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OK- This is poorly/not formatted. I'm just C&P'ing this. I'm unclear where I'm going with it, and need to determine a bunch of things fromthe get-go: 1. Is the pacing of this story even coherent? If not, is it partly so, i.e., it establishes a good pace then loses it at crucial points? Or is it just rambling? 2. Does the imagery grab the reader at all? Do I need less description, and more actual things happening? Or do I need more imagery, and how so? Do I need to describe the people better? Do I need to describe/evoke the environment better? 3. Sort of corollary to above; I don't think anything really feels like it's HAPPENING. Or at least in my head, I see others feeling that way. Is this even good enough for a set-up to a longer story? 4. Is my main (non-)character even workable? I intend to have him bloom (a bit) out of being the autistic freak that he is now. Is it too late? is his lack of substance or concrete motivation a story-killer? 5. Anything else that should be different/better about this work? Some bits are deliberately vague (obviously), but am I being too vague with things that need to be nailed down? I don't know where to go with this narrative, other than to keep on doing what I'm doing. I have a horrible feeling that this is a WRONG MOVE based on SO MANY WRONG IDEAS. As if nobody can tell, I'm trying to mix Jeff Noon with Lord Dunsany with Apocalypse World with... I need to determine whether (again) my sad little ambitions have once again outstripped all talent I have. And so- At first, it's a child, but an older child, a peer. It comes towards him, and Den forgets that he's a grownup. He's rooted to the spot, an adolescent again, as the thing with a twelve-year-old's shape sidles towards him. It's Nam. It's Nam Jun, huskier and striding more confidently now. “Hey, buuuuu-dee,” it says, just like Nam Jun used to, before he'd say something so mean, so stupidly untrue, but everyone would laugh and nod like it was true, like they'd known it all along. Then he'd catch you, and twist or pinch or knock you over. Nam Jun practiced a tight, focused craft. This thing isn't him, but Den's not able to figure out why, not yet. Nam Jun is doing that half-grin, the one you try to placate, despite all evidence to the contrary; Nam Jun doesn't get placated. Now it's close, and it's Nam Jun. Then it isn't and is. Then it isn't again, and the jagged after-images of it are still moving. It's worse than the boy it pretends to be. Face and figure appear like a photo, real at first, and then realist, then just realistic, then- Den remembers that it's a monster, and that he's not a kid, and that he has to MOVE- The closer it gets, the less Nam Jun is really Nam Jun. It stutters and twitches out of true. At a reasonable distance, Nam Jun was a bright figure, golden mid-tone face and cool-guy styled hair, bright summer surf shorts and t-shirt in aquas and primary reds and neon yellows. But soon, it's like a photo blown up too large, remade in enamel paint, pasted across heavy, corrugated fabric. The fabric shudders, and sections into pieces, shifting and distorting the perfection of the image- “-Hey, buuuuu-dee,” Nam Jun says again, the voice displaced, the expression veering and wrong- The thing is moving too fast for its own illusion. The sections of its image can't catch and hold one another. In between the pieces of Nam Jun, awful un-radiance, blackness darker than anything, photonegative non-light knifes out in bars and blades and needles of obliterating dark. Split-second optic catastrophe. That's the real thing, not Nam Jun, but something that isn't even rightly a thing, an absence with a motive and tactics and camouflage. It's moving so fast it leaves, “Heeeee-y-y-y- bu-u-u-u-u-udd-d-d-eeeeeeeee-,” distorted around and behind it now. Coming at him now, Nam Jun doesn't wait for its own sound to catch up with it. Any reasonable physics are left somewhere else. Not here. This is a dream. Den is going to die in here. Den gets slammed so hard and fast he feels the impact of the twin strikes to his chest only after he collides with the wall. The roar Nam Jun's emitting isn't here yet, just a precursor drone, an ululation at the edge of things. -the ululation combines with the hum, the whine, the tone that assaults Den in waking world, that bites at the back of his mind in real life- That noise can't be happening, this is the only place it doesn't happen, but nam Jun brought it in, Nam Jun is part of the tone, the buzz, the rasp, the whine, the- His mouth tastes like pennies and his face is *numb-throb-numb-throb*. His jaw must have clashed shut THAT hard- and Whuc-c-c-k! Den gets struck again, this time across the head- -what he sees veers into a trail, a smear of color, and seashell roar eclipses the sound that was just catching up to Nam Jun's rush. Den's whole head feels runny and displaced; now Den's seeing everything sideways and wobbly, his face and skull feeling like there are sparks and electric shocks going off beneath- -and a great sagging weakness comes over him, an all-body “I give up,” a last signal to his brain that the pain is so great, severe injury so likely, it's time to just fall away and die. Nam Jun is grinning that same gotcha grin he always had, yet his mouth is spacing apart somehow, that roar pouring out. This isn't Nam Jun, and Den isn't really fighting him. This won't be a fight. The thing is killing him, and Den feels it like a slow beating, because Den's brain's recalibrating the unthinkable into some order, even as the unthinkable shuts down all good order, even as the thing deletes Den's sad little brain. It wants to kill Den because it wants to kill Den. One of Den's old stories from when everyone bought books all the time... had this thing's type in it. They were called “Echthroi.” They don't have a name. They're not a story, though. This is a thing that looks like an old peer from childhood, a swaggering bully who despised him, who felt clear loathing at his proximity, and expressed delight in kicking his rear end. This thing is wearing a