Paradigms Lost

OneForce is still knocked out. I can’t sleep. I have to keep going. My finger’s been on the pulse of this thing for so long I forget what it’s like not to be covering this story. This story. Can you even call it that? It’s the moment. It’s what happening and more importantly, it’s what’s happening next. So, buckle up.

Last night was a hulaballoo. Having torn through Europe, me and OneForce had to go our separate ways for awhile. More on that later. Thought I was dangerous for him. Too many of the wrong types of assholes looking for me. Course he had the same issue but I really thought I was doing him some kind of favor. Maybe I was. His "Preposterous Universe" paper laid it out perfectly and was extremely well received. People are asking questions all over the world on this day, I can assure you of that.

Could he have wrote it, banging around that empty castle in the Jungfrau’s with me kicking around, getting trashed and cursing out the Bush administration and the Punditocracy or whatever else? Blasting heavy music and shaking up the locals and just...well..being me? He probably coulda wrote it, I don’t know if he could stop himself now if he wanted to, but would it have been that perfect? I’d rather not guess.

More importantly, I can confess I might have flipped my cookies for a little while there. It’s tough to say. We’re travelling. There's lots of booze, girls and a host of party favors I’ll not get into here. Well, maybe I will but not right here. And there were NSA scum on my tail at least up until Amsterdam. The question was when had they picked me up? It’s already established that the white van parked across the street for so long that spooked me in the first place belonged to some dude my hot little roommate was banging. Cops towed it away not three days after I left, I’m told. But NSA’d been on me in Vancouver and I’d actually spoken to the jackals in Amsterdam and gotten to a place where I liked the fact that I had some governmental attention. Readership is readership. Would my future torturer have a favorite?

“I really liked ‘Just Got Here or Lived Here Forever,’” your brutish interrogator would ask you, a pair of red hot pliers fastened hard to your dingus, “is the fantasy nurse supposed to represent the American Dream?”

Besides, would I be here if I didn’t flip out a little? And if the NSA actually has been following me, what does it matter if I just anticipated them a little earlier?

I hear a steady banging sound, OneForce working up a head of steam with some filly he’d met last night. About time. Been blasting Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ as he humped holy hell out of her. Been a little while for him but to give the fella his due, he is actually trying to unify physics. I can only assume he’s trying to time the orgasm for when Bolero peaks. It’s the artful thing to do and any man in his right mind would be powerless but to attempt the same.

My little chickadee lay crumpled on the fold-out couch behind me. Gave me a sour look when I got up and started making hotel coffee. I may have closed my eyes for a few minutes but I don’t think I’ve slept. I’m paid to write whatever I like at this phase and let me tell you, for a writer who’s always had to steal the time to write whatever strikes his fancy, this is heaven. I just hope it doesn’t take my edge.

These days I'm getting more and more folks that want me to write about OneForce and to a degree I am, because you write what you know but that’s not specifically the story I cover or have been covering since SenseChange was created, back in late 2000. OneForce is a part of the story but not the sum total story because the story’s even bigger than some guy totally changing the game on everything from the realm of SubAtomicParticlePhysics to How the Universe Works. But he’s a part of the story because the story is Change.

Change. Before I was iSC or iSenseChange it was just SenseChange. The name was crafted before B-Rack Obama and every other politician in the world had picked up ‘Change’ as the mantra that will resonate with the People. The name was crafted because I wanted a name that demonstrated my profound and ongoing belief that we, all of us, as a species and a planet were and are on the cusp of massive, paradigmatic change. Couldn’t have told you then –or now, for that matter- if it was gonna be good or bad but change was coming. Change is here. And you know it is too.

So yeah, OneForce is part of it but just a part, you know?

Good Christ they’re really going at it in there. Even over the blaring orchestral number you can hear stinging slaps and flesh pounding flesh. Can hear OneForce as much as his filly, which is, as always, profoundly disturbing. Mine, though still sleeping, has an annoyed look on her face which would have put the kibosh on us getting together had I seen it last night. I may be a little judgemental but I expect to only see that face much later, when I’ll no doubt deserve it. The pace is picking up, a crescendo of climactic climaxes. a cacophony of cumshots. I’m in a pickle as I want to turn up 'the Hurricane' by Bob Dylan but not so loud that I’ll have to prematurely deal with this gal on the couch.

I’m not a ‘next day’ dude and I can’t pretend I am. I said a lot of sweet things last night that have nothing whatsoever to do with today. I will be glued to my laptop for the foreseeable future, for as long as it takes to encapsulate, to crystallize what I see happening and some gals just don’t understand how a computer screen can be more interesting than they are. Or why I want them to leave. It’s ugly but nonetheless it is that way.

OneForce stumbles out, the big galoot. He’s wiping off the end of his knob with a bathrobe that looks like somebody died in it.

“Jesus fuck,” I mumble over my shoulder, “what’d she do to you?” He looks like a stabbing victim. At least three empty bottles of Valpolcella Folinari solves that mystery for any would-be Sherlock Holmeses out there. He steps, barefooted into a plate full of old roomservice and barely even notices it, leaving little mashed-potatoe smears across the kitchen tile.

“All sorts of things.” He’s scratching his all-too-visible nuts and I’m shaking my head.

“You, uh…” I began, “you tell her who you are?”

“Yep. We’re in love.”

“Ohhhhhhhhh dude,” I cradle my still throbbing head in my hands, “you didn’t.”

“Yep. Told her everything. Who I am, who you are, what we’re doing, the whole shootin’ match.”

“Fuck off! You didn’t!”

He shrugged. “I love her.” I start softly banging my already throbbing noggin into the tabletop. OneForce helps himself to some coffee, scratching his all-too-visible nuts the whole time. “She’s coming with us. So’s yours. We’re gonna be a team.” Stirs his coffee with what necessarily has to be an extremely dirty finger. “Like Scooby-Doo.”

Now the bastard’s laughing at me, sloshing coffee all over our already putrid kitchenette floor. And, to be fair, I’m laughing at myself. He hasn’t told her anything. If I know OneForce he hasn’t told her anything but he hasn’t lied to her either. He carries with him the same obsession with Truth that I do, if anything, for him, it’s way more intense. And unlike me he actually attempts to practice what preaches. His Truths are based on mathematics, mine just on what smallish kernals of it can be gleaned from the heaping masses of crap and garbage we’re being force-fed daily by a buncha media-dicks and political hacks. Which means mine arise form a far more cynical source and does nothing to hamper me getting a little creative with it in my day-to-day.

“Hell of a thing to do to a fellow first thing in the morning,” I chastised him.

“Autumn!” he hollered at his gal in the bedroom, ignoring me. “Do breakfast?”

“Don’t do it,” I hiss at him. He's looking at my gal on the couch that’s starting to wake up. Breakfast. What a dick. He knows exactly what he’s doing to me.

Look, I’m not an asshole, okay? Well…I’m an asshole sometimes. Often. But in this case I’ve got stuff to do. I’ve got a prediction in mind for the coming elections and I have to write the thing up and launch it into BlogWorlde before anybody else nails it. But I can’t just predict the thing, you know it’s gotta look good, gotta read right off the screen, gotta piss you off once and make you laugh a coupla times. It’s gotta be worthy of the iSC brand. I have a readership.

All of which is to say that it takes time, loud music, massive spliffs and most importantly, no clammering gal I met and nailed last night. Maybe I am an asshole but I’ve been calling this election with astonishing clarity from almost a year before it even started. And choosing Biden as Bama’s veep in May of this year made me officially spooky. And now I have another feeling and it’s gotta be blogged and there’s old OneForce, fucking with me.

Besides all that, we have to talk. I made a realization and he’s really starting to hit it big and I’m a danger to him once more. And I need to talk about it with him but it’s too late.

“C’mon!” he smirks at me, the dick, “what’s your gal’s name? Betcha she wants breakfast, eh buddy? Eh?”

“Force!” I whisper/bark sternly, “knock it off! You know very well I have no fucking idea what it’s name is.”

It. I called her ‘it.’ It’s out of my mouth, I can’t take it back. I wasn’t even aware I’d said it until a gorgeous blue eye opens, eyebrows arched. Doomed. OneForce holds his breath, watching the scene unfold.

“Morning,” I say to a very non-plussed gal.

"It?!? That's nice. Thanks for that."

Force tenderly grabs my gal’s big toe and gives it a playful wiggle, “aw c'mon, what’s your name or do I just call you Sweetie? Want some breakfast, Sweetie?” It takes OneForce very little time to totally disarm her, mostly through making fun of me, though she’ll never look at me with anything less than contempt from here on in, is my suspicion. My fancy footwork got entirely used up last night. But she’s giggling and nodding and stretching and laughing and very much a complete part of the OneForce Morning Coffee Fiasco. There goes my morning. He’s silently laughing his balls off whenever he can get away with it.

“Autumn,” he hollers at the bedroom, “have you met Sweetie? We're doin' breakkie!”

