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Jul 12, 2019 03:33
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From Morgue to Morgue 1154 words The vibration of my phone on the steel gurney next to me pulled me out of the other side, and back into this world. "Turn that thing off!" Dustin cried out from a room down the hallway. "No wonder my readings are all over the loving place." Normally, I would have yelled back at him, mocking whatever gadget or doohickey from some rear end in a top hat on eBay he'd decided to test out tonight. But in the space between our world and Their's, I had picked up some particularly distressing transmissions coming from our side. This call was bad news. "Hello Mr. Plum, this is Detective Barnes with the Rochester Police Department," a gruff voice crackled from the other side of the phone. "I'm sorry to call this late, but- earlier this evening we found a body." "I'm afraid I'm already working on a case," I said as politely as possible. "You'll have to call my secretary tomorrow to set something up, we open at eight." In my heart, I knew that this attempt to weasel out of whatever terrible journey this night had in store was in vain. "I'm aware that you've worked with some of our more... open-minded detectives before. This isn't about that, we need you to identify the body. We believe it's Rosa Flores." *** Detective Barnes pressed the "-1" button and folded his hands. There was no movement. "Oh!" squeaked the doctor with us, leaning forward and swiped his keycard before hitting the button again. We descended. "So... you probably think you've seen some creepy poo poo, then?" Barnes asked, carefully holding back the contempt he clearly had for us. Dustin, ever the literalist, was not as capable of reading between the lines as I. "Oh yeah, once we worked a case for some Mennonite clan down near Penn Yan," Dustin said dryly without looking up from his phone. "Saw a spectral horse trample one of 'em. Usually horses aren't pissed off enough to manifest, let alone cause real damage." Dustin looked up at me for a moment, then asked "Didn't you say they tortured it?" "Not all of them, just the one that got trampled," I replied, and the detective only smirked back. The doors to the elevator opened to a mint green and white tiled hallway. The Doctor led us to a set of stainless steel doors and swiped his keycard once more. Upon entry, Dustin immediately began to calibrate his meters to account for the room's innate magnetic fields and radio frequencies. The Doctor led Detective Barnes and I to the only occupied gurney in the room, and slowly unzipped the thick, plastic body bag. Rosa Flores, Paranormal Investigator, was dead. The woman who guided me on my first trip to other side had now taken up permanent residence with them. "Oh, Rosa," was all I was able to muster looking down at her in this state. Her face was contourted into a frozen scream. Her eyes nearly bulged out of her skull. Streaks of white marred her curly black hair. "Based on initial findings, cause of death is likely cardiac arrest," the Doctor read from a chart he'd picked up. "She was seized by something," I said clinically. "All of the indicators are here. You can only cross back and forth so many times before they expect you to start paying tolls." Barnes scoffed at my assessment. "And what forms of currency do ghosts take? Bitcoin? Yen?" The contempt which the Detective had scantly concealed before had begun to seep into every word. "How do you pay your tolls, Plum?" I rolled up my sleeves to reveal the gnarled and scarred skin on my forearms. There were claw marks and cuneiform and spirals which cracked and bled. I placed my arm next to Rosa's, almost pristine in comparison. She'd been using a passage which, evidently, carried a much higher cost. "Jesus Son, what the hell did you do to yourself?" the Doctor asked, revolted. Barnes rested his hand on his holstered weapon, uneased by the sight of my mutilated flesh. "That's it," Barnes grunted through gritted teeth. "I'm bringing you both in for psychiatric evaluation. You're clearly delusional, a danger to yourself-" he trailed off as he looked down at Rosa's body. The space between Rosa's eyes had begun to violently twitch. Slowly, a bubble of skin began to form and expand from her head. It had reached roughly the size of an orange before bursting. A beetle made of white crystal, blues and greens shimmering across the surface of its fluttering wings, crawled out from the bloody flaps of deflated skin hanging from Rosa's forehead. The Doctor immediately sprinted for the door. Barnes' eyes went wider than Rosa's as he unholstered his weapon and drew down on the beetle. The bullet ricocheted off of the beetle and found its home in my leg. I howled with pain and fell to the floor. The beetle flitted down from the gurney and rested on my chest. It crawled down to my thigh and across the hand trying in vain to impede to gush of hot blood from my wound. In my last moments before losing consciousness, I felt a great pressure digging into my leg. *** The membrane between our world and Their's is thin, translucent, and easier to cross by accident than on purpose. Each time we dream, all it takes is opening a conspicuous door to end up on the other side. I saw Rosa in my unconscious state. She had been lashed to a large wooden wheel. A faceless drudge pushed it through the circumference of a worn dirt path, his hands bleeding from copious splinters. When she saw me, she began to shriek. I tried to ask about what had happened to her, about the beetle which leapt from her brain. But she only screamed. The drudge smacked the opposite side of the wheel to quiet her, and continued to push. *** In my unconscious state, I had been taken to an institution for the standard 72 hour observation period. Leather straps constricted my entire body from movement, but I felt no pain from the leg where I was shot. Dustin told me that our lawyer had filed a formal complaint against Detective Barnes and was prepared to sue for harassment if I was charged with the murder of Rosa, in lieu of a better explanation for a human head that had burst like a balloon. Before he left, he took his usual readings, standard practice for visiting conduits of negative energy like morgues and mental institutions. "loving thing must be broken," he said as he stared puzzled at his laptop's screen. "Everything I took earlier tonight looks normal. Well, normal for an abandoned hospital anyway." "But the psychic energy from the morgue and this place are off the charts, and all the waveforms look exactly the same." Inside me, something stirred to be brought back to its home.
