With a Clockwork Heart

I was thinking of just packing up this blog since I've put up a website, but it seems I really do need somewhere to beta my fiction work first.  The only other place I hang out at online where others are willing to give my work a read and crit are fandom-related. 

The following story pretty much kicked my tail to write.  I struggled through ideas...which ones I wanted to include in the story, hypomanic states where I sat down to write only to be distracted by junk on the Internet (*shakes fist in the general drection of ICanHazCheezeburger*)  and ended up "on fire" to the point where I got a few minutes of sleep and was a wreck the next day. 

This tale, which I don't know whether to call "fantasy" or "sci-fi" (impossible world with a science fiction "feel")   is about a world where humanity has divided itself into an upper class of people who think they are very rational and who are actively trying to prefect the species by ridding it of all things overly passionate - and a regular working class of people, many of which long to be chosen to be part of the superior class.  There is some minor refernce to art history as well as to an actual dream I once had.  There is also, for fair warning, a protagonist who begins as a female but ends up as an androgynous "male" as part of becoming another class - this is presented as a sci-fi thing rather than anything that's supposed to resemble real life just because I couldn't banish the idea of my protagonist being thus "divided" out of my brain.  I don't know how well I handled it, but again, it came to me in a very sci-fi way in a world without the struggles of our world. 

Oh, and big cats that act like horses. Yep, it has those, too.

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With a Clockwork Heart

S.E. Nordwall

She rode the silver cat across the dark blue plain.  The sky was deep in pink, growing lighter with the approaching dawn.  Chain spurred her mount to chase Lin’s lavender cat up ahead.  Chain loved riding great cats.  It got her blood pumping, her instinctual thrill up.  Moving fast upon a powerful animal whose muscles and warmth she could feel beneath her legs, even through thick pants, always brought up a primal feeling.  The young woman did not always get to do this, even though she lived in a camp of working families whose sole duty was taking care of the stables for the nearest city. 

A man on the night-shift was killed last week when he’d been late in getting the animals their dinner.  He’d been jumped and devoured by old Phasha in his stall.  The man-eater remained in the stable despite his crime because an Elite individual favored him. The stablehands, even those that had not known Phasha’s victim, were particularly uncomfortable around him now.  Bigg, Chain’s chosen mount, had always been gentle and just a little more patient in waiting for his meat than most of his kind.  She wondered if that would change as he aged.  Cats could develop very different temperaments as they got older.

Chain wondered how much she would change upon becoming an Elite.   She knew that she would be able to ride cats whenever she wanted after the transformation, but she did not know if she would enjoy it as much – if she would feel as passionate as she did as an Underclassman.  The clockworks that were to be installed in her heart would regulate her emotions and keep her from having an overage of passion.  That was one of the many things that separated Elites from the rest of humanity. 

If Underclassman were really “humanity...” The Elites seemed to think that they were the “true humanity,” which was the incentive for behaving correctly enough to be chosen to join them.    To be an Elite meant living in one of the cities and being permitted to travel.  It meant an access to history and letters.  It meant a career in science and leadership.  It meant respect.  It meant being a part of ruling the world. 

Chain found her friend’s mount tied to the sturdy branch of a tree.  Lin was beneath a tall, flowering cherry tree, taking off her glasses and putting them back on again.  That was something that the Elite class did not have to worry about: The procedures done to their bodies to identify them as Elites gave them nearly perfect health.  Chain’s eyes were good, but they would be optimal next week. She’d only been chosen a week ago.  The finalizing of the records was quick, but not instantaneous. 

Ancient, weatherworn tombstones jutted out of the ground to Chain’s left.  She tied her cat next to Lin’s and walked up to her friend. 

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked. 

Lin turned around, nudging her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose.  “Getting ideas for a painting,” she said.  She had her drawing book turned to a blank page and her set of watercolor and gouache paints already laid out on a boulder. 

“Don’t you need your glasses for that?”  Chain pointed out.

“I’m trying to see things in a new way,” Lin answered.  She turned to the front of her book.  She flipped past detailed paintings that captured stones and flowers in firmly trained realism.  Even though photographic equipment could capture images perfectly, anyone interested in the visual arts was trained to do the same.  This was the art that the Elites valued.  Chain gasped as Lin turned to a page depicting the cherry tree in bright smears and dashes – not realistic at all.

“I’m trying to capture the essence, the impression” Lin explained.  “My bad eyes are kind of good for that.” 

“But it’s just smears,” Chain said.  “You’re painting like… like a wild beast!”

“It’s just seeing things in a new way,” Lin tried to defend herself.  “I think I can capture the color better when I’m not focusing on the details.” 

“It’s not real,” Chain contended.  “It’s unreal.  Do you know how much trouble you can get for this kind of… art?”

“Not as much trouble as I can get into for this stuff,” Lin said cheerfully as she flipped past blank pages of her book to some pages in the back.  The pages were filled with vibrant splashes and abstract visions.  Two paintings featured mythical creatures – painted and penned in Lin’s typical realistic hand – but the capering beasts were not of any type that existed in life. 

Chain blinked. 

“I’ve taken to painting out my emotions,” Lin said, “my dreams… and some of the stories of the past that we have mostly forgotten.  I know I’m never going to become an Elite.  I’m not suited for it, like you are… but you are my friend, and I trust that you will not turn me in. I wanted to show these to someone.  What is art if it isn’t seen?” 

“Elites do not dream,” Chain said.  “It is one of the things that is regulated by the heart-replacement.  It controls the vitae, regulating emotion and ridding the person of irrationality.” 

“You were chosen because you’re very rational and analytical.  You have a grounded mind, unlike mine.  Don’t you think you’ll miss dreaming, though?”  

“Maybe, but I think it’s a small price to pay to be a higher member of the species.”  Chain looked out upon the worn stones of the forgotten cemetery.  “We’ve been coming here for a long time.  I think a little too much about it sometimes…” 

“The people forgotten here?  I do, too.  I suppose it’s why some folk will still pray to things they don’t understand even though we aren’t supposed to.  Underclass or Elite, all we do for the world ends in this. Do the Elites even think about it?”

“The Elites are working on a solution… If I live long enough, I might never die.”

“I’m sure that privilege will only be for Elites,” Lin replied.  “I’m pretty sure that the Underclass is kept around not just to work and for the breeding purpose, but just because they need someone to look down upon.  If we were all Elites, there wouldn’t be any sophistication…no unsophisticated types to compare themselves to.” 

“All rulers need rabble, I guess,” Chain said, stretching her arms above her head as her friend painted in the wafting cherry blossoms.  They floated in the breeze like snow.  Chain liked to think that she would feel as strongly about Spring as what she was about to become as the person she was currently.  The second-hand of her new heart was only supposed to keep in check the dangerous abundance of feeling, divisive feelings. Individuals chosen for “elevation” were, by their own confession, devoid of “spiritual” sentiment – though if they’d secretly harbored any, it was supposed to vanish.  It was the same with passions such as anger or any proclivity to unreasonable fantasy. 

Imagination wasn’t off-limits to the Elites, in fact, it was vital to works of science and engineering, and was needed in rulership, but it was tightly controlled.  Any thought for “what might be” had to be grounded in known reality, like Lin’s by-training detailed paintings.  Deviations into unapproved things – especially things that were rumored to have caused people much suffering and bloodshed in the past could be harshly punished… more so for an Elite than for an Underclassman, since the Elite were supposed to be rendered physically immune to that which was “wild.”  It was quite alright, for instance, to imagine the existence of other worlds, provided they were very much like the real one.  It had been decreed long ago, however, that people should stop telling stories about dragons because dragons didn’t exist. 

