Chapter 1: The Victims
Dreaming again. Terrified. In the darkness he feels them surging impossibly up the rock slide. They hate him. They are going to rend his limbs from his body with their powerful arms and ravage his torso with their human teeth.
But it is their eyes that strike him with morbid paralysis. He can feel their eyes before he sees them. Their silently laughing faces are a hideous shock with gaping black eye sockets where reality has failed to assure us that Hell does not exist. Where the eyes should have been a sense of falling sucks at his guts.
He sees them manifest, shadows multiplying in the moonlight, racing in hideously inhuman leaps up the shattered slope. Their grotesque grins, trained on him like identical masks, insult any vestiges of courage that may have remained to him, rooting him in utter pitiable hopelessness.
Then he snaps.
As if some mountainous dynamo has roared into life, tonnes upon tonnes of mass pour into his body, a horrendous wail of weight mounts unbearably, trapped by the insane pressure, a tectonic scream locks his body in a rictus more profound than terror. The pent up agony of the weight of the Earth should have detonated his body like an obscene effigy, released firing pins in his optic nerves to shotgun volcanic gore from his excruciated face, exploding his lungs with the kindness of cataclysmic, fatal expression. But instead his pent fury drove his mind before a deafening crescendo of titanic power into the last corner of his limitations.
Then there was pristine tranquillity as suddenly immanent and unquestionable as tonnages of blue ice, expanses piled neatly inside him as if it were the most natural occurrence.
He was looking at the stars, but they were metaphysically altered. He could not help thinking that the vast firmament looked like a wondrously smeared windscreen, lambent arcs of white force speeding ponderously, as he knew they must. The heavens held velocities and distances that made the heart race with jubilation, even now he felt an elevation of his heart’s colossal pressure. Except that his heart was now a slow storm, a rumbling punctuated just like a super slow motion V8, but deeper still, and far more numerously superimposed with impossible horsepower.
He had forgotten the monsters! They must be all but on top of him!
Attempting to look down revealed the syrupy viscosity of inertia with which his body was super-impacted. Looking down his face took too much time and he obliquely noticed that there was no longer any hint of midnight breezes, though a sensation of tenuous cotton sheets wrapped his body without impeding it.
At the very bottom of his curved field of vision he espied an astonishing spectacle. It appeared that time too had become an amber honey and the nightmarish horde had been trapped in its viscous ubiquity. Those sickening things were somehow before and after themselves all at once, streaks of Chinese calligraphy jumping off ancient sandstone parchment. His terror was astoundingly replaced with complete numinous astonishment.
He so slowly gathered himself and leapt down the escarpment of his dream toward the leading creep-show. As he fell through the almost tangible sheets of delicately rupturing air he allowed himself to be entranced by just the one scary face.
As a side thought, he wondered why his perception was as it was a blend of future and past made visible in the present. It was baffling in the most curious fashion, a tantalizing mystery that he savoured in spite of the macabre horrors and due to a sense of peace that can only come from absolute security.
They could not hurt him. He was intoxicated with physical and mental power.
Still he fell and he focused his attention on the manlike being. It was masticating something he was sure of it, working its jaw in almost imperceptible frequencies. Its whole body was a demented chimera of the ordinary though beneath its human surface was a ravening hunger in the process of digesting… it was feeding on his fear! The residual fear from a moment ago was funnelling into its ocular funnels, and that residue had just run out!
Before bewilderment could even register inside its malevolent intelligence he was levelling the structured tidal wave that was his advancing arm. Like a fluid hammer of meteoric velocity driven home by the inexorable inertia of his super dense body. The edge of his palm drove in an exciting arc straight into its hideous face.
Connect.
White light ruptured from the cracked porcelain mask as the hand, arm, and body followed entirely through the length of the rank shade. A dull crack reached his ears and light buffeted his body and vision as the two halves were cast aside by the epic concussion of his first blow against the seething hordes of his nightmares.
