Sci fi short

Howdy there. I belong to a Science Fiction writers site. They are having a micro story contest. Here is mine.

RIGHT and RIGHTEOUS

Gomer cycled through the lock, popped his suit. Pee stink, sweat, fear smell. The usual post op.

Me and Kestral droning, shield check, cloaking. Today ours better than theirs. Down capped the comms, bio med. Uplinked to orbital, sent the recon data. Death toll stats. Gomer had blighted big time.

Eighty years of this shit. War so big you couldn’t get your head around it, even with enhance and implants. Too fucking big, too grotesque. Planetary systems gone, suns blown, billions dead. Both sides. Bled white.

But no end. No compromise. None to be had. Why? Because both sides knew, I mean knew they were right. Big crime. Biggest. Blasphemy. One right, one wrong. Big wrong. All wrong. All or nothing.

And man, that is war isn’t it. Yeah.

Big gomer in the ultra son cleaning off. Me and Kerstal both knowing he was over. Ship out the next shuttle. Get a rehab brain wipe, maybe the tabula rosa this time.

Gomer was good. The best. Had been. Now, his bio med readouts fluxed into the red, his cerebrals were all juked to hell.  He came out red eyed and tranqued himself stone out. No blame. I was half there myself. Another two ops and I’d be in the scrubber.

Great thing about this war? All human. Well, human, biped, similar species anyhow. None of the exotics wanted in on this. They didn’t care.

The AI’s stayed out of it, too. Human ones and the extra terr’s. Couldn’t be bothered. They’d crossed the singularity forty humps back and weren’t even speaking to the species anymore. Nothing hostile. Designed warp envelope ships, built them, and adios suckers. Have a nice millenium. Jimmied out beyond the rim.

Shit, they were smart.

Kerstal was a cute fem. Hard ass. Gung ho. Had been. But you do the implants and the enhance and it wears. Instead of your two hundred revolves around the gas burner, you got thirty. If you were lucky. Mostly you died. Mortality eighty percent. Eventually. I mean you did tour after tour cause nobody wanted you after the morph. Only each other. Not human and knowing it. Shit.

So, Kerstal and me linked and did the cyber two head. Hours of it. Forgot the surge rips and the brain burn and those moments of terror when your suit link stuttered. We flew and fucked and became each other and a thousand other dances.

I tranqued and slept. Forty hours out. Banked the sleep neuro. I would need it.

Woke up, hooked up, pumped up, stims and nano brain bio enhance, sub linked and yacked with my suit, that shortly would be me. Heinlein’s old turd about troopers. Loved it. But this was neural meld.  All for one and one only.

The suit was remade every post mission. Max, latest tech, bio and hard. Weapons hot, nukes to pulse spitters, plasma and four d missiles.  You fused and had it all uploaded new to the micro.

Kerstal woke up just as I was suiting. Smiled.

Gomer was gone. The shuttle had sinced him back to the homey’s for a little dome cleaning.

I returned Kerstal’s smile. No need for words.

Closed and prepped and got up to go out and fight for the one true god. Hallelijah. 

My, how time does fly. They, whoever "they" may be, say time is a river. It feels now more like a wind, a storm, that rushes along, and like some magic spell, carries one from place to place, memory to memory without an intervening connectivity. Ah, but no long speaking about time. Let time be today.

No great long post this morning. Dim outside, a few badly needed shreds of winter hiding the sun. I hope, for the sake of the land, there is more to come. We are short here in the west, while the east continues to be pummeled by storm after storm. Snow in Atlanta. It will be a cold day and all that.

I am re-watching Game of Thrones. I do enjoy the writings and the complexities of plot. I also enjoy any book or series where the moral lines are blurred. The relativity of good and bad depending on one's position in the game. Very close to real life I think.
Ah, but breakfast, a late one albeit, does call and my stomach growls.

Dear readers, and I hope there are more than a few of you, I bid you good morn.

CPM

Wednesday evening. It could be any Wednesday. Cold out. Perhaps a spot of rain on the morrow.
I've been re-reading the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. If you don't know him, he is credited with inventing the Sword and Sorcery genre of of fiction.

He wrote over 500 stories and died at the age of 26. I find that volume of output, and many of these stories, the bulk of them, were published.

I've read other authors criticize his writing as puerile, or adolescent, but I reject such things. Who is to say these things? Some very famous authors have taken shots at him, but he died at such an early age, before he could mature, who knows what he might have created?