threatening face, but it's a demon, it doesn't have a face, it came in from the sky, it rode in on the tone, the whine, the throb from elsewhere that keeps dreams from really happening. Finally, the sound stabilizes, and Nam Jun's sub-bass howl bells out from an ever-extending mouth. His carious teeth stretch apart as gums and jaw vibrate wider. Nam Jun's face is a maw like a lightless tunnel ringed with festering pegs. The blackness of the throat is solid, a sweep of deep space. Nam Jun is going to beat Den to death, then feed his tattered remains to the thing that makes the tone, makes the whine, the formless but always present vortex in the grayness, lurking above them all... Den wakes up. To his credit, he doesn't shriek. Then again, he wasn't that deeply asleep, either. This was more like an intrusive daydream than a real deep sleep. Sleep's pretty rare. Dreaming is almost non-existent. If it had been a real dream...Den wonders if he would have been really hurt. He was when it happened the first time. “If a dream can kill you, can the memory of dream hurt you?” Den had asked Damon this, and, as always, Damon had switched roles, going from the Above-It-All Cynical Veteran pose he adopted for walking the South Side, to the Cynical-But-Engaged Wise Mentor. His response, delivered with the usual sideways smile: “Why wouldn't it kill your stupid self, dummy? What's the difference? 'Memory of a dream...' 'gently caress's that even mean? Aren't they the same?” The el ride is easier going out from Downtown than he remembers it being. He looks around as he checks his face, wipes beads of sweat. Smoother, less start-stop around the tracks, discarded tracks, and train-viscera from 61st to 69th. It use to be a stuttering, impossible-to-doze-through ramble. A train of children's wagons pulled over loose gravel. Seasickness on a train. He'd grit his way through it. This time, Den almost was actually sort-of asleep(!), hypnotized by the ride from Garfield on through 79th. People who take the train still, they pass and congregate. Sit, stand, lurch, amble, shuffle, march. Some are young, some are older, or so old they seem ageless. That certain youngish middle age, the twenty-nine through thirty-five, doesn't seem to be here, on this train. The gap of years is a ...function of the hour? ...the day? He doesn't remember if it's a regular work day. Does anyone? Nobody seems to be dressed for work, except for a few older men, all of whom are wearing the mountain-man/jumpsuit combination that one might see on a day laborer, an itinerant grouter and dry-waller. Their clothes are bleached and darkened in alternating streaks and patches. One is wearing overalls, covered in a pointillist spew of various primers and cement mixes. All five look easygoing, as if their shifts are long over. None are hanging out with one another; there's no purpose to their arrangement in the car. None of them are carrying bags or knapsacks. All lean forward or back, relaxed. Usually, in the past, he'd have seen the uneasy sleep of the just-risen worker, trying to catch that last few moments of unconsciousness. But that's not today. The man closest to him, an incongruous bleach steak down the entire left of his sandy brown jumpsuit, crosses his cement-caked boots. His gray head raises, chin jutting outwards in a hey, I see you there gesture. Wrinkling his knobby, creased nose, the man blows his lips, and almost breathes out, “Maaaaaaaaaan, yeah. Somethin'. Somebody, down the road, make a thing that'll end up right. It just has to be.” Then his head swivels around nervously, yellowed eyes widen. Did he say that out loud? There's a particular thing that happens with a certain bunch of users. He's heard one describe the fall as a fall inwards. Den understood that part; some details didn't connect, but that he got. She said she falls backwards off of the edge of her eye-sockets, through her empty(?) skull, downwards through a figurative throat, into a universe of body with a ribcage sky,... Some feel a strong wind from their descent, like they were falling through the sky at terminal velocity, pinwheeling backwards like a floating leaf. One said he was sinking through a miasma of own blood and body-fluids. Others say it might be frothing, sharp, acrid bile or or disgusting poo poo-soup. Mostly watery and bloody, though. That's what gets recalled. And instead of feeling buffeted by falling through an “underground sky,” they feel as if they are being rapidly sucked down; the riptide of an invisible ocean or underground river. Den had been told by more than one, that ones they'd talked to, those dreamers shot into space, at the apex of some unstoppable force. They don't feel falling. They're hurled out and away into a grand empty...what?.. . That last, he truly didn't get. Even emptiness, to him, felt constricted, vortexed, pinched. The only emptiness that sounded close to what they were talking about...that was where the demons came from. Nam Jun and...like that. Like Den, everyone says they feel the...well, he calls it “the squeeze.” Everyone's got a different way of saying it. But they all get it; that astonishing powerlessness; immobilized by the velocity of out, up, down, and over, the tidal pressure, the shock and...cold?...of space? Inside one's self? Who knows? The ride is is a timeless passage, prefaced by the interminable wait. Since everything started to collapse everywhere, mass transit from the relative structure of Downtown is more a matter of hoping than waiting. Schedules from twenty years prior are posted. They used to mean something. The worst thing about the wait, of course, is not really having anyone to natter on with. No diversion means no insulation from that weird whine from above that isn't really above, more like behind you, except not really there, either... It's a compelling irritation at best, a maddening brain-melter at worst. This is made uglier by the fact that if you talk about it, it gets worse. So the rule is: come with friends to the stop. If you don't have any, make some while you're there. If you can't, suffer. Den suffers. He's stupid and