The gals are humming around, getting dressed and giggling and whatnot and OneForce is the very definition of charming-yet-rascally, all-too-awake fun while I’m a grousing, hungover jerk. OneForce works with it. I’m the butt of nearly every joke, like it’s him and the girls against grumpy old iSense. He’ll come up and ruffle your hair like you’re a five year old or something and you’d like to smack him one. And you would. If he weren’t such a big fucker.

How such a big galoot ever got into gravitation and meta-physics or actually had a mind in his head is anybody’s guess. One look and you’d expect him to take chairs in the head for a living. Its been good cover for him in our adventures. Undercover by being right up there, out in the open and over the top. Dressed to kill and yammering out of the sides of our mouths like great, coke-snorkeling CEOs. Men of Great Import. It’s how we blew right through the airport to Amsterdam and Freedom and in and out of a million little fracases across the world.

Roll with it, Sensey. It’s a part of the story now and there’s nothing to be done. I pack up the laptop and my gal grouses at me again. OneForce calls me on it and makes me up as the most insufferable heel if I’m going to bring my laptop to the breakfast table at this fine restaurant we’ll be at and by the time he’s through I may well have no choice but to abandon both it and my plans and roll with it.

Dawn of the Dish-People: Part III

I was about to call out again when my dish-friend’s voice came back. “Whew, sorry about that, we had some problems we had to deal with…”

“What happened?” I asked guiltily.

“We just had this huge pulse strike our magnetic poles, shook us up for a while.”

“What?!?” I asked.

“You ever experience such a thing?”

“Not personally,” I stammered, “actually I don’t really know.” Was I somehow responsible for this? “Everybody okay?”

“Well, we lost a few citizens but we went to a ‘Global Emergency’ and pretty much hunkered down and took care of it. I suppose we have you to thank for not losing more than we did…”

“Uh” was all I could say. My stoned mind raced back to first year physics (switched to English after that one, Christ, the math!?!) wondering if the electromagnetic bond between atoms in the spoon, or my hand or the water had somehow disrupted their infinitely tiny little planetary system. Finally a legitimate excuse for not doing the dishes: untold millions of subatomic lives could be lost, man! Unless of course I’m crazy which is most likely the case.

“What I mean is” Pardblook explained, “that before we discovered your existence, the nations of my planet couldn’t do anything together, fighting over stupid things, in fact the same types of things for millions of years.”

“Sounds like Earth,” I added unconsciously, more to myself than anybody.

“You guys still do the war thing?” he sounded sorry for me. For us.

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t like to think about it, honestly.” I thought about the India/Pakistan conflict, a vague but threatening blob in my mind involving a situation in which nuclear weapon use is being talked about almost as casually as if they were sandwiches. “I guess I feel like a decision is made by very few people and things get all heated up and all of a sudden whole populations of people are killing each other.”

“What do you fight about,” Pardblook asked sadly.

“As far as I can tell, since the beginning of time it’s been about either land and access to resources, or religion.” I responded. Its funny (as in ridiculous) that it breaks down like that, but I still think that covers most wars fairly adequately when you come right down to it. “You know, I had a Prof in university who always urged us to remember that all borders on all maps were first drawn by human hands; that if you look at the Earth from space there are no little squiggly lines all over everything. All you have is a lot of water and a bit of land and the beings that eke out an existence on and in it.”

Pardblook sighed. “I know it all too well. My world suffered the same problems. Right before we established contact with you there was talk of one nation blowing up another before the other bombed them first, that was the thinking, you know? However, when we had unquestionable evidence that we were not alone in the Universe, we realized we could no longer afford to think as a bunch of little squabbling back-yards. Because of you, twenty years ago all of our nations amalgamated into one big one, in which ‘everybody votes, everybody can read and nobody starves’. That was the motto and it turned out to be a pretty damn good one.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. So then we took all the world’s militaries and converted them into Global Repair, Preservation and Emergency Response Systems. We took all that destructive energy and knowledge and used it to build a cannon on one of our moons designed to blow up potentially apocalyptic asteroids. We find it’s a whole lot more productive than killing each other. Saved our asses twice now.”

I remembered hearing about a near-Earth orbit-crossing asteroid not too long ago, one of those cosmic near-miss situations. I also thought about NASA and other worthy organisations getting poor funding while the U.S. has just developed another brand new pilot-less bomber plane. Remote controlled destruction and mayhem, you don’t even have to leave the sanctity of your top-secret, nuclear bomb-proof stronghold these days.

“We discovered we had a lot of resources and man-power when everybody didn’t have to fight each other anymore,” Pardblook continued, jolting me out of my extremely depressing thoughts. “We were able to colonize two of our moons and a few of our surrounding planets within just a few short years. It’s been a renaissance, and this conversation between me and you will be in the history books forever. Many thanks, Remy,” he said somberly, “for everything.”

‘And I’d had nothing to do today,’ I thought to myself. A side thought was pulsing through my brain, which swivelled and focused on it. “Twenty years ago you amalgamated into one nation and it’s because of me? How long have we been having this conversation, Pardblook?”

“Well, twenty-two years I guess now? How long for you?” The joint had made my concept of time a little sketchy but it was either 15 minutes or two hours. I settled on forty-five minutes and said so.

“Coupled with that dish and sink comments you made earlier, our meta-physicists assure me that from your point of view, twenty-three of our years could indeed appear to be forty-five minutes in your time.”

I thought about those pauses Pardblook would take and come back with some kind of kooky vote or something. “Since our conversation began,” Pardblook informed me, “many people have written papers and received awards for discussing the nature of our existences, your world and mine. One of the more popular theories called ‘Cosmic Relativity’ states that an individual’s concept of ‘the Universe’ is relative to that individual’s position in it. Our vast unfathomable Universe is the subatomic world of your dishes. In this system, time also becomes relative to the orbital level of your existence. One orbit for us takes our year, but to you it’s less than a blink of an eye. However,” he continued, “as small as we are to you…”

“I dig,” I said, tripping. “As small as your world is to me, I may be that small compared to the next level of existence,” I finished overtop of his voice. What pride I felt for my hungover mind for arriving at this thought. What great weed. My Sun is someone else’s subatomic particle. “So my vast unfathomable Universe might also be wholly contained in somebody else’s sink too, I guess.”

“Or their shitter,” Pardblook joked. “That’s ‘Cosmic Relativity’.”

“And I ain’t jack-shit!” I blurted. I gotta say I was laughing my ass off.

“I guess,” he continued, “you suffer no transmission lag then?”

“Uh, no. Pretty much instantaneous. What’s the lag on your end?”

“About eighteen months if there are no intervening religious movements or world disasters like that electromagnetic pulse.”

“Religious movements?”

“Oh yeah,” Pardblook sounded tired. “See the religious types see it as some kind of affront that we still talk to you. They try to pull the plug all the time.”

“What for?” I demanded. Religious dish-beings…

“Well they think that your existence is an affront to their belief, since you’re not a god or anything, just an average joe. It means we aren’t the center of creation anymore, hell, we might even be completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We must be if we’re ‘in your dishes’ right?”

“Do you feel that way, Pardblook?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, “but then I think; is it such a bad thing to be insignificant? To be this infinitesimal cog in some broad overarching plan, the scope of which nobody will ever know or even adequately grasp? I find insignificance actually gives me a sense of personal freedom, you know?”

“Yeah I catch your drift there man.” I laughed. “Your story reminded me of something that happened on my planet. This guy Galileo…” I paused for a second. “You ever hear of Galileo, Pardblook?” You’ll most likely never learn for yourself so let me tell you; when you spend a hung-over morning conversing with a brand new civilisation created inadvertently by your own bad housekeeping skills, you learn to check out all the angles. You see a couple new possibilities on the horizon, so to speak.

“Nope,” he responded “buddy of yours?”

“Famous scientist” I responded. I had asked because I was beginning to wonder if I were communicating with the type of parallel Earth universe ideas you used to only come across in the comic books. “See, previous to this Galileo guy, the dominant mode of thought was that our star -we call it the Sun- revolved around our planet – which we call the Earth. So Galileo gets the idea from this other guy that it has to be the other way around, but Galileo actually proves it. But the religious types find this thinking kind of threatening, because if we’re not the center of attention anymore, maybe we’re not the most important thing in the Universe after all, you know? So what happens to him, the Church places him under house arrest till the day he dies! And for what? Something everybody on earth now takes completely for granted as a universal truism! But the kicker,” was I rambling? Screw it. “The kicker is this: he was put under house arrest in like the early 1700s. Well, one day the Church came down off their high horse and admitted they’d kind of shit the bed on the whole house arrest and book banning, so they went and ‘pardoned’ Galileo for his non-crime, do you want to know what year that was? I’ll tell you: 1992! Hah!! That’s three hundred years, man! This comin’ from the guys who are always saying you gotta turn the other cheek! It took ‘em over three hundred years to turn their sanctimonious cheek for one of the greatest minds in history!”

