Archive for the ‘Ken Brady’ Category
Deserve Neither
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
When you sit down next to him you feel immediately uncomfortable. You tell yourself it’s just the amount of data streaming through his young body. It’s the potential radiation. Not the eerie way his pale skin seems almost translucent. Not the way he stares at the seatback. Not that with one glance he can know everything about you.
Couldn’t be that.
You were happy to get an exit row – one small luxury – until you spotted him. If it weren’t a full flight, you would ask to move. Instead you fasten your belt and hope he can’t tell what you’re thinking.
“Everything will be fine,” he says. His voice is quiet, distant. He looks out the window as the plane pushes back.
Your eyes dart his way.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t worry. That’s what you want to hear, right?”
You poke through the in-flight magazine, try the crossword. What’s an eight letter word for paranoia?
On take-off, the hair stands up on your neck. The data makes you feel weird. They say you shouldn’t be able to feel it.
He’s looking out the window and you know he’s communicating with the rest of them, one in every plane. They do so much to keep you safe. Route your flights, help land in bad weather, keep everything running smoothly. And they watch everyone.
They watch you.
Back when you could afford it you flew first class so you didn’t have to see them. You could believe they were a cost-saving experiment, a safety contingent, a necessary evil like full-body scans or strip-searches or profiling. You could pretend it didn’t concern you.
When you level of at thirty-seven thousand, out over the ocean, he puts a pill in his mouth and dry swallows. He leans toward you, still not looking your way.
“We’re all going to die,” he says.
“Someday,” you say.
“Some sooner than others.”
The silence is as total as it’s possible to be given the roar of jet engines. You grip your armrests until your fingers ache.
“Your seat cushion functions as a floatation device,” he says. For the first time, he looks your way. “Please don’t hate us.”
“For what?”
“For stopping you.”
Looking into his eyes, you know he sees everything. Fake Canadian passport, real name, identity as an early test subject for the Airborne Defense Node project, bad dreams, bomb smuggled into cargo, microtransmitter in your molar.
Your first urge is to run, but you’re on an airplane. Your second is to bite down hard.
“Don’t,” he says. “It needs to be done another way.”
You barely breathe.
“Tired,” he says. His eyes close and the lights in the plane flicker, the plane lurching to one side. His eyes flutter open again and the lights return. The plane stabilizes.
“If you survive,” he says, “tell them it was too much to expect us to save them all.”
His eyes close and the feeling of pulsing data fades amid the darkness.
Bonus
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Mario grabbed one last coin, then realized he had timed his leap wrong. He missed the ledge and descended into darkness.
The music faded as he fell, replaced by whooshing wind. Flapping his arms did no good, but he kept it up anyway. Just in case.
A fireball suddenly flew up and past him, lighting rough rock walls briefly before it dropped back down. He then saw the fire pits below, and one small square of solid ground between them. He flapped madly to change his trajectory.
He hit the ground hard, landing on his feet, as he always did. The charred remains of creatures were strewn all around, some half crawled from the fire, others just blackened shells. The pits afforded only one exit: a series of crumbling ledges leading up to a small cave opening. He tensed, jumped across the fire pit and landed precariously on the first ledge. Another leap, then another, and he was at the cave opening.
Inside, lit by flickering torches, a dozen pairs of eyes swiveled his way.
There were four climbers in cold-weather gear sitting on turtle shells and a rather big gorilla slumped in the corner. Mario recognized himself in the other seven, jumpsuits, hats, mustaches and all.
“Mamma mia,” he said. “You’re me!”
“We’ve already been over this a million times,” said Mario. “I got here first, who knows when. Fell down a hole.”
“Me too,” said Mario.
“Fell off a cliff,” said a climber.
“Drove my cart off a big mushroom,” said Mario.
“Then him, then them, then him, yadda yadda,” said Mario. “But it’s been a while since anyone else has made it through the fire pits. Now you make eight. Eight identical Marios. Two pairs of climbers. One stubborn gorilla. That’s thirteen of us stuck here.”
“Stuck?” said Mario. “But we need to get out. We still need to rescue the princess!”
“Forget about it,” Mario said. “Even if we could get out, there are other more pressing concerns. One of us found this.”
Mario looked at the poster tacked to the cave wall. It showed a rather cartoonish looking Mario leaping over a fireball. Mario pointed to a name on the bottom of the poster.
“We have to find someone named Miyamoto. I don’t know what’s going on, or how many of us are stuck in these caves across the worlds, but I think he’s the cause of all this.”
“But how do we find him?” said a climber.
Mario looked around. “You’re climbers. You have axes, right? We Marios can jump. And we’ve got a big-ass gorilla. We can climb back up. Together.”
“Maybe with his help,” Mario said, pointing to the gorilla, who had fingers jammed in both ears, defiant as always. “But you try telling him that.”
Mario walked over to the gorilla, levered one big finger out of his ear, and whispered.
A moment of silence. Then the gorilla stood and flexed his muscles. He roared his approval.
“What did you say to him?” a climber asked.
“I told him he could have the princess. I just want Miyamoto.”
The group assembled, climbed aboard the gorilla.
Mario smiled devilishly. “Let’s go,” he said. “Someone will pay for this.”
It was time to change the rules of the game.