can't make friends. In this day and age, the noise is also a humiliating reminder of how awkward he has always been, and how little he knew it. He's got no social skill, and has to listen and wait. As a diversion, he counts; cracks in the planks of the stop, wormholes, chips in the paint of the rails. Minimal comfort. Later, while he's on the train, he watches the peoples of South Side mix and flow. This, then, is noise and clamor and interest enough to shut out that mad theremin-skirl. But, there's the whole social angle again. So he has to be careful. It's hard for him to look someone full in the face, and not have it be a problem. He hates worrying people. Worry turns to irritation, fast. On the train, especially these days, a stranger's ambiguous glance is always bad and never good. So the first thing he watches is the clothing, not so much the face. Drab winter-and rain-wear mixes with the fluorescent, with flat black stitched with gold border. Denim fabric is appliqued with a crazy collage of flags and insignia. Some are of countries he doesn't know; the wearers might not either. Korean(ish) and Cyrillic(ish) phrases and banners abound in every shade. A roaring tangle of words and lettering. Group logos, corporate, military, indeterminate: F/UKYU KREW, Anzati, Gucci, Baby Pink, AkaDemiKs, Pelle Pelle, NatSec North-Midwest, Cook County Museum of Incarceration Methodology. Others are not so clear, possibly of local make. Cristo G was my my best homie and a good brother. We are all just living in his Empire! RIP Fam. We love and miss YOU and Circle Girls Crazy and In Memory of my love, Attila You were my Only One and Soldierz At War. Cherry red with lime green, with used-to-be-white, and always black, black, black; matte and shiny, stark and smooth or fuzzy and moth-eaten. Faces. Some faces are grim and fixed by purpose. Some are guarded, hooded and cap-brim-hidden. Some are slack, neutral and absent. Some are mixed in the joy and turmoil of a long-running narrative: Stacie said WHAT? Girl please that bitch rear end nigga ain't nothing but a nigga rear end bitch...Danny, I swear to GOD there is the best-looking model available NOW but we have to go today! So she's gonna talk to her but I don't know when, just wait to hear and stop calling her... Faces. Seamed and scraped raw by the outside world; by the age we live in; by hate or not enough love; by too many petty cares held onto for too long. Smooth and full and filled with joy. Smooth, but drug-binge bloated, and pulsing with the light of youth and happy stupidity. Faces obscured by hair. Some hair is natural and kinked, some is straight. Some is hidden; an emergency-orange ski-cap, a babushka's floppy sun-hat. Faces look up from under cap-brims and expensive weaves. One lovely face is mocha gorgeous, bracketed by electric blue lips and an electric-blue pageboy wig. She (he?) purses lips in a silent conversation with two others. Lips pursed in a come-on, pursed in perplexed question, pursed in amusement. A smile, unguarded and brilliant, for a split-second, then the whole mouth shuts down to a hard flat line. Secured. Eyes are everywhere, speaking though only some riders are actually talking. Eyes are wide, and then they narrow appreciatively. They take in, and inform-categorize-dismiss. Shades of brown; mahogany kissed by orange sunset; part-green hazel; a couple striking blues and one young girl with squinting, surly heterochromic blue-brown. Then, shockingly more than once, merry, beautiful almost-black. Amongst the crowds and stragglers, eyes shine with that all-color. One woman's plain broad face is transfigured to pure beauty by her noble, mesmeric dark eyes appraising the passing scree. Den has to catch his breath to keep from speaking aloud. She never notices his amazement, though a shriveled prune of an oldster does, and breaks into quick chirping giggles. One set of eyes are that almost-black, and they are not beautiful. They are instruments, swiveling in the skull of a young man dressed plainly. The clinical monomania of the gaze kills any prettiness the shade of his eyes would have. Teenage voracity mixed with surgeon's detachment: the youth's eyes scream out "Not a person." Sociopath torchlight flickers in that stare. Everyone in the car avoids that boy. Everyone knows. Sometimes the apocalypse happens inside, in a person. Sometimes, before they're born, it's over. Everyone avoids the boy. They know; you see it more and more these days. It's important, now that everything's degraded even further, to cultivate “interiority.” “Interiority” is the trendy catchphrase used by the remainder of the world who receive news from anywhere outside of purely local sources. It refers to an elevated sense of finding diversion and some sort of faux-catharsis through non-external play. Interiority is cultivated, say the remaining pop-culture mouthpieces. It's necessary; a strong mind cultivates it. In these dark days, it's important to have a sense of inner wonder, to balance out the problems of the everyday. By “problems of the everyday,” one can easily substitute all conditions ranging from “slight depression and lassitude” to “slowly going psychotic due to insomnia and electrolyte imbalance,” or “starving to death.” For “sense of inner wonder,” one can also easily substitute, “alternative to suicide.” Interiority can be cultivated, but it's difficult to start. Due to the now ever-present whine from above, it's impossible for many to effectively cultivate through the usual means (books, audiovisual sources, masturbation) and those first steps towards nuanced interiority have to be evoked, prompted. Some blast themselves (as they always have) with drugs. Some use mantra and mortification ritual and old-school yogic tricks to desensitize, so they can “re-sensitize” in interiority. Usually, this last (mantra, yoga, meditation, mortification) is also helped along with drugs. Then, there's the electrochemical/audiovisual/neuron-conductive route that, so far, has beaten them all. The brand is called IdioNoia. The product and its knockoffs, often attributed to that self-same company (also called IdioNoia): it is known as “SingleMind.” It does what MMO's and and first-person-shooters used to do for Asperger's kids back before everything fell apart. Back before anyone in the autism spectrum would be violent and psychotic by puberty. Back before the “Internet” stopped working for anything except newsgroups and email, because graphical user interfaces were turning the whine into a visible thing, a threnody viewed in colors and shifting shapes. Using the SingleMind devices gives some people a world, a cosmos to distract oneself with. It works, but with varying degrees of effectiveness. Just like video games, it's appeal is not universal. But it helps. It distracts. It gives, in a sense, a boost to one's sense of interiority. For some few, it does another thing. Den is one of those. He's a real user. He gets a use from that dream-state. It's not just a toy to maintain sanity. He might get...away. He can leave. Like everyone else, he found out accidentally. He'd rather keep the situation under wraps. Someday, he wants to leave for sure, and he'd rather not be bogged down by unwelcome hangers-on. Interiority, ultimately, means aloneness. Falling into oneself. If he is to escape, it will be by hurling himself down through his own ribcage; the only way away, is in. Nobody else need be invited. Outside of the train, groups dwindle. Pairs and single figures again. Everyone going somewhere with a purpose, or stock still, defiant against any purpose. South Side. South Side was hit worst, hardest, and longest by the disasters. South Side was hit long before Downtown knew it was at the end of things. South Side keeps getting hit, wave after wave of “misfortune,” as if fortune or chance has anything to do with it. Waves of want and scarcity, waves and flows of power outage, food shortage, riot, impromptu take-over, abandonment, depopulation, mass imprisonment, sudden purposeless early release. Release to a life where “freedom” is the freedom to be hospitalized for malnutrition, the freedom to get cancer from accidentally ingesting the gasoline in the tap water. The end of the world keeps threatening, but the constant is just a slow release of misery-juice, mediocrity-juice, disappointment-juice, into the ongoing torrent of ugliness. The landscape is the same. It is always falling apart, slowly atomizing into grit and caked, oily silt. This has not been changed substantively by any particular disaster. Paint, fresh-looking and colored bright primes; or, paint, cracked, old, colors from other decades, from the last century's trends, Landlady Pink and Bug Butt green. All of it the same, fuzzed with an ashy halo whenever the sun flickers alight. All of it the same, grimed with the same silt, dust, grit, carbon-asphalt-particulate oils. Swabbed, muted, and eventually blasted gray. Pavement, new, squared-off with clean wire brush lines raked through. Pavement, scored, years old and filled with divots, with wear both deliberate and storm-inflicted. Pavement, ages indeterminate and ancient, colorless and riddled with more lightning-jag cracks than actual concrete. So fractured it's become a big stepped-on series of squarish cakes; concrete crumbs pressured back into rough shape. Landmarks; old or new, beaten into place by pollution, weather, being bumped up against by the dirt and grime of countless passing people and things. New buildings, renovations or civic grant endeavors, cultural centers or opportunistic mini-maxi-mart chains, standing out briefly like weird plastic and aluminum barnacles, accreting the universal shelves and drifts of dirt and scrape and wear; first around their edges, then their perimeter, then their whole surface, then throughout. Old buildings; like a collection of stacked roughshod bunkers, made up of equal parts poorly-painted plywood and pine and drywall and corrugate aluminum and still mesh shutters and and sandy, riddled concrete and more pine. Cracked, caked, clawed open, cadaverous. Mixed in amongst them, the occasional begrimed jewel with a weathered pedimented doorway made of pocked marble; scooped, flowered, scalloped and frieze-edged. A relic of a fake Golden Age in a perpetuity of reduction and corrosion. Scored and drubbed down to a shadow by the pall. Signs; state and municipal. More apparent than real, purpose known intrinsically, unspoken and unlooked-for. Shape and figurative place conveys; phrase and letters are incidental. Tourists don't come here. The signs wouldn't help anyone really lost. 87th and all parallels, to 112th, are one and the same street. They don't converge but they're all the same universe. Signs; local and sociopolitical. Gangs, crews, corners and cliques. Warning away; inviting attack. Homicide adverts or potential neighborhood suicide notes. Beacons of faith, beacons of safety, beacons of community. Rare but treasured. A long-suffering Temple of Universal Triumph of the Church of God Heaven Paradise Perfection in Christ Redemption Atonement Prayer. A longer-suffering family-held fish-fry, family-held haircut shop, family-held Suits and Shoes for All Occasions store, family-held repair shop, family-held laundry place. Flat-blasted nowheres. Former row housing, former garden park, former parking lot, former brownstone. Current reminders of what it will all look like once the long-promised End of Everything shows up. Sprays and plumes of weed grass. Patches of trampled ersatz-pavement. More gang tags. More passing Krylon signatures and manifestos. Old cement chunks of former wall, showing libraries of spray-ups from four generations ago. The alleyways are paths off of paths. They are roads and streets as sure as all the others. They are filled with their own categories of traffic, enticement, congregation, danger, and community. A stranger, late one sleeting night at the shotgun-shack Metra stop out at 95th, told him: The alleys were always here, waiting for the rest of the ghetto to get filled in around them. They were invisible and perfect then, now they are ever-present but subliminal.You don't notice...they're a city between the city. Den mostly avoided that