the sanctum burning like an effigy to hope.

And then I saw the chair. This picture was no mere photo, like the others. It was a vanity portrait, a painting in oil at least five feet high, like something from the halls of Versailles. In it, the chair was cracked, its prisoner released. To one side, I saw a black and white photo of Harrowood House flooded by the ocean to a height of three feet, and that was it. That was the end. For before me, the entire front of the house was missing. Beyond was the water of the Chesapeake, which had risen in catastrophe to lap at the wood siding, just as in the picture. It seemed like it had been doing so for a very long time—long enough to have pulled down the windward wall. The floorboards under my feet poked out, cracked and jagged, over empty space. Below were the two lower floors of the house, while far out to sea, so distant as to be shrouded in haze, was a monster the size of a mountain. It strode slowly northward, up the bay, as if moving in slow motion, its upper half shrouded in orange hazy clouds. Its massive tentacles, too numerous to count, alternated between the earth and its mouth as if it were a grazing elephant.

It was grazing, in fact. It was too far to see clearly, but somehow I knew then not only that it was grazing, but that it was grazing on people, plucking them from huddled crowds hiding under the ruins of the capital. It slid its tentacles into the gaps of the buildings like the tongue of an anteater through a termite mound. It wrapped up whole families and pulled them screaming to its seven-holed maw. What they became after stewing in its intestines, what emerged dripping and snarling from its anus, I cannot begin to describe. Pray only that you never meet one.

It was the future, I was sure. It’s what was coming to the earth—a return to the bondage we had slipped eons ago. But this wasn’t the distant future. It wasn’t what would come if some arcane string of whether-or-nots came to pass. This future was almost upon us.

Days.

The giant creature turned as if it had heard a noise. It tilted awkwardly at first as it swung its feet around. But soon it picked up speed. I had a sense then of its power, for its legs were pushing an ocean in front of it, and yet it came right toward me, toward the broken remnants of Harrowood House all the way across the Chesapeake. I turned about looking for some kind of escape. I was certain there was no way back down the hall, to my past—one unbroken line of action to the dead end of my birth. But the boards before me were shattered and two floors below was the shallow ocean. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where I could run or what place could possibly shelter me from the beast, who, I was sure, was one of the six Nameless gods who ruled our universe. It had sensed me, and although it was the future, I knew that if it plucked me from this vision, I would reenter the real world at that terrible point, having skipped over all that came between.

I heard a buzzing and a flapping then, as if from a swarm of large, batlike insects. I looked up and saw black dots swirling in the sky. Devils. Thousands of them. Swirling, like wasps preparing to descend. I caught movement one floor down and saw Anya in her burial dress. She was looking silently up at me. She was waiting. On the floor near my feet, under the portrait of the chair, was a loose photo, unframed, of feathers scattered on the ground—colorful feathers, like a shattered rainbow. Bird of paradise plumes. Bits of blood were splattered across them. I recognized them. They were part of his battle garb. I leaned down slowly and lifted the loose photo. Then I looked up at the gloating demon chair.

“There’s no frame,” I whispered. I turned to Anya again. “What does it mean? Can I change it?”

She moved out of sight swiftly, and I stuffed the photo in my pocket, dropped to my hands and knees, and began to climb over the shattered boards, whose ends were capped in sharp splinters. As I dangled, I glanced to the orange-tinted sky and could just make out the faces of the descending devils. Behind me, the ocean crashed, pushed forward by the ancient god as it strode mightily forth. The noise and power were immense, and I lost my concentration and slipped and fell, and a long splinter buried itself in my hand.

Anya was already in the hallway at the back of the room, and I forced my feet to follow while pulling the bloody splinter free. When I reached the hall, she disappeared around a far corner. I heard devils land on the roof, like the sound of scampering reindeer. I heard their scratching. I heard their shrieks. I heard the first waves of the impending tsunami fill the ground floor of the house with a rush. I heard clatter as it lifted clocks and furniture and cast them against the walls. I heard a rumble then, like a cross of elephant and lion, and the whole house shook. Glass clinked in cabinets. Pictures rattled and turned crooked on their nails.

The ancient nameless god had come.

The devils broke into the house as Anya moved again. She raised an arm to direct me around the left corner of the hall, where there was a short nook with two doors, one next to the other. They were mismatched and out of place. Neither belonged to that place. I turned to Anya, hoping for some clue as to which door I should take, but she simply looked at me, scared and helpless, as if she were not allowed.

Devils entered the hall, whooping and snarling, and I turned with a fright. They had me—or so I thought. I had no escape. But Anya raised both her arms and a door shut in front of them where there had been none a moment before. They clawed and pounded against it. It would not take them long to break through.

The house groaned. The giant wave pushed by the striding god crashed over the roof. Sea water fell from every crack and drenched everything. I turned to the doors. The motion spun my wet hair and it struck my face. I had been given a vision. I looked to her.

“I must make a choice.”

I looked between the doors. One was scuffed and shabby, the other painted and pristine. Did that mean I was to take the lesser door or the greater?

I heard the bellow then, directly overhead, and a terrible crash. The god was tearing the house apart. I went for the scuffed door as the entire roof and upper floor of the house was torn free, lifted off in one piece as if by a tornado. It flew high into the air and I saw dark clouds and swirling devils and the tendrils of the mighty god and its seven-hold maw lined with millions and millions of teeth. I saw a giant tentacle plunge for me.

At the last moment, Anya shoved the empty air before her and I was propelled through the open door with force. I tumbled to the hardwood as long handles and plastic bottles hit the floor beside me. I stood immediately and slapped my palm against the back wall, but it was solid.

“ANYA!”

I was back in Harrowood House. The sun was shining. I stood in a puddle amid a tangle of broom handles and sideways spray cleaners. I was drenched. I smelled of the sea. Watery blood dribbled from the gash in my palm. I looked at it. My arm was shaking. Pain throbbed down to the elbow.

“There you are,” Annewyn said from the stairs, as if a sundered world were whole again. Her arm was in a sling. “I knew you’d make it out.” Then she saw my face and my bloody hand and the puddle that dripped from my clothes and hair. “What happened?”

I fell to the floor, crying. I reached into my pocket and took out the picture. I looked at the blood on the cut feathers.

“Oh, no . . .”

Snippet from the conclusion of Feast of Shadows, my five-course occult mystery.

cover image by Bruno Biazotto

(Sunday Thought) Anything easy to read was hard to write

The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said of one of his letters that he did not have the time to make it shorter, by which he meant that writing well, which surely includes writing clearly and succinctly, takes effort.

The idea that something very easy to read was very hard to write is often attributed to Hemingway, but then on the internet, any adage about writing is automatically attributed to Hemingway, including the ever-present “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

In fact, that phrase was coined by the sportswriter Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, as quoted by the infamous journalist Walter Winchell in 1949. “Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. …’Why, no,’ dead-panned Red. ‘You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.'”

Quote Investigator attributes the earliest version of the “easy reading” adage to Thomas Hood, who mused in an 1837 edition of the London periodical The Athenaeum that “the easiest reading is damned hard writing.”

But there’s no shortage of contenders. In 1990, Maya Angelou gave The Paris Review an entirely different provenance:

“Nathaniel Hawthorne says, ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing.’ I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing.”

That really is one of the most important lessons—for spring writers, yes, but also for anyone attempting anything genuinely worth doing.

In the age of the internet, there’s a tendency to connect quality with immediacy and to assume those at the top are there not just because they can write wonderful jokes, novels, or songs, but because they can do so quickly.

I doubt it. If something is easy to enjoy, if it flows, it was probably very difficult to write. Even an off-the-cuff joke or tweet stands atop a pile of corpses a thousand deep.