To actually believe that these other worlds existed in some way was a terrible affront, for that kind of imagination could lead to all kinds of other crazy ideas, which a crazed person might presumably hurt others over. It was also deemed that if someone believed in too many crazy ideas (or perhaps just one particularly irksome one), their mind was too damaged for them to be of value.  The Underclass had some leeway in this, as they were considered the “past” of humanity as well as “the masses,” and as having a lower value, anyway, but a degree of control was expected of and enforced in even the poorest of their towns.     

The law was modified when a gateway to another world was discovered.  Rifts had opened here and there around the world.  There was one not far from Chain and Lin’s settlement.  Apparently, the rifts were only one-way.  People from another world had appeared, but none could pass into that other world.  Once on this side of the rift, the otherworldly visitors were stuck. They looked just like regular people.  They even spoke the local language – wherever they showed up.  More than one report had described them as the least probable thing to have ever happened.  Reporters were barred from using the word “miracle.”  Even as a hyperbole, it was a forbidden term.    

Many of the newcomers had been deemed intelligent enough to become Elites, but the “secondhanding” operation invariably killed them.  The seat of their consciousness and emotions lay in their brains rather than in the heart, which in them was an extraordinarily sensitive organ.  Their vitae did not swim in their blood and scientists among the Elites still knew precious little about the brains of these strange people.  Any that crossed over recently were put into the Underclass camps and factories.  Chain had met one once.  He’d claimed that his job wasn’t much different than the one he’d most recently had in the world beyond the rift, except he’d bred and trained horses, not cats.  He questioned the wisdom of using large predators as beasts of burden and then shut up and fed Bigg his horsemeat when the supervisor walked by. 

The Elites had advanced technology… medicine that could not make them live forever, but could extend their lifespan far beyond members of the Underclass.  They had communication technology and even machines that took care of small chores and inconveniences.  However, there were always certain chores that were better done by organic beings.  People still rode cats not just for pleasure… enforcement personnel relied upon their sharp ears, noses and twitchy animal instincts.  To raise them and other animals, Underclassmen with twitchy emotions and “animal-like” intuition were the best tools for the job.  There were multitudes of tasks that were deemed “too dull” or “too dirty” for the Elites to waste their intelligence on.  The world needed leaders and high-level problem solvers.  It also needed kitchen staff and manure recyclers. 

Mostly, however, the Elites needed breeders. 

“I wonder what it will feel like for you, becoming a man,” Lin mused. 

Chain spared a glance for Bigg, who was rolling on the ground, playing with his reins.  Lin’s steed, Westley, looked as though she’d fallen asleep standing up – four huge paws planted firmly upon the ground. 

“I won’t really be becoming a man,” Chain corrected.  “The Elites make their own into an image after the male pattern, but I won’t really be a guy like we’ve known guys.  What they are is something entirely different from us.” 

It was true that the Elites, in addition to modifying the heart with clockworks that would tick emotions into order and tock away the irrational and dangerously strong passions, would modify the body so as to get rid of that which would cause division among their “higher class.”  This meant ridding the division of the sexes.  The male form was chosen above the female form on the grounds that, throughout history, males had been dominant in most cultures.  People from the rift-world had attested that it was the same in the place they had come from, but most in their generation had responded to it by fighting for respect.  The Elites responded by making every one of their own “dominant.”

It was an unequipped dominance, however.  Elites were sterile.  This was because they chosen from among the Underclass as worthy of being elevated to their status.  Only those that thought enough like them were considered sophisticated enough to receive entrance into what they termed their “higher species.”  As it turned out, genetic modification and eugenic-breeding in the early days of their great experiment to create a better class of human did not work.  The most brilliant of couples could produce a stupid and immoral offspring and, more importantly, the opposite could happen – idiots could unpredictably breed a genius.  Much of the Elite criteria for what made a human “valuable” or “sophisticated” and worthy of their ranks did not lie in the blood.  They were quite required to keep an “inferior” race around to chose the pick of the litter from among them… at least until they could discover how to create new members of their species without relying on chance.  While too much individualism was frowned upon in the cities, they did not desire undifferentiated clones. 

“Hup! Hup! Come on…” Chain said as she nudged Bigg in the side.  She helped him to untangle from his reins.  “Such a hopeless beast,” she muttered. 

She looked back at Lin, engaged in painting while periodically taking her eyeglasses off and putting them back on, trying to capture her “essences” and “impressions.”  She wondered if Lin was right about the Elites keeping the Underclass around not primarily for work, but for the sake of having people to look down upon so as not to start stabbing each other in the back. 

She wondered if she would look down upon her best friend in the time after her secondhanding. 

Chain knew that she would.  In fact, while she kept her tongue still, she knew that she already looked down upon Lin a little.  She was not going to hand her over to authorities, for imprisoning such a harmless person would be pointless, however, she could, as someone with a mind of Elite-value, have a true respect for anyone whose mind was on the edge of essence. 

He sat on the cold flat bunk, watching the shadows cast by crosshatch-bars bathed in harsh incandescent light.  He timed the subtle shifts of those shadows and the diamonds of light on the floor to the gentle clicks and beats of his clockwork heart.   Chain stretched out one of his gangly arms and watched the diamonds dance across the clay-like white skin.  He’d missed the subtle tan he’d once had when his arms were shorter.

The body had been a shock to see in a full-length mirror for the first time – a flat chest compared to pre-modification status, but with the curve of muscles.  The height had been difficult to get used to.  Chain’s limbs had been lengthened to fit with the standard-model height of Elites of seven feet.  He’d never thought of Elites as having legs disproportionate to the rest of their bodies until looking at his own. The chalk-white skin was likewise something he’d had no problem accepting in others but was a strange, new thing.

 The height difference and the new skin were even stranger to him than the lack of attributes common to male animals.  He knew that Elites did not have anything that was unnecessary and the elimination of wastes was still possible. Other things were not, or at least, that was the idea.  Chain still thought he looked like an undressed mannequin when he was nude.  He couldn’t help but wonder what young men who’d been chosen for “elevation” thought about it when after it had been done.  Chain figured that he was lucky that even when he was a little girl, he’d felt he’d had something of a 50/50 mind in regards to the feminine and the masculine and had not, even as a teenager, ever been overly interested in the procreative arts. 

Not that his fellow Elites hadn’t found ways to fudge that rule…The Elite species was supposed to be “above sex,” but some of them found creative ways to use their androgynous bodies.  Chain learned quickly, that like the Underclass, some members of the Elite broke the rules, even though those rules were their own. 

However, some rules were never, ever to be broken.  Chain had broken such a law, through no will of his own… He was here to be “rehabilitated,” but the process was likely to simply kill him. 

It had been several weeks after Chain had undergone the “secondhand” procedure – getting a “second body” and a “new heart.”   Things had gone quite well for him at first.  He’d been given tours of several cities where his kind enjoyed fine entertainments and exercises of the intellect.  The only Underclassmen he saw were doing odd jobs and basic maintenance of the streets.  The Elites lived and worked in tall towers, letting cast-offs and run-offs flow below to be taken care of by those who lived for the purpose.  Chain had spent a day watching his new people racing riding-cats in one city.  He’d thought of signing on to be a sportsman and entertainer so that he could do that, but was given an administrative position instead, at least to start with as he took time to chose from various fields of study to pursue. 

He was to go back to his own city and to the countryside he’d once called home in order to make sure the allocation of goods and services between the city and his once-compatriots ran smoothly.  Chain’s was to be a rather patronly position.  He’d hoped not to break the rules with it… not that he’d expected punishment if he’d fudged them.  It was just a matter of honor for the newly-minted Elite. 

Strange...It was strange that he’d broken a law by chance.  It showed that he still had, in a small, simple way, a “simple mind,” despite what had been done to him. 

The Underclass worked for all and were given a “simple existence as simple minds needed,” supposedly.  They were given the hope “to make it,” if they lived correctly and were picked out of observations and testing.  They were given “miracles,” (although that word had not existed for a long time).  Of course, the classrooms of childhood were staffed by Elites willing to become teachers and it was instilled from an early age that the Elites were superior people in every moral and intellectual way.

