Jake Jackson's Blog, page 18

Have been very busy with work and family in recent weeks,...

Have been very busy with work and family in recent weeks, so there’s been some disruption on the Podcast, and the Time blogs, but there’s plenty of new stuff for These Fantastic Worlds on its way.

The big task now is a major switch from wordpress.com, to wordpress.org which has involved a great deal of planning. This will give me more flexibility on the storage space, and better integration with social media accounts. WordPress.com has treated me very well, so I’m glad to move over to the sister version, hosting on Bluehost.com. Key issues are to remove the random ads, preserve the integrity of the content, carry the Google ranking capital and not lose our many loyal followers (thank you!), so fingers crossed for the switchover.

The next few weeks will see more short fiction on SF and dark fantasy themes, a major 2016 review on sf and fantasy movies, more articles on the Only Connect themes (on Picasso, and Malevich) more on William Blake and Gothic Art, with some biogs of Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert E. Howard. And, of course, further episodes of the SF and Fantasy Podcast, These Fantastic Worlds.

So, see you on the other side!

Some other fantastic posts…

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? The Dark Ages
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The images in this post are the first inklings of a new logo for These Fantastic Worlds.

The post November 2015 Update appeared first on These Fantastic Worlds.

November 2015 Update

Have been very busy with work and family in recent weeks, so there’s been some disruption on the Podcast, and the Time blogs, but there’s plenty of new stuff for These Fantastic Worlds on its way.

The big task now is a major switch from wordpress.com, to wordpress.org which has involved a great deal of planning. This will give me more flexibility on the storage space, and better integration with social media accounts. WordPress.com has treated me very well, so I’m glad to move over to the sister version, hosting on Bluehost.com. Key issues are to remove the random ads, preserve the integrity of the content, carry the Google ranking capital and not lose our many loyal followers (thank you!), so fingers crossed for the switchover.

The next few weeks will see more short fiction on SF and dark fantasy themes, a major 2016 review on sf and fantasy movies, more articles on the Only Connect themes (on Picasso, and Malevich) more on William Blake and Gothic Art, with some biogs of Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert E. Howard. And, of course, further episodes of the SF and Fantasy Podcast, These Fantastic Worlds.

So, see you on the other side!

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? The Dark Ages
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The images in this post are the first inklings of a new logo for These Fantastic Worlds.

Filed under: Echoes & Origins, Projects Tagged: Dark fantasy, sf fiction, Supernatural, Time

The end of the Roman Empire plunged its territories into ...

The end of the Roman Empire plunged its territories into a miserable period of ignorance and chaos, which left the accumulation of knowledge to the East and Far Eastern countries. Time was left to its own devices as the people struggled to survive; natural philosophy (the discipline we know as science) was regarded as heretical.

The End of the Empire

From c. AD 350, Rome was cursed by internal revolts and threats from beyond its territories. In ad 410 Visigoths smashed through the heart of the Empire and terminated one of the most effective, productive and ordered civilisations by the sacking of Rome. By c. AD 450 Europe was a bloody pulp of war and invasion, with Aryan barbarian hordes, the Franks, Berbers, Lombards and Ostragoths, breaking into old Roman territories, looting everything they could find and then fighting one other.

Inevitably the appetite for intellectual discovery, including the development of astronomy and its use for the calendar, was much reduced, so the tribespeople, the common folk, and most of the monasteries, sank back to their old reliance on the lunar months. Scientific matters, due to a misunderstanding about the teachings of the influential Christian philosopher, Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), were regarded as borderline heretical because such matters, including Time, were felt to be the exclusive prevail of God.

The Catholic Church Inherits the Empire

Constantine’s Nicean Council, in cementing the authority of the Christian Church, enabled the continuation of the structures of the Roman Empire through Catholisism. The Barbarians wanted land and money, but they had respect for the spiritual authority and dignity of the Roman Bishopric to the extent that they were converted over the following two centuries to the Christian faith.

In AD 525, Pope Hilary asked mathematician and astronomer Dionysius Exiguus (AD 500–560) to calculate the next 95 years of Easter dates. This was part of the gathering conflict with the Alexandrian-backed Eastern Christian Church, which had always been able to provide the astronomical knowledge for such tasks, unimpeded by the chaos of the European Dark Ages.

Dionysius’s work was the first to use Anno Domini dates based on the birth of Christ. Unfortunately, we now know that, as Jesus must have been born while King Herod was still alive, the year of his birth is more likely to be between 6 and 4 bc (the year of Herod’s death). However, Dionysius’s work was a sign of progress during of the Dark Ages. He had made his changes using the best-available knowledge, being careful to couch the terms of his research as being in the spirit of God, as an article of faith, rather than em­phasising empirical evidence. An English monk, the Venerable Bede (AD 673–735), wrote the only surviving history of the Dark Ages, and used Dionysius’s Easter dates and conventions.

By the early 700s, events in the Middle East further strengthened the Catholic Church as Muslim armies conquered much of the Byzantine lands, allowing Rome to exert its independence from the cultural powerhouse of Constantinople. The Roman Church was able to assert its superiority because of the tradition that Christ’s disciple Peter founded the Church in Rome and became the first Bishop of Rome.

The Julian Calendar and Britain

In AD 664, at the Synod of Whitby, the two main Christian traditions in the British Isles – the Celtic and Roman Christians – agreed to adopt the Julian calendar and its dates for Easter.

In order to placate the dominant Saxons, who had invaded then settled in Britain, the Christian Church allowed the Saxon’s gods to be used for the weekdays, in a way which did not interfere with the integrity of the calendar or the Easter dates. To this day the English-speaking world retains Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day and Freya’s day (the goddess Eostre’s name had already been adopted for Easter), while much of the rest of Europe retained names derived from the planet based Latin forms (Mercury / Mercurii / Wednesday; Jupiter / Jovis / Thursday etc).

Charlemagne

As the influence of the Catholic Church spread, so did the bickering and factional feuding between its senior bishops. Pope Leo III, for instance, was blinded and his tongue torn out by his enemies. Charlemagne (AD 742–814), the King of the Franks, rushed to his aid and for his services he was made the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day AD 800.

This significantly strengthened the grip of the Roman Church because it now enjoyed temporal protection in the form of the armies of Charlemagne. This balance introduced a period stability that lasted for several centuries and ushered Europe out of the Dark Ages. Indeed, although Charlemagne was a barbarian king he possessed the zeal of a convert, and became a champion of knowledge, the arts and sciences. The 5th Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid (‘Aaron the Wise’), master of the Islamic world (the Abbasid Caliphate), sent a remarkable gift of a brilliantly intricate, decorated clock which would strike on the hour. Charlemagne is said to have been ashamed that he and his people could not match the splendour and learning this object represented, and he made great efforts to encourage scholarship throughout his Catholic, European world. This was the time of the Carolingian Renaissance, characterised by the exchange of ideas with the inheritors of the Alexandrian treasure houses of knowledge in the middle East, and Asia.

Numbers and Fractions

Two other areas which highlighted the extent of Western ignorance were a lack of fractions smaller than a quarter, and the absence of the numeric zero. The former was critical in solving the timing problem inherent in the Julian calendar because the actual solar rotation is slightly less than a quarter day over the 365. Because the West did not have the mathematics (or indeed the religious flexibility) to quantify this, the calendar could not be corrected with any accuracy. The numbering system we use today was developed in the Vedic period in India, 2000 BC, as a means of expressing large numbers concisely. Zero was not recognised as a number in the West, nearly 3,000 years later, towards the end of the first millennium AD.

