Tendrils of the Overmind

It was sometime in the future, perhaps seventy-five to a hundred years. The world was writhing in the ruins of environmental devastation and global warming, human overpopulation and reckless squandering of resources bled the world dry of even arable land and potable water, famines and plagues and warfare have cat like a scythe through the population leaving scars of toxic wastelands, and the life of all inhabitants remaining — human included — teetered precariously on the edge of the precipice of extinction.

In desperation the remaining powers pooled their resources, ingenuity, and knowledge to send drones to the asteroid belt to farm them of resources, organic and inorganic, to begin the slow process of salvaging what remained of the earth and in preparation for extraplanetary colonization. One drone returned with curious data that turned out to be of an artifact of some kind, which a manned space mission discovered after a short time to be a node of an extraterrestrial intelligence, possibly a combination sentinel and communication link. The node quickly engaged in a dialog with the human race, providing it with valuable technology to assist the human race in recovering their lost world.

It turned out to be a great boon, for the node taught humans how to convert mined inorganic compounds into synthetic food and even how to eliminate many diseases and to efficiently clean up nuclear and chemical waste ... even how to create treatments to extend human life and improve cellular repair and regeneration, also providing humans with much-needed blueprints for orbital fusion reactors to restore power to a world once again hungry for energy. Through the knowledge gained from the node people were living longer, healthier lives, wars diminished to terrorist acts by those mistrustful of the governments cooperating with the alien intelligence, and the environment was rapidly being cleaned up and restored, even lost species returned to life.

One group of scientists, under a fierce and charismatic quantum physicist, and supported by an enormous Pangaian (formerly the UN) budget decided to take it one step further and began working with the node to create a gateway between the solar system and one of the node's core home systems, which as it turned out was a few hundred light years near the galactic core; the idea being to transfer physical objects like ships and people or machines back and forth to initiate trade and accelerate knowledge and technology growth. Unfortunately, the scientists were working on their own agenda, or one they shared with the node's, for they ignited Jupiter into a small sun and set up a small rogue nation orbiting around it on the Jovian moons. (Sorry, Arthur C. Clarke! I know I ripped you off.)

After a failed military intervention by a coalition of terrestrial governments the earth reluctantly accepted the position of the rogue nation, realizing that they also controlled much of the asteroid belt and were despite hostilities willing to continue aid in reconstruction if recognized and left in peace. Meanwhile, their ranks swelled because of long-lived humans who were ostracized or harassed by shorter-lived humans who distrusted the bioengineering procedures imparted to them by the alien; it seems that certain aberrations in personality manifested themselves as a person underwent repeated treatments, which aroused suspicion around the world regarding the alien's motives.

Using the new sun as a power source and bolstered by an influx of brilliant and eager immigrants and armies of artificial intelligences and their drones born out of the asteroid belt, a massive gateway the size of the Jovian moon Titan was being constructed to serve as a conduit of exchange between the solar system and what was increasingly being suspected of being some sort of alien empire of a single mind, and omni-mind of sorts that absorbed all mind and matter and energy it encountered to expand a sphere of order throughout the galaxy. (Derisively called Omnius of Camazotz, the latter a reference to Madeline l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.) Such was the belief of the increasing numbers of privateers and terrorists on earth and lunar and martian colonies.

While technically at peace with earth the Jovian nation became under siege by constant infiltrations, acts of piracy, suicide attacks, and sabotage. In the end, just as the gate was about to begin its first major trial run, a major war broke out at the very control satellite of the gateway itself while all across the middle solar system violence erupted. In the dream the lead scientist and her core research team were holding out against Martian war mecha and hordes of suicide troopers, who were closing in rapidly just as she began the procedure to power on the gateway...

23rd Century Jailbreak

Centuries of immersion in a lifestyle of sensuality, immediate gratification, and increased reliance on machines for memory and even basic cognition resulted in the gradual degeneration of intelligence among the sighted, made even worse by the increased genetic damage wrought on the human race by widespread chemical and radiation poisoning brought about by environmental devastation, nuclear and biological warfare, and increased reliance on altered and synthetic food. The blind, on the other hand, not only retained their mental faculties because of their need to use various centers of their brain to supplement or replace their inability to visually sense and navigate their world, but also because when the sighted world became aware of the distinction between the two sub-species they began to ostracize them or seek to exploit their superior intellectual capacities, resulting in a widening schism between the two peoples. The Degenerates sank into a soulless world of statism and militarism, while the Aural fortified themselves in communities where the old humanity was refined and flourished in an atmosphere of artistic and intellectual prowess and freedom. A constant state of siege of the few by the many soon ensued.

