Tuesday, March 31, 2020

A Murder of Fables ☩

The FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Proudly Presents


RAVENS
by Sheikha A.
photo by S.A. Lawton

click pics to begin reading the entries



STORMCROWS
by Sheikha A.
photo by S.A. Lawton




AETERNUS AEVUM ANALOGIA
by Shaun A. Lawton
photo by Vincent Daemon




NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW
by Sean Padlo
art by Bonita Barlow




NAME2FACE.app
by Keith Graham
photo by S.A. Lawton



ELIXIR OF THORNS
by Shaun A. Lawton
art by Callum Leckie




PORRIS IN WUNPERLAND
by John Shirley
art by Jesse Stevens





THE BELLOWS IN THE BB-HEADS
by Vincent Daemon
art by Jason Barnett







THE FREEZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION HAS FEATURED A NEW ISSUE EVERY OTHER MONTH, FOR A TOTAL OF SIX ISSUES A YEAR, DURING THE FIRST FEW YEARS OF ITS INCEPTION. PRODUCTION HAS SLOWED DOWN SINCE THEN. THE EDITORS ARE STRIVING TO MAINTAIN HIGHER QUALITY AND GIVE READERS TIME TO CATCH UP WITH ARCHIVED STORIES. BETWEEN NOW AND THE END OF 2020, OUR COMMUNITY-FOSTERED WORLD WIDE WEBZINE  ASPIRES TO RELEASE AT LEAST TWO MORE ISSUES, IF POSSIBLE. YOU ARE READING THE TWENTY-FIFTH ISSUE OF THIS ONLINE CREATIVE WRITING AND ARTS WORKSHOP, DUBBED A MURDER OF FABLES. IT SHOWCASES SEVEN WRITERS, TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS, AND FOUR ARTISTS. THE FREEZINE IS A NON-PROFIT ENDEAVOR WHOSE GOAL REMAINS TO PROVIDE A DIGITAL FORUM FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS TO PRESENT THEIR POEMS, STORIES, NOVELETTES, NOVELLAS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND ART FOR READERS AND VIEWERS WORLDWIDE TO ENJOY FREE OF MONETARY CHARGES AND DEVOID OF THE SOUL-SUCKING DISPLAY OF COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENTS WHICH POLLUTE OUR AESTHETIC ENJOYMENT AND SICKEN US TO THE CORES OF OUR SOULS. THINK OF IT AS AN 'OPEN MIC' FOR SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND HORROR AUTHORS. ANYTHING GOES AT THE FREEZINE. WE ARE HERE TO INFORM AND ENTERTAIN.

STAY TUNED FOR FUTURE EDITIONS WHEN THE FREEZINE UNVEILS UNCOMPROMISING NEW STORIES FROM SURPRISE GUEST AUTHORS AND ARTISTS.

WE AT THE FREEZINE ARE DEDICATED TO PRESENTING THE LATEST IN CUTTING EDGE SPECULATIVE FICTION. IF YOU ARE A PUBLISHED OR NEW AND ASPIRING WRITER AND WISH TO CONTRIBUTE TO FUTURE EDITIONS OF THE FREEZINE, PLEASE CONTACT THE EDITORS AT

  FREEZINEFANTASYSCIENCEFICTION@GMAIL.COM.

RESPONSE TIME MAY VARY, BUT SHOULD TAKE PLACE WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, SOMETIMES MUCH SOONER. WE BELIEVE THAT BY JOINING OUR EFFORTS AND GIVING FREELY OF A STORY EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE WE CAN BOLSTER EACH OTHER'S PRODUCTIVITY AND EXPOSE OUR CRAFT TO THE FOLLOWERS OF THIS BLOG.




Thank you to all the subscribers who have dared to join us. Without you this endeavor would be an exercise bordering on futility. Please remember to spread the word about this free online publication. With your help, the editors and I myself will be better equipped to multiply the meme of cutting edge speculative fiction for a worn down world to stumble onto and enjoy while surfing the internet for something a little more rewarding than biased news.

HELP US ALL OUT and tell all your friends and fellow writers, dreamers, pirates, artists and poets about this thing. Together we can generate enough wind-power to fill the sails of this CyberShip, and set it aloft upon the stormy waves of speculative fiction and poetry. 

My undying and heartfelt gratitude goes out to Sheikha A., Sean Padlo, Keith Graham, John Shirley, Vincent Daemon, Bonita Barlow, Jesse Stevens, Jason Barnett, and SM Fletcher.  

Without you we would never have been able to keep this craft afloat, much less exploring unprecedented realms of the imagination. The Nanofleet (i.e, the BloodHost) continues to assimilate our material "in order to stockpile their dreamscape"--whatever that means. If you're a long time follower of this blog and webzine, and assuming you've been paying attention to all the editorial comments accrued piecemeal on the final day of each month dedicated to streaming an issue, then you already have an inkling as to how this digital digest came into fruition, at least according to our legend.  It has to do with the synapses in my own brain having been intercepted by an emission of neutrinos with nanocomputers embedded within them beamed into my consciousness eleven years ago from a lost colony of astronauts stranded on Ceres sometime in the future. I've been receiving these messages ever since intermittently. Weeks pass by without any signal from them, sometimes I won't hear from them for months at a time. Whenever a new missive happens to arrive, it usually instructs me to put out the next issue of the Freezine. These benefactors of our 21st century electronic fanzine will elucidate their process every once in a while. For example several years ago they began revealing how it came to be they managed to travel back in time to the year 2009, when our freezine was incepted. Apparently a team of privately owned astronauts who may have been employed by Elon Musk (it's not exactly clear, that's just one of my deductions) who were stationed on Ceres mining fresh ice water for export to Earth became stranded there for reasons unknown. They somehow managed to jury rig their equipment and utilizing nanotechnology bonded a fleet of microcomputers into neutrinos that they fired into the heart of Sagittarius A*—resulting in a wildly synchronistic interception wherein this beam of nanobot laden neutrinos traveled backward in time  to the year 2009 and intersected with some radiology equipment in the hospital that I happened to be working in at the time, resulting in my having begun the process of assimilating the Ceres Team's missives. I find it a wry and oblique development that their message of such importance presumably would be for me to put out a science fictional fanzine on my blog. Over the years I've begun to better understand their underlying imperative. Apparently their message to us remains tantamount to wildly gesticulating in a desperate attempt to get at least some of us on the planet to disengage from our addiction to commercialization and big advertising which I presume to remain the latent foremost complication on Earth which threatens to radically compromise our ability to continue surviving here. 






Please stay tuned to this same Bat-channel and spread the word about the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction because for as long as I continue receiving sporadic transmissions from our future subsidizers on Ceres this blog will proceed to assemble monthly issues of daily serialized novellas and stand alone short stories featuring fantastical artwork and photography for the express purpose of entertaining followers worldwide and bringing additional exposure to the contributors who have dared to join in and participate.





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Message the Freezine on Facebook

Email queries to

freezinefantasysciencefiction@gmail.com

and I'll reply just as soon as I am able to
and remember that TIME remains
the ultimate currency
of our lives


here on 




~ your friendly editor in chief
Shaun A. Lawton ~
 

Monday, March 30, 2020

The Bellows in the BB-Heads

by Vincent Daemon



                                                                                                 art by Jason Barnett



The noxious frying stench of the Brain Builder-Heads’ ventilating system (aka: the BB-Heads, as they were so mockingly referred to by their Leader) stank like that of some ancient and long searing, ever-present smoldering toxic-waste slag dump. It had been this way for so long that even The Leader’s Life Support System cronies (the LSS, His armed protection) perceived the stench now as a pheromone of sortsbringing out large and pinpoint erections on them whenever the stink was heavy, getting them to more resemble the bio-stone domes that had forever now become their heads—enhancing that which lived within them. When things would get that out of control, and it came to those violent and vile forms of punishment, the LSS would just use their strange and mutated architecturalized phalluses, and take by force whomever of their choosing—the act resulting in the Dwellers down there screeching in agony, painfully shaken and forced out of the LSS steam pipe urethras—only to be crushed and suffocated in the ever-forsaken wood-oven wombs. 



The Leader’s Guard, His “congress,” the pullers of the strings to a madman, as well as the planters of insidious seeds within his oddly orbital cranium (the only head of that shape) knew better however, and had been fully vaccinated through a process that lay somewhere between daily numbered injections of “unknown compounds” and the most minor of exposure therapies to their own poisons. These were never meant for the BB’s or LSS, however; they got injections of a much different sort. And not for the poisons. They were for things far worse. 


     The Leader held a sick fascination with observing the suffering of his followers. He took a dark erotic pleasure from watching his subjects suffer the effects of the ever-present toxins that clung even to the air molecules, and delighted in the strange and ever-altering mutagenic effects on his subjects, on top of their daily injections. 

