Learn to lose. It's easier that way. -- Barenaked Ladies, Everything Old is New Again
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Category: Writing

Fiction: Mile Marker 24

It’s funny how ideas evolve. When I first had the idea that this is based on, the twist wasn’t even a twist. It only occurred to me a good twenty years after I first had the idea that Gabe wouldn’t explain his true nature to Dorothy from the outset. Now, I think it’s a fun reveal, though I’m not sure if it will really play out well as a full story – there’s obviously a big change in what kind of story you’re telling if you spend an extended amount of time believing it’s one kind of story and then it turns out to be a different kind. But me, I like things that transform into other things; I was brought up on a diet of kids shows about dudes who used magic swords to turn into Conan knock-offs and trucks that turned into robots. So, let’s see how it goes.

“Sorry, what?” Gabe asked. He glanced at the clock.

“Edgy. Distracted. I said you were edgy and distracted. Like the way you got distracted just now, ten seconds ago,” Dorothy said. “If you don’t want to help me study, you can just… I take that back. I need you to help me study.”

“Yes. Right. Sorry. Trigonometry. The cosine of the arcsine of x is the square root of one minus x squared,” He said. He looked at the clock again.

“Yes,” Dorothy said, “Except that it’s history. Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” Gabe said again. “Sorry. I… Can’t really explain.”

“Complicated?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, instead engaging in some kind of staring contest with the clock. “It’s okay,” Dorothy finally said. “Believe it or not I’m getting used to you. I know you’ll keep me out of trouble. Stay on the straight and narrow. Don’t break the rules. Don’t mess up the universe.”

Gabe looked down at her with a start, as though seeing her for the first time. “Don’t break…” he started. His face fell. With a faraway look, he quietly said, “There is no who we are but what we do. There is no us but what we choose.”

Dorothy dropped her pencil. “What was that? Where did you- That was me.”

Ignoring the question, he said, “I’ve been teaching you the wrong thing.”

She stood up, confrontational. “I wrote that. Part of it. Only it’s not done yet. How did you know that?”

“I’ve been keeping you out of trouble,” Gabe said. “I should’ve been helping you choose what trouble to get in. I need to get into some trouble right now.” He snapped back into focus. “You need to call emergency services. Right now.”

“What?”

“There’s been a car crash on route 170, near mile marker 24.”

“How did you- When?”

He looked at the clock. “About four minutes from now. You don’t have to tell them that part.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small gray square. Dorothy had seen it before, but only in brief glances; he’d always made a point not to call attention to it.

“How do you know? She braced for his usual “It’s complicated.”

She didn’t get it. “The same way I know about your poem,” he said. “I’ve read it.” He opened up the square like a compact and poked at it intensely.

Dorothy didn’t understand. “They have poems that haven’t been written yet in heaven?”

He looked up from the object in his hand, surprised. “Heaven? Oh. Oh! No. Look, when I told you I was your guardian angel, I didn’t mean it literally.”

He looked back at the clock. Not a lot of time, but he gave her a second anyway. “I’m from the future. About a hundred years. I am going to get in a lot of trouble for telling you this. Might not get see you again. But this rule is worth breaking. You need to make that call, and you need to make it right now.”

“But-” Dorothy tried.

Gabe tapped on the device in his hand, and then, quite unexpectedly, he put his hands on her shoulders. She looked at his hands in disbelief, then poked him with one finger, verifying that he was tangible. “Where I come from, you finished that poem. You finished it, and you called it Mile Marker 24. After the place where your stepsister died in a car accident. Make the call.”

He picked up her phone and put it in her hand. Reflexively, she took it and fumbled, trying to dial. “You can-” she tried

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Not supposed to, but I can. I have to go. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ve got to try. If I…” He didn’t know how to finish.

Dorothy had glanced down at her phone as the call connected. Her eyes flicked back up just in time to catch the edge of a flash as Gabe vanished.

Fiction: On My Way

Another thing I wasn’t planning. SPACOM 3 was just supposed to be a cute cameo in a story that was mostly about Zeke’s struggle with the existential nature of living in a teen drama, and whether it was morally acceptable to date a fictional character. But I had so much fun writing them that I figured what the heck.

Lieutenant French tightened the straps holding Zeke to the partially-reclined chair in the middle of the drop ship, then placed the trigger in his hand. It reminded him of the buzzer from the quiz bowl game show he’d done back in high school. That had only been a couple of years ago, but it felt a lot longer.

“When you push the button, it will trigger a phased energy discharge. It’s based on K’lap’rr stunner technology, so there’s no chance of permanent damage, but it will stimulate the same part of your brain as a near-death experience. If our theory is correct, that should trigger the exotic matter particles.”

“Cool, cool,” Zeke said with a bravado he didn’t feel. “I shoot myself and hopefully it zaps this space ship back to my home with all of us inside. Or maybe it just zaps me personally back home, and I get to enjoy the view from geosynchronous orbit very briefly.”

“Low-Earth Orbit,” French corrected. “Geostationary orbit is much farther out.” She winced as it set in that this was not a helpful response.

“Why do I have to push the button myself?”

“We talked it out with Doctor Abermarle, and…” She wobbled nervously. “We’ve taken every precaution, and the theory is solid. But this is uncharted territory, and there’s no absolutes. Given that, we decided that it ultimately had to be your decision.”

Mon’a leaned uncomfortably close and coldly said, “As we are not enemies, it would be… Awkward for any of us to be the direct agent of your demise.”

“We’re coming with you, to who knows where,” St. George said. “So it’s not like we don’t have skin in the game.”

“Well thanks,” Zeke said. “And despite my sarcastic tone, I actually do mean that. You didn’t have to come with us.”

“Based on the fact that you were able to travel to Sparrow’s Folly twice while you were in your car, but the times you jumped outside of it, you ended up somewhere else, we believe that the exotic matter in your brain is influenced by a surrounding ferromagnetic field,” Lieutenant French said, “We’ve altered the internal magnetic field of the drop ship based on the precession of your unique quantum signature. If the theory is right, that should send you to your own universe. But there are constant terms in the calculation we can only estimate, so it may take us a few tries to calibrate it.”