Before finding himself in the cell with the diamond-patterned bars, Chain had wanted to do right by his family and by his friends, such as Lin. He had no desire to be as Nirron.  

Chain had heard tell of a man named Nirron who’d taken the adoration due to Elites farther than any thought proper.  His actions continued to be tolerated mainly because of the universal disregard for the Underclassmen.  “Of course the lesser would act lesser” was the excuse.  All anyone knew was that no one was to be selected for secondhanding from the area that Nirron held charge of.  He was a practitioner of medical and genetic sciences.  His works had produced improbable crops in his division’s desert climate.  His other projects had simultaneously produced a greater number of healthy births among the “rabble” and controlled their rate of birth so that the people would not accidentally deplete their sparse resources. 

The people of Nirron’s desert-district had started worshipping him.  He would let them bow before him and extend the back of his left hand for them to kiss.  The people were not supposed to worship or pray – whether they beseeched gods, spirits, beasts or objects.  It was considered divisive and “fanciful.”  However, this practice was overlooked when it came to Elite-worship if it was kept to “harmless parameters.”  Prayer to ancestral deities was always considered “harmful,” but the Elites did not seem to mind it much when such devotions were directed toward them. 

Nirron had defended the indulgence of his subjects with the claim that he was a real, physical savior.  Chain was sure it was just human pride leaching past the regulatory clockworks of the heart into the “better” humans.  Nirron had chosen to spare the life of an elderly Underclass woman in his division who was caught performing a small ritual in celebration of the old gods.  He was seen as a generous overseer for this, even though he had saved her primarily on account of her advanced age.   Even more people who’d felt a need for worship kissed his hand. 

Nirron was a savior who would cure his people’s sicknesses and make sure they were fed well as they mined the badlands, but if he or any of the other Elites were to ever cure Death itself – he would die before sharing it with anyone in the Underclass.  His “poor little children” were ever beneath him.  

That is how all of the Elites thought of the people they’d been “elevated” out of.  Chain knew it from the afternoon he’d awakened from his last surgery, holding the hand of Mae, the man who had chosen him.  When Mae had congratulated him with “You have arrived,” Chain knew what his place was to be.  He was on top – the “unenlightened” were beneath his feet, just “poor little children” at best, in need of elevation, most of them herd beasts, few worthy to actually be brought up. 

Toe the line, be naturally well-controlled and grounded within the world, know your place, display your intelligence – but don’t ever outshine your teachers even when you know you can, quell your feelings, never get caught celebrating anything fanciful, know where the lines are and do not cross them… 

Chain thought quite coolly about how he’d lived his childhood and adolescence.  There wasn’t any attachment to what he might have lost, though he knew he’d lost something.  The girl he used to be had always been analytical by default.  He hadn’t had the disadvantage of “too much creativity,” like some he’d known who would likely never “arrive” because even if they’d kept any urge to worship anything other than one of their local Elites in check, showed high brainpower in their classes and were supremely sane, they still insisted upon experimenting with paint-smears rather than practicing their crafts the correct way…

Lin… Chain had kept quiet about Lin.  His old friend, even in something as simple as her strange paintings, had a hint of rebellion in her.  Even Chain’s new heart, ticking away to dull the passions, did not erase the loyalty he had decided upon regarding her.  Lin was a weak person – an Underclassman without violence in her.  She would toil all of her life, thinking her criminal thoughts and dreaming her little dreams.  She would never be “elevated,” but there was no practical need to cast her down. 

Lin would not see Chain as superior should they meet again.  Chain, unlike others of his higher race, would not have cared, either.  Too many people of his former home would gasp in awe of his gracious presence if life had gone according to the Elites’ plan and their fawning would have been sincere enough. 

As it was, Chain was imprisoned for doing what he thought of as a “very Lin-like thing.”   He’d had a dream. 

It wasn’t as though Chain had never dreamed before.  Underclass-people were in their natural state and so had dreams when they slept.  Elites, however, were different.  The clockworks put into their hearts were a machine that worked with the heart to regulate the life force in the blood that was common to all of the people of their world.  It balanced the emotional part of this force, ticking away like a clock, each click of the gears and the hands banishing the most dangerous and irrational bits. 

The “secondhand heart” was not perfect in this, though medical Elites tried to improve upon each generation of the technology.  Members of the Elite were still able to fall in love, though only with each other and that was growing less and less common.  Anger was brought into check to such a degree that the only murder ever heard of anymore was someone of the Underclass killing another Underclassman, although Elites did have the authority to conduct cold, logical executions – when it was deemed beneficial to them to do so.  History told the Elite that they did suffer a stagnation of Art, but, for the most part, they did not miss it.  If regulating out irrational impulses meant that some beauty had to be sacrificed for practicality, the people that had started them on this road had been more than willing to pay the price.  Those currently on the road missed nothing, unless they were hiding something before they were “elevated,” in which case they quickly forgot or kept eternal silence. 

The last frontier in bringing imaginations in line with rationality had been doing something about the dreaming mind.  The first people to ever undergo the “secondhanding” process had been quite distressed that they still had strange visions during the night that neither they by will nor the clockworks could banish or control. Improvements upon the clockworks had been such a success that no Elite had been bothered by dreaming in over seventy years.  (This was one of the baffling things about the people from beyond the rift: Even the most self-controlled and logical among them dreamed.  For them, it was a necessary biological function).  It was not a basic necessity for those whose emotion swam in the blood.   

When one of the mechanisms was perfected, the sleeping mind was brought under subjection and all budding dreams were ticked away with a few clicks of the heart’s second-hand. 

Chain had defied that (not by choice) by having a dream the night after he’d come back to the hospital and base where he’d been staying during his acclimation from his tour of the City by the Sea.  The memories of the dream were vague, having begun to fade as soon as he’d awakened, very startled from it.  There was only night in an Elite’s sleep – only the darkness of the lidded eyes and the darkened bedroom.  At least, that was how it was supposed to be.

Chain had not known whether it was the talking cuts of beef that had frightened him awake or the realization that he had been, in fact, having a dream at all.  As the hour-hand of his heart assured him that he was alive and the minute-hand of his heart ticked away the bulk of his fear, he wasn’t able to muster enough appropriate fear in regards to sharing his vision.  He’d sought out Mae to speak to him about it, hoping that the one in charge of his well-being in beginning his new life might be able to help him logic-out the puzzle. 

Instead, Chain was given the status of being a dangerous subject and placed in a holding-area for Elites that were “defective.”  He sat in a small cell, awaiting a secondary surgery to try to adjust the mechanics of his clockwork heart.  The procedure was either going to mold him into the Elite that he was expected to be or it would kill him.  The latter was more likely.  Very few survived the adjustment surgeries.  In that case, it would be filed away as a proper execution. 

He’d been allowed a pencil and a pad of paper, in case he wanted to leave some notes for his family or for those that had been taking care of him, or in case he wanted to scribble out some puzzles or to jot down a list of things that had brought him to this point to be used as clues to prevent others such as him from happening in the future. 

“Man has always sought to shape man in man’s own image,” he scrawled, not really understanding what he was writing.  “Guess I didn’t take, though I was eager. My mold was formed by chance, but is still to be broken.  Now I await the death of my dreams, one way or another.” 

Chain scribbled a “goodbye” to his parents before finishing it with a note to a friend; “Keep painting, Lin.”  He knew that Lin was wise enough to hide away her irrational work, unlike him, speaking of his dream.  The clockwork heart had not ticked away his foolish trust.  Irrationally-artistic Lin, he knew, was too smart for that kind of trust.  She was capable of imagining betrayal without the fear of it being ticked away by a mechanism.      

