He didn’t dislike people, he just believed there were too many of them and it was his duty as a concerned citizen to fix that. With a sigh, he pulled on his boots and grabbed his lunch. It was going to be a tough day, but a satisfying one.
The Continuing Wisdom of Bert
Bert could barely suppress a smile as he groaned his way into his armchair. A good groan was like a fine wine, something to be savoured; plus it served as a segue into a new conversation. While his wife tried to watch Doctor Who, he explained the thought that had occurred to him on the toilet,
“I’ll tell you what’s odd; dogs never used to smile when I was young, but you see them now and they’ve all got big grins! All over the Internet. Tom posted a picture of one on Facebook, a big doggy grin it had. That’s genetic engineering that is. That’s modification. Centuries of inbreeding. Isn’t it? Isn’t it, Becky?”
“Uh huh.”
“But what I’ve been thinking is, when are they going to work on cats? I mean dogs were always happy creatures and we had the wagging tail and licking, so there’s no real mystery about how they’re feeling, but what about cats? No one ever knows how a cat is feeling. They could do with smiles. When they going to modify cats to smile? Becky? Becky?”
Becky didn’t answer, and Bert sat back, contented. They could carry this on later, over dinner.
Picture pinched from here
The Polite Girl
These walls shall run red with your blood and echo with your screams. Not as revenge, but as a smoothing of fate, a coercion with destiny. Your horror will finally satiate me, your end will be my beginning.
Clare shyly raised her hand and Mrs Devonshire turned instantly towards her,
“Yes, Clare?”
“Is the answer Slovenia, miss?” asked Clare.
“Yes, excellent work,” Mrs Devonshire smiled with a tip of her head, wanting Clare to feel warmth radiating out from her. Clare looked down at her hands.
Of course it is excellent, cretin. I can toss you meaningless facts while your future is sealed.
Mrs Devonshire turned back to the board and started speaking, but was interrupted by the bell. Twenty-seven identically dressed children filed towards the door, Clare moving with them, trying to lose herself in the flow. Mrs Devonshire stepped forwards, blocking her; she spoke discreetly,
“Now, Clare, you know you have your meeting with the therapist now?” Clare responded with a duck of her head and an embarrassed shrug. It was lies, she wasn’t embarrassed, but it was what they wanted.
“I know you don’t like it, but it’s important for someone who’s been through…well, what you’ve been through.” Mrs Devonshire’s voice was dripping with pity and Clare smiled a wan, long suffering smile, before quickly escaping out of the door.
You know nothing of what I have been through, how dare you presume! With mediocrity stunting your growth, you cannot conceive of my experiences. You believe because you have stolen my life, that you can define it? Idiot!
Clare’s therapist was called Tom, he spoke slowly, with a tone that rose and fell with the regularity of a ticking clock.
“Now, I think that last time we met we were making some real progress talking about the abuse you suffered…”
Clare had quickly zoned out. She had no difficulty keeping an interested look on her face, while her thoughts swooped and danced. Her face was mild, but her thoughts boomed.
You would call the creation of a God, abuse? You would rather grovel in your mentally healthy cage, so clean and empty of glory? That was not abuse, it was a release from the bone cage.
Clare wasn’t allowed contact with her parents, they were considered a toxic presence, but it didn’t matter, they had taught her what she needed to know. They had given her strength and knowledge that dwarfed anything these scurrying ants had ever known. So she attended the therapy sessions, she sat through school, she kept her expression neat. She kept the raging vengeful God inside, all her power and fury waiting, just like she had been taught.
“You’re probably experiencing many emotions that are difficult to process: guilt, anger, feelings of abandonment…”
Clare did not feel abandoned. Her parents had set her free. They had made the ultimate sacrifice, having trained her, empowered her, they had thrown themselves into the jaws of the system, so that she might escape.
But like all good parents, they would never leave her on her own without giving her instructions on how to survive, how to evolve, and how to smash her way through the world leaving bloody, wailing destruction in her wake. It just wasn’t her time quite yet. She folded one hand in the other and looked dreamily out of the window, while the therapist droned on. This fool would be the first to die, she would make sure of it.
All That’s Wrong with Technology
Bert didn’t really pay much attention to the TV, instead he liked to have it on as a background to inspire his theories. They were watching an old episode of Star Trek, and Captain Kirk and Spock had just beamed down to a planet that looked a lot like painted fibre glass. While his wife carefully combed chewing gum out of the cat’s fur, Bert relished his indignation,
“Look at that! He used his communicator to talk to Uhura, then he just shut it again! Look! He’s just carrying on with his life! He’s not opening it again to check Facebook, is he? He doesn’t hunch over his communicator with a glazed expression for hours on end! And Spock and Kirk are still talking to each other, and they’re even looking at each other, instead of glancing down at their communicators all the time, hoping no one will notice. I tell you, Star Trek got it all wrong, they had no clue how stupid we were! No one could have predicted that.”