Trade, Embarrassment and Knowledge

A number of events occurred around the time of the first millennium which had some effect on the development of the calendar.

Since the creation of the Islamic religion in AD 622 (the first year of the Muslim calendar), Muslim armies had conquered much of North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe such as Spain and Portugal. Unlike the Aryan barbarian hordes which had smashed their way through the old Roman Europe, the Islamic invaders brought the ideas and learning of their own more sophisticated culture and integrated themselves into the conquered societies. From AD 900 this, and the influx of trade from the East, now that the European countries had stopped fighting amongst themselves, led to a rekindling of the explorations which had been halted by the decline of the Roman Empire.

By 1100, Catholicism was at the height of its power, having become the dominant Christian belief system throughout the West. It also resolved its long-running disputes with the Eastern orthodox churches by excommunicating its primary bishop, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1054, for not recognising the supreme authority of the Pope. The Catholic and Eastern orthodox churches split irrevocably, and remain so today.

Failed Attempts at Time Change

Contact with other, more sophisticated traditions revealed the inadequacies of the Julian calendar, but the culture of the West was still constrained by the principle that scientific matters, such as the motion of the stars and the accurate measurement of time, was the immutable preserve of God.

In 1277, Roger Bacon (c. 1214–92), an English Franciscan monk, pointed out to Pope Clement IV that the calendar was disastrously wrong, so much so that the Easter and Lent dates were fundamentally inaccurate. He calculated that an extra 11 minutes in the Julian compared to the true solar calendar had resulted in a shift of one day every 125 years. An idiosyncratic but fiercely scholarly man, Bacon’s incredible scientific labours went unrecognised in his time, mainly because Clement IV died soon after receiving Bacon’s large thesis on natural philosophy and the calendar.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) rescued the Church from the embarrass­ment of its own calendar, by arguing that the existence of man and all that man can do is proof of God’s existence, so that whatever man can do must be a gift from God. This presented the opportunity for the investigation of scientific evidence.

The Plague and the Protestants

In 1345, Pope Clement VI had gathered all the research neces­sary and was about to issue a Papal Bull making the required changes to the calendar. Suddenly, a wave of plagues struck, of which the Black Death was the worst, annihilating 30 million people, one third of the population of Europe. Suddenly calendar reform once again seemed less than important.

The Reformation became the next major distraction from the changing of the calendar, because Martin Luther’s protestations in 1517 against papal authority, priestly corruption and hypocrisy, resulted in half of all European Chris­tians deserting the Catholic faith for Protestantism, by the late 1500s.

Europe’s perceptions of Time had continued to stretch from the observable evidence for over two centuries, undermining the authority of the Catholic Church as the sole arbiter of truth in the Western sphere of influence. The Roman Church had to find a way to reassert itself.

The next Time post looks at the next major attempt at rectifying the accuracy of Time-telling, with the Gregorian Calendar…

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? Julian Calendar
What is Time? Ancient Calendars
What is Time? Beginnings of Our Time
What is Time? Time and the Calendar
What is Time? Lunar vs Solar Calendar 
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The image in the head of this post is a painting by Sandro Botticelli of Dante’s Inferno, Canto XVIII, via Wikimedia Commons.

(see here for a good article)

The post What is Time? The Dark Ages appeared first on These Fantastic Worlds.

What is Time? The Dark Ages

The end of the Roman Empire plunged its territories into a miserable period of ignorance and chaos, which left the accumulation of knowledge to the East and Far Eastern countries. Time was left to its own devices as the people struggled to survive; natural philosophy (the discipline we know as science) was regarded as heretical.

The End of the Empire

From c. AD 350, Rome was cursed by internal revolts and threats from beyond its territories. In ad 410 Visigoths smashed through the heart of the Empire and terminated one of the most effective, productive and ordered civilisations by the sacking of Rome. By c. AD 450 Europe was a bloody pulp of war and invasion, with Aryan barbarian hordes, the Franks, Berbers, Lombards and Ostragoths, breaking into old Roman territories, looting everything they could find and then fighting one other.

Inevitably the appetite for intellectual discovery, including the development of astronomy and its use for the calendar, was much reduced, so the tribespeople, the common folk, and most of the monasteries, sank back to their old reliance on the lunar months. Scientific matters, due to a misunderstanding about the teachings of the influential Christian philosopher, Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), were regarded as borderline heretical because such matters, including Time, were felt to be the exclusive prevail of God.

The Catholic Church Inherits the Empire

Constantine’s Nicean Council, in cementing the authority of the Christian Church, enabled the continuation of the structures of the Roman Empire through Catholisism. The Barbarians wanted land and money, but they had respect for the spiritual authority and dignity of the Roman Bishopric to the extent that they were converted over the following two centuries to the Christian faith.

In AD 525, Pope Hilary asked mathematician and astronomer Dionysius Exiguus (AD 500–560) to calculate the next 95 years of Easter dates. This was part of the gathering conflict with the Alexandrian-backed Eastern Christian Church, which had always been able to provide the astronomical knowledge for such tasks, unimpeded by the chaos of the European Dark Ages.

Dionysius’s work was the first to use Anno Domini dates based on the birth of Christ. Unfortunately, we now know that, as Jesus must have been born while King Herod was still alive, the year of his birth is more likely to be between 6 and 4 bc (the year of Herod’s death). However, Dionysius’s work was a sign of progress during of the Dark Ages. He had made his changes using the best-available knowledge, being careful to couch the terms of his research as being in the spirit of God, as an article of faith, rather than em­phasising empirical evidence. An English monk, the Venerable Bede (AD 673–735), wrote the only surviving history of the Dark Ages, and used Dionysius’s Easter dates and conventions.

By the early 700s, events in the Middle East further strengthened the Catholic Church as Muslim armies conquered much of the Byzantine lands, allowing Rome to exert its independence from the cultural powerhouse of Constantinople. The Roman Church was able to assert its superiority because of the tradition that Christ’s disciple Peter founded the Church in Rome and became the first Bishop of Rome.

The Julian Calendar and Britain

In AD 664, at the Synod of Whitby, the two main Christian traditions in the British Isles – the Celtic and Roman Christians – agreed to adopt the Julian calendar and its dates for Easter.

In order to placate the dominant Saxons, who had invaded then settled in Britain, the Christian Church allowed the Saxon’s gods to be used for the weekdays, in a way which did not interfere with the integrity of the calendar or the Easter dates. To this day the English-speaking world retains Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day and Freya’s day (the goddess Eostre’s name had already been adopted for Easter), while much of the rest of Europe retained names derived from the planet based Latin forms (Mercury / Mercurii / Wednesday; Jupiter / Jovis / Thursday etc).

Charlemagne

As the influence of the Catholic Church spread, so did the bickering and factional feuding between its senior bishops. Pope Leo III, for instance, was blinded and his tongue torn out by his enemies. Charlemagne (AD 742–814), the King of the Franks, rushed to his aid and for his services he was made the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day AD 800.