     Once again, the Leader had His LSS gather all civilians together for another one of his rallies. But these meetings were never simple. Not only was there a well deserved and long festering dissension among the ranks, but also an incessant chatter of those near-invisible things that existed deep within each one of the Heads, including their Leader and his puppeteer Guard as well. These were tenderly referred to as the parasitic Dwellers, renting out their own little shoebox-room living spaces within the Building Brain-Heads structural skull psyches, carrying out all of their thought crimes.  Collectively locked inside, albeit the thought crimes of over one million Dwellers at once, could be a lot to withstand. These holed-up souls screamed out for food, for knowledge, for sustenance of any kind, as long as it was not the shearing asbestos-flesh fibers that the Dwellers were forced to parasitically collect (to wholly survive off of) from the interior walls of the anguished BB’s themselves. The Dwellers tore the wretched scarlet-grey substance directly from the intracranial architectures like a rotten cotton-candy made from ill-refined intestinal matter.  This substance seemed to partially replace their forever-sleeping while incessantly-awake brains. 

   There was so much screaming and bellowing and chattering going on (both inside and out of their gravel-scaled and misshapen heads) that most of these meetings would end in violent madness; rioting, sometimes cannibalistic throw-downs of sheer and utter chaos. Deranged public displays to sate nothing more than The Leaders own twisted, deeply rooted repressions, largely sexual in nature. Vile acts supported by The Guard, enforced by the LSS, and which terrified the BB’s to no end, but which they were completely powerless to control. 

   The rallies always ended viciously. They’d get so bad, so confusing, that many of the Heads would crackle and crumble apart under the high pressured anxiety alone, the constant howls of the Dwellers inside not helping one bit, but there to service the BB-Heads collapsing upon each other like the poorly structured tenements they’d been coerced to become. Their heads and minds would smash down like poorly constructed Jenga tower high-rises, as though in a powerful San Francisco earthquake. 

   It was His idea, the short man with the round head in the round black spectacles. The Leader, as He liked to refer to Himself, and forced the rest to address His Highness as well. He’d put this all into action aeons ago, as His incessant rhetoric so claimed. But no one could tell anymore. Time now was a non-sequitur; had been for countless forgotten millennia. No one knew. Once indoctrinated, time was out, almost instantaneously. 

   The Leader, however, was merely another puppet for The Guard. A narcissistic, power-crazed and blinded Figurehead controlled without even His knowledge by The Guard, the counsel of His choosing. Historically, of course, this rift of mass madness had been forever circling the nanosphere like some kind of pit-viper waiting to strike, peering silently down with the aimed blood-point eyes of a rifle-scope, and the same forked tongue. 

   As The Leader approached His crowd, The Guard followed close behind, their usual scowls and smirks aimed like intense laser-beams at His back. The Leader had worn out his welcome quite some time ago. With The Guard, the LSS, and his very own civilians alike, with their skulls now and forever remembered as concrete towers (housing those horrid Dwellers), their veins running hot with the blood of molten mortar, they leered at him with the same contempt his own guardians demonstrated. 

   But there was one with just a bit more disregard for all of this than the others’ spite combined, assuming they even had the ability to feel antipathy, or anything for that matter, after having been subject to a lifetime of the Leaders warped and frequent harshly imposed whims. 

   Nila

   Her reasons were scary and legitimate: she was quite forcibly trapped somewhere she did not belong. She had no memory of ever volunteering for something like this; of how she had gotten there; nor why everyone was so hideously malformed, lurking about in the clammy and dimly lit room, their shapes suggesting they had once been human.  Something was now terribly wrong with their skin and features, not to mention their minds. 

   Except for The Leader . . . and herself . . . mostly. 

   A remembrance occurred suddenly, somehow pulled down and out, from a rare dream that she could not share with the physically attached other half of her, who was too zoned out to receive and overpower her thought-dreams. 

   In fact, Nila had no definite memories of a time before The Leader and his New-World Disorder; not of a youth, or family, or love, pain, joy, sorrow, holidays, or even time. Just this, along with a deep inner boiling that was something akin to hate

   The Leader claimed that all had been wiped from their minds, like a flesh-compelled EMP, in the wake of the atomic destruction. He raved in fits of lunacy about the cruelty they survived, and how He had found them, raised them with The Guard. He said that theyd been there since they were children, too young to remember; that this complex in which they dwelled was once a day care center. 

   The bellows in the BB-Heads had already sprung into manic hyper-action, however. Hell, that would happen if a BB-Head merely rolled over in their sleep, causing a constant mass insomnia for all the Dwellers within the Headsand for the Heads themselves. Nila learned long ago to be still. Her connected other, however, did notand it howled and shrieked in unexpected Tourette’s-like bursts, just like the rest of these “saved” civilians. 

   Except for The Leader and The Guard, of course. 

   The Leader raised his hands and a silence hushed over the lips of the sleep deprived, the listless BB-Heads, but not the Dwellers within them. Instead, those parasites merely got louder. They could be heard as vicious little barks of confinement, befuddlement, anger and sheer pain, echoed out from inside of the Heads, louder than the loudest of BB-Heads themselves. 

   As The Leader stood between The Guard and the sweltering, stinking, toxic steam-billowing civilians, there was that one in particular, Nila, who refused to stare at The Leader’s ever rambling lipless mouth and his pinchy, black bespectacled face of deceit, as it filled her with such sickness and loathing. Instead, she glared at the fool to whom she’d let The Leader conjoin her with. 

   Oh yes, for the deliberate chromosomal damage to the BB-Heads had rendered them all sterile, with no capacity for love, empathy, or compassion (but for Nila, whose dream tingles and elusive memoriesif that was indeed what they werestill seemed to be buried in there, somewhere). 

   Each new accidental and non-ratified birth spawned forth ever more hideous things, ever cheapening degenerations, mutating quickly away from the visions of perfection of the post-atomic shamble-world The Leader had so lovingly fed into his subjects minds and bodies (the original idea of which really came from The Guardor, really, The Leader’s Leaders, if you will). He transformed them into virtually dysfunctional, barely mobile chunk-puddles of endlessly diseased genetic uselessness. 

   Nila stared viciously at the cruel crackpot joker she had involuntarily agreed to be conjoined with (been forced to, as all were) in order to try to return to the feelings of that love and compassion she once believed she felt as a child (of which she was certain she had experienced) to return to that now so long dead sixth sense of empathy. 

   This was a cruel ruse, all of it. Nila’s conjoined counterpart was a vague and ugly caricature of the male form. His chin was tripled, his skin pockmarked, littered with grit and flyspeck yellow, and his face bore only the sedate, affectless clown-features of a long-time, wet-brained drunkard. He never had anything nice to say or even think to her, if ever anything at all. Quite against her will she was physically and psychically attached by the head through a makeshift flesh tube that merely processed their mutual negativity round and round and round. 

   The birth was both accidental and non-ratified

   Nila winced in pain once again as their sloppily devolved six year old hermaphroditic child bit forcefully into her nipple, the areola bruised purple and persistently exposed and bleeding from its constant gnashing on her breast. Psychologically, this mutant (barring it lived beyond ten years, were years still counted) would always be at a mental two. 

   The Leader began to speak in His superior and trickily forked tongue; meaningless words belted out to the illiterate, ignorant, and almost wholly inattentive yet quiet and fatigued crowd before him. 

   Nila, however, was quite literate, actually intelligent, and thoughts began occurring to her in painful rushes of flash-focused bits of memory along with those damn dream tingles, as she thought of them.  And growing ever more so resolved into a potent, dangerous internal wakefulness. 

   Her gaze drifted over to The Leader, and with each gnash of her young mutants gnarled teeth clamping down on her raw, shredded nipple, her Dwellers screamed louder and louder until Nila’s head began to feel awkwardly hot. Abnormally so. 

   As The Leader spewed his words out like the rotten vomit they were, words that meant nothing, the crowd of concrete-skulled human monsters before him just gawked in awe (as they always did) whilst He rambled on in stilted sentences and multiple intermingled languages. It all meant nothing but to advance forward in creating more synthetic sociopaths, until they were perfect, vampiric hive-minded human monstrosities of mentality and form with which to finally rule the lands outside of their former day-care-center turned nuclear-dome-cave structure of The Leader’s emancipation. It was to be His perfect society, His perfect world. Synthetic sociopaths, just like the discolored and deformed beast still ripping at Nila’s teat. 

   Nila’s head began to grow ever more hot with every passing second and word spat from The Leaders crumbling granite-flesh lips, her own stinking vent-steam beginning to glow a vicious red, as opposed to its usual soot-black. 