Whew, I was nearly out of breath, and took the last slurp of my coffee. My stomach was threatening a revolt by performing slow somersaults due to its lack of solids to absorb the powerful java. My brain was involved with the dish scenario, so it decided to stick to its guns. “I often wonder what scientific discoveries or advances were sacrificed due to his internment, his lack of freedom. You know? I mean, maybe he could have discovered gravity instead of Kepler and Newton and those guys. Never know I guess.”

I was sort of lost in my thoughts as I imagined this old bearded lonely man, totally discouraged for proving the single most important discovery of his time, arguably ever. I was getting melancholic when Pardblook jolted me from my reveries.

“Well you’ve certainly caused a lot of fuss this time,” Pardblook informed me. “The religious types are outraged at you (and me, by the way) and everybody else is outraged at the religious types. Meanwhile our scientists are very curious about this discovery you mentioned called gravity. Is it something we might find of use? It’s not a weapon or anything is it? We don’t need any new creative ways to kill each other around here, thank-you very much.”

“Gravity?” I asked. What kind of scientists didn’t know what gravity was? They seemed to have no trouble understanding everything else I said and their world seemed quite similar to mine. “You must have a different name for it. It’s the force that holds you to your planet and holds your planet in orbit around a star etc. Your scientists must have a word for that?”

“Aah, of course,” Pardblook responded confidently. “We call that Magnetism. The one force in the Universe from which all things flow…”

“Hold on,” my brow furrowed and my brain chose precisely that moment to softly detach itself from the left side of my skull and back to center again.
Just like that, the backburner thought shifted and blossomed and I remembered where I heard that song. My girlfriend Faith slept over the night before and she set the alarm for herself. I have a clock-radio and choose to use a fuzzy and warm golden oldies station to wake up to instead of that monstrously evil buzzing that some people –savages- use to jar themselves into the world everyday. The girlfriend had set the alarm but left before it went off and it took nearly the full song for me to muster the strength to turn it off. That’s where the People-of-the-dishes had heard ‘Age of Aquarius’. Whew.

I returned to the topic at hand. “We have magnetism here too, but we have another force called gravity. I guess it works for the larger stuff, beyond the atoms and particles and stuff, like when you get to planets and satellites and stars…” how could I simplify this, I wondered. “Matter,” I said finally, “masses.” How could they have gone to other planets and moons and stuff if they didn’t even know what gravity was?

“What do you need another force for?” Pardblook returned. “Our scientists are kind of stumped. You say electromagnetism is responsible for atomic and molecular interactions, but larger items use this ‘gravity?’ No matter how big the mass, it’s still just a collection of atoms, right? Well, a collection of atoms is a collection of magnetic energy...”

“Well yeah,” I began, realizing it had been a while since I’d last thought about any kind of physics whatsoever. “But the interaction between masses is called gravity, I’m pretty sure it’s a different force…”

“Pardon me,” Pardblook interrupted, “but you say that an interaction between masses, between bundles of magnetic energy, is not an magnetic interaction but an entirely different one?!? Are you joking with me, Remy? We can’t afford to joke man! I’m getting old, you know!”

“I’m not joking!” I shouted at my dishes. What did he mean he was getting old? “Look, I’m not a scientist okay? What if I went and got somebody to explain it to you?”

“You could do that?” he asked. “Certainly, our scientists would be very interested to learn of this extra force of yours.”

“It’s not an extra force!” I shouted again, exasperated. To them somehow it was, I realized. “Just hold on,” I urged my subatomic friend. “I’m going to get an expert on this.”

I ran out of the house in my flip plops and bath-robe, with a beer I’d somehow picked up in the process. I jumped into my car, my mind racing like fire. What I clearly needed to do was get a scientist from good old Earth to talk sense to these guys, because I was confusing myself.

Time seemed to be an important concept to keep track of in this case. I realized that by the time I was fifteen minutes away, that my buddy Pardblook at his level of existence would probably have aged considerably in what is such a short span of time at my level of existence! If he was even still alive! What’s a half-hour of my time compared to his world? This would have to be a pretty big transmission lag, wouldn’t it?

I liked Pardblook and realized that I didn’t say goodbye to him. I hoped he would be still alive and if not, then that whoever was voted in as his successor would be just a dude, like him, average joe. Some of that stuff he’d said was actually starting to make sense to me too. Imagine a world so like ours but no more wars! Everybody eats, reads and votes! Explore space! Imagine a universe in which there was just one force that governed all physical phenomena! Kooks these people of the dishes were, but let me tell you, some of that kookiness I could catch hold of and make my own, you know what I’m saying?

Dawn of the Dish-People: Part II

One of the Great Truisms of life is the unequivocal fact that you are some type of nutcase if you believe your dishes are trying to communicate with you. Another Great Truism, though lesser known, is that a bachelor’s kitchen sink is the ideal primordial funk for the genesis of new life. Consider it: What range of random grotesquerie exists within that sink? What grand melange of food particles, booze, and leftover soap-scum from previous, hopelessly abandoned cleaning attempts? What unknowable grunge and undreamt of filth? Perhaps the more important question is precisely how long has this random concoction been left to mix and rot together? Is there really any legitimate way of knowing?

Oh yeah, I know how this all sounds, believe me. I’m only too aware of the clichés about people hearing voices and doing crazy shit, guys in loony bins that wear aluminum foil hats to protect themselves from alien thought-control rays and shit. I know about that stuff. But what can I say, it was happening to me and it felt legit. What would you do?

“You might be interested to know,” the voice returned after another slight delay, “we just had a vote and the majority of us do not believe you are the creator of the Universe. ”

“That's a relief,” I said, getting perplexeder and perplexeder, and still more perplexed. Dig my democratic dishware, voting and shit. “What are you talking about?”

“Okay, it’s like this: We intercepted your radio signals about eleven years ago and discovered that we are not alone in the Universe, that something was transmitting a signal uncommon to our usual cosmic background and that it had a beat. The discovery of the beat led to the discovery of musical tones, and finally our scientists were able to sift through the music and get to what they assumed were words. Once the words were isolated, it was nothing for our linguistics experts to decipher it and learn your language in all its delightful nuances, intricacies and contradictions. We certainly had a laugh about onomatopoeia, let me tell you!” He chuckled, as did I, though I hadn’t the foggiest notion why.

“Some of our brightest mathematicians are developing logarithms” my dishes continued, “that should some day give us the history of your existence within a few decimal places!”

I farted long and gustily. Back-burner thought moves to the front: Where did I hear that damned song? The gray matter that carried the relevant information was still adhered to the side of my cranium. Need liquid. Thought returns to back-burner.

“Eventually our scientists were able to broadcast your message around the world and it was this lofty sort of tune which led some of the religious types to believe it was a message from the creator of all things, and the scientists disagreed, saying that it was another civilization. Quite a caffuffel went on and finally it was decided that the only fair way to communicate with you was to pick a citizen chosen completely at random by our very best computers. So I’m like the middleman, your average joe.”

“No shit,” I responded, “that’s a pretty heavy responsibility.” I smoked a joint in sympathy.

“You’re telling me?” the voice laughed. “So, not a god huh?”

“Only in the sack,” I responded, exhaling long and deep (where had I heard that song, c’mon man!), “No, I’m just your average joe, like you.” Was this really happening? The herb relaxed me a little bit though, took the edge off the weirdness of the situation, funktified it up a little. “Fortified with funktitude” I unwittingly said aloud.

“Pardon?” asked the voice.

“Nothin’,” I responded. “Hey listen, my name is Remy.” Which is my name by the way.

“Pardblook” he said introducing himself. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, stellar” I said. My brain was thinking about a little coffee and my stomach thought it should take priority, having lost on the whole milk-cereal thing. My brain won. Because it calls the shots, baby.

“Hah,” he chuckled politely. Apparently I’d punned in there somewhere? “So where is your planet or system located, Remy?” he continued.

I went about the machinations of coffee preparation, careful to not let any water fall into my suddenly loquacious sink, don’t want to fuck with the mix just yet, you know? I also slugged back a large gulp of water directly from the Britta in the fridge, some of which sloshed over the rim and onto my bare toes. I thought back to my first year astronomy course. “Outer edge of the Milky Way Galaxy.” There’s five years and untold thousands in student loan for you. Bastards’ll never take me alive, I swear it.

“Milky Way huh? Never heard of it,” said Pardblook, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“And you?” I intoned, “are in my kitchen sink.” Pardblook paused again while my coffeemaker gurgled noisily. I never clean it and the coffee is delicious, these are two facts which you may or may not link as cause and effect. Me, I’m indifferent.

“Well,” Pardblook spoke when he returned from wherever, “coupled with that dish comment you made earlier, our meta-physicists assure me that from your point of view we can in fact be considered to be located in your sink. Logical, doesn’t sound very dignified though does it?”