For myself, when I read his writing as a teenager, Howard, more than any other of his peers or those who followed, wrote with such fire, such intensity, at his best, he seemed to be writing of things he'd really seen, of fantastic cities and beautiful women and monsters and creatures of the outer cosmos, that he had experienced. Yes, he wrote for the pulps, an artisan, producing huge volumes at penurious rates to keep body and soul together. But, critics be damned whether named King or Moorcock, who published "legitimate" works with publishing houses, but despite that, between them they produced only a handful of books that had nearly the sheer pulse pounding impact, the visceral power of Howard's Texas based prose.

Say what you will about him, he was a true story teller. A yarn spinner, and by the gods he could make you feel the sweat in your hauberk, the blood pounding in your veins when you slashed and bled and sometimes died in worlds of his imaginings.

He is not as known as Edgar Rice Burroughs, or dozens of other writers of that era an style, but his creation CONAN, that singular character is ubiquitous, around the world his name has carried for all these decades. And for that alone he should be honored.

I too am a simple artisan, a craftsman whose work I hope will entertain you, excite you, carry you to places you might not otherwise have journeyed to. I don't compare myself to him or to any others.

I do know one thing, now in a different season of my life, having known the travails of outrageous fortune, of having had loves and lost them, had good and bad, flights of fancy and depths of despair, that as I go back through his stories, some of them, not all, but some, carry me still on dragons wings to the dark lands of the nether gods, to the green sward of ancient ruins where dragons lurk and beautiful women fight beside their warrior kings or thieves.

His works have fallen out of copyright, so many of them are available for free, and to ride on the wings of the dark beings without a tithe seems unfair, but such is the fate of those who create and go to dust, as all we must too. Read him sometime when youth fires your imagination and that damned idiot critic can be shut up for a short time. Then come and fly with these long ago written tales and enjoy the ride.

Blood and damnation they will pay afore yet I fall......

Monday of a dry winter. Driest in California in five hundred years. That's a long time. That's back when the indians had the real estate. Fished, lived in the desert and the forests. Back when Ishi's people were a going concern. Don't know Ishi? Look him up. Last of his people. Caught in the foothills outise Oroville I believe in the late eighteen hundreds. Lived with an Anthropologist in San Francisco. Smart guy. Quite the celeb. But like his not so lucky kindred back east caught some White European disease his immune system had never been prepared for and gone. Ishi, the last of his tribe. Early dead. Final.

Lesson there? Maybe. We've dug around almost everywhere on Earth. Explored, exploited, excavated, disinterred the bones of the recent dead and the ancients. Nothing holy. Depending on your religion.
Found HIV in Africa. Something new thirty years ago. Piece of the genetic pie in monkeys we'd never encountered. Nasty disease. Oh, and unlike what you read, a universal killer. Not a gay disease.

Lots of plagues and diseases lurking around. Viruses. Bacteria. Many unknown, unaccounted for. And we think we've got the planet figured. Ours. Conquered. Yeah.

Lots of older societies thought that. Pompeiians, Incas, Aztecs, Romans, Celts, Trojans, Vikings, Han people, Black feet, Cherokee. Druids. Yup. All gods people. Children of the great spirit. Read on it. All thought they were the ones. Chosen. THE PEOPLE some of their societal names meant.

Some died out; disease, drought, famine, social collapse, but most got conquered. The OTHER god's people showed up and destroyed them. All prayers on deaf ears. No lightning, no intervention of the gods, no hammer strokes from Valhalla or Heaven, or the Seventh Ray. Nope. The invaders tromped through, crushed them to dust, burnt their temples, ground their bones to powder. And gone. Some tribes, cities, states, a thousand years old, most younger. Same end. Gone. Now just dust, a few ruins. Visigoths to Greeks, Turkoman to Mongols hordes. Big kingdoms and small. Great and humble. Now, just a page in a history book, or some whole books, sets of books. Not much of a mark.

Latin was the language of the world once. You speak Latin? Write it? Neither does anyone else. Dead language they call it.

Lesson? Well, maybe it's that whether microbes or a better arrow, any society, ANY civilization can go at any time. Some last a long time, some short, but they all go.

Oh, and those viruses I spoke of earlier? They mutate. Like Ebola. Little shuffling of its DNA and big mass die off. Airborne? Oh, yes, lots of ruins, lots of broken pots and hollow eyed ghost towns. Maybe all?

No worries though. Look around. Everything is solid, steady, last forever. Yeah. Until it doesn't.

No need to stay awake about it. Probably nothing. No mutations, or better spears or lurking microscopic cooties to lay us low. Naw.

