James Osiris Baldwin's Blog, page 6

A rather more delicate sketch of Sapheda

Chapter Seven

Mike sat back warily as his Bible shunted out to one side of the display ring, making room for the Homeland loading screen. Homeland was the game they all played together—every soldier had his team on the servers. Even the Watchers played. It was good practice for the real thing, kept them sharp. He saw Symon’s username and number in the server list, and when his lean insectoid face came up into view, Mike relaxed a little.

“Got signage?” Symon held up a card as Mike loaded his character. A real card. Paper and ink.

The best ways to get around the Controllers, the Eyes of God, were primitive. The absolute best was a secure vidlink to a third-party device, like a camera, with no recording and an accompanying professional conversation. You got ink and paper and held up notes. Ink and paper had to be hand-made: the Sams made ink with urine, alcohol and burned boot leather, and their paper with mashed TP cut with cardboard, bleached and dried over the heating vents. It was thick and coarse, and the sheets were a dull blueish color from being scraped and reused over and over. For some reason, no one had ever been caught with a cam feed and signage, not that he knew of. Maybe the Host didn’t like to look at Nephilim for too long. Or maybe, they didn’t know how to read hard-copy. It was a learned skill passed down through generations of the Nephilim in Lord’s Cradle, from Alpha to Alpha, then from them to the squads.

Mike rose, still nude, and padded quickly and quietly across the cold tile floor to the shower block. He crouched down and reached behind the lockers. There was a vent in the wall, and inside that was a chipped out hole they had dug out to stash paper and other small contraband. Symon watched on anxiously from his room, tiny mantis pupils swimming in his huge green eyes. He wasn’t in his Terminal Suite, the huge chair that hooked him up to his command panel. He was in his private quarters. This little chat was cutting into his shut-eye.

When Mike had what he needed, he went into one of the shower stalls and set up his own video feed. He routed it through a gaming server on the network, the sort of place Purity Control was less likely to look. The corona split and rotated behind his head, exchanging some of its mass to build a larger holographic screen ahead of his face. He could keep the game to one side, his conversation with Symon to the other. Symon joined the map, a perfect simulacra of the New Guinea highlands, and they set their avatars to roam.

“Alright.” Mike wrote and held up the card, frowning. “What have you been telling the others?”

Symon had a hand-made quill of sorts. He bowed his head gracefully, and scrawled on his paper. Signing was a slow way to converse. Good, in some ways. It made you think about what you wanted to say.

“I’ve been hiding your squad history searches,” Symon wrote. His expression was grim as he held up the card, turned it over, and wrote his next line. “Every man in the squad has looked at the page re. #2’s disappearance. That sort of thing brings P.C down. I needed to say something to you… about that, and about Sam-A.”

Alpha? What the hell was he doing now? Mike scribbled a single word. “Why?”

“He has been making inquiries in the Deep Net.” Symon watched him steadily through the screen. “I am concerned.”

No. No… what the fuck was he thinking? Hacking into the Deep Net was very, very illegal. The churning anxious emptiness that he’d felt on finding Twofer gone from the squad photo returned, redoubled. Mike’s fingers shook. “Why the Hell has he done that?!”

“You know.” Symon watched him steadily through the screen.

Shit. Mike restlessly scruffed his hair. He could answer his own question: he knew what Alpha was thinking. Twofer was his soldier, his little brother. Alpha had fought and killed the other PatriotAlphas they’d been decanted with to win the right to lead them. He was a control freak, a perfectionist, and proud. The squad was all Alpha had in this place, other than the cold comfort of faith and the fear of God. Mike turned his card back to his first question, and tapped it, frowning. What HAD Symon been saying to them?

Symon glanced down. He paused to scrape his card clean. “I am reluctant to tell you. You will report.”

“I won’t.” Mike shook his head, and looked him dead in the eye. He’d report Symon alone in a heartbeat, but not Alpha. He’d never report Alpha.

The pinpoint iris in Symon’s huge green eyes flared and then contracted, just before he averted them again and bowed his head to write. When he ran out of space, he turned the card over and continued while Mike played on the other window, rubbing his hand over his lips and the back of his neck. When Symon finally held the card up, he had to bring it in close so that Mike could read the tiny writing.

“PC runs random performance scans on all units. Human and Neph. Samuel-2 was too smart, he asked too many questions. He was dwelling on deeply improper topics in the Deep Net, I can guess. I was told to maintain an independent terminal for him during the last jungle arena exercise. He was segregated for ‘re-education’.”

Symon held up a finger for him to wait, and wrote his next line. Mike thought he looked pensive, but his expressions were often hard to read: Watchers had no mouths: the lower half of his face was plated with chitin, with only a small slit. “I’m sorry, Mike. He’s probably dead.”

“You’re wrong. The K.C. says he ascended.” Mike shook his head as he held up his next card. “You’re committing BLASPHEMY.”

Symon shook his head. He paused to scrape his card, then write, while Mike bristled. His leaden fear had been flushed away by building, cold fury. He had butchered half a dozen simulated Pacific Alliance soldiers by the time Symon finished. “Please listen. You don’t know the things I do, S-M. You don’t live in the Lighthouse. I see and know things you are not supposed to know. ‘Re-education’ is one of those things. No one comes back.”