His captors assured him that if he died during the adjustment that it would be an easy death.  They said that he’d go to sleep and not wake up and that he’d simply slip into darkness.  Chain didn’t entirely trust that.  If he was aware enough of the darkness to experience it, perhaps the process wouldn’t be terrible.  Chain thought that he could just as easily awaken during the procedure to see his chest opened and to feel small knives scrape against his bones.  He’d heard rumors that a few “readjustments” had ended with subjects awakening like that.  Chain feared that if that happened and he died right then, his “eternity” might be made of his own screams. 

At the same time, Chain remained calm.  His heart ticked away his fear before it became panic.  He breathed easy, accepting the possibilities of fate. 

A guard came for Chain and opened the door to her cell.  “Is there anything that you wish to do before the procedure?” he asked in a passionless voice.  “You are one of us, even if you are incomplete.  You are allowed a visit to the garden or to speak with Mae.”

Chain rose from his bench, feeling underdressed next to the guard in his uniform.  All Chain had on was a plain pair of shorts that had been issued to him.  Casting a sidelong glance to the figures outside the window of the cell, Chain whispered “Take me to the stable, please.” 

The crosshatch bars rattled as the door slid into place.  Chain walked beside the guard serenely.  There were criminals of the Underclass held here, too, in different blocks – hence the guards patrolling astride great cats outside.  As an Elite – even as a broken Elite – Chain knew that he was entitled to this privilege. 

“Why the stable?” his companion inquired. 

“I love cats.  I just want to pet one for a final time, if it is, indeed, my final time.” 

Chain was led into a clean stable with rows of great cats in stalls.  Some of them attended to the remains of their dinner while a few craned their necks above their wooden stall-doors, the top doors of which were open to allow them to sniff the air and growl at their companions across the row.  Several stalls were empty – the ones with cats that were working presently.   

Chain found a silver beast that reminded him of Bigg.  “Agen,” he read on the nameplate on the stall.  The cat was a female.  Chain eyed his guard as he caressed Agen’s head and gently played with her ears.  The cat purred and pushed him with his huge head. 

“May we be left alone?” Chain asked. 

The guard sighed and walked off down a hallway.  The stable was closed right now.  The area outside was filled with guards.  Also, Chain knew, through an off-beat tick of his heart that the guard did not dream that he would want to escape.  Alhough he’d been held in a cell as a precaution, no one that had ever been “elevated” refused a secondary secondhanding if one was prescribed.  After all, they had been chosen to become Elite.  No one who’d been given that privilege would ever want to be anything else.  Also, having had the procedure done, there was no place for them to go.  It wasn’t as though anyone could become a member of the Underclass again. 

The second hand of the clockworks was supposed to tick away overages of emotion, including fear – even fear of possible death. 

Chain’s new heart, however, was just broken enough to let in some of his Underclass instincts – just a few of them.  He had enough feeling to care about his memories.  Not only was he concealing her knowledge of Lin’s subversive activities out of sentiment the kind of which Elites were said to see as a weakness, Chain had a desire to live just a little bit longer. 

“I remained myself after all, I guess,” he said as she drew some tack from where it had been left upon a wall and began saddling up the silver cat.  He tucked the rims of a set of goggles over the animal’s ears.  Goggles were great for keeping sand and dirt out of a great cat’s eyes as well as providing visibility in the night with the press of a tiny button.

Chain mounted and casually rode out of the stable.  The guards caught sight of him and snapped to attention.  Chain leaned over and whispered to his mount.  “Run!” He kicked the poor beast in the sides and flattened his body against the saddle. 

A final ride around the facility before becoming fully-integrated.  A final ride before death.  Either way, an experience that Chain had to have.  Execution or “elevation” – either one was a kind of death and in this moment, Chain was living. 

His heart was beating fit to burst its clockworks. 

For several minutes and endless moments in the mind, Chain was a young woman again, a girl riding her own favorite cat across a blue plain, ready to meet her best friend at the ancient graveyard with trees in bloom.  The girl regretted ever even wanting to be elevated.  She was unsophisticated, ignorant foolish and free.  She was mad with the desire to pray to anything and everything except an Elite, to cry openly, howl at the moon and to laugh at them all in their faces.  She wanted to smear paint across a piece of canvas or paper in the most abstract and haphazard way possible.  She wanted to paint with her fingers and then smear her body in all the colors.  Most of all, she wanted to ride – to fly across the open land, belonging to nobody, in leaps and bounds tandem with a beautiful steed. 

Before Chain realized it, Agen had leapt the wall of the facility.  The beast was running hard across the desert district, over a blue hardpan plain.  The animal seemed to leap forever. 

When Chain bothered to look back the way they had come, he saw no pursuers.  He thought he saw a puff or two of dust caused by men turning their steeds around.  Agen slowed to a walk of his own accord.  Chain stayed astride him, dumbfounded and clutching his aching chest.  He hadn’t actually busted his mechanism, had he? 

He looked at scraggly bushes and tufts of dry grass as Agen huffed and chuffed.  He dismounted, allowing the animal to rest.  The cat flopped upon the dust of the plain gratefully.  She panted and held what almost resembled a smile to Chain.  He removed the cat’s reins and goggles.  The animal definitely had a smile in her eyes. 

“You enjoyed that as much as I did, hmm?” Chain said, rubbing the cat’s forehead.  He looked down a little agave plant growing at his feet, then turned around and looked at the open desert ahead. 

Chain had nowhere to go to. Riders from the facility would probably ride out to find him and take him back to complete the adjustment procedure – or just for termination since he’d just proven a dangerous instability.  He laid the reins and goggles upon the ground before Agen.  “Thank you, friend,” he said as he began walking away, “and goodbye.”

The cat panted and licked her nose in response.  She did not get up.   

Chain walked on toward a ravine.  He walked along the rocks until he found a way down into it and began to investigate a dry wash at its bottom.  He knelt down and started to dig in the sand, seeing it there was, perhaps, some water from the last rainstorm caught in the deeper sand.  His hands came up dry.  He couldn’t help but think of Lin and what she might do in this situation.  Lin would not go back to allow herself to be shaped into the Elite image or just to die.  Chain could not become an Underclassman again, and so was a person of nowhere.  Still, he knew that his old friend, in this situation, would be determined to live as long as one could, just to see whatever essence life had to give.

Chain wouldn’t live long without water.  Chain knew that he would not live long at all, anyway.  The guards would be back after grouping reinforcements and despite Agen’s long and spirited run, the cat had not taken him very far from where he was supposed to be.  Even if he managed to hide within the canyon, he’d go hungry. Much of the food that the Elites ate had to be modified specifically for them.  Even if the newly-minted Elite-turned-wild found adequate hydration, he would starve to death out here.      

Somehow, that was okay with him. 

Chain felt his heart tick softly. 

END.  

  

Accidental Unoriginality

Accidental Unoriginality

A little bit to get off my chest. 

Over on the videogames forum I go to, there are personal blogs for members and a whole blogroll.  It’s not formal, people post whatever their thoughts are there, from seriousness to silly things like memes and, recently, one guy laying all of his Legend of Zelda series games out in a pattern after the official Timeline.  I post more often there than here lately.  I’m actually contemplating scrapping this thing in favor of designing a website to promote my writing so I can have something for Kindle to link to should I break down and self-publish one of my novels in e-book form.  I actually got a Kindle for Christmas mostly for the sake of seeing how works look on one, getting a feel for it for the possibility of self-publishing after facing the facts that I’m not good and/or flashy enough to get published in the conventional way. 

That brings me to talking to people on my little forum blog about publishing and books.  There’s someone on the forums who’d bought a company’s publishing package and I asked him how that went.  There was another young person who was dismayed at the depressed tone of my complaint at receipt of a rejection letter who was basically all “Never give up! Never surrender!” 

