Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Connected / Chapter 1: Transitions
Friday, June 4th, 2010
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the first chapter of an ongoing flash serial, “Connected.” Search for the tag “Connected” to find other chapters. Subscribe to the Daily Cabal RSS feed for a new chapter every 2 weeks.
Every man has his tribe. Home. Work. Streams of consciousness flooding in. No man is an island. Even in the dark of the night, dreams stream in. Everyone, everything… connected.
Except for these moments. These transitions. Tribe to tribe. Home to work. Family, friends, all-access celebrities, blinked away. Alone. Isolated. David Morello–just a sack of meat waiting.
But only for a moment. The system dials, reconnects. His feed swallowed, disseminated, reconstructed. Detective David Morello. NYPD tribe.
Macros pilot his meatsack to its desk but he’s already got a homicide request. There is a moment of disorientation as the on-scene detective’s visual feed obliterates his own.
A man on a bed. As if asleep. Except his eyes. Black ruins that ran down his cheeks. Crisped flesh at the edges.
“Morello patched in,” he says.
“Chambers,” comes back a hard nasal voice. “My ‘sack’s on-scene. John Doe. Dead on my arrival. Fried.” Chambers pulls up images from the crime lab mainframe. Twisted cranial wiring. Morello asks the AIs in research to cross-reference them.
“Too much heat,” Chambers says. One more image. Graphic.
“We know what the Doe was connected to?” Morello asks. Known harmful feeds, or downloaded malware will cut the case time.
“That’s just it,” said Chambers. Diagnostics begin scrolling down the shared feed. “He wasn’t connected at all.”
No. Morello denies it. The thought of it. It is as if he is suddenly alone. Suddenly in the dark. In that yawning moment of disconnection stretching out, out, out. No feeds. A man alone. Quaking, Knowing this is the last transition. Life to death. Just a sack of meat.
#
He cuts the police feed. Dials his home tribe. His kids, his wife. Sensations wash over him, through him: puzzling over a math problem, over a recipe for stew, watching an ass track down the street.
#
Back. The murder scene. NYPD tribe.
“Thought I lost your feed,” Chambers says.
Again, the fear. But weaker now. John Doe’s problem, not his,
He gets Chambers to flip the corpse over and sees the burn mark. Suicide. Overcharged himself. Morello isn’t surprised. Disconnected… alone… No man is an island. He is either buoyed up by others, or he drowns.
Morello posts his report. He watches the feeds of those who read it. All of them sharing the knowledge. All of them, through him, connected.
Out the Angels Come
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
This is a sequel to “God Is Not Screwing Around“.
Martin was not in Heaven. He appeared to be in a suburb of Heaven at about one in the morning on a weekday. He wandered down vaguely curving streets through 70’s- and 80’s-era raised ranches that were uniformly dark and silent. Martin felt like he had been wandering for hours. If that was true he was late for his meeting with God.
Another intersection: Pinta Street and Apple Tree Way. He’d been here before … right? Or was it just someplace like it? No, this was the place: there were those concrete, warehouse-looking buildings he’d seen before with the signs that said things like “Platform 3” and “No Lifters.” He had a choice of either a grimy alleyway by the “No Lifters” sign or going back into the winding suburban maze. The maze was beginning to creep him out, so he decided to take his chances with the alley.
The alley was short, it turned out, and ended in a wooden door that was a little bit ajar. Martin pushed on the door, but couldn’t see anything in the dimness beyond. He went through.
“Oh, wait, hang on!” said a trim little guy with beautiful teeth, stepping out of the gloom and putting a hand on Martin’s chest. “What’re you doing here, now?”
“I’m Martin?” Martin said.
“Is that a question, or are you actually Martin?” said the trim little guy.
“Actually Martin.”
The trim little guy smiled and dropped his hand to a “shake” position. Martin shook it. “Martin, I’m Timmy Gates … they call me Pearly. You here to see God?”
“He said 3:00.”
“Well, time is immaterial here, and you died at 2:57, so you’re all set. OK, people!”
This last thing was said to the gloom, which lit up with golden and misty white light. A host of angels–a large host, as in probably more than a thousand–burst into song. Martin had a hard time tracking the song, but it was so gorgeous his head nearly exploded, and it seemed to be more or less on the theme of “We love you, Martin! Welcome to Heaven!”
After about a week of that–which was less than Martin wanted–the angels wrapped it up and then flapped off without a word, leaving Martin alone with Pearly.
“Is that because God … ?” Martin began.
“Oh, no,” said Pearly. “They do that for everybody. You can’t stop angels from singing, am I right? Come on, let’s go see the Big Guy.”
So they went to see the Big Guy.