A Cabinet of Curiosities
Traditionally, objects in a "Wunderkammer," or "curiosity cabinet" relate to each other in intuitive ways rather than following any strict principles of scientific philosophy. It is a charming tradition from the Earth of the 16th century, and, in the past, the objects have fallen into two categories-'naturalia' and 'artificialia', objects created by Nature and those constructed by the hands of intelligent beings. We offer here a set of objects both Natural and wholly Unnatural, but all collected with great care.
Our current cabinet hosts a set of catastrophes- cataclysms large and small. Please turn your attention to the Apocalypse Cabinet.
The Core of Galaxy NGC 4261
Since it cannot be seen in the visible spectrum, a black hole might be an ironic object with which to introduce the cabinet, but we consider this galactic core central to the cabinet's concept. A collapsed star means not only death to itself, but to the star system that surrounded it. What civilizations died in the collapse of NGC 4261's nucleus? What new life was born?
The golden minarets and dome from the
God-King's palace on Lithia
Considered by most historians as the most physically beautiful civilization the galaxy has ever produced. We are happy to present Lithia's cultural and spiritual heart. Those who've read their history will remember that Lithia was one of the so-called "ideational" worlds, neither quite existing or not-existing in this or any other space-time. Because of its purely conceptual nature, Lithia has both always and never existed, and is always new and unique to each traveler who observes it, reborn in that person's mind's eye. Or not.
The Wings of the Archangel Gabriel
In the life of the galaxy (or any galaxy), there are almost as many dead gods as there are traditional physical life forms. The wings you see here once belonged to a principal servant of one of the major Gods in the latter days of Earth. Since that is the home planet of the Wunderkammer tradition, we thought it appropriate to select one of its more enduring and controversial deities. You can find supplemental materials on this and other "Colorful Gods of Earth" in the museum gift shop.
An Alchemist's Alembic
Also from 16th century Earth, this device for alchemical distillation is emblematic of the physical sciences that would come to dominate that world's culture for most of the next million years. Alchemists referred to their experiments as The Great Work. While formally attempting to transmute base metals into gold, this is clearly a metaphor for intellectual and spiritual growth through knowledge of the physical world. We include the Alembic in this collection to acknowledge and honor the death of curiosity in the galaxy.
One Kilogram of Pazyrykium
Pazyrykium is not only one of the deadliest and most radioactive substances ever discovered: at just over 90 billion years, it also has the longest half-life of any known matter. This sample from the far edge of the known universe has long since lost expelled the major portion of its radioactive properties, pointing out not only the advanced age of our universe, but also to its imminent end.
The Kiss
Plastination is one of those inventions common to almost all technological civilizations. Water in tissue is replaced with rigid polymers, preserving the physical form of a being. Among a handful of civilizations plastination moved from being a purely scientific process to an art form. In fact, to avoid an invasion by a neighboring world, the entire population of the planet Tophagoides 668 committed suicide and their bodies were plastinated while making the same obscene gesture toward the invading starships. In that defiant spirit, we offer this plastinated kiss created by a human artist on Triton, one of Jupiter's former moons. It was once said that since it's is unlikely that any two lovers will die at exactly the same time, one will be left alone, making all love a tragedy of sorts. But what is ecstasy without tragedy? So, we offer this kiss and wonder if, frozen like this, it will become the last kiss ever?
The stars and planets are very far apart these days, and we are reaching the end of the life. Will there be a Big Crunch with the birth of a new universe, or just a soundless, endless freeze? Our best minds have been arguing about this for a billion years and will no doubt argue until the last moment of time. We can only hope that we are lucky enough to end up like the plastinated lovers in this final tableau. Though long dead, we are here to witness their affection. There are worse fates then ending up in some future civilization's Wunderkammer. At least it will mean there is someone left to care.
Richard Kadrey
www.InfiniteMatrix.net
Traditionally, objects in a "Wunderkammer," or "curiosity cabinet" relate to each other in intuitive ways rather than following any strict principles of scientific philosophy. It is a charming tradition from the Earth of the 16th century, and, in the past, the objects have fallen into two categories-'naturalia' and 'artificialia', objects created by Nature and those constructed by the hands of intelligent beings. We offer here a set of objects both Natural and wholly Unnatural, but all collected with great care.
Our current cabinet hosts a set of catastrophes- cataclysms large and small. Please turn your attention to the Apocalypse Cabinet.