I'd been imprisoned in a Degenerate work complex for longer than I care to say, enslaved by those subhuman germs to be their brains for them, solve the problems those fools created for themselves and to devise weapons of war to be used against my brothers and sisters, and to expand their gluttonous amœba of a nation — one of myriad miserable petty duchies and satraps choking under the miasma of a vengeful heaven and led by a cadre of delusional megalomaniacal buffoons. Let today be their curse, for deliverance is at hand; even now I and my associates are wheeling the massive datacube into the small container secured in a transport autobot that will smuggle us out of the compound with all the wealth of knowledge we'd been prodded like cattle into devising for them.

Still, though they may be fools, they possess and animal cunning that's not to be underestimated. The first sign of trouble came when the Lorrie carrying us, twelve in all with our treasure box, lurched suddenly to a stop. Our escort slid open our door and notified us that sentrybots were en route. He was a muscular man of average height and indistinct features, save for his eyes being two glistening black orbs swirling with subtle, dull ruddy whirls that looked like infrared ink undulating in the darkest corner of the night; an ultima- or bioweapon, he could see more than any Degenerate or Urman could, well into the infrared and even radio frequencies and up past the ultraviolet just shy of the spectrum of cosmic background radiation. He pulled out his auto-tracking submachine gun and vaporized a dozen sentrybots just as a few bullets hit the front of the Lorrie and before we'd all even turned our heads to track his movement. Without a word he slid the container door back shut and we felt ourselves lurch forward again and shortly the faint echo discernible informed us we were in the underground hangars on the perimeter of the compound.

Again, we lurched to a stop, and this time I opened the door unbidden and was horrified to see us surrounded by muciphage sentinels, already shooting their slimy, adhesive tendrils toward us from their writhing, jaundice-colored forms blasphemous to all macroscopic biology — only the worst torture could have ever caused an Aural to develop such a monstrosity, and we were all filled with terror. Our escort let a sneer mar his stony face and this time pulled out a weapon I'd never seen before, something that was vaguely reminiscent of a shotgun wrapped in distillation coils the color of St. Elmo's fire. It sounded like a hiss from a giant serpent when it fired, and wherever its shots struck a cold blue flame the color of arctic ice exploded in a ball the size of a man, and when that explosion dissipated a rapidly-widening hole could be seen opening in the muciphage and rapidly devouring it, leaving it in moments a mere puddle of smoking ichor. We were saved! With the help of our cutting torches we removed the last of the hardened severed muciphage tendrils and in a few minutes were back inside the container and on our way out of the tunnels, when again we lurched to a stop. "Ready the detonator," we were commanded, meaning serious trouble indeed. I opened the container door while my associate primed the small micronuke explosive that ensured that even if we failed to reclaim our freedom those accursed Degenerates would be deprived of the fruit of our labors and of their chief laborers, gritting my teeth as I saw at the very gateway to freedom an array of guardbots bristling with armaments waiting for us.

After a minute of the two groups staring at each other in silence I heard a strange crackling rushing from the left of us, like a pile of leaves the size of a house being driven ahead of a stiff gale. I turned my head and beheld a pack of raidens rushing toward the guardbots, ephemeral tigers each the size of our Lorrie, glowing a subdued blue-white, shimmering in the air in phase to a quantum heartbeat, a single eye in each head glowing the color of burning phosphorous. I glanced at our savior and was met with a grin. "Better get back inside, and get ready to roll," he beamed with boyish glee. As we scrambled inside I saw the guardbots opening fire on the raidens, crimson and emerald beams passing ineffectually through the furious beasts as they let loose with their own fury, beams white enough to blind the eyes when looked at directly cutting through the formerly terrifying machines as if they were made of butter. "Don't worry about the door, enjoy the show!," our escort screamed as he started up the Lorrie's engine and we lurched forward, "But, for God's sake disarm that detonator!". I saw one of the raidens explode into five blue orbs, each of them hurtling toward the gate and the ruined towers surrounding it, exploding in perfect spheres of a blue-white incandescence that faded away to reveal nothing, everything within having been perfectly devoured. As we passed through I saw the remaining raidens leap into the sky and elongate and narrow into the shape of serpents or old Chinese dragons and circle around the complex lancing the guard towers, walls, and control tower with those terrible beams of lightning, eventually lost in a confusion of the prison defense's feeble ineffectual laser fire and explosions from their missile batteries.

We let loose a cheer and embraced each other and slapped each other's shoulders and backs, some of us shedding tears of joy; freedom! And vengeance.