He landed on the precipice previously occupied by his enemy and he felt a fierce pride well up from the depths of his being to shout soundlessly into the far reaches of the ionosphere. A relentless conviction swore bloody murder into the depths of himself as the precipice shattered timelessly beneath his grey leather sneakers: he would destroy the civilization that masked the enslavement of man to this race of gaolers, thereby starving those empirical vampires of their complacent despicable gorging, and cut a swath of ending through their fetid ranks all the damn way to their regent here on Earth and smash its reign over us out of all possible existence, obliterate every last mote of its manifestation on every discernible plane of existence.
Wrecker had never dreamed so powerfully in all his life and he had dreamed as lucidly as the human heart can stand, breaking him with nightmares and visions night after night, as he suspected all people had suffered growing up. At least his sister and brothers had fared no better than him, this much he knew. Though most people never remembered their dreams, nor did he most of the time. Most of the time - but sometimes even as an adult he remembered or swore that movie horrors had crossed over into reality, if only for a moment.
Adults could not recall the fact of the matter. In the true sense of the word, this fact was insidious - an evil comfort that only hid the truth that the ugliness of this sick and twisted world festered beneath the glamour of true human values. Imponderable monsters feasted on human valour while they slept and it had been this way for millennia. He looked down from his furious reverie.
He saw their grinning masks had begun to change by degrees to a dismay that fed him instead. Their anti-empathy reflected in the glorious mirror of his puissant being and they all seemed to quail and cringe, frozen in the contradiction of their existence, caught begging for the mercy they would never grant by vice of their horrid being. It was Wrecker’s turn to grin maniacally at the dismay of his prey. It was Wrecker’s turn to bask in the terror of those who had hurt his family and his people.
For the almost innumerable generations since this twisted race had first beached themselves on the plentiful shores of our atmosphere and taken residence in our dreams, transmogrifying dreamscapes into hellish blue prints for the very real nightmare they had us visit upon ourselves in our waking lives, usurping our grand designers to ensure self-destructive ends, apartment blocks arrayed in matrices that crushed our natural ability to harmonize, societies that consumed each other with atomic pyres in honour of these self-made Gods.
The super-dense gravity of his certitude suddenly blazed as if with a billion lumens of triumphal emotion fusing the horde’s craven numbers from the inside out, range mattered nothing. In slow motion, exaggerated phosphorous flashes seemed to take his picture like some obscene press conference, their cavalcade of slow turning light flares abruptly charged, leaping with unexpected acceleration straight at him, startling his perspective.
The inrush of hexagonal spinning iridescences slammed into his chest, infusing senselessly hilarious gyres of energy to his exalted consciousness. He erupted with hysterical laughter. Phosphors pressed his tearing eyes shut while his massive body quaked with his blasting cachinnation.
He was only dimly aware of the ticklish flinders through which he fell, falling through the broken face of the cliff, oblivious to all but his own roaring, world-shaking laughter.
*
Another day of sunlight. Wre
cker wakes and remembers nothing. The curtains slowly stir, like a fleeing wedding train glimpsed at the edges of a dream. The sun winks through the split, like a glorious garter belt.
In the dark pit of his gut a confusing ball of electric anxiety threatens like secret Tesla coils.
Is he hungry?
Deep down, the anxious lightning coughs, splutters, and putts out. Who can be bothered with anxiety anymore? Lots of people he supposes. But not him. Not anymore. Its’ cold and pain are welcome resources now, necessary in fact, like super-cooled rocket fuel or something, anti-matter maybe. Sadness is, in his case, a vast reservoir of power at his disposal.
So he tells himself.
When he needs it he just puts on his hideous, samurai face mask and detonates his suffering with righteous anxiety, and triumph roars out of his Klein bottle, terrible and furious and certain.
He smiles like honey at the golden window and the stirring curtains, his tummy dawning with a sunrise of its own.