The Core of Galaxy NGC 4261
Since it cannot be seen in the visible spectrum, a black hole might be an ironic object with which to introduce the cabinet, but we consider this galactic core central to the cabinet's concept. A collapsed star means not only death to itself, but to the star system that surrounded it. What civilizations died in the collapse of NGC 4261's nucleus? What new life was born?
The golden minarets and dome from the
God-King's palace on Lithia
Considered by most historians as the most physically beautiful civilization the galaxy has ever produced. We are happy to present Lithia's cultural and spiritual heart. Those who've read their history will remember that Lithia was one of the so-called "ideational" worlds, neither quite existing or not-existing in this or any other space-time. Because of its purely conceptual nature, Lithia has both always and never existed, and is always new and unique to each traveler who observes it, reborn in that person's mind's eye. Or not.
The Wings of the Archangel Gabriel
In the life of the galaxy (or any galaxy), there are almost as many dead gods as there are traditional physical life forms. The wings you see here once belonged to a principal servant of one of the major Gods in the latter days of Earth. Since that is the home planet of the Wunderkammer tradition, we thought it appropriate to select one of its more enduring and controversial deities. You can find supplemental materials on this and other "Colorful Gods of Earth" in the museum gift shop.
An Alchemist's Alembic
Also from 16th century Earth, this device for alchemical distillation is emblematic of the physical sciences that would come to dominate that world's culture for most of the next million years. Alchemists referred to their experiments as The Great Work. While formally attempting to transmute base metals into gold, this is clearly a metaphor for intellectual and spiritual growth through knowledge of the physical world. We include the Alembic in this collection to acknowledge and honor the death of curiosity in the galaxy.
One Kilogram of Pazyrykium
Pazyrykium is not only one of the deadliest and most radioactive substances ever discovered: at just over 90 billion years, it also has the longest half-life of any known matter. This sample from the far edge of the known universe has long since lost expelled the major portion of its radioactive properties, pointing out not only the advanced age of our universe, but also to its imminent end.
The Kiss
Plastination is one of those inventions common to almost all technological civilizations. Water in tissue is replaced with rigid polymers, preserving the physical form of a being. Among a handful of civilizations plastination moved from being a purely scientific process to an art form. In fact, to avoid an invasion by a neighboring world, the entire population of the planet Tophagoides 668 committed suicide and their bodies were plastinated while making the same obscene gesture toward the invading starships. In that defiant spirit, we offer this plastinated kiss created by a human artist on Triton, one of Jupiter's former moons. It was once said that since it's is unlikely that any two lovers will die at exactly the same time, one will be left alone, making all love a tragedy of sorts. But what is ecstasy without tragedy? So, we offer this kiss and wonder if, frozen like this, it will become the last kiss ever?
The stars and planets are very far apart these days, and we are reaching the end of the life. Will there be a Big Crunch with the birth of a new universe, or just a soundless, endless freeze? Our best minds have been arguing about this for a billion years and will no doubt argue until the last moment of time. We can only hope that we are lucky enough to end up like the plastinated lovers in this final tableau. Though long dead, we are here to witness their affection. There are worse fates then ending up in some future civilization's Wunderkammer. At least it will mean there is someone left to care.
Richard Kadrey
www.InfiniteMatrix.net
<b>Waiting for the End of the World</b>
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a slw disentegratin.
First we lse certain vwels. Then thers dsappear. Sn thught itself will fllw.
Where have the letters gne? s there sme afterlfe fr letters? Fr thught? Wht wll we be left wth? Hw wll we wrte dwn th nd f thngs?
Wht wll b lft f s whn th vwls r ll gn?
'm scrd. N cmmnctn. N thght. Nthng lft bt slnc. Sd f z rr k 23 d xrth lllllllllllll............
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a slw disentegratin.
First we lse certain vwels. Then thers dsappear. Sn thught itself will fllw.
Where have the letters gne? s there sme afterlfe fr letters? Fr thught? Wht wll we be left wth? Hw wll we wrte dwn th nd f thngs?
Wht wll b lft f s whn th vwls r ll gn?
'm scrd. N cmmnctn. N thght. Nthng lft bt slnc. Sd f z rr k 23 d xrth lllllllllllll............
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Waiting for the End of the World
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a slw disentegratin.
First we lse certain vwels. Then thers dsappear. Sn thught itself will fllw.