This significantly strengthened the grip of the Roman Church because it now enjoyed temporal protection in the form of the armies of Charlemagne. This balance introduced a period stability that lasted for several centuries and ushered Europe out of the Dark Ages. Indeed, although Charlemagne was a barbarian king he possessed the zeal of a convert, and became a champion of knowledge, the arts and sciences. The 5th Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid (‘Aaron the Wise’), master of the Islamic world (the Abbasid Caliphate), sent a remarkable gift of a brilliantly intricate, decorated clock which would strike on the hour. Charlemagne is said to have been ashamed that he and his people could not match the splendour and learning this object represented, and he made great efforts to encourage scholarship throughout his Catholic, European world. This was the time of the Carolingian Renaissance, characterised by the exchange of ideas with the inheritors of the Alexandrian treasure houses of knowledge in the middle East, and Asia.

Numbers and Fractions

Two other areas which highlighted the extent of Western ignorance were a lack of fractions smaller than a quarter, and the absence of the numeric zero. The former was critical in solving the timing problem inherent in the Julian calendar because the actual solar rotation is slightly less than a quarter day over the 365. Because the West did not have the mathematics (or indeed the religious flexibility) to quantify this, the calendar could not be corrected with any accuracy. The numbering system we use today was developed in the Vedic period in India, 2000 BC, as a means of expressing large numbers concisely. Zero was not recognised as a number in the West, nearly 3,000 years later, towards the end of the first millennium AD.

Trade, Embarrassment and Knowledge

A number of events occurred around the time of the first millennium which had some effect on the development of the calendar.

Since the creation of the Islamic religion in AD 622 (the first year of the Muslim calendar), Muslim armies had conquered much of North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe such as Spain and Portugal. Unlike the Aryan barbarian hordes which had smashed their way through the old Roman Europe, the Islamic invaders brought the ideas and learning of their own more sophisticated culture and integrated themselves into the conquered societies. From AD 900 this, and the influx of trade from the East, now that the European countries had stopped fighting amongst themselves, led to a rekindling of the explorations which had been halted by the decline of the Roman Empire.

By 1100, Catholicism was at the height of its power, having become the dominant Christian belief system throughout the West. It also resolved its long-running disputes with the Eastern orthodox churches by excommunicating its primary bishop, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1054, for not recognising the supreme authority of the Pope. The Catholic and Eastern orthodox churches split irrevocably, and remain so today.

Failed Attempts at Time Change

Contact with other, more sophisticated traditions revealed the inadequacies of the Julian calendar, but the culture of the West was still constrained by the principle that scientific matters, such as the motion of the stars and the accurate measurement of time, was the immutable preserve of God.

In 1277, Roger Bacon (c. 1214–92), an English Franciscan monk, pointed out to Pope Clement IV that the calendar was disastrously wrong, so much so that the Easter and Lent dates were fundamentally inaccurate. He calculated that an extra 11 minutes in the Julian compared to the true solar calendar had resulted in a shift of one day every 125 years. An idiosyncratic but fiercely scholarly man, Bacon’s incredible scientific labours went unrecognised in his time, mainly because Clement IV died soon after receiving Bacon’s large thesis on natural philosophy and the calendar.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) rescued the Church from the embarrass­ment of its own calendar, by arguing that the existence of man and all that man can do is proof of God’s existence, so that whatever man can do must be a gift from God. This presented the opportunity for the investigation of scientific evidence.

The Plague and the Protestants

In 1345, Pope Clement VI had gathered all the research neces­sary and was about to issue a Papal Bull making the required changes to the calendar. Suddenly, a wave of plagues struck, of which the Black Death was the worst, annihilating 30 million people, one third of the population of Europe. Suddenly calendar reform once again seemed less than important.

The Reformation became the next major distraction from the changing of the calendar, because Martin Luther’s protestations in 1517 against papal authority, priestly corruption and hypocrisy, resulted in half of all European Chris­tians deserting the Catholic faith for Protestantism, by the late 1500s.

Europe’s perceptions of Time had continued to stretch from the observable evidence for over two centuries, undermining the authority of the Catholic Church as the sole arbiter of truth in the Western sphere of influence. The Roman Church had to find a way to reassert itself.

The next Time post looks at the next major attempt at rectifying the accuracy of Time-telling, with the Gregorian Calendar…

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? Julian Calendar
What is Time? Ancient Calendars
What is Time? Beginnings of Our Time
What is Time? Time and the Calendar
What is Time? Lunar vs Solar Calendar 
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The image in the head of this post is a painting by Sandro Botticelli of Dante’s Inferno, Canto XVIII, via Wikimedia Commons.

(see here for a good article)

Filed under: Science, Time Tagged: Baghdad, Black Death, calendar, Carolingian Renaissance, Charlemagne, days of the week, Julian Calendar, medieval, millennium, Nicean Council, religion, Roger Bacon, science fiction, space-time, Sumeria, Thomas Aquinas, Time, Time and the Calendar

The lights have gone dark in a downtown block in New Manh...

The lights have gone dark in a downtown block in New Manhattan. Special Unit Bain is sent to sort it out before the Bots arrive and go public.

Echoes | Far Flung

“Oh Hell!”  Bain was hurled through the door by the explosion of darkness. A brooding face had emerged from the soul of the distant past, and broken onto the landscapes of New Manhattan.

Several days earlier Bain had woken from a troubled sleep and stared from his 30th story apartment out to the blinking lights of the dark city. His titanium arm, generally a boon, often woke him with the itching of metal against flesh.

‘You’d think I’d be used to it by now.” He mused, rubbing his arm tentatively, remembering the grim transformation from amputee to experiment, so many years before.

The windows of his apartment stretched from floor to ceiling. The view was magnificent. The place was owned by the NYPD special agency, and strictly on loan. But he had helped with so many cases it felt like home, for now at least.

As he looked out, the sea of darkness swelling below, he noticed a cluster of lights fall silent, somewhere near the Financial district.

“Odd.” He grunted, and reached for some clothes. He knew he’d receive a call, so, best to be ready. As he yawned, and pulled the tunic over across his muscular frame the cellphone next to his bed buzzed.

“Yep.” Voice activated the response was immediate. A set of co-ordinates was registered by the phone, and the chip in Bain’s arm, so he stood, rubbed a palm across his face, stuffed his old-fashioned pistol in the back of his breeches, and heaved himself towards the door.

Barely requiring the command to open, the door clicked ajar, well trained as it was to his swift exits in the middle of the night, and hissed shut as Bain leapt out, heading for the simple stair case that led to the elevator on the floor below.

His cellphone buzzed again. This time it was the grumpy tones of Pickman, the only DI authorized to deal with Bain, whom most in the Police Department regarded as dangerous and deluded.

“Ignore the co-ordinates. Meet me at the corner of 14th and 11th.” Bain entered the lift and wondered what sort of life Pickman inflicted on his family. He’d obviously received the call before Bain, wrenched himself from a pitiful few hours of sleep, left his family, and stalked the dark streets of the city, terse and morose.

* * *

“So, you made it at last.” Pickman was consistent, at least.

“Good to see you too.” Bain nodded as Pickman managed a half lift of a smile. Collar up he was cold, something Bain was rarely afflicted by.

“It’s over there.” The weary Inspector motioned with his head. “The building with no lights.”