Then she said something that made me twitch.  I had posted bits of query letters from two of the works I’ve done as basic samples of “These are the basic premises of two things I have written, you can get a feel for my general style. Is this marketable?” - For the guy I was talking publishing/marketing stuff with.  The girl who responded to me, in a fit of encouragement told me “That second one! It reminds me of His Dark M-”

And immediately my mind screamed “GOOD LORD, NOT ANOTHER ONE!”

I have a novel about people and their guardian creatures.  With what I hear from people, it seems, when I try to describe it before I even get two sentences out, you’d think that Phillip Pullman had *invented* the idea of supernatural guardians instead of them being a staple of mythology and fantasy everywhere.  Ugh.   I informed my blog-reader that I had not read the His Dark Materials books, that what I’d heard about them turned me off of being inclined to read them due to ideological differences thus far, even though I’d heard they were good, and that I actually got the initial idea from something in one of the Legend of Zelda games (Link and his guardian-fairy).  Of course, I happen to prefer bat-winged dragon-lions in my own fiction… 

The blog-buddy messaged me trying to convince me that I really should read her favorite book series, not to be tainted about what I’d heard about it.  I punched up TV Tropes on it and went through its entries there again – tropes descriptions and reviews from fans, links to review articles and the like and… I can see a lot of ideal logy in the descriptions that I can agree with, but some of the things that turn me off are things I suspect would really turn me off in a full reading.  I’m strangely enough not turned off by a fictional world in which God is evil and must die by the end, but I am turned off by the Unfortunate Implications that no-one who ever made the honest mistake of believing in said God is portrayed with any sympathy at all. Coupled with the class-ism described in the Unfortunate Implications part of it, it leads me to wonder if in reading these books, I’m signing a mental contract with an author who thinks that people who gravitate toward the “lowly” or toward things he disagrees with are “just inferior people.” Doubly problematic when I fall under a couple of “inferior” categories. I know I’m stupid for it, but I am hypersensitive about things like that.  I have to watch my depression-triggers.  I’m probably reading too much into a friggin’ tropes description. 

I read a few of the Left Behind books back in the day when they were popular.  They were particularly odious in regards to “agrees with the authors on abstract concepts = good / disagrees = all their works are tainted.”  A few books in and there were even pages at the head of the books dividing the “sides” people were on.  “Believers / Villains / Undecided.”   Nuanced as a brick.  Arbitrary, too. I’ve realized since I’ve left those books behind, that I’ve pretty much outgrown the idea of categorism.

I remember getting annoyed reading The Lord of the Rings over there being no good Orcs... that’s how deep it goes with me.  One of the things I like about my beloved Legend of Zelda game series is that, while it runs on a black and white morality, there are a few shady people and some “good” monsters.  The usual “humans are good, monsters are bad” gets diced up a little on occasion, and pretty much puree’d for Twilight Princess. I actually got annoyed a bit on the lastest title, Skyward Sword when the resident good-guy helpful monster thought that he had to transform into a human to be “good.”  He was good already.  I’m with his little child-friend in that game: He should have kept his flappy bat wings.  He didn’t need to lose them to be good.      

I like to think with my own writing, that when I’m writing characters who disagree with me about a broad, abstract concept that I’m giving them sympathy, sense and reasons in regards to why they would disagree with me.  I’ve had too many genuine friends who disagreed with me sharply on abstract (and even hard-in/right now political ) issues where we could discuss things without me coming away feeling stupid, and us still being friends and seeing the goodness in each other.  I find it fairly easy to write this way when I don’t know what I’m about most of the time and am a depressed, insecure person and I feel like whatever position I’m trying to convey, I’m coming from a place of weakness rather than strength.  In other words, I’m not even sure if my own message is the right one.

 Yes, I have villains who are actually villainous, but I tend to make that a combination of being messed up in the head and having a personal sadism. Somewhat based on history and real events/people who’ve existed (you don’t need ideological enemies to have a serial killer villain), and moreover based upon my own dark side, things I can imagine.  

I don’t know if I do any of it right because I’m not published yet and… ARGH! As soon as I open my mouth about anything I’ve written or am writing, I get some spiel from someone about how “That’s totally like this very favorite thing of mine!” 

I was almost turned off of one of my favorite childhood movies because I was a part of a writers club in which the head of the club insistently and repeatedly compared a character of mine to Falcor because she thought she was being cute, apparently.  I was a part of a writer’s club years ago that met in a bookstore coffee shop.  I was having them read a story of mine I’ve since scrapped.  I had a character that was a white German shepherd with wings.  The head of the club got it into her head that “white flying dog” must equal Falcor the dragon from “The Neverending Story” even though they were nothing alike save from being white in color and able to fly… AUUUGHG. 

Strangely enough, a friend turned me onto what has become my very favorite videogame by saying “this is like something you’d write” but I think that was because she didn’t compare anything among my characters or premises to anything specific in the game.  In fact, there is nothing specific in Shadow of the Colossus that’s a mirror to anything in any of my stories.  However, the idea that I write stories with melancholy themes and isolation indicating that I would like something with a similar general theme really hit a winner. 

Maybe that’s the trick to attempting to compliment an idea of mine to encourage me to write:  Don’t compare the premise to being “Oh so totally like” your already favorite thing after having only seen a couple of sentences of it.  This only makes me worry that I’m accidentally ripping off people who are known and probably a lot better than I am and feel like giving up on my premise.  Don’t compare one of my characters in a borderline rip-off way to a favorite character of yours when you know well they are very different and only share a fur color.  If you want to encourage me by comparison like that, try *themes* - raw *themes.*  

Please don’t make me worry I’m ripping off something unless I’m *actually ripping off something.* 

Thank you.  

Abscence (Revised)

An edited / spiffed-up version of a short story I put up on this blog previously. 

"Some miracles are unwanted."

Absence

S.E. Nordwall

It was being called “Spontaneous Cellular Regeneration” and by a few other “science-y” sounding names that he couldn’t quite wrap his tongue around so as to avoid the inherent religiosity of the term “resurrection.”  There were some terms he found insulting and, thankfully, only a few people in the media used them before getting the idea that they should stop.  It didn’t matter what anybody called it, the fact that it had yet to be explained remained to frustrate everyone involved, not the least of which was its subject.

Alfred Stiff (and that was his real name) rubbed his left arm where blood had been taken as he walked the pleasant paths of a sunny cemetery.  It was close to the hospital – a few blocks over.  The man had not needed to drive, which was a good thing, as he had yet to get his license back.  The legal hang-ups with that were nightmarish. 

“At least it wasn’t bone taken this time,” Mr. Stiff muttered to himself.  Why the staff had to use huge horse-needles on him, he did not know.  It was then that it occurred to him that he’d seen a horse being given veterinary treatment once and the vet had used very tiny and delicate needles on the animal.  Lucky beast.

Alfred walked to the plot where his own grave lay.  It had yellow police-tape staked up around it.  The tombstone reading “A. Stiff” was still there.  If nothing else, Alfred thought, his family had a sense of humor that came in a lovely shade of black.  The grave had been kept separate on the request of people who were investigating his case.   

The man vaguely remembered clawing his way through dirt.  He had no idea how he broke the seal on his coffin.  According to investigators, it had popped loose on its own somehow, but a busted coffin was hardly the miracle here.   

Alfred Stiff had been alive just about a year now.  Before that, he’d been dead for ten years.  He was being called the “Great American Zombie.”  Most of the country seemed to regard him as a huckster even though he’d had very little, if any monetary gain from his adventure.  His status had brought him enough suffering to make him wish he’d stayed dead.  Alfred really wasn’t a zombie, though.  He may have been one in the most technical sense and that is where he preferred to use the term “resurrect,” even as his doctors were trying to find some other term for him.  “Revenant” was likewise okay with him.  “Litch” was absolutely not. 