“But that also means it might be hard for you to go home afterward,” Zeke said. “Why take the risk?”

“It’s your sunny disposition,” Doctor Waller said, standing up from the flight controls.

“No it’s not,” Zeke said.

“No it’s not,” St. George agreed.

“That is not the reason,” Mon’a added, dispassionately.

Waller shrugged. “Okay, it’s her sunny disposition,” he said, pointing a thumb at Roxy.

“What can I say? I’m cute as a button.”

“And you’re taking all this very well,” Waller said. “Most people on this version of Earth take a while getting used to the space ships and the aliens.”

“You get a lot of aliens in Sparrow’s Folly?” St. George asked.

“Once in a while for the Halloween episode, but otherwise, no,” she said.

“You are unperturbed by the prospect that your metaphysical nature derives from a work of fiction relative to your partner.” Those familiar with Mon’a’s speech patterns could tell this was a question.

Roxy shrugged adorably. “I’m nineteen. I think it’s pretty normal for a nineteen-year-old to think she’s the center of the universe. I just happen to have documentary evidence that it’s literally true in my case.” She squeezed Zeke’s hand. “I got your back, jack. Now or never. Ready?”

“I feel like I could stretch this out a little longer,” Zeke said.

“Just lay back and think of home,” she told him.

“Or failing that, somewhere nice. One of those fun beach shows,” St. George said. “Nothing too murdery. Try to avoid kaiju.”

“No zombies,” Mon’a said, neutrally.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.” Zeke sighed, and put his thumb on the button. “I hope this doesn’t hurt,” he said as he pressed it.

Then the entire universe was pulled inside out through a microscopic hole in his brain.

 

Fiction: Domo Arigato 1

Dipping once again into the pile of “Stories I meant to write decades ago,” this is actually an idea I had way back in the ’80s, but it took several decades for the key element of the climax to come to me. Now, the material is maybe a little dark given how young I was at the time, but keep in mind that I had just come off of Captain Power. Also, the original idea was a jukebox musical, but that doesn’t translate well to prose.

Rick set Lauren down on the couch and checked her eyes. They’d already turned gray. Fine silver lines had started to trace paths along her temples. “Who is she?” Daryl asked.

“A friend,” Rick said, “But not for long if we don’t do something.” He found one of the two android weapons on the table where he’d left it earlier, took out the power rod. “This is how they did it. They call it a sillicizer. It changes organic matter into…” He trailed off.

Everyone else just watched in confusion as Rick crossed to the time machine and opened a panel on STEVE’s housing. He placed the silvery rod into a test tube mounted to the inside of the panel and closed it. “STEVE,” he said. “Use your sample analyzer to invert the molecular structure and create a reversal agent,” he ordered.

STEVE looked up at him with no expression from the rounded screen. “An-na-na-na-lyzing,” the computer stammered. “Scan process will ta-ta-ta-take one-one hundred trillion cycles. All cir-cir-circuits busy.”

“She’s getting cold,” Daryl said, checking Lauren’s pulse. “Do we have that kind of time?”

“No chance,” Rick said. “I have to go back. They must have an antidote.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Casey said.

“She saved my life. I have to do something. Besides, we can’t just leave her here. If she changes, she could–” His eyes moved around the room, landing on the bin of parts. “I have an idea. STEVE, prime the time machine.”

“Un-un-un- Error. Circuits are busy. Do you w-w-wish to cancel the current job?”

Rick looked flustered for a moment. “Oh. Okay. Right,” he said. He walked around to behind STEVE, opened a different panel, and started rapidly hammering on a keyboard inside.

“What is it?” Casey asked.

Rick kept typing. STEVE’s image vanished for a second then reappeared. “Circuits r-r-ready. Starting time machine warm-up.”

“The professor was a genius,” Rick said. “STEVE is amazing, even by today’s standards. But he’s still an ’80s computer. Single threaded, single tasking. He can only do one thing at a time. But when I rebuilt him I used a modern CPU to run his program in a virtual machine. So I can add a simple task scheduler to run multiple jobs in parallel. It’s a little bit of a kludge, since STEVE’s program doesn’t have any access to the task scheduler, but it should work for now.”

STEVE’s eyes followed Rick closely as he returned to the parts bin and began quickly plugging pieces together. A coil of wire. A large bar magnet. A wah-wah pedal. “What are you doing?” Casey asked.

“I’m going to threaten them,” Rick said. “I’m going to march right into the robot headquarters and make them give me the antidote.”

“I thought you said they took over the whole world,” Daryl said. “You can’t just take them on.”

“Not a lot of choice,” Rick said. He stepped close to Daryl and looked down at Lauren. “I’ve got something they need. Something they’ve waited a long time to get their robot pincer hands on. Hopefully I can make a deal.”

“T-T-Time machine ready,” STEVE chimed.

Casey shook her head. “Don’t do this. It’s too dangerous.”

Rick kissed her cheek. “I have to do this.” She frowned, but looked over to Lauren on the couch and gave a grudging nod.

She slipped off her ring and placed it in the socket on the time machine. Rick did the same. As the time machine started to light up with purple energy, Casey returned her ring to her finger. Rick instead slid his into a clip on the device he’d built and pressed down the pedal. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “If that’s not enough time…” A quick glance at Lauren confirmed that she was changing rapidly.

Casey struggled to find a response. “Stay safe,” was all she could choke out before a violet ribbon stretched out from the emitter on the time machine to Rick’s ring, whisking him twenty years into the future.

Fiction: SPACOM 3

Colonel St. George rubbed his temples and sighed. “Let’s try this again. Two days ago, you interrupt my lunch to tell me things you shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Then, this morning, you somehow manage to break into one of the best-protected installations on the planet. And you’re telling me that you knew how to do that because of a television show. Have I got that right?”