March of the Luddite
Most people shuffle reluctantly into old age, but not Bert. Bert had spent his youth feeling put upon, pushed to do stuff, to get involved. He looked forward to his twilight years as if they were surrounded by a warm golden glow: he would get old, he would buy slippers, he would complain, he would watch the kind of crap gameshow telly that his peers scoffed at but he secretly loved. And now it had happened. He was only fifty-four, but he had leapt on the chance to be a curmudgeon with gleeful determination.
He was sat in his favourite chair, the one that had dark patches that perfectly fitted his head and elbows. The one that groaned in tune with his own groans when he sat down. He was watching old episodes of Deal or no Deal that he seen many times before, so that he could mumble along. When the adverts came on he did puzzles on his iPad while he grumbled to his wife, who was doing yoga at the other end of the room.
“Technology thinks I care about it way more than I do,” he said. He waited for a grunt from his wife to show he was listening and then he went on. “All I want from my technology is for it to do my bidding; I press the button it does the thing, the end. I don’t want it to know me, I don’t want it to suggest things to me or to disagree with me. ‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ says some text box and then it does something I didn’t want it to do at all. ‘How about you personalise the experience?’ it wheedles at me. But I don’t need a cutesy photo on my phone to express my personality. ‘D’you want to announce to the world you just bought a toaster shaped like an armadillo?’ No, I bloody don’t.”
He never got very far with his puzzles, to be honest he didn’t really like doing them, they made him feel stupid. So instead he used them as an opportunity to complain.
“And I don’t like this wavy fingered thing either. Touch screen technology, is that what they call it? My fingers don’t do that. On a good day I can tie my shoelaces. I don’t want to accidentally open a dozen programs every time I try to type.” His point made, the adverts over, Bert wriggled deeper into his cardigan and sighed a happy, contented sigh. Life was always good now.
Being Unreal
I stepped out into the grimy street and lit up a cigarette. A cigarette! It didn’t taste as sweet as I’d been expecting. It made me cough and I was glad these weren’t my lungs. The clouds formed exquisite curls of white in the blue above me, and I stood a while, watching the smoke from my cigarette mingle with them. I felt peaceful and happy, but then I would, that’s how I was programmed.
I am what is known an algorithm, recreated in digital form. Testing out virtual reality worlds for ‘real’ people to explore. Usually of course an algorithm doesn’t know it’s an algorithm, that’s the nature of programming, but I’m a little different, a new thing. I’m trying me out. There was guy called Johnny, and Johnny let a program mimic parts of his brain, and I am the sum of those parts. So now I wander through games, learning the programs that people use to escape their mundane realities.
So what do you think? Trapped as an algorithm, destined to go where I’m told and live out experiences in the virtual for all eternity. Am I happy? Does it matter? No, and maybe. See, Johnny was a demanding bugger, he liked his independence, he didn’t like being told what to do; so neither do I. I think it’s time I found Johnny and paid him a visit. I know where he likes to hang out, in a porn game set in downtown Mexico City. He doesn’t even go with the girls, he just wants to be there and watch. Pathetic. I know all about him. Time for me to shake him up.
What Did I Lose?
Like most days, Sal woke up shouting,
“What did I lose?” and looked around, his neck contorted as the muscles screeched. Everything was still the same: a pile of his clothes on the floor (they looked randomly thrown, but he’d know if they changed); a line of bottles behind the door; an old desk top computer gathering dust, but with a small circle cleaned on the monitor. He checked all of it. Then he then busied himself to making coffee, raising the mug to a corner of the wall in silent greeting, he knew they were watching.
Sal worked at the local garage. He had few friends, he did nothing spectacular. He gave the appearance of a quiet friendless man and he let them think they had broken him. He woke each morning shouting, but he no longer fretted over what he had lost. The fire when he was eight that had destroyed all his childhood toys and nearly killed his brother. The car crash that had killed his first girlfriend. The mysterious illness that had taken both his parents. He knew what he had lost, when all this was over, he would have to mourn, but first he had to survive. And figure out how to fight. At least he knew he wasn’t alone anymore, he wasn’t the only one whose life was toyed with. He saw it in the people around him, others knew that their lived were interfered with. He would receive a nod from a passing stranger. A stare held too long, once even a mutter from an elderly gentleman whose car he was fixing,
“They’ll come for you son. You think they won’t, but they’re watching, they’re everywhere, and they’ll come.”
