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Exactly a year ago today, I lost my job.
In so many ways, it was a first for me. I started working at this place–a software company–part-time while I was in college. The only other jobs I had in that period involved babysitting computer labs for minimum wage, and doing some consulting work for a CPA. Eventually, I left both of those for the sake of the software company, so I could work more hours there, but I was still considered an intern. The pay was better, and the work was more challenging and interesting.
Eventually, they picked me up full-time and put me on salary. It was a nice pay increase, and I got benefits, too. But, perhaps more important than that, they decided they liked me well enough that they didn’t want me to go anywhere. I enjoyed working there. I made friends. I learned a lot. The company had a strong culture of trust. You could walk to anyone else’s office, no matter where they were in relation to you on the org chart, and talk to them. The company felt like a family. They were understanding when my (then-future) wife was dealing with difficult medical issues that had me taking care of her instead of going to work. In general, they weren’t even that concerned at what times you were in the office, as long as you got your work done. Like I said: trust. They trusted you to do your work and put in the time they required.
One of my favorite stories from working there involves the new employee orientation. Mind you, this was while I was still an intern, and I’d only been there a month or two. Nobody knew who I was at that time. Most of the orientation was your typical “welcome to our company, this is how we do things” sort of presentation. I don’t recall it being very memorable. But for lunch, we went out to a nice hotel restaurant, and I ended up sitting at the table with the man who was the President and CEO of the company, not to mention one of the founders. I’m the sort of person whose instinctive reaction to “suits” is one of suspicion–that they’re putting on an act and would just as happily stab you in the back if it was good for the bottom line. But Wil was different. He spent most of lunch listening rather than talking, learning details about his new employees. We even talked about programming techniques for a while. There was no subject he wouldn’t discuss, and there was a kindness and integrity about him that I’ve seen in very few people over the years, especially those so high up the corporate ladder. Needless to say, he made a strong impression.
After lunch, we headed back to the office. I rode with one of the other Vice Presidents. I realized sometime later that I’d lost my keys somewhere–most likely in that same VP’s back seat. Now, VPs being such busy people, he was booked up in meetings for a while. So, I checked his schedule and went to wait by his office around the time his last meeting was set to end. Meetings being meetings, it apparently went long–he didn’t come to his office, in any case. Along came Wil, who had probably just gotten out of a meeting himself. He remembered my name, asked me if I was looking for someone, and I explained the situation. “Well, let’s go find him!” he said.
And that’s what we did. We went to the meeting where the VP was, who gave us his keys so I could go get my keys. I retrieved them, handed the other keys back to Wil, and thanked him for taking the time out to help me. It certainly wasn’t something I would have asked him to do. But that incident always stuck out in my mind as exemplary of him, someone who would always take the time out to help someone, even if it’s with something trivial.
Time passed, the company grew to over 500 employees, and I got immersed more and more in their development processes and tools. Version control became my specialty, which turns out to be quite a complex and interesting task when you have over a hundred developers to worry about. They all want to code their own way, and they absolutely do not want to be hampered or slowed down. Yet, for an effective version control system, you must require certain steps at certain times, and people have to follow the procedure in order for the process to work. All in all, it was a highly educational experience and I’m confident those skills will serve me well for the rest of my career.
The company, for various reasons, ran into financial trouble. Though every quarterly meeting we were told the company “didn’t make budget,” the blow was softened by the numbers. It looked like cash flow was decent, that the company was turning a profit, even if it wasn’t as big as the owners (a private investment firm) wanted. But things got worse and worse. A fair number of the Vice Presidents and Directors were trimmed, and there were several small layoffs–no more than 20 or so at a time, so none of them seemed dire.
It was determined that what the company lacked was strong leadership. Not that Wil was a poor leader, but that in dividing his time between duties as President and CEO, he more often neglected the CEO part and delegated the day-to-day operations of the company to others. However you’d like to explain it, the point was simple: insufficient executive leadership let the company get pulled into too many directions, and led to declining profits and eventually, losses.
A new CEO was brought in, a man who had a reputation for coming into trouble companies and making them profitable again. I had kind of a weird impression of him, at first. He had a larger-than-life personality, a definite presence that was felt when he walked into a room. He wasn’t the same kind of guy as Wil, that much was certain, but I didn’t know if that was good or bad. You need a different skill set to run a company than you need to hobnob with customers and investors. So, I was willing to give him a chance.
He said he would “transform” the company, and in fact laid out a 90-day timeline for doing just that. Those 90 days would be spent identifying the company’s problems, working out a plan for solving them, and then beginning to enact that plan. Nothing that would take longer than a year would be on the table. The company needed results now, not in 5 years.
Teams were formed to carry out the information gathering. There was some shuffling done at the executive level again. I wasn’t really involved with the transformation, but I kept my ears open to hear what was going on, and it sounded like a lot of issues had been spotted and some new sources of revenue were proposed–many of which were lines of income we had at our disposal, but simply hadn’t exploited yet.
On December 4th, 2008, when the transformation was close to completion, there was a large reduction in force. I was unaware it was even happening, since I was too busy doing my work. Around 11AM, my boss came by and asked if I had a moment. He led me to one of the computer labs near the front of the building–secluded, I realized–and sitting in that room was the VP of the Quality department. I knew this was bad, considering I rarely saw her. I figured out what was happening before she got too far into her explanation. I went numb. I’d been at this company for seven years, and this was how it would end? A little talk, an envelope with a severance agreement in it, and then out the door?
I’d never been let go from a job. The decision to leave had always been mine, and I thought I was valuable enough to this company that they wouldn’t shuffle me out the door. But when it came time to cut costs, how valuable you were to the company didn’t factor into it that much. It was all about how much you cost the company, in terms of salary and benefits. No matter how good your work was, no matter how much time you put in, if they felt you were too heavy on the “expense” side of things, you were gone. They cut people they needed, but they had little other choice. One hundred and twenty-six people lost their jobs that day, out of a company that had around 450 employees at that time.
About a week later, my wife found out she was pregnant. That news didn’t go over so well with me, since I was unemployed and panicked about how we’d survive, much less take care of a new kid. But I buckled down and did what I had to. The company hired an outplacement service, which sounds like they help you find a new job, but it’s more indirect than that. What they actually did was help us build our resumes, polish our interviewing skills, and get lists of potential employers and recruiting agencies. They were a big help, but it was only the first step.
After getting a new resume put together, I signed up with several job sites, hooked up with recruiters, and started applying and interviewing. Several jobs fell through. Some of them, I thought I was perfect for, and even the interviewers seemed impressed, but it was not to be. This was late 2008, early 2009, and employers quite simply could afford to be as picky as they wanted. With so many workers coming back into the market, having lost their jobs, there was a multitude to choose from. There was no sense in picking someone who didn’t have the exact skill set you wanted, and then some!
Nevertheless, I tried to carry on with my job search, knowing that even when I did my absolute best in an interview, factors outside that could cost me the position. I did decide I would be willing to relocate, but that my family would remain in Indiana. I could live very cheaply on my own and still be able to support my family without uprooting them. Hardly an ideal situation, but then those are the choices you’re left with, sometimes.
In late January, I interviewed with a software company in New Jersey. They reminded me in many ways of the company I worked at before, as it might have been ten or fifteen years earlier. Small and agile, with a lot of bright people putting their expertise together. My wife and I flew out so I could interview, and it went very well. Once we got back, though, I didn’t get my hopes up–anything was possible and I didn’t want to get my heart set on any particular job, knowing it could fall through.
The week after we got back, however, I got a phone call from the recruiter that first got me involved with this company. They made an offer, I went over it, and then I accepted. I made arrangements for a place to live, and a couple weeks later I was living in New Jersey. I started work, sunk myself into the company’s atmosphere, and have since made the best of the situation.