   The Leader, ever so unaware, kept on with his pinched and twisted smirk and round, blackened spectacles (the goggles by which he claimed he could see into every mind with) punctuating his long, bewildering speech. Instinctively, Nila tried to approach, but was stuck fast to the immobile triple-chinned clown, whose own face was beginning to contort into something like actual pain. His blackened soot on his head began to glow red as well, though nowhere as vibrant as Nila’s own. 

   The mutant toddler champed its maw down on Nila’s breast for the last time. In one swift maneuver she both pushed the bestial kid away, fully tearing her nipple off as she did so, the pain feeling like both relief and agony at once. Nila then yanked her near atrophied neck to the right as hard as she could, ripping the frail flesh tube connection to her Siamese-clown goon, a horrible cascade of stinging spray of odd fluids and boiling blood scalding and soaking all Heads around them. It was quite the attention grabbing scenario she did not intend, nor was she the least bit ashamed of

      The Leader fell into an immediate silence of the most deafening kind. He stared, astonished, as the hot blood chemical fluid spray began to douse the others around them. A mass awakening seemed to begin within the screeching parasitic Dwellers always lurking and feeding off the pink mold on the intracranial walls of the BBs. 

   A sound exploded en masse, all at once, like a high-decibel sonic weapon of some kind. Their slummed flesh tenements of concretized skulls were beginning to collapse and shatter from the inside out, sending millions of those Dwellers running mad for escape with every crumbling dome. 

   The mutant child tit-mangler disappeared among the chaos, finding anything it could now latch its jagged teeth into. The triple-chinned goon merely fell over with renewed spasms of atrophied muscle, twitching like a victim of end stage Parkinson’s, sickening fluids still sluicing from his torn connector. 

   As The Leader saw all of this, he began to back up, only to be stopped like a wall by The Guard, even as they were backed by his own mangled LSS. The masses moved in closer, collapsing, screaming, coming at the little dome-headed and pinchy-faced bastard in the round black spectacles. 

   But it was Nila who charged her way through the crowd with violent shoves and a strength of body and mind she had no idea she possessed,  all of which virtually exploded from somewhere deep within her. Fighting her once soulless atrophy, pushing the far more weakened Heads out of the way like a crazed animal. Nila was bee-lining her way straight toward The Leader. 

   The BBs granite and flesh concrete skulls were beginning to catch fire, countless Dwellers still scattering, running, escapingsome still with bits of the almost edible intracranial asbestos-like moss dangling from their chins. 

   The Guard and LSS walled The Leader in tight, letting the gathering of waking and disoriented, yet slowly focusing BB-Heads come ever closer, discombobulated, skulls aflame, faces of magma and rage becoming awake again, ever so painfully. 

   Nila pushed herself into The Leaders face, spitting contentions of venom and disgust: You did this to us. You. 

   A sheer act of rage, she bit hard into His cheek. No one stopped her, nor was going to. After all, Nila didn’t just have a little extra loathing for The Leader, but during his little experiment on her and the triple-chinned goon, The Leader decided to have a little sick fun himself. He had given her the head of a broken condom, not a standard concrete Builder Brain-Head. She looked the consummate fool, the top of her head sagging like a deflated rubbery whore dunce-cap connected to that waste of a clown, and a mutant monster consistently biting pieces of her left breast off for years (she'd given it solely the one breast, after the initial, terrifying incident of mangling). 

   The Guard and LSS merely held The Leader down as He tried to flee from Nila’s own mad gnawing. She spit the piece of His raw and bloody-pebbled cheek-chunk back into His own face. “Take the fucking glasses off.” Her command could not be argued with. 

   The rancid flavor of his bitten off cheek still clung to the inside of Nila’s mouth, the initial texture off-putting and wrongthe blood-pebbles being gelatinous beige tumors and nodes, feeling almost like tapiocaNila could taste The Leaders oncoming death. 

   The Leader, craven, in a state of pure terror and surrounded by nothing but these crumbling hateful BB-Heads of his own creation, reached up to feel his own cheek gnawed off, and let out a ghastly groan. 

   The Leader then removed his mysterious black and all-covering spectacles with albino-white and trembling hands. 

   There was nothing there. 

   He had no eyes, just empty abysses of maniac hate. 

   Most of the Heads had now crumbled, fallen to the ground, flames of the deepest reds and oranges and blues now flickering uncontrollably from their skulls and setting everything on fire, the entire former day-care-center turned granite-death-camp burning up in toxic waves of strange, thick blue smoke. 

   Everything was aflame, that is, except for the little Dwellers that knew they’d need new homes. A slum; new kinds of rotting minds; somewhere they could feast and enjoy the agony of these monsters . . . whatever these monsters may be. 

   The Leader was trapped and frozen catatonic with fright, as all the Dwellers began to form their bodies together, climbing up and over him. He was covered in them now but far too weak to try and shake or brush them off. The Leader fell back, The Guard and LSS backing away as far as possible, as his whole body was strewn with the squirming mass of strange little creatures. 

   The Dwellers had just discovered his empty eye sockets, into which they crawled with such glee that their all-too-familiar shrieks and screams of pain now became an intoxicated, euphoric laughter of a new kind of madness. It almost sounded as if they were having a New Years Eve party in there. 


   New years evewords verbotenthere was no time anymore...or was time indeed returning? 


   No one was quite sure whether The Leader was still alive, but his Dweller-riddled body was squirming along the charred ground like that of a maggot-filled roadkill rabbit. 

   The Guard, and the LSS as well, they just disappeared silently, almost invisibly back into the poisonous coal-like blue smoke. Never to look back or even let themselves think on this again. They just got out fast. 

   The Dwellers were all over and inside The Leader, behaving much like the one hive-minded creature they’d become; like that which He tried to create, perhaps almost successfully so, albeit in a much different fashion. It was truly grotesque to behold. 

   Nila wandered off into the roiling smoke and pungent stench of the bio-stone, the flesh-burning magma, the rapid decay, through the atrocity that surrounded her. This was no longer her world, nor had it ever been. All shrieks and self-absorbed pleas for help fell upon her newly unbound and beauteously deaf ears. 

   Flesh. Nila was of the flesh again, the dunce cap gone. 

   She did look back one time, back to the forsaken Leader, Mr. Mok Popolac, and giggled delightedly at his writhing, near-cadaverous form.  She could now hear only the echoes of the Dwellers having the party of a lifetime going on inside The Leader’s own rotten mind. True sounds of joy, so long unheard. 

   Nila turned back, and walked from the flesh-charred smoke of a hazy, gradually lightening indigo and into a world she was told was long dead, that was never there. 

   It certainly seemed there now. 

   For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt truly free of both The Leader and the bellow of the Dwellers. At that moment, amid the conflicts of chaos and sheer personal joy, Nila genuinely smiled. 

   “Miss!” Nila thought she heard a voice yell from the now blue-black smoke of apocalyptic waste that surrounded her. 

   A man, in an odd suit covering his entire body, stood before her. He even had a mask on, his face visible to her through its clear plastic shield. His eyes looked intelligent, blue, and kind. 

   “I’m Dr. Chorn, I am here to help. Are you okay?” His words were calm, steadied, and sounded almost alien to her ears. She understood some of what he said, but there was a time when she could’ve fully understood those words just fine, and reply without such hesitancy. “Apocalypse,” was all she responded. 

   “Don’t talk. Some other paramedics will be here to further assist you shortly. If I can do anything now, please let me know.” He watched her carefully, glimpsing her soul deep in her jade eyes. He knew she was in there, somewhere. 

   Nila then brought her hands to her matted, stringy dark-blonde hair, ran her fingers through it,  and stopped to rub the back of her neck ever so gently, in a gesture of self-comfort. She saw her reflection in the doctor’s mask, noticed how beautiful she was. Nila touched her own face. 

   She was real. 

   She touched the doctor’s mask. He was real. 

   She then let out one of the most blood curdling screams one could ever hope to never have to hear . . . and, in Dr. Chorn’s case . . . feel.







Saturday, March 28, 2020

Nine Tenths of the Law: IV

by Sean Padlo





   Jacob ordered them all to cease, shouting above the priests, the murmuring ephemerals, the buzzing electricity of Faraday Cages and Jacob’s Ladders. These constructs were pure founts of plasmonic energy that offered raw strength to the ephemerals; power and semi-corporeality were the gifts bestowed. The barracks felt like a frozen foreign wasteland, with creatures of ice and mist gathered here. Thomas, the boy, sat shackled within the eye of the maelstrom.

   Nash crept forward toward the boy. Jacob, without a glance, shoved the bloated, nosy fool away. Nash tumbled backward and crashed into the priestly triad. Their chanting stopped at last, if only for a moment.