“At least it’s not the shitter,” I added helpfully.

“I suppose. Hold on a second, would you?” he asked. I looked at my coffee-maker which had just stopped gurgling. “I’m not going anywhere” I drawled casually, and I wasn’t. I poured myself a coffee and checked the fridge knowing full well it was completely devoid of meaningful food (possibly a couple more experiments in there, too) or coffee accoutrements. Always have sugar though, I always lift a handful from the coffee joints (napkins too, tons of napkins. Often double as shit-tickets. Love wipin’ my ass with Starbucks man, love it. Do it every day). Without thinking, I grabbed a spoon out of the sink to stir my coffee.

The human brain sometimes becomes so accustomed to performing some actions that it’s like the higher functions just turn themselves off and let auto-pilot take over. That’s my only explanation I have for turning on the faucet of the sink with which I had been having such a nice conversation. “Pardblook?” I called cautiously.

“Hold on Remy,” was all he said, gravely. I waited anxiously and sipped my coffee. I wondered what I’d say to anybody who showed up in my apartment right about then. Anxiously waiting for my dishes to collect themselves. Praying they would be okay. Anxious to resume our conversation. Not bloody much, is my guess.

No Juice Chapter 3: the Dirty Rogue Rules of Existence

I found Frenchie outside a small tent, not too far away from the Warpig. Just far enough he’d probably say. “Some light show, uh?” he asked me. “Worl’ comin’ to and end or what?” I shrugged. What the hell did I know?

I’d instantly liked the fellow, in spite of having been somewhat of a prisoner when I’d first met him and in spite of him having openly taken advantage of the fact. He’d have taken anything he had a use for. This was the way, these days and I’d lost more than a pack of smokes and a battery in the days behind me. Would lose a lot more in the days ahead of me. Or maybe that was all over since I’d become a Dirty Rogue.

A Dirty Rogue. Did things just get better or worse? Am I more likely to survive or die? I’d found the T-Rex and realized the quest had only now, after all these many years, just begun. Frenchie jumped up, gave me a thorough inspection.

“Two arms, two legs and a head?!? Well done, bro!” Frenchie gave a mock roar, his fingers splayed to mimic claws, “T-Rex didn’t want to eat you?”

“Nope.”

“Recruited you, huh?”

“Yup.”

“Stealin’ juice?”

“Looks like. T-Rex says I’m useless as bugger-all til I do.”

“Truer words never spoke,” he pointed at me, serious for probably the first time. “Welcome to my world, Media.” He pulled an honest-to-god actual cigarette and to my amazed eyes, lit it.

“I haven’t seen a cigarette in…” I tried to figure it but couldn’t, “well, a long fuckin’ time!”

He took a deep draw. When was the last time I’d seen a cigarette? “I know,” the cat winked, “I mus’ be the las’ smoker in the worl,’ uh Media?” He probably was. “Da filters I foun’ somewhere in Germany. Leaves ain’t real tobacco but it reminds me of it.”

It’s a deeply ingrained habit, the smokes, making my mouth water just looking at it. Amazing, to have outlasted nearly all our other addictions, all neatly trumped by the biggest, most wide-ranging addiction of all: Juice, or lack thereof, priced all other addictions right out of existence. Like your booze, need your smokes or dig your crack? We’re out. Forever. What are you going to do now?

“Dirty Rogues is a big operation,” he began, jarring me from thoughts, I mean, is he going to let me have a drag off that thing or what? “you wanna know what any big operation is all about?” he quizzed me before answering his own question. “Juice. You know ‘dis, right?” I nodded. It made sense.

“We get it where we can find it. Barter for it when we can, take it when we got to,” he shrugged like what’re you gonna do, y’know? Around us the campsite was coming to life, Rogues shaking sleep out of their eyes, grumbling against the Fates and cursing the T-Rex. Quietly.

“Any military has an infantry, since da dawn of time,” Frenchie continued. “T-Rex sees us as his infantry. Cuz he knows the essential fact ‘a da Oil Wars: putting bullets into somebody is a peripheral task. Done only when you absolutely must so as not to waste any of dat which should not be wasted. On a battlefield full of assholes that are trying to steal from you every bit as much as you are of him? It’s shit like this, make him a great man. I don’t like him, not one bit, but…” he trailed off, maybe enjoying his smoke or maybe just not wanting to talk anymore about the T-Rex. Great man or no, they called him the Thunder Lizard for a reason.

“Anyway, da T-Rex,” Frenchie got himself back into lecture mode, “da war trumpets blasted and everybody else was hyped to fight Eurasia and the Russkies, everybody all full of blood-lust piss and vinegar, comprend?” I understood it. So did any citizen of a Nation at war, which at that phase was a pretty all-encompassing category. “All da udder squadrons and battalions and platoons and everybody couldn’t get out der fas’ enough to kill an’ be killed, belly full of anger an’ a heart full of fear.”

I remembered it well. There was an awful lot of fear going around and who could blame anybody? It turned out that it was a situation where the other guys did something awful to us and they were coming to get us so we had to go over there and fight them kind of deal. And I distinctly remember charges that this faction or other of them ate the children of their enemies. So, there was that. You just have to fight that stuff right?

“Not da T-Rex,” he smiled and nodded like he’d thought of the idea himself, “an’ not da Dirty Rogues neither. Fuck ‘dat. He jus’ kep sendin’ us back and forth to the supply depot, a different Rogue each time, claiming to be from a different division. Said da same thing to each Rogue before he sent ‘em, da same thing I’m gonna tell you when I’m done yammerin’ away at the moonlight.” He took another deep haul. He’s gonna smoke the whole goddamned thing, I remember thinking, right in front of me. Fuck’s sakes.

“First supply clerk dat caught wise to me got smoked wit a can of Campbells Chunky Style, I ‘tink it was, eh?” He laughed as if it were just yesterday he’d brained some poor bastard with a can of soup. “An when T-Rex heard I didn’t pick up dat dented can and put it in my loot-bag with res’ of da loot he kicked my ass all over the campground.” He laughed, “an’ whose to say at this late date dat I didn’t deserve it. Not me, not you and an’ not nobody. I’d murder for a can of Chunky-style.”

“Me too,” I agreed. Why not?

“A few of us caught on right quick to da T-Rex’s thinking. I think me, it’s because I’m French,” he smiled and shrugged -as if to say is it not dat way?- “but da T-Rex had his one good eye on da prize, the only prize der can ever be in dis War. Who can keep da pieces on da board and, more importly dan dat?” He held his finger in the air and waited for me to finish it…

“More importantly than that is who can keep the pieces moving. The longest.” I paused. “Til the end.”

“C’est ca!” he beamed, approving of the answer and giving my head a knock as if to test it’s ripeness, “To the end! You gonna be just fine stealin’ juice, Media.”

“My name’s-” I held out a hand.

“Forget it, whatever it is,” he advised/ordered. Ordered?? “ You Media now," he laughed as if I had no say in that matter. Which I guess I didn’t. “Fuck it. A good name nick-name is not to be wasted!”

Frenchie had packed everything up neatly and I helped him load everything into the back of a pick-up truck with some fairly extensive armor modifications. Others were also loading and a boy of about ten was already in the back, placing each item with maximum efficiency. Turned out making yourself useful was the only way you’d last in this outfit. Not just the T-rex’s orders but the way of life for a Dirty Rogue, a code which every last Rogue held sacred.

“Anyways, you wanna know what he told dem Rogue troopers on their pantry missions, you ready for da rules of your bran’ new existence as one a’da Dirty Rogues?”

“Lay it on me.”

“Make you a deal”

“Fuck! What?”

“Deal is I teach you to steal juice and you make me famous, uh?” We both laughed. It was ridiculous. Famous amongst whom? “You tell da worl’ ‘bout Frenchie and his band of thieves in da tyrannical T-rex’s Dirty Rogues,” he howled aloud like a werewolf, for no reason I could discern. “So when Frenchie he go back to la belle provence all da ladies know his name and abilities, oui?” Werewolvian howl now explained.

“Deal, what’s the goddamned rules?”

“Scrapper!” he bellowed, and the ten year old boy looked up from his task. “What’s the first rule of Resource Acquisition?” Kid frowned like it was below him to be quizzed on something so deeply ingrained. He dropped a rolled-up sleeping bag in a pile and held up a single finger,

“Juice first, Frenchie!”

"And?"

Kid sighed like he had no time for something so obvious: “…food and water second.” “Medicine third. Weaponry fourth.” He held out the required number of fingers for each task. It made perfect sense to me as soon as I heard it and it would rule my days every waking second I was to be a Dirty Rogue.

We rounded the corner and came upon Acquisitions. They looked no different form the rest of the Dirty Rogues: racially and gender mixed, filthy and cold. The only difference from any other squadron in the Dirty Rogues was there were more children in Acquisitions than anywhere else. Frenchie would explain it to me later, that kids were essential in getting into small places, and quietly when they want to. When they were fit to be soldiers they’d fight the good fight like anybody else.