Bain peered down the narrow street. At 3 am the noises of the busy city were suppressed but in this neighborhood they were almost absent. And the light noise of the street lamps was faint. In the middle, on the South side of the block was a small apartment building with perhaps 15 floors. The blocks on either side were peppered with lights, mainly in the hallways and stairwells, but not this one. Everything has shut down. The darkness seemed to suck at the lights.

“Powercut. What’s the big deal?” Bain looked back at Pickman who managed to yawn and frown at the same time.

“Walk with me a little and you’ll see.” They sauntered down the Northern side of the street, covered by the shadows of the buildings around them, and stopped in sight of the darkened apartment block.

“Ah, yes.” Bain saw a melted flow of mortar and brick that fell from the open mouth of the building like a large, melted tongue.

“The maintenance bots are on their way. I’ve rerouted them. They’ll take an hour.  I need you to clear this up before they arrive. Once they make their reports there’ll be too many questions. As usual.”

“Yep.” Bain pulled his gun from the back of his belt. “I guess you’re the lookout then.”

Pickman grimaced in response, “Go!”

Bain ran quietly over the road, and shuffled up to the melted brick. He looked around, but seeing no other way of entering decided to chance the tongue and clambered up finding footholds of broken brick.

“God, this is a mess.” He entered the lobby to find everything misshapen, gravity pulling the walls and the ceiling down in a long, slow dance. The elevator too was melted to distortion, although the ancient metal grills remained undamaged. A tiny green light blinked invitingly. He took the stairs instead, gingerly placing his feet on the swollen steps, straining his neck, looking ahead, watching the floors slowly warp in font of him.

A slow moan emerged somewhere above. Bain whispered into the chip embedded in his arm.

“Fifth floor.”

The moaning was quiet but a long, single sound. He had heard this before, he knew it to be a chorus of voices, overlapping each other, swimming around in murmurs and whispers.

“Er, minor problem,” Pickman’s voice crackled into the heaving silence. “The maintenance bots have rerouted themselves.You’ve got 20 minutes.”

“Great. You should see this place.”

“No thanks. That’s why you’re there.”

“As always.”

“Don’t complain. I know you enjoy it.”

“Hah.” Actually Pickman was right, and Bain grudgingly agreed as carefully he turned a corner. “Oh, here we go.”

In front of him the corridor was a leap of waves and butchered matter, what had been a floor, with walls now resembled the inside of a train wreck, dark fluids dragging from the ceiling, bulging intrusions, shifting rhythmically in time to the steadily increasing groan. Now he could hear the multiple voices, and slipped his way through the revolting corridor.

He passed several apartment doors, none of them accessible, except for the last one which lay partially open.

“Room 519.” Bain whispered.

“Ten minutes.” Pickman’s voice curled up from Bain’s arm.

He pushed at the buckled door. The voices ebbed and swelled, but there was nothing to be seen, just a gorge of darkness, a pit, a vast well without light. But somewhere deep within the voices rose, and seemed to detect him. He could feel a subtle pull within the cells of his body, as though something were trying to pull them apart. He realized what the dark fluids in the ceiling were, the remnants of human forms, separated from their solid state.

“Five minutes.”

He dropped to his knees, his feet still clinging to the door frame, pains creeping across his limbs, his flesh shaking and separating. He pulled a small cube from his tunic, and began to reverse out of the room, his gun held aloft.

“Two minutes”

“Ok. Ok.” Bain grunted. He was losing his balance. His legs could not support him any more. The voices from within the room began to overwhelm his senses, and the vast darkness rose before him.

“One Minute.”

On the floor now Bain shuffled back, using his unaffected metal arm, struggling out of the room, pursued from the distance by a dark formlessness, now bellowing its huge call.

“It’s here.”

Bain shouted, “Now!” A massive burst of light broke in a wave from the little cube he had left in the room. He managed to squeeze his finger on the trigger of his pistol, and as the blast of energy from the cube lashed across the face of the darkness, the fierce retort of the gun flung Bain backwards, directing him out of the window on the fifth floor, watching the white light burn back into the receding gloom, and detonate the entire building which folded back on itself, consuming the dark malevolence which unravelled and screamed, this time with the utter, eternal fear of an ancient creature returning to its origins.

Suspended in the air, hurled backwards Bain watched the building disappear. As he began to fall, blacking out, the thirty foot Mainentance Bot lifted its gigantic hands to cushion his fall and set him back down next to Pickman, on the opposite side of the narrow street.

The dust crumbled around sending great blooms into the night sky, bringing normality and noise back to the street.

* * *

“Shall we tidy up now sir?” The Maintenance Bot kneeled down and checked for instructions. The building had all but disappeared, just the misshapen rubble as evidence of its existence.

“Yes, yes, and let’s get this man to the medics.”

“Is he the cause of the mess sir?”

“Oh yes, but he’s one of ours. And without him we might all melt into the darkness.”

“If you say so sir.”

Pickman looked up at the Maintenance Bot and wondered if they learned insolence from their makers, or perhaps it was just a natural response to the absurdity of life.

He walked back to his family, and filed a simple report.

“Situation dealt with. Nothing significant left. Special Unit Bain’s assistance invaluable. Instruct standard payment to be made.”

[ends]

More in two weeks, (next week, comes another slice of “What is Time?”)

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Disintegration
Time Thief
Water Grave
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Deadly Survey
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.

The post Micro-fiction 029 – Far Flung appeared first on These Fantastic Worlds.

Micro-fiction 029 – Far Flung

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/029-far-flung.mp3

The lights have gone dark in a downtown block in New Manhattan. Special Unit Bain is sent to sort it out before the Bots arrive and go public.

Echoes | Far Flung

“Oh Hell!”  Bain was hurled through the door by the explosion of darkness. A brooding face had emerged from the soul of the distant past, and broken onto the landscapes of New Manhattan.

Several days earlier Bain had woken from a troubled sleep and stared from his 30th story apartment out to the blinking lights of the dark city. His titanium arm, generally a boon, often woke him with the itching of metal against flesh.

‘You’d think I’d be used to it by now.” He mused, rubbing his arm tentatively, remembering the grim transformation from amputee to experiment, so many years before.

The windows of his apartment stretched from floor to ceiling. The view was magnificent. The place was owned by the NYPD special agency, and strictly on loan. But he had helped with so many cases it felt like home, for now at least.

As he looked out, the sea of darkness swelling below, he noticed a cluster of lights fall silent, somewhere near the Financial district.

“Odd.” He grunted, and reached for some clothes. He knew he’d receive a call, so, best to be ready. As he yawned, and pulled the tunic over across his muscular frame the cellphone next to his bed buzzed.

“Yep.” Voice activated the response was immediate. A set of co-ordinates was registered by the phone, and the chip in Bain’s arm, so he stood, rubbed a palm across his face, stuffed his old-fashioned pistol in the back of his breeches, and heaved himself towards the door.

Barely requiring the command to open, the door clicked ajar, well trained as it was to his swift exits in the middle of the night, and hissed shut as Bain leapt out, heading for the simple stair case that led to the elevator on the floor below.

His cellphone buzzed again. This time it was the grumpy tones of Pickman, the only DI authorized to deal with Bain, whom most in the Police Department regarded as dangerous and deluded.