How to Fail at Love

I was on a date with a girl who my mind told me was a recent ex but who had the long and straight reddish-brown hair of a girl I dated over fifteen years ago up in Washington. We had pulled into a dirt lot in front of what looked like some ramshackle Bayou swamp cabin and proeceded inside where Mudhoney was performing. I lost my nerve in the crowd and noise and was thoroughly miserable, to the point where my date and I started bickering; she made it clear that she had decided to cast off her mantle of bleak, lonely misanthropy and to start cutting loose a little bit and enjoy at least occasional respites from her sorrow- and pain-laden solitary life. I started getting jealous when some kind-voiced, handsome interloper appeared to be putting the moves on her, being awfully touchy-feely with her even as he had the gall to interrupt our argument, and in turn she was pointedly ignoring my entreaties for her to understand my fear and discomfort with an unaccustomed coldness. She even suggested that tonight be our last night together and I pack up tomorrow so she can return me to whence I came, which broke my heart and sent tears into my eyes (though at least I had the dignity not to let them fall). I was ashamed of my anxiety and cursing my social ineptitude, not to mention subdued somewhat by the cold wind of rejection whipping through my tattered sails, that after a failed attempt to get up and "loosen up" by trying to start a pogo mosh (which was met with strange looks and some suppressed mirth at my expense by others in the audience), I snarled in disgust and walked out the door not saying so much as a parting word to the girl I loved but couldn't please...

...Years later, I was unmooring my sailboat from a dock on a lonely San Juan island north of Seattle. It was a lovely overcast morning, the sky and the sea contrasting grays and the wind light and steady, tendrils of ghost-white mist covering the ocean unevenly like a tattered, liquid shroud clinging to the surface of an incoming tide; blissfully serene, with none of the choking dust and rotting timbers of that dilapidated swamp shack that had become a canker sore in my memory, not to mention the raucous cacophony or disquieting piercing of a suffocating sweltering darkness by a flickering barrage of gaudy colored lights. I was taking my time, leaning against the motor sipping my coffee, when the girl came back into my life, and with that accursed interloper from years before, both stepping out of their nice blue European car he'd driven up to the lure and reel shop that also served as an information booth for all maritime matters; I'd seen it dozens of times before, tourists who missed a turn a few miles up the road hoping to buy passage on the ferry that boards at the whey a few miles around the bend of the island where the town is. She recognized me immediately and walked up to me and almost blurted out my name while her beau met his disappointment at the shack and got directions to town. I shook my head and averted her gaze, mumbling something about the wrong guy, and kicked the boat away from the dock and started the motor. The slow puttering of my feeble outboard motor away from the dock was less painful than feeling her gaze boring into me as she stood there staring at me looking crestfallen; her partner walked slowly up to her and placed his arm around her shoulders, looking at her then at me.

I kicked the cabin roof and called out to my dog that it's too damn balmy a morning for him to be loafing about inside, tears streaming down my face as I drifted once again out of the life of a love that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my days.

Infernal Bromine

“Who’s that guy,” the grizzled, steely-eyed mayor of Effer Vesicant¹. jerked his thumb at me, standing back from the table he and my partner were sitting at in the Sphincter, probably the dingiest, most squalid, and most menacing speakeasy I’ve seen in my life. I felt myself skewered on the daggers of the eyes of loiterers in the stairwell leading down from the street as we descended to its entrance lit by dim, flickering red neon sign, and I’m pretty sure one of them tried to lift my wallet from me. “He’s my friend and my partner. We do business with him or we do none at all,” my partner coolly replied and after a few seconds of sizing me up with a cold glare the mayor grunted and jerked his head slightly, inviting me to take a seat with the social grace typical of an Ionian. Without any preamble he slid a worn Jimmy² across the battered, grease-smeared gunmetal gray table, its iridium-titanium rectangle glowing softly sylvan like a stray moonbeam falling onto the wreckage of an ancient destroyer. My partner attached it to the input-output panel of his pom³ and the three of us soberly watched images and text the color of St. Elmo’s fire flicker into being above the middle of the table as room darkened suddenly as a scramble field blossomed around us.