   Jacob studied the boy: severely anemic, his bare skin stretched and rippled, split and scarred and bleeding. Noses and mouths, fingers and hands, pressed against and distorted the child’s body. His skin bruised and mottled, then stretched to transparency only to suddenly snap back to its original form. Appendages not his own pushed against his skin. Words appeared on his skin in hashes and scratches that called for help, that pleaded; words that begged rescue.

   There was a war being waged inside Thomas. Nash had gotten to his feet and moved behind Jacob to glimpse the boy and screamed when he witnessed a face and head, birthed from the child’s neck, gnashing teeth scraping against flesh from within. Nash put his hands upon Jacob’s shoulders to steady himself and found the man's body to be feverishly hot. He jerked his hands away and stepped back. Everyone around them had fallen strangely silent. Nash noticed that the ephemerals had all moved back and gathered together in silence at the periphery of the room.

   The priests returned to their exorcism chants, spraying Holy Water over the head of Jacob Morningstar and splashing the face of Thomas. The boy howled and struggled against his restraints, the Holy Water blistering the boy’s skin upon contact. Jacob’s scalp smoked and sizzled, and the man bellowed, once more ordering the priests to relent.

   Jacob leaned in close and said, “Thomas! Are you here, son?”

   As Thomas replied with a weak nod, the ephemerals returned to their task of entering the boy. One after another, they advanced unrelenting. They drove into his form with an audible whump and a warm glow. But they came faster now: whump…whump…whump whump whumpwhumpwhumpwhump!

   The glow of each successful entry was rewarded with the same radiance as before, but there was no time to fade. The incandescence built upon itself, brighter and brighter still, becoming blindingly intense. The priests screamed, clawing their eyes and tearing at their faces. Nash bellowed, his hands raised high, and decided to escape through the iron doors. Jacob Morningstar appeared to draw the luminosity out of the child, and in to himself. He grew taller, larger now. Dark, feathered wings sprouted and grew from between his shoulder blades. The buttons on his shirt popped, the fabric itself tore apart and shredded from his back. With his palm outstretched, he turned and sent a stream of light that set Nash afire. The man’s screams rose high and shrill, but thankfully ended quickly as his plump body sizzled, turned to bright ash, then spread out, drifting down like black snowflakes.

   “No
” Thomas shouted. His body settled; his flesh healed and as he looked up and met Jacob’s eyes, the shackles fell awayand he stood. Naked. Strong. Perfect. The moment was beautiful, serene. Thomas raised his hands and beckoned the cowering ephemerals left in the barracks. They came to him at once. Thomas became light. He was neither corporeal nor ephemeral. He had developed into something else. He had become more.

   The ephemerals swirled and merged like cirrus clouds, closing around the boy who was no longer a boy. The priests scratched blindly against the iron doors, while fort security pounded against the other side. Thomas drew his glowing hands into fists, drawing them toward his chest.

   The bodies of the priests collapsed to the cold stone floor as their spirits rose up, free of their anchors, and flowed into Thomas as if carried on a gentle breeze. The pounding from the other side of the doors abruptly stopped as they flew open, the ward exploded in a shower of sparks, and from the other side wisps of ephemera appeared, dancing and twirling around each other before slipping into Thomas.

   Thomas stood before Jacob, countless strands of gossamer enshrouding him like a shimmering robe. Jacob Morningstar knelt before Thomas and said, “Is it you? Are you in control now?”

   Thomas smiled and caressed Jacob’s cheek. “I am. It’s a wondrous thing.” He extended a hand to Jacob, and they climbed the stairwell together. Every ward exploded, the sigils cracked and split apart. They stepped thoughtfully over fallen bodies as they continued to ascend, the light of Thomas leading the way.

   They reached the top of the stairs and made their way outside. Thomas led Jacob by the hand, and they headed toward the main entrance of Fort Monroe. A curious crowd had gathered there, and Thomas drew their ephemera into him, the bodies slipping away, falling like shed linens.

   Through the main doors, Thomas smiled lovingly as his guardians emerged. Jacob stepped between guardians and child. “Your jobs are done. You are released.”

   The female stepped forward. “We have done what was demanded of us, and we deserve to be rewarded.”

   Jacob Morningstar’s jaw clenched, his words whistling through his teeth. “You are released. Go now. That is your reward.”

   “Now just wait a goddamn minute,” The male said. “That wasn’t the deal!”

   Jacob stretched his hand toward them as his palm began to glow. Thomas put his hand over Jacob’s and lowered it.

   “A just reward for you both,” Thomas said. He clenched his fist and his guardians burst from within. Their ephemera rose, and Thomas squeezed his fist tighter. The wisps of their spirits gathered, tightly, though they darkened until bits of sulfur ash drizzled to the ground.

   “You must not allow your emotions to control you. Know who you are, son.”

   Thomas offered a pleasant smile. “I am awakened.”

   “Good. You must always know thyself.”

   Thomas drew a golden light from within, letting it spread outward to his fingertips. “I am Legion…”

   Jacob Morningstar finished his sentence. “Yes… for you are many.”

   Thomas looked behind them and inhaled deeply. The sulfur ash of his guardians passed into him. And it was good.




~ The End ~



   Return Monday, March 30
    to read the final story in this issue

The Bellows in the BB-Heads
feat. art by Jason Barnett





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the FREEZINE of
Fantasy and Science
Fiction  


 


Monday, March 23, 2020

Porris in Wunperland

by John Shirley      

          