Novels in particular require repeated kneading and polishing. You go over the text, and over it, and over it, and over it until you can practically recite the damned thing by heart.

I’m not exaggerating.

Quality is not bounded by talent. The most talented writer in human history never once produced a masterpiece on the first draft, nor even probably the second.

Quality is a cousin of talent but the daughter of effort. The very best writing is not produced by the most talented writers but by the most committed ones.

(Art) The Sci-Fi Megatech of JC Park

Korean artist JC Jongwong Park imagines giant tech, from the ever-popular enormous spaceship to behemoth alien architectures. The large scale of his creations creates a sense of awe and power, even as they are contrasted with the mundane, such as the giant robot being moved on a highway or a restaurant overlooking planet earth, reminding us of why we love sci-fi.

Find more by the artist here.

The Future is Strange.

The bus pulled onto the shoulder to report the bleeder on the side of the highway. A car had clipped the man’s leg, which bent awkwardly to one side. His hands had frozen into fists and his feet were limp, and they wobbled over the asphalt as he dragged himself forward on his elbows, one after the other, as if fleeing for his life in slow motion. He felt neither cold nor pain, and his frosted eyes remained fixed on some distant salvation even as the gargantuan bus rolled to a stop behind him.

Nio and several of her fellow passengers leaned into the aisle to peer out the high windshield. In the distance, the overcast sky was beginning to retreat, leaving waves of cotton-ball clouds.

“I dunno why we gotta wait for this,” a white-bearded passenger announced from the back.

“It’s the law,” someone whispered.

The bus conductor, who tended the self-driving vehicle from a console, spoke softly into his radio as a pair of teenagers, too young to remember the outbreak, snapped pictures of the awkward, broken man now illuminated in the alternating flashes of the bus’s hazard lights. The tires of a passing car sprayed icy slush across the shoulder, and it struck the undercarriage in heavy clumps and doused the disheveled bleeder, who simply lurched forward again, pulling his legs limply along.

“That poor man,” a woman near the front told her companion. The bus had become so quiet from the awful spectacle that everyone heard it.

“He shoulda lined up like everyone else,” the bearded man declared. He removed his red cap and waved it like a banner. “Let’s get goin’ already.”

There was a click of static as the conductor announced over the speakers that they would be waiting approximately ten minutes for the highway patrol to arrive. The bearded man threw up his arms in frustration. Nio forced herself not to turn and look at him and instead unfolded her translucent phone, but being so far from a town, the custom device had no secure connection—nothing but commercial networks—and the last message she’d received was still Semmi’s.

I still think this is a very bad idea.

A second passing car honked at the bus’s partial blockage of the highway, and the noise startled the baby in the seat across from Nio, one aisle ahead. He began to cry, softly at first, but increasingly insistent. The infant’s mother rocked her child gently and tried to quiet him, but he was hungry or cold or had simply had enough of the bus and was letting the whole world know. Several passengers shuffled in annoyance.

“Shhh . . .” The young mother’s darkly complected face bore equal measures of patience and fear as she whispered to her child in Spanish.

Nio leaned forward across the aisle with one hand extended. “He’s beautiful. May I?”

The young woman nodded, happy at first to have an ally. She froze awkwardly a moment later when Nio pressed her hand to the child’s forehead, as if feeling for a fever, instead of caressing it tenderly. Almost instantly, the wailing babe stuttered. After another moment, his eyes brightened and he began sucking an invisible pacifier. Nio heard quiet exhales of relief. As she leaned back into her seat, more than one person turned from the front to peer at her through the gaps. She certainly stood out, with stubbly hair and heavy loops in her ears.

The colored lights of a police cruiser flashed across the inside of the roof, and Nio grabbed the collar of her puffy winter coat and turned it up nose-high. The patrol car parked at an angle and a trooper exited and waved the bus on.

“Finally . . .” the grisly man said.

The bus tires carved valleys in the slush as the big vehicle pulled onto the highway and began accelerating smoothly. Several passengers clapped. Nio watched from the half-frosted window as the broken man on the shoulder, still lurching forward, receded from view. In his stead was the bleak landscape of the North American high plains. Tufts of brown grass poked through a fondant of white. Low hills were cut into even barbed-wire squares. Nio had traveled nearly 400 miles since leaving her home that morning. Somewhere ahead, a young woman was dying, perhaps inexorably—the latest victim of a killer neither of them had met. Just then, it seemed he was going to get away with it. Again.

Nio took out the unopened letter from her coat pocket and stared.

Pasture and fields gradually gave way to repair shops and fast food chains, but it wasn’t until the bus passed a boarded Dollar-Savr that anyone noticed the damage. It looked like a tornado had hopped across the town on a pogo stick. A leafless tree left a three-meter hole in the earth after being uprooted and dropped onto a snow-topped house. A plump Buddha had fallen from its perch over a Chinese buffet and now golden-mooned passersby from the crumpled roof of a parked car. Ice-covered vehicles were scattered about the ditches and fields like a giant child’s abandoned toys.

The bus was passing a Christian school when a teenage girl half-screamed in surprise and pointed the other direction.

“What the hell . . .” The bearded man got up from his seat and leaned over Nio to look out her window. He smelled like grease.

Some distance away, an enormous donut hung in the sky. The words Wonder and Land, written in sprinkles, curved around the top and bottom of the colorful confection. It seemed likely that somewhere nearby, a donut shop was missing its sign.

“How’s it staying up there?” a woman asked.

The fiberglass donut hung motionless 50 feet in the air. Everyone on the bus immediately raised their phones or tapped their lenses, triggering tags to appear on their screens or in their field of vision. Nio glanced around. No two devices seemed to give the same cause or description. Everyone on the bus was seeing the same thing, and yet none of them were.

The bus slowed and turned left, and the donut disappeared behind a derelict depot.

“Hey, this is the wrong way,” someone called from the back.

As the bus finished its slow turn, Nio noticed the policeman on the road waving vehicles to the side with an orange baton. His patrol car blocked the way, along with a sign announcing a detour.

The bus was directed to a gravel lot across from a 24-hour diner, where its hybrid engine rumbled gently as the conductor announced a curfew. He warned that only residents were being allowed into town and anyone getting off for more than a bathroom break should be prepared to show their driver’s license or other form of identification. The bus would be stopping for thirty minutes, he explained, before continuing to Jamestown, and anyone not scheduled to remain who wanted to stay on board should speak with him.

Nio lifted the strap of her rolled bag over her head and stepped down to a sidewalk pockmarked in frozen footprints, like the fossil of a prehistoric riverbed. Her breath billowed over her puffy coat’s high collar, and she huddled into it for warmth. It was the fourth day of record-setting April cold. It was supposed to last another four. From what she could see, it appeared the town had prepared for an inland hurricane. Storefront windows were taped in large Xs. The sidewalk display in front of a nail salon had been chipped from the ice and brought inside, where it barricaded the door. A handwritten note on the wall of a 100-year-old pharmacy announced that it had closed early for Moving Day. A similar announcement was posted on the door of the diner, next to the sign that declared it was for “Patriots Only.”

Nio checked her phone again as the old man in the red cap and overalls hurried past her on his way to the bathroom. The last message had simply said Please. She scrolled through the public thread to confirm the address. She tapped it, which brought up her map application, but it could only display the blue track of the 8-hour, 400-mile bus ride. The signal icon at the top of the screen was gray—there was no encrypted coverage in the town. Her state-of-the-art untraceable phone still had no service.

“Shit . . .” Her breath erupted in a cloud, and she shivered once uncontrollably. It was frigid. She hadn’t expected to be out in cold weather.

Another police car blocked the intersection near the diner. Its electric engine was silent but its heater ran continuously as the pair of officers inside kept watch on the crowd. Nio expected them to roll down a window as she approached, but they didn’t, and she knocked on the glass.