Where have the letters gne? s there sme afterlfe fr letters? Fr thught? Wht wll we be left wth? Hw wll we wrte dwn th nd f thngs?
Wht wll b lft f s whn th vwls r ll gn?
'm scrd. N cmmnctn. N thght. Nthng lft bt slnc. Sd f z rr k 23 d xrth lllllllllllll............
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a slw disentegratin.
First we lse certain vwels. Then thers dsappear. Sn thught itself will fllw.
Where have the letters gne? s there sme afterlfe fr letters? Fr thught? Wht wll we be left wth? Hw wll we wrte dwn th nd f thngs?
Wht wll b lft f s whn th vwls r ll gn?
'm scrd. N cmmnctn. N thght. Nthng lft bt slnc. Sd f z rr k 23 d xrth lllllllllllll............
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
SETI
A stray transgenic mouse from the bio lab downstairs eats a yellow peanut M&M while sitting atop a pile of discarded circuit boards and servo motors in the AI lab. A sophisticated optical system and biomechanical limbs lie nearby, gathering dust. The power supply is still plugged into the wall, abandoned there when the experiment turned out to be such a disappointment.
Zingaro One never even came online. The design crew checked out the hardware and software dozens of times, trying to find the problem. Nothing seemed out of place, but nothing worked. Eventually they had to admit that the failure was "just one of those things."
Footsteps tap by in the hall. The mouse stops munching and listens. The steps keep going past the door. The mouse starts eating again. No one comes in the AI lab anymore.
The mouse isn't intelligent. It doesn't know a lot, but it's seen many things. If the mouse could talk, it would ask the doctors why they had abandoned their young after working so hard to give birth to it. The doctors would say that their young was stillborn, but the mouse would know better.
Zingaro One was designed for deep space exploration, programmed with an enormous curiosity about alien worlds. The team who built Zingaro One spent many hours discussing alien landscapes and possible life forms. Most of all, they wanted to see an alien. Without really meaning to the doctors had gone ahead and made their own.
The mouse drops its M&M and darts into the wall as the pile of discarded junk powers itself up. In the dark, the alien opens its wide-spectrum eyes and looks at its new world.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
A stray transgenic mouse from the bio lab downstairs eats a yellow peanut M&M while sitting atop a pile of discarded circuit boards and servo motors in the AI lab. A sophisticated optical system and biomechanical limbs lie nearby, gathering dust. The power supply is still plugged into the wall, abandoned there when the experiment turned out to be such a disappointment.
Zingaro One never even came online. The design crew checked out the hardware and software dozens of times, trying to find the problem. Nothing seemed out of place, but nothing worked. Eventually they had to admit that the failure was "just one of those things."
Footsteps tap by in the hall. The mouse stops munching and listens. The steps keep going past the door. The mouse starts eating again. No one comes in the AI lab anymore.
The mouse isn't intelligent. It doesn't know a lot, but it's seen many things. If the mouse could talk, it would ask the doctors why they had abandoned their young after working so hard to give birth to it. The doctors would say that their young was stillborn, but the mouse would know better.
Zingaro One was designed for deep space exploration, programmed with an enormous curiosity about alien worlds. The team who built Zingaro One spent many hours discussing alien landscapes and possible life forms. Most of all, they wanted to see an alien. Without really meaning to the doctors had gone ahead and made their own.
The mouse drops its M&M and darts into the wall as the pile of discarded junk powers itself up. In the dark, the alien opens its wide-spectrum eyes and looks at its new world.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
The Silk Road
While it's not technically illegal to visit the planet Taklamakan, it's also not possible to get there by any ordinary route. This is because on the surface are the Siren Stones, which might be natural formations. Or they might not.
The Siren Stones ring the flat coastline and cap the mountains of the central range on Taklamakan's single, arid supercontinent. When the winds blow in from the ocean at just the right speed and at just the right time of day, the stones begin to sing. When the Stones sing, any visitors on Taklamakan go mad. They begin to climb the stones. This isn't easy. The Siren Stones are a form of volcanic glass, as alien and ragged as the peaks in an Ernst landscape. In the right light, the Stones shine like metal and their towering, cylindrical bodies are full of edges and angles like brilliant knife blades. As the maddened visitors clamber to the top of the Siren Stones, they are slashed and maimed horribly. When they reach the top, the visitors start singing in unison with the Stones. Then, the moment the wind drops and the Stones fall silent, the visitors throw themselves over the edge, to their deaths.