“Ignore the co-ordinates. Meet me at the corner of 14th and 11th.” Bain entered the lift and wondered what sort of life Pickman inflicted on his family. He’d obviously received the call before Bain, wrenched himself from a pitiful few hours of sleep, left his family, and stalked the dark streets of the city, terse and morose.

* * *

“So, you made it at last.” Pickman was consistent, at least.

“Good to see you too.” Bain nodded as Pickman managed a half lift of a smile. Collar up he was cold, something Bain was rarely afflicted by.

“It’s over there.” The weary Inspector motioned with his head. “The building with no lights.”

Bain peered down the narrow street. At 3 am the noises of the busy city were suppressed but in this neighborhood they were almost absent. And the light noise of the street lamps was faint. In the middle, on the South side of the block was a small apartment building with perhaps 15 floors. The blocks on either side were peppered with lights, mainly in the hallways and stairwells, but not this one. Everything has shut down. The darkness seemed to suck at the lights.

“Powercut. What’s the big deal?” Bain looked back at Pickman who managed to yawn and frown at the same time.

“Walk with me a little and you’ll see.” They sauntered down the Northern side of the street, covered by the shadows of the buildings around them, and stopped in sight of the darkened apartment block.

“Ah, yes.” Bain saw a melted flow of mortar and brick that fell from the open mouth of the building like a large, melted tongue.

“The maintenance bots are on their way. I’ve rerouted them. They’ll take an hour.  I need you to clear this up before they arrive. Once they make their reports there’ll be too many questions. As usual.”

“Yep.” Bain pulled his gun from the back of his belt. “I guess you’re the lookout then.”

Pickman grimaced in response, “Go!”

Bain ran quietly over the road, and shuffled up to the melted brick. He looked around, but seeing no other way of entering decided to chance the tongue and clambered up finding footholds of broken brick.

“God, this is a mess.” He entered the lobby to find everything misshapen, gravity pulling the walls and the ceiling down in a long, slow dance. The elevator too was melted to distortion, although the ancient metal grills remained undamaged. A tiny green light blinked invitingly. He took the stairs instead, gingerly placing his feet on the swollen steps, straining his neck, looking ahead, watching the floors slowly warp in font of him.

A slow moan emerged somewhere above. Bain whispered into the chip embedded in his arm.

“Fifth floor.”

The moaning was quiet but a long, single sound. He had heard this before, he knew it to be a chorus of voices, overlapping each other, swimming around in murmurs and whispers.

“Er, minor problem,” Pickman’s voice crackled into the heaving silence. “The maintenance bots have rerouted themselves.You’ve got 20 minutes.”

“Great. You should see this place.”

“No thanks. That’s why you’re there.”

“As always.”

“Don’t complain. I know you enjoy it.”

“Hah.” Actually Pickman was right, and Bain grudgingly agreed as carefully he turned a corner. “Oh, here we go.”

In front of him the corridor was a leap of waves and butchered matter, what had been a floor, with walls now resembled the inside of a train wreck, dark fluids dragging from the ceiling, bulging intrusions, shifting rhythmically in time to the steadily increasing groan. Now he could hear the multiple voices, and slipped his way through the revolting corridor.

He passed several apartment doors, none of them accessible, except for the last one which lay partially open.

“Room 519.” Bain whispered.

“Ten minutes.” Pickman’s voice curled up from Bain’s arm.

He pushed at the buckled door. The voices ebbed and swelled, but there was nothing to be seen, just a gorge of darkness, a pit, a vast well without light. But somewhere deep within the voices rose, and seemed to detect him. He could feel a subtle pull within the cells of his body, as though something were trying to pull them apart. He realized what the dark fluids in the ceiling were, the remnants of human forms, separated from their solid state.

“Five minutes.”

He dropped to his knees, his feet still clinging to the door frame, pains creeping across his limbs, his flesh shaking and separating. He pulled a small cube from his tunic, and began to reverse out of the room, his gun held aloft.

“Two minutes”

“Ok. Ok.” Bain grunted. He was losing his balance. His legs could not support him any more. The voices from within the room began to overwhelm his senses, and the vast darkness rose before him.

“One Minute.”

On the floor now Bain shuffled back, using his unaffected metal arm, struggling out of the room, pursued from the distance by a dark formlessness, now bellowing its huge call.

“It’s here.”

Bain shouted, “Now!” A massive burst of light broke in a wave from the little cube he had left in the room. He managed to squeeze his finger on the trigger of his pistol, and as the blast of energy from the cube lashed across the face of the darkness, the fierce retort of the gun flung Bain backwards, directing him out of the window on the fifth floor, watching the white light burn back into the receding gloom, and detonate the entire building which folded back on itself, consuming the dark malevolence which unravelled and screamed, this time with the utter, eternal fear of an ancient creature returning to its origins.

Suspended in the air, hurled backwards Bain watched the building disappear. As he began to fall, blacking out, the thirty foot Mainentance Bot lifted its gigantic hands to cushion his fall and set him back down next to Pickman, on the opposite side of the narrow street.

The dust crumbled around sending great blooms into the night sky, bringing normality and noise back to the street.

* * *

“Shall we tidy up now sir?” The Maintenance Bot kneeled down and checked for instructions. The building had all but disappeared, just the misshapen rubble as evidence of its existence.

“Yes, yes, and let’s get this man to the medics.”

“Is he the cause of the mess sir?”

“Oh yes, but he’s one of ours. And without him we might all melt into the darkness.”

“If you say so sir.”

Pickman looked up at the Maintenance Bot and wondered if they learned insolence from their makers, or perhaps it was just a natural response to the absurdity of life.

He walked back to his family, and filed a simple report.

“Situation dealt with. Nothing significant left. Special Unit Bain’s assistance invaluable. Instruct standard payment to be made.”

[ends]

More in two weeks, (next week, comes another slice of “What is Time?”)

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Disintegration
Time Thief
Water Grave
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Deadly Survey
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: creepy stories, Dark fantasy, gothic, podcast, robots, sf fiction, Supernatural

The Julian calendar was altered and misunderstood, but ul...

The Julian calendar was altered and misunderstood, but ultimately became the basis for all subsequent records of time until 1582.

Up to the early years of Caesar, the Romans calculated the years against the date of the founding of Rome in 753 bc, or the reign of the succession of emperors. Calends (from which the modern word ‘calendar’ is derived), meaning the coming together of people, was the first day of the month, a time when the priests would announce the sacred events and festivals of the coming month.

The Julian calendar removed the 354-day lunar year calendar, introducing a 365-day solar version, with leap years every four and alternated 30- and 31-day months, with 29 days in February. To bring it into line with the observable motion of the stars, 69 days had to be added to the first year; called the Year of Confusion, this lasted 445 days, with the first day of January starting in the old month of March.

Caesar’s reforms were an important part of the struggle between the sacred and the secular, relieving the priests of their central role in defining the calendar. The objective fact of the day was, for the first time, not subject to the machinations of the priests and their sponsored politicians.