A male officer lowered the window four inches. “Town’s not safe,” he declared before she could ask a question.

“But this is very important.” She was practically dancing to keep her legs warm. “Someone I know is—is sick.”

“Sick?”

“She asked me to come. To help.”

“Did she call the city?”

“I don’t know,” Nio said. The cloud of her breath all but obscured the officer, whom she could barely see.

“You can have her call 911 and wait here. But my advice would be to get back on that bus. Bus company’s agreed to take folks on to the next stop.”

He rolled the window up.

Nio waited in front of her own reflection, but after a moment, it was clear the conversation was over. She could probably sneak past the barrier, she thought, but she didn’t know where she was going, nor how far she’d have to walk in the snow. She stepped into the diner in the hopes of getting directions—and warming herself—but was stopped by the hostess, who politely pointed Nio to the sign on the door. Turning as if she hadn’t seen it, she caught the officers’ watching her from the car. With their eyes squarely on her, she complied.

A tall, dark-skinned man sitting in the booth near the window paid for his coffee by waving his hand over an electronic token and walked out the front.

“You need a ride?” he called.

Nio turned, surprised.

“I heard you talking to the hostess,” he explained. He pointed toward the parking lot in back. “I’m heading into town if you want.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Yeah.” He looked down. “I guess that’s what it’s come to. Your choice,” he said and started walking again.

Nio closed her eyes and felt his bioelectrics. The hum was weak at that distance, but the pattern was precise. Organized. He didn’t have the high-pitched urgency of a man on a violent or sexual prowl. He was calm. Curious. She could feel him modulating up and down evenly in a pattern common with athletes and soldiers—anyone in the habit of reacting quickly.

As usual, the modulation reminded her of a song.

“Variable Stack,” she breathed. By Vetrans of the Meem Wars.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Nice to meet you. Del.”

He looked down at his padded work suit. The name Del was stitched in fancy blue letters inside a white oval on his chest.

“Sharp.”

Nio guessed he was in his 30s. He was fit and had narrow eyes that were constantly smiling, even when his mouth wasn’t.

He unlocked a battered early 2000s pickup and leaned over to manually open the passenger’s side door, which squeaked. Except for a folded letter on the seat, the inside of the vintage car was immaculate. Del picked up the envelope and moved it to the dash.

“So,” he said as she shut the door, “where to?”

“The Cedars. You know it?”

“The apartments?” The name seemed to catch his attention. “You sure you wanna go there?”

“Something wrong with it?”

He paused. “It’s kind of a dump.”

“I’ll risk it.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just promise me you’re not lookin’ to score.”

The engine started with a rumble and Del backed into the alley. The interior of the truck smelled vaguely of earth and manure. Nio rolled her bare fingers in front of the vent, and they tingled in the coming heat.

“Keep your head down,” he said as they turned onto the main road.

Del waved as they passed the police cruiser. The traffic light at the next corner turned yellow and he rolled through it.

“Clear.”

Nio sat up and noticed a small boutique bakery with an NRA seal on the door. A pair of young women were chatting at a table near the front. A sign underneath them in the window said RED ONLY.

Del saw her looking. “Don’t worry. The Starbucks goes the other way, if you’re so inclined.”

“Is it far?” she asked.

“Far?” He laughed once. “In this town, you’re five minutes from everywhere. You got a name?”

“Nio.”

“Nye-oh,” he repeated. “Interesting.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Is it rude to ask what nationality that is?”

“I dunno,” she said. “You guys have a lot of rules.”

“Us guys? Are you not from here?” Del studied her appearance. The high collar. The shaved head. The metal loops. The wide, sad eyes with lingering bags underneath. “What’s with the jacket?”

Nio looked down at it. The exterior of her knee-length puffy coat was a plain gunmetal gray, but the interior, visible only at the cuffs and inside the high collar, was neon orange.

“Out here,” he explained, “we wear the hunter’s orange on the outside.” He nodded to a round-bellied man shoveling his driveway in a heavy camo-and-orange hunting coat.

“Well, it’s reversible,” she said. “So, I’ll keep that in mind.”

“What brings you to town?”

“Visiting a friend,” Nio lied.

“He can’t pick you up?”

“She’s sick. That’s why I came.”

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

They rolled through another intersection, and Nio saw boarded houses and a third roadblock and a fishing boat on top of a liquor store. A man on the roof had a hand on his head like he was trying to figure out how to get it down.

“What the heck happened here?”

Del pointed the opposite way. Nio turned and wondered how she could’ve missed it. Far away, on a bluff near the horizon, a banded deep core mining platform straddled a hill like a four-legged god. Its massive pillars and broad, sail-like protrusions caught the red of the setting sun.

And then it was gone. The truck exited the intersection and the platform disappeared behind more houses, half of which were empty. Nio could only catch glimpses of it between the trees and electrical wires.

“Deep crust miner,” he said. “Pulls up rare metals. Stuff with funny names. Bitterbase or something.”

“Bitterbase?” She almost laughed. “You mean Ytterbium? Or Ferropericlase?”

He studied her again. “You don’t look like a mining engineer.”

“What do they look like?”

“More facial hair, for one. You work up there?” he asked skeptically.

“Nope. Never seen one before.”

Unlike oil platforms, which rose no more than a couple hundred feet in the air, the deep core miner was nearly a skyscraper. But since it had similar proportions to its oceangoing cousins, the winds at altitude were a serious problem. Where an oil rig could be boxy and exposed, a deep-crust driller was louvered and aerodynamic, including two large adjustable metal sails that rose in parallel from a shell-shaped center mass. Red lights spaced evenly along the ridge of the sails blinked in alternating intervals. Nio could just make out the white of a massive corporate logo.

“So, you just happen to know about funny metals?” Del asked.

“I know about lots of things.”

“Here for the big show?”

“Show?”

“Moving day.” He nodded again toward the intermittently visible platform.

“They move that thing? How?”

“Same way we got the amazing floating donut.” He reached for the letter on the dash and handed it to her. “We all get one.”

The embossed seal of the State of South Dakota sat proudly at the top. Nio unfolded the paper and read aloud.

“This letter is to remind you that from 11:00 p.m. on April 23rd until 3:00 a.m. on the 24th, Central Daylight Time, the gravity in the vicinity of Long Lake will be reduced between sixty and eighty-five percent. Water and power services across Brown, Campbell, Corson, Dewey, Edmunds, Faulk, McPherson, Potter, and Walworth Counties will be suspended from 10:00 p.m. in the evening until such time as the region is deemed safe. No evacuations are ordered. However, the Long Lake area remains closed and you are urged to secure any loose belongings weighing under 30 lbs. and to remain indoors. Persons wishing to apply for relocation—”

She stopped and folded the paper again. That at least answered the question of why the latest victim was way out in the middle of nowhere. It would be easy to hide in all that chaos.

“Wait.” She scowled. “Anti-grav emitters are outlawed.” It was half-statement, half-question.

“They are.” Del nodded. “But international mining conglomerates get special exemptions.” He squinted at her skeptically. “Sure you’re not here for the move? Protest, maybe?”

She smiled. “You think I’m a protester?”

“We get them, along with the odd tourist or two. Supposedly you can see the legs light up. Gotta stay up late, though.” He leaned forward to look up at the darkening sky. Light was fading. “When they planned it, it wasn’t supposed to be this cold.”

“Sounds riveting. But I’ll have to pass.”

“Then how do you know what ferroperiscope is, or whatever?”

She smirked at his intentional mispronunciation. “Interested in geochemistry or just making conversation?”

“Neither. I guess I just wanna know what’s so important two people had to die.”

“Die?” Nio looked up and down the frozen street. Hardly anything traveled. “Is that why everyone’s packing up?”