            Whenever Lo He “Larry” Chan worked late in the high energy physics lab, the janitor seemed to make it a point to come in and harangue him. Glancing up from his work, Chan heard the floor polishing machine outside the lab and glimpsed Randy Porris passing the little window in the door.  
Porris would soon be in here, yapping away about how western civilization was going down the tubes just as Spengler said it would and how applying Ayn Rand and paleolibertarian Austrians like Hans-Herman Hoppe would get us back on track. Then Porris would wind up with the Barack Obama was an enemy of the United States rant and true conservativism recognized that survival of the fittest was synonymous with liberty; he’d end with “liberals are eating at the root of western culture.” And then he’d start over.
Chan was raised in Singapore to be polite and culturally tolerant, but it was getting difficult to bear.  Porris would pretend to clean the lab as he ranted, so theoretically he had a right to be there. Chan thought about working elsewhere. But everything was intricately set up here. He preferred to put in a couple hours after everyone else had left the high-energy physics lab, because he had more access to more equipment. And he was close to the next-level tachyon breakthrough. Plus, Richard had left him, had gone on without him, and it was hard to be alone in the evenings…when he and Richard used to sit on the couch and talk about work and life and…
          Chan didn’t want to think about Richard Arnold Samsen. He just wanted to use the tokomak field to confirm his capture of the tachyons he needed for the next excursion. Another issue with Porris is that he was a janitor with an engineering degree—he’d been fired from a couple of firms for ranting and demeaning the women there, and he’d ended up a janitor. But his engineering degree and a little knowledge of science might make him dangerous, looking over Chan’s shoulder. Suppose he realized what Chan was working on here? None of the other PhDs working at the University knew the whole story—Chan pretended to be far behind where he really was. He was worried about how his discovery might be misused. He had begun to think that perhaps it should never be revealed.
As he bent over the displacer—his own design, a flattish silvery octagonal piece of equipment inscrutable to the other researchers—Chan winced hearing the click of the key in the lab door.
Porris backed through the door, starting to drag the floor polisher in after him.
“Randy, pleaseI really can’t have anything as noisy and vibrational as a floor polisher going this evening,” Chan pleaded. “Just—dust or sweep or something. Carefully, I beg of you. And do close the door behind you.”
Porris shrugged, and replaced the polisher with a broom. He forgot to close the door.
“The door, Randy. If you please.”
          “Okay, whatever. It’s not like it’s top secret.”
“How do you know?” Chan said mildly. He checked the tokomak feed to the displacer as Porris made fitful efforts at sweeping.
After a few minutes, Chan glanced at him, distrustful of the way Porris seemed to be staring at the linkage connecting the tokomak to the displacer plate on the floor.
 Porris was a pudgy man, with wide hips and narrow shoulders; pale, with little splashes of rosiness on his cheeks, and jet-black hair that contrasted dramatically with his very white skin. He had black mutton chops—he’d said once something about Gilbert and Sullivanand his hair was parted in the middle. He peered at Chan’s equipment with black eyes and said, at last, “Whatever that is, you’re really making progress. You look like a guy who’s making the final touches.”
Chan shrugged. “Final touches are never final.”
“So, you’re from what, Singapore?”
Chan sighed. “Yes.”
“You are kind of young to be a professor.”
He’s wondering if strings were pulled, thought Chan. “Am I? Would you mind getting the dust bunnies from the corners please? They’ve piled up atrociously.”
“I shouldn’t be doing this menial stuff,” Porris grumbled. He took a little hand-held vacuum cleaner from his belt and stalked angrily to the corner nearest to Chan. “I am a systems engineer.” He vacuumed for a moment, and then fiddled with the device. “But, you know, they had to find some excuse to get me out of there to give my job to…” The rest was a mutter.
“There’s an odd contradiction in what you libertarians say you believe and what you call for,” Chan said, in a carefully friendly voice, as he removed the transfer cable from the displacer. Chan had decided to get the rant over with so Porris would eventually leave.
Paleolibertarians,” Porris said. “What contradictions?”
Chan straightened up from using the vibrational attuner on the displacement platform—the attuner probably looked like a tuning fork to Porris, though between the tines of the fork was a small translucent screen flickering with data. “I mean, Randy, you insist on extremes of firmness at the borders, an end to asylum refugees, troops everywhere to enforce this…But you speak darkly of ‘statists,’ people who insist on having a state, a nation defined by something other than culture—statists are a bad thing, you say. But what are you doing but firming up a state, when you reinforce the borders and call for troops?”
Porris sniffed. “Special exception. Emergency situation.”
“Another thing that confuses me is how you can be as concerned as you are with fluoride in the waterand also you say you like fishingand yet you’re unwilling to regulate industries that pollute water. Pollution which has been shown to cause cancer in people and damage fish populations…”
“The free market will sort all that out! It works like thisas Hoppe says…”
And then Porris was off on a long, convoluted series of flimsily linked rationales that would take him at least twenty minutes to unspool. When he was done, Porris seemed angry. “Roy Flenner said you could be a spy for the Chinese communists. I mean, I’m not jumping to that conclusion but…”
Chan smiled and shook his head. “Am I! I wish someone had told me! But maybe I should send them an invoice, if I’m owned a paycheck from them…”
“Go on and laugh. What is it you’re hiding here? I’ve been taking notes.”
          “Notes you say! That’s intrusive. Not sure the university would like that.” Well, this was alarming. His secret could be ferreted out into the open if Porris was noisy enough. It was nothing to do with China but it certainly was explosive. “I’m from Singapore, not China, I’m not a communist, and it’s sounds like you’re the spy around here.”
          “So you say.”
          “Anyway, look—it’s pretty obvious you have this suspicious attitude toward me because I’m an Asian immigrant. If I were from Norway and doing the same work it wouldn’t seem suspicious to you.”
          “Now it’s the old ‘you’re biased’ baloney they used to push me out of the job because people can’t handle the truth!”
          “You have a distorted view on the world, for sure, Randy. And I can prove it to you.”
          “Oh yeah?”
          “You want to see what my work is about, yes?”
          “Sure. But…”
          Chan took the risk. He had to find a way to deter Porris from crying up his secret work—most of it secret even from the university. “I’m working on time travel. And not only have I succeededI’ve used it. I’ve traveled to the future, several times. Can’t do the past except, won’t work, it’s essentially set in stone—except you can travel back to the starting point from the future, to a split second after you left.”
          Porris gaped at him. He had very yellow teeth. “You’ve traveled to the future?” He laughed a sneer at Chan. “You’re a liar.”
          “Don’t blame you for thinking that. Just loan me your watch. You’ll get it back unharmed in ten minutes.”
          “What? It’s the most valuable thing I own! My uncle gave it to me. It’s got an inscription on the back!”
          “I promise it’ll be returned to you intact. If you want proof of time travel, bring it here, set it on the displacement plate.”
          “Which is what?”
          Chan waved a hand toward the inch-thick silvery octagon on the floor; it was just big enough for a man to stand on. “Right there. I give you my word I won’t hurt the watch.”
          Tugged along by curiosity, but ever so reluctantly, Porris set it his watch on the displacer.  
          “What time does it say on the watch?”
          “Eight-seventeen p.m.”
          “Very good.” Chan took out the attuner from his lab coat, adjusted the data on the little touch-sensitive screen, and pointed it at the displacer. A green spot appeared on the attuner’s little screen. He then took the controller from his other pocket.
          “What’s that? A TV controller?”
          “Adapted for my use. Now, step back, several steps.”
          Porris took a few steps back, bumbling into a steel work table. He scowled at Chan. “Why do we have to step back?”
          “Keep your eyes on the watch.”
          Porris looked but shook his head. “I think I want it back right now
          Chan pressed the button, and the air grew thick; it seemed misty for a moment, with the only clarity just above the displacer. There was a soft hum and an indefinable sense of discomfort…
          And then the watch and displacer vanished, a pop sounding as the space the two devices had occupied suddenly emptied and the air rushed in to fill the vacuum.
          Porris stepped forward, goggling at the empty spot as the mist vanished. “You’ve disintegrated it!”
          “No. It’ll be back. What time does it say on the wall clock?”
          “Looks like eight-eighteen. So what? Where’s my watch?”
          “Give me ten minutes.”
          “There must be a trap door of some kind.”
          “Feel free to look for one.  Now, let me explained to you why Keynesian economic works, though it has to be modified to include taxing the wealthy pretty vigorously. Government investment in small businesses, government loans to help start-ups, money to state programs…”
          “Keynesian! Why it…what?  Porris was triggered by that, as Chan had hoped. He was practically apoplectic.
          “Not only that, but there’s good reason to believe that giving anyone underfunded a base income has a far more beneficial effect on the economy than negative.”
          “You think you’re going to convert me to communism?”
          Chan couldn’t help but chuckle. “It’s capitalism. I don’t even like the term ‘Democratic socialism.’ I prefer to call it regulated capitalism. And I’m a capitalist! I hope to be rich from a couple of inventions I’ve patented. But we need regulated capitalism, as a football game needs rules—”
He kept talking for a little over nine minutes, sometimes over Porris’s protestations, giving examples of modified capitalism and socialized medicine that worked well in other countries, offering to show him charts, challenging his sources.
          “Now let me explain to you—” Porris began.
          Then Chan interrupted sharply, “Quick! Look at the floor where your watch was!”
          Porris looked. “What? It’s not…”
          The mist, the blur, the odd discomfort in the air—and then the displacer materialized, Porris’s watch lying on it.
          Porris’s mouth hung open. “That’s…it’s…a duplicate…”
          Chan said, “Pick it up and look at the time. It’s safe. The process is completed.”
          Porris bent over and snatched up the watch and looked at it. “It says eight-seventeen—now eight-eighteen…”
          “Look at the wall clock.”
          “Eight-twenty-seven!”
          “Is that your watch and is it running properly?”
          “Yes, yes, it’s running, has the same nicks and the inscription—but I’ve seen stage magic before, Chan. Mirrors, whatever. A gimmicked wall clock.”
          “Face it, time passed for us but not for the watch. It travelled ahead through time, ten minutes in an instant. Do you really think we haven’t been arguing for ten minutes? Really? Think back.”
          Porris opened and closed his mouth several times.
          “Now…I’ll show you something else. I’m going to vanish—try to touch the spot where I was, the instant I go, so you can see it’s not mirrors or whatever. Then wait two minutes. Count to a hundred-sixty.”
          Chan stepped onto the displacer, adjusted the attuner…
          And hesitated. Suddenly he found himself thinking of Richard. If he sent Porris into the future, would he be doing the very thing Richard disapproved of? “Some technology should be banned,” Richard had said. “Suppose they find a way to use it to go back before their own time? Or suppose they go forward and attack people there, or bring a disease with them—or the sick ideas of our own time? Humanity isn’t ready for it, Larry. We need to use it for one more trip—and then destroy the displacers…”
          They had argued bitterly over that. Chan had worked on the time displacers for years. And then there was Richard’s desire to abandon the 21st century entirely. They’d broken up over it. Richard could be so judgmental…
And he left me alone, Chan thought. With a little flare of anger, Chan pressed the button on the controller—
          And for a moment the lab, the room, Porris—the whole universe vanished. He experienced the familiar but still quite horrible sense of infinite nothingness looming over him; about to destroy him.
          Then the lab snapped into place around him. Chan gasped, feeling sick, as usual, though he’d only gone a couple minutes ahead in time. He was, as usual, a bit dizzy.  There was the usual vinegary smell that followed a time trip, and the dispersing mistiness.
          “Did you…count?” Chan asked hoarsely.
          “Yes. I did.”
          “So—you see the process does me no harm. Just a little dizziness—a moment’s disorientation. It passes quickly. I can prove to you that you’re wrong about economics and social forces, Randy. It so happens that people who think like you are going to take over. Utterly free markets, no taxation on the rich because their trickle down is ‘so very vital’…Immigration squelched…Your racial and cultural values in place…Complete privatization, no regulation of industry, no concern for greenhouse gases…You can see it all in person! The displacer follows the time current closely so you’re carried in space tooI can send you to another place on Earth as well. And there is a professor in San Francisco, in the early 22nd century—he knows all about the machine. He’s sworn to silence, of course. He’ll guide you around. Tell him I said not to lecture you. You can see for yourself if it works or doesn’t…Think of it! Your peoplevindicated! And you’ll come back here after a short time, no worse for wear.”
          Porris shook his head, putting on his watch. “I don’t believe you. For all I know you’ll adjust that thing to electrocute me.”
          “Nonsense. There isn’t room for both of us or I’d go with you.” There were several displacers but he thought it better if Porris went alone. “You just saw me travel in time. Look—you could share in the Nobel Prize for this as a fellow experimenter!”
          That got Porris’s attention. “Would you put that in contract form?”
          “If we can write it up quickly. The energy vectors won’t be suitable forever…”
          They went to the PC, tapped out a quick contract, just one page. Porris made some changes, then they printed the contract out and signed it. Porris photographed it with his phone and then sent the contract to his cousin Will’s email. “Will’s a lawyer. I hope he’s sober…”
          “Very good.” Chan was pretty sure the contract would end up meaning nothing at all. “Step onto the displacer, please, while I adjust the time setting…”
          Porris went to the displacement plate but stopped short of stepping onto it. He licked his lips. “This is insane…”
          “It’s your big chance, Randy,” Chan said, making the adjustments. “Be honest with yourself. You’ll never be more than a janitor if you don’t go through with this.”
          Porris grimaced. “I don’t know…” But he stepped on the displacement plate. “I guess…wait! You know what, this is too dangerous. Let’s take it to the university board first and—”
          But Chan pressed the button on the controller.