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Jul 15, 2019 00:07
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In, with Owner of faces, who comes from Nedjefet, and judges impatience.
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Jul 15, 2019 16:35
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Owner of Faces/Nedjefet/Impatience The Assessment at Miccosukee Indian Village 1,196 Words Seth Brunacini's bottled-up rage was finally about to boil over. Seth's anger was a total lack of patience towards the minor inconveniences any one of us might face in a typical day. For most people, deep breathing would be sufficient to deal with an unexpected traffic jam or a boss asking for "just one more thing, before you leave." For Seth, these were personal slights against his happiness, courtesy of an uncaring and unjust universe. While it normally took him about 30 minutes to get home, today's commute had stretched to well over an hour. He screamed until he was red in the face at the stop-and-start traffic, punching his steering wheel and dashboard. But nothing Seth did seemed to let the other drivers know that he had to be home *immediately* to check the same websites he spent all day at work checking. After nearly five minutes of weaving through the rows of the outdoor mall's parking lot, he finally found a spot near the entrance closest to the Baskin Robbins. He *deserved* to reward himself after having to go through that hell. In and out, doing his best to avoid the lollygaggers and aimless windowshoppers. But as he grew closer, Seth stopped in his tracks. A throng of middle-schoolers, all wearing neon-yellow t-shirts from a class trip to Adventure Landing, swarmed into the ice cream parlor from the opposite side of the mall. Immediately, the line grew from nothing to spilling out towards an Auntie Anne's Pretzels. "I'S FURSE! Gyefurt!" he shouted at a passing eleven year old, enjoying his Cookies'n Cream. "Nedjefet!" Seth's teeth gnashed. A blood-vessel in his left eye burst. He collapsed, flipping a table and sending a container of used pretzel dipping cheese soaring across the mall. A shock of neon yellow filled his vision as he lost consciousness. *** "You up? All here, now?" A woman crouched over Seth, slapping his face with a latex-gloved hand. Her round face beamed down at him with a gapped, toothy grimace. He saw his own relfection in her mirrored aviators, and noticed that his shirt had been cut up the front, exposing his pale chest. "I think so..." Seth trailed off, realizing that he had been moved out to the parking lot. The woman stood up, and was not a typical EMT. Her black tanktop was splattered with orange bleach stains, and her denim shorts revealed legs adorned all over with band-aids. In his confusion, all he could think to ask was, "Are you a nurse?" The woman cackled. "Get in the car, dummy!" She shed her gloves like snake skins, letting them *flop* onto the black top as she walked to the driver's side of an '87 El Camino. "Come on, where's that famous sense of urgency?" Seth did not have time to process what was happening before he was in the passenger seat. "Folks call me Sia," she said, eyes locked on the road. Sia flipped open the center console, and produced a glass pipe and zippo lighter. Bracing the steering wheel between her knees, she lit whatever was inside and inhaled deeply. Then, she passed it over to Seth. "Do you think it's a good idea?" "'Do you think it's a good idea?'" Sia mockingly repeated. "'Are you a nurse?' Lemme ask you a question, what was sooo important you couldn't wait ten minutes for those kids to get ice cream? Had to go ruin my night instead, draggin' my rear end down to the goddamn Everglades..." Seth looked down at his shirt, frayed from being cut with medical shears. He flipped down the sun visor and opened the mirror. He first observed his bloody left eye, but then noticed that his pupils seemed depthless and empty, with no light shining out from behind them. "I'm dead?" Sia groaned in exasperation. "Look, I got all your answers right here," she said, again offering him the glass pipe. "Consider it orientation. I thought you hated wasting time." The orange and yellow swirls of pigmentation in the glass seemed shift like desert sands. He let the smoke pour into his lungs. By the time he exhaled, Seth understood that they were not really driving through Florida. This was a waypoint between Life and Whatever-Comes-Next. Sia was taking him to an assessor, who'd determine whatever that Whatever would be: death, rebirth, or return. "We're close, you were gone for quite a while." Sia turned off a podcast about notable ergot poisoning epidemics throughout history. "What did you see?" "For a long time, I was in a waiting room. Weeks, maybe months. I read through every magazine they had a hundred times. "Then, they finally called me in, and I was in a Publix with a list of groceries. I'd start to go down an aisle to grab something, and there'd be an old man right in front of whatever I had to get. And I'd do all of the things I'd normally do: I'd grit my teeth, loudly exhale through my nostrils, every passive aggressive lovely little thing I could do to let this guy know I was waiting for him. "Except, then I'd turn to look at another customer like 