The Cherry Blossoms of Regulon V

               Zob Kane stood above the greatest floral spectacle in the galaxy: myriads of grottos and rosy shadows, elegant trunks with spines extended and quivering in the alien sunset. “Ah, Regulon V is so sublime, in its summer cycle. Can’t you feel the sublimity?” He sighed: the long, peaceful sigh of the Artist-In-His-Element. “I could paint here forever.”

               Perhaps, thought Will. But nothing good.

               They set up their tripods, planting the legs deep in the nitrous-rich earth. Sublime… What did this idiot know about sublime? They’d eaten burgers for breakfast, for Chrissake. But Will didn’t go for mockery—it wasn’t like his friend would’ve listened.

 “Very sublime,” he said.

               “They’re poisonous, when they come down. The blossoms. Did I tell you?”

                “I was the one who told you.”

               “Right, right. Just like you told me about that girl, back home. Good call there. She was fantastic.” His friend fumbled for the z-axis paints, failing: the mittens of his space-suit were soon stained in a clumsy rainbow. There were newer models, but Zob had insisted on “authentic” suits. He tried to preen his Dali mustache, couldn’t do it because of the bubble helmet, and settled for a raconteur pose. “Look at those blossoms, how rugose! That quintessential sunset! I think I’ll start in lime-pink. Lime-pink is so trendy.”

               “You do whatever feels right, man.” Will moved his easel several steps back; he didn’t want to get in the way of genius, after all.

               “I’m so glad we came. My Muse is with me, Will. She’s embracing me.”

               I brought you here. It was my money, my life. Given for you.

               Will painted a Regulan flatworm. He wasn’t sure why; it just seemed to fit the empty space, its features sharp and vicious. The colors came to life, wriggled free of the canvas, and started floating towards Zob. The pincers snapped, the stinger flashed and throbbed with menace.

Will was quite far along, in Z-axis painting—farther, he suspected, than anyone had ever gone. Without a better word for it, he supposed he was a god. It brought no joy; the girl had been the last in a series of insults that stretched for years. His hands trembled.

Regulan flatworms were ethereal; they wriggled right through the molecules of your clothes and skin, to suck your organs empty. It was a horrific way to die.

                Zob, the peacock, stayed oblivious. “They’ll hang this one in the gallery, just like my thesis. I can sense it.”

               Liar. That work was mine.

              The theft had been subtle: “a little help” on the final graduate assignment had required more and more work, until it was unparalleled. Now, Will’s piece hung in the alumni hall at Berkelee, a plaque naming it Bee’s Insides in Radical-Yellow… by Zob Kane. 

            The flatworm was very close.

You do whatever feels right, man. Was this the act of a just god? 

A loving god?

Will’s hands grew still. He painted a gentle breeze of lavender-indigo: it rose from the canvas, drifted and blew the flatworm away. Its delicate body tumbled over the leaves.

               “The petals! Oh, the petals!” Zob was painting, Will saw: really painting. Not well, but still. The pigments were a pale copy of the valley, but the first layer had promise; the second might well contain real technique. The third… Well, by the finish, his friend might have something. His very first non-plagiarism. “Look at those colors. I see what the religious types are about, now. God is great, and all that shit!”

               Will smiled. “Yes. He truly is.”

               Zob turned to him, and his cheeks were shining the color of the toxic blossoms. “What would you know? You haven’t even started yet.”

"Alt-History Sunday Sneak Peek"

This is the intro to an unfinished short story about temporal terrorism, set in the Bush years for maximum chuckles. I'm still working on the ending.

I also have a new novel in the works--haven't sold my first one yet, of course, but stay tuned!

-Paul

 

                On September 11, 2001, federal agents arrested a group of terrorists whose hijacking plan would have brought down the Twin Towers. This operation was conducted with little fanfare, the perpetrators were locked away, and few newspapers even bothered with a front page splash about the plot. The CIA and FBI had done their jobs and the threat of Al-Queda was contained; as far as the media was concerned, there wasn’t really much to report.

                On September 12, radical eco-terrorists from the future set off a device in the middle of Times Square. This device directly linked New York City with a period in the late Cretaceous, sixty-seven million years in the past. This “temporal link” erased whole entire neighborhoods, including portions of the Bronx and Queens and much of upper Manhattan. The fabric of space-time was permanently shredded in the region, and the rips spread quickly, replacing parts of upstate New York and nearby New Jersey with vast swathes of jungle. Carnage, confusion and panic were widespread, and the National Guard was mobilized. By the time that President Bush declared a national state of emergency, several thousand people had died: many were shunted into the past when the Link was activated, and countless were injured by prehistoric creatures. Many of these were carnivores, suddenly and violently introduced to an environment they did not understand. They reacted aggressively, seeing the intrusion of human beings and skyscrapers as an assault on their territories.

                The photograph summarizing the madness, taken by war correspondent Steve McCurry, shows an Allosaurus rearing its head over Central Park. Its taloned foot presses down on a police cruiser, and NYPD officers are firing their sidearms at the animal. The serrated teeth of its massive jaws are bearing down on the officers, all of whom would lose their lives that day trying to secure the nearby boroughs.

                It goes without saying that the Link defined a generation, changed the face of the earth, so on and so forth. The terrorist’s ultimatum—an immediate end to carbon emissions, under threat of further devices being detonated—were ignored, and Operation Home Front was begun to exterminate the dinosaurs and find the people responsible. Over the next decade, hundreds would be arrested on suspicion of harboring temporal fugitives, and the fledgling President would be impeached after he authorized the use of nerve gas on “contested” (read: rioting) areas of New York City. The damage to time’s fabric continued to unfold, spreading from state to state, churning out regions and animals from bygone eras into America’s terrified streets.