“Couple arcs cut through town the other night. You shoulda been here. Can’t even be sure of the ground under our feet anymore. Now they can turn that off, too.”

He noticed Nio’s scalp then but quickly pointed north in a clear effort to avoid staring at the six oval scars just visible under the flat stubble of her hair.

“There’s three,” he explained as Nio ran a hand across her head involuntarily. “One across the border in North Dakota, one out west in the badlands, and that one, about fifty miles out. Ever since they started drilling, there’ve been tremors, which is apparently what triggered the emitter ‘anomaly.’ Or that’s the story. Two dead, though, so they’re moving it west while they figure out what to do.”

Nio watched the town pass. It seemed so ordinary. “That’s terrible.”

“So?” Del asked, waiting.

“So, what?”

“What is it?”

“You mean ferropericlase? It’s a kind of iron oxide.”

“Rust?”

Nio nodded. “Same as on your truck.”

“I’ll have you know this is a Chevy and it’s a classic.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, wait, people died so they could mine rust?”

“Not exactly. Iron oxide crystallizes at very high temperatures and pressures, like hundreds of thousands of atmospheres.”

“Sounds like a lot.”

“The human body can handle maybe five. Deep in the earth’s crust though, rust forms crystals, sort of like table salt, which conduct electricity in one orientation only. Otherwise, it’s actually a good insulator. That’s really important in certain applications of solid state physics.”

“Such as?”

“Well, if you bind ytterbium ions to an electrosensitive enzyme that—”

“An enzyme? Like something organic?”

“Yeah. Like how hemoglobin binds iron. The enzyme changes configuration to either inhibit or encourage quantum tunneling. That creates a quantum logic gate. If you stack a bunch of biomechanical wafers like that, you get a 3D quantum matrix similar to what they use for the Shri-class intelligences.”

“I thought the big treaty said we’re not making any more of those.”

“Well, no one really knows what the Chinese are doing, but whatever it is, I doubt it’s with rare earths from North America.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“Research. Ostensibly, everyone’s cooperating to avoid another AI arms race, but they still want to be the first to design the next class. That’s all Shri Brahma does actually: contemplate consciousness on behalf of various research groups.”

After a moment of silence, she turned to see the smirk on his face.

“You sure you’re not an engineer?” he asked.

“Ha. Would I be taking the bus? But what about you, cowboy?” she asked quickly. “Been here your whole life?”

“Naw. Moved here in junior high. Had a chance at double-A ball.”

It was his turn to notice the look on her face. “You don’t know what that is,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Wow.” Del stopped at a red light. He leaned back to examine her again in mock seriousness. “You really aren’t from here. Who doesn’t know about football?”

She shrugged.

“Come on. You gotta tell me.”

“I grew up in Taiwan,” she said after a heavy sigh.

“Taiwan?” He paused as if to contemplate a missing punchline. “Can I say you don’t look even a little Chinese?”

“Because I’m not.”

“And you don’t have an accent.”

“It was an international school. All English.”

“Do you also speak . . . whatever they speak in Taiwan?”

“Taiwanese.” She smiled again. “Yes. I do.”

The light changed, and Del drove in silence for a moment. “I blew it, didn’t I?”

“Blew what?”

“You’re smart and know about geochemistry and shit and I don’t even know what folks speak in Taiwan.”

“I know very little about geochemistry. But hold on . . . Were you hitting on me?”

He laughed once. “That bad, huh?”

“No, it’s just . . .”

It was all wrong. He wasn’t modulating romantically, which meant that whatever he was after, it wasn’t a date. Nio had been warned not to trust anybody. But she hadn’t really taken it seriously. She assumed a town like that wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous as anything she was used to.

Del waited. “It’s just I ain’t got no game. That it?”

“No. I didn’t say that.”

Silence.

“Then what?”

“You were right.” She pointed ahead. “Looks like we’re five minutes from everywhere. You can let me out here.”

Del slowed and pulled to a stop in front of three blocks of aging, cheaply built ’20s apartments. A pile of planks and downed branches in the corner of the parking lot was topped in mounds of snow. Hanging inside a second-floor window, back-lit so it was clearly visible even at night, was the red, green, and yellow Kekistani flag.

“You sure I can’t interest you in a not-entirely-terrible dinner?” he asked. “This town’s gonna get really dead in a couple hours.”

“Worried about me?” Nio opened the door and stepped down carefully. Her heavy unlaced boots nearly disappeared in the slush.

“How do you know I’m not just trying to get in your pants?” he joked.

“You’re not,” she insisted.

“So, you’re psychic, too, is that it?”

She waited for an explanation, but Del only shrugged.

“Come on,” Nio urged. “I told you where I was from.”

He exhaled slowly and looked down the road. “I saw you get off the bus. People like you come out here, they’re one of two things: lost . . . or trouble.”

“Which one am I?”

“I was hopin’ lost. Why you think I offered the ride?”

Nio smiled. “And now?”

He glanced to the flag. “Nothing good happens here. I mean it.”

“I believe you. See ya around, cowboy.”

She shut the door. But Del didn’t pull away immediately—not until the man buying drugs under the stairs of the adjacent building completed his transaction. He glanced once at Nio’s bare head as he left. Then he glanced at the man in the truck keeping an eye on her.

A cracked sign directed her to the top of a concrete staircase, where her destination, apartment 2A, sat facing the side street. Nio turned a corner and lifted her hand to knock. She stopped as soon as she saw the door.

It was open. Just a crack.

Del’s engine rumbled, and Nio turned her head just in time to see his taillights disappear around a corner in the dark. She shut her eyes. If she concentrated, she could just make out a single pulsing spiral emanating from inside the unit. Female, if she had to guess. Whoever she was, she was throwing off waves of nervous energy.

There Should Be Unicorns by The Flaming Lips.

Nio knocked weakly. “Hello?”

“Who’s there?” a young woman called from another room. It was followed by frantic scrambling and what sounded like the handling of a firearm.

“We spoke earlier. Online. You asked for my help.”

“How did you get in?”

“The door was open.”

There was a pause, and Nio slowly pushed the door. It creaked.

“I have a gun! Just . . . just go away.”

“I came a long way,” Nio urged.

After spiking, the woman’s cycles were gradually decreasing, and Nio took a cautious step in.

“I just wanna help.”

Nothing.

“Please.” Nio recited the word. “That’s what you said. Please.”

A striking young woman with vivid amethyst hair appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. Her sky-blue skin had just enough lavender to keep it from looking like a joke. Her eyes were solid fuchsia, as were her lips, and she had short, blunted devil horns in her forehead. In her hands, she clutched a .357 revolver.

“Why would anyone come all the way out here just to help?”

She said it like a skeptical teenager. Nio guessed she wasn’t older than 20. She opened her arms instinctively to show she was unarmed.

“It’s kind of a long story. But I just want to help. I promise.”

The devil woman shifted nervously, and a blue tail appeared from behind her legs.

“Impressive,” Nio said. “Graft?”

She nodded once.

It was a kind of semi-permanent cosplay. She was meant to be Gogo Ichigo, a digital persona popular with post-pubescent boys. Gogo, whose last name meant strawberry in Japanese, was a color-changing succubus that bounced around in revealing clothes as if oblivious to the effect it had on her fans. A movie had been released the previous year in which she fought crime with her sexual-occult powers. The young woman’s mod was completely realistic, which also meant very expensive. She was certainly showing it off, even in the cold, with tight cutoff jeans, heeled knee-high boots, and a tank top that wasn’t much larger than a bikini. Her arms were stuffed into a winter coat but she kept it off her shoulders, like she was perpetually about to disrobe.

“What happened to your head?” she asked Nio. “Did you have cancer or something?”