'Can you believe this?' But, they'd be doing the same things to me! And I'd look at my hands and realize that I was the Old Man, just trying his best to get everything he needed- literally as fast as my body allowed. "By the time I got to the next aisle, I'd be me again. Over and over. Thousands of aisles. Exactly the same, every single time." Sia lit two cigarettes then passed one to Seth, who didn't hesitate at the offer this time. *** The Assessor's long black robes fell off the back of a bench in front of a statue of a Native American man in cut-offs wrestling an Alligator. They were flanked on each side by totem poles, each topped with eagles. One's wings were spread, the other's were not. As Sia and Seth approached, the Assessor rose from the bench. They shook Sia's hand. Gazing into the hood of their robe, Seth felt as though each pair of eyes he'd ever seen stared back at him. They handed him a manila envelope. Seth removed a single sheet of dot-matrix printer paper. Under official assessment of the Owner of Faces, it was determined that the soul inhabiting Seth Brunacini had acted with impatience, but was redeemable and should be returned to Earth immediately. Sia gave him a pat on the back. "Always remember how happy you were when you read that." *** When Seth's consciousness returned to his body, he became acutely aware that he felt no sensation whatsoever. Physically, he was unable to do little more than blink voluntarily. A young doctor first noticed Seth's eyes fluttering during her nightly rounds. After confirming that he was able to hear her, she read him his chart. "We'll start some assessments tomorrow, and then develop a recovery schedule based on what we find. That being said, the damage the aneurysm caused was extensive, and we should try to keep our expectations realistic. The most important thing we'll need from you is patience."
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Jul 22, 2019 06:01
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In! Character: 1 Setting: 2 Genre: 3 Song: 4 RFT: 5
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Jul 22, 2019 13:25
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Chili posted:Pepe Silvia Browne your… Just 'Cause It's Shiny, Don't Mean That It's Clean 1,362/1365 Words Detective's Log, 04/24/2033: It's hard to see beauty in the Falls anymore. I start each day the same way I always have: go to Frankie's for a cruller, park by the Rainbow Bridge, try to take in the natural splendor. For a long time, it was enough. But Karen's been gone five years and... I don't know. It looks like anything else now. Job hasn't been the same either. Ten years back, city council decides that too much time and money is spent responding to calls from Casinos. Too many vagrants dirtying up the sidewalks, unlucky drunks refusing to leave the pit, and... well, cleaning up worse upstairs. The Niagara Gaming Group were more than happy to foot the bill, so long as they were guaranteed a certain degree of oversight and input. First came the new equipment, then the concessions from the police union. Soon our presence on the streets was being replaced by drones instead of supplemented by them. Now there's maybe a dozen real cops left, and we're all glorified casino security. *** Detective's Log, 04/25/2033: Last week, there's snow on the ground. This week, I'm baking in hundred degree heat, trying to keep as many fans going at once as this piss poor excuse for an office can support. To make matters worse, last night someone managed to execute the single biggest casino robbery this town or any other's ever seen. $35 Million. The internal security team froze all digital transactions and evacuated the building. Now there's a few hundred patrons of The Crescendo ready to storm the lobby and take what's left. I'm left with fragments. Our culprit was probably rushed out of the building with everyone else. One great big deluge of bodies running in a panic, creating the perfect cover. Security footage is gone, points to an inside job. Someone would not only have to have admin credentials, but intimate knowledge of the system's architecture to cover their tracks this well. No physical evidence found in the fault, no sensors triggered in the vault monitoring system's log files between the previous physical sweep and the one where the money was discovered missing 15 minutes later. All failsafe systems tested and in working order. Working around the clock on this case. No leads so far. Got a hunch, though. A bot did this. *** NGG Chat Logs, 04/26/2033: TS: What's the status? MD: our boys are on the case MD: they know an AI was involved, but there's nothing to link anyone to the bot MD: maybe we'll get lucky and they'll pick someone random to frame lol TS: Haha TS: You joke, but the board would be ecstatic with that kind of outcome. TS: Save a lot of time and money. I'm talking promotions for us both. MD: we've got ways to go before then MD: plus, nothing in place to stop that random person from being one of us TS: Let's fix that ASAP. *** Detective's Log, 04/28/2033: Markus Dergel, some techno-wiz who designed NGG's security network, is not talking. He seemed far more interested in defending the integrity of his "masterpiece" than acknowledging the situation on his hands. My