I enjoy my new job, though I don’t like being away from my family. I make it back to visit when I can. Given how soft the market remains, I don’t have any plans to return to Indiana in the foreseeable future. This is a good job and I intend to keep it for a while. It does amaze me, though, how different my life is from a year ago. Looking back on it, I’m glad I was let go from my last employer. I’ve had so many new experiences since that happened, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. While my present circumstances are less than ideal, they are a fair sight better than being jobless, or working for a company where the entire culture and philosophy has changed, in my opinion, for the worse.
Having gone through a layoff, RIF, whatever you want to call it, though, I can honestly say I’d never want to experience one again. One per lifetime is enough for me.
I’ve been very remiss about updating this. Mostly, I’ve been working on my book. It has been edited, typeset, has supplemental material, and now only lacks a cover–which I am working on.
I am going on vacation next week, too, so updates will be sporadic for a while. Once I have the book in the can and I’m not on vacation, however, things should pick up once more.
I’ll try to throw in a few more bits from the archive this week, though, if I can manage it.
I haven’t done much in the way of music lately, so I rectified that by creating a 58-minute ambient piece: Drone (58)
Right-click to download. Comments are always welcome.
As someone who runs several websites, I’ve become pretty familiar with some of the common content management systems out there. Although you will find people who advocate for a particular CMS over another, I’m more the kind of person who wants the right tool for the job. No system is right for every situation. So, this article is meant to help you choose which one is right for you!
I’ll be touching mostly on WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, though I will throw in a few thoughts about PHP-Nuke, as well.
WordPress
WordPress is the de facto standard for blogging these days, and for good reason. It’s easy to install, easy to set up, easy to use–all around, it’s easy, easy, easy. If you’re a non-technical user, WordPress is a great system to use. It is also reasonably extensible.
Pros
The interface is very clean and easy to navigate. The ability to update plugins directly from the browser is a nice touch. It also supports a multi-user environment right out of the box, in case you want to run a blogging site with multiple authors. The wealth of available plugins provide a lot of options and additional features. The template system is also highly versatile: templates such as Atahualpa provide a vast array of options for customizing the look and feel of your WordPress site.
I’ve found the plugin system very easy to work with, having written a plugin of my own for a niche where the available plugins were inadequate. With no prior experience writing WordPress plugins, I had mine up and running within a couple hours.
All WordPress requires to get started is a working PHP installation and a MySQL database. You can also get a hosted blog on the WordPress site if you don’t want to spring for a capable hosting account.
Cons
WordPress had a recent, dangerous security flaw that impacted a few people I know. Fortunately for them, they only lost their settings and not their entire WordPress database, though they had to call on someone with more technical expertise to help them sort it out.
Additionally, WordPress has no mode for a safe failover if a plugin update introduces a fatal bug. You just end up with the PHP “white screen of death.” The way to address this is to remove all plugins, restoring them one by one until you find the culprit. However, less technically-inclined users won’t know to do this, and may be unclear how to proceed.
I’ve also found that quite a few WordPress plugins are no longer maintained, and compatibility between major versions is not guaranteed. So, a lot of older plugins just plain won’t work. This isn’t a fault of WordPress, per se, but the community building plugins for it doesn’t seem to be quite as large and active as those developing plugins for, say, Drupal.
Summary
WordPress is a great system if all you need is a straightforward blogging platform, are not a technical expert, and require a clean, simple interface. You can have total control over the presentation of your blog, however, the available plugins may be inadequate if you have unusual requirements.
Joomla
Joomla is an appropriate system for those who run larger sites or who need to deal with large numbers of pages. It’s suitable for things like corporate intranets, group sites, and the like.
Pros
Joomla is fast. Very fast. Its caching system whips the pants off of pretty much all competitors. If you run a large site and you just need it to be fast, fast, fast, Joomla is a good choice.
It also has quite a few plugins, and I’ve found it tends to have a greater variety than WordPress. On the downside, however, since Joomla is more popular with companies, many plugins cost money. There are also a lot of free ones, though, so don’t let that be a deterrent.
Joomla is also pretty easy to set up. Installing plugins is about as straightforward as it is with WordPress.
I’ve also never experienced a “white screen of death” with Joomla, even with some plugins installed incorrectly or with fatal errors in them. It’s a very robust, powerful system.
Many older Joomla plugins are also compatible with later versions, thanks to a built-in legacy mode. It can cause some problems, but I have rarely experienced issues with it.
Cons
With Joomla’s focus on speed and survivability, you knew there were going to be downsides.
First off, the template system isn’t nearly as powerful as the WordPress system. While WordPress themes can add an entirely new maintenance area to your admin panel, Joomla themes do not. If you want to adjust the colors or layout, you’ll have to manually modify HTML and CSS files. If you have a good grasp of those, however, you’ll be just fine. It’s just not quite as point-and-click as WordPress users may be accustomed to.
While there are quite a few plugins available, a lot of the free ones are of lower quality than you might find for WordPress or Drupal. Integrating with third-party applications (such as forums) doesn’t work very well. Community-oriented plugins are not very mature for Joomla. It is definitely more of a content-driven, rather than user-driven, system.
Summary
If you need to manage a large site comprised mostly of your own content and that of other members, rather than building a hugely-interactive community, Joomla is a great choice. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it’s extensible. You may have to do more of the heavy lifting to get it fine-tuned to do what you want, but it will be rock-solid and stand up to high traffic.
Drupal
Drupal is quite possibly the most powerful CMS out there. It’s also the slowest. For this article, I will refer exclusively to Drupal 6, which is the current production version and the one with which I am most familiar.
Pros
The default installation of Drupal gives you a simple site with news, blog, content page, and forum functionality. If you have more specific needs and don’t want to dig through the plugin directory, you can try one of the installation profiles, too. It’s easy to get up and running.
However, the real power of Drupal is in its vast array of plugins, called modules. There are thousands of modules available, for almost any purpose you could imagine, and many you never would have considered.
Essentially, while WordPress and Joomla are primarily blogging/news engines, Drupal can be turned into just about anything you want. Its social networking features are the most developed. I built a creative writing community out of off-the-shelf Drupal modules. If you don’t like the content types that come with Drupal, you can build your own with the Content Construction Kit. You can add modules to control user access based on social networking user relationships, page-specific access rules, or even use a point system. You can also use a combination of them, as I have done.
Modules are updated regularly with new features, and new ones are coming out all the time. If there isn’t a module to do what you want, it is often possible to request it, or get it added to a module that’s close to what you want.
It also has a very nice theming system, and you can allow your users to choose from the themes you have installed, if you so choose. User permissions can also be controlled on a very fine-grained basis.
Cons
Such power and versatility doesn’t come cheap. Drupal is easily the slowest of the major content management systems. While it has a powerful page caching system, it is essentially useless if you use any kind of dynamic page generation. This means anything that controls page access or generates dynamic content is going to bypass your cache system and not give you a performance advantage.
Modules (and Drupal itself) are updated constantly, and it can be a somewhat arduous process to update your Drupal installation. While it is straightforward, there are many steps involved and things can go wrong. It’s crucial to always do a backup just before any upgrades. You never know how two modules might interact and hose your database. This is a rare occurrence, but I’ve seen it happen.
Security flaws are found on a regular basis, too. While I have never seen one exploited in the wild, Drupal’s rapid pace of development means you need to stay on top of your updates.
Summary
If you need power with no regard for speed, Drupal is your best bet. You can build virtually any kind of site you want with it, no matter how special-purpose it is. Maintenance is more of a hassle than with other systems, and there are significant performance tradeoffs, but if you absolutely must have that level of power and extensibility, you can’t beat Drupal.
PHP-Nuke
Just a few words about PHP-Nuke. It is more similar to Joomla than the other systems. Like Joomla, there are pre-customized versions out there, my favorite of which is Nuke Evolution Extreme. If you want a stable, robust system that isn’t exactly bleeding edge, something like this will suit you just fine. Nuke Evolution Extreme, in particular, has phpBB built into it–in fact, the entire user system just piggybacks on top of phpBB, so there’s only one database to maintain. I’ve found it very suitable for environments such as “clan” sites, which just need to be able to communicate easily and have a simple interface for adding pages and so forth.