Some of the kids you’d see amongst the platoon were biological children of the Rogues themselves, others kids had been absorbed by the platoon where necessary. Kids made good soldiers, as horrific as that would have sounded Pre Peak. They were naturally adept at it, saw life as a game, didn’t take up much space and didn’t eat as much food. Maybe we’d all burn in hell for exposing them to a life of war, but I had a good idea we were all up shit creek on that front anyway.

Of the twelve gathered before me, five were under the age of thirteen I would have guessed, three boys, two girls. The rest were adults in various stages of preparedness. My first thought upon seeing the assembled group was not the battle-hardened soldiers I knew them to be, but rather a couple of close-kit families on a campsite. One fellow leaned up against his fast-track, playing his guitar for the assembled children who watched him play as if it was magic. Gone were the distractions of the past, the videogames and television. Post Peak, the guitar was making a huge comeback.

“One foot on the brake and one on the gas, hey!” the song was slower than the original I had heard so long ago in Paris, he played it a little moodier. American driving tunes was the hottest nostalgia around, the last big trend to hit the internet before the whole thing just fizzled out. “Post my face wanted dead or alive, take my license and all that jive because I can't drive 55.” He had a strong voice and played the guitar pretty well.

“Frenchie!” exclaimed the youngest of the group, a girl of probably about eight years.

“Ah, bonjour ma petit,” he smiled at her as he swooped her up into his arms. “Comment cava, uh?”

“Bien,” she responded shyly, fearful of me. I was a stranger here, and in this wartorn world a stranger was something to watch carefully.

“I teach dem all French,” Frenchie told me in a prideful aside, putting the girl back to the ground. “Dey say when dey are young is best for people to learn da new language, eh? All the children in Resource Acquisition speak French. Can save your life if you’re ripping off Eurasians.”

“I saw a big, big star last night Frenchie!” the little girl informed him, “the biggest I’ve seen in my whole life! Did you see the big star?” A troubled look washed across his face before he turned back to her.

“Oui, Aurora” he responded to the girl simply, “I saw the big star also.” The star was one thing, the shimmering globule was another.

“Where did it come from,” Aurora persisted in the way that only a child can.

“Je ne c’est pas,” he shrugged at her, “but do you know who might have an idea is our brand new friend Media.”

“Do you know where the big star came from, Mr Media?” Aurora asked me, more comfortable around me after being introduced by Frenchie. The Quebeccer turned and waited for an answer the same as Aurora did. The team around me had started loading their stuff on the back of another modified pick-up.

“Have to be a supernova,” was my guess. I’d taken astronomy in university, the one science credit I needed before moving on with my real passion, journalism. I had enjoyed the course though, marvelling at what we know and don’t know about Life, the Universe and Everything. I was the last generation of Oil-Age students, and I often wondered what the world would look like when and if we could some day return to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake rather than simple survival. The libraries had been sacked and pillaged for heat in the last several winters and the Internet, maybe the last vestige of man’s intellectual accumulation, was lying dormant for the foreseeable nonce, waiting to be switched back on by whoever had the juice to do it. Maybe aliens. Maybe God. Maybe the T-Rex. Maybe nobody.

“What’s a supernova?” Aurora asked me, as Frenchie picked her up and settled her into the back of the pick-up beside the guitar player and a woman who may have been her mother. I hopped in across from her as Frenchie got into the front and gunned the engine.

“A supernova is when a star explodes and dies,” I informed Aurora who had waited patiently for my response. She looked troubled at this, and no wonder.

“That’s sad,” she said. The motherly figure beside her looked a little troubled at me. Though young, Aurora was probably no stranger to death and I think I could have phrased it in a more indelicate manner. I’d been on my own and fighting for my life for so long that social exchanges were still a trifle difficult, especially with kids.

“It’s not really sad, Aurora,” I began explaining, “that star does it all it can then blows apart in a beautiful explosion of light and fury which goes on to make other stars. So that star becomes a bunch of baby stars.” I thought it was something like that, but it had been a long time ago since my uni days, and only since the big black-outs had I been thinking as much about astronomy. I think we all were. You had to.

“Emmett!” Frenchie bellowed from the front, “give us some tunes, for chrissakes!”

The fellow with the guitar, Emmett, started strumming another rocking tune and the children all clapped their hands appreciatively. A few of the adults, myself included, smiled as well, as he sang:

“Here they come! The boys in the bright white sports car! Waving their arms in the air! Who do they think they are? And where did they get that car?”

I’d never heard it before but I liked it.

Infernal Dick: the Road to Pandaemonium

When I opened my eyes again –something I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever do again- I was in the center of a huge, smoking crater of my own making. The ground burned into my back until I could no longer lie there and it burned the bottom of feet when I finally stood. You never get used to the burning down there, your hands, your feet. It always burned you, every step you took and it always hurt like a motherfucker.

I was naked and hairless, my skin cooked meat. Hell, eh? Wasn’t liking it so far. I looked up and saw something falling toward me, had barely moved out of it’s way as it crashed and exploded into the crater –my crater- right where my head would have been had I not gotten up. It was my bottle of Glenfiddich. What a waste of a fine booze. Coulda used a belt of scotch like Custer coulda used a few more guys.

I glanced back up. If the bottle had made it why not Ol’ Faithful? And sure enough there she was, at first just a flash then an object until she fell right where I needed her. I caught her delicately, like she was an egg.

“Lookin’ good, baby,” I whistled. She looked too good, truth be told. If the heat was enough to turn my fine belt buckle into molten slag it was more than enough to explode bullets. But Ol’ Faithful had been restored to her previous state of grace, missing one bullet which was no doubt still lodged somewhere in my frontal lobe. I still had shrapnel sticking out of my head from when she let me down, but Ol’ Faithful herself was right as rain and good to go as ever. Made me wonder if that’s how some things work down here or if maybe I had an ally in all this, a benefactor with another agenda that would be revealed to me at the right time, like when the trail gets hot. Or hotter. You want to watch out for gifts from mysterious benefactors when you’re on a real mind-bender of a case. No free lunches, right? Right.

But can Ol’ Faithful kill somebody who’s already dead? More importantly, could she kill the bastard who sent me here? My instincts told me yes. They also told me it would be sooner rather than later. In this business good instincts is the difference between life and death and I listen to mine like they were the Buddha. Just because I was dead didn’t mean I was going to give up any of my old habits, bad or good.

I climbed out of my crater, each handful of Hell an agony. But I had become a man on a mission again, like I was for the Jade Seal. I could feel it in me. A righteousness that dared all obstacle, feared no authority and demanded Truth. I vowed with each agonizing handful that I would use my pain to fuel the fire, my own personal fire. I was just gonna save it all up and when I was in the position to, I meant to give it to any and all persons involved with my death and the death of Margie.

I looked at the firey hole from whence I’d climbed, and the cracks that had splintered out around it. I don’t know if I dented hell or not but I damned sure left my mark, which was a good start. I like to make a good impression. With flames all around me I took my first painful steps, gradually picking up a respectful pace as my mind turned to the situation. Old habits died harder than me, I guess, because just like that I was on another case, and not a pro bono deal either. Somebody was going to pay handsomely for Margie and me, one way or another.

*

Hell, so you know, is a bizarre and garish nightmare, like some junkie’s twisted dream of Las Vegas at the end of days fused with Jack the Ripper’s London. The whole thing is aflame and yet, strangely dark. As many strange creatures lurked down cavernous alleyways. It is a vast and sprawling Metropolis, and the only cars are old-school carriages, like the kind that would be pulled by horses in the old days. Of course these were pulled by some of those same tortured human souls I’d seen skewered on my way down here.

“Hey, move it pal!” a voice warned me from behind. I whirled and saw one of these carriages boring down upon me. I stepped aside. There were nine souls, grey-haired and wearing power-suits moving faster than they could ever have in their mortal lives, pulling aong behind them a huge, nightmarish wagon. Up top sat a large black horse and an even larger demon howled and laughed as he sadistically whipped the nine souls. I started a light jog to keep up with the lead sled-soul who had warned me out of the way..

“Say, buddy,” I asked him, “whattaya know about a room 210?”

“Piss off!” he hissed. He was huffing and puffing, his face a roasted pork.

“No need to be rude,” I advised him. And there wasn’t. He wasn’t pulling my carriage around, was he?

“Piss off before he-“ and just like that he was interrupted by a sharp crack and a burning whip lashed across his back. My new friend screeched in agony, the flesh on his back ripped open and burning from the lash. He never altered his speed for even a second, I noticed. I looked over at the Demon who’d lashed him. Red, horns, tail, sure, but not my demon.

“Whattayou put up with this for?” I asked the soul, genuinely curious, “whattathey do to you to make you pull their fat red asses around for them?”