bot theory seemed to intrigue him. First he laughed off the idea of one sophisticated enough to break his system and steal the casino's money. But his tune changed when I suggested it only needed to do the former. A human familiar enough with the system to point his AI partner to the right directories would be more than capable of handling the latter. The Department of Cybersecurity is constantly discovering some Chinese or Iranian bot probing financial datacenters, hoping to worm their way in and funnel everything out. Seeing as how Markus's job was to prevent that sort of intrusion, you'd think he would've at least heard of these bots! But, as soon as I brought it up, he went tight-lipped. Kept saying there's no bot smart enough, and referred any further questions to his lawyer. Is Markus our man, or just suffering from a bruised ego? *** NGG Chat Logs, 04/29/2033: TS: Update? We ready for Monday? MD: so far so good. he seized on the bot thing and it's dragging him in circles. MD: per our previous convo tho, he actually thinks a human used a bot to pull it off MD: maybe we'll get lucky and get those promotions after all?? lol TS: Who's the primary suspect? *** Detective's Log, 04/30/2033: Either Markus is the unluckiest man in the world, or someone powerful doesn't want this case getting solved. The day after we spoke, Markus was fired by the NGG board as part of a unanimous decision. This morning, his body washed up on the Canadian side. Another dead end. Spoke with Tim Swanson, NGG's head of security administration. Someone better at smoothing out edges than Markus. He assured me that the system had been thoroughly swept for AIs and come up clean. I got the impression that they cared more about what they'd lose if it got out their system was susceptible to bot attack than a paltry $35 million. Karen and I used to go up to the Canadian side for years. At the time, it felt better. Sure, it was touristy, but their side was thriving while ours was shriveling up. I guess you can only take in natural wonder for so long before you think, "all right, so what else is there to do around here?" Maybe I don't blame them now that I feel the same way. Anyways, now we got all the same stuff over here. 'Cept we're not thriving. Turns out, they were just better at dolling it up than us. These towers suck the blood out of this community each and every day. People living paycheck to paycheck, hoping the next slot'll be the one to change it all. But just 'cause it's shiny don't mean that it's clean. *** Detective's Log, 05/01/2033 The case has gone completely cold. The weather is the opposite. I go over each detail in my head, piece by piece, so many times now that they've lost all meaning. It's just information being pulled through me. What was the missing link here? A man walks into a casino and steals $35 Million. No sensors or cameras detect him. Probably left in a crowd. Bot-involvement likely. I can't continue to work in this heat. There has to be some culprit, some piece of evidence I'm overlooking. Casino. Falls. Bots. Karen. *** NGG Chat Logs, 05/02/2033 TS: Good Morning! Prepped for the meeting today? MD: bad news and good news MD: I got in early this morning to go over the logs. he's done. MD: looks like he made it about a week this time. huge improvement over the last build. TS: drat. Well, it's still progress. He only made it a day in the last stress test, right? TS: What exactly did you change? MD: personality overhaul. hates the establishment. got a dead wife lol TS: Why? MD: I figure most people who want to be police grew up watching crime shows and reading crime books MD: and then they end up acting like imitations of cool movie detectives MD: so I trained the personality module on 100,000 hours of cool movie detectives TS: Hard to argue with the results. TS: We'll have to run it by legal to make sure it doesn't count as an AI rights violation. TS: But with improvement like that, I'm sure we'll be able to work something out! MD: having a dead wife isn't torture MD: being given an unsolvable case to intentionally break your brain, on the other hand lol TS: Technically, it falls under the testing clause, so we should be good there.  MD: lmao MD: "just cuz it's shiny don't mean that it's clean" MD: anyways, I'll compile the data into some graphs for the slides. you know how they love graphs! TS: Yes, thank you. TS: and please change the name to something appropriate. TS: I don't want NGG seeing that their new AI Detective is named Buttmachine haha
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Jul 29, 2019 02:15
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Winner of Gachadome? Moi?? And on only my third submission ever??? I'm honored. And I'd be even more honored if my story was included in the zine. And obviously, you'd be honored to include it as well. I'll hop on the discord some time today to claim my prize. Thanks, Judges! Edit: Actually, could someone PM me or post an invite link to the Discord? I can't find one in this thread that isn't expired. Pepe Silvia Browne fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Aug 2, 2019 |
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Aug 2, 2019 14:05
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I'd like to unburden myself of a BAD DOG.