                                                                       

                      
         A horrid vast emptiness. Infinite nothingness. Porris was unable to scream—there was no air—
          And then a room snapped into being around him.
          Feeling ill and depressed, as if everyone he’d ever known had died, he looked around as the mist that wasn’t really mist cleared away…
          A man was staring at him in surprise. “Cabra, fonta m’po eyes, yahno!” the man exclaimed. He was a tall middle-aged man with a long face, receding hair, a lantern jaw, pouches under his reddened eyes. He wore one-piece clothing with a pattern on it resembling a suit, and not in an ironic way.
          “What?”  Porris’s voice was hoarse. “What’d you say? Are you the…?”
          “Sorry. Took me a second to recall the American dialect of your time…Ah, I am Professor Scarnek. And you?”
          Porris was looking around at the shabby basement room. It smelled of mold. There were various jerry-rigged devices cobbled together here and there against the concrete walls. A naked bulb flickered in the ceiling.
 “Me? I’m Randy Porris.” He stepped off the displacer. “Where the fuck am I?”
          “The basement of my house in San Francisco, California. I assume that Chan sent you, yahno?”
          “Yes. Uh—yah. Not no. Said I was to tell you not to lecture me, just show me how, uh…He claims…God my stomach hurts…he claims that the current society here…wait, when am I again?”
          “It is now June 7 in the year 2145 A.D.” He sighed and muttered, “I’d say ‘C.E.’ instead but you might report me.”
          “2145? I’m not going to believe it until I see the flying cars and the…I don’t know.  But I need to see it.”
          “Flying cars? There are some small luxury helicopters in use but only the Wunperz have those. If you want a good view of the area you and I will have to see if there’s a roller working. I do have some transportation left on my U-card. I’ll show you around if you give me your word you won’t say anything about this lab. I have some contraband material.”
          “Yeah, see, alreadythere wouldn’t be any contraband material in a true libertarian society.”
          “Oh, I suppose that’s right,” said Scarnek, giving a morbid chuckle. “This way.”
          They climbed the rickety plastic basement stairs and emerged in a house that seemed smaller than the basement. Somewhere a rattletrap air filter hiccupped. The walls appeared to be vinyl. There were stacks of old books along the walls, and soiled old art prints, looking like they’d been cadged from a dumpster. “People still read physical books now?” Porris asked. “I’d a thought it’d be all on a screen.”
          “Some do. I collect physical books. There aren’t very many left. Most of these will come apart if you try to read them. The percentage of people who can read anything to any real degree is very small now.”
          They squeezed past stacks of books and magazines and a door, recognizing Scarnek, hummed and sputtered and finally decided to open for them.
          “Good. It’s working today,” Scarnek muttered, leading the way onto the street. “Otherwise we’d have to go through the side door. More dangerous.”
          Scarnek paused on the grubby plastic sidewalk and glanced at the gray-brown sky. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to rain.” He coughed. “Good thing. When the wind’s blowing from a hundred square miles of refineries, Porris—there’s a toxic rain. You don’t want to be out in it. They haul the bodies of a number of homeless off next morning. Ah, there’s a roller at the corner…”
          It was murky, humid, and itchily hot outside. A sheen of sweat instantly covered Porris’s face. His eyes stung as he puzzled over the crooked, slightly bowed buildings around them. They looked almost cartoonish. “People design buildings crooked now?”
          “Oh, they started out looking more or less straight. But construction regulations were dropped, after the Free Market Act and they eventually sag. These buildings are plastic amalgam. Stuff mined from old landfills and culled from the sea.”
          “You sure as hell live in a grotty neighborhood, Scarnek,” Porris said, stepping over a moraine of sludgy trash.
          “This is one of the better neighborhoods outside the Wunper bottles. But there’s no street cleaning anymore. The company that’s supposed to do it just—doesn’t. It has a twenty-year contract. Everything is privatized, you see. Fire department—very expensive to get them to come. Water. It’s undrinkable without a heavy-duty filter. Gas-lines, all hospitalization, electricity, all privatized…Most people can only afford part-time electricity…”
          “Oh, come on, if it’s privatized other companies will offer better services to compete.”
          “Except it doesn’t work out that way. They’re influential, connected companies, so no other companies are offered a chance to compete and even if they did it would take years before the first contract ran out so it never happens and the company privatizing a public service cuts corners or barely does the job at all and acts with incredible arrogance toward consumers and…I could go on.”
          “You’re not supposed to lecture me.”
          “Your remark contained an implied question—which I merely answered. Some answers are a bit complex, you know.”
Porris was feeling dazed, unable to accept that he had travelled in time, yet unable to deny it.
“There’s the roller. Only a two-seater. All I can afford…”
The small self-driving vehicle, a dull oblong of plastic with three wheels, was sitting at the curb, a wing-door invitingly open, the car murmuring something about remembering to renew U-cards. “We are now accepting a quart of blood for two days renewal.”
          “Did it say a quart of blood?” Porris asked.
          “Yes, for people who can’t afford to pay for their transportation cards. The blood is sold overseas somehow. TransportCo has a special rolling clinic. I don’t give them blood. I have some money wired to me from overseas, just enough to get by…”
Scarnek climbed into the roller, and Porris squeezed in opposite, so close their knees touched. “No seat belts…”
“They claim there’s no need, as the rollers supposedly can’t crash into anything but of course that’s not true. It’s a corner cutting feature.”
“So, you get money from overseas?” Porris asked, unable to keep the suspicion out of his voice.
“Finland, actually. They value me as a historian.” Scarnek drew a card from a pocket and held it up for a scanner. “We are going to Fisherman’s Wharf,” he told the machine, and with a few stomach-wrenching false starts it jolted into motion. “Yes, without that money I’d be on the street. Pensions were privatized and then faded away when no new ones were given. And with universities eradicated—”
          “What? Eradicated?”
“Yes, public universities—all gone. There are only private schools now. Not many of those. Hard to get a job there if you’re not a wunper, even if you have enough money to pay for it.”
“What’s this wunper thing?”
          “It’s from ‘the One Percent’.” He pointed up a steep hillside as they trundled past a side street. “See those houses, up top?”
“They look like they’re in bottles.” Big curvy glass enclosures shaped to follow the outline of a row of houses.
          “Yes, the ship in a bottle effect—they’re all in the same ‘bottle’ of transparent metal. Well, that’s where some of the wunpers live. Our hermetically sealed elite.” He chuckled. “They have much bigger bottles, in other places—Bel Aire, much of Manhattan, the Vegas Holy-Hive, large parts of San Jose. Only the soopa-reech live in the bottlesthe moneyed 
elite. Except, there are some lower management types who inhabit a servants’ hallin pretty good conditions, relative to the average person outside the bottles. That’s what passes for the middle class now. And service people…rather poor, but safer than those of us outside the bottles. About fifty-five per cent of working people live in the factories they work in, robot-repairers being the lucky ones with private rooms. Most of them are actually replacements for broken automation…The ability to understand the machines has badly deteriorated along with the available education…”

          “Factory dormitories? Like those Foxconn factories in China?”
          “Just like that, yes. China now uses automation, much more successfully than we do, for all such things.” They rolled by a group of ragged teenaged boys who seemed to be trying to strip a broken roller half up on the curb. Other people—white, brown, Asian, mixed racewere hurrying along past boarded over shops; they all wore painted close-fitting clothes, with personalized gas masks dangling around their necks, just in case; they tended to keep squinting worriedly up at the sky. Other rollers passed by, the riders looking grim. Something juddered overhead and Porris looked up through the sun roof; a small helicopter of some kind whooshed not far above, following the street. Its underside seemed to be made of ornately intaglioed silver.