Zeke laid his head on the table in frustration. He hadn’t expected this to be easy, but plowing on through blind faith wasn’t getting him anywhere. “I get that it sounds dumb,” he said. “But come on. Didn’t this already happen to you guys once?”

St. George shot a glance to Doctor Waller. “Any idea what he’s talking about?” Waller’s shoulders twitched in confusion.

Zeke sat up, processing. “That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Okay. That helps.”

“Now you’re saying you’re from the future?” Waller asked. He’d been playing the “good cop” role so far, but he sounded frustrated. Which was fair, given how long they’d been at this.

“No, definitely not the future,” Zeke said. “I told you. I’m from a parallel universe. Or whatever. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. Well, I mean, I am, I guess. But not that kind of scientist. The normal kind who doesn’t study wormholes and aliens and parallel universes.”

Waller nodded and sighed. “And in your universe,” he said, almost, but not quite completely suppressing a skeptical tone, “We’re a TV show.”

“That’s creative,” St. George said.

“Ted, you have to admit, some of the things we’ve been through make a lot more sense as ratings stunts,” Waller said. “Like the time-”

St. George silenced him with a glare. “Not in front of the suspected alien agent.”

“See, this is what I mean,” Zeke said. “If I knew exactly where we were in your storyline, I could prove at least some of what I’m saying by predicting the future. But you won’t tell me anything. Do you still have the Klepton truth machine? You could plug me into that and it would tell you that I’m telling the truth.”

Waller shook his head with what looked like genuine sympathy. “There are some forms of mind control that give it false readings. Maybe you really do believe what you’re saying, but you’ve been brainwashed. Or, if you’re telling the truth, how can we know it will even work on someone from your universe? From your perspective, this is all fiction, isn’t it?”

“Again with revealing sensitive information to the weirdo,” St. George said, exasperated.

“Maybe at first, I guess,” Zeke said. “But I’ve been living in a teen drama for two years now. I am totally over any sort of prejudice toward the ontological nature of someone’s plane of existence. You should hear who we elected president.”

“Let’s pretend I’m humoring you,” St. George said. “How did you get here?”

“Car crash,” Zeke said. “Two years ago, I was driving up 40 in a bad storm, and I lost control and went into the guardrail, and when I woke up, I was in a hospital in a small town in Rhode Island surrounded by a cast of quirky, attractive, quick-witted characters that I recognized from the hit basic cable teen drama Sparrow’s Folly. I spent two years trying to figure out a way to get home. I tried interfering. I tried not interfering. I tried just driving back to my own house, and I do not want to talk about how that went. Then, six weeks ago, I tried going skiing. And the ski lift broke and I very nearly died, and now I’m here. Well, a few other places first, but here eventually. I’m simplifying. Fortunately, that whole incident where everyone in Columbus lost three hours was still in the papers, or else I’d never have figured out where we were.”

“And this doesn’t seem a little hard to believe to you?” Waller asked.

“Well sure,” Zeke said. “I realize that the most rational explanation is that none of you are real and this is all a coma dream. But that’s not an actionable hypothesis even if true; I can’t just will myself out of a traumatic brain injury, can I?

“So, assuming this is a real world and I am really doing the things I think I am, I wandered around town until I found that diner where you guys hang out, and when you blew me off, I wandered out into the woods and found the ventilation shaft you used when you needed to sneak the Jindro out of the base. And I was expecting you to catch me right away, but I was hoping I’d be able to dazzle you with my inside knowledge.”

“This was a bad plan,” St. George said, wryly.

“That’s fair,” Zeke said, depressed. “But you must know I’m human by now. You get those Precursor bio-scanners in season three. Can that detect that I’m from a parallel universe? I can’t remember if it ever came up.”

“There is something unusual in your scan,” Waller conceded. “But we don’t know what it means. We’d need to compare it to something that we could confirm was from a different universe.”

Zeke had an idea. “Ooh, what about a portal token? SPACOM 5 could send you one of those.”

St. George and Waller exchanged a long look, silently arguing something. St. George conceded. “SPACOM 5 was lost, presumed KIA. I’m not even going to ask how you know about them.”

Zeke lit up. “You don’t know!” he almost shouted. “That’s it. That’s the thing. I can help you. I need a piece of paper. I hope I remember this.”

Another silent conversation, and Waller slid his notepad across the table. Zeke started writing furiously. “SPACOM 5 is alive. Well, mostly. They’ve probably lost a couple people by now. They got out before the supernova. The Precursor device was a portal into luminous space.”

“Luminous space?” Waller asked.

Zeke kept writing. “It’s a parallel universe. But the usual kind, not a TV show universe. They call it that because the vacuum energy is different so empty space glows and the stars are black. And yes, I know that doesn’t make sense. There’s a running gag where any time someone tries to explain it, they get cut off. Here.”

He pushed the notepad back. Waller studied it. “This is the language of the Precursors,” he said. He pointed to the first line. “This is their name for Earth.”

Zeke nodded, excitedly. “And the second one is the dinosaur planet where you found the weather machine. I think that should be enough for you and Lieutenant French to work out the math. They’re not just names. They’re coordinates. The names tell you where the planet is.”

St. George gave Waller an expectant look. He nodded. “That’s possible. We have some fragments of other Precursor planet names. Samia should be able to work out an algorithm to translate.”

“I want to make a deal,” Zeke said.

“A deal for what?” St. George asked. “And what does this have to do with SPACOM 5?”

He pointed at the third line. “That’s the name of a Precursor outpost. That’s where you find the second portal. The one that lets you contact SPACOM 5. I am just giving that to you, no strings attached. Save you a couple of months, maybe save some lives. You scan a portal token, figure out how to tell if someone is from a parallel universe. Hopefully you start trusting me.”

“What about the deal,” Waller asked.

“I want your help. I want to go home. Or back to Sparrow’s Folly. Or ideally, back and forth to either one whenever I want. Occasional vacations to that kid’s show where everything’s made of candy.”

“Why?” Waller said. Simultaneously, St. George said, “I love that show.”

