The Making of Friends

July 28, 2007 at 11:29 pm (Artifice.EXE, Fiction, sci-fi, Short Story)

I’d like to make a few comments before posting this. I mentioned a post or two ago that I was having trouble with a short work entitled Disciple of the Gauntlet.

Well, I kept having trouble with it, and found two of the reasons that I kept struggling were these: First, it was very long, and really more of two short stories that were only slightly related stuck together. Second, it felt more like part of a novel than a short story, which isn’t a huge problem, except that I was trying to make each individual thing self-contained.

Both of these problems stem from the fact that I wanted the readers to be able to read the story on it’s own, and still get it without having to read any of the other stories to do with Artifice. Well, I decided to forget that, and just fix the problem. Here lies the first of the two quasi-related stories, entitled The Making of Friends, and it is at least slightly recommended that you have read both The Glory of God and The Trick to Fish prior to reading this, although it is most certainly not necessary.

As a final note, if this feels a little half-finished, that is because, really, the stories of Sera and Terri are part of a larger work, and thus the story isn’t finished yet. Perhaps not that beneficial in the realm of short story, but this is stretching boundaries all over the place anyway, so here’s the bit-of-novel/short-fiction, The Making of Friends.

———————————————–

The first time Sera met Terri, was at the Pike Place Market, when Sera had been idly watching the show, and accidentally beaned Terri with a crab.

It had happened fast, and Sera hadn’t quite realized the significance of what had taken place that day. She had, as usual, been using her specs. She had just turned sixteen, and had gotten a new pair for her birthday the week previous. Her old specs had been clunky and too big—like those massive goggles that kids wore at the pool before they learned how to keep water from going up their nose. These were much better—they were to her old specs what a crotch rocket is to a little pink tricycle with streamers coming off the handlebars. Even sitting still on her face, they looked like they were going fast.

The gauntlet that had come with them wasn’t bad, either—great processing power, and a much more reliable wireless signal, so it was always in contact with the specs. Her old glove had looked like something an old lady would use for pulling weeds. This was a proper gauntlet—encased her arm halfway to her elbow, and was streamlined so that, for all the thing’s bulk, it didn’t look like she had a sledgehammer instead of an arm.

Sera had been watching the show from afar, using her specs to zoom in and record some of the more entertaining bits. She normally didn’t stop by Pike Place, because it had become a tourist trap over the years, and she didn’t like crowds. After all, she almost always had her specs on, and was at least a little more prone to run into other people than the normal pedestrian. She tried to stay away from streets, too, in case she took a real car for something that her specs showed her, and waltzed in front of it.

Today, though, she was shopping for a present for mom, and Mrs. Bevens was quite partial to the hand-made preserves that the stand just down the street from the fish market sold. She had stopped by, jam in one hand and gauntlet in the other, to watch the fish market just for old time’s sake.

She almost didn’t see the crab coming. It must have slipped from someone’s hand, because it was on a collision course from her head, and she only caught the tail end of one of its pinchers in her telescoped vision.

Pure instinct—Sera had always had good instincts, and good hand-eye coordination—made her reach up and catch the thing with a gauntleted hand before she knew what was fully going on, which earned her a small round of applause. With a few flicks of her pinky and a twist of her wrist, her specs became as translucent as normal glasses and left her staring at a pair of black goggled eyes on stalks like black marbles each glued to a bit of red macaroni. She gave a girlish scream, and flung it back in the direction it had come from.

That haphazard throw ended up changing the entire course of her life, because the crab had flown strait and true, and skipped off Terri’s surprised face like a piece of shale skipping off a pond. The tall girl—who at first, Sera thought looked more like a puppeteer’s marionette, stretched out lengthwise—fell over in a mess of gangly limbs, strawberry-blond hair, and orange waders.

Sera actually had the grace to look embarrassed when Terri got to her feet, stalked from behind a stand of ice-packed squid and up to her.

“You throw this crab?” she asked, holding up the offending crustacean at her.

Terri was tall—very tall. Sera wasn’t, and the older girl towered over her by more than a head’s-height.

“Ah, yes?” Sera offered, wondering somewhere in the back of her mind whether assault by crab was a punishable offense.

“Not a bad throw,” Terri said, waving the google-eyed thing at her. “Crabs are slippery, and it’s easy to botch. You ever thrown a crab before?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Sera said honestly. She was sixteen, and this imposing girl in big orange waders was clearly older—maybe even nineteen. Clearly in another class of adulthood altogether. Sera wasn’t used to being noticed by college aged kids.

Terri seemed to find this response funny, and let out a laugh that would have been more appropriate coming from a man. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Sera. Um.”

“Sera?” Terri asked. “Well, I’m Terri. It’s not a bad job, catching a crab whats been thrown at you, you know, Sera. You must have been paying attention.”

Sera wasn’t entirely sure that because this older girl was suddenly on a first-name basis with her that it worked the other way around.

“I try, um… Ma’am.”

“Terri. It’s Terri. That’s what names are for, right?”

“Yeah,” said Sera, although she wasn’t as sure as she’d like to be. “I guess.” Her lips moved for a moment, as if trying to parse a detail from the conversation. “’What’s been thrown at you,'” she said softly. “What, you threw that crab at me? On purpose?”

“Yeah,” Terri said lightly, “I thought you were a Goggle Kid, and they annoy me. Quick crab on the head makes them wake right up, though.”

Sera found herself scowling. “I’m not a Goggle Kid,” she said frostily.

She wasn’t a Goggle Kid, although this hadn’t been the first time she was confused for one. After all, Sera was almost always wearing her specs, and the the folks at her school would be shocked to know that her right arm really did exist under her gauntlet. And she was a little more klutzy than most people, even without the specs on, and so it was easy to associate her with the society of the Goggle Children—the ones that became so wrapped up in the images on their lenses that they forgot the real world even existed. The ones that forgot what trees looked like, unless they saw them in a D&D game.*

But Sera always kept in mind that there was one key difference between her and the Goggle Kids: her opacity settings. Out of her own room in her own home, she never turned hers up past 50%, and settings that high were reserved for sitting on the bus while checking her mail, or working on a paper for school over some McDonald’s. She never played games while walking, or worked on schoolwork or anything. Out in the open, her specs were for observation—zooming in on an interesting scene without looking nosy, or taking a picture or movie when she wanted to remember something. But she never disconnected herself from the real world. There was a line there, and even if she was close to it she wouldn’t cross over. Not into Goggle Kid territory. She would keep her eyes open to what was really around her.

“I’m not a goggle kid,” she said again.

“Well, I figured not. You caught my crab,” Terri said. “I’ve hit Goggle Kids before. Sometimes with halibut. They normally only flinch a little. They never catch the thing.”

Sera found herself smiling, despite herself.

“That’s a nice rig you got,” Terri said. “You good with specs?”

“Pretty good,” Sera said humbly, because even though the computer guy at her school called her in to fix things, she didn’t want to assume anything about this older stranger. She found out, later, that she had made a wise decision.

“Great. Do you play Tourney?” Terri said, and she was smiling with a friendly, infectious grin that Sera couldn’t quite help but start to return.

Tourney was a game, and Sera did play it. She was a little nervous about saying so, though, because the game was rated Adult for bloodshed and revealing costumes for the women, and Sera wasn’t quite legally an adult yet, but Terri’s smile won her over.

“Yeah, I play.”

“What’s your username? Maybe I’ll come find you sometime, and we’ll play?”