“PISS OFF!” he shouted at me. There was a sharp crack again and he cringed in anticipation, but the lash was not for him It was for me. It struck me in my left shoulder and hurt like a sonofabitch. I looked at my shoulder where the flesh was flayed open and aflame, patted it out and wheeled on my aggressor.

He was a big, fat malevolent prick and his lash was up and ready to strike me again. To hell with that. As his whip lashed out towards me I held up ‘Ol Faithful, counting on her cold blue steel to counter the flame. The lash whipped around her handle and held fast, so I grabbed it with both hands, ignoring the pain and yanked as hard as I could, upending the fat prick onto the ground. I lost a finger in the bargain, but it was somewhat gratifying to watch him wallow like the pig he was. For maybe a second.

“What the…” was all he managed to get out before I was on him. By the time the coach rolled to a halt I had the demon’s own whip wrapped tightly around his neck and gave it a tug to let him know I wasn’t in a cute mood. Which I wasn’t. You ever lose a finger?!? It fucking hurts, man! Even when your dead!

“210,” I spoke into his ear, softly. Gently, almost. Just to fuck with him. I’d of course done this before, a few times.

“What?” he grunted, so I tightened my grip.

“Room 210,” I repeated, “I have a date with the Devil.”

“Room 210,” he gasped, “right, sure, no problem.” I loosened my grip, a little bit. “It’s in Pandaemonium, naturally! Your new around here, ain’t you buddy?”

“Yup. How do I get in to this Pandaemonium?”

“Oh, certainly, that’s easy,” he responded helpfully, “mortal souls are dropped from above by the Hell-Harpies into the very pit of Hell, where they’re sorted and placed and put to good use. Actually kind of surprising they didn’t do that with you…say, why don’t we just whistle up the Malebranche for you? They’ll get you sorted.”

“Mala-nothing,” I responded, “I’m not getting dropped into anymore pits. I’m going in the front door.”

He chuckled as if that were the craziest thing he’d ever heard, until I tightened up again. “Thing is,” he groaned, “only a demon anointed by the dark master himself may gain entry to Pandaemonium.”

“You ever get anointed by the dark master himself?” I asked him.

“But of course!” he sniffed, a little bit insulted.

“Good.”

I dragged the over-sized demon head over to the front of the carriage and set it down for a second in front of the Suits, who stared in disbelief even as they tried to catch their breath. I walked up to the fellow who I’d spoken with before.

“Pandaemonium.”

“That way,” they all pointed, huffing and puffing, a few had begun straightening their ties. “Can’t miss it.”

Of course. It was like once I saw it amongst the dizzying madness of the place I would never unsee it again. Of all the towers and structures, the largest was of course Pandaemonium, a huge baroque nightmare and a hideous affront to all that was good. It was garish, ridiculous, ugly and terrible at the same time. Reminded me a little bit of a bar I’d went to in Winnipeg, once.

I walked off. Naked and charred. Demon-head in tow. Ol’ Faithful hanging loosely from my pinky-less left hand. Pandaemonium. I remember wondering if they had any good booze. I was developing a powerful thirst.

No Juice: The Belly of the Beast

CHAPTER TWO

What the commander had referred to as his Rover was this huge fusion of trailer and tank. His command post was a heavily fortified trailer with a monster tank growing up around it. The ‘War-Pig’ was everything that T-Rex was in appearance: a weathered and grotesque-looking combination of stealth, tactic and violence, a looming danger and an affront to the gods. Rumor had it the thing could move like hell-fire, too.

I climbed up a ladder over the huge, man-sized tread of the beast, opened the lid and dropped into its belly. A candle burned slowly inside and the commander sat at his desk, itself a makeshift deal of two sawhorses and somebody’s front door. A candle sat on it and flickered shadows across the ceiling.

“I don’t have my camera,” I said as I settled to the chair he’d left me at the far end of the table from him. “Carmelita has it I guess. I’ve hoarded the battery on it for three years, fought for it with my life at times. Killed for it in Ireland.”

“We need the juice,” his voice rumbled thought the dark interior of the war wagon, “and we’re taking it.”

I hadn’t anticipated this, really. “You don’t understand…” I stammered. To have gone through all this and they were just going to jury-rig it into something else. “But, what about posterity?”

T-Rex laughed like it hurt him to do it. “I keep you on because the Great Oil Wars are what’s going to end up defining us as human beings, for good or ill. Nature’s great experiment with life and intelligence comes to a head when this war does. I keep you here because unlike 100% of every rag-tag collection that still claims to be a fighting force out there, we, the Dirty Rogues are still capable of accomplishing important objectives, do you understand me?”

“Like?” I asked. The pencils were useless without my pad of paper, which, truth be told, were down to the last three sheets anyways.

“What news have you of the last Nexus?” he interrupted my train of thought like a jagged blade. Supposedly Eurasia had created three Nexus class Megatankers, gargantuan beasts that roved the battlefields and stocked up their armies just as ours choke on fumes and barely adequate field moderations. That was the shape of this war, thought by many to be Man’s last; those that had the fuel to keep on going would be the champs and the others would amount to little more than decaying dinosaurs for future generations, if any, to marvel at. Historical curiosities in an earth turned museum/junkyard.

The three megatankers were spoke of as myth on the battlefields, and apparently all sides had heard tell of them. Whose the damned thing had been in the first place depended on the telling. The Asians, the Eurasians, the Continental Americas or the Russians took turns taking credit for them and then would turn around and blame it with derision on the others. It was a dubious distinction to be the creator of those crafts, for they were a feat in modern technology, carrying enough fuel that any force needed but not travelling on said fuels. Some said it was solar and turbine powered. Others said it was purely atomic. What made the distinction dubious was that whoever made the damned things supposedly lost them somewhere in the battlefield, lost in a bureaucratic affair or, as is so often the case in this war, they’d gotten stolen then lost.

Supposedly, of the original three, one was blown up by the Asians, who were about to lose it and didn’t want it to exchange hands. The second was believed to have been found by C.A. forces, dry as a midsummer Texas day. The third was rumoured to be still at large, and at this late stage in the game, a powerful chip on a battlefield full of discarded and decaying hulks. That’s if they’d ever even existed at all.

“A rumour,” I answered him, “a myth.”

“I asked what news you had of it, not your opinion!” He banged his fist on the table, shaking the candle between us. His one good eye blazed angrily at me.

“If it ever existed they haven’t found it yet,” I answered him to the best of my ability, “at least as far as I know.” He looked excited at this.

“And its location, I mean generally, any word on it?”

“Most people agree it’d have to be in the middle east somewhere,” I began, “if the thing has actually been lost.”

“And if it hasn’t been lost?” he asked me, “where then?”

“Well, others think it has been taken, flown back and dropped off to whoever made the thing, to fuel the defence against its own populace.”

“Mount up, you Dirty Rogues!” the shouting voice of Carmelita drifted through the hatch. “We leave tonight!” If she was still reticent about her troops being pushed yet further by the Thunder Lizard, her voice didn’t give it away.

“Ah yes,” T-Rex frowned, “the homefront. How is it out there? Gone to total shit yet?”

“Pretty fucked up,” I responded. If he asked me about the state of the Continental Americas as a nation right now, I wouldn’t know where to begin. When I’d left ten years ago, only the very rich and very stupid were still driving cars, rich because you had to be to get even a spritz of gas for your tank, stupid because it made you a target. And the roads were getting all thrashed anyways.

“It’s getting ugly,” I admitted. “Civil unrest,” I continued, “starvation and disease is becoming a factor on the populace as well. Power’s off more often than on.” That was what finally pulled the plug on Big Media, and with nobody left to proclaim the validity of war, the people had forgotten the evershifting face of evil foreign powers or terrorist bands that had instilled within them such all-encompassing fear for so long and awoke an anger at the powers that be on a more local scale. Can’t perpetuate fear with no juice.

“No juice,” he murmured to himself, then shouted out the hatch. “Number One!” he called out to his next in rank, before turning to me. “Now, you listen to me: what you’ve heard about the Americas, that’s the rumor. That’s the myth. And if I catch wind of you mentioning any of that to any of my troops and I’ll put one of my last bullets into the middle of your brain. My Fighting Rogues don’t need to question what they’re fighting for, or what’s going to be waiting for them when and if they ever get back, you understand me? They are alive today because they believe we can win this war.”

“Get up you filth-ridden dogs!” Thompsen called out into the night, “We’re charged and honor bound to fight the good fight in other climes, not count sheep in the comfort in the warm musk of our mother’s teats! Arise you disgusting savages, for tomorrow is today, right now in fact, and it has been for a long fucking time!”

I could hear the tread of army boots up the side of tank and quickly asked the only interview question I would get in with the platoon leader that particular day. “Can we win this war, d’you think? Is there anything to win?”