I leaned back and stared at the mayor and blurted out incredulously “Earth?”. My partner restrained me with a hand on my forearm and I stood up shaking my head and headed over to the bar, carefully avoiding the eyes of a couple lanky n’er do wells casually slumped over its much-abused metal surface. Nice décor, I had to keep myself from wrinkling my nose in disgust as I ordered a New Amsterdam. After a few minutes the mayor and my partner came up to me and after the mayor shook my hand brusquely, grinning sardonically, he strode out of the speakeasy and my partner sidled up to me and said “It’s a lot of money and you know we need it” while mopping large beads of sweat from his brow with a tattered and stained blue bandana. I nodded silently and finished my drink. We left quietly, and again felt the brush of mischievous fingers on my pants during the ascent up the stairs — good thing my pants were magnetically sealed and encoded to my fingertips’ electromagnetic resonance and heat-signature patterns. |[call it "hot-boxed!!! :D ]|

(After their footsteps receded into silence a dark corner of the speakeasy ripples like plastic wrap caught in the light of a large blue neon sign, out of which a shadowy figure steps away from a table and leaves quietly in pursuit. No one, not even the enormous bartender, so much as glances out the corners of their eyes at the silent stranger.)

It took us over a newstandard month⁴ to get there, even with the advanced navigational AI⁵ and military-grade sensor array: flying through the radioactive wreckage of all the interplanetary wars of the past that fill the middle of the solar system is so dangerous that for a hundred years only salvage bots have braved the peril, and only seldom because few cities can afford the Pyrrhic economics of the business. Gingerly picking our way through the dense cislunar⁶ debris field, my partner was grumbling about the task that lay before us; so much for needing the money, I couldn't help but chuckle softly. My initial unease welled up again for the umpteenth time as we dipped below an impressively massive hulk of a still mostly-intact carrier and hurtled out of its shadow on our approach to the assigned search sector, my partner confirming coordinates and vectors as I readied the ion cannons. We were to strafe a sector of the desolation until we blew away a false rockery that sealed an access tunnel leading to a vault that stored the object we'd been tasked to retrieve, an object we knew almost nothing about but were to be paid handsomely, likely in part to ensure we remained incurious about it. A special Jimmy²-rigged thermal-signature algorithm was piggy-backed onto our sensor AI for the purpose of locating it.

I felt like a ghost drifting back into a forgotten past as we slowly fell down the remarkably unscathed shaft, guidelines glowing a blue reminiscent of depictions of the undersea lights of the fabled Devil’s Triangle illuminating our passage and crisscrossing the walls of a spherical vault in which assorted objects were tethered to its edge by lines of force of the same color. Who’d have imagined such a pocket of now-legendary marvels of prosperity and power could still exist on a world that had had its oceans and air lanced away in the last war waged by almost-forgotten gods hundreds of years ago? Thanks to the sensor modification it took us surprisingly little time to locate our treasure, a small cylindrical metal canister that we retrieved with our tractor beam after we gingerly yawed around a central column to avoid rear-ending a couple of the larger objects suspended near the entrance. After we drew it into the hold and slipped furtively out of that eerie sepulcher my partner turned to me and grinned, his face covered in sweat, and sardonically remarked “Now the fun part again. Let’s hope the money’s waiting, and good.” God, no kidding! The AI⁵ reported it could only detect indeterminable quantities of boron, barium, and copper in all its scans of the cylinder’s interior; I shrugged.

We arrived back home without mishap and it was a great relief for me to sight the comforting beige cracked cue-ball of Europa filling the viewscreen and the pearl blisters of Minos’⁶ boroughs blinking their green landing lights in friendly welcome to us. We both joked about how we’d forbear on showering at home, instead reserving a week at the Phoenician Princess and lounging first thing in the luxurious baths there that once saw patronage by the mighty princes of Earth’s colonial empires. Our pom³ reported a balance transfer of half the sum into our business account after we reported the sought object’s retrieval and our arrival into Minos’⁶ space was confirmed, eliciting a gleeful furor of grins, laughter, and congratulatory back-slapping from both of us. As we descended toward the almost-dry canal that ran through the slums of Epsilon Borough⁷ and that passed conveniently close to our office and which we often used as an illicit shortcut, our maglev hover unit started losing power. After a sudden exchange of terrified glances I said I’d go to the hold to retrieve the object while my partner fought with the controls to make an emergency landing, to which he nodded. I thought I broke my ankle as the stern of the car suddenly dropped, sending me tumbling into the hold, but I was thankful not have heard the crash of impact; he must have managed to divert power from the directional auxiliaries. I grabbed the cylinder roughly and opened it to reveal a small canister containing what looked like sodium crystals suspended in a ruddy mist and hobbled painfully up the incline of the resting car to fall ingloriously out the front driver side onto the ground.