Terri was still smiling. She had thin lips, and a lot of teeth. She looked slightly hungry. She had lots of hair, too, and it hung almost to her waist in a rather unruly manner, which made her seem much bigger and taller than she actually was. Sera looked up, a little intimidated, and thought of Eric Mathews, from her biology class, who was six foot one. She was fairly certain that Terri was even taller, and certainly more spindly.

“The Glory of God,” Sera squeaked out, and then, because she felt that this might require explanation, “so that when I kill somebody, it says ‘so-and-so has been killed by The Glory of God,’ see. I wanted The Wrath of God, but it was already taken.”

“Right,” Terri said, and rested her palms on the back of her head, bony elbows hanging forward on either side. Sera suddenly thought of a satisfied spider who had just felt a tug in her web.

“Well, I should be getting back to work. I have to stuff a mackerel down my drawers and dance around. If you’ll excuse me.”

She gave Sera a pat on the shoulder, and left towards the fish market again.

That was their first meeting—and Sera really didn’t think much of it. She didn’t realize it at the time, but that was when the words Once Upon a Time found her, and her story started beginning.

——————————————————

*In fact, almost all Goggle Kids did play all the latest Dungeons & Dragons software, and so not only did they almost all know what trees looked like, but most of them knew which ones to pray at to get a +9 defense against ogres, and which ones were infested with level 21 bark-goblins.

3 Comments

Giving Blood

July 26, 2007 at 6:52 pm (Fiction, Short Story)

“Would you like to give blood?” was the last thing that Seth wanted to hear, coming out of the cafeteria Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t just that the stupid red cross girl had asked him after every meal of every day this week, not seeming to get that ‘no’ the first time implied that the subsequent answers wouldn’t change. It was the test in French that he had failed earlier in the week, and that there was nobody to blame for it but his own non-foreign-speaking self. It was his roommate, who snored in his sleep with bare-chested gusto. It was how he very, very badly wanted to curl up to a good book and grumble like a crotchety old man when anybody interrupted him.

Karma was broken though, and the girl, with her silly-looking, fake nurse’s cap perked up as soon as he was through the glass doors to the cafeteria, chirping: “Would you like to give blood? You could help save a life!”

He tensed—lips pursed, eyebrows raised—and gave her a look normally reserved for telemarketers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

He had told her, of course, that he had been to Europe recently, and couldn’t, and that he had a blood disorder, and that his blood pressure was too low. As far as he knew, none of these things were true, but he didn’t know for absolute certain, except for the Europe one, and so consoled himself that he wasn’t really lying, he was just speculating.

He wouldn’t have really cared if he was lying, though.

Blood drives, he knew, were good things in a general, academic sort of way. This didn’t help Seth like them any more. He didn’t like the idea of getting stuck with a needle and then bled, like a pig. Maybe he was just prejudiced against people without enough blood—did that make him a bigot?

He wasn’t much more worried about being a bigot than being lier though.

He gave the brainless pretend-nurse a patient smile, and said “no thanks, I’ve already given blood.” It would have been very easy to get snide with her, which was the reason he was careful not to. Besides, if she couldn’t remember the countless excuses he’d already given, she probably wouldn’t realize that he was lying now, too.

The mismatched furniture of the student center had been pushed together and out of the way to make room for the cots, where people sat still, doing nothing while they bled for cookies and juice.

Instead of walking through the cots, like a sensible person, Seth took the long way around, crawling about and through stacked furniture when he had to, until he could just reach his bag from the coat rack around an upended couch. He snatched it—it was slim, like a briefcase—and slipped out of the building with a rush of soccer players, preparing to head out via bus to an evening game.

Seth wished them skill before turned off their path, heading to the English and Languages building.

There was an office there, where Seth made a habit of taking over on any evenings when French tutoring wasn’t already occupying the space. Him and Catherin, the French tutor, had an informal competition going to see who could get there first each day. The loser of the nightly competition normally ended up conducting business in a small, but comfortable, nook in the first floor hall, with a couch, a few folding chairs, and a vending machine. The winner got the office, which had a desk and a chair that spun.

If he ever happened to win firm dominance over the space, he might ask her to dinner one night, and sometimes he hoped that if she won, she would do the same. It might help his French grade, after all, and she was pleasant, for a foreign-language person.

Today Seth got there first, which surprised him—he was running late, and Catherin was normally more punctual than competitive. Not one to have mercy on a rival, he sat down at the desk and turned his chair so that he could see out the door to smile presently when Catherin walked by and pretended to ignore him.

Meticulously, he set his briefcase bag against the far leg of the desk, removing from it a stack of papers about a quarter inch thick, and a red pen. He uncapped his red pen, which was the kind with the long, needle-like nub and the clear bit of plastic in the middle acting as a window to the watery ink sloshing around inside. Thus far, it’s the only red ballpoint he had found that worked properly without petering out after the first few markings.

Licking his forefinger very lightly before turning each page, he leafed through the sheets of paper, idly considering what his project for the evening was going to be. He had started a new poem earlier in the morning which could already use some trimming, but there were other, older projects that needed observation before he lost all passion for them.

Finally, he selected an old essay, which he had originally thought to send in to NPR’s This I Believe, but couldn’t because it had been twice as long as the requirements allotted. He had pared it down considerably, but still had about one hundred words too many.

He pulled the two paperclipped pages out and spread them in front of them, so he could see both at the same time. He read the entire thing over without making a single mark. Then he reached down and drew a single strait line across the title of the essay, I Believe in Self Control, because it didn’t sound good on his tongue. He was thinking about what might work in its stead when the door opened.

It was Catherin, who had broken the unspoken condition of the unspoken competition, and opened the door while he clearly had control of the office. She was panting and out of breath, though, and her freckled cheeks were flushed, which was something that normally only happened in Seth’s imagination, and so he decided to forgive her.

“I’m about to go into an exam for French Regional Dialects,” she said, and looked horrified. “I forgot a pen.”

Seth looked up at her over his glasses, capped his and held it up. “Do you mind red?”

“Anything,” she said, and he handed it to her. “Thank you so much, Seth,” she said as she leaned out the door, pulling it closed with her. “You’re a life saver!”

Seth watched her disappear, and tried not to sigh. She really was an exquisite person. He thought for a moment about her panting, and began to think for a few moments more. Then, without so much of a shake of his head, he thought the word nepsis so crisply and cleanly that he might as well have said it out loud. Nepsis, he thought again, all images of panting and freckles fleeing. Nepsis—the control of thoughts.

Repeating that mantra, he reached to his suitcase, and pulled out another red pen—he always kept three of them on him at all times. Well, two, now, but he would quickly replace the lost one.

For a moment, he glared at the title, before writing in above the scratched out title, “I Believe in Nepsis.”

And then, because he realized that the title would require an in text definition and explanation, as well as a reworking of a few examples (which would add no less than thirty words, when he already needed to drop so many), he wrote next to it “Consider in an alternate draft.”

Then he proceeded to read the rest of the text a second time, very slowly. Each time he stumbled upon an unsatisfactory word, he would grimace like a carpenter seeing a poorly made joint, and his pen would sweep down like an angry bird. After an hour, the pages was littered with angry, red scratches, livid and sharp, like blood on the paper.

————————————-

Some quick notes about this piece, it has nothing to do with Artifice, first off. Secondly, it is pseudo-autobiographical, in that I modeled the beginnings of Seth’s character off of my own habit of correcting what I write with a red pen and my unfortunate phobia of needles, which keeps me from even considering giving blood.