A bald man with translucent skin appeared in the doorway and stopped, surprised. Nio could see the orbs of his eyes through his eyelids, the shadow of his nasal septum through his nose, the outline of his teeth through his lips. His facial arteries throbbed like wriggling worms as they branched asymmetrically across the sides of his face. Same for the veins in his scalp. The rest of him was covered in black clothing, like a mortician.

“Squid protein,” Nio noted.

“Yeah,” he said like he was tired of people mentioning it. He glanced between the women like he wasn’t sure what to do. There was a bag of weed in his hands, and he stuffed it into his jacket.

“You left the door open!” the devil-woman snapped.

“I just went around the corner.”

She stormed over and slammed it shut. There were five locks on the inside. She turned them all.

“This is Jay,” she said finally, motioning to the translucent mortician. “I’m Truly.”

“Nio.”

“Nye-oh,” the guy repeated, in that way everyone did.

“She’s here to help.” Truly said. She motioned to the bedroom. “Becks is in here.”

Colorful Christmas lights had been tacked across the otherwise empty walls, and they gave the bedroom a neon glow. Judging from the empty fixture in the ceiling, it was the only source of light. A large purse sat atop a small duffel in the corner, and Truly tossed the heavy revolver on top. A lone winter coat hung in the closet. The only furniture was a mattress on the floor next to a space heater with throbbing coils. A large-breasted woman in jeans laid on her bare chest, motionless. Her hands hung over the sides of the bed like she’d been strangled. A cluster of empty water bottles and used tissues were scattered to one side. On the other, three rows of crystals had been laid neatly in a spoke pattern. A large quartz spire sat vertically at the focus of the arc.

“Are they helping?” Nio asked.

The woman on the bed looked like a sculpture of a corpse. Except for the upper right side of her back, the whole of her skin was unnaturally white and pocked with dark veins, giving it an uncanny resemblance to marble statuary. But there was some kind of large lesion over her shoulder blade. The flesh was red and swollen and had erupted in a dome of large, opaque cysts, like fish eyes, the largest of which was two inches across.

“That’s worse than the pictures you posted.” Nio unsnapped her jacket in one pull and unrolled her bag.

“What’s that?” Jay asked.

“Army surplus medic’s kit,” she explained. “Picked it up on the way.”

She studied the young woman’s face, which was stunningly beautiful. She seemed catatonic. Her pale, blue-white eyes were open but took no notice of the stranger examining her.

“Are her eyes part of the mod?”

“Yes,” Truly answered.

“Same for the alabaster skin?”

“What’s that?”

“Skin that looks like porcelain.”

Truly nodded.

Turning human skin a primary color was easy. You simply injected the upper dermis with a CRISPR solution that caused the epidermal cells to express an otherwise harmless enzyme that acted on any of a number of naturally occurring carbon-rings—reducing them or adding a methyl group as necessary. But primary colors were loud and unsightly and people only used them to roleplay Star Trek aliens. Subtle secondary colors required mixing. Vividness and opacity were achieved by including operons—genes that control the expression of other genes—in the modified DNA to regulate the amount of each coloration enzyme. In the Truly’s case, it meant light methylation with the barest hint of hemoglobin reduction. It was a real art, largely developed by home modders, and easy to get wrong. The internet was full of disaster pictures: kids with more ambition than sense who downloaded specs for someone else’s skin tone and turned themselves an awful shade of puke green just in time for prom.

“Here.” Nio held up a pair of surgical masks. “Put these on.”

“Why?” Truly snapped. “What’s wrong?”

“Just a precaution. Looks like you guys might’ve downloaded a virus. Who was the artist?”

“Just this guy we know.”

Below her left shoulder, a two-inch fleshy stub erupted from a round wrinkle over her scapula. It dangled downy feathers like autumn leaves preparing to fall. It was surrounded by a pentagram of handwritten hexadecimals.

Nio slipped a mask over her face and latex gloves over her hands, then she pressed a needle into a rubber-topped glass vial.

“What is that?” Jay asked meekly.

“Just saline. I wanna see if there’s a reaction. This might hurt a little,” she told the girl.

When she didn’t respond, Nio inserted the needle to one side of the lesion. The girl drew breath sharply but didn’t flinch. Nio wondered how much she could feel. Her skin was stiff and dense. Nio had to squeeze the plunger hard to inject even a small amount of saline. When nothing happened, she removed the needle and felt the girl’s back with her fingers. It was stiff and rubbery, like cartilage.

“It’s calcifying her.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s not in a stupor.”

Nio leaned close to the girl’s face. Her eyes were bright. They moved just slightly toward Nio.

“Jesus . . .”

“What is it?” Truly asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s probably very difficult and painful for her to move.”

Truly covered her mouth with both hands. “You—you mean she’s awake!”

Nio nodded. “How long has she been like this?”

“Since last night.”

“Do you have any lotion?”

“In my purse,” she said excitedly. “I need to keep my skin moist or—”

“Get it. Is she on any medication?” Nio put the needle back in the bag and prepared another.

“We got her some oxy,” Jay explained as Truly walked to the kitchen. “For the pain.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Do you know if she has any allergies?”

When there was no answer, Nio turned. Truly was staring at her friend and swaying back and forth. There was a tiny bottle of Cetaphil in her hand. She wiped the tear that fell. The drop was luminescent, as were the pools under her eyes. If she were true to character, all of her bodily fluids would glow in the dark.

“We’re gonna need a lot more than that,” Nio suggested.

“I think there’s some in her car,” Jay said in place of his friend. Nio could see the muscles of his lips contort when he spoke. The pulsing arteries of his face revealed his heart was beating fast. “I’ll get it.”

Nio could tell he wanted an excuse to leave. She heard the jingle of keys followed by the sound of the door opening and closing. That time, he locked all five locks.

“What about drugs?”

“Black dust,” Truly said. “Last weekend. And weed. Almost every day.”

“Alcohol?”

“Not since last night. No, wait. Two nights ago.”

Nio cleaned the needle with an alcohol swab and prepared another injection.

“This is an anesthetic,” she told the girl on the bed. “You may feel a little sleepy in a moment, but I need you to try and stay awake, okay?”

The girl blinked as if in slow motion, and Nio tried not to grimace on her behalf. She inserted the needle in several places around the cyst, injecting a little each time. Past the hard skin, the girl’s flesh felt normally soft, which suggested the altered keratin was only being expressed in her dermis and the rest of her organs might be working fine.

The room was quiet as Nio waited for the anesthetic to take effect.

“Becks . . .” she repeated the name. “That short for something?”

“Beckham,” Truly breathed.

“That’s pretty.”

“We didn’t know what to do. I have money.” She pulled out a wad of crumpled bills from her jacket and held it out like it was the plague.

Dancers, Nio thought. Hardly anyone else used cash.

“We can talk about that later. Let’s get the lotion on her and get her to a hospital.”

Truly didn’t move. “We can’t go to the hospital.”

“We can’t leave her like this.”

“You said you could fix her!”

“I said I could help. She needs a hospital. They have machines that can sequence an anti-retro-viral.”

Nio poked Beckham’s hard skin several times with a finger. There was no response, which suggested the anesthetic had worked. She dug in her bag for an aspiration needle, which came in two pieces. She screwed the 8-inch metal tip onto the injector.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to drain the cysts first, get whatever is in there out of her.”

There was a loud blow on the door, powerful enough to break several of the locks, and Truly jumped back. Nio heard a chain fall loose and dangle over the wood. A second blow immediately followed the first. Nio stood as Truly ran for the duffel.

The third blow ripped the hinges from the wall.

Intro to The Zero Signal, a Science Crimes Division Mystery, available May 2021!

(Art) The Amazing Acrylics of Akihiro Higuchi

This is a companion to last week’s post of fantasy art by Theo Stylianides, who imagined an alternate history where Japanese samurai adorned themselves in the armor of giant insects (and even rode them as mounts).