"Let's eat," he winks back at the world, and gathers himself to leap out of bed.
from Sure Fire
INFINITE DAY
A novel by the author of Jason Micheal Dunn
Chapter 1: A Mind as Divine
Storms, as if with minds of their own, train their pacific eyes on the steel and concrete bastions that are our major cities, though when these powerful beauties bat their wild lashes, said bastions soon are battered and smashed, their own properties dashed against themselves, succumbing as they must to these ecologically new implacable maelstroms of just repercussions. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the increasing cold induced by ash cloud cover, each city’s prodigal wealth of heat pollution shines like a colossally flagrant emergency flare spilling argents out and up, into the night, summoning doom home, just as light summons squid from the deeps at night, the heat of our desperation attracts the ardour of cold lovers-cyclonic titans from the days of creation, rotating their hips, howling all the world to an end.
Auto immune deficiency syndrome has, as indeed originally predicted, slipped beneath the radar of concern during the intervening decades of gestation only to resurface as the inexorable plague of the end of days. One billion infected, Africa is a giant AIDS colony, a dumping ground for every gutless nation to offload their recently infected. The cure is as controversial as the virus and twice as expensive. Nanodes, synthetic microorganisms, have their RNA molecules programmed to search and disassemble any virus cell atom by atom in nanoseconds. Sufferers with credit enough to pay for the cure are injected with billions of nanodes with instructions to kill AIDS cells on sight. Each and every carbon tube enzyme is manufactured by an artificial process of evolution to be far more robust and reliable than regular microorganisms. While regular enzymes speed up chemical processes literally a million times over, a flood of nanodes are able to perform a slew of biological marvels with far fewer errors in just a fraction of the time. They simply take any and every virus cell apart atom by atom in a matter of seconds. However, the debate as to whether such treatment should be legalized at all rages over dangers the likes of which are said to make the Fukushima depth charge look like child’s play, which indeed it may as well have been, considering the blinding interplay of pride, despondency, and international buck passing that led to the greatest ecological disaster the human race had ever seen.
The major controversy arises over the issue of overpopulation. Since nanodes were first envisioned at the dawn of the 20th century by the futurist Feyeraband, long before such speculative musings were considered in all seriousness, the equally unlikely danger of unstoppable self-replication was also prophesied. It was imagined that if one nanode could build another nanode out of the molecular material in its environment in just a single minute and each machine new and old assembled another in the next minute then such exponential growth could see the entire mass of the Earth eaten and transmuted into a massively dense devouring cloud in just three and a half days, provided they could in fact consume the molten core and survive. A moot point considering none would remain to witness the virtually impossible.
After thousands of years and dozens of civilizations achieving the halcyon heights of luxury in both quality of life and peaceful relations, able to partake in the wealth of education and superabundant opportunities to advance the betterment of all human life, time and time again, those with wealth and opportunity have turned their backs on humankind in order to daydream further and further into slave fuelled decadence. The death of the oceans has come and gone. The utter homogeneity of edible varieties of grains is an uncomfortable fact in the making with millions dying in the bottom of the bell curve every hour. Human rights are cashmere baby blankets sold by Corporations who wield the only rights. They own the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the right to buy or sell anything under the sun. Freedom has a price tag and to live means to participate in the sale of your innate ideals while you purchase a portion of someone else’s freedom.
These were the only four fundamental factors bathing Odette’s burnished mind: ecology, pathology, technology, and morality. So many distractions had ceased to be for her, meditations on the spurious bleached from her everyday moment by moment, all but completely. Her tectonic passions, debilitating hypochondria, psychotic technophobia, her clinical depression, had been insurmountable, immutable constants in a universe of unfathomably pervasive distraction. All gone. The losses had been too many, the scrambling desperation that so marked her tortured teenage years, her twisted twenties, and dirty thirties, had left her scoured psyche free of purchase whatsoever. Her wide open consciousness had been punished for being true and intelligent all her life, first bored out by the drills of rote learners, then sculpted by the failing planes of the human behavioural bell curve. There was no more room for mistake. There was no such thing as mistake. Her polished mind was a convoluted toroid smoothly finished by the song of the universe whistling through the wholes of her brain. She knew exactly what to do and she was certain that the emerging results would be beyond the human capacity to reasonably expect. There was nothing this world could offer her. It had failed her so utterly she looked instead toward the next world, the world she had imagined since she was little; the world that had evolved to keep in tune with the soundness of her developing logic and in sync with the immutable rhythms of her idealist heart.