stop. Even more isolate than the el stop, with a schedule even less sure. Most “conversations” he'd had there at night were far more perfunctory. Not edifying at all. Sometimes terrifying in their implicative threat. He adopts the slow amble that gets the least attention. Purposeful, but not his usual marching, obsessive pace. Heading from west to east. Roughly west to east. Sometimes the square, ordinal north-south-east-west grid of the streets is questionable. As he walks, he glances up and tries not to stare. A group of older gentlemen talk at a wall displaying something-MARKET; the first part of the advertisement is battered away, and replaced with PIRU ORIGINELS BLOOD MUFUKKA. That, in turn is surmounted by human being rear end human being! Smashtown Get Money Boys GD 7-14 til tha world blo. You ain't blue you ain't fo TRU human being rear end human being! The men seem at ease. One sports the attire of a visiting professor, corduroy pants and leather patches on his jacket. The others are more street-attired, but are equally at ease; they carry themselves with an easy sway and lean against the wall in a manner unlike other, more guarded groups. A bundle of teens, boys convinced they are men, strut and dance by as well. They are dressed in identical colors, mostly sporting jerseys and hoodies, red-over-black. Their demeanor is proudly defiant; whatever they are talking about dies on their lips as they pass him. One in the rear of the group throws him a glance: 'gently caress's this fuckin' gump doin' here? Nothing else happens. He reaches the edge of the quad, which always feels strange to him. There should be a sense of displacement, of crossing from one territory to another, like most academic environments cultivate. There's no such feeling here. Has it always been this way? Even at the doddering, forgotten, unknown college campus, the grime proliferates. The lighting blears and smears through creeping patinas. The American Brutalist concrete and faux-brick buildings are edged with splits and shears. Causeways are crumbled and puddled by the outside-creeping-in. What's most telling are the perpetually new, always-updated stickers on every building entrance, exit, maintenance door. A bright white semiautomatic weapon surmounted and crossed by a bisecting stripe of bright red: literal meaning, NO GUNS ALLOWED. Unspoken implication: "There are guns everywhere out there, but out there is not in here." Actual message, parsed through long-standing context: You May Die Here For No Good Reason. The stickers are very noticeable on the mostly-desolate campus. But they are a feature of the whole environment, for dozens of miles square, until the infrastructure is so throw-away and desultory that even this one constant disappears. The message never disappears: You May Die Here For No Good Reason. Waiting, now. Another interminable wait, measured by an analogue clock; the décor so last-century, it would offend even those used to the kitsch of the nostalgic. Corrugate, ribbed concrete walls, broken by glazed brickwork, as though two buildings were pieced together at the same time? Who won? Who was first/ What's the real building, what's the appendage? The lights are old, too. Fluorescent, yellow glow. Somehow stark despite the patina that they shine through. The dust makes the light a solid technical “goldenrod,” he muses. Still, it feels the same nauseating stark-white-edging-off-into-ultraviolet-pink one could remember from the exposed fluorescent tubes of yesteryear. It's not helping that the whine, the tone from nowhere-above, almost exactly matches the stuttering pulse of one of the lights. But that's probably his imagination. A figure is seated near him, right next to one of the lecture-halls. A freshman? What's he doing here? There doesn't seem to be any indication of any social meet-ups. The main reason Den chose today was because it was a Saturday, and also some kind of documented “No Campus Services” day. He assumed that meant there was another service shutdown or mandatory furlough, a cost-saving measure fronted as a brief vacation for the state workers. He approaches, like he's going into the lecture-hall, staring past the kid. This one's probably not a freshman, even. Squatter? Some teenager waiting for someone else? The young face watches him closely. Den notes a modified “conk” haircut, kinking and frizzing out at the edges. Probably not called that; he knows that the style's resurgence is not actually connected to any nostalgia. The boy actually stares at him; his eyes seem almost pleading, downturned. Expecting hurt; preemptively solicitous and sad. If Den were to adopt the same expression, it wouldn't make things go easier. Why would anyone... The boy stammers out, in a surprisingly high voice, “uh, es'cuse me? Is there a class today? Should I, like, move?” He rises into a half-crouch off of the chair and the plastic frame scrape-creaks. “...nah, man, nah,” Den interrupts, “Nah, just, I think there's like no classes or anything...I thought.” He pauses. “are you waiting for a...are you a freshman? Just, you look-” The boy touches his hair, quick, tap, pat. His nails look weirdly white in the lights. His eyes are still wide, anxious. “No, I'm in a class for high school like an alternative school it's a class they call Saturday Scholars and it's for us when it's, we, we didn't get through...y'know, school. Because...so it's like-” Den starts to make the jump in his head: “You signed up for it, but you don't know where it is, and you're waiting here because you're pretty sure this is where they said,” the boy is nodding exaggeratedly, his expression falsely beaming. I am so glad you aren't angry, the smile says. Den translates this as, I am so scared because I've never done this and this place is new to me, and has to remind himself that he has, many times, been this person. Pathetically grateful when things don't completely derail immediately; assuming from the start that everything's already failed... These days, it's become a more common outlook. But he's not South Side, so people don't expect it. The apocalypse happened