It’s not nearly as bleeding-edge as the other systems, but it is very capable and featureful on its own.
Finally, I would stress that you carefully evaluate your needs before choosing a content management system–and whether you actually need one at all. Depending on what you want to do, static pages might serve you better. Or, none of the above will suit your needs and you might require something more purpose-specific. Wikipedia has a handy list of CMS software, which is worth digging through if you want to find something for a particular niche.
As always, it’s best to choose the right tool for the job. I use all the above systems in one way or another, depending on my needs. Some are heavily customized, some aren’t. No system is perfect for every environment and situation! That is the key point I’d like you to take away from this article.
So, good luck!
I admit I am still something of a Linux novice. Nevertheless, I have always preferred my web servers run on the LAMP stack. My solitary experience running a Windows web server was a nightmare I’d not wish to repeat.
However, today was one of those days where I would have liked that same ease-of-use. For a program I wanted to use, I needed to install ImageMagick. No big deal, right?
I ran “yum install ImageMagick”, and what do you know, I got 404 errors on every last repository. Nice! It didn’t take me long to figure out that the packages for my operating system (CentOS 5.2) had been moved, but it did take some time to determine just what I would have to change in order to make it work.
Basically, I had to alter my yum repository definition to use “$releasever” instead of a hard-coded “5.2″, which is how it was originally set up. At that point, though, everything was fine. I got ImageMagick installed.
I screwed something else up along the way, though, and I just wanted all my processes restarted correctly, so I rebooted. Tried to SSH into it after that, and got the lovely message, “Server refused to allocate pty”. Very helpful, right? I’m not exactly someone who knows squat about SSH beyond how to login and mess with the shell, so it took some looking to find the problem. Evidently, when I installed ImageMagick (which brought with it a ton of dependencies), it killed some file system entries that were required by SHH. Yay!
To fix, I had to run:
/sbin/MAKEDEV tty
/sbin/MAKEDEV pty
Then, I could get back into SSH. Fortunately, lxadmin was working, and I finally found a use for its primitive and otherwise worthless “Command Center” tool, which lets you execute arbitrary shell commands.
I also wanted to add a few options to my system startup. Just some plain ol’ shell commands, nothing fancy. No services or anything of that sort. This is not as obvious a thing as you might suspect. I knew it had to go in one of the rc.d scripts, but I had no clue which one.
The answer: rc.local. Specifically, /etc/rc.d/rc.local. You can add whatever commands you want to execute there. Be sure to add an ampersand (&) to the end of any command that might take a while, so it’s run in the background.
So, I am learning. It’s a frustrating and often annoying process, but now I have everything working the way I want it to. It does expose one of my lingering gripes with Linux, though: nothing is obvious. Who would think installing a program would break something completely unrelated, like SSH? It doesn’t make any sense. SSH worked fine from day one, until I installed ImageMagick. For that matter, I don’t see why ImageMagick requires 38MB of dependencies, including most of Gnome and X11. I realize it’s just using them as libraries, but still, I do find it a tad aggravating to see space getting used up by chunks a windowing system I won’t even be using. Windows has “DLL hell,” and Linux has “dependency hell.” Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I guess.
This is an unfinished book I worked on back in early 2005. I actually found it very promising, but as I got into it I wondered who would want to read such a relentlessly grim book, especially when I wasn’t planning on any kind of happy ending. In fact, the very process of writing it and planning it was depressing me, and I considered it an altogether unhealthy experience. I have thought about going back to it from time to time, but then I look at my notes and what I had written down, and it makes me sick to my stomach. It came from a very dark place that I don’t know if I want to tap again. If I do approach this material in the future, I’ll need a better plan that provides some kind of relief, so the entire work isn’t just a tortuous journey through human misery.
You can read the first four chapters below the fold.
Continue reading There Is No Cabal
In honor of the 10th anniversary of the computer game Homeworld, I am reposting an essay I wrote on December 27, 2006. Enjoy!
Homeworld.
Released in 1999, it is still probably the best 3D real-time strategy game set in space ever made. Others have come and gone, but I always go back to Homeworld. Aside from being a good game in general, its story and atmosphere really sell it. I would dare say that without its intriguing, mystical ambiance, it would not be nearly as interesting a game.
As someone who creates worlds and cultures for fun, I appreciate the hard work that goes into the process. People who don’t do world-building (also called geofiction and subcreation) might assume it doesn’t involve much more than assembling a patchwork of cultural traits and drawing a crude map or two. While some projects never get past that stage, many go much further. A world with any amount of effort put into it won’t be a poorly-constructed synthesis of disparate elements, but a consistent, believable place.
That brings me to Homeworld’s universe. Some say it exhibits “aesthetic completion,” meaning its various parts, though abstract, fit together into a consistent whole. Homeworld achieves this by portraying all its graphics in an abstract fashion: battles are fought from a third-person perspective, where you view the ships participating. Because the ships are deliberately alien, there is no “right” way for them to look–as time goes on, they do not appear dated, because they have no real-world counterparts to make a valid comparison.
Naturally, most games also include cutscenes, which are either rendered in the game engine (a la Half-Life) or show up as interstitial CGI sequences. The problem with CGI is that it is expensive and dates quickly. If you don’t believe me, look at the opening sequences for any game made around 2000, and compare it with a new game. Chances are, even the in-game graphics look better than the 5-year-old cutscenes.
Homeworld avoids this issue, again, through abstraction. Instead of expensive and quickly-outdated CGI cutscenes, animatics were used. An animatic is essentially a storyboard that uses simple techniques to illustrate motion: panning over an image, or moving parts of it. Homeworld’s animatics are black-and-white, adding to the epic, historical feel of the game itself. Like the rest of the game, they do not illustrate people (with one understandable exception), but ships, cities, and technological artifacts. Once again, because everything illustrated is intentionally alien, the images never appear dated or incomplete.
The aesthetic cohesion doesn’t stop with the graphics. The sound also refuses to recall a particular era. Ships sounds are fairly generic–bullets, beams, explosions. Radio chatter is calm and serene. The music is ambient, often with a Celtic or Middle Eastern motif. Wordless vocals enhance several of the tracks. In fact, my favorite is the song played when the Kadeshi confront your fleet. It’s hard to explain how a song with a man humming can actually be ominous, but it is.
The developers of Homeworld originally wanted to make a Battlestar Galactica game. When they failed to secure that license, they came up with Homeworld, which has a similar story, but a completely different tone. The music and imagery, as well as some of the missions, conspire to lend a mystical feel to the proceedings–a sense of history being fulfilled. One of the designers discussed how the mysticism implied in the Homeworld games helps give them their timeless feel, and I am inclined to agree.
Even with all this talk of aesthetics and artistic themes, we’re still talking about what is a really good game. If the story doesn’t intrigue you at all, you would do well the pick up the game anyway, especially if you’re an RTS fan. There are copies you can find via Froogle, or you can try Homeworld: Cataclysm (which is a “standalone expansion”) or Homeworld 2, which is a lot like the original. If you can appreciate a game more because of its gameplay and story than because of its graphics, you should give this one a shot. And hey, it’s a bargain title these days…
This is one of my early versions of what would become Shatternity. It is, in fact, the earliest incarnation I still have: it’s from 1996. Shatternity itself goes back to 1989, roughly, but I have virtually nothing on paper (or in electronic form) until 1996, sadly. I wrote out several hundred pages and then tore them up because I was unhappy with it. Most of the elements–technologies, alien races, etc.–managed to make it into later incarnations.
Commentary follows the story chapter.
TITUS
Chapter One
“This is Captain Mark Alexander Titus authorizing the abandonment of ISEC-31, designation Titus. Once again, abandon ship!” The orders came between bursts of weapons fire from both vessels involved. The larger ship, the aforementioned Titus, received a rather unceremonious beating from the distended, diamond-shaped craft. The design was unknown. The race within it was unknown. The only thing known for certain was that Titus, one of the most powerful vessels in the Interstellar Space Exploration Commission’s registry, was about to be a total loss.