Remember the nitwit babbling about the thousand year reich? What's his name? Yeah, his boots rang on granite too. Big Ideas. Oh, he was a monster, a madman, period. Mass killer of millions. Kind of a human version of Ebola. Just a little Viennese microbe, nobody, Corporal in World War One. Got gassed. Lived. Broke artist with some half baked ideas. Jail time. Nobody. But somehow, that little thing, that one bad human apple, he mutated, spread, sucked others into his sphere. Human plague. Interesting analogy.

Killed seventy five million humans according to the latest theories. Way up from the original fifty five millions at an earlier count. Human disease. Makes you wonder. Bin Laden? another microbe? Small killer comparably. What, maybe ten, twenty thousand? What about the Korean microbe? He's over there mutating right now. Makes me wonder on either a micro or macro scale what's brewing?

Easy to suck on that death apple, huh? Go to that dark place. Think destruction and apocalypse. Humans been singing that song for millennia. Heck, whole religions based on it. THE END of days.

Me? believe it or not, I'm an optimist. A true believer. We'll beat the odds. Disease, despots, disfunction, and disaster. Yup. Beat them all. I think we'll go to the stars. Populate the galaxy. Yes. Look around. We've fumbled and bumbled a long way from rock throwers to astronauts. And the death makers and doom sayers have been along for the whole ride. But, here we are.

So, mixed message today? I suppose. Humanity is a mixed message. Noble and vile, numinous and  venal, brilliant and stupid. But, so far so good. Kind of.

Got to watch those microbes though. Big ones and little ones. Yeah. Sometimes they mutate on a moments notice.

Me? I'm breathing deep. Great faith in the infinitude of the cosmos. Yeah. Trillions of suns, billions of planets. Man, what a time to be alive. First AI's about to come online. Maybe ten years. Artificial Intelligences. Self changing computers? You bet. Self driving cars, direct neural connects to the cyber worlds. Gonna happen folks. Quicker than you think.

I had a preacher tell us, his congregation, back when the first manned ship was on its way to the moon, that God would never allow humans to touch it. The moon. Put there in the firmament to light the sky. Bible said so, he said. We did touch it. Went there repeatedly. Not enough. But, we'll be back.

Preacher? He got his by a dump truck.

But, If you think I'm trying to tell you what any of that means, you are mistaken. I don't know.

Changes coming. Big ones. Biggest in history. Faster, more unimaginable than anything before it. Next twenty years. Keep breathing. Yeah.

The world the flesh and the devil

Tuesday afternoon. No rain. No rain in a long while. One week long brutal cold front, but no rain. Drout. Sunny California a little too sunny. Bad vampire weather, if you believe in the daylight shadow vampires. 

I don't. I believe in old worlds. Old ones. Met one, in Vienna. Not a Television want to be. The real deal. I was there last year. End of the gig. All night coffee shop. Weird dude. Black clothes, almost like a shadow. Kind of could only see him from the corner of my eye. Straight on, he was blurred, there and not. Wore a hood. Not a sweat shirt hoodie. Not a hip dude. Not a pretender. Real. 

Why did he talk to me? No telling. Right moment, wrong moment. Only fifteen minutes with him. But blood red eyes. Long incisors. White skin. Not pale, not light skinned. White. Under the hood. Just a glimpse. 

What he told me. Knew who I was from the book. Yeah. Thousand year old fan. Or something. Some thing. He spoke in a deep accent. Said it was russian. Old russian. Hard to understand. Mumbled. Kept his face down. 

Spoke quickly. Rapid fire. Like unburdening. A ten minute tell all for a million sins. 

Sunlight deadly. The stake and silver. Both enders for him. Had known a number of the undead. Over the years. They came and went. The god thing. Yes, he said. Yes. Evil and good. demons and living. 

Said he'd gotten caught one time. Thirteenth century. Spent time on a rack. Broke bones, ripped tendons. And he didn't die. None of the killing things. Broke him wrecked him. But they made one mistake. They threw him onto the blood soaked stone. Blood. Said it soaked into him. Osmosis. And the damned repair good. Quick. Only a minute. There were fourteen torturers and nobles there. Had caught him in his dirt home. Drug him in. Sent for the priest. But too slow. 

And he ripped through them. Now this part of the conversation he was animated. Favorite memory stuff. Lurid detail. Arms from sockets, heads torn off, and on and on. Lots of blood. And he broke down the six inch thick oak doors. Blew them off the hinges with one blow. 

Then he ran down. Good times he said. Long ago. Said he had an appointment with some vamp wanna be Algerian girl who loved him to suck on her. Ten years of it. 