As a note: I have heard the words nepsis used by many an author, but I cannot find it in any dictionary. I think it might be a foreign word that a few of the more learned authors out there talk about from time to time. In light of not having a formal definition, I’ll supply one. Nepsis is the discipline of controlling one’s thoughts—and is no small task to accomplish.

2 Comments

On Plots and Pains

July 24, 2007 at 10:45 pm (Artifice.EXE, Fiction, Journal)

I am in the middle of writing a short story, thus far entitled Disciple of the Gauntlet. Just prior to writing this entry, I had three extremely different, half-finished drafts of it, and am completely baffled as to which one to pursue.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t worry—I would complete all of them, because there is no writing that is worthless. But this is not a normal short story. This one is important, and will define two of the most important characters to Artifice in a very deliberate way.

I’m not terribly worried about messing up. I haven’t started writing anything but short stories, yet, and so if things simply go completely wonky, I can simply scrap a few bits of text to the abandoned folder, and start anew. But, I get the feeling, that once I finish one of these drafts, the other two will become ineffective—something will have happened that I can’t take back, which seems silly because the content of the story itself is not of any great consequence.

I can’t figure out why I’m so hung up on it, but it doesn’t feel like normal writer’s bloc. I feel like this will be a point that will determine what direction this novel takes.

I’m worried about other things about the novel, too. Mostly failure.

I feel that, in the case of a single project, the novelist is the writer who risks the most. I poet can sit down, and write something of satisfaction in an afternoon. If, when she is finished, she finds she has something worthless, she has simply lost an afternoon, and can try again. The short story writer can write something in a week, and be happy. Write something bad, and all that has been lost is a week. Not so the novelist. The novelist invests years in the writing, and if, when the final words are written, what is sitting on the table isn’t good, the novelist has failed at the work of those years.

This thought terrorizes me. I am afraid to risk, because I am afraid to fail—the consequences of failure are terrible. But the terror is more than this: I fear letting the story I am telling down. You can’t re-use plots, as a novelist. Well, you can’t and still be great. If I screw this up, then Sera, Terri, Rebecca, and the others living within my mind won’t see the light. This terrifies me even more—that I won’t be able to craft the people as I see them in my mind. I fear that’ll I’ll only be able to make them into paper and words, and nothing more.

But then, I think, what can I do but try? My characters won’t become any more real for my procrastinating. If I wait until I know I’m ready, I’ll die before I touch the pen to paper. I must write and hope, and pray that I won’t fall on my upturned pen.

2 Comments

Here’s My Badge

July 18, 2007 at 12:34 am (Artifice.EXE, Fiction, noir, sci-fi)

Began working on this after reading Zodiac, because I figured, the best way to understand a genre is to try to write it, so I tried my hand at noir. At least, that was how it was for the first five sentences. Then it got all silly on me, and ended up as this, which isn’t very noir-ish at all. I’m still tagging it as noir anyway, though, in case that brings in extra views.

I appologize, I’ve been reading no small amount of Terry Pratchett lately, and the Italian mob boss suddenly turned British on me the second I introduced him. I hope you’ll forgive me.

In any case, here it is, introducing a new character to the growing list: Rebecca Clives.

—————————————————-

Inspector Clives was sitting calmly in the parlor of Boss Giovanni.

She was dressed in pinstripes, for the irony. Her legs were crossed at an angle that was specifically calculated to run parallel with the line of a sight with someone with a height of five foot nine, and revealed a tantalizing little triangle of space between her two thighs and the material of the skirt. It was a window—the perfect voyeuristic porthole, revealing several inches of pure skin before dipping temptingly into shadow.

She was reading a magazine, posture relaxed but good, even with the legs.

She wasn’t really reading, though. She was looking at a blueprints. Her glasses, which looked like the might be better suited for a secretary, weren’t glasses. They were high model specs. The latest edition. The insides of the lenses were painted a transparent blue, just clear enough so that she could, should she need to move quickly, see what was happening in the room she was occupying. The blue was cris-crossed with white lines, set at neat right angles to each other, to show a perfect floor plan of the parlor and surrounding rooms, scaled down to fit within the confines of each lens.

Casually, without moving so much as an inch, she hooked her right index finger into the air and pulled it downwards, like she was scratching behind the ear of some invisible cat. The images on her specs shifted; the current set of blue prints scrolled to the bottom of the lenses and disappear while a new set scrolled down into view from the top. Blueprints for the floor above her.

She didn’t think she would need it—a good escape plan—but it never hurt to have one.

Her index finger drifted into the air again, and repeated the motion, only backwards, and the previous floor appeared on her glasses again. She made the scratching motion with her middle finger, and the layouts of the two floor superimposed themselves.

The implants had been worth it. Before, when she’d still been using a gauntlet, something like this wouldn’t have been possible. Gauntlets stuck out like a sore thumb, and made anything stealthy impossible. Now the motion and pressure sensors that used to lay in the giant metal glove had been compressed into five microcomputers, and implanted under each fingernail of her right hand. It had hurt like having her hand in a meat grinder after the surgery, but the sheer convenience of it made the whole thing worth it.

Of course, the loss of the gauntlet had meant loss of processing power and memory, too—no room to put much of that in the microcomputers—but she made do with the built-ins of her specs and the few little backup storage units under her nails. She didn’t need much, after all. She didn’t live in her specs—not like the Goggle Kids. No, she just needed something to keep a few bits of data in—a few hundred gigs is all. not even a full terrabyte. They had offered her one, but it would have taken up all the room in her specs, and she needed at least one ear piece free for… additional hardware.

Now nobody suspected a thing. She always kept her specs on one-way view, so nobody looking in from the outside could see the images on the inside of the lenses. They looked like normal glasses—you’d probably find them on a particularly professional school teacher, or perhaps a personal aide.

As she sat, the receptionist walked in. In the old days, back when things worked the way they were supposed to and the Boss was always hanging out in a fancy office behind some close, family run business, this would have been the guy behind the counter, smiling and asking what you wanted. Of course, if you told him you wanted the exact right things, and then gave a little wink, you’d get in to see the Boss.

That, though, was the old way of doing things.

Now it was much worse. Now it was… honest. Giovanni didn’t hide that he was a Boss, anymore. Too much work, and not enough payoff. Now it said it on his business card.* This was, when one realized it, a genius strategy, because nobody really read business cards anyway, and the few that did only stared at it for a while before dismissing it out of hand.

There, went a great many famous last words, is a businessman with a sense of humor.

Well, with all the good natured honesty going about, Inspector Clives felt it would be good to return the favor.

The man—who spoke in an Italian accent and had an Italian mustache—was exactly five foot nine, and so his eyes fell perfectly to the tantalizing corner of shadow peeking from Inspector Clive’s skirt. Normally this would annoy her, but today it gave her an odd sense of satisfaction. It meant she had done her research well.

After a moments ogle, which was clearly not intended to be surreptitious—there was the honesty again—the man’s eyes flicked to her face. “Do you have an appointment?” he asked.

Inspector Clives put down her magazine. “Not an appointment,” she said, “but I feel Boss Giovanni would like to see me anyway. I believe he’s free at the moment. My name is Rebecca Clives.”

He was free, at least according to the her specs. This was unusual, which was why she was here at eight thirty on a Saturday. Boss Giovanni was a busy man, and finding a time when he didn’t have an appointment was a stretch.