Mike didn’t like the look of those talky marks around ‘re-education’. They meant something wasn’t real. He knew what was real and what wasn’t, and he had been given all the education they needed on matters of salvation. He was in the middle of composing a furious reply when a puff of cold air brushed his skin: a shadow fell, and he jumped in place, looking sharply towards the doorway. It was action from the game: no one was there. No Controllers, no Templars. Not even Alpha. Just fear. “Bullshit. The Bible says that Nephilim can ascend. Successions 3:16, 3-4!”

“Whatever you think, Sam-A is putting himself in danger. I am trying to warn you.” Symon’s eyes narrowed. “They told me my brothers all went to R.E. All ‘saved’. I want to WARN you.”

He had to be lying. Twofer was in Yetzirah because the Knight-Captain and the Bible said so. This conversation had gone for too long.

“The Knight-Captain is the LORD.” Mike’s cheeks were hot. He wanted to throw the card at Symon’s buggy face.

“If you report me, I will be forced to confess. I will have no choice but to confess Sam-A’s activities.” Symon’s face hardened into an aloof, proud mask. “No matter what you think, he’s gone. Even if you believe #2 is safe in Yetzirah, transcendence is merely another form of death.”

“You piece of shit.” Mike held up his next sign and nearly crushed it when Symon shrugged. The Watcher began to scribble as fast as his thin little hands could move. Mike started to write down the appropriate verse, to SHOW him, but Symon was the faster writer and got his card up before Mike could. “Talk to Sam-A. Warn him. Don’t let him make the same mistake as #2.”

The feed cut. Mike logged out of the game, and then slammed his fist into the wall of the shower. “FUCK!”

It was several minutes before he was calm enough to carefully scrape the thick paper clean. He flushed the blue curls down the toilet, watching them spin, and then disappear. He felt dirtier than he ever had before. Even the guilt he felt after being fucked by Alpha felt better than this. For the first time, Mike truly understood why the Watchers lived in the Lighthouse. It was the same reason that the Host’s women lived in the Evehall: they were evil, weak of will, intellectual and envious.

Salvation was real. The chance was like a bright flame in counterpoint to the ever-present shadows of scourging and war, evidence that they still had hope. They prayed for it under Yetzirah’s white gleam when they were outside, at the chapel and their dormitory shine when they were on base. A few Graces, a session with the Chaplain, and perhaps they would soon act as if no one had ever gone at all.

“Six things does God hate… a lying tongue. Fucking hell, Symon. God hates liars.” He muttered aloud to the room, and heard the tinge of desperate hope in his own voice. If it was true that Alpha had gone where Symon said he had… he had committed a grievous sin. Mike HAD to report that, by law.

His palms grew tacky at the thought. What if the rest of them were doing it, too? His brothers, looking at things they had no right to look at, polluting themselves? He thought back to Sixie’s words, and the tired sour faces of the other Sams.

Mike had seen scourgings. They all had. Twenty two Samuels had been decanted from the labs. They lost three. Alpha had killed the other two PatriotAlphas to become leader of the squad. The other, Number Eighteen, had blasphemed and been questioned and scouraged in front of the squad. First he had started scratching, then moaning and then praying for forgiveness as his skin erupted in pinpricks of blood. His moans had turned to screams as huge gaps appeared in his flesh. Mike had watched numbly while his failed brother collapsed, writhing, burning, screaming as his bones were laid bare, his tissue disintegrated, his organs torn. All the Controller had done was lift and incline his fingers. Purity Control held the power of life and death in their long hands, and Alpha was a fool if he thought he’d escape their notice.

More Religious Crazy

Let’s not bring back drawing and quartering, okay?

I don’t plan on making these list posts a thing, but while you’re waiting for Chapter 7 of God Has Heard, here’s a bunch of random facts and research on Puritan and Calvinist Christianity. I learned these while researching the religious batshittery in England and America, and which also characterizes the UNAC in fictionalized form.

7 Random Facts about Calvinist Christianity

In the 17th Century, many people believed Satan was physically present – in demon form – and active on Earth. There were many claimed sightings of him.
Puritans attributed pretty much all misfortunes to the Devil: death, crop failures, social friction among the congregation. They also blamed his agents, who was generally anyone disabled, weird, or unlikable.
Instrumental music, dancing, and celebration of holidays such as Christmas and Easter were forbidden in Puritan times, as the festival traditions were known to have roots in Paganism. The only music allowed in these communities was the unaccompanied singing of hymns. Glorifying love and nature was considered to be heretical, because these were both things which were, by and large, considered to be evil.
Calvinists and Puritans were a cheerful bunch. The only thing they valued – other than religion and associated institutions, such as marriage and childrearing – was work. Toys and dolls were forbidden, as play was considered to be a frivolous waste of time. Children spent their time working alongside their parents as soon as they were capable.
Church didn’t just happen on weekends. Villagers were expected to go to the meeting house for three-hour sermons every Wednesday and Sunday.
Crimes were judged in a manner which nowadays would seem quite absurd. Most people were convicted based on ‘spectral evidence’. This was testimony of the afflicted, who claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was allegedly afflicting them.