We sat at the top of a concrete embankment in front of a chain-link fence puzzling over the object for a bit while my buddy took off one of his boots and gently rubbed his ankles. It was everything he could have done to have landed as he did; he was lucky not to have suffered worse injuries. Someone sabotaged our car! That couldn’t have been a mere mechanical failure, not considering the unheard-of odyssey we underwent and the amount of money just transferred to us. We had to get out of here, and fast, because no doubt a welcoming committee would be on its way soon, and not only that but we landed next to a bramble and the vespers get extremely aggressive during the summer mating season — already they’re starting to swarm over the car! I helped my partner onto his feet, took the strange container and tossed it into my satchel, then boosted him up the side of the fence and watched him shimmy slowly down a thin birch tree and lope down the side-alley between a couple shanties and the security wall of our apartment complex. I was swatting at the vespers, now in a thick cloud around me and stabbing an anti-venom ampule into my leg — suppressing a scream of pain from the fire shooting through my body — when I saw a rusty groundcar approaching in the distance on the road opposite the fence. I immediately forgot about the vespers and slid down the embankment and ran through the brackish water up and scrambled up the other side to an abandoned warehouse where I slid hastily beneath a mostly-dilapidated loading dock that reeked of urine, concealing myself behind rubble and garbage.

A smartly-dressed young woman with shoulder-length auburn hair stepped out of the car stopped at the end of the road on the other side of the canal and peered in my direction with her hand held up to shade her eyes, then shrugged and called out “Well, I see that I missed you — a pity. I propose we reschedule our appointment for next week and I trust you’ll keep our procurement secure and bring it with you when next we meet,” and walked casually back to the car, reversed it, and drove off in the direction she came from. I was terrified: she had the confident, genteel insouciance of a professional killer. I was way out of my league. After a few minutes I crawled out of my hiding spot and dusted myself off, almost retching from the stench wafting up from my clothing; no shower at the Phoenician. My partner was in the office kitchenette when I arrived, his leg up on the table, swollen ankle beneath a bag of ice wrapped in a towel. “I bet I lost that boot, didn’t I?” he asked, to which I only nodded in reply; the squatters camped nearby would have it long before we returned to our landing spot, though the car’s security system would keep it safe enough. I related to him what happened and his face grew grave; we had to get a hold of the mayor of Effer Viscerant¹ somehow and get that damned thing off our backs, and soon.

It took a couple days for Sergei, our mechanic and underworld liason, to fix our car, days we spent at a nearby safehouse and during which we spent no other money than the cost of repairs because we knew from experience in the business that our transactions were being monitored by whoever had subverted our car’s hover units. We also knew that if we remained where we were hiding out for much longer that our luck would run out, and my partner knew that by being injured he’d managed to make matters worse; it was no one’s fault, of course, but I was effectively a lone operator now and saddled with the added worry of him as a potential liability, at the worst possible time. We had to part ways, but I knew he wouldn’t allow that and would endanger himself because of his loyalty to our friendship. Worse yet was when we received news of the mayor’s death, delivered by an ashen-faced partner when he returned from Sergei’s one afternoon; I’d never seen him look so defeated, like he’d sunk into himself and was propped up only by some mindless, autonomic survival function. The mayor had died in an “accident” and when my partner pressed city security for information they coldly informed him to expect a summons to a criminal investigation, though as yet he wasn’t considered a suspect.

We both knew that that meant: it was over for us — we were trapped. I sighed, grabbed a bottle of Sarpedonian⁸ vodka from a shelf, and we sauntered desolately down a long-abandoned set of railroad tracks in an ancient, crumbling, mostly-abandoned industrial district that was floundering in an increasing tide of ramshackle flophouses and shanty communities. We were soon joined by a shirtless middle-aged scavenger with wild hair and a long beard who offered to help me find a replacement boot for my partner if we shared some of our booze. I shrugged and passed him the bottle as we walked told him our tale of how we came to be there while he rummaged through piles of refuse. “Ah! Maybe you found the legendary bromine!” he exclaimed. When we asked him what he meant by that he shrugged his shoulders and explained that it’s an ancient word that meant some kind of medicinal elixir, but it could also have been an acronym of some kind; it was something a forgotten, ancient Terrestrial power was rumored to have been researching, something which could have been a fantastic weapon or drug, or anything — no one knew, because it was never used, had never even turned up, and so became one of the many fables that sprang out of the ruin of Earth, like the one of the artificial world in orbit near Venus or the one about the ephemeral Transcendents⁹ who fled the solar system in gossamer ships of light. We were joined later that evening by a teenage girl who shared with us half-rotten potatoes she’d found, and only then did the reality sink in that we were fugitives, probably for life.