The man smiled patiently—the sort of weasel-smile that would, on a more seedy man, involve gold teeth. “Perhaps I could check and see if he is keen to take any unscheduled visitors,” the man said. “What is the nature of this visit?”

“I’m a freelance worker,” she said, “here to assassinate him.”

There was a brief moment of silence. Inspector Clives has just handed over her business card.

But, of course, the man doesn’t read the card. Honesty, and whatnot.

He smiles again, and Inspector Clives once again expects to see gold teeth.

“I’ll see if he’s interested in dying today,” the man says politely, and turns to go.

As he is gone, Inspector Clives picks up her magazine again, and runs over some potential escape routes. Boss Giovanni’s office has windows in back, and is on the first floor. If nothing else she could put a few shots through it and jump through—that would be messy, though.

The man comes back, smiling. “The Boss,” he said, “Is interested. He will see you. You understand I’ll have to check for any hidden weapons and what. If you please.”

Inspector Clives understood that getting frisked by this man was likely to include a grope or two, but was entirely prepared for that. Putting aside the magazine again, she stood up, and thrust her arms out to either side. Her pin-striped coat pulled apart, and interesting things happened to the oxford covering her torso. The man’s eyes bobbed down from her face like a yo-yo.

She gave him a professional smile, and said, “Well?”

He was surprisingly professional about it, actually. A hair further forward on her sides that police regulations, and there was an obvious debate in the man’s mind before he decided against a blatant palming of her rear.

Things went smoothly until he found her handgun. She was half thinking he wouldn’t find it—for the same reason that nobody read Giovanni’s business cards. Honesty. He was, after all, looking for hidden weapons, not a firearm that was sitting right her hip.

For a moment he stared at it, as if not quite believing it was there, before staring up at her, smiling again. Amazing, thought Inspector Clives, he thinks this is some joke.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to confiscate that,” he said, almost apologetically, like he wanted to see what would happen if she got in to see Boss Giovanni with it.

Inspector Clives shrugged, and pulled it away from the holster. It was a trusty handgun. She’d had it custom made for her. She called it the Blacktail, on account of it being all black, and she liked the name.

She handed it over to the man, warning him that the safety was off. Casually, she lifted a hand and rubbed the right ear piece of her specs—a habit she had since she was a child. “Is that all then?”

The man’s face twitched, and he reached idly to scratch at his left cheek. “Yes, Boss Giovanni will see you now.”

Inspector Clives nodded, and stepped around him, back towards a door that looked remarkably like any other door in the building. She remembered the days when there was some drama about it—a big set of oak double doors, probably, and a big heavyset desk behind it.

She was about to grip the handle when there was a heavy thud behind her. The man wasn’t big, but he had fallen like a tree and hit the ground all at once, creating quite the sound. She turned around, curiously, and decided that she would take her Blacktail back, just to be on the safe side.

With it again at her hip, she knocked on the door and, without waiting for any response, pushed it open just wide enough to slip inside without the slumped body in the hall beyond to be visible.

Boss Giovanni was fat, but in a rather regal way that made you think of a man who merely appreciated a good meal, rather than bathed in it. On either side of him, standing with arms akimbo and completely-shaded specks over their disproportionately small heads, were two flunkies she immediately decided to call Thing 1 and Thing 2. It was likely that three of her, plus a small elephant wouldn’t have weighed as much as either of them. They were shaped remarkably like bricks from the Jurassic period.

Boss Giovanni smiled at her, not unlike a barracuda smiles at, well, anything made of flesh, really.

“Miss Clives, was it? Come in, please. I hear you are hear to assassinate me.”

“Inspector. Inspector Clives, actually,” she said, and as she walked forward she gave a courteous nod to Things 1 and 2, again rubbing the ear piece of her specs out of habit.

Thing 1 didn’t move.

Thing 2 raised a hand that could have enveloped her head like a ping-pong ball, and scratched at his neck with a finger like a French baguette.

“I’m not an official inspector, you see,” she said, briefly flashing a badge that made it look and awful lot like she was a real inspector, “but the title helps open certain doors you understand. Mostly I do freelance work. I can be Officer Clives, and even Detective Clives if necessary.”

Giovanni nodded appreciatively. “I understand the need to emulate certain branches of law enforcement entirely,” he said, in the same voice that craftsmen everyone talk shop with. “I take it you’re looking for employment?”

Inspector Clives shook her head, “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Work is pretty good this time of year, actually. I’m here to assassinate you.”

They hadn’t noticed her wearing the gun, yet, probably because they knew that nobody got into this room with weapons on them. They weren’t looking for guns.

For a split second, Inspector Clives was a little worried that they would notice, though. Honesty, she thought, was a troublesome gig, because there was always a risk that somebody might believe you.

But then Boss Giovanni smiled again, and laughed. “Very good, Inspector,” he said. “As it so happens, I do have a few certain errands that I could use some help with. I’d pay you handsomely, of course. And who knows, if I like your work, we could use you again in the future. Would you like a cigar?”

“No. Thank you.”

“I see, then,” Giovanni said, lighting his. “Nothing important at first, you understand. I can’t let you get in too deep to early, I think. Professional distrust is necessary.”

Inspector Clives nodded.

“In that case, I think that I’d-”

Thing 1 collapsed. Didn’t make a sound when he did so, other than the slow rumble as he fell: first knees, then the chest and, like a snowball following an avalanche, the head.

Giovanni looked at him, vaguely suspicious.

Thing 2 tensed momentarily, and collapsed as well. There was a slight burn mark on his neck, where he had scratched earlier. If Giovanni had time, he could take a very fine magnifying glass, or even perhaps a microscope, and look to see a very tiny red barb in Thing 2’s skin. It was pumping out electricity, and Thing 2’s body, which only dropped by his brain every few days or so to catch up on things, had just realized that it was no longer conscious.

The barb, if Giovanni really had time, could be seen to come from a very small, short range dart gun which used highly compressed air to fire the projectiles. The guns were very expensive, and always used for stealth operations. They were normally mounted in innocent looking things. Like the ear piece of a pair of glasses, for instance.

Giovanni had no such time, though, because he was sweating, and looking down the barrel of Inspector Clives’ Blacktail.

She smiled, a sweet smile, and said—

“Rebecca?”

–and said…

said…

Rebecca, who wasn’t really in Boss Giovanni’s office at all, sat up from her bed guiltily.

“Yes?” she asked.

The door to her room cracked, and someone poked their head inside. “Rebecca? Hows homework coming?”

Rebecca, more than just a little indignant that Inspector Clives’ final statement had been cut off, resisted the urge to say something nasty.

“Fine, mom,” she said.

There was a moment, while the head, which was haloed by the upstairs hall light, stared at her a moment. “You haven’t been playing, have you?”

Rebecca moved a few fingers inside of her gauntlet, and the half-written adventures of Inspector Clives disappeared from her clunky goggle-specs, and were replaced by a long, long list of half-completed algebra. “Of course not, mom,” she said.

The head looked momentarily suspicious—which made Rebecca nervous. If only the Honest strategy worked in real life.

“Well, dinner will be ready soon,” she said. “You should turn some light on. It’s not good for you to be in the dark all the time.”

She closed the door, and Rebecca was alone with her specs again.

Rebecca fiddled with her fingers, wishing that she really did have the implants. Again. The yet-to-be-completed adventured of Inspector Clives, appeared back on her specs.