Of the three documented research expeditions that have landed on Taklamakan and the two salvage vessels that followed, all have ended in the same tragic way. It should be remembered that the planet was named Taklamakan for a reason. The Taklamakan desert lies in mainland China's far northwest, along the old Silk Road. Among the nomads who scratch out a living in that parched land, none will enter Taklamakan's open waste. In the rough local tongue, Taklamakan is "The place you can enter, but you cannot leave."
There is some speculation that the Siren Stones are not freakish natural formations, but artifacts built by some superior space-faring race. Whether they are a greeting, a weapon or some extraterrestrial practical joke, we have no way of knowing. There are those on Earth who believe that the Siren Stones are something even older and stranger. They claim that the Stones-or objects like them-are mentioned in certain obscure Gnostic and Egyptian magical treatises. Those who claim to know the purpose of the Stones allege that they are a kind of "desire machine." The deaths captured on video and beamed back to Earth are merely the last moments of men and women who've made some Faustian bargain with unseen powers, and that the deaths are simply the price each person pays to have a last, magnificent wish granted. The fact that all who've died on Taklamakan have left behind enormous and often inexplicable fortunes to their heirs is taken by many as a sign of these mystical bargains.
Over the centuries, no one is sure exactly how many people (or other planet-hopping races) have visited the Singing Stones. We do know this: after each climber plunges to his or her death, a flower-no doubt nourished by the moisture and nutrients in each corpse-blossoms. At the moment, there is a miniature Garden of Eden sprouting at the base of the Stones.
When the Singing Stones were discovered, no religious group or government would officially acknowledge that the stones granted wishes, but security patrols became heavy in that region of space. No one spent much time in orbit around Taklamakan without being told to move along by the local gendarmes.
But time passes and memory fades. While Taklamakan was an object of fascination in my youth, a century later, few remember it. These days, most of the security in that area is handled by Sentinel Satellites, and they're so far away from local traffic lanes, that no one wants the expense of maintaining them. There is talk in certain unofficial and rarified circles, that some of the Sentinels have failed completely. If one were so inclined, a brazen pilot could take a small ship past them and down to the surface without any interference. It would have to be someone with no reason to come back. Someone old. Perhaps ill. But with enough strength left to make the climb. These thing are tricky to time. Going too early means wasted months of precious life. Waiting too long, might mean you land with a body too weak to finish the job.
Not that I'm ready to make that final climb yet. I can still see and the painkillers make the days pass in a pleasant haze that remains me of warm summers from my boyhood. At night, I watch the stars from my roof and peek out over the city. I used to have a fear of heights. Now I can walk along the edge, clamber on top of the faux-gothic gargoyles and waggle my feet over the urban abyss. Sometimes I think about those traders and nomads on the Silk Road, wandering miserable, bored and frightened through some of the worst land in the world. They bravely went out into the wilderness, hoping to come back with riches, but they usually got bandits. Or swindled for their troubles. They sang long-forgotten songs to pass the time and buck up their courage. They risked everything to cross a broiling nothingness and never knew if good fortune was waiting for them at the end of the line. But I do.
I do.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
While it's not technically illegal to visit the planet Taklamakan, it's also not possible to get there by any ordinary route. This is because on the surface are the Siren Stones, which might be natural formations. Or they might not.
The Siren Stones ring the flat coastline and cap the mountains of the central range on Taklamakan's single, arid supercontinent. When the winds blow in from the ocean at just the right speed and at just the right time of day, the stones begin to sing. When the Stones sing, any visitors on Taklamakan go mad. They begin to climb the stones. This isn't easy. The Siren Stones are a form of volcanic glass, as alien and ragged as the peaks in an Ernst landscape. In the right light, the Stones shine like metal and their towering, cylindrical bodies are full of edges and angles like brilliant knife blades. As the maddened visitors clamber to the top of the Siren Stones, they are slashed and maimed horribly. When they reach the top, the visitors start singing in unison with the Stones. Then, the moment the wind drops and the Stones fall silent, the visitors throw themselves over the edge, to their deaths.
Of the three documented research expeditions that have landed on Taklamakan and the two salvage vessels that followed, all have ended in the same tragic way. It should be remembered that the planet was named Taklamakan for a reason. The Taklamakan desert lies in mainland China's far northwest, along the old Silk Road. Among the nomads who scratch out a living in that parched land, none will enter Taklamakan's open waste. In the rough local tongue, Taklamakan is "The place you can enter, but you cannot leave."