“Because I know another name. The big one. The Precursor home planet. Look, you guys give all the planets serial numbers and that’s great for you, but I can’t remember a single one of them, so I can’t help you with which ones are good and which ones are bad. But I can remember the ones with names. I can skip you all the way to the end of the series without you spending years wandering around hyperspace looking for clues and accidentally waking up Cthulhu or Space Godzilla. At least one of those happens. Depends on how literal you’re being.”

Fiction: Unbent

I was surprised to find I had another piece of this in my head. It’s… Still not great, I think. But I’m trying a new thing where I go ahead and write things instead of agonizing over them in my head for thirty years. So here.

Wind.
One branch bends.
Unbroken.
Another breaks.
Falls.
But remains
Itself.

Dorothy crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Then she took it out again and carefully flattened it. She sighed.

“Knock-knock.”

She looked around, surprised. “Gabe?” she said to the empty room.

He stepped through the closed door. “How did-” she tried. “What did-” she tried again. Every question she wanted to ask felt stupid in light of the material reality of him. Or unreality, as the case may be.

“How did it go?” he asked. “The audition. That was yesterday, right?”

She wasn’t done with trying to interrogate him, but she let him distract her anyway. “Understudy,” she said. “Just as much work but less scary. They cast Anna, though. Rebecca Gibbs. I guess it turns out she always wanted to be an actress? She’s not ant good at it, but she’s popular.”

“Congratulations, I think,” he said. He seemed slightly distracted, looking around her room with a curiosity Dorothy couldn’t quite parse. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Nice view,” he said. “I like the tree.”

“Why did you knock?” she asked.

He looked down at her desk. “I thought it might make you uncomfortable if I just bamfed into existence in your bedroom,” he said.

She blanched at the thought. “So you can just do that, show up here whenever you want? What if I was naked?”

He blushed impressively. “I wouldn’t. We have… There’s procedures. Your privacy and autonomy are completely protected. Mostly. As much as we can. It’s complicated. And mysterious. Sorry. Did you write this?”

He was looking at the poem. Suddenly self-conscious, she reached through him to snatch it off the table, crumpled it again, and threw it in the can. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to check on you. Make sure everything worked out okay. I know I got you in some hot water the other day. That was careless of me.”

She looked away. “Anna still thinks I’m weird, but I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. And then there’s her friends.”

“Oh?” Gabe asked with a tone of surprise that wasn’t entirely convincing.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb. Someone brought a six-pack. And they got caught. It would’ve been pretty bad for me and Anna if we’d been there. You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Nothing’s set in stone, but some things have more wiggle-room than others.”

“How?” she asked. “And why me? What’s it to you?”

“It’s…” he struggled.

“Complicated?”

He sighed and started pacing. “Thing is, most people’s lives just sort of work themselves out. There’s nature and nurture and genetics and free will and externalities and internalities and a million little nudges and mostly it all just balances out and people sort of tumble into the space the world has made for them, and that’s fine. It’s like… Skiing.”

“Skiing?” Dorothy asked, lost.

“When you’re halfway down the mountain, maybe technically you could change your mind and go somewhere other than the bottom, but it would be a lot of work, and you’d probably fail, and besides, the bottom was where you meant to go in the first place.”

This did not help Dorothy make sense of what he was saying.

“But anyway. There’s a flow and most people just go with it. But some people more sort of… Don’t. They’re slippery. It’s like skiing and… Actually that metaphor doesn’t go anywhere. The point is that you’re different. You’re… Slippery.”

“Why?”

Gabe shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s complicated. And this time I mean that it’s so complicated that I don’t understand it either. Some times those million little nudges line up just so, and instead of you falling into the space the world left for you, the world falls into the space you left for it.”

She shook her head. “What is this, some kind of Campbell thing? I’m the chosen one and I have a great destiny to fulfill?”

He raised his hands defensively. “No, nothing like that. Kinda the opposite. You don’t have a destiny. You’re a free agent. That’s why I’m here. When a person could do anything, there’s some incentive to make sure they do the right thing.”

“What does that mean?” Dorothy asked. “What kind of incentive? What’s the right thing, and why does anyone care about me? I’m nobody.”

Gabe took a quick, sharp breath. “You’re not nobody. You could do so much. You could change the world. So…” he looked around uncomfortably. “Do a good job at it, maybe?”

“How?”

He smiled. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a good person. You just need the occasional nudge to make sure you don’t forget that.”

The smart speaker chimed out a dinner bell. “This isn’t the end of this conversation,” Dorothy said.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” Gabe said with a smile. “Have fun. Live your life. Learn your lines. You’ve got this. And if you don’t, I’ve got your back. In a vague and mysterious sort of way.”

He stuck one hand in his pocket and gave her a jaunty wave with the other one, then popped out of existence. Dorothy waved her hand through the space he’d occupied. This was going to take a lot of getting used to. With a deep sigh, she headed downstairs to dinner.

Ten seconds after the door closed behind her, Gabe winked back into existence. With a guilty glance over his shoulder, he stepped to the wastepaper basket, reached down, and very carefully picked up the crumpled poem.

Fiction: The Saints and the Poets

This is a piece of a plot bunny that has been bouncing around my head for about thirty years and I am finally willing to commit a bit of to written form. You’d think it would be less clunky after all those years, but I guess if I could make it flow quite right, I would’ve written it down a lot sooner. It’s mostly inspired by High Concept Sit-Coms, so I tried to keep it shallow and, despite tremendous mental pressure, avoid profanity.

“Will you please trust me on this? Don’t go. It’s a bad idea.”

“Why would I trust you?” Dorothy asked. “I’ve known you for all of ten minutes. She’s family. Technically.”

“Yeah, but which of us seems more inherently trustworthy?” Gabe flashed an exaggerated smile.

“Well what do you have against it? We’re just going out to have some fun. You’re acting like they’re plotting some kind of heist. Do you-” she shook her head. “Do you know something?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Gabe said. “But I would really like it if you trusted me. Trust is important, don’t you think?”