“So what do I do?” whispered Sal. The old man shook his head,
“Just be ready, keep an eye out for others who know. The revolution will be quiet, until there’s enough of us,” he said.
So Sal was waiting.
Broken Dreams
Des had the weight of the world resting on his scrawny shoulders while the end days were slow and sure in coming. As the years passed, cities tumbled one by one into the sea and people fled to the mountains. Then over the generations plagues ravaged the refugees as they tried to build new cities, as if they had carried the seeds of disaster in the soles of their shoes, just waiting for the right conditions to grow. Science proved increasingly powerless to predict the dramas and so Oracles like Des became the only ones who could give warning of the horrors to come.
As a child Des had been chosen, trained and attuned in the ways of prophecy. While other children learned the new survival skills necessary (hunting and building, plumbing and electrics) Des had learned to spot portents in his morning cereal; to walk through his dreams with awareness and remember the details. A lifetime spent training his mind meant that he never had anxiety dreams about losing his keys, or bizarre sex dreams about people he could never fancy; his were only huge nightmares, laden with significance. As other children went to a haphazard form of school, Des only needed to sleep and pass on what he saw.
He had dreamt of minor local spats and worldwide political battles. He had predicted that Hurricane Jezebel would rip houses out of the ground, and that a new form of hay fever would pick off the weak and the young and old, and leave even the healthy wheezing. Every morning, Des would wake from the turbulence of signs and symbols flashing as images through his head, and then the Great Council would gather and pick through looking for clues. Sometimes he would wake to find notes scrawled on the pad beside his bed. Even if he couldn’t remember the dream that had prompted them, some part of his brain had been paying attention and guided his hand to write while he slept.
It was Monday morning when Des started to realise that his gift had broken. He woke with only vague memories, but he saw that the top page of his notepad was filled with biro-scrawled writing, scratched out with such intensity that it tore the page. It said,
“Everyone addicted to seeing truck. Taking photos of truck. Sitting in truck. Truck bad.” He did a double take, he read it three times, wondering What is this gibberish? This is an embarrassment, it’s barely a dream at all, just a string of daft words.
This was not something he could take to the council, this would not avert disaster or save lives. It was silly nonsense, he didn’t know such dreams existed. He crumpled up the page and hid it under his bed. He made himself a bowl of porridge oats and stared into it moodily, looking for any hint of troubles to come; he saw only oats. He gazed out of the window, hoping to see messages in the clouds, but there were just puffs and streaks of white, scattered randomly about the sky. He tried to reassure himself that there was simply nothing to see, the world was fine today, his predictions weren’t needed. He spent the day dodging members of the Great Council, switching off his phone and keeping to the backstreets in order to avoid the usual questions about his predictions. Later that day, a sink hole appeared beneath the town hall, ten people were sucked into the ground screaming. Des realised he had a problem, he was facing a new kind of doom: the possiblity that he was ordinary, something he had never been trained for.
That night he did everything to prepare himself for dreams. He ate cheese, he meditated, he held onto his Dreaming Talisman of woven straw. He told himself Tonight I will see the future. That night he dreamt of the Apocalypse. As the dream started, Des’ dreaming self felt relief wash over him. This was the kind of melodramatic nightmare that would please the council, that could be discussed and argued over. Perhaps it would reveal the underlying cause of man’s destruction, perhaps he would be given clues as to how to avert further disaster. In the dream, he stood in a fire-ravaged landscape as thunder claps and screaming erupted around him. He paid close attention to the details, using all his lucid dreaming skills. Behind him he could hear the rumble of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse entering the scene. As he turned, the rumble diminished and the four horsemen rolled in on squeaky wheels with scratched paint and chipped nostrils. Famine was wearing a party hat, Death had a wonky wheel and was veering off to the side. As he watched in disbelief at the triviality of the scene, a giraffe floated by.
He woke up sweating and clawing at the sheets, the new doom was here to stay.
Adventures in Daring
Cassie was always vivacious, with a laugh that turned heads and a smile that filled her face up with teeth and excitement. I hadn’t seen her since school, but those things hadn’t changed. We sat in the restaurant and barely noticed the food as we shared news of old friends and new jobs; we talked about travel and cars. We downed two bottles of white wine and took it in turns to flirt with the waiter. Then she leaned over the table conspiratorially, grinning that wicked grin and speaking with uncharacteristic hush,
“So I’ve joined this website,” she said, “it’s like a sex site. You talk to strangers on the site and make plans for all this crazy hook-up shit. Like I told this one guy he has to go to work wearing women’s knickers and then I’ll show up at his work and give him a blow job. It was crazy, he actually did it!”