“She smiled a sweet smile and said…” Rebecca dictated, and the words appeared on her lenses.

What did Inspector Clives say?

Rebecca had had an absolutely perfect one liner to cinch this up right before she had been interrupted, but now it was gone.

Rebecca pouted for a moment, saddened by her suddenly missing words. How was a freelance detective supposed to garner any respect without a suitable line before pegging the badguy?

She let out a sigh, and said “Bang!”

But it just didn’t feel right.

————————————————————–

*Boss Giovanni – freelance policy enforcement, entrepreneurial assistance, sub-legal contract and loan broker

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Zodiac

July 18, 2007 at 12:30 am (Fiction, noir, Reading List, Review, sci-fi)

Zodiac is yet another title by one of my favorites, Neal Stephenson.

In Snow Crash, Stephenson dragged us through the virtual reality of Cyberpunk. In The Diamond Age, he yanked us through a nanotechnological world of post-cyberpunk sci-fi.

Now he gives us another time period and another genre—the time of Zodiac is now, and the style of Zodiac is noir.

Those of you who are familiar with noir already know that it came from the film noir movement, a style of film making that was infested with grittiness, both in the film quality and in the stories the films told. They had a propensity for violence, vulgarity, and a cynical, edgy feel that made them ideal for detective stories and mysteries.

Some of you may recognize the name Guy Noir, Private Eye, a popular character from NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion. All his exploits are captured in a farcically noir setting, full of busty women and intrigue. The old Loony Toons, where Daffy Duck ends always ends up saying Wait A Minute, I AM Dick Twacey! Both are light hearted mockeries of the Noir style.

Too be frank, I don’t much care for noir, especially as it is transferred into literature. It lends itself towards narrative devices that should be used with care, and infrequently. The substitution of people’s features for their names, for instance (a man with a pinstripe suit might be referred to as if his name is “Pinstripes,” and a man with a mustache becomes “Whiskers”) is a classic noir concept. Other tricks of the trade include: swearing a lot for no apparent reason; not fully describing anything beyond four letter words, to deepen a sense of mystery; having a cynical main character who runs a constant inner monologue of sarcastic thoughts about everyone and everybody throughout the entire course of the book.

In sum, Noir has a tendency toward non-descriptive, underdramatic writing, and tries to make up for it by having lots and lots of attitude. It is the antithesis of Pollyanna, that is, the standard romance novel, which has far-too descriptive and melodramatic writing. Too much of either one is not entirely good.

Zodiac applies noir styles to Neal Stephenson’s writing. Stephenson, I would normally say, has more attitude in his writing normally than any other novelist I’ve read today, but also a fair amount more brilliance in the art of description. When he dresses himself up in a grainy trench coat for a romp in noir, not too much changes. He gets more attitude, as one might assume. And he gets less descriptive—although only in quantity of metaphors. Even in Zodiac, when he describes something, he does it fiendishly well.

The plot he weaves is a detective story, too, in accordance with tradition—with a cynical, sarcastic main character named Sangamon Taylor who has an unusual propensity for figuring out the mystery in the nick of time, and a cast of gritty characters who you can never quite tell are good or innocent until the very end.

There’s a twist though: Taylor is no normal detective. He’s an environmentalist, and the crimes he busts are toxic—like companies dumping toxic waste into Boston harbor. Picking up the book, I was worried. I thought that Stephenson, who I always saw as a paragon of mere commentary in a world of messages, was finally trying to persuade me of something, and I was in for a moralistic tale of saving whales.

Nothing of the sort here—if you like a detective story, you’ll love this. Stephenson tells a story of crime, murder, and confusing science that would make even Sherlock Holmes sweat. There’s real mystery here, and a real sense of horror when you realize that a whole lot of the chemistry and biology Stephenson talks about through the detective work—as always, presented in a brilliant way that even the layperson might fully appreciate—is actually accurate.

It all starts when Taylor, being the professional corporate pain-in-the-rear that all environmentalists are, discovers some PCBs in the Boston Harbor—a form of toxin that, unlike most unhealthy water-bound things, tends to kill people within a week, from insides-turning-to-jelly instead of years, from cancer, like most poisons to.

As he searches for the culprit, he manages to get on the bad list of half a dozen corporations, the FBI, perhaps the mafia, and a group of satanic druggies who misheard PCB as PCP, and have been on a jealous craze ever since. An, in the background, the looming threat of a contamination that would wipe out all marine life grows steadily larger in the background.

I tend not to like noir unless it’s at its best, and I liked this very much. The things that annoy me about noir still annoy me about the novel, but I’m willing to let them slide in light of all the good here. If you are a noir fan, this is a definite read. If you aren’t, pick it up anyway, or borrow my copy—it’s worth it, if only for the education.

Not as good as some of Stephenson’s other works, but still far better than most.

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The Glory of God

July 8, 2007 at 6:26 pm (Artifice.EXE, Fiction, General News, sci-fi)

Here’s another brief piece of fiction, introducing another character I’m working on. Chughes made a post on the trials of fiction writing, and the balance of single-character introspect verses character interaction. I’m in the same boat, but on the other side—I can write two characters together in a serious scene, and I can write about things happening, but as soon as a plot slows down, so do I.

Well, in any case, here’s the introduction of a character named Sara. I should give a dual warning: first of, these characters are going to be part of a cyber-punk universe, so be prepared for occasional sci-fi elements creeping in. Second off, this particular revolves around a video game, and contains minor vulgarity and bloodspray. If you don’t want to read either of these things, I would recommend you go down to a different post, and read that.

In any case, enjoy.

————————————————————–

The only light in the room is the soft glow coming from a pair of specs. The room is small, though, and the dim light it well. The specs are resting on the face of a girl, who is sitting in front of a desk looking for all the world like she’s unconscious—she’s limp like the wadded clothes that are strewn across the floor, and her mouth is hanging open just wide enough for bugs to make their way inside.

The only telltale signs that she’s even alive are occasional twitches. Her mouth will close to swallow now and again, or her jaw will clench. The muscles along her cheekbones shift now and again, presumably to squint or widen her eyes. It’s hard to tell if that’s the case, though, because her eyes are invisible behind the specs. She has the opacity set to max, and so the lenses might as well have been spray painted white.

In the real world her name is Sera Bevens, but that doesn’t matter at the moment. Nothing in the real world matters at the moment because, as might be seen from her zombie-esque state, Sera isn’t currently a resident of the real world. Sera is currently in the middle of an advanced fortress somewhere light years from earth. Most of the details about this fortress are inane and unimportant. What is important about the fortress is that it’s been partially destroyed, and huge hunks of metal are strewn about conveniently for use of cover.

Sera has about eighty three percent of her body armor left, and her shields are recharging at an acceptable rate, which means she’s better off than most of her opponents. She has a shotgun as her primary weapon (it’s the best for one on one close encounters, and this fortress throws a lot of those at you) and a long range rail gun thrown over her shoulder should any sniping opportunities pop up. She also has a single incendiary grenade, but those are by and large useless unless she’s in a close quarters free for all, so it will no doubt stay by her side in reserve.

Also, her name isn’t Sera right now. It’s The Glory of God. The Glory of God named herself this for one specific reason: the rush of satisfaction she gets whenever she does… this.