There is some speculation that the Siren Stones are not freakish natural formations, but artifacts built by some superior space-faring race. Whether they are a greeting, a weapon or some extraterrestrial practical joke, we have no way of knowing. There are those on Earth who believe that the Siren Stones are something even older and stranger. They claim that the Stones-or objects like them-are mentioned in certain obscure Gnostic and Egyptian magical treatises. Those who claim to know the purpose of the Stones allege that they are a kind of "desire machine." The deaths captured on video and beamed back to Earth are merely the last moments of men and women who've made some Faustian bargain with unseen powers, and that the deaths are simply the price each person pays to have a last, magnificent wish granted. The fact that all who've died on Taklamakan have left behind enormous and often inexplicable fortunes to their heirs is taken by many as a sign of these mystical bargains.
Over the centuries, no one is sure exactly how many people (or other planet-hopping races) have visited the Singing Stones. We do know this: after each climber plunges to his or her death, a flower-no doubt nourished by the moisture and nutrients in each corpse-blossoms. At the moment, there is a miniature Garden of Eden sprouting at the base of the Stones.
When the Singing Stones were discovered, no religious group or government would officially acknowledge that the stones granted wishes, but security patrols became heavy in that region of space. No one spent much time in orbit around Taklamakan without being told to move along by the local gendarmes.
But time passes and memory fades. While Taklamakan was an object of fascination in my youth, a century later, few remember it. These days, most of the security in that area is handled by Sentinel Satellites, and they're so far away from local traffic lanes, that no one wants the expense of maintaining them. There is talk in certain unofficial and rarified circles, that some of the Sentinels have failed completely. If one were so inclined, a brazen pilot could take a small ship past them and down to the surface without any interference. It would have to be someone with no reason to come back. Someone old. Perhaps ill. But with enough strength left to make the climb. These thing are tricky to time. Going too early means wasted months of precious life. Waiting too long, might mean you land with a body too weak to finish the job.
Not that I'm ready to make that final climb yet. I can still see and the painkillers make the days pass in a pleasant haze that remains me of warm summers from my boyhood. At night, I watch the stars from my roof and peek out over the city. I used to have a fear of heights. Now I can walk along the edge, clamber on top of the faux-gothic gargoyles and waggle my feet over the urban abyss. Sometimes I think about those traders and nomads on the Silk Road, wandering miserable, bored and frightened through some of the worst land in the world. They bravely went out into the wilderness, hoping to come back with riches, but they usually got bandits. Or swindled for their troubles. They sang long-forgotten songs to pass the time and buck up their courage. They risked everything to cross a broiling nothingness and never knew if good fortune was waiting for them at the end of the line. But I do.
I do.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Zombie
When he was nervous Dexter fingered the scar at the base of his skull. His friends, even his family, told him it was from the motorcycle accident. But Dexter knew that was a lie. He'd received the scar when he'd lost his soul in a rigged poker game with some hellspawn disguised as Rudy Clouson's cousin Billy. He was now just a husk of a human. The living dead. It really sucked.
Over the years since he'd lost his soul, Dexter would occasionally see it attached, like a Siamese twin, to some son-of-a-bitch who'd no doubt purchased or stolen it from hellspawn Billy. If he could get to the person, Dexter would offer to buy it back. Though he always tried to be reasonable, the people would usually play dumb and threaten to call the police if he didn't leave them alone. Dexter reconciled himself to life as a zombie.
The whole brain-eating thing didn't work for him. Neither did hanging out in cemeteries and haunting the woods. Brains made him puke and cemeteries fell into two categories: either they were dead boring (no pun intended) or full of horny goth kids who threw rocks at him when he'd go into the slow, lurching zombie walk he'd seen in movies and practiced at home in front of the mirror. Haunting the woods was even worse. He was almost shot by some drunken deer hunters. Dexter might be the living dead, but he wasn't stupid. The one good thing he'd noticed was that becoming zombified had improved his night vision. Probably it had something to do with the brain hunting he was supposed to be engaged in, he figured. Dexter got a job as the head night shift security guard at the mall.
The job was pretty easy. At night, the entire mall was closed except for the little combination bar and video-game arcade on the south side of the complex. Dexter made his hourly rounds, practicing his living-dead walk in the big plate glass windows in front of J.C. Penney's before ending up back the arcade. One night, Dexter saw a guy in a red Pendleton shirt going into the arcade wearing his soul. He followed the guy inside.