His body was currently healthy.  If he were a “zombie,” he would be rotting, or at least not be in possession of his own, sharp mind.  He was inexplicably healthy for someone who’d been pumped full of embalming chemicals and buried for a long time.  If there had been no witnesses to his “wakeup” or said witnesses had not been confirmed as mentally sound, what had happened to him would not have been believed by anyone.  As it was now, accusations of a hoax and of severe mental illness ran rampant. 

Mr. Stiff felt profoundly sorry for his witnesses. They’d been the family and friends of some other dead man, gathered for a funeral.  That man had not returned.  Because of the accusations of mental illness, Alfred got the impression that these people were considered by many to be even less “human” than he was for being merely a freak.  He’d had some trouble with that.  His legal status was still “deceased” – since there was no precedent for someone in his situation. 

Alfred sat on a bench at the edge of the trail and looked at the sky.  “Wish I could remember Heaven,” he said to himself.  “Maybe it would be easier.  Hmm. Maybe it would just make things more complicated.” 

Mr. Stiff did not remember anything between his falling and rising.  He remembered dying, yet he had not fully registered what it was at the time.  After that was the sensation of cool fresh air, the feeling of dirt under his fingernails, and after that, the discomfort of people poking and prodding him on a hospital bed.  It was all vague, but he didn’t remember a misty Heaven, a fiery Hell, or a life spent reincarnated as a squirrel or whatever else was supposed to have happened to him.  He greatly annoyed disbelievers in those sorts of things as well, on account that he did not dismiss the possibility that his spirit went somewhere and that he simply did not remember it.  “We all sleep.  Not all of us remember our dreams,” he’d say. 

Mr. Stiff had quite a time when he was on one of those cheesy talk shows.  He’d been hesitant to appear on one of those things that served, in his eyes, to perpetuate the stereotype that people who watched daytime network television were idiots.  The spiritual guru that had been on the show had pressed Alfred intensely on the subject of the afterlife and of spiritual “awakening.”  Mr. Stiff had felt sorry for him, or something along the lines of “almost sorry” simply because he’d always found it hard to feel much for the rude.  The way the guy leaned into his personal space was something he found creepy. 

He’d had nothing to give the guy, having decided to remain honest.  No light, no peace – not even darkness or a “void,” to disappoint some members of the studio audience as well as the strawman-style skeptic that had been brought on the show.  He’d apparently hoped to hear that his experience had been like deep sleep – maybe not the “death” part, but the “dying” part.  From feeling a “punch” and realizing he’d been shot in the chest, to the sensation of falling to the floor, to the vagaries of “waking up” – for all that was in between, the element of Time had not existed for Alfred.  He’d let the skeptic down mightily when he’d failed to see his “lack of time or anything” as proof that there was definitely no afterlife.  As far as Alfred was concerned, his experience wasn’t proof or disproof of anything at all.  He was letting people of science try to figure out why his body was alive again, but all he could give them was his body. 

That was the way those talk shows worked:  They put two people of opposing views on along with a main guest because not only does debate get going, the studio audience gets riled up into a frothy mass.  Conflict attracts viewership, and if the truth lies somewhere in-between, the truth be damned for the ratings.  This was one of the reasons why Alfred saw them as “television for idiots” and only made an appearance because of the money that was offered.  He had the need to upkeep himself and felt the need to help out his family.  Being a famous victim-of-something-strange pretty much meant fortune for being a freak and all-but guaranteed exclusion from ordinary work.  Still, he outright refused the televangelist that had come to him.  Morons and sensationalists he would work with while cringing just a little, crooks he would not work with at all.  The smell of sleaze on that one was as thick as the scent of his hair-gel. 

Alfred wondered if he had any right to owning such standards.  There were times when he’d wondered if he should have left honor in the grave.    

“What’s wrong with a cross on your tombstone?” Anne asked as they stood before Alfred’s grave. 

“Nothing, really, but…” Mr. Stiff answered his sister. 

“You are not lacking for company,” Anne suggested, “and you always believed in your own way, even though none of us have been active in the church for a long time.” 

“It’s not bad in and of itself,” Alfred answered, “It is what you thought I would have wanted.  I do not find it an offensive symbol; I just fear others might someday” 

“You fear others might someday...?” 

Alfred sighed.  “I think that sometimes symbols are more important to people than reality… or actual people.  Reality and real people are complex things.  Symbols are simple.  With the way the world’s going and all of the bad stuff we hear about hypocrites and criminals in the churches, well… along with a lot of other unfortunate associations… I just fear that someday our world will change enough that people in the future will see crosses like we see swastikas today.  The stupider ones will raid graveyards like this, knocking over the headstones in hopes of desecrating the memories of folks they don’t think deserve to be remembered… not that it will really hurt them, being already dead, but still…”

“That’s a harsh vision.”

“Even swastikas weren’t originally and always evil,” Alfred muttered, “They’re symbolic of fortune and suchlike in some cultures – some Far East luck-symbol, at least before the West got a hold of it.  Most folk think in the negative, I suppose – Easier to gain a bad association than a good one.  A little bad use or bad press can wipe out thousands of years of good fortune.”

“So, you’re saying you don’t want people to assume things about you.” 

“Exactly,” Alfred said with a smile.  “The cross is not a bad symbol; it’s just that it has both good and bad associations.  As long as I have breath to speak, I can justify whatever I happen to be associated with.  I can explain why I follow the good parts of something and reject the bad.  Maybe people won’t believe me, but at least I can have my say.  I am powerless when I have no breath, though.  I know that better than anyone alive today.”

Alfred Stiff had moved in with his sister and her family shortly after the media storm had begun to die down and the hospital released him.  Anne had to procure him lawyers to win that right.  Having been deemed a subject valuable to science and having legally given up the rights due to the living upon his death, his general personhood was something that had to be earned for him in court. 

There was mention of vivisection and even dissection after “killing him again” to get a thorough look at all aspects of his body and brain early on.  The individuals that suggested these things had been quickly dismissed from the project.  The team that worked with Alfred in trying to figure out what had happened to him and what was going on with his body, for the most part, cared about his welfare and happiness – if for nothing else than the fact that a happy, cooperative subject was the easiest kind of subject to work with.  More, too, could be learned from one “undead” body than one simply made dead again.  

They had not wanted to release him to begin his life anew, preferring that he live at the hospital twenty-four-seven, but that was most of Mr. Stiff’s contention with the main team.  He came to the hospital as a study subject as to a job now.  He had eight-hour days with two days off per week.  Their tests and sample-taking often hurt, sometimes, quite a bit, but the man knew his value to science.  He hoped that study on him would help people someday.  In the keeping of a willing subject, giving Alfred Stiff his freedom and basic rights helped his morale, but he was still glad that his sister got lawyers involved.  It was a comfort to him that his humanity was down on paper and in record so that people like the mad-scientist idiots who’d first observed him couldn’t get their way without ramifications. He remained “deceased” in most of the practical, legal documentation, but was, nonetheless, declared a “legal person.”  It was a strange in-between.  He couldn’t drive or buy a home, but he could live and expect not to be tortured. He was still fighting for his remaining former rights.  As he saw it, no one in the world ever had rights that didn’t have to be fought for.  He was grateful to have people on his side.

For his part, Alfred’s hope was that knowledge gleaned from the studies would save people near death or bring back people lost to sudden tragedy.  He hated to be selfish, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to see everyone in the world resurrected as he was – at least with the world as it presently existed. 

He sat in a chair in a clean room decked out in tones of white, blue and machine-chic  watching a favorite old television series on a laptop resting on a desk before him. 

“Oh, I love this episode!” one of his doctors said.  The red-haired woman leaned over his shoulder to watch. 

“It’s a bit mind-trippy,” Alfred replied.  “I’m not sure physics would actually work that way on the ship, even in the weirder depths of space.”

“Not to mention the giant space-octopus.” 

“That, too.” 

She turned to him. “You really like space operas, don’t you?” she observed.  “They’re all I’ve see you watch while you’ve been here.” 