in different waves for different sides. Some died fast or disappeared, but some just ended up bunkering up and disappearing behind neighborhood fortresses. The South Side was the place that it all washed in, and everyone endured. Over and over and over. It was always the ending, but never the end. The kid's a byproduct of the decline; probably one of the last of the kids still trying to go to school full-time, actually graduate off a stage. Please his momma, make her proud instead of half-ashamed all the time. Except he's probably too faggoty to make it through the cage match that any public school still standing's become. Some teacher or counselor or probation officer or hall warden figured him for eventual chum in the water, deliberately “failed” him to force him into alternative school. Where he needs to be. So he doesn't die from the attentions of his peers. Den tries to gentle him down; stares past his head, slows his blinks, tries not to squint his eyes. “Dude, I get it...you do what's gotta be done. Dude gotta be about that thing, huh? Ya try'nna hold onto that good thing, and you showed up for it. Step one, man. It's good,” the kid seems to agree for real this time, his nod more measured, more responsive than just a bobbing reaction, “...it's good, and you're doing the right thing. Probably the group'll show up soon. But just in case,” Den slows down his patter, “just in case, if nobody shows up in like ten minutes, go check the new Library. This is the Ed Building, but that'd be the other place a study group'd be, so...” he trails off, the youngster's nods barely perceptible now. Suddenly, he realizes the kid must be trying to categorize him, probably has categorized him, just as Den figured him: not useful, not threatening, not interesting, not informative, just...not. He backs off with a half-wave, and spins around in affected casual stance. Time to leave; come back in ten or fifteen. It's the social thing again. Without a compelling common obsession, he can't talk long. Nobody wants to. He's not socially...anything. He stands outside. The theremin from another world is shrilling out its tune. Overcast is deep, like always. The wind is intermittent and directionless, like a thousand invisible tiny dust-devils, whipping at face, hair, clothes in a different pattern every few seconds. Den stands outside the Education Building and waits out the count. The place is deserted by the time he comes back in. Of course. Kid was too weirded out by him to stick around. He hopes that he gets to the group or the class or the school, though; hopes that he didn't bail on the whole thing because of that last awkwardness; hopes...what? That something goes right for someone, somewhere? “-really are that fuckin' kid,” he puffs out under his breath. An empty hall says the vowels back at him, glottal-metallic. It's true. He is. Pathetically grateful at the merest chance of not-bad, pathetically hopeful that it'll turn out all right. Pathetic. What did you ever make happen, back before, when it would have mattered? Or did you just sit around hoping, then, too? Is that what you're doing now? He wonders. Damon shows up five, maybe ten minutes later. He strides in like it's not really a thing they're doing. Like he was looking for something to do, and hey, there's Den! Awesome! The door yanks open, the air changes with a shwuuuck, and a brief wind lifts clothes and hair with a silent sort of all-body flick. Damon swings in and around on the door, like that guy could do who played in the “Willy Wonka Chocolate Fantasy” story. Or whatever. Damon offhandedly once made reference to some dancer named Gregory Haim or Heinz or something. Den was probably doing his not-getting-it look again, so Damon got silent and then changed the subject. But still, he was a dexterous guy, and far more social than many Den had hung out with. Ever. Damon sits in one of the crappy plastic chairs, and motions Den over. No big thing, but, y'know, come over and see this, he offhandedly gestures. He rummages or pretends to rummage in a tightly-organized knapsack. Brings out the unit. “Check this out,” he says. “Like I was sayin' this, THIS, is a real-deal advancement in the form, you know? A, a-” he flicks his gaze upward, in the old what am I really trying to convey? face, reading the fake cue-cards behind his eyes, “...an innovation in the standard! Yes!” He grins like a cartoon villain. He has the face for it. But then again, he's got the face for a lot of things. Damon Josephs seems to have the sort of self-possession that would allow him to get tagged as “class clown” and “class heartthrob” and every other vied-for stereotype one could want in a high-school yearbook or a college fraternity. If those standards still held true, that is. No high school had time or budget for yearbooks (or classes, sometimes). And these days, it was a rare college that allowed for off-campus organizations, since the cartel problems and, of course, the eventual wreckage of everything else. Damon got truly hosed over by the place he's in, Den thinks again for the millionth time. In a world that was the least bit right, he wouldn't be just Damon. He could have been anything. And yet, the man in front of him doesn't seem to mind at all. Mediocrity really just seems to be a momentary blip to Damon. It might not be an act. That's how surreally comfortable he seems inside himself. “Dude, look. Just look! Look at...this fuckin' piece of art dropped in your life...c'mon!” Den looks. It's ordinary. It looks as anonymous as every other maybe-IdioNoia-but-maybe-a-knockoff unit he'd ever seen, ever. Black, except where it was gray. Wider than it was tall. Some kind of bump where the lensing-to-optical projection/processing thing would pop up (probably with the usual cryptic code written around the externally-visible lens, something like PROJPROC 44-50 NO RESET or PROIECCION MAS ULTRAISMO 670 THz NONAVISADO. “What?” Damon looks perplexed. Then brightens. “You don't see the difference yet, OK. I forgot. You can't see how much simpler the interface is without a trip, can you? Sorry man, I wasn't