The Completely Fucked Up Story of Jonathon Edwards

Jonathon Edwards was a Calvinist scholar, preacher and writer, and was responsible for one of the most messed up ‘revivals’ in American history. The TL;DR version is that he wrote and preached sermons so terrifying that people killed themselves out of desperation and fear, including his own uncle. They mostly killed themselves by starving themselves to death, and/or cutting their own throats.

 

 

 

Chapter Six

Lord’s Cradle. Two weeks before.

No one said a word about Twofer the morning after he disappeared, but there was a tension in the squad so dense that Mike could have cut it with a wire. He saw it in the taut jaws and wary eyes of his brothers, in their slow turned heads and hunched shoulders. They were barely ready for lineup when the door opened, and the Knight Lieutenant and his corporals entered the common area. As one, every Sam dropped to one knee, his right fist crossed over his heart. Mike averted his eyes. He was fresh out of the shower, but as the Host moved past him, their white uniforms rustling softly in the thick silence, he felt fresh sweat prickle on his lip and under his arms.

The Host went into their rooms—perfectly neat as always, thank God—and into the shrine. When they came out, the corporals drifted off towards the room that Twofer had shared with Sev and his fireteam, while the Lieutenant stayed outside, surrounded by the Sams. Alpha looked up when the rest didn’t dare to, sweeping the room with his eyes. “One-Six, Ten, go get the maundy basin and wash the Knight Lieutenant’s feet.”

There was no cry of ‘Sir yes Sir!’ for that order. Without a word, Sixie and Ten rose and saluted, and then hustled into the shrine to get the tools they needed. Mike held his place, torn between reverence and fear. The Templars were a day early for their regular inspection, and when the lesser Host emerged with a full satchel of something, he pressed his lips together in a thin line and hoped they did not pay him any mind.

The platoon sergeant worked them ferociously that morning. He heaped abuse, making them fight him, making them scream with the effort of obeying his direction. Mike was too exhausted to think by Yard. His feet felt like they were chained to blocks of stone that he had to jerk up with each step. None of the others were much better. There was only so much your healswarm could do against raw fatigue while you were awake. He kept their biofeeds live on his corona, recording their stats through the day. They were all stressed, according to the computer, and no one had slept well the night before.

After training, he watched Sev and Alpha walk together around the perimeter of the sunny dome where they decompressed, talking with bowed heads. The others broke into couples and fireteams, putting their backs to the yard overseer. Mike wandered between these small, disengaged groups, bearing witness. If morale dropped beyond a certain threshold, he was supposed to file a report. If he did, the Chaplain would take the entire squad apart for confession and questioning. Mike listened in to their conversations, but there was no mention of Twofer. All they talked about was getting back out into the jungle. That was something he understood: it was easier out there, with a gun in your hand and the wind in your hair, the enemy in front, God pushing you from a distance instead of watching you over your shoulder. It was a kind of freedom.

Mike finally went to Sixie, sitting alone in the shadow of a sports shed. That in and of itself was unusual. He was one of the most social of his brothers, always willing to talk. When Mike drew up, Sixie said nothing, but instead offered him his vaporizer. Mike accepted, and crouched on his heels beside him.

“Everyone’s acting like they’ve got ants up their cracks today,” Mike said, feigning airiness. He watched the distant forms of Alpha and Sev as they passed by the guard tower. Alpha had been dealing with his strange mood the way he did everything: by working harder, pushing more, saluting faster, polishing his boots with concentration so complete you could have kicked him and he’d ignore you, engrossed in scrubbing up a perfect spit-shine.

“You think? Tsch.” Sixie shook his head. “Did you do what I said in mess yesterday? You get a look at the squad history?”

“Not yet. Why?” Mike tensed a little. This was dangerous talk, especially out in the yard. There were three other squads out there with them.

“It’s important. You should do that later tonight. Not out here.” Sixie glanced at him, slow-eyed. “And have a chat to Symon.”

“Symon? What the hell’s he got to say about anything?” Symon was their Watcher, their logistics man. Watchers flew the planes that dropped them, piloted the robots that escorted them, managed their radios and relayed commands and marching orders. He could staff fifteen simultaneous Terminals by himself. He could be in a virtual meeting with Alpha while he talked to Air Traffic Control about the plane he was flying and relayed the Host’s commands over the Net to the squad.

“You just ask him about that. He’s got some interesting ideas, old Symon.” Sixie held his fingers out, and Mike passed the vaporizer. He took a small drag, and offered it back before he stood, leaving Mike to watch him wander away.

Much later, in the dim light of their room, Mike lay in Alpha’s arms and stared at the blank wall in front of his nose. He had slept a little after sex—one of those weird, dozy half-sleeps where he closed his eyes for two hours that passed in five minutes. He had held on to his residual pleasure for as long as possible before doubt and guilt set in. The latter was normal; the former, unusual. He didn’t understand how his men—they were as much his as Alpha’s, in some ways—had soured so much overnight.