                Some fortified their homes. Many simply packed their things and ran.

                Jim Conway’s family drove right into that shit.

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.

Post 1: Moon Spiders

Welcome to Gaslight Rambler, home of rampantly unpublished part-time writer Paul Spears. Here we have the leftovers, the little deaths, the minor earthquakes and tremors of a story that might be or a story that might have been. Flash fiction, chunks of memoir, the story of what happened when Bonnie and Clyde got Instagram. This is the spiritual zoo where we keep the psychedelia, the purple leopards with yellow spots and eyes like beetles.

Here, under glass, I stash the strangeness in my head.

Post #1: Craterface

There are things on the moon.

Put that away. No, you can't see them on Google! Open your mind. That's not how you see reality. You go in there, reality has already been taken from you. Invisible fingers scrabble up the evidence, scraping the images clean. You're never going to see anything online. I'm talking about the naked eye here. I'm talking extraterrestrial shit.

I'm talking moon spiders.

Yes, laugh. Go on, laugh. I like it when you laugh: it reminds me they haven't gotten to me yet. The ones who tell me I should have stayed on the funny farm, the ones who burnt my fingers with matches when I was six, they yes T H E Y have already been lobotomized. Don't ask me how--it's not my place to say!--but I bet if you opened up their skulls, the cranial orbs of the cacklers and hatemongers, you wouldn't find brains but some sort of slippery collection of artificially inserted tentacles. Don't you tell me what's crazy!

I know a thing or two about crazy.

The moon spiders. That's what we were talking about. Yes, I can see them. You can too with a powerful enough telescope. A piddly Orion patio tripod isn't going to do it--no, you need something bigger, something on the order of Hubble. A big beast, the kind NASA shits out like diamond-encrusted taxpayer-funded turds every now and then. Turn my money into an orbital bombardment satellite and call it a telescope, will you? That's all well and good but you might as well put a lens on the damn thing, you know what I'm saying?

You don't know what I'm saying. That's fine.

Anyway, if you can get remote access to one of these--it's easy, if you know the right people--you can zoom in on the lunar surface. Very bleak, very beautiful landscape, like Arizona or Nevada with all the color slurped out. The Midwest in grayscale, ha-ha. And if you can up the resolution on the images a little--of course they've got a digital feed, you don't really believe that it's not live and twenty-four-seven and watching us all constantly, right?--you can see them. My strange little friends.

They're quite busy creatures. They live in craters, mostly; I find their communal structure fascinating. They seem to have a modicum of intelligence, which is more than I can say for the humans I know. Ha! Most times they roll rocks into odd configurations, or skitter across the landscape like dainty little puffs of legs on spiny tendrils. I say 'spiders' but really they're much more like crabs, big crabs on the order of the Marianas Trench entities or the ugly bastards off the coast of Japan. They're quite agile due to the low gravity. How do they eat and breathe? Don't look at me, I'm not a biologist. God, you just don't listen at all, do you? I've told you this a thousand times, over and over: I'm a cryptozoologist. I study cryptids. You don't care, you just don't care. That's alright.

I'll make you understand.

Sometimes the little guys (I haven't come up with a name for them yet, but I will--I named the legless weasels of West Virginia after my sister, she was so sweet when she was alive) will put on a puppet show. I shit you not; this actually happens. It's fascinating. They'll drag out a space suit from some poor undocumented CIA astronaut or lost Soviet cosmonaut, they'll crawl inside that ripped fabric with the bloodstains still caked in (frozen solid for all time, of course, it's chilly on the moon) and they'll do a little dance. I don't know what the dance is called, exactly, but they seem to be having a pretty good time.

I suspect it's a jab at communication. Communication is so important, don't you agree? I would have communicated with people more, if they'd cared about me. About my work. I would have talked with my sister more often. I might have even talked to you, before you cut my funding and stole my satellite uplinks away. We could have had camaraderie, you and I. We could have been good buddies.

But we're not.

It's so peaceful here, I like it. Nobody to bother us, or make noise. Just us, and the moon spiders. And this is why I brought you: they've taken up art, lately. Scribbling designs across the lunar dust. Not tracks, designs--they're writing. A curious, alien foray into literature, scratched on dead gray particles for the whole world to see. And they're very committed to this project--they've covered several square kilometers already. It will only be a matter of time before the patterns become visible to the naked eye. What will NASA and the world government do, then? Mass mind-wipes? Theta ray bombardments? It seems so much trouble, just to hide a few invertebrates. I shudder at the thought of such misuse of public funds.

Why are they doodling up there, do you think? Documenting their history, perhaps? Their culture? Or maybe they're just tired of being ignored. Like all strange, creeping creatures living in ugly places, they feel the urge to come out and taste daylight occasionally. To push their boundaries. Much like myself, when you put me under duress.

You shouldn't prod the lesser creatures of the universe... We have a tendency to bite.

Place your eye against the telescope--yes, right there. The patterns will become visible quite soon. A few days at most. The adhesive on the viewfinder will keep your skin nice and snug, removing any chance of a missed sighting. Electric shocks will keep your eyes open, when I want them open. It will take a little while, but you'll see. I was right all along, don't you get it? The proof is out there, right over our heads! My vindication!

At long last, you'll truly see.