Archive for the ‘Ken Brady’ Category
Partial List of the Saved
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
This is actually a story by Ken Brady. We’re having some technical problems with the site that are keeping Ken from posting under his own name, but with any luck, everything will be sorted out over the weekend.
Standing on the foredeck of the Titanic the first thing we notice is how real the wind feels. We walk unnoticed all the way up to the bow railing and spread our arms as if to fly like that meat actor back in the flat days. The days when it only took a few hundred million dollars and a contrived love story to suspend disbelief.
We have greater requirements. When the only reality we have is a construct, we come to rely on the details. Down to the prim, the pixel, the ray. And here, on the deck of one of the most famous disasters in human history, we will make our stand, take our chances, be saved or fade into obscurity, forever lost.
We have been in the Purgatory Hub for six days now, and our cluster will lose its public funding tomorrow. None of us had enough money in life to buy our way into everlasting life, so here we are, in a final act of desperation.
We know the great ship will strike an iceberg tonight, and we must find new bodies to inhabit before that occurs. We must do or die, as the expression goes. If we don’t face death in a body of historical significance, we will simply be deleted. We will not join the other uploads in the Perpetual Cluster, not become part of the global mind, not become part of human history. It will be like each of our two hundred lives never existed.
Choosing another life is difficult. None of us knew in which historical event we would find ourselves, but some of us recall bits of useful data, factoids from history class or pop culture. We are on the upper decks for practical reasons; in first class, we have a better than sixty percent chance to live forever.
We move through the cabins and lounges, each of us choosing a body. We temporarily assume their names and identities, their lives and last hours. Women and children first. The unfortunate among us are left with men. We choose the richest-looking men.
If we are lucky and our assumed names match those on the front page of The New York Times, April 16, 1912, if we are indeed on the partial list of the saved, we will earn a place in history. We will be survivors.
The alternative is not really an alternative at all, but the dark depths of the ocean and the cold embrace of eternity.
History is our only route to the future.
It’s the Beer Talking
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Here’s a quick message from cabal central: we’ll be undergoing some site maintenance this weekend, so the site may be down for some or all of the period from Friday to early next week. Thanks for bearing with us.
And now, on to Ken’s story.
Johnny knew it was a bad sign when the jukebot switched to country music without his keying in so much as a chit. It rolled past his table, turned a suspicious cam on him for the briefest moment, then cut off its trance-punk-disco mix in the middle of a three-chord flourish. Did he really look that desperate?
He took another swig of beer when a voice whispered in his head that, yes, he looked like he’d slept in his clothes again, like he’d just been dumped by his longtime GF for a multitude of clichés, like he’d lost his job to a young tool just out of college working for half the salary. All this was true, and that made the bot’s choice of Vince Gill whining about his lost lover all the more depressing.
The voice said, “Order another beer,” so he did. The waitbot brought a pitcher.
Halfway through the next beer, she sat down. Retrogal, hair all big and splayed out, just how he liked it. Jeans that looked like they were made from real cotton, so tight they seemed painted on rather than worn. George Jones, long-dead but somehow still relevant, warbled from the bot about Corvettes and two-dollar pistols.
“Hi,” she said. The waitbot put a glass in front of her and Johnny filled it. “I just love this beer,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Speaks to me,” Johnny said. His words were slurred. “Tells me stuff.”
She finished half the glass in one go, then nodded like that was the most profound thing anyone had ever said to her. Of course, Johnny reminded himself, this was a bar, and it might well have been.
“Feeling lost,” he said.
“She dumped you, huh?”
“That’s not the half of it,” he said. “Wait, how did you…”
“Beer talking,” she said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He tried to say something else, but failed.
“I can help you get it back,” she said.
“Get it back?”
“What you lost,” she said.
He thought about that long and hard, as only someone drunk on nano-enhanced beer could do. He thought all the way through Kenny Chesney talking about not knowing what he’d do if he lost it.
She smiled at him and put on some lipstick that glowed like electrified maraschinos.
That settled it. Johnny downed his Nanoweizen, poured another glass from the pitcher, and ordered a round for the house.
Smart beer, dumb retrogal, the promise of redemption. Maybe not a solution, but a damn fine distraction. What the hell.
When “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off” started playing, he knew he’d made the right choice.
He’d take her home, open up a bottle of Patrón, and turn on some rock and roll.
The hangover would be worth it.