During their last tour in Papua New Guinea, Twofer took a bullet while they retreated along the banks of the Amazon with the Dragon hot on their heels. They were on search and destroy somewhere—command hadn’t told them exactly where—when close to thirty Raptorines burst out of the jungle behind and above their position. Trapped without backup on the ass-end of a steep hill, they’d had no choice but to run down and regroup on flatter ground. Mike remembered the mad plunge through the jungle in the dark, branches slapping his helmet like claws. They’d lost them in a swampy valley flat, hiding out in the mud and mangroves.

When they regathered, they were wet, angry, itching to meet the enemy hand to claw on even ground, but Twofer limped straight over to Mike. His armor was smoking, the front black and twisted. He made it to within arm’s reach before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the ground.

“Well, shit,” Mike said. He bought his pack around and reached up to pull a nanite extrusion from his corona. It came out as a thin, gleaming wire that he touched to Twofer’s coronal jack. The biofeed downloaded, and immediately, he knew that something was terribly wrong.

“How bad is it?” Alpha asked. Mike already had Twofer’s armor off and his manual surgeon’s tools out by the time that Alpha came over. He had the others in foxholes and behind makeshift barricades to secure their site. They’d thrown out a false trail through the water to break away, but the chance of being found was high. Raptorines were tenacious, man-eating abominations. They’d be searching.

“Some kind of explosive NVD. It’s taken out his entire swarm.” Twofer had lost a lot of blood. The bullet had struck him in the sternum, and thank God for that: it had shattered the bone, but his ribs had kept the worst of the charge from shredding his organs. Without a healswarm to stop the bleeding, Mike had to clean and pack it manually. He wedged the tip of a wound filler into the hole. “We’ll see.”

Alpha watched on, his gun cradled in his arms. The lines beside his eyes were deep in the creeping shadows of the early morning. “God damn it, Twofer. You aren’t allowed to die ’til the War’s over, you hear me?”

No Nephilim wanted to die before the end of the War. Without victory, they remained soulless. Without souls, there was no redemption. No Yetzirah. All they could look forward to was Hell, forever. “I know, Sir. We’ll have to keep infection at bay and hope he doesn’t get any of the Big Three. I’m keeping an eye on it… last thing he needs is a dose of Sunny.”

Whatever had been in those bullets had stopped Twofer’s wounds from healing, but he when he regained consciousness, he’d dragged himself up and hauled ass for the tense three-day march to base. Mike’s diagnosis was sound: Twofer had lost his entire healswarm, and despite their efforts, the wound festered in the jungle air. There was no way to get him a new one: the

Sams had to help hold the base against the main force who had been on their heels the entire way back. Mike had done surgery on the necrotic tissue the old-fashioned way, down in a bunker that vibrated with the impact of every shell overhead.

He’d grappled with forceps and alcohol and gauze for close to two hours while Sev stood guard and prayed. Twofer survived by the grace of God, but he’d been left with a messy star-shaped scar the size of a human fist that his new swarm never quite fixed.

And that was the heart of it, Mike thought. His absence festered in them all like that open wound had. They were missing his luck, his familiar scar and quirky smile. Twofer was the best gamer in the platoon, a real crack shot: he got together on the network and played Homeland nearly every night with his brothers and his friends outside the squad. Tonight, no one had played the game after chow. No matter how good the circumstances, the reality was that he’d disappeared as suddenly as if he’d been killed. Mike needed to find the source of this sudden infection. It was time to look at the squad history.

Carefully, he rolled out from under Alpha’s heavy arm and stole away to the common room. He eased down at the table, and opened his desktop display. The corona could project an internal corneal display, or an external holographic projection. He chose the latter. His Bible reader was there, as always, the secret codes of prophecy to be found in the text highlighted with a soft golden glow. He drummed his fingers rapidly as he thought his way through to the troop directory. Accessing the squad history wasn’t illegal, not in any way, but he could imagine there’d be some scrutiny when Purity Control noticed that every Sam had gone to the same page.

The browser widened and loaded, and his fingers froze.

Every squad had a page on the directory that listed their stats, their achievements in the war, their major confessions and lapses of discipline, and their position in the kill ranks. They were Samuel-226, the 226th squad to bear their name. Their photo was much like all the other PatriotRangers squads: nineteen grim-faced, dark-skinned, dark eyed men towering over their Creche Chaplain… or it had been. The space where Twofer had been was closed in by One and Three, the way they now sat at mess.

Mike read the rest of his squad’s file twice over, wondering if he’d missed something in his disbelief. He hadn’t. Everything had been wiped from the file. Twofer’s Honors and Confessions were missing from their nine-year service history, a full four of which had been spent at the front in the trenches of Christchurch. Numbly, he closed the database and surfed through to Homeland. He logged into the game, and sure enough, Twofer’s top-ranking score was gone.

That hurt. That struck him like a fist to the gut. Mike drew a deep, stiff breath, and sat back. He knew that winded sensation well. It was fear.

It didn’t make any sense. Twofer had been raised above them, Saved. He was redeemed in the sight of the Lord. Why had they erased everything that he had left? Mike backed out of the VR and closed the game, backpedaling into the dull light of reality.