Crew members raced to escape craft, shuttles, cargo cruisers, freighters, fighters–anything lying around in one of the monstrous bays could be considered fair game. Fire suppression systems worked diligently on the bridge to extinguish the rampant flames. Propulsion: a destroyed system. Life-support: quickly slipping toward nil. The crew, composed mostly of quasi-civilians operating on essentially namesake enlistment, mercilessly trampled Security in their efforts to flee. Humanity had not encountered hostile extraterrestrials before. The crew very obviously had no idea what to do.
As another direct hit rocked the faltering vessel, the bridge crew decided the time had come to escape. They departed to abandon ship. Display panels indicated 5 minutes until the ship self-destructed–but as the protocols laid out, self-destruction could occur prematurely in the event of total computer failure or if analyses predicted that the vessel would not survive to complete the countdown. In either case, the ship would detonate immediately. The last escape vessel had barely slipped out of its bay when Titus erupted in quantum-nuclear fury.
“Pod one-niner! Hull debris coming your way!” The voice of Lieutenant Robert Thomas Maxwell barked the warning from his own craft, escape pod 10. Having spent the past two years with the ISEC’s exploratory defense program and the prior 2 years working as an unofficial “experiment,” he’d managed to save the Titus on more than one occasion. This time, of course, none of his energies could save the outgunned craft. The opposing vessel had begun attacking suddenly and relentlessly. As Maxwell watched in horror, the diamond-shaped adversary began picking off escaping craft. One by one, they burst apart. Then, instantly realizing his own pod was being similarly targeted, the interior brightened into a white flare. Then the world darkened.
The crew of the Titus along with the alien crew were left on a cold, damp surface with obscuring fog limiting visibility. “This is my domain,” explained a booming, ubiquitous voice. “I am Rok’Nor. Rather, that is as close to a name as either of your races could possibly comprehend from me. To do away with formalities–my nature is extradimensional. That affords me the capacity to annihilate any or all of you at any time or method of my choosing, so please be cooperative. My demands are as follows: the Terrans will duel the Cranions in melee combat. Last creature alive goes free. Begin amusing me now.”
Captain Titus protested. “My crew is not here to amuse you. If you want to hold onto anyone, let it be me–and release the rest of them.” Naturally, that proposal was the first to come into Titus’ mind–and the most obvious one Rok’Nor had anticipated.
“Splendid, a display of self-sacrifice already. What is it about human life that you value so much?”
“If you let everyone else go, I’ll tell you the answer,” Titus suggested.
“Very well,” came Rok’Nor’s voice. “You will remain. The rest shall not.” The world topsy-turvied again.
“This is the Terran vessel Titus to the attacking craft–please respond!” Maxwell shouted through a communications terminal. He gripped the captain’s chair as the bridge rocked again. “Keep those shields up!” Maxwell barked.
“They’re coming down about as fast as I can put more power into them!” the tactical officer complained.
Another shudder. “What was that one?” Maxwell demanded.
“Mines containing large clusters of antimatter, sir,” came the explanation from science officer Samuel Collins.
“Helm, three-quarters lightspeed,” Maxwell ordered. The shields flickered again as the hull buckled in several places. The ship moved sluggishly due to its immense mass. As a thruster engaged on one of the mines, nothing could be done as it made a beeline for Titus‘ shield generator. Meanwhile, yet another impact took its toll. “We’ve lost flight control!” the helm officer yelled, panicked.
“There’s a mine on a direct course for our shield generator,” the tac officer noted grimly. Just then, the mine struck. The hull buckled and flaked. Fully half of the ship’s shield strength was sapped by the destruction of the generator. “Breach on deck 12 now!”
Yet another mine ignited its latent propulsion system, this time on a course for the bridge deck. Despite being buried under a dozen meters of ablative armor, a mine of such strength posed more than a substantial threat. As the mine struck, all computer displays fritzed. Always a terminal sign. “Abandon ship!” Maxwell ordered.
“Sir, incoming message from engineering… we can’t abandon ship. All bay doors have buckled or been otherwise jammed. We’re stuck!”
Maxwell was really starting to hate the news the tac officer kept giving.
Commentary: The chapter ends rather abruptly, doesn’t it? The concepts being hatched here were half-developed at the time, and I’m not certain where I was going with them, to be honest. You can see some elements that look similar to other parts of Shatternity here, though. Mark Titus and Robert Maxwell feature prominently, although in my current “canon” Robert never served under Mark, and Mark didn’t command his own ship. Rather, he was a diplomat.
ISEC was a revision name for ISEA. In later versions, I went back to ISEA, as I clarified what the organization’s purpose was. Cranion ship design definitely evolved in the interim, too. This incident is clearly meant as the outbreak of the Cranion War, which is one of the focal events in Robert’s life. So, a lot of these things did carry over.
Rok’Nor was kind of a shameless ripoff of Nagilum, an extradimensional alien from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even at the time I wrote this, I knew what I was emulating, and I still remember. Rok’Nor was meant to be one of many beings called the ‘Nor. Their properties were eventually devolved until I wound up with only two mysterious representatives: Stak and Vral, two individuals who are somehow involved in the creation of the timeships. I decided extradimensional beings would be represented only by the Powers from Magnetic Gecko, and I am still working out what to do with them to tie my multiversal cosmology together.
The writing is surprisingly decent given the time period it came from. Could be better, could be worse. I transcribed this from a notebook a few years ago so I probably cleaned up anything that was really awful.
This was the first bit of Body of Evidence that I wrote, back on August 4, 2003. Yes, I have the exact date recorded. I was somewhat annoyed when the TV show Lost came along and did something very similar, but what can you do? I ended up cannibalizing elements (and characters) from this project and it become part of Magnetic Gecko, so at the very least, this stuff is worthwhile to get some insight into the world that MG would eventually uncover.
The main difference here is that, at this point in the series, there’s some weird stuff going on, but it’s unclear exactly what’s happening. That’s the way I like it. Over time, it would have been revealed what was going on with the island, as the kids got closer to unlocking its central mysteries. Commentary follows the story. Read on!
Body of Evidence: Day One
Episode 1: Neek
I felt her skin under my fingers. Her arms, her hipbones, everything. I just couldn’t see her. Too dark. I didn’t need to. I just pulled her tighter.
“Wake up! Unique, wake up, you muchacho perezoso!”
Except I was only holding a bundle of blankets. I sighed and blinked the sleep out of my eyes. My mother was yelling for me.
“Are you getting up?” came her voice again.
“Yes, Madre, I am awake!”
“Get down here and eat something!”
I grumbled my way into a t-shirt and jeans and stumbled down the stairs. My family, excepting my father, were in the kitchen. My brother and sister were sitting at the counter, and my mother was washing dishes, wiping counters, all that stuff I was happy to get out of.
My mother handed me a plate. Grilled cheese sandwich and ants on a log. I’m two years old, after all. “I’m seeing Pug today, I’ll eat something with him.”
“You’ll eat now! Sit down with your family and eat.” She had enough of a smile when she said it that I knew she wasn’t angry–she hardly ever was. But insistent? Definitely.
I sat down next to my brother, who immediately stuffed away the drawings he was working on into a folder. “What’re you drawing, Hermano?”
He just stuck his tongue out at me. I returned the favor. He was such a strange five-year-old. Rarely said a word. Always drawing something, but no one ever saw what. And no one knew where he kept his folder hidden when he didn’t have it attached to his hand.
Then Tolerancia chimed in. “Madre, Uni was on the phone until 3AM!”
“No wonder you slept until eleven,” my mother chided. “Who is she?”
“You already know who she is,” I replied, taking a bite out of the sandwich she wouldn’t let me leave without eating.
“It’s the Summers girl,” my sister blabbed. “She dresses funny and I hear she hangs out with bad people.”
“You be careful with girls like that,” my mother had to warn. “They can be trouble.”
“I can handle her, Madre. She’s not like that.”
“I bet he’s slept with her already.” My sister again.