In the real world, one of Sera’s fingers, which is encased in a heavy, almost gauntlet like glove, twitches. In the space-fortress, The Glory of God, who has worked her way up to the rafters, pulls out her rail gun and takes aim. Somewhere, some two hundred meters below her, another player collapses with a staggering amount of nothing where most of him was supposed to be. That person, who’s name was pen15m4n, is probably sitting somewhere on the other side of America staring dumbly at the inside of his specs, which are displaying his dead body and the words “You have been killed by The Glory of God.” The Glory of God can’t see the words, but she knows that they’re there, and it fills her with satisfaction all the same.

Sera is grinning. The specs, which take the basic concept of wrap-around sunglasses and surgically remove all the ugly bits, are flickering spectacularly with backlight reflections of the images being sent directly to Sera’s eyes. The earpieces wrap around the back of her ears and then plug directly into her cochlear canals, simulating perfect surround sound. She even has a special attachment that juts off one side, runs down her right jaw and then up to her mouth, so she doesn’t have to rely on the shitty microphone that the specs originally came with. Where she in a team-based match, she’d be using this to be in constant communication with her allies. She doesn’t really play this game to communicate, though. She plays for the blood spray. In free for all matches like this, she seldom uses it.

Other, like the kid she just pegged, do. “Jesus Christ!” he screeches, and The Glory of God can tell from the voice that he’s too young to be playing a game this violent. “Camping whore!”*

“I know,” says another soul, who she had demolished a few minutes earlier. “I think she’s hacking.”

The Glory of God is used to this sort of audio, and ignores it. She sees another likely target, but he’s hiding a bit too well to snipe. She shoulders her rail gun, pulls out the shot gun, and dives from her peak in the rafters like an eagle with a shot gun.

The maneuver she is attempting to pull requires her to steer a free fall with a back-mounted jet back, aim, and turn all at once. It takes near-perfect coordination to pull off, but this isn’t much of a problem, because The Glory of God makes a habit of being perfect.

She drops right in front of the shmuck, with both barrels leveled at his nose.

The game is graphically unrealistic. In the real world, Sera flicks two of her fingers in her gauntlet. In the space-fortress, the guy’s head explodes, spattering The Glory of God and the surrounding area with three metric blood-drives worth of people-juice.

This makes her eighth kill since her last spawn. Were this a one on one match, it would be no big deal, but this current round is a brawl-type match with about thirty players at any given moment. The average lifespan for a combatant in a game like this is less than a minute, and a normal player is lucky if she gets more than a single kill in that time. The Glory of God is no normal player, though. She averages four to five kills per spawn—she’s an elite. Eight kills is still a lot, though, even for her, and she can’t help but be a little impressed with herself.

In the process or scoring her eighth kill The Glory of God had dropped down into a mesh of shredded steel siding which resembles a some sort of jungle-gym turned evil, like a playground had wandered into a knife shop and had an accident. It’s dangerous, because it gets extra-hard to maneuver, and enemies can hide anywhere.

Sera’s hand is moving frantically, her five fingers squirming like the legs of an ant under a magnifying glass. On the inside of her gauntlet are countless little pressure-sensitive joints and panels, little gyroscopes and wireless transmitters and LPSs (Local Positioning Systems) that tell two hundred fifty six separate processing units what’s happening with the glove. When she wants to fire, she taps her index finger against the table top. When she wants to change weapons, she thrusts her thumb out then drags it in towards her palm. To jump, she simply lifts her palm off the desk, and The Glory of God’s back-mounted boosters catapult her forward into space.

Sera’s going into her third hour of gaming though, and so none of this is even on her conscious anymore. It’s taken a long time for her to get as good as she is, and by now her brain’s adjusted. She thinks jump, and it happens in the game. The fact that her palm lifts from the surface of the desk doesn’t even register in her mind anymore, and she merely recognizes the spinning of her vision as The Glory of God’s jets go off, slinging her forward like a skipping stone fleeting across the surface of a lake.

In the middle of flight, a camper from some higher level snipes her. It’s a head shot, that cuts through her shields and body armor and thunks into her skull like a shotgun shell hitting a watermelon.

Sera’s lips pull in a sudden grimace. On her specs, the view shifts so that she’s viewing The Glory of God’s body from an angel’s eye view. The now-useless hunk of meat continues to careen across the charred landscape, where it splats uselessly against one of the fortress’s far walls and flops to the floor.

“Shit,” is the first thing Sera says into her microphone, then, to concede that a headshot against an airborne target is no small feat, “Nice one.”

Her specs dull just a little, and a bold number 10 in angry orange appears on her lenses. It counts down slowly, one number per second, and she prepares, suddenly keenly aware of the soreness in her finger joints and wrist. She rotates the gauntleted hand twice, wriggles her digits, and then plops it down heavily on her desk again.

The number reaches 0, and then her specs glare to life again. Her vision swims in a sudden, spontaneous, unloving birth, and The Glory of God is alive again.

—————————

* Camping refers to a strategy used in many games which involves sitting in a single spot with a sniper rifle, and picking off enemies as they come into range. While tactically sound, it is normally considered a form a cheating. The phrase “Camping Whore” on the other hand has little to do with camping. Rather, it is the mating cry of adolescent boys who lack any form of gaming skill in the first place, and try to make up for it by being fowl-mouthed.

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The Trick to Fish

July 6, 2007 at 6:21 pm (Artifice.EXE, Fiction)

It was the first thing Terri learned when she began work for the Pike Place Fish Market.

She had wanted to work there since she had first seen it: a flying-fish spectacular, pulled off by surly, full-bearded fisherman and college boys who still thought burping loud was funny. You told the cashier what you wanted, and as soon as he barked out a few words your order was airborne, flying from worker to worker like a bowling pin in a juggling competition. The guy behind the desk would pluck it from the air as soon as the crowd surrounding the market had gotten enough of a thrill, throw it to a wooden slab, lop off the head right in front of you, and tell you that the king salmon is ten nintey-nine per pound, how much do you want?

Terri had started work there as soon as she was tall enough to pass for an adult—which was early, because Terri was taller than most boys her age. The manager had been against it—Pike Place was famous for their teamwork, and thowing an extra cog into the machine had potential to screw everything up—but after a few weeks of begging, he had given in and decided to give her a trial run for a day to see if she could keep up with the rest of the group.

That first day, Terri hadn’t known the Trick. She had thought the hard part would be catching the crabs and lobsters, because they had sharp edges.

Turns out she was wrong. The crabs had been easy; just grab them by a leg when they sailed by, and send them swinging onto their next target like a hard-shelled Indiana Jones. It was fish that thwarted her.

She had fumbled the second one tossed to her, and it had dropped—cold and slimy, like a jumbo slug that had been refrigerated over night—into her too-big orange waders, smearing down her leg and settling in the cleft right near the pit of her knee.

Like a girl (she was ashamed to admit) she had screamed, and did a little jig which only succeeded in driving the pacific salmon deeper into her pant-leg. The crowd thought it was all part of the show, and kept laughing as one of the fishers who was about three times her width walked over, grabbed her by the waist, and shook her upside down until the fish fell back out of her waders and onto the cement.

Terri had been slimy in places she hadn’t wanted to be slimy, and positive she was fired for dropping a fish, but as the fisherman flipped her again and set her on her feet, he gave her a wink that was only barely visible behind the wall of hair that his whiskers and eyebrows made.

Then the show went on, and Terri didn’t drop another fish that day, or the next week. Half the time she had to make diving catches, slinging herself over the crab display to catch an incoming halibut with both hands and most of her torso.