A small voice much like his own responded to his silent questioning. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

He rubbed the aching spot just under his sternum. Proverbs 3:5. Of course. Shame washed over him in a wave, but they settled him a little, those familiar words. Restlessly, Mike bought his Bible reader into focus. He could find comfort there, and perhaps answers. Grief and confusion was eating away at morale. A report would only draw the Chaplains down on them, and if the Chaplain wasn’t convinced, Purity Control would intervene. Mike ground his teeth. The Controllers were the instruments of God’s wrath. They were black, shiny as a scorpion’s stinger. Their feet never touched the ground, and their coronas whipped with thin extrusions, like tentacles. They could incinerate a soldier with a look. He didn’t want to risk a report. A good sermon and a pep talk from Mike, their counselor, had to be enough.

Mike bookmarked his place and skimmed through to Successions. Now that Revelations had been fulfilled, the Lamb had added the final two books that had been missing from the Bible: Ascension and Successions. Ascension reminded Mike of the Old Testament in a lot of ways, recording the history of God’s chosen people before the Collapse and the return of the Lamb. The Holy Spirit had struck down all of the unworthy in a single night. The blacks, the gays, the Jews who would not accept Him as their savior, the pacifists and wicked women. The Lamb anointed the Guardians, God’s avatars on Earth, with eternal life. He created the Host from mortal men, and bought forth food from the dead gardens in the failing Shards. He was their Savior, who delved into the Deep Net and restored their systems and data.

Successions was the inheritor of Psalms, praises and laws to the Kingdom of God on Earth, and told the story of the building of Yetzirah, where they would eventually go to join the rest of the Host, who dwelt in Heaven. Mike browsed that section while he mused, composing notes for a sermon in another window. He paused when the highlighted numbers and letters of the Bible codes blinked out, and the highlights moved to other, unrelated verses. At first, he wondered if he was too tired and his BCI was on the fritz. But then he noticed the new highlights spelled something.

“Need to talk.”

Mike’s tongue thickened in his mouth.

He was being hacked.

5 Ways Megaman Helps You Succeed

‘The Little Blue Bastard’, as he is commonly known in Australia.

This is kind of a personal admission, I guess, but I spent a lot of my early childhood homeless. I was in and out of shelters, in and out of social services, and eventually ended up at a school that rehabilitates children too messed up to be able to fit into mainstream settings. One of the few touchstones of sanity in my younger years was videogames. I couldn’t afford a system of my own, so I played Megaman and Sonic the Hedgehog at a run-down community house and youth centre in Melbourne. One year, my Godmother hit on a small fortune, and she gave me a SNES and a copy of the newly released Megaman X for my 11th birthday. Best birthday ever.

These games were and are a creative basis of my self-help. I still keep pictures of Megaman and Zero (his rival/best friend/bromantic interest) on my wall. I have had these pictures all through high-school, and they have inspired me all through uni, through my Honors Degree, and now, in my current job as a writer and editor.

Here’s what the Megaman game series taught me about personal success:

 

Anyone else notice that Sigma is also rainbow fabulous?

1) The Circumstances of Your Life Can Be Overcome

Megaman began his existence as a second-rate robot slave, sweeping the floors of his creator, Dr. Light (who, to be honest, wasn’t a very nice guy). His life of servitude came to an abrupt end when Dr. Light’s equally Machiavellian buddy, Dr. Wily, turns on him and steals his technology to create an evil sentient robot army. Dr. Light retrofits Megaman out as a fighting robot, basically by cutting off one of his arms and replacing it with a gun that can absorb the powers of his adversaries. Upgrades are in the works, but for the first several games, Megaman has shit all except his plasma rifle and an over-developed sense of responsibility. He eventually exceeds Light’s expectations, not to mention the expectations of his friends and enemies.

Chances to change the circumstances of your life do come along. If you can recognize them and seize them, you might have to work your ass off to make the most of them, but little by little you can claw your way up upgrade by upgrade.

 

2) Knowledge: The Right Tools For The Right Job

Megaman games are unusual in that the goal is obvious from the start: you pick a boss – your target – and work through the level in pursuit of that target. Kind of like a hit-list. There are actually some kind of disturbing elements to Megaman, if you think about it.

The bosses in Megaman are hard to beat unless you know their weaknesses. Your job is to work out what those weaknesses are. If you tackle the game in a certain order, it becomes much easier to beat. Megaman absorbs the abilities of his opponents and can use them to defeat the next one. By constantly learning, you can gain the tools you need for success and follow the path of least resistance. Many problems in life are caused by lack of knowledge, but even more than that, they are caused by not applying the knowledge you have.

 

3) Success is Not Easy: It is both Complex and Poignant

There is at once a sense of haunting sorrow and grand accomplishment when you finish a level in this game. You’re basically playing a hitman who is killing the mentally-enslaved servitors of a terrorist. Despite Capcom’s flimsy storytelling, one thing is very obvious: Megaman’s victories are bittersweet.

This is true in real life, too – you can’t make progress in life without giving some things up, even if these things are just the secondary benefits of being unsuccessful. David Wong’s infamous ’6 Harsh Truths’ article on Cracked makes some interesting points on this particular topic. Procrastination and self-pity have their own weird benefits, which in my own experience, are mostly related to conservation of energy. Reaching out to others, being there for strangers… all those things cost energy.

 

4) Having Values Means that You Will Make Enemies

And sometimes, the enemies are people you once considered friends.