Augustus Caesar

The promise of stability was undermined initially when the leap years were applied every three years instead of every four. This was eventually spotted by Emperor Augustus, so that from AD 4 the dates were correct. Augustus indirectly caused the other main problem in the early years: in recognition of Caesar’s work on the calendar, the senate had changed the name of the month Quintillius to Julius, which we know as July. Similarly, because Augustus had completed a stunning series of military victories in ad 8, so the month of Sextilius was changed to Augustus. Unfortunately this month had only 30 days to Julius’s 31, so they took one day from February and reorganised the 30- and 31-day months from September, producing the disorganised second half of the year which persists today.

Constantine the Great

In AD 312 Constantine moved the centre of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople. With its closer proximity to Alexandria, Byzantium was a thriving cultural centre and afforded greater prestige than Rome, which at that time was suffering the fatigue of empire and leadership. The origins of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the great schism with Rome can be found in this move.

Constantine declared himself a Christian and, as a Christian ruler, proceeded to impose his will throughout the Roman Empire, reversing the secular authority established by Caesar over 300 years earlier. He called a gathering of all bishops to Nicea in Turkey to resolve the many differences of faith and modes of worship between the sects that had developed throughout the years since the death of Christ. One main issue was the date of Easter.

After much painful and difficult debate, Constantine was able to make three significant alterations to the Julian calendar. Sunday, at the end of the seven-day weekly cycle, was pres­cribed as a holy day, deliberately not the Saturday Sabbath of Judaism. Christmas was a fixed holiday, while Easter was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the measurably moveable spring equinox. It is said that the phrase ‘moveable feast’ originates from this feast of Easter. The first council of Christian bishops issued what became known as the Nicene Creed, laying the foundation stones for a single, unified Christian faith, the Catholic (from the Greek katholikos, ‘universal’) Church.

Names of the Months

The English names for the months have their origins in the Latin language and come to us from the Roman Empire.

January: Januarius. After the god Janus.
February: Februarius. Februa was the Roman festival of purification.
March: Martius. After the God Mars.
April: Aprilis. Either from the Greek god Aphrodite, or the Latin aperire, meaning to open, April being the opening month of spring.
May: Maius. After the goddess Maia.
June: Junius. After the goddess Juno.
July: Julius. After Julius Caesar, in 44 bc, formerly Quintillius, from the Latin for fifth, quintus, being the fifth month of the old Roman calendar.
August: Augustus. After Emperor Augustus, in 8 bc, formerly Sextilius, from the Latin for sixth, sextus, being the sixth month of the old Roman calendar.
September: September. From the Latin for seven, septem, being the seventh month of the old Roman calendar.
October: October. From the Latin for eight, octo, being the eighth month of the old Roman calendar.
November: November. From the Latin novem, nine, being the ninth month of the old Roman calendar.
December: December. From the Latin for ten, decem, being the tenth month of the old Roman calendar.

The next Time post looks at Time in the Dark Ages Calendar…

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? Ancient Calendars
What is Time? Beginnings of Our Time
What is Time? Time and the Calendar
What is Time? Lunar vs Solar Calendar 
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The image in the head of this post is the  Aztec calendar stone, from 15th Century, now housed at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City (see here for a good article)

The post What is Time? Julian Calendar appeared first on These Fantastic Worlds.

What is Time? Julian Calendar

The Julian calendar was altered and misunderstood, but ultimately became the basis for all subsequent records of time until 1582.

Up to the early years of Caesar, the Romans calculated the years against the date of the founding of Rome in 753 bc, or the reign of the succession of emperors. Calends (from which the modern word ‘calendar’ is derived), meaning the coming together of people, was the first day of the month, a time when the priests would announce the sacred events and festivals of the coming month.

The Julian calendar removed the 354-day lunar year calendar, introducing a 365-day solar version, with leap years every four and alternated 30- and 31-day months, with 29 days in February. To bring it into line with the observable motion of the stars, 69 days had to be added to the first year; called the Year of Confusion, this lasted 445 days, with the first day of January starting in the old month of March.

Caesar’s reforms were an important part of the struggle between the sacred and the secular, relieving the priests of their central role in defining the calendar. The objective fact of the day was, for the first time, not subject to the machinations of the priests and their sponsored politicians.

Augustus Caesar

The promise of stability was undermined initially when the leap years were applied every three years instead of every four. This was eventually spotted by Emperor Augustus, so that from AD 4 the dates were correct. Augustus indirectly caused the other main problem in the early years: in recognition of Caesar’s work on the calendar, the senate had changed the name of the month Quintillius to Julius, which we know as July. Similarly, because Augustus had completed a stunning series of military victories in ad 8, so the month of Sextilius was changed to Augustus. Unfortunately this month had only 30 days to Julius’s 31, so they took one day from February and reorganised the 30- and 31-day months from September, producing the disorganised second half of the year which persists today.

Constantine the Great

In AD 312 Constantine moved the centre of the Roman Empire from Rome to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople. With its closer proximity to Alexandria, Byzantium was a thriving cultural centre and afforded greater prestige than Rome, which at that time was suffering the fatigue of empire and leadership. The origins of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the great schism with Rome can be found in this move.

Constantine declared himself a Christian and, as a Christian ruler, proceeded to impose his will throughout the Roman Empire, reversing the secular authority established by Caesar over 300 years earlier. He called a gathering of all bishops to Nicea in Turkey to resolve the many differences of faith and modes of worship between the sects that had developed throughout the years since the death of Christ. One main issue was the date of Easter.

After much painful and difficult debate, Constantine was able to make three significant alterations to the Julian calendar. Sunday, at the end of the seven-day weekly cycle, was pres­cribed as a holy day, deliberately not the Saturday Sabbath of Judaism. Christmas was a fixed holiday, while Easter was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the measurably moveable spring equinox. It is said that the phrase ‘moveable feast’ originates from this feast of Easter. The first council of Christian bishops issued what became known as the Nicene Creed, laying the foundation stones for a single, unified Christian faith, the Catholic (from the Greek katholikos, ‘universal’) Church.

Names of the Months

The English names for the months have their origins in the Latin language and come to us from the Roman Empire.

January: Januarius. After the god Janus.
February: Februarius. Februa was the Roman festival of purification.
March: Martius. After the God Mars.
April: Aprilis. Either from the Greek god Aphrodite, or the Latin aperire, meaning to open, April being the opening month of spring.
May: Maius. After the goddess Maia.
June: Junius. After the goddess Juno.
July: Julius. After Julius Caesar, in 44 bc, formerly Quintillius, from the Latin for fifth, quintus, being the fifth month of the old Roman calendar.
August: Augustus. After Emperor Augustus, in 8 bc, formerly Sextilius, from the Latin for sixth, sextus, being the sixth month of the old Roman calendar.
September: September. From the Latin for seven, septem, being the seventh month of the old Roman calendar.
October: October. From the Latin for eight, octo, being the eighth month of the old Roman calendar.
November: November. From the Latin novem, nine, being the ninth month of the old Roman calendar.
December: December. From the Latin for ten, decem, being the tenth month of the old Roman calendar.

The next Time post looks at Time in the Dark Ages Calendar…

Some other posts of interest.