          Scarnek made a tsk sound and muttered, “Oh sepsis-fuck, now what…”
          The roller was slowing to avoid something piled in the street—an awkward, soft looking pile of…
          “What the hell! Those are bodies!”
          “Yes,” Scarnek sighed. “Apparently there was a hypoxia cell sweeping through here. We haven’t had any for months. They’re sort of like the dead zones you had in the oceans in your time, but they’re in the air. They’re a consequence of climate change oceanic acidification—the ocean produces a lot of our oxygenand too many rainforests gone, too much plant habitat paved over—not enough oxygen produced. That’s one reason for the wunper bottles. We’re lucky the cell has passed on…”
          “How long have these bodies been there?” Porris asked, as the roller zigged and zagged to avoid bodies.
          “You notice the flies? Several hours, probably. The companies tasked to remove them are always dilatory. By the time they get here it’s too late to harvest organs.”
The roller bumped over something. Porris looked back. “Did we just run over someone’s arm?”
“Oh yes, the rollers are supposed to know better but they’re not very well made, really…Ah, and speaking of the glorious results of privatization—look!”
          They were passing a burning tenement building. Flames gushed out windows, and black smoke huffed; the outer walls of the plastic amalgam building bubbled from the heat. Someone was screaming. The building collapsed inward on itself…
          “That thing’s totally out of control!” Porris blurted.
          “No public fire department
and whoever owns the building couldn’t afford to pay the fire control company. Let’s hope someone adjacent did, or the fire could spread from one building to another. They take out whole blocks that way. Even if fire control came, it’s purely robotic, and only about a third of their robots function.”

          They left the burning building behind, and Porris turned back for a final look. The ornate helicopter was hovering near the building, it’s copter-blades fanning the fire. Porris turned away, an odd, sick feeling inside.
          Twenty minutes more, and the roller pulled up at Fisherman’s Wharf…

                                                                          

          “The bay looks…wrong.” Porris shook his head. “Like…”
          “Sluggish? Glutinous?”
          “Yeah.”
          They were leaning on a metal rail overlooking the bay. The dingy light showed waves that never quite reached peaks. There was no foam at all. The jellied waves were low, slick, and silent; seeming to rise and fall in slow-motion. Porris saw no seabirds, not even gulls.
          “It’s mostly close in, a littoral phenomenon,” Scarnek said. “Apparently when global warming and pollutants changed the ocean’s chemistry, it became extra acidic, more in some places than others, and that killed off most species of fish and sea mammals—but boosted a type of small jellyfish. They multiply hugely, and then they die for lack of food, and some enzyme in them combines their bodies into a mat a couple of meters thick.”
          The sea glopped, and there was noise from a crowd behind them, but mostly it was eerily quiet. “There used to be sea lions at the Wharf.”
          “There—you can see the last traces of one.”
          The clouds had parted enough so a shaft of sunlight hit the sea, lighting up the contents of the translucent jellyfish layer. The skeleton of a sealion was trapped there, slowly undulating with the dullard waves.
          Sickened, Porris turned away and shaded his eyes to look toward the piers. Two of them were covered with shantytowns of tents and plastic wall-sections. Dark figures shuffled about.
          “Ah—you’ve spotted one of our local ‘retirement communities’,” Scarnek said, his voice bitter. “In your time there was Social Security—not anymore. Most elderly end up on the street, and those who aren’t killed for their few belongings manage a sort of life in places like that. You can eat that muck on the sea.  The old ones know where the wunper-dumpsters are hidden, too…”
          Porris turned to look at the shuttered restaurants—one of them had smoke coming from it. He glimpsed a squatter’s cooking fire through the windows. There was a limousine pulled up on the street, passenger doors open, and there stood a handful of sleek, blond, tanned people in old fashioned, finely tailored clothing, watching three street performers. Above them protective drones stood guard and recorded the event. Porris could make out both guns and cameras on the larger drones.
The gaunt performers, two ragged men and a woman with long matted hair, and much torn two-piece tights, were doing something like line dancing while singing a song that went,
“Here’s the dreeble where the feeble etta-by
 Here’s the gripple where the pipple multiply…”
After several more verses the song rose to a loud high pitch, with the words,
“Herezer azzes, hopey pazzes!”
And at that they all dropped their pants, showing grimy genitals and toothpick legs.
“Huzzah hobahz!” shouted one of the wunpers and they began to throw bits of food, bread and cheese and synthetic meat. The performers lunged at the food—without bothering to pull up their pants—and stuffed as much as they each could in their mouths, cramming some into pockets for later.
“It’s like when people fed bread to seagulls here,” Porris said dazedly.
There was a chorus of squealing off to one side, and Porris turned to see five grubby children chasing an emaciated raccoon. As he watched they cornered it between a rusty dumpster and the wall of a disused restaurant. And commenced beating it to death with broken pieces of concrete.
“Oh god that’s cruel,” Porris murmured.
“Would Ayn Rand think so?” Scarnek asked. “They’re only fighting to survive. They’ll saw that thing up between them and either roast it themselves or take it home to family. Protein is hard to come by.”
Porris turned a glare on Scarnek. “Drop the Ayn Rand cracks. You know nothing about her.”
“As a matter of fact, since she was so influential, I wrote a critical biography of her—”
There was a yell of pain from one of the kids. Another kid had hit him with a stone. They were fighting over the dead raccoon…
Just as a large van with flashing lights pulled up, and two uniformed men in darkly visored helmets got out, guns in hand. A chyron ticker impregnated in the media-paint of the vehicle’s doors said, “SFSecurityCo…rioters disperse…SFSecurityCo…”
“Most people around here can’t read that warning on the door,” Scarnek remarked dryly.
“Rioters, cease!” the men shouted.
The children didn’t hear them. The cops opened fire, their smart-guns squirming in their hands to aim precisely—and neatly shooting two children through the back of their heads.
The other kids screamed and ran. The wunpers clapped and cheered. “Bravo!”
“Good Lord,” Porris burst out. “They shot those kids down! They weren’t dangerous.”
Keep your voice down or you'll be arrested, at best, Scarnek whispered. They are encouraged to shoot rioters--that is, the people they choose to call rioters--and they do the headshots because it's really all about harvesting the children's organs. FSecurity sells them overseas. A refrigerator truck will be pulling up in a minute. Grimacing, Scarnek rubbed his eyes. You know, what you just saw is just the 'magic of the free market', Porris--
Okay, Porris said, through clenched teeth. I've had enough of this bullshit. Obviously, you're showing me the worst things around--I haven't seen the best of it. 
  
“The best of it? Like the people throwing bits of food to the performers?”
“And—maybe you made up the antecedents of this, maybe it was liberals—”
Scarnek sighed. “Come on, let’s get the roller before someone else does. It’s not healthy to hang around during a harvesting.” They hurried toward the parked roller. “Look, Porris, you don’t have to believe me. I can’t offer you a library. There are none. But there’s a place where you can use my card to access anything you want. The history is all there. All this traces back to trickle-down theory, Ayn Rand’s deification of selfishness, libertarianism in a perverse collaboration with the Christian right, corporate control, the failure to deal with greenhouse gases, and—maybe most of all—a takeover of the internet and most other media right-wingers.”
“Then somebody didn’t actualize market theory the way they should’ve, goddammit!”
“It’s just that an unregulated society can sound like a good idea but no one is equipped for the real repercussions when things get worse and worse.”
“Just get me back to the displacer and send me home. You can do that, right?”
“He would’ve set it for you to go back next time you stepped on it. Perhaps it’s for the best. Don’t bother trying to warn people about all this—historical time has momentum and it’s almost impossible to divert. The old ‘Sound of Thunder’ idea doesn’t really work out…”

                                                                

On the verge of exhaustion—wrung out by emotion—Porris stalked back and forth in the lab. He’d returned seconds after he’d departed, to find Chan standing just exactly as he’d left him. Chan was not surprised to find Porris in this state.
“You can take wipe that smug smile off your face, Chan!” Porris growled. “The world the libertarian right envisioned was interfered with, sabotaged! But it has to right itself! A hundred years past Scarnek’s time free markets will have it worked out!”
“What a man of faith you are!” Chan said mildly.
“Okay, maybe two hundred years,” Porris said, shrugging.
Chan patted him on the arm. “You look tired. Let me offer you an energy bar and some juice…and an alternative travel plan.”
They sat at a worktable, and Porris sullenly ate part of an energy bar and drank some cranberry juice.
“Who the hell likes just cranberry juice,” Porris muttered, making a face after he drank some.
“It’s apple-cranberry, actually. Richard got me into drinking it.”
“Who’s Richard?”
“My partner. We…” The words my partner did it; triggered a stunning flash of realization. He would never find another Richard Samsen. Richard was the love of his life. Trying not to think of him, day after day, just wasn’t working. He made up his mind. Whatever he had to do to go back to him…he would do it.
“Doesn’t matter just now,” Chan said. “Here’s what I suggest. We both go two-hundred-seventy years in the future, together, and see how it all worked out. If your social theory worked out in the end or not. Do you want the truth, or not? Seeing is believing.”