“Shut up!”
“See! He has!”
“I have not! Shut up!”
“Unique! Don’t talk that way to your sister. Tolerancia! Leave your brother alone.” Then she came a little closer to me and stared. “Now, I don’t care what you have or haven’t done, but you watch yourself and be a gentleman.”
“I know, ma’. You raised me right.” I sighed and choked down the food as quickly as I could just to escape this discussion.
“Good. Stop eating so quickly! You’ll never get any nutrition out of it that way.”
“Then can I just not eat it?”
“Unique! Mind your mother!”
“Yes’m.” I slowed down while exploding my sister’s head a few dozen times. She wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d just shut up occasionally. The little brat.
I finished my food and dumped my plate in the sink, heading for the front door. I went for my car keys and my mother, in all her omniscience, called to me. “Your father took your car while his is in the shop. You’ll have to walk, or take the bus.” Dammit!
I caught up with Pug a few streets outside of downtown, sitting on the steps outside a condemned house, smoking Pall Malls and tossing pebbles across the street. “Where the hell were you?”
“My father took my car today.”
“You mean we have to walk? Fucking brilliant.”
“Like you had any plans.”
“At least I could’ve made plans if we had access to a vehicle.”
“But you forget one thing.”
“What?”
“It’s my car.”
“Except when your father wants it.”
“Point. Where did you want to go?”
“Nowhere in particular. It’s just boring and summer, and the old lady won’t let me stay home all day.” He stood up and dropped a handful of pebbles, and pointed in the direction he was walking. I went with him, having no clue where we might be going.
“You could get a job,” I pointed out.
“What, so they can track me with my Social Security Number? No thanks. If I ever do get a job, it’ll be with an assumed name, and I’ll get paid under the table.”
“Paranoid much?”
“You know they collect that shit in aggregate and use it to predict trends and stuff? And then they put it to work in their social engineering projects. Do you trust bureaucrats to architect your future?”
“I don’t think we have much of a choice there. And you really need to relax.” I meant that wholeheartedly. Pug was bad enough without nicotine, but when he was on about his conspiracy of the day, his fingers would shake and his breathing would become sporadic and irregular. Sometimes I thought of asking about his home life, but somehow I knew his paranoia and general anxiety probably had a lot to do with his family. Not something I wanted to get very involved in.
“Everyone says I should relax. Maybe I don’t want to relax. Maybe I like being wide awake. I’m not living in a dream world like the rest of you. I know what’s going on. The whole system is designed to catch people like me and make them ‘conform.’”
“I kind of doubt that.”
“Did you do that computer thing I asked you about?”
“Well… what you are asking for is possible, at least. But I have no idea how to make plastique.”
“You sure don’t know much.”
“About blowing shit up, anyway.”
“I’ll give you a recipe. But you got a transmitter and a receiver, right?”
“Yeah. 900MHz. Should work up to a few hundred feet away.”
“But my room is a Faraday cage. You’ll have to put something on the door frame to carry the signal to the computer itself.”
“What the hell did you do to your room?”
“I lined it with copper mesh. I know about TEMPEST, man. Don’t you? All your electronic devices can be monitored remotely.”
“I think if anyone wanted to go to the trouble of spying on you, they’d manage.”
“But they’d have to put forth some effort, and maybe then I’d notice.”
“Or they’d just kill you.”
“Man, shut up! I’m tired of arguing with you. Will you do it or not?”
“Sure. But I’m not making plastique at my house.”
“Fine, I’ll make it for you and give it to you.”
“Let me rephrase. I will not bring any explosives into my house.”
“Then you can finish it in my dad’s garage. If you blow up his Corvette, I’d just laugh.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” When I next looked ahead, we were heading onto one of the outer roads. I guess one could call it a highway. It stretched from one end of the island to the other, with ports at either terminal. Up ahead there was an overpass for the street that crossed the pseudo-highway–it covered the northern and southern ports.
It was lunchtime, so traffic was moving along as people tried to use this road as a shortcut to restaurants. Nothing out of the ordinary, except people failing to notice that if everyone takes the same “shortcut,” it ceases to be all that short anymore.
Pug threw down his cigarette butt and, in all his eagle-eyed observation, caught a vehicle on the overpass that was moving erratically. He and I recognized the car simultaneously. “Isn’t that–”
“–High Clash’s car.”
“And he’s–”
“–that’s not right!” The vehicle, northbound, red, large, old, swung sharply left, toward the guardrail, bursting through, and flipping end-over-end into the traffic below.
“Holy fucking shit!” came out of my mouth before I could help myself. The fast-moving traffic slammed into the car and each other, spilling over into all lanes, and smashing the traffic quite quickly into a sudden standstill. Smoke and flames sprouted from several cars. Some people’s horns were stuck blaring. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked, turning to Pug.
“I don’t suppose I can just stand here.”
“No, you can’t. Let’s go.”
I’ll probably never be sure what induced me to get involved. Something about seeing so many people hurt, trapped, dying. My instincts took command and pushed me into the wreckage, to see if there was anyone that could be easily extracted. I managed to pull an old woman and a few kids from vehicles before emergency personnel showed up. I didn’t get to see what progress Pug made before we were shooed off the scene. No sooner were we pushed away from the carnage than news cameras got in our faces. At the time, I had no idea what I was saying. I imagined I was saying something intelligent, but I was hardly coherent. Pug ended up destroying one of those $40,000 cameras, and that’s when we had to start running like hell. Pug laughed the whole way.
Pug and I parted ways a few blocks from his house, still unable to wrap our heads around what we’d seen. We agreed to inform each other if we found out what became of High Clash–the cause of the whole mess. I turned my back on Pug and headed home. It was almost time for dinner.
I got back to the house and found my car in the driveway. My parents were having some sort of discussion when I walked in, which they abruptly ended when they heard the door shut. I put my shoes on the rack by the door and flopped onto a sofa in the living room. The TV was on and Tolerancia was crying in one of the other chairs. My mother came in and looked at me. “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“There was a terrible accident today on Long Way. That Clash boy threw his car off the Short Way overpass!”
“Yeah… I saw it. Why is she crying?” I asked, nodding toward my sister.
“Her friend Lake didn’t make it out.”
“Oh. What about High?”
“I haven’t heard about him yet. But it should be on the news shortly.”
And it was. The raw numbers: 6 dead, 34 injured, 22 cars involved. High was listed in critical condition at Passage & Reverence. The little “interview” with me popped up, and I had no idea it was going to be so embarrassing.
“What did you see?”
“[beep] [beep] and he threw his [beep]ing car off the [beep]ing overpass! I’ve never [beep]ing seen a [beep]ing thing like it! Holy [beep], [beep]! [beep]!”
Maybe they only aired that part for entertainment value. If so, that wasn’t very nice.
They listed the names of the dead. Fortunately, it was no one I knew. But there was Tolerancia’s friend. I wanted to comfort her, or at least do something vaguely brotherly, but I was too generally annoyed with her to try. My mother halfheartedly tried to make something for dinner, but we ended up fending for ourselves that night. My father commented that my car needed a tune-up, and that he’d scheduled one for Thursday. I told him I’d take it in.
I took a nap for a few hours, and by the time I woke up, everyone else had retired to bed. 10PM. What had roused me was a sound from outside my window–a door slamming. I took a peek and saw her running to her car. I didn’t need to see tears to know they were there. I sighed and got back into bed, debating myself for a moment. It was a short argument, and I sprung into my shoes and hit my car, following her now-distant rear lights.
I eventually figured out where she was going.
A few minutes later, I was not far behind her car, on the Long Way again. There were no signs of the earlier pileup in the darkness as we passed it. I followed her for a good fifteen, twenty minutes, before she pulled off onto an unpaved road, and I knew where this one went.
It wasn’t much longer before I found her car a few hundred feet from the beach, and pulled up alongside. She wasn’t in the car, though. I looked toward the water, and saw her there, sitting, looking past the stars and the ocean.