“But this is weird. You know that, right? That what you’re asking is weird? I’m being asked to hang out with, ahem, The Cool Kids, and you, who I don’t know from Adam, is telling me assassinate my social life for mysterious undisclosed reasons and–” Dorothy felt the sudden weight of unwanted attention and looked around. “Why are people looking at me?”

Gabe glanced around, nonplussed. “Oh,” he said. “You didn’t realize. Sorry. I thought you did. They think you’re talking to yourself.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they can’t see me.”

She set her water bottle down. “What are you talking about?”

A guilty expression spread across Gabe’s face. “Okay. This isn’t going well. I can’t actually explain, but I can show you.” He paused and held up his hands in a warding gesture. “You should brace yourself so you don’t overreact.”

He held out his hand in front of him, then slowly moved it toward where she’d set her bottle on the table. He extended one finger toward it as if to push it over. Then, in a slow, smooth motion, passed his finger straight through the bottle.

Whatever bracing Dorothy had done wasn’t sufficient. She let out a little yelp, drawing even more unwanted attention before she could stifle herself. Through clenched teeth, she whispered, “You’re a ghost?”

“I’m not a ghost.”

“Then I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. I can prove that. Maybe. But, um…” he nodded over her shoulder.

Anna. Dorothy hadn’t thought there was still a “worse” things could get. “Oh. Um. Hi?” she tried.

“I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Anna said. “But ‘my step-sister is a schizo,’ isn’t a good look for me.”

With a sour expression, Gabe said, “Ooh. Ableist much?” He stood up and walked over to Anna. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re really hot. But that’s not a good look.”

“I.. Uh…” Dorothy struggled.

“Drama club,” Gabe said.

“Drama club,” Dorothy repeated, surprised.

“Drama club?” Anna parroted.

Gabe walked through Anna and another table of students and pointed at a poster on the wall, too far away for Dorothy to read. “Audition,” he called out. “Thursday.”

Having no other choice, Dorothy decided to run with it. “Drama club,” she said again. “There’s an audition Thursday. I… I thought I’d try out. I was practicing.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed, suspiciously. “You? Drama club? Isn’t that a little ESFP for you?”

“I’m… Broadening my horizons.”

“What’s it for? The audition?”

“Our Town,” Gabe shouted. “Be right back.”

Dorothy glanced over just in time to see him futz with something in his hand, then he simply vanished. Anna looked her up and down, lingering on her pinafore. “Okay, fine, I find that broadly plausible. Show me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Show me what you were practicing.”

“Why?”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Just do it. Let me see how big of a fool you’re going to make out of yourself, so I can decide whether or not to disown you.”

“Um…” Dorothy stammered.

Just then, Gabe reappeared behind Anna, walked through her, and held up a script. “Eyes here,” he said. “Forget everyone else, just look at the script, don’t think about the extent to which your entire social existence is in existential peril.”

It was more than she could process, so she did as she was told. “​I can’t,” she read. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them. “So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look…”

A hush fell around her as she recited Emily’s goodbyes to Grover’s Corners, but Dorothy stayed focused on the paper in front of her and didn’t notice. Even Anna seemed hypnotized by her delivery, though Dorothy couldn’t see it with Gabe between them. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it-every, every minute?” she finished.

“No,” Gabe said, filling in the corresponding part, “The saints and poets maybe. They do, some.”

“I’m ready to go back.”

When Gabe lowered the script page, Dorothy finally noticed that every eye in the cafeteria seemed to be on her. She blushed and reflexively brought her hand up to her face. “What?”

“Wow,” Anna mumbled. She struggled for a second and had to physically shake herself to recompose. With exaggerated nonchalance, she said, “Yeah, that’s passable I guess. I, uh. Tell you what, I’ll go with you. It’ll look good for college, right? Wait. Thursday? Crap. Never mind. I’ll take care of it. I got to go find Jimmy.” She turned and stalked away.

The rest of the room slowly returned to normal business and Dorothy turned back to the lunch table and sat back down, befuddled by what had just happened. “What was that?” she whispered through clenched teeth.

“They liked it. You impressed them. You really don’t appreciate how gifted you are,” Gabe said. “You’ve got a power in your words. Someday, they’ll be your own words, but Thornton Wilder will do for a start.”

Dorothy pieced it together. “Thursday,” she whispered. “You committed me to something Thursday. Anna too. So we can’t-”

“There,” Gabe said, smugly. “See? No social assassination required. I got your back.”

“What are you?”

He cringed. “Really can’t explain. If it helps, just think of me as your guardian angel.”

Fiction: To Tell The Tooth

I didn’t actually intend to post this, but it’s my birthday and I don’t have anything better to post, so here you go.

Sprix picked at the dirt around the base of a tree, found a twig, and gave it an experimental bend. It snapped. She discarded the pieces and poked some more. “I don’t believe you.” Cam said.

Sprix flexed a new twig and grimaced as it folded easily. She cast it to the ground. “I manifested ex nihilo before your eyes,” she said. “So either I am what I say I am or you’re having a psychotic break, and… Oh.” Her expression suddenly changed from frustration to sympathy and she put her hand on Cam’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a rough year. But you’re going to be okay. You’re not going crazy; you can trust your senses. You can trust me.”

Cam shrugged the hand away. “I can trust the weirdo in the theme park costume who says she’s a fairy godmother? Sure.”

Sprix moved on to another tree and started poking through leaves. Cam reached up, snapped the tip from a low-hanging branch, and offered it to her. Sprix slapped it out of her hand. “Don’t do that!” she said. She cast a quick side-eye toward the base of the tree and, through clenched teeth, said, “It has to have fallen of natural causes. Gift. Of. The. Forest. Gift. How’d you like it if I snapped off a bit of you for alchemical purposes?”

Cam took a step back. Sprix had not done anything so far that read as even mildly threatening. In fact, she gave off an aura of safety that defied explanation. It took effort to think about the fact that she was certainly dealing with someone who was… unwell. Who she’d followed out into the woods. Alone. Without witnesses. What was she doing?