“I will immerse myself in the nanode bath waiting for the near death state of lowest metabolic rate to be fully induced. You two will monitor my condition from this control room.” Odette was a striking woman, petite, long straight black hair recently all shaved off, skin white as white ever so lightly freckled across her cheeks, and cold as cold. Her demeanour would best be defined as imperious. Too many heart-breaks had interred her smile in the grave of the future. She wouldn’t allow anyone, especially a man, see her lips alive with mirth, they might get the wrong idea, as they are certainly wont to do. She was no longer given to heartless dalliance, nor was she taken with flippant or inane concerns. She couldn’t care less for fashion, nor art, both having ceased to serve any true function. For the most part style had become a tumescent malignancy swallowing its own dwindling substance. Or so she told herself. Her mind, able to deny excess in an artefact whilst simultaneously embracing its essential conatus, its human striving, was able to gently touch upon the least part, which was paradoxically the forgotten whole.
“So if you don’t survive denaturation and we are unable to revive you we should depopulate.” He was referring to the nanode population in the bath. Lance had given up normal human affectations in Odette’s presence. Her unresponsiveness had murdered his regular ebullient charisma halfway through the first day of working in their cramped lab. There was still a certain pleasure he gained from their mutual sterility however. The absence of humour and any warmth whatsoever provided their interactions with an unadorned familiarity. Their often unspoken cooperation in close proximity made their terse trade in data and eye co
ntact somehow open, engendering an unvoiced and unacknowledged loyalty in him. Somehow her impeccable manner had robbed him of desire whilst stealing his eye simultaneously.
“That’s right. Also…?” She tilted her head just so, as she always did when testing his procedural knowledge.
Slade fielded the question, “If the nanodes reach an over-population threshold we are to flood the vault with neutered disassembler nanodes.” Unlike Lance in an abundance of ways Slade was still professional having long since given up criticising the project and its superabundance of what-ifs. Where Lance was swarthy and unmarried, Slade was almost pink, an albino, even his wife was an albino, and they were truly in love. They’d met at varsity while finishing their PHDs in Microbiology. Some people had all the astronomical luck. All new alabaster Ken and Barbie!
“And if I do survive denaturation…?” Lance and Slade flickered a glance in each other’s direction, neither had got used to Odette’s neutral attitude toward what Slade had once called, “the nerdiest suicide he could never have even imagined.” He had called it that to her face, and he had done so with fiercely controlled vehemence. Odette’s unreactive mien had absorbed his abhorrence like the angelic visage of a statue, seamlessly flowing on to elucidate eloquently if soullessly on the finer grain of her ingenious process, finishing with the disclaimer contract and exorbitant rate of remuneration. That was the third day they had all worked together, the third day of induction through the tiered stages of her process, and the first day the pieces of the puzzle had begun to be put together in their uncanny tessellation. It was just after Slade’s shock and then dismay that his mood had also been murdered. Something about Odette and her lone genius stripped personality of the extraneous, like an autoclave. That was her nickname when she was out of ear shot. “The Autoclave wants nano-feed synchronized to inject at upwardly graduating increments in order to elude residual immune response resulting in toxic shock and death. Are you sterilized by that, Slade?” “I’ve never been more sterilized in my life, Lala. The question is does that sterilize you?” “Hey, I was born sterile.” “Your mother’s sterile.” Eyes grinning if not their mouths they carried on in that fashion tirelessly. It had only been three months of instruction, drills, and test runs and since then life had lost meaning in the most meaningful way previously unimaginable. They were clean, as if they had been junkies or something, but what had they been strung out on?