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Aug 20, 2019 13:54
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Pepe Silvia Browne posted:I'd like to unburden myself of a BAD DOG. Free To A Good Home 668 Words I thumbed the end of the leather leash. It wasn't too late to call it all off. I could have told the stranger to get Rupert's crate out of the back of his truck. I should have never posted the ad, sorry for the trouble, here's some gas money. But when I looked down at Rupert, I know that I'm doing the right thing. I cannot care for him in this state. "Free To A Good Home," the ad in the paper read. "Doberman Husky Mix. Must Have Big Yard." Sheila had brought the dog home shortly after our youngest left for college. When we were 23, we'd gone from casually dating to married, under one roof, and with a kid on the way in the span of six months. And for two and half decades, she'd been too busy fixing lunches and watching soccer practices to worry about whether she wanted any of it. In my experience, there are two types of dogs: the ones whose eyes seem as thoughtful as any human's might be, and the ones whose eyes seemed soulless, like a wild animal. Rupert was the latter. His pale blues eyes shined out with an eerie glow like phosphorescence. Each time he cocked his head while on the receiving end of a behavioral correction, I'd think that maybe he understood what I was saying. But then I'd catch him tearing up Sheila's garden. And there we'd be again. For three years, Sheila held on to the fantasy that Rupert would change. When she finally got fed up trying to deal with him, she'd asked for my help. She'd known that I had dogs growing up, but couldn't grasp the difference between a pet like Rupert and a farm dog. My father treated them like any other tool, and I'd learned no different. All this to say, my theory for Rupert's misbehavior was simple - he was bored! A dog his size was bred to help farmers, not sit in a living room all day. Our training was more rigorous, focused. I did not care if Rupert knew his name or could sit on his hind legs and clap his front paws. The only I was interested in Rupert learning was the perimeter of his hunting ground. This is our yard. Protect it at all costs. Sheila was pleased enough when Rupert stopped digging up her garden. He was no longer making GBS threads in the house or barking at passing by neighbors. Rupert was a model for canine behavior. And though Sheila wasn't enthused about the dead rodents and birds that kept showing up on our doorstep, it was a small price to pay. Everything changed the night after Mrs. Watson's cat got loose. I was worried from the screaming in the backyard that Rupert had attacked the old woman. It was actually just Mrs. Watson watching in horror as the dog tossed Socks's mangled corpse into the air over and over again, spilling entrails across the lawn. It was a discipline problem. Boundaries. So I dragged him inside by the collar and disciplined him. Rupert looked up at me with those pale blue eyes, his mouth drawn back into a grin. He cocked his head to the side, then lunged at me. I do not blame Rupert. There are no bad dogs, only bad owners, after all. I was the one who'd taught him the rules, then went back on it. I do not blame Sheila either. She did not sign up to spend her retirement helping me wipe my rear end and climb out of bed into my chair. I am grateful for the years she gave me. "Well, alright." The stranger dusted his hands off after slamming his tailgate shut, then squatted down to address Rupert directly. "Are you ready to go, buddy?" He cocked his head to the side. Three hundred acres for him to hunt to his heart's content. With all my might, I lifted my arm to hand the stranger the leash.