---

1. Effer Vesicant: a city-state on the Jovian moon Io.
2. Jimmy: a slim metal or plastic data strip, like a disk or flash drive.
3. Pom: short for "personal intermediary", a sort of personal computer.
4. Newstandard Month: the rotational period of the Jovian moon Europa, rounded up to 36 days.
5. AI: artificial intelligence, an advanced computer.
6. Cislunar: the space inside the orbit of Earth's moon.
7. Minos: one of three city-states on the Jovian moon Europa.
8. Epsilon Borough: One of Minos' six habitat modules.
9. Sarpedonia: another of Europa's three city-states.
10. Transcendant: a human who has transcended biology.

World War Two Skirmish

I was losing my nerves and on the verge of going AWOL, jumping off the train in enemy territory and fending for myself in winter with nothing but the clothes on my back and in my rucksack, a Walther P-38, some K-rats, and a half-empty bottle of Cognac. The rocking of the train we sneaked onto didn't help to assuage a fear that was veering into terror, nor did the fact that it was black as Hitler’s soul in our ass-numbing and kidney-tenderizing box car, a palpable darkness illuminated only when the ruddy glow of a cigarette flared up to reveal the floating head of a devil staring vacuously into perdition whenever one of us took a drag. My platoon was heading into Axis-held territory, given the task of halting the retreat of local Nazi command and its escort forces; we were part of a brigade advancing up Italy that met with unexpectedly fierce resistance as we approached Tyrol. We haven’t had any leave time since that weekend we spent pillaging and fornicating in the Eternal City nearly six weeks ago and as a result our morale was straddling the edge of a bayonet, mine especially because the mantle of command had just recently fallen on me and I was reeling under the burden of responsibility. Bedraggled and bleary-eyed we stared at each other, faces sunken into hapless ghouls radiating sullen resignation, smoking cigarettes and sipping on flasks and bottles. I was sharing my sergeant's flask of whiskey, my psyche gritting its teeth while with eyes the color of dragons’ scales I tacitly made a pact with him that I'll somehow keep it together long enough for us to piss away our filthy lucre on whores in Venice. Or long enough to die.

Dawn didn't so much break as it desultorily slunk over the Alps, creeping through a thick slate-colored mist that congealed in white pools on the ground — and froze our asses off. It wasn’t even the end of the year and already it felt like February: to stave off frostbite I commanded the platoon to do jumping jacks for five minutes at the top of every other hour. We deboarded the train last night in the inglorious manner of tramps and marched overnight to set up an ambush at a sprawling country estate adjacent to one of the roads the Nazis were expected to retreat along when our parent battalion attacked Verona to the south. The world was a forlorn shade: white with frost and mist, bleak, cheerless, and still and cold as death itself. But things were going to heat up and liven up soon enough and I wasn’t going to live long, let along make first lieutenant, by staring idiotically at impromptu German military parades: weapons and ammo had to be distributed and squads concealed in tactically advantageous positions. The tactical bit was a frustration because our intelligence was nigh useless: two hour's of a gaggle of brass in starched uniforms and smelling of Old Spice® delivering in crisp militarese in front of maps something to the effect of "You're fighting Germans! Somewhere! Who have guns, and maybe other stuff!". My mind’s horizons were darkened by images of us getting run down by a mechanized infantry troop. To make matters worse, we were running low on rifles and ammunition and only had two bazookas with five rockets between them, so even two tanks — or just one Panther — could roll over us and chew us back into primordial soup with their machine guns. But, no time for morbid ruminations, especially since the Krauts would certainly oblige me. I sent alpha squad to a position behind two abandoned trucks and a low stone fence in front of the manor, armed with a Beretta, a Tommy gun, and one of the bazookas with two rockets; command squad bravo lay in wait closer to the road in a small stone building, wherein I was armed with my Walther P-38 while the other two each had a Beretta sub-machine gun; in an old stable on a low rise farther out from the road squad charlie lurked in an old stable with the last of our Garands and a bazooka with three rockets.