And that was that. I glanced out the window at a passing trolley car and he was gone. Fast. Yeah. True story. 

Ok, this wasn't a blog. Just a memory. But still. Keep shining sun. good to be in the daylight. 

Dig it. 

If you are following my newly instituted blog here's the big headline. THE BOOK is on Kindle.

It's been an interesting and arduous journey. Twelve months from first word to publication.

As with any long work, there have been stumbles and outright falls along the way, moments of "why am I doing this," or "my life sucks? you know, the usual stuff one goes through.

But, here it is, Der Tag, The Day. Maybe The Week would be closer. I have a couple of items to futx with before the big announcement. But on the brink.

 I'll put out the word in as many venues as I can churn up that my baby, child of my imaginings and experience, has left the fold, thrust into the world.

Which got me to thinking. Hard as it is to believe, I was a child once, a baby, and before that a gleam in my father's eye. Before that? molecules, atoms, quarks, earth, water, iron, selenium, potassium, a little lead, all sorts of various simple and complex scattered elements.

Fact is, I will be again. Out of the elements and back to them. No immortality band wagon for me. Just a few years too soon onto this green earth. Maybe fifty years later I'd have coalesced in my future mom's womb and been born into a world where gerontology, the study of aging, would have allowed me, oh, a couple of hundred years minimum to explore my life and the world.

But, life, however much of it we get, whether years or moments, or none at all is largely a matter of luck.

Fate? Not sure.

In my short time on the planet I have almost died, expired, been extinguished several times. Disease and accidents have almost shuffled me away into the infinitude, back to the elements more than once.

Destiny? I wish, but heck if I know.

A brief tale on this subject.

At Eighteen months, on my mom's birthday, my family drove to San Francisco for a day trip. I have no memory of what we did, if we beached it, or ate, or just drove around.

But, on our way home, as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge (this all according to my mom and dad and my siblings) my brothers and sisters were gaping out the car windows all screaming "look at the boats, look at the boats,"

And I, a toddler, but not wanting to miss this spectacle, stood up and leaned on the door handle. In those days, long before silly seat belts and safety standards, the door handles move downward to open, The handle depressed, the door flew open, and out I went.

Yup, your faithful writer was ejected from the moving car on the Golden Gate Bridge at a speed my dad estimated to be fifty miles an hour.

As I've noted, I have no memory of any of this, probably just as well, but Pops glanced in panic in his rearview mirror and saw me bouncing and rolling down the road.

For once, there were no cars behind ours. Fate? Luck? Who knows, but dad's slammed the car into reverse, screeched back to me, clutched me back in the car and raced to the Presidio, which in those ancient days was a military base right past the toll gates on the SF side of the bridge.

The military doctor at on duty examined me. All the skin had been scraped from around my head as I rolled and bounced along the asphalt. (no doubt screaming in panic the whole time, but no memory of that either), and despite abrasions, contusions, scrapes and scratches, I was unharmed.

I could have perished. Concussion, been run over by trailing cars, which almost always, even back then, were thick on the bridge. But, no, I lived. Was unharmed.

OF course, babies are amazingly flexible and elastic at that age. Bones and even the skull are soft, pliable, and can take a lot of abuse, Natures protection against mommies dropping them and the like.

Not sure nature planned on the flying kid on the bridge when those adjustments were added to the design, but glad for it nonetheless.

Those surface injuries quickly healed and I went on, into childhood, my teen years, young adult hood, and so forth, and here I am.

Why? No telling. So I could be to write my book? To interact with all the people I have met along the way? I have no idea. To the best of my knowledge I have contributed no miraculous cures for disease, nor in my scribbling changed the direction of human endeavor. So, why did I survive and in the decades since so many, perhaps many more deserving souls than I, perish in the myriad ways of existence? Not a clue.

I think about it on occasion and discuss the vagaries of existence, the what if's and why of our lives. But so far  the light bulb has stayed off. As it has for wiser minds than mine.

There is a little back country philosophy in the novel on this subject, which I will let you discover for yourself when you read the piece for yourself.

Laying here typing, I will admit, that I am very happy to be here this morning. That i awoke this morning and get to be here for this day, whatever it might bring.

C. Philip.

The Moving River

                                                      

 Recent letter to a friend. 

Just decided to post this. Musings on a Sunday morning. Dawn. 