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Aug 26, 2019 04:55
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Aug 27, 2019 19:50
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Barnaby Profane posted:In your world, the Number changes so quickly that people perceive it simply as a blurry sort of aura. Your story focuses on scientists developing cameras with nigh-infinitessimal shutter speeds. Dr. Vorka, The Atmos, and Gus 1187 words "Of all the mysteries which have plagued humanity, there are two which are undeniably responsible for shaping the state of the world at large. The first, of course, is 'Which God should we worship?'" Dr. Dennis Vorka was pleased with the small chuckle this elicited from the crowd of tech-bros. "The second is the reason I've come to speak to you today, and one whose answer may soon be within our grasp." The doctor lifted his arms to the heavens, each hand skirting the edges of the blue and white fog which swirled in a long thin cloud above his head. The Atmos. "What the hell is THIS thing?" The crowd erupted into laughter and applause. Gus watched his hero with admiration from the back of the cafeteria-turned-lecture-hall. He'd been fascinated with Dr. Vorka's research since he'd first started researching the Atmos in high school. For others, Gus's interest in the Atmos seemed to be an unhealthy fixation. To Gus, it was the only thing worth learning about. He did not understand how some were able to wake up each morning, brush their teeth in the mirror, and not be constantly aware of the giant unanswered question floating above their heads. "For the Egyptians, it was the rope that connected each man to the afterlife," Dr. Vorka continued. "The ancient Chinese believed each Atmos contained the spirits of one's ancestors which would protect and guide the individual. Jesus Christ and his followers claimed it was 'Holy Smoke' from Empyrean, placed in each man by God himself." These were the myths about the Atmos that each child was taught, asked about on a standardized test, and then vaguely remembered for the rest of their lives. But Gus was not satisfied to learn these stories and put his curiosities away. He wanted to know about the realities of the Atmos. What physical properties had been measured from it? Did it react to any stimuli? Could a human continue to live without one? It was his high school librarian who had set him on a path to where he was now when she recommended Dr. Vorka's seminal work, "The Atmos: Deciphering The Ever Present Cloud." Despite being an academic text, Gus pored over the figures and analyses inside with an enthusiasm most teen boys reserve for comic books and pornography. Page after page, chapter after chapter, a single idea was reinforced in Gus's mind: "This is what I want to do with my life." "Today, our understanding comes from a slightly more secular standpoint," Vorka said with a smirk, again drawing a short wave of laughter from the room. "Over the past 40 years, the team of researchers we've assembled has spent millions of manhours investigating each aspect of the physical phenomenon which manifests above the heads of every human being on the planet." Vorka paused to scan the crowd, and made eye contact with Gus as he announced, "I am proud to say that we may have found something more substantial than 'Holy Smoke.'" A screen lowered from the ceiling. Over the past five years, Gus had been working under a special division of Vorka's facilities dedicated to capturing images of the Atmos. Due to limitations in technology, it was nearly always photographed as a semitransparent blur. Only at the highest of commercially available shutter speeds was the cloud able to be represented as the elusive, continually shifting mass seen by the human eye. And in this, the division found their answer. The camera is merely a simulation of the eye. What the camera captures in a series of thousands of separate images, the brain receives as an unbroken stream of information. Where the camera's ability is restrained by its light-detecting sensors, the eye's is similarly restrained by the brain which processes the information. To Gus, the solution was obvious. Those team members whose stomachs turned during the initial development of the interface were quickly replaced with more qualified biological engineers. After tests using the eyes of other species proved unfruitful, the vast quantity of "donor" eyes needed were routed through back channels to avoid arising suspicion. After two years, the team had successfully created an interface for receiving digital information through an optic nerve. In two more, they'd developed a process for growing bio-cameras with capabilities beyond those of the human eye. And after endless retoolings and trials and patches, they'd created something which captured images at speeds no purely digital sensor could match. In those images, Gus did not see the typical translucent blue haze above his head. He saw digits, ten of them at a time, different in each frame. At 100,000 frames per second, 500,000 frames per second, and 1,000,000 frames per second, there seemed to be no difference. Even with the outstanding progress they'd made, the bio-camera was still too slow for the number to be the same in two consecutive frames. The results were quite unsettling to Gus. After dedicating his life to the pursuit of this mystery, he found himself at the entrance of yet another