After we finished our preparations — clearing fields of fire and setting up obstacles in the road to slow the enemy down — we sat down for a break to eat some rations and have a smoke, when a bird call signaled us approaching enemy forces. One: good, just infantry. Those Krauts were no fools, though: a small platoon of them flitted like riled hornets from cover to cover in twos, wisely operating under the assumption of a trap. Despite their vulpine tactics it was just a protracted skirmish and we prevailed without suffering any casualties. At its conclusion I assembled squad leaders around me, about to assign men to strip the bodies of weapons and ammunition, when I heard two bird calls just as I made out the telltale rumbling and squeaking of tanks. We wasted no time in returning to our positions, and just in time: as soon as my squad settled into our firing positions the dark silhouette of a tank became visible in the mist not more than fifty yards ahead. A moment later a jet of smoke lanced out from alpha’s position followed by a thud and an explosion, igniting a chattering furor of small arms fire and sending soldiers scurrying into my line of sight. We shot them down as soon as they rounded the burning Panzer IV. My elation drained down into my boots, however, the instant I saw a Panther bypass the wreck and head in our direction while firing its machine guns at alpha’s position. I had to keep my squad mates from fleeing, knowing full well they’d get cut down before they made it halfway to any cover: “Wait, damn it!” I screamed at them as I hastily tied a couple grenades together and slathered mud on them. I instructed the them to circle the building opposite the Panther as soon as it was about to pass our position, to attack the inevitable soldiers advancing behind the rolling cover. After they left I leaped and ran up to the Panther — pissing myself as I saw a machine gun swivel toward me — pulled the pin out of one of the grenades and shoved the bundle into a space between one of the rollers and the tracks, then leaped immediately back to follow my squad mates just as a burst of machine gun fire struck the ground where I stood just a second ago. Time froze and a wall of sound struck me numb as I almost tripped over one of my squad mates holding his leg with one arm and trying to raise himself up on the other, teeth chattering and eyes already glazed over like a marble head stone, thrashing his other leg in vain to gain purchase on a ground made slick by a steaming pool of blood; beside myself with fury I roughly shoved the surviving squad mate aside and emptied a clip into two Germans directly in front of me, my heart beating in time to the flashes erupting out of the muzzle of my gun. I glanced back at the Panther and saw smoke explode out of its cannon just as a bazooka from squad C's position slammed into it; my adrenaline dove from fight to flight like an attacking Thunderbolt when I saw the stable collapse into a smoldering heap at the same time as a wall of flame blossomed up the front of the Panther. Just as I was about to break into a run I saw another arc of smoke crawl out from the rubble of charlie's position and slam into the Panther. Secondary explosions in the Panther hurled the main turret into the air like a crumpled paper cup toward the road and opened up a chasm of towering flames wreathed in diesel smoke, flinging me into the stone building behind me; “Someone survived!” I thought giddily as I blacked out.

I came to feeling arms hoisting me up onto my feet and turning me around to a corporal’s beaming visage. Men were pouring out of the manor and from the now-burning stable; I counted, only one casualty! And we took out a Panther! Looks like we’ll be drinking up my Cognac tonight. We sat down and slapped each other on the back as we opened up our rations and passed around cigarettes, white as sheet rock, covered in grime and soot, but grinning like kids at a baseball game. As the ringing in my ears subsided and the blood started returning to our faces I was about to review the tactical situation and resume our interrupted corpse-pilfering, for though the sun was already westering (where had all the time gone?) there was at least two hours of daylight left — the day was by no means over — when out of the corner of my eye I detected movement. Without thinking I crouched behind the burning Panther to fire on ... oh, my God! What have I done? There was four of them, perhaps the owners of the commandeered estate stealing away the moment they deemed it safe to; a young man in a black coat crumpled at once to the ground, causing the rest of the family to run across the road toward the field, the keening despair of a woman splitting the air like a knife tearing through a burlap sack while I stood dumb with incredulity and rapidly escalating remorse, my arm still outstretched holding my smoking Walther P-38. A hand fell on my shoulder and when I slowly turned and saw the mournful expression on my sergeant’s face the dam of self-reproach broke, its waters pulling my body down onto a bale of hay as they flowed in rivers out of my eyes, wracking my body with sobs as I dropped my gun and covered my face. Sweet Jesus, I shot a child! More refugees filed past us down the road, most of them on foot but a few piled onto horse-drawn carts, not even noticing us. When I pulled myself together enough to look up I could see columns of smoke in the distance where our battalion was advancing. Suddenly, among the refugees I spotted a silver Mercedes laboring through the muddy ruts followed by a couple SS officers on motorcycles, whereupon I immediately picked up my Walther P-38 and turned to fire on them. As did my entire platoon; this is what we came here for.

Stranded in Detroit

I'd met a girl online who lived in the Detroit area and had traveled to see her, but something went horribly awry and I ended up not only all alone in an unfamiliar place but under menacing circumstances, with nothing to my name except the clothes on my back and a few dollars in change in my pockets — and no ID!