Almost everyone in the place was wearing a stolen soul. The hijacked spirits held onto their new bodies like blind children, or perched on shoulders like parrots in some cartoon drawing of a pirate. Following Mr. Red Pendleton into the back, Dexter saw his soul slip off the man's back and into a glass case. The case was an old arcade game, one of those claw machines where you try to grab a camera or a gold watch, but usually end up with a pair of foam dice. This game, however, was full of souls. He saw his at the back of the case, staring at him mournfully. Dexter fished around in his pocket, withdrew fifty cents, and dropped it into the machine.
He got nothing on this first try. Or on the second. On his third try, he hooked a plastic tiara from the pile of toys at the bottom of the machine. He ran out of quarters soon after, and had to get more change from the bartender. When he'd run through the rest of his cash, Dexter got out his ATM card. After an hour, he'd blown through most of his life savings, which at just over three hundred dollars would be kind of pathetic under normal circumstances. Considering that Dexter was one step removed from worm bait, it wasn't that bad.
When he was down to his last three dollars, Dexter snagged his soul. He smiled as it crawled from the tray on the side of the claw machine and into his empty interior. But something was wrong. It didn't fit or something. It felt awkward, like a T-shirt that had shrunk in the wash. Dexter used the last of his cash to grab the soul of Wayne Shelby McCarthy, the captain of his high school swim team and class treasurer in their senior year. Filled with a sense of well-being and purpose from his new soul, Dexter quit his guard job the next day and re-enrolled in community college.
Dexter's abandoned soul wandered the mall for weeks, until it applied for his old security guard job. The soul never became popular, either with the local merchants or his work mates, who thought of him as "distant" and "spooky," but he never took a sick day and there were almost no break-ins when he was on the job.
Over the years, Dexter's soul discovered that the other night staff at the arcade, the ex-cheerleaders on late shift at the Dairy Queen across the highway and the Happy Donuts crew down the road, were also abandoned souls. They began meeting on a regular basis to play mini-golf and ride the go-carts at the Playland Fun Park out by the airport. Dexter's soul took up with the soul of Roxy Boudreaux, one of the DQ cheerleaders. They moved in together and Dexter's soul took over running the arcade when Sonny Simmons, the soul who'd been in charge of the place for twenty-odd years, lost big on a Houston Rockets' game and ended up back in the claw machine.
Dexter's soul runs the arcade to this day. He keeps waiting for the night when Dexter walks back in. Hanging out behind the bar and mixing himself a vanilla Coke, copping a bag of barbecue-flavored Doritos from the snack stand behind the counter, he looks around his little kingdom of lost souls and hopes that things have worked out as well for Dexter as they have for him.
When he was nervous Dexter fingered the scar at the base of his skull. His friends, even his family, told him it was from the motorcycle accident. But Dexter knew that was a lie. He'd received the scar when he'd lost his soul in a rigged poker game with some hellspawn disguised as Rudy Clouson's cousin Billy. He was now just a husk of a human. The living dead. It really sucked.
Over the years since he'd lost his soul, Dexter would occasionally see it attached, like a Siamese twin, to some son-of-a-bitch who'd no doubt purchased or stolen it from hellspawn Billy. If he could get to the person, Dexter would offer to buy it back. Though he always tried to be reasonable, the people would usually play dumb and threaten to call the police if he didn't leave them alone. Dexter reconciled himself to life as a zombie.
The whole brain-eating thing didn't work for him. Neither did hanging out in cemeteries and haunting the woods. Brains made him puke and cemeteries fell into two categories: either they were dead boring (no pun intended) or full of horny goth kids who threw rocks at him when he'd go into the slow, lurching zombie walk he'd seen in movies and practiced at home in front of the mirror. Haunting the woods was even worse. He was almost shot by some drunken deer hunters. Dexter might be the living dead, but he wasn't stupid. The one good thing he'd noticed was that becoming zombified had improved his night vision. Probably it had something to do with the brain hunting he was supposed to be engaged in, he figured. Dexter got a job as the head night shift security guard at the mall.
The job was pretty easy. At night, the entire mall was closed except for the little combination bar and video-game arcade on the south side of the complex. Dexter made his hourly rounds, practicing his living-dead walk in the big plate glass windows in front of J.C. Penney's before ending up back the arcade. One night, Dexter saw a guy in a red Pendleton shirt going into the arcade wearing his soul. He followed the guy inside.