                                                                   The Moving River

Ah, my friend. Yesterday was dark for me. That artist's mind the article talks about went towards whatever demon place it sometimes leads. Thoughts of failure and how foolish my choices have been, thoughts of how irrelevant my words are, how poorly wrought, and thoughts of not being. Yeah, all that junk got cranked up, brought stage front, into the footlights of my little internal theater. Man, that is unpleasant. I know you do it too, as do all us humans, for whatever reasons, paranoia, old time baggage, fantasy, reality, whatever the cause, those times are wretched. 

Being who I am  and what I am, I go more often than many, maybe more than most. I don't compare myself with the real artists, only in IMPULSE do I include myself. Van Gough, Hemingway, all the remembered ones, all were hoar haunted and more than a few chose the self handed end of life. 

My thoughts go there on occasion. Last night for a couple of minutes. Not real, but seemingly real. Those, "what difference would my not being here make", and so on and so forth. 

One of my literary heroes, Robert E. Howard, who invented Sword and Sorcery, who eked out a living in Waco Texas writing for the pulps, who could not find a like minded person there in the dry plains, shot himself at the age of 26 in his car outside his father's house. His mother had just died. 

What is the point of this missive? I don't know. 

I suppose just to note that we celebrate the celebrities. The famous, those whose works, whether actor, writer, painter, politician, pope, blare into the public consciousness. Their images, words, faces, deeds, edicts, become landscape of the culture, of the world. And they are the few. The mighty. The remembered. 

But, what about those who toil and are forgotten? Those whose vision might have been as grand, as prescient, as beautiful, but for whatever reason were never seen nor noted? Those whose works were destroyed by fire, war, disease, or just through being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Whose eyes saw things considered foolish, or worse, blasphemous by those in power, and were thus expurgated from the eyes of history? What of them?

And what of the ordinary people? Those who toil for years to raise a family, and work themselves to the bone, even unto death? Who celebrates them? Who acts as their advocate, who speaks for them?

This one morning, sitting alone, as I have spent the vast bulk of all my mornings, a thought that makes tears roll from my eyes, I do.  

I speak for the dead, the everyday, those magnificent invisible billions, yes billions, of people who built the world. Who toiled in the mines of the remembered rulers, the masons, the vintners, the whores, the famers, and wives and husband. The faceless warriors, who had faces, and dreams and children and a whole universe of life in each of their now unremembered minds, who died. Whose mark on history is in an obscure text, or a bestseller that state that Ceaser's legions destroyed the Gauls and not many were killed. The not many. The few. They died. Their dreams ended, were scratched out. 

And no one can say what great things they might have done had they lived. Or what terrible things. The fact is they did not live, did not survive, were not marked, or if marked, their small monuments, many carried only in the minds of their wives and children, or husbands, those ephemeral spires of the inner self were thrown to the wind and lost, erased, and gone forever. 

Unless you believe, as R. E. Howard did, that all those lives lived in the wind, came to him in dreams. That those imagined worlds had real existence somewhere. And why not? 

Why not other lines in the endless whirl of the universe? Why not alternate lines of every dream ever dreampt? 

Einstein said that every moment ever lived existed somewhere. Had existence still. 

And, perhaps each and every lost artist, seeker, farmer, soldier, sailer, wife, mother, daughter, tather, perhaps somewhere each and every one of them achieved their dreams, whether grand or small, of having an empire, a farm, a child, a perfect world, peace, plenty, perhaps somewhere along these endless lines, they each achieved the unimagined, the unimaginable. Their dreams. 

I won't tell you mine. You are familiar with some of them. Enough. And, in this sadness I am seized with this morning, I hope my dreams on some plane are realized. And I am not done, not yet, despite these demons sitting with me in this room, in me, in my too busy mind, I am not finished. Not yet. 

At best few years remain to me. I want them to be happy, filled with love and more plenty and more peace. I want people to read my tales and be recognized and appreciated. 

I want those things, and of course the demons whisper and hiss that none of those things is possible, or that what worlds live in my dreams are not worth the writing, not worth the effort to put down. 

Just fade, they say, stop, wander into the dark trees and let your bones be found in spring. 

But I choose for this day at least not to listen to them. Instead I speak for the dead. For the forgotten, in this little message, sent to my best friend, let us not forget those whose bones we walk on now. Whose lives were real and so many and whom are now the dust of the stage we dance upon. Let us remember those who gained no words but as background noise in the great symphony of time. 

Greet our ancestors in this moment. Let us remember the faceless great, all who came before, joined by the genes, and all of them, the grand horde that has walked the planet, from single cell to the awesome high thinking genetic dreams we have become. Let us pause and celebrate them. Remember them. Their sacrificies and glory, even if for only this one holy moment.