It wasn’t long before the tall girl with the bouncy pigtails who fell on her butt every other toss was a crowd favorite. She had a little cheering squad, even, which provided her with a constant exited hubbub which crescendoed into a football style WHOAAAAAH every time she dove to catch a sea creature.

She had thought, going in, that the Trick to fish was to not drop any.

She learned fast, like everyone else who’s ever worked at Pike Place, that the trick to fish is to make the folks watching you smile. You did that, you’d be just fine.

She’s still one of the crowd favorites, after three years of work—famous for over-the-counter diving catches, an internationally renowned mackerel-in-me-trousers dance, and a particular flair for the fish-toss, which was a long standing tradition of the market.

She’s standing in the middle of the audience—the regulars who know what’s coming are standing back a few feet. She’s got her waders on, and and some gloves to increase fish-traction. Her hands are held up, palms parallel with the ceiling, like a samurai preparing to accept a ceremonial blade. Behind the counter, two guys are flinging scallops back and forth between themselves like a pair of harlequins playing with brightly colored balls.

Behind Terri, though, is someone who’s clearly new to the fish market. The girl’s talking on a cell phone studded with pink rhinestones, and isn’t really paying attention to the fact that she’s only about two feet behind the waiting fish-monger.

Terri checks the girl in her peripheral, and decides to be annoyed by the cellphone chatter. When a king salmon suddenly arks out from behind a counter at a perfect forty five degree angle, Terri doesn’t catch it like she’s supposed to. She steps aside.

The fish is a little larger than a normal salmon, The cellphone girl gets only a flash of warning before twenty pounds of sea-flesh lands on the pavement in front of her with a wet slap, sloshing her jeans with fish-juice and almost ruining her hundred dollar shoes.

The cellphone drops from her hand as panic steps in after the danger is over, and she burbles a stream of profanity just loud enough for Terri to hear.

The tall girl grabs the fish by the tail and swings it up over her shoulder. Lifting a finger, she points at the cellphone girl like and angry mother and says, “Don’t cuss.” The crowd starts to laugh.

Then she goes about face, and swaggers back to her post like William Wallace returning from war, salmon resting on her shoulder like a Claymore.

She brings it down across her cutting board, and takes its head off with a butchers knife in one stroke.

Then she glances up to the woman who ordered the thing, who is still chuckling, raises one thin eyebrow and says “That’ll be ten nintey-nine per pound. How much do you want?”

————————————————————–

This is one of the experiments I’m doing with a character I’m working on. It has nothing to do with anything, no significance and no meaning, but I like it nontheless. The tenses were terrible to work out, and I’m pretty sure there are still a few errors in with the was/had-been switches, but given that this particular piece isn’t going anywhere, I’m not terribly worried about it.

If you don’t know what Pike Place Fish Market is, shame on you. Go to Seattle now, and look for it. Or just go to youtube, although I haven’t found a video yet that quite catches the energy of being there live. I exaggerated it up a little for the sake of the story, but not much, and anyways it’s fiction so I’m allowed to do that.

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Panera Again, Fourth of July, 2007

July 5, 2007 at 12:04 am (Fiction, Journal, Work by Others)

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

I’m sitting in my Panera again, wondering what it is I should write about. I hope that this won’t end up being just another rambling post that won’t actually go anywhere, but if it does I won’t take it down. People deserve to see writers at their worst as well as at their best, and I don’t quite think I’ve managed either in this blog yet.

Finished up Akira today, and I’m just pages away from two more. This’ll give me four reviews to post over the coming week. It’ll be fun, I think.

I’ve been writing more, too. I haven’t wrestled any games off the internet and into my computer, yet, and so I have little to do but. I’ve been starting a whole lot, lately, and not finishing very much. My 7th grade English teacher would be rolling in his grave right now–he always told me that you have to start what you finish. He was a good man, but I can’t agree with him here.

Leax was writing about characters in Grace is Where I Live, and the process of writing fiction. He talks about how, before he could fully write fiction, he had to understand what it was. Fiction is intrinsically different than any other form or writing. With poetry, there is a demand for truth to be in the words, or at least some sort of significance. All the great poetry follows this pattern, it seems to me, and most of the greats like Wordsworth and Frost have described it as such: “Poetry is truth filtered through emotion,” or “Poetry is the meeting of Humanity and Truth.” And essay has a certain purpose surrounding it: when you write an essay, you know what you want to accomplish, or it turns out to be a bad essay–meandering all over the place with no point whatsoever. Even journals and memoirs are meant to record some sort of personal feelings on a subject or event.

Fiction seems more whimsical to me. It is easy to look at a poem and say “the poet thinks this” or “the poet is saying that.”

Not so with fiction. I think it is because of characters. In a work of fiction, it is not only the author who is writing. All the people the author is writing about have their own say in the story, and the writer is just as controlled by the narrative as the narrative is controlled by the writer. This means that you can’t just sit down and write and say “I’ll write a novel about how unfair capital punishment is.” What if one of your characters disagrees with you–you must either destroy the character for the sake of your message, or destroy yourself for the sake of a person who exists only in your mind. I think Flannery O’Connor says it better than me:

“It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus recreate some object they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not people.”

and later…

“When you write fiction you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action.”

Leax puts his two cents in, as well:

“The possibility of writing fiction opened to me when I finally understood that patterns of meaning are not shaped by the conscious intent of the writer; they emerge naturally from the freely chosen actions of the characters… The story itself is its meaning. A writer’s task is first to tell it and second to trust it…. To write fiction I had to sacrifice that drive for self-knowledge appropriate to me as a poet and seek instead to know, to love and to honor my characters and the world in which they lived.”

This is what I’m doing: I have characters, and I’m beginning to get to know them before I begin a significant work. I throw Sera Bevens, my protagonist, into a western world, or perhaps next to a stranger on an airplane, just to see how she will act. I wish to know her, like I’d know a dear friend, and I wish to be able to tell her story like she’d like me to tell it. This is the challenge of the fiction author–learning to sacrifice self for story.

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Thoughts on The Diamond Age

June 17, 2007 at 11:46 pm (Fiction, Review, sci-fi)

The Diamond Age

Government has failed. This is the first thing you need to know about The Diamond Age. In some cases, it was simply destroyed through public revolt. In other cases, through economic systems that made taxes both impossible and impractical. Still others through outright disintegration. Whatever the reason, government is dead, and it isn’t coming back.

But, no matter how bohemian folks claim to be, nobody really likes anarchy, and so rising up to take the place of government is big business, catering to the law society and security that customers demand. Say you’re a white, Christian, right-wing conservative: well there’s a community for you. It’s a hyper-advanced gated community called a burbclave, guarded by microscopic defense robots called mites. Perhaps it’s run by Walmart, or Microsoft or some other megacorperation. Well, you show up at the Walmart burbclave. You pay Walmart money, and they let you in the gate, give you a house. You live in that burbclave, until you feel like leaving. You pay Walmart, and Walmart supplies you with gas and electricity and utilities. They have their own police force, that patrols the burbclave and shoots the people who don’t have permission to be in there. But it’s not just Walmart who has burbclaves. They have burbclaves for everyone.