rabbit-hole to dive into. He didn't know if he was prepared to start asking an entirely new set of questions about the Atmos: What did the numbers signify? How fast were they changing? The utility of letting go of these questions altogether and being only vaguely aware of some spiritual explanation had become readily apparent to him. That was until he presented his team's results to Dr. Vorka himself. Vorka was ecstatic with the images. He immediately demanded to tour the lab and get photographed himself. "Of all the research we've done here, all the avenues that have been explored, you've discovered something entirely new," he told Gus. "We've wasted fortunes on studying the Atmos under different conditions. We've restricted subjects to all meat diets, dosed them with illicit substances, put them under extreme physical duress. All to see if we could detect some change in that cloud above them. Terabytes of data recorded and cataloged, never to be touched again. And here you are with your little eyeball camera, to show us that we didn't even know what we were looking at." Having his work praised by his idol put any doubts in Gus's mind at ease. He knew failure waited for him if he tried attaining a state of content agnosticism towards the Atmos. That path had been closed off long ago for him. The questions were there to be answered. He was doing what he wanted to do with his life. Gus even proposed a new path forward to Vorka, a form of data collection for their continued research. As Vorka finished the presentation on the bio-camera, the screen rolled back up into the ceiling. "Obviously, the Atmos is not the only application for this breakthrough. I'm thrilled at the potential benefits this partnership may yield for us both. By miniaturizing and incorporating the bio-camera into the design of your devices, you'll not only have unparalleled image quality, you'll be able to offer your customers something none of your competitors can," Vorka explained. "The chance to see what's actually happening above their heads."
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Sep 2, 2019 00:09
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I'm in.
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Oct 3, 2019 14:52
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Handicraft, War, and Wisdom 1563 words The calendar hanging behind the gas station clerk had more red x's than blank days in September. Soon, the morning ground would be frosted and the shelters would be gradually getting more full. Time for Athena and Isaac to migrate south. "18.75," the clerk coldly stated, no doubt expecting a sob story about why they couldn't pay and it was just these few things and oh please just this once could you have a heart? Athena slowly ripped open the velcro of her wallet and laid a $20 bill on the counter. While the cities had learned to ignore people like them, for the most part, Montana had been good. They'd found plenty of work along the highways, as the ranches were in their busiest season for tourism. City folks who referred to it as "flyover country" most of the year now flying in to play cowboy for a week at all-inclusive resorts. Which meant more work for the people most willing to get dirty: ranch hands, and maids. Every few weeks since April, they'd followed the same routine: First, hitch a ride to a truck stop to get cleaned up and get info. Once they found out a place was hiring, they'd pay for showers and clothes that weren't worn to poo poo. Usually, Athena would approach a trucker and sucker them into giving her and her "kid brother" a ride. Then, when all 6'4" and 260 pounds of Isaac climbed up into the cab with them, it put to bed any notions of impropriety on the driver's part. Getting from place to place was the hardest part. As with most businesses, the ranches were more than happy to hire help who agreed to be paid under the table. Outside the gas station, Isaac sat shoeless on the curb. Athena placed the jug of water and a plastic grocery bag she bought down next to him. "Give 'em here," Athena said, and Isaac handed her a pair of weathered, knockoff Timberlands. An older manager had bought them from the Wal-Mart for Isaac about three ranches back when he saw him working in running shoes held together with duct tape. From the plastic bag, she furnished a bottle of super glue. Sitting down next to him, she rustled through her pack for a sewing kit. With keen needle precision, Athena mended a hole where the counter met the heel, then ran a bead of super glue along her stitching. She spread it like butter across the seam with a flathead screwdriver. "Thanks," Isaac muttered, reaching for the boots. Athena slapped at his hand. "Nuh-uh! You wait for that glue to dry, I don't wanna have to do the same again tomorrow. My fingertips hurt like a sunnofabitch tryna to sew that shut!" "How the hell am I 'sposed to catch a train if I got no boots? You want me to walk through the train yard in my bare feet?" Isaac removed a 24 ounce can of Steel Reserve from the bag and cracked it open. "It'll be dry by the time the train gets here, smarty-pants. 