thinking. Let's get to a place where this all can...” He looks around, and suddenly goes from Leading man to Cartoon Villain again, “...get goin' real quiet-like.” Den almost wants to squawk with laughter. That's another thing. Damon is smart. Not Den's kind of “smart,” with qualifying little quote-marks around the word. Damon is actual smart. Den's just smart enough to sound smart, and to sometimes understand enough to do what smart people tell him is right to do. Mostly. Damon's not like that. Apparently, he does things in the world. He has his poo poo managed. Den could “afford” to be here because he's so low; nothing he does will really matter tomorrow. Damon, on the other hand: Damon's here because he actually could afford to be. He's got a value to his time that allows him to actually pursue interests and hobbies, and delegate responsibilities to others, and things like that. To Den, this is basically like being a fairy-tale magician. How do you end up being where he is? He's asked himself a million times. The answer is the same as ever. If you think people“end up” like him, you'll never be that guy. They head off again, pushing past the gun-insignia. The ever-helpful You May Die Here For No Good Reason. SimpleMind units aren't difficult to use. But they do suffer from one problem; in order to first connect, one has to stand or sit still, and actually be calm. This is harder than it sounds. The retina can't dilate or shut too much at once, or too many times, for about a straight twenty-five seconds. So calm, still, and gazing straight ahead without too heavy a blink rate, and no anxiety; not easy in these times. Damon's joy is over what amounts to a small improvement in the delivery system. The lensing device of this...prototype? variant? upgrade?...is less sensitive to small optical focusing errors and tics. It can lens through a user's retina and do full connect in about a thirteen-second count. Also, Den notices that a few double-blinks that would have derailed an initial full connect on another SingleMind are no big deal for this new type. It still requires that he be otherwise pretty stock-still, but... ah, falling, system must have engaged faster than I, oh ...falling back out of the sketchy living room that Damon's roosting in currently, white on eggshell on taupe, on wood floor, off wood floor, out of the world, inside himself, falling back through his tunnel of view, back down through a driftwood-gnarled osseous mass past a vast lolloping throat space, down and in, into a body that isn't a body but a place encasing other places, all of the bodies and the very thought of what bodies are.... ...falling backwards and down, but he wasn't, because it was and wasn't falling, really, it was a part of him moving or shifting in another part of him. And it wasn't "down" or "backwards" because there was no "up" or "forwards" as his head became a cavern and then a vault of bone and glutinous, fibrous sky, then a waymark on the vortices of what was his vast whirling sinus and the booming, open, fluid and pulsing hurricane of his throat, esophageal abyss, the vesicles and lymph-blebs and squeezing, beading million moistures and glowing, fizzing body-gels of his homeostasis writ large in heat-color, the reeking oil rainbow of infrareds and underyellows, subviridians and blackness-blues and unviolets and pulse, pulse, pulse... ...tumbling backwards was also like being pulled in some new unseen direction, and through his own body-door, inside-out, inside-through. He was at once himself, yanked like a doll on a wire, pulled taut, battered and knocked against the cosmos of his inner body-galaxy, and "he" was dream-him already, just a spheric point of view, a non-dimensioned reference for the else-ness around it. And he flew-fell-rolled-shot and traversed. In life, his eyes are rolling back, eyelids stuttering, momentary and superfluous interrupt of the beamed transmission, and his body is frozen and frame rigored as if in nightmare. It won't matter; the transmission's just got to have occasional reconnect; most of the architecture's been scribbled onto the lens of (his soul? some camera-obscura receptor in a mercury-reflective area of his forebrain? a sheet of glass laid across his occipital lobe?) and it needs no constant feed, just a little laser-beam bump, bump, bump every few seconds. And he's himself but not, and falling-flying through and into himself. And the nauseating strata and storm of osseous fiber, riddled with pore and seam, like clay from eons ago turned vegetal, yet like great scaly, fronded vegetation baked and turned petrified a billion billion layers over, like the growth of unlovely sheeted shell-fern-horn that it was, writ gigantic, a folded continental plate of skull-scape. And further into the fuming, simmering scab-oceans of mucous-membrane, great Pontus of the internal humors and the inner flesh-fluid interstices, a heaving infinite shoreless wave of liquid everything. And pinwheeling into the great heated dark-not-dark of the throat, and the grand thoracic universe of the void where a body was... He won't see the body until later when he comes out of the inside, even if it's outside. Instead, whupwhupwhup, air lifts and re-compresses around him, as the ribbed, wave-fluxing spiral of throat caverns out into a shock of blue sky. Blue, so blue. Blue like the background to channel four when you'd switch an old analog television to “video.” That blue. Blue like the blue of a neon sign but with no glassy edge to it, and no flutter or flicker, no imperfection, just a straight blue-bolt mass of cerulean until the rotating, spinning horizon. Blueness without ripple or variation. Burning bluelight-blue. Somehow the blaze of azure doesn't tint everything, doesn't drown out the colors of the world. Wind, good wind this time, shears past him, making a beer-bottle-tootling noise at his ears. It's icy cold, but in a wonderful way, because he knows it'll be over once he slows down. It's just another sensation to savor. Den's coming in, the rush of entry a blurring of tactile and visual sensation, like the pixellating