I went toward her cautiously. I didn’t know if she’d seen me beforehand. Didn’t want to scare her off, either. I quietly sat down beside her. She jumped for a moment, then calmed down when she saw who it was. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi. Nice night.”
She shrugged. “It could be.”
“Sorry for tailing you out here. I just saw you were upset.”
She smiled, just a little. “Thanks for caring.”
“Are you okay?”
The smile went away quite suddenly. “I swear, my parents must have signed a pact with the devil that endears them to make my life miserable.”
“What’d they do now?” As one might imagine, this was not a unique discussion. Just a variation on a theme.
“They tell me where I can and can’t go, with whom, and when, and why, and it’s just ridiculous. I’m sixteen years old. I’m not a child. I can be responsible. I am responsible. But they won’t let me prove it. As soon as I get home, they’ll probably take my keys away and ground me forever. So, I’m going to stay out here as long as possible.”
“I hope you don’t mind some company, then.”
“I don’t mind your company.” A little smile again, and then she faced the water. “I feel so trapped here. This island in the middle of fucking nowhere. And it never seems like there’s any way to escape.”
“Some people leave.”
“But you have to have somewhere to go. What am I going to say? ‘Give me money to leave because I hate it here’? I don’t see that working very well.”
“You still have a couple years to figure all that out.”
“I don’t think I can survive another couple years. This place suffocates me. It’s like everyone here is sleepwalking, totally oblivious.”
“You’ve been talking to Pug again, haven’t you?”
“Not like that. It’s just that… no one realizes how pointless our lives here are. Or maybe they do and don’t care. Their spirits are already gone. And then there’s SOMAC… controlling everything worth controlling around here. I just can’t live like this. There has to be more out there.”
“And you’ll get to see it someday, if you just stay focused now.”
“Yeah. That’s just the hard part.”
I moved a little closer to her and picked up a handful of sand. “You could be glad you’re not sand, I guess. Takes millions of years to form, and then a few minutes to turn into glass. Or fiberglass. There’s a lot of stuff that we wouldn’t have if not for sand, but it doesn’t seem that important, does it?”
“Does anyone ever tell you you don’t make any sense?” She took the prompting anyway and dropped her head onto my shoulder.
“I hear that all the time. It doesn’t matter. We’re not sand. We’re people. And people are stupid and strange and nonsensical. Grains of sand are all alike. People aren’t. I’m pretty sure you can’t make anything useful out of people, either. So, that’s lucky for us, or someone would’ve made an industry out of human derivatives.”
“Yeah, lucky us,” she snorted. Maybe the things I said were a bit too weird, sometimes.
“Des?”
“Neek?”
“I’m just saying things don’t have to make sense. There doesn’t have to be a point to everything. When you figure that out, you’ll be free, and can do whatever you want. Expecting there to be some grand reason for everything is going to disappoint you. Thinking getting out of here will change anything is going to disappoint you, too. Change doesn’t do any good on the outside if the inside stays the same.”
“You may not be much of a philosopher, but at least you kind of make sense now.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Now shut up and hold me.”
So that’s what I did. I think we eventually fell asleep, but most of it was an uncertain, fuzzed blur. One of those things I’d like to remember, but can’t seem to grasp with any clarity.
Commentary: Adverb soup. Too many “-ly” words. On a technical level, the story is easy to follow, but it jumps from event to event without a good framing device. Maybe a framing device is unnecessary, but it feels like I’m telling three different stories, and none of them come off making the point. Granted, the whole purpose the “Day One” project was to actually cover a 24-hour period from the point-of-view of each character. In that sense, some of the events were random and will have no further repercussions, and others would be important down the line.
Pug isn’t meant to be taken seriously, and hopefully his behavior and manner of speaking demonstrate that. He’s paranoid to the point of absurdity. Neek is much more laid back, with a responsible streak. Pug shuns responsibility and it’s a wonder he has any friends at all: odds are people like Neek only tolerate him out of a sense of pity. If the few friends he had didn’t stick with him, he wouldn’t have anyone.
Neek’s relationship with Des(tiny) Summers was supposed to be one of the major anchors of the series, though I never finished Day One so it’s difficult to know how that would have turned out.
Were I to rewrite this, I would probably reduce the use of Spanish. It feels clunky and awkward and I think I can communicate Neek’s heritage and family environment without being so blunt about it.
For the curious: yes, all names are just everyday words. Some are less everyday than others. But all of that was meant to add to the otherworldly feel of the series. It’s like our world, but not exactly. I only managed to write Day One entries for four (out of ten) characters. I had high hopes for this series, and perhaps I will come back to it someday as a “side story” to Magnetic Gecko, to provide more background on the events in that book.
Don’t say I never did anything nice for you! Here is an all-new original short story from me. It’s a concept that I had rolling around in my head for several months, and I decided to finally get down to the business of writing it. I hope you find it enjoyable. Comments, as always, are welcomed. I may post some commentary on it later. Since I just wrote it, I’m not really in the mood to pick it apart just yet!
So, enjoy!
SMOKE, FIRE, AND ASH
April 14
Blackouts are getting worse. I was walking to school this time, alone as always. Nobody wants to be friends with the “Blackout Bandit.” I’m not sure where I was, somewhere between Godman and Oswald Streets, and the next thing I know, I’m on the roof of the school. Carly’s mom saw me up there and called 911, and they brought out a fire truck and the whole nine yards. Everyone was yelling and getting upset. Some of the kids told me to jump. I swear I don’t know how I made it up there. A fireman came up on a ladder and helped me down, and my parents took me home after the police questioned me for a few minutes. I told them I wasn’t suicidal. Mom and Dad had a few words with the principal and the cop. I don’t know what all that was about, but they took me home and sent me to my room, and I could hear them arguing for a long time. I know it’s all because of me.
I swear to God, I don’t know why I have blackouts. I’m not crazy. I’m not making it up. I’m not trying to get attention. I just want to be normal. All I ever want is to be normal, and nobody will let me have that.
These journals are stupid and I’m sick of doing them. They aren’t going to help me figure out why I’m blacking out. I never remember anything. I just wake up somewhere strange. This is so pointless. I’m having them every day and no one is doing anything about it. I’ve been to so many doctors. None of them ever find anything wrong with me. They can’t even say I’m crazy. When I’m not blacking out, I’m a perfectly normal 11-year-old. As normal as I ever am, I mean. Normal kids don’t do this. Normal kids don’t wake up on the school roof. Normal kids don’t get told they should jump.
Evan Brooks shifted nervously in his seat, trying desperately to pay attention to his teacher, but hopelessly distracted by the itchiness of his brand-new shirt. Horizontal stripes–bright red and dark blue–made a circuit around his torso, the stiff polyester irritating his skin. He wanted anything other than to be noticed, and his mother put him in the tackiest, most boring clothes imaginable. Like I’m not unpopular enough already.
Hushed tones propagated the rumor of yesterday’s “incident,” with Evan on the roof and half the student body calling for him to try his hand at flying. He decided he was lucky they didn’t ship him off to the “psycho ward,” the place where they sent crazy kids who tried to jump off of buildings. He had a therapy session with Dr. Felten after school, one he dreaded attending. He kept a journal of every blackout, and as they became more and more numerous, his notebook began to fill quickly. They used to come months apart, then it was weeks. Over the past year, the interval diminished to mere days, and for the past couple weeks, he suffered at least one a day. No one ever saw these blackouts–he never seemed to have them around anyone else. Sometimes, another person would rouse him, but his actual collapse went completely without witness.
The doctors tried every test in the book, ruling out as many diagnoses as they could. Sleep studies indicated no sleepwalking, no narcolepsy. EEGs displayed no trace of seizure activity or even abnormal brain function, other than tremendous levels of anxiety–decidedly normal, under the circumstances. That was where Dr. Felten came in.
“Physically, there is nothing wrong with you,” the Doc explained, eyeing his young patient. Evan shifted nervously on the sofa, his eyes darting around the room, as if to find an escape. “These symptoms indicate a deep emotional trauma, one you are unwilling to acknowledge.”