“Better than talk shows.  You haven’t seen me watch the couple of cooking shows I like.  I figure that’s our future.  Not the octopi, but the stars…”

“I bet you wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I was always more interested in biology than astrophysics.  Find me a space-octopus to study and I’m in!”    

“Well,” said Alfred after calming his laughter, “If you crack me, figure me out… I’m… kind of hoping the world will save the widespread resurrecting until we reach the stars and find some planets to terraform and all that good stuff. Some might say that we need a ‘new heavens and new Earth’ for such a change in the dynamics of life.  We might need a really big heaven and lots of ‘Earths.’  Think about it.  If we bring people back willy-nilly, folks will have to stop making babies for…Earth to…um…work.  As it is, I still get hungry and need to breathe and, of course, I take up space.  I don’t think I’m immortal, just…returned. We’d glut up the planet real quick if everyone who died got brought back as a normal, everyday thing.” 

“Have you ever wanted children?  It would appear to be possible for you, given that all of your systems seem to be intact.” 

“My ex-wife and I thought of it when we were first married, but held off actively trying until the time was right.  Good thing, too, since we didn’t last long.”

“She hasn’t come to visit you.  I’d think she would, Miracle Man.”

“Eh. The breakup was ugly and so was she.” 

“Such an evil grin!  ‘Miracle’ or not, I guess we can’t call you a saint.”

“Don’t you even dare.”

Alfred Stiff decided at once point or another that people were more or less fictional to each other.  He didn’t think that reality was a subjective matter or that human beings did not actually exist or anything as overreaching as that.  What he concluded from his observations, however, was that people had a tendency to create their own narratives concerning others.  People made guesses as to what a given other person was like, what their motivations were and their thoughts based upon appearance, position and a few mannerisms. 

Since there was no way of knowing what and how a given individual thinks apart from what they chose to share with others, this shorthand and the little narratives that came with it were, in Stiff’s reckoning, the best mere mortals could do.

If everyone’s mind was like his own, the world was made up of people living complicated inner lives that they’d never share with even those closest to them, not just out of privacy but out of sheer complexity.

This was apparent in a study of history.  It seemed that when a person had made themselves some fame and were long-dead, everyone quoted them.  If they were vindicated by history and people thought of them as “good,” their every speech-quote and every scrap of writing that they left behind were used as evidence of being on a group’s side.  If a person was infamous, their every quote was analyzed and used to connect them to their enemies. 

Alfred hadn’t made much use of the Internet ten years ago, but his sister had a fast connection and several household computers – some old and scavenged, one expensive and new.  Alfred had read that the name for a particularly popular phenomenon on some of the forums he’d take a look at was “Godwin’s Law.” It applied to quoting Adolf Hitler and comparisons to him.  He wondered if there was some kind of positive form for it, a “Jefferson’s Law,” considering how often the quotes of Thomas Jefferson were used by people of every political party as supposed support for their more-often-than-not purely modern agendas. 

The longer you were dead, the longer you were “nice and safe,” and moreover – “useful,” it seemed to him.    

This realization was a little more unsettling when it came to the rewritten memories of people who knew a deceased person in life.  After a while, those could become distorted, too – “absence makes the heart grow fonder” as was the common saying.  Alfred learned this intimately in regards to his own life, his own death and his own family.    In the case of his ex-wife, who bothered to meet him just once after his “awakening,” he’d become more demonized over the years in her personal narrative of him.  She’d definitely wanted him to stay dead.  For his part, he felt sorry for her new husband. Alfred had suggested a good local bar that served some very strong concoctions to him.  He had not reacted positively.

Dealings with his sister were more distressing in that she had never stopped loving him, but had changed him slightly in her mind. He found that she was surprised and offended by some of his little mannerisms.  Alfred cursed rather causally, for example, except around her two boys.  It wasn’t anything novel that had come about after his awakening – he’d always remembered firing off an expletive every once in a while when something wasn’t working right, when he was untangling electrical cords or had received a particularly annoying bill in the mail.  (He asked Anne how his dept collectors got word that he was alive again.  Her response was that they’d never acted as if he’d died.  They just forwarded bills to next of kin, addressed to him, for the entirety of the decade.  The same thing had happened with requests to re-subscribe to magazines).    

“Could you tone it down?” She’d asked him when he was trying to fix the hinges on the screen-door of the family porch.  The woman had yelped as though Alfred’s casual swear had physically hurt her.  She spoke to him as though he were a child she wished to discipline. 

“I dropped a screw.  They’re hard to see, the little buggers.  The boys are at school, what’s it matter what I say?” 

“You never used to be like that.”

“Hmm?  I don’t recall ever doing anything different…” he grumbled.  You act like a meaningless word is dangerous.    

Anne stood still for a moment. 

“Something wrong with you?”

“I just realized something.”

“Hmm?” 

“You’re right.  I guess… I just didn’t remember how you spoke in the little moments…”

“What are you talking about, Anne?” 

She began weeping.  “After you d-died…” she whispered… “I forgot…It seems like I just forgot so many little things about you.”

“I’ll watch my language for you if you really want.”

“No!  Please, be yourself! It’s just… this whole business is weird.” 

“I know,” Alfred said, stepping over to his sister and wrapping an arm around her.  “What’s happened to me is something that hasn’t happened since the time of myths. I wonder, like everyone else, if it really happened at all…”

“I don’t believe in collective hallucinations,” Anne replied, “And I know you weren’t a twin. I saw you in an open casket after being done up.” 

“When a thing happens that everyone tells you shouldn’t have happened, you begin to doubt it and doubt yourself.  It is okay, Anne, don’t cry.  Maybe some would rather I stayed dead than gotten lucky so as not to disturb what’s ‘supposed to be,’ but I know that you aren’t one of them. You’re my little sister and nothing’s going to change that.

“Has your medical team figured out hide or hair of it?” Anne asked. “It’d be nice to have some explanation beyond it just being a ‘miracle.” 

“Eh,” her brother said, separating from her and picking his screwdriver up again.  “Maybe I was revived by a fairy or someone, somewhere made a pact with a shadow-demon that can bring people back from the Land of the Dead.”

Anne laughed.  “Dylan and Francis will have to show you the little game-room they have set up.  Compared to the games we used to play, the graphics on theirs will blow you away.” 

“I never asked what you did with my old consoles.” 

“We kept them. They’re also in the game room, though the 1980’s- beast is up in the attic.”

“Have the boys ever played with that one?”

“Nope. The old games are with it, though in an old crate.”

“I shall have to dust it off and bring it down and school them,” Alfred said with a grin.

“This is all we could get,” Francis said as he showed off a game-case of some title that “Uncle Al” had never heard of.  “It’s from a few years ago, outdated…”

“But the used stuff is cheaper, anyway,” Dylan finished for him.  “I like used games better – that way I can read reviews online so we don’t waste our money on lame-ass crap.”

“Your mother shouldn’t hear you say that,” Alfred scolded. 

“We say worse!” Francis said, sticking his tongue out at his older brother. “The trick is to listen for her at the door when we’re playing one of the fighters so she doesn’t hear us…” 

“I bet you come up with some creative insults for each other,” Alfred said.

“Play with us, Uncle Al! We’ll play whatever you want to play first!”

“Yeah, and maybe next week, you can talk Mom into taking us to the game store in the city.  They were going to build a Lana’s Castle a couple of blocks from here, but…”

“But?”

“When you… what mom said… you know…” Dylan struggled.

“What he means to say,” Francis butted in, “is that there was this big protest from the town council and people, since the guy who killed you liked videogames.” 

“Oh, that…” Alfred said, biting his thumbnail. 

“We’re lucky Mom even lets us play stuff,” Dylan explained.  “She doesn’t let us play the really cool stuff, though, nothing really bloody and awesome.” 