The moral dilemma of whether or not the mavericks act of their own accord or because they are infected with a virus raised more than once, especially in the Megaman X games created for the SNES. And yet, the enemies make it very clear during the cut scenes that this is their

I always thought Zero was a girl. Now I maintain he is FtM.

choice. Megaman’s bittersweet victories mostly arise from him accepting that he will have enemies for doing what he believes to be his duty and his purpose.

 

5) Bullies Suck, Trauma is Inevitable, and You Can Still Do Good

Basically every robot enemy you encounter, and Dr. Wily, especially, are out to make Megaman feel like ass. They tell him everything they can think of to undermine him… and yet they never do actually succeed. Megaman acknowledges his own weakness to Zero and others more than once, but it doesn’t actually stop him from kicking ass. He has some pretty nasty things happen to him, too: people killing his friends and even his damn dog. Its not like his life is exactly easy – but Megaman turns the taunting and trauma into fuel for his accomplishments.

James is the author of LILIUM and thinks way too much about the videogames he plays. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the LILIUM Fan List here.

Want to read God Has Heard? Click here to start the free web serial from Chapter One, or click here to go to Amazon and buy the whole thing.

Homophobia and ‘Dead Queer Syndrome’

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, which means it’s time for almost-identical sounding Blog Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Also, fancy prizes! Read on.

Because I am primarily a writer of fiction with racially and sexually diverse casts, my topic for today is something I named ‘Dead Queer Syndrome’, or DQS for short – a phenomenon particularly apparent in comics and ‘LGBT Fiction’ where the gay or trans protagonists die because they are being punished for being gay or trans.

This post will be short and angry.

DQS vs Actual Narrative Tragedy

LGBT characters who experience DQS don’t die from natural causes or because of a greater narrative framework. They don’t die in heroic sword-fights or nuclear explosions or as revolutionary leaders or because aliens burst out of their chests. No. They die in abject, horrifying ways directly related to their being gay or trans. I HATE this. Hate it hate it hate it.

The Dallas Buyer’s Club. Brokeback Mountain. At Swim, Two Boys. Look at any LGBT fiction list and you will see it over, and over, and over. WHY DO THEY ALL FREAKING DIE??

Dear Fellow Writers: There’s a difference between tragedy and sub-textual punishment, okay? Killing off someone because they are LGBT, having them beaten or raped, making them disposable or sidelining them to be killed off later, those are all kinds of community-reinforced, sometimes internalized homophobia and transphobia. It needs to stop. What are the real stakes beyond the sexuality or sex of the protagonist?

In my own book, God Has Heard, the stakes the Sams fight and suffer for has very little to do with Nephilim sexual orientation… as will become more and more apparent as the series goes on, and the events triggered by Mike and Alpha’s decisions ripple on through.

So What Can We Do?

I personally think its time that we started telling stories about queer people who live, who overcome hardship, who find peace and acceptance and function in the world, who bravely carve out queer spaces of their own in realistic or fictional settings and function there. We need characters who aren’t raped or beaten to death, who don’t die from HIV, who may or may not struggle with grief and guilt, who love their partners and rescue their children from terrorists or Martians or whatever. Characters who have healthy relationships, real friendships, and real roles. Characters who die for what they believe in, instead of because of what genitals they have and/or what they prefer to do with them.

And for fuck’s sake: let’s start having M/M relationships in novels and stories WITHOUT it being all about them fucking. There is more to a gay man’s life than sex, and more to a trans person’s life than their gender.

I think it’s high time we had LGBT protagonists in Genre Fiction. Mysteries. Thrillers. Urban Fantasy. Books that don’t end up on the ‘Gay and Lesbian’ shelf. Books that aren’t erotica or coming-out stories. Gay men, trans men, lesbians, and trans heroes and hero/ines being authentic to themselves and their experiences while they kick ass and take names.

Want to chip in? I am giving away one free paperback copy God Has Heard to a lucky commenter, and one copy to someone on the LILIUM Mailing List. Leave a comment or join the list to enter the draw, and may the odds be in your favor.

You can hop the next post by clicking here:

God Has Heard Paperback Now on Sale

The paperback edition of God Has Heard is now on sale at Amazon! They have reduced the price to $6.99 – so if you were hanging out for the paperback, now’s a good time to save a bit of cash.

You can pick it up here: http://www.amazon.com/God-Has-Heard-LILIUM-Volume/dp/1497403502/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

What Happens Next?

The God Has Heard web serial will continue on schedule until the entire book is published on this website, in addition to the complete version being available in paperback and ebook formats.

Now that publication is done and sealed, pretty much the only GHH talk (other than the Chapter Updates on the web-serial) will be follow-up news of reviews and signings. From this point, it’s full steam ahead on Our Lady of Sorrows, the second book in the series. The OLoS blurb and more information on LILIUM #2 will be out in June 2014.

Thank you all so much for your support. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help and effort of friends, betas, and first readers.

LILIUM will be participating in the Hop Against Homophobia on May 17th, so stay tuned for the blog post. I will be giving away one free GHH paperback copy to one commenter.