Fine artist Akihiro Higuchi has done the opposite. He has adorned real beetles in the style of Japanese acrylic using the traditional characters, motifs, and imagery of his homeland. The result is astounding and highlights once again the deep connection between Japanese culture and nature.

(Fiction) Agencies

“Is it moving?” Quinn asked the helicopter pilot. He had to shout into his headset to be heard over the noise. It was a small copter, and the blades were not far above the wide canopy.

“Outward, about 1500 meters an hour in all directions,” the man shouted back. “More toward the east.”

Quinn moved into the second seat to look out the east-facing side. The dark sky overhead threatened rain, which was already falling in sheets near the horizon, obscuring what lay beyond. Below them, a cluster of police cruisers and firetrucks flashed their lights at a barricade, keeping people at bay.

“And it was first reported this morning?” Quinn asked.

“That’s what they told me, but you’d have to confirm that with HQ.”

Quinn nodded and moved back into the other seat. From that height, the anomaly seemed like the iris of a massive human eye. A bulbous outer mass, like semi-metallic charcoal, traced a furrowed oval almost two miles across at its widest point. It sloped down quickly at its inner edge and dissipated to a web of interconnected strands, like heavy vines, that grew ever more sparse until they all but disappeared amid the colorless landscape of the interior. At first glance, everything inside the massive oval seemed like it had been burned. But it hadn’t. The sparse trees still had leaves. Tufts of grass sprouted along a creek bed. But all of it was the color of graphite, which made it hard to discern any detail.

“Can we get closer?” Quinn asked.

“Sorry.” The pilot shook his head. “No can do.”

“And we don’t know where it started?”

The pilot simply pointed. Since the anomaly’s growth was uneven, there was no clear starting point. Anywhere inside roughly six square miles of sparsely wooded rural landscape could’ve been the point of origin—or none, Quinn realized, if it had migrated from somewhere else in the night.

“Comm check,” a technician from the base said over the radio. Her voice crackled with static.

“Comms holding,” the pilot replied.

“Problem with the radio?” Quinn shouted over the staccato chatter of the blades.

“It’s slightly magnetic. Messes with the navigation and radio. I have orders—this is as low as we go.”

Quinn tried to hide his frustration. “Then what exactly was I supposed to see?”

“That.” The pilot pointed.

To the left, in the middle of a field far inside the anomaly, several jagged spires grew at odd angles from a central point. Immediately after noticing them, Quinn spotted several more, smaller structures that his eyes had mistaken for dead trees.

“What are they?” he asked, but the pilot only shrugged.

Quinn raised his phone and used the camera to zoom. The motion of the helicopter made it hard to focus, but he was able to get a closer view. The dark, angular spires were very thin and grew at a 60-degree angle, zigzagging in a kind of saw-blade pattern as they radiated up and out from a central point on the ground. Although the lines occasionally merged and separated, they kept moving outward, forming a basic crystal shape. Each “shard” appeared to be flat, but perpendicular to the ground, like a knife—as if giant shaking hands had traced invisible crystals in the air.

“Used to be a cell tower there,” the pilot told him.

“Used to be? What happened to it?”

The man shrugged, and the two sat quietly for a moment as the helicopter flew a thousand feet over the foliage. Toward the southeast horizon, sheets of rain fell like drapes, but it was moving off and Quinn could just make out the gray silhouette of high-tension power lines, beyond which was a smattering of houses and single-story structures.

“You said it’s moving faster to the east?”

The pilot nodded.

“How long before it reaches the town?”

“At this rate, about four hours.”

“Not much time, then. Better take us down.”

“Hold on,” the man objected as the helicopter continued in its flight around the massive oval. “You haven’t seen it yet.”

“Seen what?”

“Just watch. Shouldn’t be long now.” The pilot pointed to a digital timer, which was counting down the last few seconds in red digits.

Quinn turned back to the window and examined flat tendrils of the charcoal-colored anomaly again. Parts of it reflected light from the bleak, overcast sky with a faint rainbow sheen, like a film of oil on water.

Suddenly, the entire surface of the circular outer mass lifted in spikes, like fine scales, which swayed back and forth. Then it shook. Ripples ran down the entire length as static burst over the radio and the lights inside the helicopter flickered. The bulbous anomaly surged outward. And that was it.

The pilot smiled back at Quinn.

“Jesus.” He swallowed dry. “What the heck was that?”

“I thought that’s why you guys were here,” the man joked.

The helicopter banked hard to return, and Quinn had to press his hand to the low canopy to brace himself. As they flew over a lonesome house on a rural road, he watched a scared family being evacuated into the back of a white van. A child clutching a colorful toy looked up at the helicopter and turned to watch until it was out of sight. Quinn saw a large propane tank in the back yard. It would soon be swallowed, along with the family’s possessions—whatever couldn’t fit in their hands.

The chopper landed in a clearing outside a cluster of tents and vehicles that served as a temporary crisis center. The makeshift headquarters stood on a small rise overlooking one part of the anomaly’s path, along with the nearby town. State police and firemen mixed with federal agents from the FBI and FEMA, who glanced at Quinn as he passed. A few did a double-take and smirked at his uniform.

He pulled out his phone and asked Ezra where he was.

STILL ABOUT 20 MIN AWAY

WHY SO LONG?

There was a long gap.

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO ANSWER THAT

And then:

I DIDN’T STOP

A pair of military helicopters burst over a rise and flew low over the encampment on their way to the anomaly. Quinn watched them go, as the child had done, before making his way to the mobile HQ at the far edge of the camp, where it sat overlooking an open field bordering the high-tension lines. A full-bird colonel and her two lieutenants stepped out, and Quinn waited for them to leave before making his way up the steps. They didn’t even look at him.

Inside, Special Agent Roger Erving of the FBI stared grimly at a bank of screens. Quinn stopped when he saw him. His old boss turned and noticed Quinn’s uniform, and for a moment neither man spoke. Quinn looked down at his clothes. The arms and upper chest were a very pale burnt yellow. The rest was dark blue-gray, except for a matching faint yellow stripe that ran down the pant legs. The material’s thick weave was supposed to be airtight, fire-retardant, and tear- and acid-resistant, and it looked like it. It was stiff and unflattering. To announce the new agency’s presence, the letters SCD were emblazoned boldly on the back.

Erving held out his hand. “Surprised to see me, Agent Quinn?”

He was shorter than Quinn remembered, but no less imposing for it. His hands were large for his body, and he had a deep baritone that Nio had described as a jazz DJ’s.

“No, sir,” Quinn said, reverting reflexively to the only word he had ever used to address the man. “Just wondering how you got here so quick.”

Special Agent Erving was based out of New York and oversaw the Bureau’s high-profile cases. Quinn’s career at the FBI hadn’t been remarkable enough to earn him such a  prestigious placement. He’d been based out of Minneapolis and was only seconded to Erving’s team as a kind of babysitter. Still, in their short time working together, Quinn had developed considerable respect for the man.

“It’s molting again,” the Asian woman behind Erving warned. She had her hair pulled in a pony tail and wore a jacket that said FEMA.

On the main screen, the border of the anomaly rose in spikes again. Then it shuddered and jolted forward.

“Molting?” Quinn asked.

“That’s what we call it,” the woman explained. Her name tag said Nguyen. “The good news is, the time between episodes is gradually increasing. We think it might be slowing. You the guy from Science Control?”

“Orlando Quinn. Crimes Division.” He stuck out a hand but the woman didn’t bother.

“Do we think this was a crime?”

“Incident Commander Nguyen has operational authority,” Erving told him.

“Have you been able to get a sample?”

Nguyen smiled wryly. “Tried.”