“Besides, I wasn’t always. I’m working my way up. Used to be a tooth fairy.” She crouched by another tree and toyed with several more sticks.

“I’m sorry, no,” Cam said. Something was holding her back from reacting as strongly as she intellectually knew she should, but this was still a bridge too far. “There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy.”

Sprix looked up at her with a squinting look of condescension. “Then what happens to the teeth?” she asked. She dropped most of the sticks she was holding and continued turning the others over in her hand.

“No, really. I’m not giving you this one. I have children,” Cam said. “It’s the parents. It’s me. I’ve done it. There’s no magic elf-”

“Fairy,” Sprix interjected with a surprising venom in her tone.

“Fairy,” Cam repeated, hands up. “They go to sleep, we sneak in, we take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. No magic. No,” she cleared her throat, “fairy. It’s us. We take the teeth.”

Sprix seemed pleased with the stick she was holding and stood up. “Then where are they now?” She pinched the twig between her fingertips and gave her wrist an experimental snap. The twig slipped from her fingers and hit Cam in the chest. Sprix cringed.

Cam felt her face fall. “What?”

“The teeth. Where are they now? Two kids, forty teeth. Where are they? You didn’t just chuck them in the trash, I assume?”

“I, uh…” The question didn’t just catch her off guard. Thinking about it caused her active distress. “I…”

Sprix smirked. “I’ll tell you. Just like you said. They go to sleep, you sneak in, you take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. Then you go about your business, get distracted, set the tooth down, probably in a drawer on the nightstand, tell yourself you’ll find a place for it later… And that’s the last you ever think of it, because some, ahem, weirdo in a theme park costume slips in and takes it when you’re not looking.”

“What about the money then?” Cam asked in spite of herself.

Sprix had turned back to the leaves and detritus, looking for a new stick. “The nice thing about money is that it’s fungible. Would you even notice if there was an extra quarter in your purse the next morning? Would you question it if a dollar bill randomly showed up in the lint trap the next time you did a load of laundry?”

Cam tried to process the question, but her brain didn’t want to. “I… Um…”

Sprix tried more sticks with increasing frustration. “It’s okay. I get it. Your mind is blown. That’s all right. I’ll erase your memory when I’m done and you can go back to thinking you’ve got a secret horde of milk teeth you’ve somehow misplaced and that isn’t even slightly weird or creepy.”

That snapped her out of it. “Wait, what?”

“All part of the service.”

“I don’t consent to that,” Cam said.

The words stopped Sprix dead in her tracks. “You will,” she said. When she saw Cam’s expression in response, she backpedaled. “Sorry. That wasn’t meant to be a threat. Well kinda. Actually no, definitely not a threat. Thing is, you can feel it, can’t you? Your brain doesn’t like this. Most humans aren’t wired for exposure to magic. Either you will adapt, or it will get worse, and most people don’t adapt. Eventually you will decide that it would be more comfortable to go back to living in a world that behaves according to rational, scientific laws, and you’ll be okay with me editing myself out of your memory to make that work. Simple.” Then she head-butted the nearest tree in frustration. “Or it would be if I could find some decent wand-wood. Chestnut is great, but the American chestnut tree has been functionally extinct for close to a century.”

Then Cam surprised herself. Her brain didn’t like the magic stuff. That fit. But it could grab on to a simpler, rational, concrete, idea. Like the fact that the American chestnut tree had been functionally extinct for close to a century. “Actually, I can help with that.”

Flash Fiction: The Swim Lesson

A short story that came to me too late for Halloween.

I watch Maria complete another lap of the pool. “Good work,” I said. “You beat your best time by more than a second.”

She treads water and asks, “Really?” I show her the stopwatch. She presses her back to the side of the pool and starts on a set of leg raises. I drop the rest of the way into the water and join her. She starts talking about her boyfriend, and I can’t remember whether or not I’m supposed to know him.

“It sounds like you already know what you want,” I tell her. I have no idea if that’s true yet, but it sounds good. “Just figure out what’s holding you back and whether or not it really matters.”

“Thanks,” Maria says. She cracks her neck and stretches out in the water. “I don’t want to get all sappy. But, like, I really feel like I can open up with you. Be myself.”

That’s a nice thought. “Me too,” I say, and I stretch out too and relax.

“Listen. It’s not me. This isn’t me,” Rebecca says. “You’ve got to get out of here. Run!”

Rats. Relaxed too much there. I turn myself upright.

“Rebecca?” Maria asks, startled. “What was-”

I wave her off. “Sorry. My mind wandered a little.” I take her hands in my hands, and touch her shoulder to comfort her.

It takes her a good ten seconds to figure it out, which is good because I was going to break into a smirk if it took her a second or two more. I’m awful, I know. I like Maria, I shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. Very slowly, she looks at her hands in my hands, then turns her head to where I’m touching her shoulder.

I give her a friendly wave with the tentacle.

She struggles, of course she does, but I’ve got her arms and legs before she knows what’s happened. She goes under, and in her panic she sucks in a lungful of water.

Crud. I try to help her, but she’s thrashing around too much in a full-on freak out. Finally, I manage to get a little tentacle into her ear and tap out, “Hey, slow down or you’re gonna drown. Let me help.”

That does not actually put her at ease, and I can’t blame her, but she’s surprised enough that she freezes for a second so I can get a couple of tentacles up her nose. I suck pool water out of her lungs and blow air in, which is less unpleasant than it sounds, but still pretty gross.

“There. You okay? Stop struggling and I’ll lift you out of the water and we can talk about this. I know this is weird and all, but-”

She does not stop struggling. In fact, she kicks me. Really hard. “Come on,” I tap into her eardrum. “There’s no way you can overpower me, and I’m going to eventually break you if you keep trying.”

She kicks me again. Fine. Okay. We’ll do it the hard way then. I pull one of the tentacles up out of her lung and punch it through her ethmoid bone. Poke around a little and… Ah. Yes. There.

Okay. Do you understand me now?