Chapter Five

Papua New Guinea. Present time

The basics of Nephilim psychology were one of the first things Mike had learned during his medic training, soon after awakening outside of the decanting labs. With his corona jack still puffy and sore to touch, the Creche Chaplain uploaded the knowledge in his first lessons, before he’d even been introduced to his squad. He had to know how the men in his care reacted to pain, to fear, to being shot, to the threat of infection or death, and what they were given to counteract these stressors. Monitoring their spiritual strength and their compliance to the Law was one of his solemn duties as a soldier. The stern technician who administered his first GNOSIS sessions was up-front about what was happening to him. “Your mind is being filled with the word of the Lord. You belong to Him. He decides your life, your death. You cannot eat, breathe or speak without Our blessing.”

Operant conditioning, he’d called it. The Host had filled him with the Lord until he was fit to choke, but it was all wrong. He had been given a broken program.

As the morning wore on, Mike lost what little coordination he’d had. He couldn’t turn his head. The muscles of his neck and torso twitched with spasms when he tried to move. Not for the first time, he wondered if it wasn’t more than some mental problem, if it wasn’t just in his head. The damp jungle crawled with every possible kind of poisonous animal. His healswarm could have shut down. He could have tetanus. His body ached with deep, fiery pain, radiating from his pelvis, up through his bowels and through to his back. It was his hope that the organs would soon give out. Even that thought went against everything he had been taught and programmed with. Mike observed from a bewildered distance as the reactionary guilt washed over him in a heavy wave of languor.

The passage of time was marked by the slow crawl of sunlight across the steaming ground. Animal sounds filtered through the humid bush, the whoops and squawks of birds, the chittering of insects. Mike’s vision exploded with color as a huge bird glided through the jungle ahead and alighted clumsily on a palm tree. It was blurry, at first, but when he lifted his eyes and focused, he saw that it was barred red and green, with a huge scarlet beak like a bloody sickle claw. He didn’t know what it was called. From the front and the rear he had been pressured with what the Host wanted him to know and do. But now, he wondered… why hadn’t they told them about His works? God had created these creatures, the birds and the plants and all the insects. Why? And why had he never learned? He’d had the entire Net at his fingertips, but all he’d been taught about birds was that you could eat them, that they were immune to the diseases which made the Earth uninhabitable for the Host, and that they could give away your position to the enemy if you weren’t careful.

Mike squinted. The bird was beautiful, a flash-bomb of color in the endless sea of green, and he watched in mute fascination as it pulled a berry from the tree, held it in a clawed foot, and gnawed the pulp from around the pit. Mike had eaten some of the things that grew in the jungle. There were nuts that came in a huge round shell. He’d gotten the outer layer off, but his knife hadn’t worked on the husk inside. His cauterizer had fried it and made it taste nasty. In the end, Alpha had picked a bunch of them, got in his AEGIS, and stomped them until the shells broke. Mike remembered laughing, crouched with Fora and Twofer around the splintered mess. They picked the shards off the ground and nibbled the creamy flesh, spitting out the papery skins, while Alpha watched indulgently from the cockpit.

His reverie was split by a piercing shriek that jolted him to full alertness. A pulse of white agony shot through his abdomen. Panting for breath, eyes darting, he saw the bird flap its bright wings, screaming with a rasping saw-through-metal cry. It bounced through the trees, and was echoed by a hundred replies. This bird was the advance scout. It had found what they were searching for, and now, it called the others. Mike shrank back as the sky darkened, flinching under the winged shadows. They blew cold over his skin, a flock of soaring, drone-lean silhouettes. The cries grew louder, morphing all too easily into the screams of his squad over his dead corolink. It built higher… and then he could hear the whine of a charging HEO cannon. The Sentry!

Mike’s limbs unlocked with the anticipation of battle. He fumbled his mirror and held it out, trembling, but the Sentry was still motionless. He was sure he had heard it, but the plasma turbine was not spinning.

As his adrenaline ramped down, his body froze in pieces, one traitorous limb at a time. He was like the golem in the stories, only able to move when the Master willed it. Mike searched frantically for something else, something to take his mind off the noise and the pain and his hammering heart. He looked down, and saw a centipede the size of his forearm. It was dabbling its jaws in the trail of tacky, rotting blood that had escaped the AEGIS he hid behind. His tongue thickened with loathing, then disgust, and when he remembered that it was eating some part of his dead brother, maybe even his Alpha… hatred.

“Leave it alone.” He croaked, ears full of screams. The sounds shifted from the sounds of birds to men and then back. Mike jerked against his mental bondage. The centipede kept at its gruesome meal, antennae wiggling around its red, flat head. Mike’s anger built until it was fit to burst, and suddenly, he roared and bought his hand down, hard, splashing the creature with mud. It whirled in a spiral and scuttled away, but not far enough. When it stopped to feed again, Mike snarled, and smashed his fist down on its back. “I said leave it the fuck alone!”

The centipede’s shell cracked under the weight of the blow. The pieces wriggled, one crawling towards him. He flinched away from it with a cry, and then crashed, dizzy and unable to rise. The insect convulsed, pincers waving, and then fell still.

The chattering had cut off, the birds fallen silent. The tree had gone quiet, the leaves shuddering from their sudden freeze. Mike forced himself up, scrabbling against the mud. He was so dizzy. He got half-way before his arms gave out and pitched him back down. No good, his inner doctor chided. Mike lay on his side, teeth locked, his head pounding. Still alive.