Evan sighed. “The only ‘trauma’ I’m having are these damn blackouts!” he snapped. “My parents have always been nice to me, I never had trouble at school until this started. Other than some bullies, I guess. But everybody gets that and they don’t zone out and wake up halfway across town.”
“Evan, the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this is for you to be honest with me. If you can’t do that consciously, then I think it’s time to do what we talked about before.”
“You want to hypnotize me?”
Dr. Felten gave a single nod. “Your parents have agreed, and given the growing intensity of your blackouts, I don’t believe we can afford to wait any longer. I do not want to receive a call that something terrible has happened to you. I want to help you, and I think this is the only way.”
Evan slouched against the back of the sofa, eyes cast downward. “I don’t know. I don’t even like going to bed anymore, because I’m afraid I’ll end up somewhere weird.”
“You can trust me,” the Doc assured. “It’s just you and me here. I won’t let anything happen to you. If I think you are getting too worked up under the hypnosis, I’ll wake you immediately. I don’t want to trigger an episode, believe me.”
Evan blew out the breath he’d been holding in, and finally acceded. “What do you want me to do, just lay on my back?”
“That will be fine.”
The boy swung his legs up onto the couch and rested his head on the arm, folding his hands over his belly. “I don’t see how this is going to help.”
“Trust me, this will do some good. It may take multiple sessions, but we will get to the bottom of your blackouts.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
Felten continued in a soothing tone. “I want you to relax as completely as possible. There is nothing to fear here. I want you to look up at the ceiling. Notice the spackle patterns on the ceiling–all the points and valleys. Focus on one of them. Find a spot, and focus all your attention on it. Concentrate on it as hard as you can, as if it’s the only place in the universe that matters. It’s a special place, a place only you know about, and I want you to completely inhabit it, make it your own. You will still be aware of my voice, but your body will become very relaxed the more you focus on that one spot. Just keep your attention on that spot, allowing your body to become relaxed and comfortable. At some point, your eyes may feel the need to close, and that’s okay. When that time comes, you can feel more and more relaxed. You can close your eyes and let that relaxation spread over your body. That’s it, just let it come over you.”
Evan didn’t really feel it coming on, until his eyes began to fall shut. That one spot on the ceiling–where three peaks made a kind of bright triangle, a perfect shape amid such chaos–it stayed in his mind as his eyes let go, shrouding him in darkness. Yet, he still thought he could see that spot. He could see the spot, and hear Dr. Felten’s voice as if being whispered right into his ear. His muscles loosened, the anxiety melted out of his body, and the Doc’s gentle drone lulled him.
“Now, I would like you to imagine that you are in your favorite place in the whole world, as if you were there right now. It might be a place you’ve been to before, or a place you’d like to visit, or maybe a place that doesn’t even exist–it’s your place, and it belongs only to you, and you can go there anytime you like. Maybe you are there by yourself, or maybe you have a friend or loved one with you. You are doing your favorite activities in this place–I don’t know what they are, but they are yours, and you are having a perfect day, doing your favorite activities in your perfect place.”
Evan’s thoughts drifted, until he found his “perfect place.” It didn’t even take much thought. It was simple darkness–nothingness. He felt nothing. He saw nothing. He became nothing. And yet, he could imagine no better way to be. Even Dr. Felten’s voice faded away into a formless noise. He lost touch with his body, with his senses. Nothing happened and nothing mattered, and he felt only peace–if perfect stillness was a thing that could be felt at all.
And then he snapped out of that place–pulled violently, yanked and ripped from it, tossed onto the floor of the shrink’s office, and it was no longer him alone with Dr. Felten. The gray-haired man was stretched out on the carpet, supine and unresponsible. The dark-haired receptionist had her mouth over his, blowing air into his lungs. Evan panicked. “Oh my God! What happened?”
“Call 911!” she shouted, likely louder than she meant to.
Evan got up, shaking off a sluggishness that seemed to inhabit his whole body, and reached the phone on the desk, dialing the digits. His fingers slipped over the buttons. It took three tries to get those three numbers punched in correctly. “911, what’s your emergency?”
“I’m at Dr. Felten’s office, and he’s dying or something!”
“Can I have your location?”
“I… I don’t know, on Sycamore, I think!” He wiped sweat from his forehead, his anxiety back with a vengeance.
“We’ll dispatch an ambulance immediately. Is anyone else there with you?”
“Yeah, the desk lady is here,” he stammered. She got up and came to grab the phone from him.
Dr. Felten didn’t respond to any of her efforts at CPR. She explained the situation to the dispatcher, and Evan paced frantically next to the motionless doctor. “Oh God. Oh God,” he chanted.
April 15
Dr. Felten died today. I didn’t see it happen, I was hypnotized. I thought it was going well, and then I woke up on the floor and he was dead. The desk lady said she came in and I was on the floor, and he wasn’t breathing. She checked us both and found that I was OK, so she did CPR on the Doc. He didn’t make it. I don’t know if they’re going to tell me how he died. I just have a feeling it was my fault. Everything is my fault. If an asteroid crashed into Earth and killed us all tomorrow, that would somehow be my fault.
And why am I still writing these? No one’s going to want to see me after this. I’ll be the kid who murdered Dr. Felten, the guy who was on the cover of TIME magazine and had all those fancy certificates on his wall. I’ll be the crazy kid with blackouts who killed the most respected psychology guy in the southeast.
I don’t want to be crazy. Or just take out that last word. I don’t want to be.
Evan soaked his pillow with saline tears, as much as he tried to hold them off. The Spider-Man pillowcase drank up his misery and the pillow it surrounded shielded him from the shouting outside–his parents freaking out over their son’s well-being, again. He never wanted to put them through any of this. He only ever wanted to be a good son to them, to do well in school, not be a troublemaker, get good grades, go to college, get a nice job, and be the boy they could be proud of. They didn’t have any other kids. He was their one and only chance, and he was blowing it big-time.
The sun set and he fell into a restless sleep, not knowing any other kind these days.
He expected to wake up to his 6AM alarm, to get ready for school. Even though his parents probably would have let him stay home, he wanted to go. He wanted to be normal–to act normal–to not let anyone see how badly it bothered him. But it wasn’t the alarm that woke up. It was the sound of crickets, chirping right by his head. Dew-speckled grass dusted his face, coating it with a chilly film of water. He groaned, rolling from his stomach to his back, and saw the moon high in the night sky. “Ugh,” he protested. “Not again.”
He was thankful he never changed out of his clothes the prior evening, since walking around in pajamas–or worse, just underwear–would have been even more embarrassing. He didn’t recognize the house whose front yard he’d wound up in. Even the street names were off. “Bellevue.” “Angola.” I’ve never been to this part of town, he realized grimly. How am I going to get home?
He made for the sidewalk and walked toward the denser clusters of houses up ahead, going on the assumption that it would lead him to a main road he knew, and that he could follow home. He had no idea what time it was, but the lights at every house were off. Only a few porch lights supplemented the moon- and starlight.
He walked uncomfortably down the street, his socks wet with condensation, and the occasional rock making him wish he’d have the foresight to wear shoes the next time he blacked out. He looked around at the houses nearby, noticing how big and nice they were–garages with two or even three cars, houses with three or four stories, and lots of land between them, lots more than his parents had in their little tract. He wondered if this was the ritzy part of town, where all the wealthy people lived. It took him almost a minute to go from one house to the next, a feat which took only seconds in his home neighborhood. And these houses all looked new, everything about them seemed to sparkle in the moonlight. No simple A-frames or ranches, either, but lots of angles and bay windows, hooded lights going up around the walkways to each front door, turned off for the night. And there’s no way I’ll ever end up in a place like this, not with me being a damn lunatic.