“Don’t waste my time!” he shouted angrily as Carmelita’s head appeared upside down. It was in an order to her that I would hear my fate over the next weeks and months. “Media-geek stays. He can interview who he wants as long as he carries his own weight. He learns the subtle art of nicking juice and gets on a siphon team as quick as possible. Give the battery to techie and see what he can use it for.” With each command, Carmelita nodded, and he dismissed her before turning back to me.

“Media is your hobby now. Soldiery is your life. You can’t learn to steal juice you’re dead to me,” he informed me, “and to you. Posterity or no.” With that he rolled out a map on his table and began studying it, and I gathered I was to go. I climbed up and out eh belly of the beast and hopped off the tread.

I glanced at that unnaturally big star, or where the big star ought to have been. I became aware of soft under-humming whisper that was around me and for awhile I was unable to distinguish it from the strange thing that was happening to our stars, our sky. The underhum was the sound of the camp’s voices quietly whispering amongst themselves about what we were all looking at. Where the giant star had been was now a shimmering field that appeared to make the stars behind it move and shudder. It was if some giant shimmering glob was between me and all the stars I’d ever seen. And the super star of how ever many hours ago, was breaking into smaller pieces in front of my very eyes.

*

The ejection of soupy plasma from the exploding black hole races out equally in all directions, faster even than light, though some creatures believed such a thing must be impossible, having only the most rudimentary of ideas about what was really out there, what it was all made of or how any of it actually worked. The plasma between the exploded black hole and a viewer on a nearby spinning planet creates a blurring and shaking effect, the after-image of the same type of explosion that has created and destroyed everything that ever was.

Infernal Dick: Durante's Fall

It’s distressing to know that you’re dying, all the more so when you realize you’re going to the wrong after-party.

I fell. For a long time. Days? Nights? Who could tell? Why Hell and why me? I’d never been an angel; I cursed a lot and drank even more and sure, I’d certainly skinned more than my fair share of broads but had I ever transgressed anything that would lead me to the realm of eternal damnation and suffering? Fuck that! If anything, I’d always felt as kind of a guardian for those around me that were unable to do what had to be done to defend themselves, and I’d taken no small number of pro bono cases when I felt my help was in need but couldn’t be afforded. So what the hell was I doing going to Hell? And murdered by a demon, no less! What kind of shot at life was that?

I was falling towards a huge glowing red haze and it was when I first noticed the haze was actually a sprawling metropolis with each building ablaze that my hair and eyebrows first singed then burst aflame. I stopped trying to put out the fire with my hands when I realized that they too were blazing hot and I was only making it worse. I mourned my hair for about a second –hey, I’d managed to keep a full head of hair in spite the ravages of time and a hard life- then turned my mind to the situation. That’s one thing about being not just a detective but a great one: you gotta roll with the punches and work on what’s comin’ at you next.

So, why does a demon travel to the living world to kill little ol’ me? I had to go on the assumption that, strange as it sounded, my murder wasn’t personal. Which meant it was vocational. Old Man Weatherington was pretty connected, but nobody’s that connected and if the Santorelli gang had the pull to send a full-fledged devil from hell after me they would have done it a long time ago.

I was puzzling over that when a hoard of winged demons circled towards me, cackling viciously with pitchforks a’waving. I could see another poor soul already skewered on the end of one of these bastard’s forks, crying and moaning and strange as it may seem, I hated him more than I hated the demon. I vowed they wouldn’t find such an easy ke-bob in this soul and readied myself.

Fights aren’t like in the movies with those big, gorgeous roundhouse swings all the time. Fights are fast. Fights are dirty. You ever find yourself in a fight, what I’ve found is the faster guy generally wins, every time. You get in more shots and more accurately and he’s lyin’ on the ground and not you, which is a good thing. Because then you can start kicking him. Hey, I told you I’m no angel!

Now, if you ever have the misfortune of being unarmed against more than one armed attacker it’s of quintessential importance that you make an example of the first one, and you want to take his weapon away from him. Which I did.

I knew he was going to try to spear me like his buddy did the other ass-soul and when he did I grabbed the shaft and twisted it from his grip, just like I did former Golden Gloves boxer turned bodyguard for scumbags “Knuckles” Kazlowski when he came at me with that mop handle, and I took all his momentum and swung him behind me. Old Knuckles had crashed unconscious into the trophy case where Weatherington had cleverly hidden the Jade Seal, but I wouldn’t be so lucky with this demon. Or his buddies. But I’d never been real lucky anyways. Just ready.

The next one that came in was entirely unprepared for me, which is why I was able to jab him right in the face. Hit ‘em where it hurts, that’s always been my motto and it’s served me damned well over the years. His shriek was girlish and he spiraled harmlessly away from me and I laughed the first laugh since, well, my death, I guess. But there were so many more coming, like hoards, one would say.

I figured if I was going to Hell because of some asshole demon I’d make the whole shit-heap pay. For me and for Margie. I twisted my body so I was falling head first, tucked my arms at my side and my legs together so my body was like a knife. Or a missile.

I blew through the hoard like a hot knife through butter as my body picked up tremendous speed. I was screaming, laughing, burning, insane as right near the end I tucked my body into a cannonball. It’s an odd plan, setting out to put a dent into Hell, but a good dick has always has a plan.

DAWN of the DISH-PEOPLE (part I)

Dawn of the Dish-people


Bath-robe and flip-flops, hung to the gills at three in the afternoon on a week-day. What a slob! What a headache. Some of the functions of my brain had just turned on, like the first guys on shift, the keeners. Stomach and thought alarms had rung off in my throat and stomach and I coasted to the kitchen on some distant and shrouded archetypal impulse power.

That particular morning (and I acknowledge that my definition of morning is vastly different from the contemporary) I walked slowly and painfully to the fridge, my sustained sluggishness having had lost out to the very driest of mouths. I chugged back the last mouthful of milk in the fridge, knowing full well that my stomach would soon crave cereal and give me grief for this decision.

Mental note: still have two beers left. Good deal.

It was right after I’d tossed the big, plastic milk container carelessly behind me in the rough vicinity of the garbage pile in the corner when the tiniest piercing noise appeared, just barely within the range of my hearing. It was enough to pierce my sensitive brain -currently so dehydrated that it had adhered itself entirely to the left side of my skull, playing hell with my equilibrium- and enough that hurting as I was, I knew I had to hunt down the source of that sound and extinguish it at all costs.

Such a tiny sound is difficult to track down, but eventually I tracked it to the worst of places, the vilest most disgusting place in my whole apartment. My kitchen sink and the dishes therein had been festering and coagulating for so long that I’d actually entered a whole new level of irresponsibility, actually buying paper-plates instead of just washing the damned things. Previously I had only washed what few dishes I needed for each meal, however, the pile was such that washing anything now was pure folly.

“This is 2006!” I had exclaimed aloud to my apartment one day not too long ago, “why should I sully myself with this heinous clutter? Paper plates is the answer!” So off I went to the corner store congratulating myself for the idea and humanity in general for the invention, and bought a pack of 200, most of which are now in the garbage pile in the corner amidst an omnipresent haze of fruit-flies that I fire-bomb biweekly. I am a bachelor and remain defiantly unshamed about any of this.

So anywho, there I stood, perplexed, having determined after an extensive auditory search that the noise was emanating from somewhere within that nasty dish-pile. This didn’t make a lick of sense, but I strained my ears anyway. It was not just a hum but some light melody drifting barely beyond recognition.

The human brain is complex and intricate, able to do several different things at the same time. This was one of those instances, as my brain simultaneously expounded on the true wonder of the moment (what the fuck!?!), received ultimately unanswerable signals from my stomach declaring it to be empty (need cereal, no milk left), identified the melody that I was hearing ("the Age of Aquarius," by the Mamas and the Papas, and instantly wrote the whole thing off as impossible and somewhat disturbing so therefore unworthy of anymore of my time (isn’t there a football game on?). I shuffled off, rubbing my temples, entirely unaware of the complex mental gymnastics that had just happened, and on a hung-over day to boot.

Because the human brain is so complex and intricate, mine eventually came around again to the strange phenomena that I couldn’t have just witnessed. I turned off the World Cup prelims (Ireland was getting their asses handed to them anyway) and all other extraneous noise sources. I approached the sink and as I did, well, there it was again: “Aquaaaaarius, A-quar-i-us, bonnanannanana, bonanananana…” but it was really fast like the Chipmunks used to do it back when white paint was cheap.

“What the Christ?” I asked aloud. Aquarius stopped at that time (where had I heard that song before?) and then the dishes actually spoke to me for the first time ever.

“WhattheChrist?” a tiny voice, or voices, responded. “Uh,” I began, unsure how one actually addresses suddenly animate cutlery and chinaware, “hello?”

“Hello!” the voices returned, and my dishes actually cheered. I admit to being thoroughly creeped out about then. If my mouth were open any further I’m sure the top of my head would have fallen off. Save me money on haircuts.