Fiction: By the Numbers

It was Thursday, which meant that instead of going to the main office as usual, Joshua headed to the old office, on the sixth floor of a 1920s Romanesque revival-style office building in the old part of town with dodgy heat, a dodgy elevator, and the finest electrical infrastructure the 1920s could provide. He did not like these working conditions and he did not understand them, but he had accepted that neither relocation nor an explanation were forthcoming, so he chose to live with it because the work brought its own fulfillment.

He nodded to the administrative assistant whose name he did not know. He had been discouraged from interacting with the staff at this office more than was necessary, another element of his working environment he neither liked nor understood. His life seemed sometimes to be full of these compromises, accepting conditions he didn’t like or didn’t understand because of the compensation.

Four days of the week, his compensation for doing boring mathematical analyses was largely financial. The job paid well and the environment was pleasant. Thursdays, he came to the old office and suffered the stairs and the cold and the isolation because of the puzzle. He stepped into the small office with “Research” written on the door and drew the shade. He hung his jacket over the back of the chair, unlocked the filing cabinet and put his phone inside the top drawer. Then he closed the cabinet and twisted the dial to a different combination. With a muted clunk, the cabinet swung away from the wall. He ducked through the hole behind it, and pulled a strap on the rear of the cabinet to swing it back into position.

The adjoining office was similar to the one he’d entered in floor plan, but very different in its details. The paint was gray, chipping, and undoubtedly full of lead oxide. The sparse furnishings and decoration were distinctly mid-century. Steel tanker desk, low-backed chair that didn’t adjust in any useful direction. Where the door should’ve been was an unplastered stretch of brick. The computer on the desk was antiquated as well, though not nearly so much as the rest of the room. He twisted the old-fashioned rotary light switch and the old-fashioned ceiling lamp lit up. He turned on the computer and waited an impossibly long time for its startup sequence. The old computer lacked any sort of modern amenity, but was adequate to his work, connecting to some private network to outsource any significant computation, and it had access to the internet, provided by way of something called a transient virtual client which was adequate for anything other than video and showed him advertisements for shops and services in Kyrgyzstan.

As usual, there was a fresh stack of papers in the top desk drawer. Photographs of crowded public areas, accompanied by pages of metrics. He never received context for the photographs or explanations of the metrics. When one of the senior partners had offered him this assignment, the cryptic nature of the work had been part of the hook. He was to study the data and mark certain correlations and patterns. He would not be told why he was doing this or what he was looking for, as the results had to be kept utterly isolated from outside assumptions, and if he knew what he were looking for, it would taint the mathematical purity of the process. If he were somehow able to work out the meaning of the analysis for himself, it would disqualify him from performing it, but, he had been assured, it would open certain other prospects for him, currently undisclosed.

He had never actively attempted to root out the larger purpose of this work. It was clear to him from the beginning that if he were to find enlightenment, it was expected it would come from the work itself. So he had simply applied himself to it diligently. He very quickly started noticing patterns in the numbers. At first, he received terse but frequent feedback. It was rare for any of his finds to be marked incorrect, but quite often, several of them would be returned marked as false positives. Over time, he came to understand contextual clues which determined, say, whether a particular Beatty sequence or Hahn series was a near-miss or or genuine interest. He rarely received any feedback these days.

On very rare occasions, he would find a sequence of numbers or an indistinct shape in an image that seemed incorrect or incomplete. He could request more information, and the following Thursday’s packet would contain a revised document. He sometimes suspected these errors were deliberately inserted to test him. Last week, he had marked two such documents. They were at the top of this week’s pile.

“REQUEST DENIED. DO NOT PURSUE,” had been stamped over the marks he had made. This wasn’t something he had seen before, and he was a bit worried that he was in trouble. It had been an unusual decision. One photograph had been of a crowded metro station. The other, an art gallery. In both pictures, he had noticed the same striking woman, wearing a business suit and a broad-brimmed blue hat, looking directly at the camera. He wouldn’t have marked it down at all, but when he broke for lunch that day, he’d seen her again. In person. At the cafe in the four-story nineteenth-century Italianate across the street. He was so surprised that he’d had to force himself not to stare. Joshua had stopped at a convenience store on his way back and bought a cheap magnifying glass to confirm the pictures. It was indeed the same woman. On closer inspection, he recognized a man in one photograph beside her— he had been in the cafe as well. The companion was likely in the second photograph too; Joshua saw a man of similar build, but his face was obscured.

So he had inquired about the woman, and been denied. That was unfortunate, because it meant that the coincidence was going to linger on his mind. He flipped through the rest of the day’s papers quickly.

There she was again. This did not seem like a coincidence. He looked for the man, and eventually found him. He had to consider this carefully. He was told not to pursue the woman, but he hadn’t asked about the man. He set the photo aside.

Joshua moved the keyboard to the side, set his briefcase on the desk, and opened it. Em was another one of the compromises in his life, though what relationship wasn’t? He accepted conditions he wouldn’t have chosen for himself because of the compensations. The compromise today was an article she’d asked him to review. The abstract sounded like junk science, but he could give it ten minutes to let his mind clear.

Without any sort of engineering background, the bulk of the article was mostly meaningless to Joshua, something to do with impurities in photovoltaics and something called “micromorphous silicon”. It was frustratingly coy, aiming for a level of scientific respectability that precluded coming right out and saying what it wanted to imply. The mathematics, at least, he could understand. By this point, he was expecting some straightforward p-hacking or circular analysis, but… the calculations actually seemed pretty solid. Okay then. Obligation fulfilled. That was all he was expected to do, after all. He still thought the article was junk, but exactly what kind of junk was beyond his expertise. All he could give his expert opinion on was the numerical analysis, and—

Something looked familiar. He’d printed the article because it was more convenient than reading from the ancient CRT monitor, but he hadn’t wanted to waste a ream of paper on the raw data that was also attached. But there was something in the short table of sample data on the last page. He moved his briefcase to the floor and replaced the keyboard, then waited an interminable minute to be connected to the transient virtual client, then waited more as he pulled up the email. He nervously made a quiet ticking noise with his tongue as he painstakingly copied cells from the data file into the statistics program. The same distribution. These weren’t patterns he’d seen before but…

It was like there was a pattern of patterns. A metapattern. The patterns were different, but places where they occurred was the same. The same underlying logic, the deep pattern, that underwrote the pages of data in his special research project was here, purporting itself as the output of some kind of solar panel that could sense the “aura” of living beings.