He made almost no sound with his socks scooting along the pavement, so when he heard a faint but rhythmic tapping from behind, he began to grow suspicious. He started sweating again, speeding up a little, but not turning around–if someone was coming up behind him, he didn’t want to tip them off that he heard them coming. The pace behind him quickened to match his, and grew louder and closer, ringing in his ears above the chirping of crickets. When it sounded like it was right on top of him, he spun around and saw someone a good 12 inches taller, and a baseball bat coming at his face from the left. He tried to fall backwards onto his rear, hoping that would result in a miss, but the bat connected nevertheless. Strangely, though, it didn’t move him. He saw it pass through his field of vision, and he swore it struck, but he didn’t feel it. All he felt was a slight tingle, but nothing jerked his head in the direction of the bat’s motion, as if his skull simply wasn’t there.
He hit his butt on the sidewalk and both Evan and his would-be attacker traded astonished glances. Evan thought the other boy looked about sixteen or seventeen, with short, dirty-blond hair, and an anger-red face. Built like a football player, Evan didn’t want to tangle with him at all. But they were at an impasse. “Who are you?” Evan squeaked.
“You don’t even fucking know, do you?” the older boy growled. “You killed my father, you piece of shit!” And then he swung again.
This time, Evan had nowhere to go. The idea of cracking his head open on the sidewalk didn’t appeal, and that was the only outcome he could anticipate if he threw himself backward again. So, he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable skull-whacking. But the pain never came, and once again, momentum did not direct his head along with the bat. He opened one eye. “Are you going to do it or what?” But the older kid stood there, eyes wide with disbelief, panic quickly replacing anger.
“What the hell are you?” he demanded.
“What are you talking about?” Evan shot back, smacking his hand on the concrete.
“The bat just… just went right through your head!”
“Wait, what?” How is that even possible?”
“Man, fuck this! I’m outta here!” Without another word, he took off running, taking the bat with him. Evan thought about giving chase, but saw little point in that. He just wanted to go home.
April 16
Thank God nobody noticed me being gone last night. I think it was Dr. Felten’s son that tried to beat me up with a baseball bat. I don’t know what happened. He swung at me, I thought he hit me, but I didn’t feel anything. He freaked out and ran away. What’s wrong with me???
Maybe I should’ve jumped off the school roof the other day. Maybe I did kill Dr. Felten. Something’s not right with me. I don’t even feel pain. He hit me with a baseball bat and I didn’t even move. It’s like I’m dead inside and the rest of me is still figuring it out.
I don’t know what to do.
Evan sat by himself at recess, like usual, leaning against the barn that stored the lawnmowers, portable soccer goals, and other equipment used by the groundskeeper and the PE department. The other kids played tetherball, climbed on the jungle gym, tried to see how high they could go on the swings, played hopscotch and basketball on the blacktop, and Evan just watched, grabbing handfuls of rocks from the gravel next to the blacktop and tossing each little one into the grass. If the groundskeeper caught him, he’d get yelled at for putting rocks in the grass for the lawnmower to choke on, but he didn’t care. He found that to be true of most things anymore–he just didn’t care. The other students thought he was insane, Dr. Felten was dead, and his parents had no idea what to do with him. They barely spoke to him when he was home, the three of them going through dinner as a silent ritual they all wanted to get through as quickly as possible.
He looked down at the collection of tiny rocks in his hand, tossing them one-by-one. “Heads up,” someone called, and he raised his head in time to see an inch-wide rock come hurtling at his face. He closed his eyes and cringed, but only heard the sound it made as it collided with the aluminum wall of the barn behind him. He opened his eyes, confused.
“That’s what I thought,” the same voice said.
Evan looked up and couldn’t quite make out the figure towering over him, the sun directly over the man’s head, forming a blinding halo. “Am I dead?” Evan blurted.
The man stepped back and laughed heartily. “No, you’re definitely not dead. Watch.” He took his boot-clad foot and viciously kicked a stream of rocks at Evan. All of them plinked harmlessly against the barn, settling on the sidewalk behind him. Evan looked even more confused.
“What is this?” he begged. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re changing,” the man said simply. “You’re becoming who you were meant to be.”
“You mean I’m going crazy?”
“No, not at all. You’re ‘manifesting,’ I guess we’d call it.”
Evan sighed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve been watching you for a while. Saw you on the roof the other day. And the other night, with Doc Felten’s kid. I’ve seen what you can do. But I think you’ll have to prove it to yourself, before you’ll believe it.”
Evan scoffed, shrugging his shoulders. “I still have no idea what you mean.”
“I know. Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.” He turned around and strolled off.
“Wait!” Evan called after him, but it was like the man just vanished. He swore he never took eyes off the retreating figure, but the man was gone all the same. Maybe I really am out of my damn mind.
April 17
As if I didn’t have enough problems, some crazy guy started talking riddles to me yesterday. It sounds like he’s stalking me. He really creeped me out. I don’t know what to do. Something weird is going on with me. Stuff passes through me like I’m not even there. He told me I wasn’t dead but I feel like a ghost. I feel like I’m just wandering through this world and no one notices I’m here.
Is this what it’s like to be dead? Am I really even writing anything in this journal? Or is it a fake, too? Am I a dead kid imagining I’m doing things, but I just won’t let go? If that was true, could I even realize it? I wish someone had answers. I think that guy did, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said I couldn’t be told. Whatever it is, I just want it to happen. I can’t stand waiting, wondering what it’s all leading up to.
I just realized, I didn’t black out last night. What does that mean? Am I done? Then why do I feel worse than before?
Evan set out the next morning for school, eyes cast downward at the sidewalk as he took even steps, his thumbs hooked into the straps of his backpack. He barely noticed a chilly morning breeze, the last gasp of the previous night’s rain shower, the delicate fingers of a cold front pulling away from the area. A distant dog barked. Evan sighed, not watching up ahead, having the route to school memorized for some time now. Six streets down, left turn, two streets down. He’d made this walk since he was eight, never with a problem, except for his recent blackout. His parents suggested driving him to school in the morning, just to make sure he got there in time, but they didn’t protest when he insisted on walking himself. He wondered if that was because they didn’t want to smother him, or because they resented him and didn’t care if he never came home.
He wrapped himself up so deeply in these thoughts, he never saw the cherry red Acura round the corner where he was crossing. The driver never saw him, either. Evan just stopped dead when he saw the bumper cross into him, and time seemed to slow to a crawl. A black powder formed at the point of impact, just above his knees. He expected to fall over and smack into the hood, but instead he had the sensation of floating, his body disintegrating as the car passed through it. No blood, no cracking bones, not even any sprains, just a dark dust spiraling out from the bottom of his torso. He made eye contact with the driver as his face came up toward the windshield, and then he became a being more of touch and tingle than sight and sound. He could no longer see, but he remained aware of his surroundings. The breeze he’d so easily ignored before became a part of him, wisps of air and mist entangling with gray particles, dancing through the sky. He felt himself moving up, up into the air, high above the car, above the trees and houses, until they were all distant dots without form or function.
And then he came back down, quickly and deliberately, making an arc toward the roof of the school, coming up fast, and he felt his own substance again, his feet smacking into the concrete, and his body tumbling end-over-end across the roof. He gasped for air, landing on his side, clutching his backpack tighter than before, somewhat dazed but vaguely aware of what had transpired.
He still remained somewhat uncertain, and the last thing he wanted was to be found on the roof of the school again. They’d lock me up for sure this time. So, he stepped toward the back of the building, climbing up to the edge, facing outward to the playground–empty and quiet. He sucked in a deep breath, prepared to believe it was his last, held his arms out at his sides, and let himself fall forward. He saw the ground approach, faster and faster, and at the last second realized he didn’t want to see himself hit, so he squeezed his eyes shut.
That feeling came again, the blissful nothingness, the wind carrying him away from everything, and he realized what he could do, finally. Thoughts formed in the particulate mass dancing through the sky. Dust. Ash. Something. I’m something.
April 18
Mom and Dad,
I’m sorry I always made you worry so much. Things are going to be so much better from now on, I promise. I’ll be the son you always wished you had. I’ll be something special. I am something special.
I love you.
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JonathonWally
K.E. Ireland
Levi Montgomery