                                                               

Chan and Porris snapped into the year 2289—and found themselves in what appeared to be a loft converted into an art studio. Drones fluttered, swooped, glittered—many of them had wings—and formed abstract shapes in the air, directed by a tall, broad-shouldered man using a control glove. He had let his hair grow out, Chan saw—his glossy brown hair fell past his shoulders. His work outfit was a 20th century mechanic’s blue overalls he’d brought with him to this time. Chan felt his heart leap, watching him at work. Then the man seemed to notice the odd atmosphere the displacer had brought; the fading mist that wasn’t mist. He turned as Porris, hunched over, groaned and shook his head.
“I hate these goddamn time trips…”
“You won’t have to do it again, Randy,” Chan said, taking in the wide smile on the sculptor’s face—it was a relief to see that Richard was pleased to see him. Sunshine glowing through side windows seemed to make a nimbus around him.
I’m a dippy romantic, Chan thought.
Richard opened his arms and Chan rushed into them. A wave of shuddery release went through him, both pleasure and pain.
 “You’re here to stay?” Richard asked, whispering in his ear. “Last time we talked, you said…if you came to this time…”
“Yes. I’m here to stay.”
“That’s good. But if you want to be with me you know the one condition…”
“I’ve changed my mind—I’m ready now.”
“It can wait. Who’s your friend?”
“Hardly that. This is Randy Porris…” Chan stepped back from Richard, keeping hold of his hand. “I told you about him. Trickle-down theory, libertarianism mixed with Trump’s anti-immigrant thing, white nationalism—the whole shebang. I promised him a chance to see the alternative…” Chan gave Richard a significant look. “I think he’ll…stay.”
Richard raised his eyebrows. “Really! Well, wonderful!”
“Randy,” Chan said, “this is my fiancéif he still feels that way. Richard Samsen.”
 “You met your boyfriend in the future?” Porris walked over to a pitcher of water on an elegantly restored Victorian table. “Can I have some water?”
“Water? Certainly!” said Richard. “Tu casa mi casa.”
 “We met in 2015, in Berkeley,” Chan said. “September sixth.”
“This water safe to drink?” Porris asked, looking doubtfully into the glass.
“Randy here just came from Scarnek’s era,” Chan said.
“It’s a whole new world, Randy,” Richard said. “Drinking water is clean, the air has finally cleaned up—they just got that done about fifty years ago. We’re feeding and employing whoever needs it. Education is free. Healthcare if free.”
“Oh god. A liberal fascism!” Porris shook his head and drank some water. “That’s…good water.”
“It’s not fascism, it’s a global democracy. The USA has sovereignty the way, say, California did in the USA in our time. But it’s one worldwide Republic. We do have some firm global laws—and as a result, women are completely equal with men everywhere. Of course, progressives were able to take advantage of the tragic fact that the world your people created ended up creating a giant petri dish for a half dozen new plagues. People died by the billions. That led to revolution. And those with the cures were the more progressive countries, Randy. The European Union, principally—and South Africa, Australia, Japan, other parts of Asia. And India after the big revolution there. The survivors listened to the people who saved them. The wunperz are quite gone—but there are still people who can be wealthy to a reasonable degree, if they work hard.”
“This is all your story, man,” Porris said, clacking the glass down on the table.
“Come out with us and see—we’re in San Francisco, and it’s rebuilt, green with parks. Everyone has work but no one has to have it—but you see, we have capitalism! It’s just carefully regulated. There’s still some extreme weather but we’re moving into a new climate system nowgreenhouse gases are under control. Energy is clean—we finally figured out fusion, we use solar extensively.”
“Yeah, right. You’ve been brainwashed.”
Richard smiled with an empathy that had always moved Chan. Richard Samsen had been a sociology researcher as well as a sculptor in the 21st century…
“You keep talking about ‘we’,” Porris said. “But how long have you been here?”
“Oh, by we, I mean—decent people. Empathetic, environmentally aware people for whom social justice is as natural as going to a party or taking a swim.”
Porris snorted. “I think I’m gonna be nauseous here.”
“We’re still cleaning up the mess left by your society—still cleaning the oceans, still using DNA to reconstitute key animal life, still trying to re-educate pockets of lunatic religious fanatics.”
“Yeah, I knew it. Forced re-education camps!”
 “No, no—we give them food and water and other resources in exchange for voluntary education time in their own homes. We’re gradually winning them over. We’re not without spirituality, after all.”
“And this society is tolerant,” Chan said. “They have an archipelago of islands where everyone is some variety of anarchist! Long as they don’t pollute or tyrannize women, they can do as they please!”
“So, you made the free thinkers move to remote islands!”
Richard shook his head. “It’s a free choice. We do arrange the air travel if they want to go. But look—let’s go out and look at the world—see it as it is now! We’ll start locally and go wherever you want. It’s not a utopia—we have all kinds of issues. Population control is one. Then there are people who are born psychopathically predatory—what’s the right thing to do with them? There are still murderers about! And some people go off and form small autocratic societies, and cults. We don’t let them develop dangerous weapons, and we don’t let them abuse women. But should we intervene in other ways? And what about space travel? Some want to go, some don’t. There are arguments about all these things and more. But first—how about some lunch?”
“Richard’s a great cook,” Chan said.
“Oh, naturally,” Porris muttered.
But Porris enjoyed the World Cuisine lunch.  
Later, when they returned from a long day of touring and talking to random people, Porris was quiet, taking it all in. He was awestruck by the transformation San Francisco had gone through since Scarnek’s time. He was stunned by holographic coverage of the world government’s council meeting—the black woman world president; the argumentative representative from the People’s Democracy of China; the consensus that carried the day.
Back at Richard’s house that evening, seated around the Victorian table drinking wine, and enjoying exquisite lab-grown meat—slaughterhouses were quite forbidden—Porris stared into his wine, scowling.
“Flying cars,” Porris said wonderingly.  “I saw real flying cars…”
Richard nodded. “There was an influx of scientists from India and Pakistan to the New USA, about forty years ago, and one of them figured out how to control Casimir force for levitation. I’ve almost saved enough money for one…”
Chan and Richard sat across from Porris, holding hands. “Larry, we can be married in New York and do a honeymoon tours of the canals of Manhattan,” Richard was saying. “And—I just want to say I was wrong to leave without you. You had a career, big plans in 2019 and I wanted you to abandon them and just go to a better world with me…And it was selfish. When you let me go—when you sent me to the world I wanted…the look on your face broke my heart.”
Chan smiled wanly. “You thought I’d follow you, eventually. And you were right.”
Richard laughed softly. “I hoped! But you know, to seal the deal—we should finish up here.”
Chan nodded gravely.
Richard got up, went into a tool nook off the studio, and returned with two ten-pound sledgehammers.
Porris looked at them nervously. “So that’s how you weed out people like me?”
“What? This is for the time machines,” Richard said, handing a hammer to Chan. “I don’t think mankind is ready for time machines. And Larry doesn’t feel you should go back—you might dig up his research, I take it and—who knows?  Trust me, Randy. You’ll be better off here…”
Porris watched open-mouthed as they went to the displacers—and smashed the octagons into small pieces.
Then they tossed the hammers aside—and kissed.
Porris groaned. He pounded down the rest of his wine and poured some more. “Trapped in a liberal paradise!” he sobbed. “Christ almighty help meI’m in Hell!
Porris put his face in his folded arms. Richard came over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Randy—we’re going to a party. Lots of people there—many different points of  view. Do you want to come?”
Porris sighed, sat up, and wiped his eyes. He felt strangely…better.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Why not?”

                                  

The End










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