“But?”

“All our probes get eaten.”

“Eaten?”

Erving nodded as if to confirm the tale. “Everything except the glass. So far, all we know is that it’s slightly magnetic. And it’s growing.”

“What about knocking a piece off somehow?”

“Tried it,” Nguyen said. “We whacked it, torched it. The Bureau even shot it.”

“And?”

“The surface is like kinetic sand,” Erving explained. “Bullets make a brief dent but then just get absorbed and everything goes back to how it was.”

“And the blowtorch?” Quinn asked.

Special Agent Erving shook his head in the negative. “It’s at least partially metallic. Seems to disperse heat throughout its mass.”

“So what you’re saying is we have nothing.”

“One of our pilots noted it’s eating the litter off the ground. There were some old washing machines in a ditch that are apparently no longer there.”

“Environmental group, maybe? Returning the land to its natural state?”

“That’s why the Bureau is here,” Nguyen drolled. “But so far, we have no evidence this is a terrorist act.”

“What happens when it reaches the high-tension lines?”

“It’s not the lines we’re worried about. It’s the hydroelectric plant.” She pointed to a map on a screen. “Here. Four miles down the road. There are ten thousand homes, several hundred businesses, five hospitals, and a bunch of child care and nursing facilities in the flood plain. If the dam goes, a whole lot of people are going to lose everything. And that’s assuming they can all be evacuated safely and on time.”

In the brief moment of silence that followed, it was clear that no one in the narrow room expected such a large-scale evacuation to come off without incident.

“So that’s your line in the sand,” Quinn said.

Nguyen nodded.

“What’s the plan?”

“As it happens,” Erving interjected, “the plant that builds the MOAB-C is in McAlester, Oklahoma, about an hour away by air. The National Guard have a C-130 ready to go.”

“You’re gonna blow it up?”

“Part of it,” Nguyen said. “It’s already larger than the blast radius of any conventional weapon. But if we’re lucky, we might be able to divert it away from the dam.”

That explained the military choppers. Quinn thought about the child he saw clutching the toy.

“How many houses in the blast area?”

“Too many,” Erving said, turning away.

“We’re evacuating now,” Nguyen added quickly.

“What about the interior?” Quinn asked. “Do we know it’s clear? Have we checked for missing persons?”

“That could take hours. There isn’t time.”

“So you’re just going to drop a bomb?”

“No. What we’re going to do is prevent the dam from failing.”

“Word is,” Erving said calmly, “you all are better equipped to analyze this kind of thing.”

He meant the Crimes Division’s “toys,” as Kripke called them, most of which were prototypes.

“Equipped or not,” Quinn said, “we can’t do anything from here.”

Nguyen crossed her arms. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m saying someone’s gotta go in there, make sure your drop zone is clear, and try to get a sample so we can figure out what we’re dealing with.”

“In case you didn’t notice,” she replied in terse syllables, “there isn’t enough time between pulses for an air drop. Or an extraction. I’m not going to lose any more aircraft.”

“We lost three drones already,” Erving explained.

Quinn shrugged. “Have to find another way in, then.”

“How?” Nguyen scoffed. “We have a viable plan. I’m not going to jeopardize—”

“You’re already jeopardizing! With all due respect, ma’am, for all you know, there could be half a dozen people trapped in there. We owe it to these people to look.”

“We owe it to the tens of thousands more in that flood plain to stop this thing here, while we still can.”

“I’m not asking to change the plan, Commander. Just give us as long as you can. That thing is, what, three, four hours from the town? If we don’t find anything—”

“I’m sorry. It’s a little late for that.”

“And why is that?” Quinn asked sarcastically. “Why weren’t we called earlier?”

Neither Nguyen nor Erving answered. Instead, the Incident Commander pointed toward the anomaly.

“That border is two meters high. It stretches ten meters back. How do you plan to get in without touching it? Pole vault?”

“I might have a way.”

“And what happens if you get trapped? Before we lost contact, the drone footage suggested that that web, or whatever it is, is constantly shifting. Without radio communication, we’ll have no way to know if you’re safe. We’re 30 minutes from final evac. If we drop within the hour, we still have time for another shot if something goes wrong.”

“So don’t wait,” Quinn said. “Get a second plane in the air.”

“You don’t get it. You’re not going in there, Agent Quinn. I’m sorry. That’s final.”

“I don’t think that’s your call,” Erving interjected.

Nguyen looked confused.

“The new law is very clear,” Erving explained. “As subject matter experts, the SCA takes lead on any unknown technological threats, same as the CDC has point on pathogens. Or are you gonna try to tell me that thing’s natural?”

Nguyen’s lips pursed. “It was you that called them. Wasn’t it?”

Quinn looked to Erving for a reaction, but the man was cool.

“This kind of thing is exactly why that law was passed.”

“How long can you give me?” Quinn asked.

“You can’t be serious,” Nguyen objected. “What is it with you guys and your macho bullshit?”

“Commander Nguyen is not wrong that we’re cutting this tight,” Erving said softly. “Anything more than two hours and we’re in jeopardy.”

“Two hours.” Quinn sighed. “I don’t suppose you wanna tell me why we’re here with only two hours to spare?”

Erving was stone-faced.

“Fine. You can explain it to Dr. Chang later.”

Incident Commander Nguyen turned to the window behind them, which was partially obstructed by a tall antenna. “Where’s the rest of your team, Agent Quinn? Or are you going in by yourself?”

It was a fair question, but since Quinn didn’t have an answer, he kept his jaw clenched and exited the mobile command center. He pulled his phone outside, just as Erving called his name from the door.

“You weren’t supposed to be here at all,” he said grimly.

Quinn nodded. “Understood.”

Then he shut it.

A woman with a clipboard and a FEMA jacket hurried past Quinn and into an open-sided tent full of emergency kits. Each was packed inside a small red case with a shoulder strap.

“Excuse me,” Quinn called. “What are those for?”

There were stacks of them.

“For the evacuees. Why?”

Quinn stepped inside the tent and unzipped one of the red bags. He pulled out one of two bottles of water.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

“I need to borrow one of these,” he said.

“Who are you?”

Quinn saw a pallet of sandbags on the far side of the mobile HQ. “And one of those.” He pointed.

“Hold on. What agency are you from?”

But he was already walking away. He tore the sandbag open on the far side of a parking lot and let its dry contents fall into an empty water bottle. As it filled, he heard a slight peep behind him and turned to see a fancy self-driving rental car pull to a stop next to an ambulance. Ezra was on his phone in the back seat. His soft face looked all of twelve years old.

“Where’s your uniform?” Quinn asked as the skinny kid got out. He was still in his street clothes.

“Oh. I didn’t know if that was one of those things that we didn’t really—”

“Put it on,” Quinn ordered as he opened the ambulance. No was one inside, and he grabbed a roll of white surgical tape.

When he stepped out, he saw the woman with the clipboard talking to her supervisor. They were looking at him.

“Actually,” Quinn said, “go ask them for directions first.”

“Directions?”

“You can do that, right?” Quinn asked as he loaded everything into the soft-sided red case.

“Yes. It’s just. I don’t know where we’re going.”

“We need the quickest route to the far side of the anomaly. To the train tracks. That thing’s gonna cross a drainage tunnel sometime in the next thirty minutes or so.”

“Tunnel?” Ezra waited.

“I saw it from the air.” Quinn tossed the bag into the back seat of the car.

“But the car has a—”

“Map apps aren’t going to know that thing is here, so they can’t tell us what roads to avoid, or where the roadblocks are, can they?”

Quinn walked around to the driver’s seat and began tapping on the vehicle’s control screen. “Just ask them the fastest way to the train tracks. Please.”

“Um. Okay.”