'Sides, we gotta find a ride to the yard first anyway. You ain't gonna walk five miles 'in your BARE FEET' either, are ya?" Isaac looked at her with a blank stare, then smiled. His brain's processing power lagged about five seconds behind whatever was going on. But he was kind, a hard worker, and had a big sister to do his thinking for him. "And those were supposed to be for AFTER we got on the train, by the way!" Athena pointed to the can as Isaac tipped it back. "Gonna be a lot harder to sneak your rear end onto a train if you're drunk. Give it here, we'll split this one." *** By the glow of an LED lantern, Athena rolled a joint with the last of her and Isaac's weed. By the time they'd gotten to Idaho, the beer was already gone. The pair were ready for sleep but would need to get completely zonked out to find it on a freight train car floor. They had lucked out back at the yard and found a car that was only half-filled with UPS packages stacked into sturdy walls. The other half was sparsely filled with big nylon bags filled with padded envelopes and smaller postage. Athena wedged one into a corner and sat on it like a bean bag chair, and Issac followed suit five seconds later. As Athena slid her tongue across the rolling paper to seal it, Isaac blurted "You ever think about Mama? What she might be up to?" "No," Athena said. "Ain't worth thinking about." She did, of course, think about their mother and what she might be up to. Frequently and with malice. She had run off when Athena was 13, shortly after her and Isaac's father was diagnosed with cancer. Isaac was only 7 at the time, and much of the responsibility for keeping him fed and looked after fell on her shoulders what with their Daddy being sick. A few years back, Athena had created a dummy Facebook profile to look Mama up. She was a middle school guidance counselor in Utah now. It struck Athena as ironic that the woman who abandoned her as an eighth-grader in desperate need of guidance was now offering wisdom to kids the same age. As she lit the joint, she wondered if Isaac knew. If he'd seen Athena scrolling through her page at some library or after they'd lifted a smartphone at a Starbucks. Or if it was just random coincidence that he'd ask while their train was en route to roll through the same state where their estranged mother lived. "Here you go, big guy," Athena said as she passed the joint over to Isaac. "Put that pretty little head to rest. By the time you wake up, we'll be in Nevada." Isaac burned down half the joint in one pull, let out a massive cloud of smoke, and settled into his makeshift bean bag chair. Athena smoked the rest by herself, put a blanket over her brother, and turned off the lantern. *** When Athena awoke, the train had stopped and the car door was opening. She and Isaac sat just out of sight in the corners of the car, and she shimmied silently over to him to try to wake him up. She placed her hand over his mouth and pressed a fingernail into his ribs until his eyes opened. "Isaac. There's someone outside. We have to assume they already know that we're in here. I don't know where we are, but we need to run as soon as we get a chance. Do you understand?" Isaac nodded. As quietly as possible, the two strapped on their pack and crouched behind the bags. As the door opened, Athena's worst fears came true. The man who emerged in the daylight was not a Union Pacific employee, but a DHS agent. The beam of his flashlight swept across the car before he declared, "Department of Homeland Security!" He set the light down and began climbing into the car. At the corners of her peripheral, Athena saw Isaac move. The five-second window had not yet passed, and Isaac was still playing by a different set of rules. Isaac tossed the bag at the agent, knocking him out of the car, then hopped down on top of him. She heard him begin to run. Then the shot, and her brother's wailing. Athena peaked out from the door and saw the agent approaching her brother, who'd been shot in the leg. From her pack, she armed herself with the flathead screwdriver. She sprung out of the train car towards the agent and drove the screwdriver into his ribs as hard as she could. As he crumbled to the ground, she grabbed his dropped weapon and chucked it into the nearby brush. She had just gotten Isaac to his feet when the second agent came around the corner. "FREEZE!" *** In three days, Athena had not seen or heard anything about Isaac, despite her constant pleas to the jailors. Trespassing, Assault of a Federal Officer, and some of the agents she'd talked to had bandied the word Terrorism. The first she was all too familiar with, but she was in over her head regarding the latter two charges. They would mean decades in federal prison, if not life. Still, her main concern was Isaac. She would confess to being a sworn sleeper agent of ISIS if it meant him remaining free. Her public defender ripped open artificial sweetener packets and poured them into his coffee. "I'll see what I can find out about your brother. In the meantime, is there anyone you want me to contact? Do you have any family who might want to know you're here?" Athena thought for a moment, then swallowed her pride. On a yellow legal pad, she wrote down her mother's name. "I don't have a phone number, but she's on Facebook. And she lives not too far from here, last I heard." On a guidance counselor's salary, Athena doubted Mama would be able to afford $250,000 bail. But who knows, maybe an impassioned plea from an estranged mother might pull the right heart string of the right juror. At the very least, she'd finally see the damage she'd done.
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Oct 7, 2019 02:53
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