The first post in the What is Time? sequence
What is Time? Ancient Calendars
What is Time? Beginnings of Our Time
What is Time? Time and the Calendar
What is Time? Lunar vs Solar Calendar 
William Blake: Artist and Revolutionary
Only Connect, the Creative Melting pot of 1910 and Modernism
Fibonacci 0
Micro-fiction podcast: Time Thief

The image in the head of this post is the  Aztec calendar stone, from 15th Century, now housed at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City (see here for a good article)

Filed under: Science, Time Tagged: Anthony and Cleopatra, Babel, Babylon, calendar, days of the week, medieval, millennium, religion, science fiction, space-time, Sumeria, Time, Time and the Calendar

Gravity’s gone into reverse. Skyscrapers, houses, street...

Gravity’s gone into reverse.  Skyscrapers, houses, streets sucked into the skies. Everyone is racing out of town. Except Kyla. And she’s feeling sleepy.

Echoes | Disintegration

The skyline melted upwards. At first just fragments of the buildings had fluttered up to the thick clouds above, but soon a steady stream of masonry, dust and metal particles drifted to the skies .

“Where’s gravity when you need it?” Kayla muttered to herself, she stood on the other side of what had once been a vast lake and watched the city of her birth crumble in the distance.

She looked down for a moment and grunted at the presence of her titanium footwear, courtesy of a locked cellar in the family home. She remembered the day she discovered them.

“Come on dear, everyone’s leaving.” her mother’s best friend, from next door, had called at the house, knocking loudly. Kayla had felt sleepy. It was the middle of the day and she had slumbered peacefully on the sofa by the front door, for what felt like days.

“Hold on!” She shouted from the depths, struggling to emerge from the gentle waters of her dreams. She pushed herself upwards, uncertainly, the knocking at her door battering her senses, “ok, ok. I’m coming!” She tried to shout, but her words slipped through her lips like sliver fishes.

Cautiously she turned the latch.

“Come on Kayla. We’ve got to go!” The door opened to the panicked face of her neighbour, her children, slung around her like a cloak, all of them squealing and bawling.

“What’s going on?” Kayla asked, rubbing her eyes.

“Haven’t you heard? It’s all over the news: internet’s down, no phone lines, look!” A shaky hand poked at the trails of dark smoke across the hills. “That’s New Chicago.”

Kayla, peered though narrowed eyes, picking out not just one, but several thick funnels of smoke. “Doesn’t look right to me.” She shook her head, and winced.

“Of course it’s not right,” her neighbour threw a nervous glance at her children. “Oh, God, come on.” She looked back at the car, waiting impatiently on the street, her husband in the driver’s seat, leaning over, shouting, revving the car, “Kayla, if you don’t come now, you’ll be caught. It’s coming this way.”

“Ok, ok, you go. I’ll follow on, I just need do ––.” She watched her neighbour whirl regretfully towards the car, tumble in then screech off, dust heaving at the sidewalk, just avoiding several other cars, all heading out of town.

Sleepily she fumbled for her car keys.

“Oh, what’s this?” Instead of the expected bundle, she fished out a crumpled note, long forgotten in the coin pocket of her jeans. Wrapped inside was a key. She read the scrawled text and was reminded of its origins.

“Use it. You’ll need it some day.” Never one for long speeches her grandfather had stuffed it into her hands just before he passed away. She remembered his calm voice, a leitmotif of her early years, comforting and guiding, rolling fables and facts across the landscape of her youth. For years after his death it was his voice that accompanied her to her job interviews, that forced her out to the store, that pushed her on her runs. His voice faded now, still soothed her when she fell ill, as she withdrew slowly from her friends and family, her work, losing all connections with life, drifting around her home, tripping over the unwashed clothes, the growing list of broken disorder.

She stared at the paper and the key, and in her sightline she eyes glanced idly at the door beyond, under the stairs, locked for as long as she could remember.

She walked unsteadily across the living room, and carefully aimed the key at the lock.

The door yielded without a murmur. She felt for a light on the inside, but finding none, proceeded down the precarious gloom into the darkness below where she found a tiny space, a pair of titanium boots and another note from her Grandfather, stuffed inside.

She reached for the note. “If you’re reading this, you’ll need the boots. Keep your head down for as long as you can bear.”

She knew better than to question her Grandfather. Tentatively she slipped her feet in, and found them surprisingly comfortable. She realized that the house above her was beginning to rattle, the winds she’d seen in the distance now breaking across the street, slapping and crashing at everything.

She closed her ears, took a last look around, then crouched down, her eye scrunched up like a little girl on a hide and seek mission. She felt the ground rumble. The floor of the little cellar seemed to buckle, but her lead shoes held her steady, and she smiled in the comfort of her grandfather’s protection.

The house around her ripped apart, wooden panels flapped away, the windows smashed out, every item in the house began to disintegrate, pulled into the skies above, as though a gigantic magnet pulled at the iron within every atom.

Kayla’s legs ached, so much she began to cry. And her head screamed at her, the muscles around her eyes burning with the effort of forcing them shut.

Finally she allowed herself to surrender, and all at once she stood up, inhaled deeply and opened her eyes.

It was night time. Or, dark at least. There was almost no sound. And she found that her home had disappeared, and all the houses and trees, and yards that marked out the neighbourhood, all gone. Thin trails of smoke flickered around her, feeding into the dark skies above. And she looked out, across the bay, towards the city of New Chicago, a steady stream of masonry, dust and metal particles drifted up to the skies from the remnants of the skyscrapers.

“Where’s gravity when you need it?” Kayla muttered to herself, she stood on the other side of what had once been a vast lake and watched the city of her birth crumble upwards, in the distance.

She looked down at the lead boots, thankful for the presence of her Grandfather.

“So how did he know?” She didn’t remember him as a scientist, although she had been too young to think of him as anything other than a kind, comforting soul.

As she peered intently at the disassembling world around her she saw a curious motion disturb the upward flow of matter. It sliced across the skyline, creating a disturbance that rippled in its wake, lapping against the banks of destruction, rolling behind, gathering strength and speed, opening a chasm in the destruction that fell upon the air around Kayla until she felt herself eroded by the waves, lapped and licked by the disintegration until she too began to disappear.

* * *

“Oh!”

“Thank God.”

“What the Hell?”

“We nearly lost you on that one Kayla.”

“How did you––?”

“Tried everything: not sure you wanted to leave, sent so many different avatars after you. It was the boots in the end. Nothing else worked. The programme nearly finished, you’d have stayed there forever…”

“Did you get enough data on the anti-matter particles?” Kayla smiled at the kind eyes of the old scientist who carefully unplugged her from the anti-gravity machine, and helped her from the gurney.

“I suppose so. We’ll have to start real-world testing soon.” They looked out at the thin atmosphere of Titan, one of Mars’ many moons.

“Well I wouldn’t recommend it yet. Didn’t you see what was happening?”

“Yes, but we’re under pressure from the shareholders. They need results, they want some return on their money.” The old scientist pushed the hair back from his forehead.

“Perhaps they’d like to go into the next virtual model,” said Kayla, “and see how they feel about it then!”

“We’re under so much pressure, you don’t realise, from the shareholders.”

“But it’s not ready yet ,the programme won’t finish properly, it doesn’t generate enough gravity.”

“I know but it doesn’t matter to them.”

“Well it would if they were here.”

“Huh, they’ll never come here. These sorts of corporations don’t risk the lives of their shareholders…”

[ends]

More in two weeks, (more from What is Time? next week)

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Undertow
Time Thief
Water Grave
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Deadly Survey
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.