Things clicked into place. The characteristic markers that distinguished real matches from false positives. They were delimiters that partitioned the data by— he took a page from his work queue. Now that he knew what to look for, it took only a few seconds to mark the page up. He compared it to the picture. Yes. The number of partitions was the same as the number of people in the photograph. He tried a few more, and the pattern held.

And then it didn’t. The fifth page of numbers partitioned into twelve blocks where only eleven people were visible in the corresponding picture. He inspected each block of numbers in turn. There. The fourth block matched one of the patterns he’d spent a year looking for. It frustrated him that he didn’t have old results to compare with. He went through the rest of the pile as quickly as he could. Every time there were more blocks than people, one of the blocks would show a characteristic sequence. But he couldn’t un-see it; without comparing his old work, he didn’t know whether he’d have found the same things. He couldn’t be sure he’d have found all of these sequences before. This new technique was faster, but what if it was giving him some new kind of false positive?

He didn’t have a full sense of what it meant, but the implications were coming together in his mind. The number sequences were some form of metric in the form of variable-length records, most of which corresponded to people in the pictures. The anomalous sequences corresponded to something not visible in the picture. Something hidden, perhaps? He could just about imagine this as some kind of security technology designed to find, what? Criminals? Terrorists? Fare-jumpers?

Joshua looked out the window. He was getting hungry. Maybe he should break for—

He couldn’t be certain it was her, of course, not from this angle. But given the choice of coincidences, it beggared his imagination less to assume it was her than to contemplate the possibility of encountering some other woman in the same broad blue hat. Twice in consecutive weeks.

He had three pages. Two from last week, and one new one. Joshua hadn’t even thought of her when he had been marking off the blocks that represented individual people. No two blocks were the same. No two blocks had ever been the same, for that matter. But there was a similarity. He could see it now. Or at least, he thought he could see it now. He would need to find a way to avoid confirmation bias.

He re-checked everything. Did some numerical analysis. He still couldn’t characterize it, and that was infuriating. But it felt right. A set of three blocks, one from each page, that, while otherwise unremarkable, were somehow related to each other and to none of the other blocks in any of the pages. And then he found a second set of three. The man and the woman. It had to be. One set of blocks was him, and the other was her. If he was right, it confirmed that the figure with the obscured face in the second picture was indeed the same man.

And then he found a third set of blocks.

Fiction: Orbital Dynamics

Is this a continuation of The Last Will and Testament of Ebeneezer Scrooge? Don’t know yet. Maybe.

A star shines in every direction. No matter how much of its light a planet can absorb, a single planet could never absorb the whole output of its star. This isn’t a fault in the planet or in the star; it’s just a matter of geometry. One planet can’t catch all the sunlight, and one star can’t light up both sides of a planet at the same time. But that doesn’t mean you can just put your planets wherever you like. It’s a balancing act of masses and velocities and distances, and not every orbit is stable for every planet.

Keith’s orbit was very eccentric. Not an easy orbit to accommodate. Other orbital bodies had to shift to avoid collision. He’d been explaining something to her for about ten minutes, and Em only understood about two-thirds of it, but his passion kept her invested. She forced herself to look at the clock. She often lost track of time with him, and there were other orbits to consider. A gentle external force to keep everything in line. “If you’re not sure about the analysis, I know someone you could show your results to.”

A hint of a catch in his breath. “You mean Joshua, don’t you?” The disapproval in his tone was controlled; if she hadn’t know to expect it, she wouldn’t have noticed.

“Someday, you’re going to tell me why you don’t like him,” she said.

His smile came back a little and he raised his hand. “Purely a matter of personal taste,” he said. “I don’t have to like all the same people you do.”

“You don’t,” she agreed. “But it makes things easier.”

“There’s a certain baseline level of difficulty we can’t really avoid,” he said.

“Which is why I’d prefer not to invite more.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I feel the way I feel. If I had any issues that were objective, I’d object.” The juxtaposition of “objective” and “object” forced a hint of a smirk to the corner of his mouth.

Em sighed and leaned into him. An objection would play merry hell with her orbital dynamics. She didn’t want to think about it, so she took out her phone and pulled up the weather report instead. She felt him shoulder-surfing. “Going somewhere?” he asked.

“A bunch of us are doing STEM night at the elementary school. I’m trying to decide if it’s worth bringing the Apo. It’ll impress the kiddies, but it’s not really worth the effort if it’s going to be cloudy.”

“You should take the one you made in middle school,” he said.

She wrinkled her nose. “What? The Newtonian I made out of a shaving mirror and a dentist’s mirror and a mailing tube?”

He nodded. “Think how cool that would be for a little kid: here’s an actual astronomical instrument you can make with stuff you found around the house.”

“I don’t know about ‘actual astronomical instrument’.”

“Still.”

“I’ll think about it. Got to call mom and see if she knows where it is.” She checked the time. “I need to go soon. The cat will mutiny if he doesn’t get fed by eight.”

He harrumphed mildly. “Gax can’t feed him?”

“He’s on the road until Friday.” Em stood lazily, not at all eager, and found her sweater.

As she pulled it down over her head, Keith said, “I’ll email you the draft paper and the raw data.” He huffed slightly. “You can forward it to Joshua if you want.”

“If I want?” It took her a moment to find her shoes.

He rolled his eyes. “Are we doing this? Fine. I would appreciate his input.”

And that is why, one week later, he received an email from an address he only vaguely recognized, flagged “Important”, and written in all-caps. “IF YOU CAN REPRODUCE THIS WE NEED TO TALK IMMEDIATELY.”