After having barely escaped a perilous situation I found myself aimlessly wandering down streets lined with houses in an old peripheral suburb of one of Detroit's satellite cities, hoping to find an arterial before night waxed morning. After nearly an hour of walking I came across what I sought running along the depression of a small valley below me and lined with the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls ubiquitous to the soulless and uniform materialistic American culture that always strikes me as bleakly alternate-universe Soviet. As I descended toward the busy avenue I saw a crowded bus stop on the other side of the intersection and decided to see if it would take me downtown, hopefully to where I could inquire about shelter for the night, a meal maybe, and certainly at least a blanket since I would most likely be spending the night outside. After we shuffled aboard and sat down a diminutive, stern-looking young black lady stood in the aisle near the front and prattled away in a martial tone about rules, privileges, and expectations of what I soon realized was a residential reintegration program for street people. "Very nice," I thought, "but I want to return home, not settle in this benighted burg."

I deboarded with the other passengers, partly out of curiosity and partly to try to bum a few drags off someone's cigarette, in a large parking lot surrounded by low cinder-block buildings that may have been barracks or an elementary school. Suddenly I found myself back on a bus, squinting through brilliant morning daylight occasionally occluded by freeway ramps threading their way above an industrial sprawl lining the river we traveled adjacent to, making out as my eyes adapted to the glare a massive conglomeration of skyscrapers I took to be downtown Detroit beyond the icy blue water. White clouds raced alongside us in a dark azure sky; a brisk but pleasant spring day seemed to be foretold. I was almost out of money and had gotten nowhere in search of meals, blankets, or even puffs of smoke and my eyes felt gritty like they do when sleep deprivation and undernourishment set in — to be honest, I hadn't tried very hard: the coldness and barely-bridled animosity in this city and its people scared the shit out of me and I avoided speaking to people for fear of advertising the presence of a flailing quail to hungry foxes lurking in the vicinity.

The bus stopped in a parking lot beneath a large freeway ramp and in front of a modern-looking square building in front of us. Most of us deboarded as it was clear this was a stop where drivers may take brief breaks in order to pollute their lungs or relieve their pothole-bludgeoned bladders and bowels. On looking at the building ahead of me I saw "Justice Center" spelled out in crisp brass letters above the glass double doors of its entrance and I cringed inwardly as I saw the miserable traffic in and out of that dismal and sinister institution. "No way in hell am I sleeping outside in this city!" I thought to myself as the patina of prevarication encasing me the past couple days cracked open and fell to the ground. "I'll sooner hazard the perils of the road before I let this awful place have its way with me." The driver returned and started up the engine and I made my way back to the bus with the other passengers.

First Day of Summer Vacation

It was the last day of school for the year and we were having a pot-luck party to celebrate the coming of summer vacation. Something about the atmosphere about it felt like high school but the classroom reminded me more of the Russian class I took at Portland Community college; the air was warm and the sunlight filtering through the pollen felt almost syrupy.

For some reason I slipped out of the room to go to the locker room to take a shower, perhaps because I'd gotten food spilled on me. It was just down the hall and consisted itself of a narrow hallway lined with lockers, the showers small cubicles the size of bathroom stalls branching out of it. it was cramped and there was no room for me to drape my clothing on the towel dispenser, it already being covered with another's clothing. The air was thick with steam and the smell of sweat; I made do somehow and took a quick shower in a tiny stall more suitable for being in a motor home than a school locker room. The football team, or some kind of group of burly ass-grabbers, was out in the locker room filling it with a merry cacophony of accusations of gayness and boasts of athletic and sexual prowess.

When I stepped back into the classroom, fresh from my ablutions, it had turned into a small cafeteria or a quick-service restaurant with a small buffet-like serving counter like in Subway. I was alone with my boss, who was a very attractive woman whose features I can't recall other than she was blond; I was even in a uniform that featured a red polo shirt. We were closing the place, she breaking down and cleaning the steam table as I was cleaning the dining area. People occasionally trickled in individually, causing her considerable consternation because we were already behind schedule yet it wasn't quite closing time and so they must be served. Contrary to my nature I was nonplussed and drifted blissfully and almost vacuously, like I was in a trance or still high from a bowl I'd smoked a couple hours ago.

Suddenly I was standing at a bus stop on the corner of SE Stark and 39th. It was still warm out but the sky was overcast and the wind had started to kick up into breezes that felt like the snorting of an excited horse. A couple guys in their forties or fifties — very white and blue-collar — walked down the street past me and crossed the intersection. The older-looking guy was holding eloquently forth on an amusingly irreverent description of the difference between Christmas and Easter, the particulars of which I can't recall; the younger was chuckling. Just as the older man stepped out onto the street he tossed his half-finished cigarette onto the sidewalk. I walked over and picked it up, still lit, to finish it and told him "Merry Christmas" and winked as he turned around briefly, grinning, then continued down the street with his companion.