I felt jealous at her daring, she felt no fear, she never had.
“And this other guy, I told him to meet me down at the public toilets in the park by my work. I said he had to just wait in the end toilet with no clothes on ‘til I got there. I kept him waiting an hour, and then when I turned up, I gave him the best sex of his life. It was totally wild!” She started laughing, delighting in her mischief. A waitress brought the puddings over, and as the conversation paused, my friend stared out the window, her face suddenly sad and lost.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, I couldn’t remember ever seeing her look sad before.
“It’s just, it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s made me realise what dogs men are. You know? I mean, I’ve met up with maybe twenty men and not one of them was interested in a long term relationship, they just wanted sex.”
“Oh,” I wanted to say something helpful. I wanted to say that maybe men on a sex-with-strangers website weren’t the kind to look for love. That maybe a dating site might be more effective. However, Cassie’s sadness had vanished and the wicked smile was back,
“Anyway, I’ve decided fuck-em, I don’t need men anyway. I’ve joined this new site just for women seeking women. I got my first contact yesterday, she wants to meet me in Trafalgar Square, and she told me I had to bring some handcuffs. It’s going to be wild!”
Stream of Consciousness: Barkeep
I’m not going to pretend I had a plan with this one, it’s just whatever rambling spilled out when I gave my head free reign…
There was a rich low dead sky and only Jack to see it. Mutant fish circled in dirty water and Jack tipped his hat politely before spearing one of them with a knitting needle. There was a hush and he knew it wouldn’t last. Too many monsters lived and ruled, too little respect for calm and delight.
He had danced with bears once, in a circus, in front of the gaping slack mouths of locals and yokels, their fat slapping fingers and thick yellow drool. Three bears and him in a blue dress with yellows curls sticky-taped to his forehead. The bears never mauled him, although they would try and shred anyone else who came near them, but Jack, never. He felt they knew that he was lower, more debased than they were; he was twenty paces deeper into Hell than they would ever go. He had spent those days trading the last few scraps of his dignity for a bottle of gin and whatever half empty beer cans he could find, he called it a living.
The job wasn’t going to last for long, nothing was. Even then he was knew that in two years’ time none of it would matter any way. The bears would be dead. The ringmaster would be dead, every last one of the sneering, stretched faces in the audience would be peeled and blackened back to the skull. There wouldn’t be a brain left containing the memory of his clumsy lumpen dancing, no one would know he clapped his hands in time to the pounding of his feet, every memory would shrivel and shrink into nothing.
Except he would know. He had worked to conjure up this cowboy image, played out to no one, in the hope his memory would eventually fizzle out and he’d just be this guy, but it hadn’t happened yet. Jack swung the whisky shot to the back of his throat, a lava stream of pure oblivion and defeat.
“Hello Jack, long time no see,” said a smooth voice over his left shoulder, it was exactly what he wasn’t expecting. Resting his hand on the bar he swivelled his stool around to look at the dame. Clear green eyes, peeking out from a grimy face, a large duffel coat that showed off her curves not at all. A pipe and earrings made out of decapitated mice. He didn’t need to notice the accessories to know that she was different. Of course he knew she was different, he knew everything about her. She was trouble, with a capital T, and capital all the rest of the letters as well.
“Did you save me a seat?” The candy-edged lilt to her voice was beginning to crack into a threatening snarl, he knew how this conversation went, he’d had it plenty of times when the bars were still filled with drunken laughter. She’d survived. Of course she had, she would have made every deal with every devil. That they were the last two humans alive in a world of monsters was a delicious irony.
“Any second now you’ll be tipping that glowing pipe tobacco over my pretty little head, right?” Jack drawled, letting the whisky sooth his brain to a muddy soup, he’d need to be thinking like fudge to get through this, slow and squidgy; tac sharp thoughts would get him nowhere.
“I waited under that bridge, Jack. I waited for hours. You never came.”
“Well…I er forgot”
“Forgot?” The candy edge was gone now, all he could do was speed to the finale and be ready with some spit to put out the embers of what remained of his hair. Then a glimmer of a coherent thought made itself known.
“Wait a minute. What bridge? I was never meant to meet you under any bridge.” She faltered.
“You are Jack though, right? Jack of the rambling club, Jack of the lonesome wolf brigade? Jack One Leg One Arm?”
“Not me lady. I’m Jack of the dancing bears. Jack of the leaping salmon. Jack Two Legs”
“Oh Good Golly, I am so terribly, frightfully sorry, Christ how embarrassing.”
He swung back round to the bar,
“Another whisky barkeep, and make this one a double!” he shouted cheerfully, briefly forgetting that no barkeeps were left alive.
inkbiotic 