“Listen, just what the hell is going on here?” I asked, feeling ridiculous, which was a little better than thoroughly creeped out.

“I’m afraid I don’t get your meaning,” a single tiny voice responded to me, ultra-fast. “We certainly don’t mean to disturb you…” Was I imagining that this response was a little bit slower this time? And where had I heard Age of Aquarius, was it last night? Who plays that damned song these days anyways?

“To disturb me?!?” I blurted out wondrously. “Jesus-jumped-up-Christ in a sidecar!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite get your meaning, sir. Should I call you sir or…?” Whoever it was let the sentence hang.

“What, do you want my name or something?” I asked incredulously, “you’re my dishes for Christ’s sakes!”

There was a pause then, and I took that time to absently scratch my head and my nuts at the same time.

“Hello?” I asked again, thinking I must have just imagined this wacky phenomenon. I remembered this urban legend about a guy who’d had an acid party at his house, and had unwittingly lost one of these tabs of acid in his carpet, only to have stepped on it some eight months later! As the legend goes, this poor bastard had just stepped out of the shower and got all prepped and prissied for a job interview, drives off in his car, gets to the place and starts peaking in the waiting room. A total-surprise, hallucinogenic time-bomb just implodes his day. Was I in for some kind of hellish psychadelic mind-trip? “What the hell,” I thought, “didn't have a whole lot on the agenda today anyways.”

“Sorry about that,” came the voice, “I was just consulting our meta-physicists about that dishes thing. They assure me that from your point of view we can in fact be considered your dishes.”

“Well that’s a relief now isn’t it?” I responded peevishly. “Of course you are! What the hell else could you be? From your point of view?”

“Well we might just be a civilization capable of recognizing and responding to the signals of another life-form,” the voice responded somewhat haughtily, “that’s what the hell else we could be, for one thing!”

End Part One

Bats Ablaze 2 of 2

“I’m not done with you yet,” come a voice from above. I look up and there’s Bats on top of the entrance.

He gracefully leaps down, an eerie silence as his feet touch ground. We walk back to where we were and Bats watches the alley again. “So I learn that you’re not only a student, but a good one,” he continues as if he had never left. “I guess you could say I made you my little hobby for the last couple of weeks, Hugo. I disguised myself as a guidance councellor and got a hold of your files at school, some of your exams and essays…” We hear sirens in the distance and Bats checks a watch hidden in those big crazy gloves of his. He looks up at me. “I really enjoyed one of your political-science papers. What was it? ‘Nationalism Equals War: Toward a New Global Revolution?’”

“'Global Renaissance', but yeah,” I chuckle, remembering that paper. “I took a chance on that one. Some teacher’s won’t let you write like that.” Bats doesn’t say anything and I remember where I am. A couple of cop-cars pull up to the alley way and they get out and look at the tied-up thugs. Like a total suicidal madman, Bats just leaps off the roof, from right beside me. I get all woozy and dizzy just watching him, and have to grab the ledge for support. But he just glides down there, his cape acting like a glider and a parachute at the same time. He says a couple words to the cops before launching another tether-line and peeling off like he did the last time. At least this time I know he’s coming back, I just don’t know from what direction. Dude isn’t going to surprise me again, I think, looking towards the entrance that he appeared from last time.

“So,” he says, from behind me, creeping me out again, “I go to your house and sure enough, you have a huge crop growing in your basement. I looked at how you set it up. Complex system, unlike any I’ve seen. Your design, yes?”

I nod my head and try not to beam with pride. This system is of my own design and the crops are absolutely huge, and rich with big fat buds. If marijuana were legal I would patent this system and retire from even this casual form of work.

“I investigate some of your things. You read the newspaper every day-”

“So I like to be informed about what’s going on, so what?”

“I look at your bookshelf, in your files, your journal…” he continues as if he doesn’t even hear me and for a few reckless seconds I feel like hitting him again. Who is this guy to invade my life, the sanctity of my home, read my stuff? Fortunately, that feeling passes as a dull throb in my wrist reminds me of what happened the last time.

Instead I ask him a question. “So, what’s the point Bats, huh?”

“My point,” he says looking up at me, “is that you are well-read, an independent and articulate thinker and writer and…”

“And…” I’m dumbfounded. What the hell does this guy want from me? Is he going to beat me up, pull some kind of Clockwork Orange bullshit on me or not?

“And in spite of myself I started to like the person that you are,” his shoulders hunched. “I started thinking, well, no wonder you’re friends with a guy like Jacob Hannah. But you’re a CRIMINAL!” his eyes narrow and his fists clench, “just another filthy criminal puke living off the suffering of-”

“Stop,” I urge, gently considering the circumstances. “Just stop.”

“But you sell drugs! ”

"I sell herb. Not heroin, not coke. The stuff I grow in my house is the same stuff that grows naturally all over the world, you get that? Naturally, as in: grows whether we're here to smoke it or pass judgement on it or not.”

"It's illegal!" he shouts at me, exasperated.

"'It is the just man who disobeys the unjust law,'" I respond. Not my own words, of course..

"Thomas Aquinas," Bats names the author miserably, revealing himself to me as an educated man.

"Besides," I press, "how illegal is it? I mean do you hop into your Bat-jet to apprehend jay-walkers and people who rip the little tags off their mattresses? Goddamned stuff was just legalized in Canada, you know?" I'm laughing in spite of the situation. "And here in Gotham, I don't know if you know but the cops are sort of turning a blind eye on it these days. Not worth the hassle, too many cases getting thrown out of court by too many judges who just can’t be bothered with it…"

"Yeah," Bats sighs resignedly, his broad shoulders slump as he leans against a roof-top gargoyle. "I know. I read the papers too, get all the scientific data on it…"

"And it's not too bad, right? I mean, it's smoke in your lungs, so that's never that good for you, but beyond that…" was I really having this conversation? With Bats?

"What about the gateway stuff, you know, joints lead to lines, then needles and you’re an addict! You ever see a hardcore heroin junky before, Jueroux? What about a crack-baby?" he paces to the edge of the rooftop. I’m pretty sure that if he jumps off again I'm gonna ralph.

"You ever see a neighborhood pub?" I respond quickly, "alcohol's a drug." I've had this argument before with my Dad, so I'm ready for it. "What about a 'Starbucks'? Caffeine is a drug. I bet every crack-head, heroin cokehead junky you've ever met has also drank a coffee or a beer. Probably smoked more than a couple cigarettes too."

"It's not the same thing!" Bats vehemently complains.

"Why not? Look, I thought about all that gateway stuff going into this, you know, growing and selling?" Bats nods his head, listening while surveying his city. Our city. "Thing is, some people are going to drink, smoke and fuck whatever they can get their hands on. Some people are just waiting to become addicts, because their lives are totally empty even before they ever sniff their glue, drop their acid or snort their cocaine. Or else their just total lemming types that do whatever somebody else tells them to do. Either way, they’re going to find the hard stuff whether there's any herb around or not."

“And the proof is in the pudding, Bats! Look at me, look at Jacob!” I urged him. “You think Jacob has time for a little crack habit? You think I’m going to wind up in that alley down there with a needle in my arm because I dig the herbage? Not bloody likely!” Believe it or not, Bats starts nodding his head in agreement. Maybe I’ve talked my way out of a beating after all. Nobody will believe this story, nobody.

“You’ve given me something to think about,” says Bats over his shoulder as he fires off another tetherline to god-knows-where. He starts running to the edge of the building as I realize he’s taking off again.

“Hey Bats!” I shout at him, “wait, man!” His feet start shuffling through the gravel, the first time I’ve heard him make a noise on this rooftop as he lurches to a stop. He doesn’t ask what I want, he just turns and tilts his head slightly to the left, a master at non-verbal communication when necessary. He waits as I consider the sagacity, nay, the sheer insanity of what I’m about to offer him.

“Look,” I begin uncertainly, “we can debate the positives and negatives all night up here and you can go home and research all this as long as you want, but you still won’t really know what it is we’re dealing with. You won’t know why intelligent people like Jacob Hannah and I smoke this stuff, right? I mean obviously there has to be some merit to it…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bats shrugs me off. “Are you actually suggesting…”

I press at my peril. “Bats,” I begin, “you exhaustively investigated me and you brought me up here to talk about this stuff. So here we are, and if you want me to ask the question, I’ll ask it.”

Here goes. Many instances of your life you have to either roll the dice and let ‘er buck or pack it up and go home. I go into my left pocket and pull out the P.R.Js, selecting a particularly fat one and putting the rest back in my pocket. I pull out my lighter and light this bad-boy, taking a great, deep inhale, all the while noting his eyes widen as if the fucker just can’t believe I’m doing this right in front of him, which makes two of us.

“So, Batty …” I say amidst a voluminous cloud of smoke, “smoke a fatty?” I hold my breath and brace myself.

Fin