If your a hippie, there’s a burbclave for you. If you want to be immersed with fellow spanish-speakers, there’s a burbclave for you. If you’re in the KKK, and hate everybody but white people, there’s a burbclave for you. And each one is a sovereign nation, which might be split in to hundreds of individual franchises scattered all across the world. If you’re a citizen of the Uncle Joe’s Chinatown in Kentucky, then your a citizen of Uncle Joe’s Chinatown in England, and in China as well. They’re all one nation, owned by good old Uncle Joe.

It’s a world where you can go shopping for whatever culture happens to float your boat, and with no government and, by and large, no law outside of these burbclaves, nobody can criticize you for it.

This is the world that was presented to us in Snow Crash, a book by Neal Stephenson that came out slightly before the Diamond Age. It’s important to talk about this, because in many ways, The Diamond Age is a sort of indirect sequel to the previous novel. It takes place in the same world, some fifty to sixty years later. The plots of the two books aren’t connected, and it doesn’t really matter which order you read them in, but Snow Crash came first, and the world setting in that novel is sort of a stepping stone over to culture in The Diamond Age. And believe me, the world that’s thrown at us in The Diamond Age requires a stepping stone to fully grasp.

The Burbclaves are still present, although toned down somewhat with time. This isn’t the primary cultural icon of The Diamond Age, though. Franchise Nations are old hat in this novel. The that has completely revolutionized the world is an invention known as The Feed, which catapulted humanity out of the space age and into the diamond age, from which the book draws its name.

The concept behind the feed is that nanotechnology (that is, machines that work on a very, very, very tiny scale) has come to a point now that we are able to construct things a single atom at a time. With the birth of this technology, diamond, which is really just a whole lot of carbon atoms stacked on top of one another in a very simple way, becomes the cheapest and most common substance in existence. The feed itself is a massive storehouse of atoms, containing all the different elements on the periodic table. People use Matter Compilers (MCs for short) which are hooked up to this feed.

Want a hunk of diamond? Go over the the MC, hit in that you want a hunk of diamond and wait a few minutes. Then, like getting heating a cup of coffee from a microwave, you open up the MC and theres a diamond, probably in a cube a few inches square, sitting there.

But why would you want diamond? It’s cheap and worthless. Even glass is more valuable. There are millions more uses for the MC than just diamond.

Say you’re hungry. Hop to the MC, and order some rice: it’ll pop out seconds later, and if you were smart about how you ordered, it’d be steaming, ready to eat, and in a disposable bowl. Or say you needed a place to sleep: go find an MC big enough, and crank out a mattress, maybe along with some pillows and a comforter. Not everything is free, of course. Rice doesn’t cost anything, effectively solving world hunger, but if you want a shiny new laptop, you’d have to pay for that.

This is life in The Diamond Age. You live in your prepackaged burbclave, and eat rice that was constructed, not grown.

Enter Nell, a 4 year old street urchin who doesn’t even know what letters are. She has a mother, Tequila, who jumps from abusive boyfriend to abusive boyfriend like a child playing hopscotch. Nell also has a brother, who tried his hardest to protect Nell from the walking emotional land mine that is their mother, and the string of attempted rape and beatings that come from her boyfriends. She has four children, consisting of a stuffed dinosaur named Dinosuar, a stuffed duck named Duck, a stuffed rabbit named Peter Rabbit, and a doll with purple hair named Purple.

Also enter John Hacksworth, a nano-engineer from a neo-victorian burbclave who is working on a very important project for a very important little girl: a princess named Elizabeth, in fact. The project is a book. Not just any book, in fact, but the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. This isn’t a normal book, made of paper and bound in leather. The pages of this book are made of countless nano-machines, constantly observing, processing, and calculating information. It is through coincidence that the book doesn’t end up in the hands of Princess Elizabeth, but instead the hands of young Nell.

When the little four year old, not even able to read, opens the book, her life changes forever. This is Nell’s first experience with the Primer, which reads aloud to her, because she cannot read herself:

~~~~~

Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector. She also had four special friends named Dinosaur, Duck, Peter Rabbit, and Purple.

Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time, a raven would come to visit them…

 

“What’s a raven?” Nell Said.

The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view toward the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. “R A V E N,” the book said. “Raven. Now, say it with me.”

“Raven.”

“Very good! Nell, you are a clever girl, and you have much talent with words. Can you spell raven?”

Nell hesitated. She was still blushing from the praise. After a few seconds, the first of the letters began to blink. Nell prodded it.

The letter grew grew until it had pushed all the other letters and pictures off the edges of the page. The loop on the top shrank and became a head, while the lines sticking out the bottom developed into legs and began to scissor. “R is for Run,” the book said. The picture kept on changing until it was a picture of Nell. Then something fuzzy and red appeared beneath her feet. “Nell Runs on the Red Rug,” the book said, and as it spoke, new words appeared.

“Why is she running?”

“Because an Angry Alligator Appeared,” the book said, and panned back quite some distance to show an alligator, waddling along ridiculously, no threat to the fleet Nell. The alligator became frustrated and curled itself into a circle, which became a small letter. “A is for Alligator. The Very Vast alligator Vainly Viewed Nell’s Valiant Velocity.”

The little story went on to include and Exited Elf who was Nibbling Noisily on some Nuts. Then the picture of the Raven came back, with the letters beneath. “Raven. Can you spell raven, Nell?” A hand materialized on the page and pointed to the first letter.

“R,” Nell said.

“Very good! You a clever girl, Nell, and good with letters,” the book said. “What is this letter?” and it pointed to the second one. This one Nell had forgotten. But the book told her a story about an Ape named Albert.

~~~~~

And thus begins Nells education. The story is a bildungsroman about Nell, wherein she travels from an ignorant street urchin to, transformed by the nurturing of the primer, a brilliant lady capable of studying and comprehending subjects like advanced nano-robotics without any more than a few pages of scrap paper (which the primer is always ready to supply).

The novel is set in the Hong Kong/China area, and is heavily influenced by Confucian thought. The quote from Confucius I posted a few days ago was pulled directly from the text of this book, in fact. It delves into matters of education, and where the duties of rearing a child belong, along with the power of technology for both advancement and destruction of culture and society. The characters are original and believable. The plot is, 95% of the time, coherent and educated, and while the book is a dense read, there isn’t any need to drudge through it.

Stephenson is a masterful writer of fiction. He understands humanity and people well enough to come up with good characters, and he understands how dialog works well enough to write quality conversation. He manages to explain the technology in enough depth to satisfy the sci-fi buffs out there, but does it in such a way that even the most technologically inept could follow along. On a level of both linguistics and storytelling, this is certainly worthy of a read.

Now that the praise is over, there needs to be a few warnings. First and foremost, this is a work of adult fiction, and deservingly so. It is very, very good adult fiction, but adult fiction nontheless. If you are queasy, not up to dealing with mature themes, or under the age of 17-ish, don’t try and read this. Second off, there are passages of this that get very surreal and hard to follow. The society that the novel takes place in is for the most part followable, but there are times when it gets weird enough to throw even the most avid readers. I had to read these passages through several times, and even now they’re still hard to follow.

The last warning, is that Stephenson seems to have a little trouble with his endings. In this particular case, I like the ending. You might not, though. There are a lot of little side stories that don’t get resolved, and compared to the sheer scale of the story (it ranges over 14 years, and has a huge cast of characters) the end can seem underwhelming or abrupt.

Despite these few hitches and warnings, though, the book remains fantastic. Neal Stephenson is a good author, and one can never really go wrong with him. I highly recommend you give this one a read, along with Snow Crash, as soon as time permits.

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