blur of that...what was that program's name?... when it was rotating over a far-away globe , then you told it “1101 South Whatever Street,” and suddenly, ZOOM down towards the details- As he collects views, as detail reasserts, colors intensify and also acquire significance, a sense of hue and chroma containing thaumos, each shade a special magic fire, and a catalogued, subliminal power for each color. This is what the shared perceptions of many overlapping will do. A resonance is created, probably as hormonal as it is spiritual or imaginative. A flexing buildup of figurative "oh that means something to me" touching off countless lizard-brain shivers, endless iterations of pineal-gland excitations echoing through the users' collective perceptual architecture. What was that computer application? A mapping reference Den used when he was young, where things went from a vague, polychromic roil of planet and ZOOM, Den's kid eyes had bugged wide as the view shot inward and down, and suddenly he was seeing 6344 South Ellis: "Mama, that's us! That's our house today!" That was what the unfreezing uncoiling, sharpening clarity was like; Earth(tm), a function of ante-catastrophic search engines. First terrain, landmass, then landscape, then features of the populous habitat, then streets, buildings, roofs, cobbles, signage, lamps, and here he is like always. A rush and blast of sharpening detail and a non-inertia stop, because as far as the shared instance was concerned, a Den-analogue might as well have been there forever. ...that's what it's like. Except not really, because SingleMind is so full-immersive. It even cuts out the whine. Or, at least, most of the time, until the user's body starts to shock out of the immersion, and the brain starts to pull itself back to full consciousness. But wake-up is always bad. It'd probably be bad no matter what. Especially for people like Den. The process is different for Den, in good and bad ways. Sometimes very bad ways. The viscid colors cycle and pixilate, greens on greens on greens this time, a verdant continental mass, gigantic from this orbit, and only somewhat obscured by the vortices and waves of storms and fronts. The light in the sky never truly resolves into a sun, no matter where Den tosses his gaze. Always, the sky itself is throwing off that wonderful light, and showing only unrelieved computer-screen blue. As he nears, the landscapes unfold and his view warps along with them. Mountainous, absurd in scale, Monumentalist abstraction, each green hill a soaring mesa. Each city a crazed coral, like those O'Brien illustrations from The Three Billy Goats Gruff... Pop-up-book page spread run life-size and hallucinogenic. The cityscape and country-scape accordion out into his perception. Den catches his breath at the impact, but there is no impact, there never is, he's there on ground, surrounded by dreamscape...city?...street? His body is figurative to his own senses, and he looks down/through his point of reference at the cobbles. There are cobblestones this time. They are weirdly vitreous, like squared-off versions of those bottle-bottom windows he'd seen as a young kid. Sandy and rough in parts, chipped and conchoidal in others. They are a deep-grey, with clots of milkier white, and portions of obsidian black. He would stamp experimentally, but that would mean Den would fix his legs and feet in form, and that requires more interest than he's got. So he leaves the prospective shattering of cobblestones for another time. The place looks like any dashed-hopes Eastern-seaboard mill town in any of those Wahlberg movies of the beginning of the century. Like a bad neighborhood in an old Pennsylvania town, or south Boston that he'd seen in photos, before the flooding. There are wooden poles with cross-slats; they have... electrical wiring?... trailing in huge bundles and streamers across them. The wood is real wood (!), not plastofiber, and the grain of the wood is spaced and mottled with coatings of varnishes, oils and paints and bug- and worm-burrows. How do they not fall over? The houses are at least partly from two centuries ago; they look every instant of their rain-battered age. The dirty glass of the mostly-shuttered and iron-barred windows looks rippled and bowed, as ancient as the houses. There are signs and posted artifacts on every pole, many at a time. They appear to be painted tin or aluminum. Some are showing pictures, he thinks. Den hasn't narrowed his focus enough to read what he thinks is lettering on the others. The chipped, scraped and faded signs are interesting as a phenomenon in themselves; their information isn't compelling. Den hasn't seen this kind of street since before the first disasters. Then some people show up. They all start out looking like types, scratches and fragments from his own memories, and from others', from all the old analog TV programs that so many can remember. The change and distort, moving through indistinct air, like a nearsighted person's peripheral haze. They are now getting sharper. They are, in order of time: all male or absent any features that say “female,” all of the same probably-white shade, all have probably-straight hair, they all are moving at a (…) ...in order of time: all male and of varying body types, all have adopted postures of low, threatening movement, all are carrying things as as they jog forward and (…) ...in order of time: all grizzled men of two general types, all moving to intercept, all with arms swinging weapons of some sort (…) ...the updates are extreme and not immediate enough, going from far-off soft focus to halogen light-clarity in bits and pieces over a series of seconds. Den's turned to run by the time he's actually able to determine the threat. These are marauders, vikings, thugs, mooks, something conjured up from distilled fears of going to places that Aren't Our Tribe. His not-body spins his view too slowly, like his head and shoulders were a pintle mount on a weapon pod, or a surveillance camera on an arc-swivel. He isn't going forward and away fast enough.
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