The post Micro-fiction 028 – Disintegration appeared first on These Fantastic Worlds.

Micro-fiction 028 – Disintegration

https://thesefantasticworlds.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/028-disintegration.mp3

Gravity’s gone into reverse.  Skyscrapers, houses, streets sucked into the skies. Everyone is racing out of town. Except Kyla. And she’s feeling sleepy.

Echoes | Disintegration

The skyline melted upwards. At first just fragments of the buildings had fluttered up to the thick clouds above, but soon a steady stream of masonry, dust and metal particles drifted to the skies .

“Where’s gravity when you need it?” Kayla muttered to herself, she stood on the other side of what had once been a vast lake and watched the city of her birth crumble in the distance.

She looked down for a moment and grunted at the presence of her titanium footwear, courtesy of a locked cellar in the family home. She remembered the day she discovered them.

“Come on dear, everyone’s leaving.” her mother’s best friend, from next door, had called at the house, knocking loudly. Kayla had felt sleepy. It was the middle of the day and she had slumbered peacefully on the sofa by the front door, for what felt like days.

“Hold on!” She shouted from the depths, struggling to emerge from the gentle waters of her dreams. She pushed herself upwards, uncertainly, the knocking at her door battering her senses, “ok, ok. I’m coming!” She tried to shout, but her words slipped through her lips like sliver fishes.

Cautiously she turned the latch.

“Come on Kayla. We’ve got to go!” The door opened to the panicked face of her neighbour, her children, slung around her like a cloak, all of them squealing and bawling.

“What’s going on?” Kayla asked, rubbing her eyes.

“Haven’t you heard? It’s all over the news: internet’s down, no phone lines, look!” A shaky hand poked at the trails of dark smoke across the hills. “That’s New Chicago.”

Kayla, peered though narrowed eyes, picking out not just one, but several thick funnels of smoke. “Doesn’t look right to me.” She shook her head, and winced.

“Of course it’s not right,” her neighbour threw a nervous glance at her children. “Oh, God, come on.” She looked back at the car, waiting impatiently on the street, her husband in the driver’s seat, leaning over, shouting, revving the car, “Kayla, if you don’t come now, you’ll be caught. It’s coming this way.”

“Ok, ok, you go. I’ll follow on, I just need do ––.” She watched her neighbour whirl regretfully towards the car, tumble in then screech off, dust heaving at the sidewalk, just avoiding several other cars, all heading out of town.

Sleepily she fumbled for her car keys.

“Oh, what’s this?” Instead of the expected bundle, she fished out a crumpled note, long forgotten in the coin pocket of her jeans. Wrapped inside was a key. She read the scrawled text and was reminded of its origins.

“Use it. You’ll need it some day.” Never one for long speeches her grandfather had stuffed it into her hands just before he passed away. She remembered his calm voice, a leitmotif of her early years, comforting and guiding, rolling fables and facts across the landscape of her youth. For years after his death it was his voice that accompanied her to her job interviews, that forced her out to the store, that pushed her on her runs. His voice faded now, still soothed her when she fell ill, as she withdrew slowly from her friends and family, her work, losing all connections with life, drifting around her home, tripping over the unwashed clothes, the growing list of broken disorder.

She stared at the paper and the key, and in her sightline she eyes glanced idly at the door beyond, under the stairs, locked for as long as she could remember.

She walked unsteadily across the living room, and carefully aimed the key at the lock.

The door yielded without a murmur. She felt for a light on the inside, but finding none, proceeded down the precarious gloom into the darkness below where she found a a tiny space, a pair of lead boots and another note from her Grandfather, stuffed inside.

She reached for the note. “If you’re reading this, you’ll need the boots. Keep your head down for as long as you can bear.”

She knew better than to question her Grandfather. Tentatively she slipped her feet in, and found them surprisingly comfortable. She realized that the house above her was beginning to rattle, the winds she’d seen in the distance now breaking across the street, slapping and crashing at everything.

She closed her ears, took a last look around, then crouched down, her eye scrunched up like a little girl on a hide and seek mission. She felt the ground rumble. The floor of the little cellar seemed to buckle, but her lead shoes held her steady, and she smiled in the comfort of her grandfather’s protection.

The house around her ripped apart, wooden panels flapped away, the windows smashed out, every item in the house began to disintegrate, pulled into the skies above, as though a gigantic magnet pulled at the iron within every atom.

Kayla’s legs ached, so much she began to cry. And her head screamed at her, the muscles around her eyes burning with the effort of forcing them shut.

Finally she allowed herself to surrender, and all at once she stood up, inhaled deeply and opened her eyes.

It was night time. Or, dark at least. There was almost no sound. And she found that her home had disappeared, and all the houses and trees, and yards that marked out the neighbourhood, all gone. Thin trails of smoke flickered around her, feeding into the dark skies above. And she looked out, across the bay, towards the city of New Chicago, a steady stream of masonry, dust and metal particles drifted up to the skies from the remnants of the skyscrapers.

“Where’s gravity when you need it?” Kayla muttered to herself, she stood on the other side of what had once been a vast lake and watched the city of her birth crumble upwards, in the distance.

She looked down at the lead boots, thankful for the presence of her Grandfather.

“So how did he know?” She didn’t remember him as a scientist, although she had been too young to think of him as anything other than a kind, comforting soul.

As she peered intently at the disassembling world around her she saw a curious motion disturb the upward flow of matter. It sliced across the skyline, creating a disturbance that rippled in its wake, lapping against the banks of destruction, rolling behind, gathering strength and speed, opening a chasm in the destruction that fell upon the air around Kayla until she felt herself eroded by the waves, lapped and licked by the disintegration until she too began to disappear.

* * *

“Oh!”

“Thank God.”

“What the Hell?”

“We nearly lost you on that one Kayla.”

“How did you––?”

“Tried everything: not sure you wanted to leave, sent so many different avatars after you. It was the boots in the end. Nothing else worked. The programme nearly finished, you’d have stayed there forever…”

“Did you get enough data on the anti-matter particles?” Kayla smiled at the kind eyes of the old scientist who carefully unplugged her from the anti-gravity machine, and helped her from the gurney.

“I suppose so. We’ll have to start real-world testing soon.” They looked out at the thin atmosphere of Titan, one of Mar’s many moons.

“Well I wouldn’t recommend it yet. Didn’t you see what was happening?”

“Yes, but we’re under pressure from the shareholders. They need results, they want some return on their money.” The old scientist pushed the hair back from his forehead.

“Perhaps they’d like to go into the next virtual model,” said Kayla, “and see how they feel about it then!”

“We’re under so much pressure, you don’t realise, from the shareholders.”

“But it’s not ready yet the programme won’t finish properly it doesn’t generate enough gravity.”

“I know but it doesn’t matter to them.”

“Well it would if they were here.”

“Huh, they’ll never come here. These sorts of corporations don’t risk the lives of their shareholders…”

[ends]

More in two weeks, (more from What is Time? next week)

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

Undertow
Time Thief
Water Grave
Ophelia A.I.
Helm
Deadly Survey
Masks
Henge

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.

Filed under: Microfiction, Podcasts Tagged: creepy stories, Dark fantasy, gothic, podcast, sf fiction, Supernatural