Among the game-cases, “Uncle Al” found an old favorite of his.  He and Dylan sat side-by-side on the carpeted floor with controllers playing a player-versus-player swordfighting title.  Francis watched, eager to play the winner, but cheering on his uncle.

Mr. Stiff had known Dylan.  The child was two years old when he’d embarked on his adventure in coffin-stuffing.  Francis was new to him, born a year after his murder.  It warmed his heart that the children had an appreciation for some things that he did not think they’d have an appreciation of.  Videogames were expected, but not the titles he knew.  Though the game he was playing at the moment had a roster of characters with fierce and sometimes improbable-looking blades, the carnage was bloodless, with damage shown in light-flares and effects to the character’s hit-point bars. 

The man thought, as he played, to the young man who’d killed him.  He had not remembered his face very well from the incident.  Most of what he knew came from news article archives he’d read.  The kid had been twenty-two years old and had been an ex-employee of Steve’s Market, a small grocery store that Alfred had stopped off to in the evening after work. 

Alfred remembered the contents of his shopping basket that night: There was a frozen chicken-fried steak dinner because he didn’t feel like cooking anything for himself that night, nor picking up another burger from a sack made transparent by the grease.  There was a box of nasal-decongestant pills because he could feel himself coming down with a minor cold, and he’d grabbed a bottle of some cheap off-brand cola.   He’d walked to one of two staffed registers (Steve’s had yet to install a do-it-yourself scanner station) when the kid had come in – dark, messy hair, black denim jacket and white tennis-shoes that were falling apart (Alfred had no idea why he remembered that).  The next thing he knew, the kid had pulled something from his coat and there were several sharp popping sounds, some screams, and something that felt like a mule-kick to his chest. 

He felt wetness before he felt the appropriate pain, but he suddenly could not breathe.  He looked down to see red splats on the floor, felt his knees buckle and that was just about all he remembered before the sensations of cold grave-dirt on his fingers and some doctor shining a light in his eyes.

According to what he’d been told and what he’d been able to see in news video and article archives, he was one of four people killed in the rampage, including the gunman. There had been very few people in the little market at the time.  One other man who was a customer of the store had been shot in the head.  A little girl had taken a body-shot and died at the hospital.  Her mother was wounded as well as the clerk at one of the registers.  The young assailant had, after seeing what he’d wrought, eaten his gun before police even arrived.   

Alfred Stiff had visited the graves of the victims other than his own, including the grave of the murderer.  From what he’d read, the boy had been very troubled, not that it was an excuse in any way for what he’d done, but the man felt more a sense of sorrow over the whole ordeal than a desire for revenge.  He did not hope for a Hell for the boy for having died by his hand.  If he carried any anger, it was over the dead little girl and the random man he never knew rather than for himself.    

He had inexplicably “gotten better,” after all.  He thought the little girl should have “gotten better,” not him.  If it was the whim of a God, perhaps a dark sense of humor or trickery was involved. Perhaps his fate was the doing of a capricious writer.  Maybe the little girl was very happy in a Heaven he couldn’t remember and wishing her back wasn’t something she’d want anyone to do.  Maybe nothing was involved save some bizarre quirk of biology and there was no one to blame or to beg a different outcome of.  All he could do was to leave some flowers beside the headstone of the girl he never knew and move on… 

And play videogames with his nephews, who were glad to have an Uncle Al.

Reports on the young killer noted, among other things, that he had been quite an extensive videogame hobbyist and a few of the kid’s favorites - according to his relatives and what had been found in his home that had been listed in one article - were some of Alfred’s own favorites.  There was a title or two he’d never heard of and a few he’d avoided (although an adult gamer, he generally found himself much more fond games featuring swords and sorcery rather than gun-filled historical simulators or gritty things that were supposed to be set in real-world locations).  Still, to keep a gaming store – something he would have welcomed in the community – out even partially “in his name” seemed a little harsh. 

The articles also had what he felt was a disturbing emphasis on the killer being a “loner.”  Alfred wondered just why, whenever someone who was gregarious did a notable mass-murder or attack with that as an intent, the news media would print and do sound bytes proclaiming how “appalling” it was that such a normal, social person would act out like that.  Whenever someone who happened to be an introvert flipped their pancake for whatever reason, their introversion was portrayed “normal for unstable people.”   Alfred was living under the care of his sister’s family at present, but in his previous life, he’d lived alone and liked it.  He’d tried the marriage-thing, and it hadn’t worked out.  He’d enjoyed his solitude and, like friends of his he rarely saw because they also enjoyed their solitude – he’d stockpiled books in his apartment, not guns.

Being an unwilling and unwarranted “martyr” for keeping gaming culture out of the neighborhood wasn’t as bad as being used as an unwitting shill for other things, but it still annoyed him. 

It was another reminder of how powerless the dead were.  He assumed he’d be in that state again eventually.  Given his basic mammalian survival-instinct, inevitability had always bothered him, but now it bothered him more than ever.  Right now he knew keenly that his “name” could be used for or against damn near anything and in his absence he couldn’t do squat about it.  

Perhaps he’d request to have a symbol from a game-universe etched on his new eventual tombstone instead of a cross.  He knew of a harmonious arrangement of triangles that could be nice.  Considering that a local trash-collection company and a local accounting firm used similar symbols, it would confuse people. Alfred considered that a bonus. 

The misguided memories of those he’d left behind had deepened to an extent he never could have predicted. 

Alfred found himself hugging his sobbing sister again.  This seemed to be happening on an ever-more-frequent basis.  Some little mannerism would set her off either because she’d remembered it from their youth together or because it seemed, somehow, out of character for him only for the woman to be given a reminder that it wasn’t. 

More than that, Anne had constructed memories of her brother that never were, because they never could be.  She had so many scenarios for which he’d been absent that she’d imagined “If Alfred was here” for.  By his off-hand comments and the small actions of his day-to-day living, he’d been shattering her illusions without even meaning to. 

“When did you change politics?” she’d ask.  “You never liked shows like that,” she’d say… 

“The Al I knew wouldn’t put up with that garbage they’re doing to you at the hospital!” she demanded, “You were always so defiant, what happened to that?” she moaned.

“Ssssh,” the big brother told his little sister, rubbing her back after a particularly hard conversation.  “Isn’t it natural for people to change?”

“But…” Anne said with a tiny choke, “You haven’t… you really haven’t.  It’s only my mind that’s changed you!  I feel like… I don’t even know you anymore sometimes, but it’s not even your fault!  You do something unexpected, then suddenly my mind tells me I should have expected it, that it’s my addled mind to blame!”

“Your mind isn’t addled.  It’s just human.” 

“I-I…I’m worried that I cherish the memory of you more than I cherish… you. You, Alfred.  It’s almost like…”

“You wish I’d stayed in the ground…”

“No! Never that!” 

“The dead are supposed to stay that way… you said your goodbyes. You had closure. Then I had to wake up and mess it all up. I reopened all of your wounds and I can’t even be the person your mind wrote me to be, what your heart really wants me to be…”

“Al…” 

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  It also distorts the memory.”

“I can make new memories of you.”

Alfred sighed.  “I received a miracle I never asked anyone for, but that doesn’t mean a miracle was a good thing.”  

A. Stiff looked at the grave with the marker that read “A. Stiff.”   He plucked a small wildflower from the path-side and placed it before the stone, bending down past the police tape.  The man smiled at the thought of laying a flower on his own grave. 

In some ways, existence itself was just a kick in the pants, but it had its bright spots, too.  He’d been made a stranger in his own world, a foreigner to his own life.   He was largely out of the news now, his “miracle” having become mundane – it wasn’t that it had been replicated in any way or even figured out, it’s just that life went on.  There were always new stories in the world to chase.  News would be a breakthrough on his case or another one like it occurring.  For now, he was relatively free.   

He was not sure that the miracle he’d suffered was a good thing, but for the time being, he’d make the most of it. 

END.