“Mike.” A thin, frightened voice called out from the funnel. “M-Mike?”

Oh God. Mike stared at the dirt in front of his nose. His breath stuttered out. For a moment, he thought his heart had, too.

“Mike?” Niner’s voice was hollow, tinny, grinding out from a brittle, aching throat. “Mike, oh God Mike, please.”

Mike’s hands trembled around his gun, still in his hands. His lips parted, but no sound emerged for several long seconds. “Go back to sleep.” To his ears, his own voice sounded no more natural than his brother’s. “Just… go to sleep, Niner.”

He could hear Niner straining to move. “H-Help me up… we have to, we have to get back to b-base.”

“I can’t move.” Mike shook through. If he’d had any hope of rising before, it was gone now. He felt transparent, heavy and cold, like the gas that blew out around them when they jumped from the belly of a troop carrier. Pieces of him peeled off and crumbled, blowing off in the wind, and his voice cracked. “It’s, I… the fucking Grace. The programs. I can’t move.”

Niner slurred off into silence. In the long pause that followed, the birds began to call to each other again. The dead leaves that Mike stared at blurred, the ground swimming into a mass of smeared green and brown.

“Mike… don’t leave me out here. P-please.” He could hear the blood and toxins bubbling in Niner’s throat and chest. “Mike…?”

But Mike couldn’t get up. He was trapped, again, and now, he couldn’t even speak. The full horror of what had been done to them at every meal, every session of Grace, with every GNOSIS upload bore down on him. They uploaded so much, and so little of it was real. He couldn’t stop the waves of anger and self-loathing that washed through him as he struggled up against it. Hating the enemies of God was good. God wanted His enemies destroyed. If he could hate strongly enough, maybe he could move and take the war to them as he was meant to do, one stumbling step at a time.

Mike summoned the memories of Grace, reels that instilled hate of the enemy. Men dying, Raptorines plowing into squads of his own people. Hideous reptilian monsters, man-eaters, demons. But instead, he there was only the hate of God, pressing him face down into the black earth like a huge boot on the back of his neck. With slowly dawning horror, he realized that it wasn’t only God who hated. He hated Grace, the operant conditioning. He hated Alpha for dying. He hated Niner for still being alive. And he hated… he hated…

No. That was the ultimate blaspheme. Frantically, Mike tried to bend himself towards righteousness, away from darkness, but nothing could stop it once it started. He couldn’t say why God was so full of spite. He couldn’t say why nothing he had done in a decade of service had cleansed him of sin. Nothing had saved Alpha, who loved him and his squad and the Host. He hated it. But most of all, he hated Symon.

Rage bubbled up like a living thing, some hidden, bestial symbiont. He roared aloud. Some of his strength returned. It was just enough for him to remember what to do to stay alive so that he could find Symon and kill him—a compulsion even greater than the inability to eat the barrel of his own gun.

The shakes didn’t stop, but the dying embers were stoked with pure, blinding, unadulterated hate. He could live for that.

Mike rolled over, facing the clouds, and opened his mouth to the rain.

Chilling Out in Budapest!

Gorgeous, leafy Baross Utca.

I’d heard Budapest was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, but wow. Check this out.

Hello from Hungary! I’ve moved on from Germany, my last pit-stop on my ongoing global nomad adventures. Now, I’m writing and working in Budapest, the capital of Hungary and surely one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever lived in.

A lot of European cities seem to have no trees on the streets, especially in England. Cork and Dublin were practically leafless; the elegant architecture became really bleak after a while. But Budapest seems to have nailed the balance between greenery and stonework. The results are fantastic.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m actually going to backtrack through the countries I’ve lived in over the last couple of years, blog about them, and post photos. Why? Because being a global nomad has had an enormous influence on my work. The experiences I’ve had – good, bad and in-between – have been immensely formative.

There’s now a new category. The ‘News’ section has become the ‘Blog’ section, and will have a bit more of a personal character from this point in. I’ll talk about the work process, travel, word count, and other developmental stuff.

Speaking of wordcount: yesterday’s tally on Our Lady of Sorrows was 3600 words, for a total of around 30K. There’s still anywhere between 50-80K to go, and then, the type-in!

What is the type-in, you may ask?

I draft all my novels longhand. Like a boss. Or a Lithuanian church scribe. I find that I can write longhand in ways that I just can’t on computer. It feels freer, more private, more authentic than what I generally churn out straight onto computer. It’s also mostly crap, but it is very much like sketching. Loose and rough, the formation of the image that is then refined into a sexy svelte little package.

And speaking of sketches, I’ve been drawing:

Before and After: From the first ‘block-in’ sketch through to a mostly finished product.

Who’s this, you might ask? Devon ‘Knives’ Krukov, one of the major human players in Our Lady of Sorrows. There’s a single quote from him on the Nephilim page.

But here are some more photos of Budapest!

 

 

 

 

IT HAS ARRIVED

Backwards, but legible: The first paperback proof of God Has Heard!

 

The God Has Heard paperback proof has arrived! LET THE EDITING BEGIN!

 

OM NOM NOM NOM