After he had disabled the self-driving function, Quinn called the office switchboard and told Clo to get everyone on a teleconference in 30 minutes.

“Can you get satellite imagery?” he asked. “Do we have the hard line to NOAA yet?”

Clo saw something on her computer screen she didn’t like and cursed in French. “I’m not sure. I’ll try.”

“If you can get Trotsky a time series, he might be able to reverse-estimate a point of origin. Or narrow it down anyway.”

“Are you really going in there? With the kid?”

Quinn looked up to see him return. “You got a better idea?”

Ezra got in the car, somewhat flustered, and directed them south on a nearby state highway. After a mile, they turned west on a county road, where an enormous mechanical combine, like a dump truck on wheeled stilts, rolled through an interminable field of corn. There wasn’t a person in sight. The widespread automation of agriculture meant human farmers could compete on price and generally gave up mass monoculture to focus on the boutique market, accelerating the trend of slow, gradual depopulation of rural areas. That meant there was no one there to tell the machines to stop and seek safety, and they went about their work oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding around them.

Quinn slowed as the car approached a roadblock, but the deputy waiting must have been expecting them because he waved them on. Quinn raised a hand in greeting as they passed.

“You like to drive, don’t you?” Ezra asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the first thing you did when you got in the car was disable the self-driving AI.”

Quinn didn’t answer immediately. “Old habit, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was Bureau policy. You never knew when you’d have a chase, so we were required at all times to use law enforcement vehicles with a high-speed pursuit module. Where one was not available, which was most of the time, it either had to be manual or else have the option to disable the safe-driving protocols. I grew up driving, so manual was just easier. If I had my way, SCD would have the same policy.”

“I don’t know how to drive,” Ezra said. He opened his mouth to say more but stopped.

Quinn guessed, based on his face, that it was going to be something like “No one does.” Among young professionals, Quinn supposed, that was probably true.

“None of your friends drive?”

When Ezra shook his head, Quinn noticed him gripping the handle in the door.

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really?”

“Well. Maybe a little. Statistically, I mean.”

“Statistically? How does something statistically bother you?”

“I just meant it’s fine. If you trust yourself more.”

“Well, I’m glad I have your permission.”

Ezra laughed once, but being unsure if Quinn meant it as a joke, he stopped quickly and his face turned red.

After another quarter mile, the vehicle’s tires jiggled railroad tracks, and Quinn slowed and leaned forward to get a better view out the windshield.

“I think it’s this way,” he said, turning left onto the bumpy, sloped stretch of clearing that followed the tracks. The car tilted, and everything loose slid to the passenger’s side, including the red bag on the back seat.

“There.” Quinn pointed to an old farmer’s windmill poking over the tree line. The sail at the back had been pinned to the blades so that it no longer turned. “I saw that from the air.”

He put the car in park but didn’t move.

Ezra looked confused. “Are we going?”

“Look . . . I know you’re nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.”

Quinn stared at the kid’s hand clutching the plastic of the door.

Ezra let go. He looked down at his palm, moist with sweat.

“If you don’t think you can handle this,” Quinn said, “now would be the time to say so.”

“You don’t think I belong here, do you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re thinking it.”

Quinn took a long, deep breath and let it out. “It’s not that simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell you what. You tell me why you are here, and I’ll tell you what I mean.”

Ezra paused. “Aren’t we in a hurry?”

“Tell me,” Quinn insisted.

“You mean, why didn’t I go into the private sector?”

“I dunno. Does that have something to do with it?”

Ezra blushed again. “Sorry. It’s just my parents and everybody have been asking why I didn’t start my own company.”

“And?”

“I guess I’m just not excited to wake up every day for no other reason than to make a lot of money.”

“A lot of people would be happy just to make a little.”

“Yeah.” Ezra got quiet.

“I understand you’re gifted—”

“I’m not a genius. Or whatever.”

“Fine. Call it a rare skill. You wanna do something noble with it first, is that it?”

“I just don’t want my life to be only about money. I wanna do other things. Interesting things. I wanna help.”

Quinn snorted.

He caught himself when he saw Ezra’s face. “No offense, but not too many people would put ‘helping’ and ‘government work’ together.”

“But that’s what made this job so interesting,” Ezra objected, suddenly very engaged. “The department is totally new, so there’s a chance to do more than just administer policy. We get to interface with leaders in the industry and create something genuinely intelligent that could help people for a really long time—a model way to integrate science into society.”

“Yeah.” Quinn nodded solemnly. “It’s possible, I guess.”

Ezra saw his face. “Or maybe I’m wrong.”

“I don’t know what kind of recruitment speech Director Ogada gave you, but this is the reality. You wanna help people? This is how you do it. Not by ‘interfacing with industry leaders’ or letting your car chauffeur you from the airport at a safe speed. There are a lot of people counting on us right now. Not just any civilians that might be trapped inside that thing, or the families about to lose their homes, but our colleagues, too. They need us to come up with a better option than dropping a very large bomb. And fast.”

“Yeah . . .”

“You know who else is counting on you?” Quinn waited a moment for an answer. “Me.”

The car was quiet.

“I got a wife and a kid and another on the way. You really think I wanna go inside that thing? I dunno. Maybe you thought the world was appropriately staffed, that there were always enough people in every agency and they were all adequately trained for what they have to do and we’d be rolling up here like the Men in Black or something.”

“Who?”

“It’s not important. Point is, that’s not how the world works. Not at all. Like it or not, ready or not, this is the job you got. Right here. Because I can’t do this by myself. I need a partner. And I can’t go in there and try to figure this thing out while also holding your hand. So if you wanna quit, do it now.”

Ezra pressed his hands together and looked down at the floor.

“Why don’t you take a moment to think, okay?”

Quinn got out and immediately heard a distant but familiar fluttering sound. He looked up to see a large media drone hovering some two thousand feet in the air. It wasn’t directly over the anomaly, but it was close—closer than Erving and Nguyen would like, Quinn was sure. Not a minute later, the same helicopter that had given him the tour appeared to move the drone back.

The passenger side door opened while Quinn inventoried the trunk. He heard Ezra putting on his uniform.

“For your information,” Quinn called, “the reason I disabled the self-drive was because this whole area has been declared an emergency. By design, the car wouldn’t have driven us anywhere near here. Machines don’t keep you safe. They keep their investors from being sued. That’s all.”

The contents of the trunk was the reason Ezra had to escort the rental car from the airport. It contained their equipment, nearly half a million dollars packed inside a portable high-tech forensic kit. In a separate locked case next to it were a pair of spherical drones, each roughly the size of a large grapefruit. Quinn touched the top of one and it lit up and rose into the air.

“On that note,” he continued, “we both need to keep in mind that very little of this stuff has been tested in the field.”

“So . . . what do we do?” Ezra’s voice shook.

He stood in the grass in his stiff, new uniform.

Quinn turned the drone off and stuffed both of them inside the kit. Then he converted the case into a backpack by opening a pair of Velcro strips on the bottom and removing the padded straps tucked underneath. He handed it to Ezra and slammed the trunk shut.

“Go through this and take out anything that isn’t shielded. There’s no sense in carrying anything that will just get fried by those pulses.”

“But . . . how are we going to get in?”

Quinn looked up at the darkening sky. “In’s not the problem,” he said softly. “What you should be asking is how we’re gonna get out.”

Chapter from my WIP, the second Science Crimes Division mystery. Get the first here.

cover image by Klay Abele

The Unreal

We thought we would invade and colonize cyberspace. In truth, the opposite is happening. We’re far from being able to transmute matter, of course, but ideas, rendered digitally, continue to creep over the border.

We’re going to have to start using unreal the way we use undead: to mean that which is not real but which is indistinguishable from it.

Check out these unreal photorealistic renders by Bitter.