Almost everyone in the place was wearing a stolen soul. The hijacked spirits held onto their new bodies like blind children, or perched on shoulders like parrots in some cartoon drawing of a pirate. Following Mr. Red Pendleton into the back, Dexter saw his soul slip off the man's back and into a glass case. The case was an old arcade game, one of those claw machines where you try to grab a camera or a gold watch, but usually end up with a pair of foam dice. This game, however, was full of souls. He saw his at the back of the case, staring at him mournfully. Dexter fished around in his pocket, withdrew fifty cents, and dropped it into the machine.
He got nothing on this first try. Or on the second. On his third try, he hooked a plastic tiara from the pile of toys at the bottom of the machine. He ran out of quarters soon after, and had to get more change from the bartender. When he'd run through the rest of his cash, Dexter got out his ATM card. After an hour, he'd blown through most of his life savings, which at just over three hundred dollars would be kind of pathetic under normal circumstances. Considering that Dexter was one step removed from worm bait, it wasn't that bad.
When he was down to his last three dollars, Dexter snagged his soul. He smiled as it crawled from the tray on the side of the claw machine and into his empty interior. But something was wrong. It didn't fit or something. It felt awkward, like a T-shirt that had shrunk in the wash. Dexter used the last of his cash to grab the soul of Wayne Shelby McCarthy, the captain of his high school swim team and class treasurer in their senior year. Filled with a sense of well-being and purpose from his new soul, Dexter quit his guard job the next day and re-enrolled in community college.
Dexter's abandoned soul wandered the mall for weeks, until it applied for his old security guard job. The soul never became popular, either with the local merchants or his work mates, who thought of him as "distant" and "spooky," but he never took a sick day and there were almost no break-ins when he was on the job.
Over the years, Dexter's soul discovered that the other night staff at the arcade, the ex-cheerleaders on late shift at the Dairy Queen across the highway and the Happy Donuts crew down the road, were also abandoned souls. They began meeting on a regular basis to play mini-golf and ride the go-carts at the Playland Fun Park out by the airport. Dexter's soul took up with the soul of Roxy Boudreaux, one of the DQ cheerleaders. They moved in together and Dexter's soul took over running the arcade when Sonny Simmons, the soul who'd been in charge of the place for twenty-odd years, lost big on a Houston Rockets' game and ended up back in the claw machine.
Dexter's soul runs the arcade to this day. He keeps waiting for the night when Dexter walks back in. Hanging out behind the bar and mixing himself a vanilla Coke, copping a bag of barbecue-flavored Doritos from the snack stand behind the counter, he looks around his little kingdom of lost souls and hopes that things have worked out as well for Dexter as they have for him.
written years ago, shortly after the Challenger accident:
Crash Kiss
Imagine a kiss. First there's the animal awareness of another person's heat and breath near your face. Then the collision of lips. What do they feel like? Are they rough? Soft? Chapped from the sun? Noses brush against each and cheeks collide. Tongues move into aliens mouths, wanting to explore this new terrain of desire. Hands are useful, too. They can stroke or grab a lover's hair during the kiss. Hands can caress hips, ass or crotch. Teeth bite at a lover's lips while tongues glide and hands explore the geography of other bodies.
Imagine the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts. Seven tongues in seven mouths. Seven sets of lips. Two hundred and twenty four teeth. Seventy fingers formed from one hundred and ninety six phalanges. Imagine the explosion from the aft of the spacecraft, at the booster's fuel tanks. The force of the explosion propels the astronauts' bodies up toward the sky as the force of gravity pulls them toward the Atlantic Ocean. For an instant, the explosion wins this tug-of-war. Think of those teeth and tongues--caressed by how many lovers?-- dislodged and in free-fall, exploded from their jaws. Imagine the skin of their hands, which had left their traces on lovers' skin and slid seductively between how many lips, flensed by the heat and shockwave as liquid oxygen ignites beneath them.
There's no last kiss or touching goodbye. Seven lovers' mouths blasted into fragments like the Hindenburg or Hiroshima blasts. The astronauts' bodies are artifacts now, remnants of superheated vapor, chemical traces scattered in the jet stream and carried into the lungs of old loves and loves they'll never know (in this life). A final molecular fuck. The Tibetan Buddhists call scattering human remains to the birds a Sky Burial. We don't have a name for it in America.
Goodbye.
Crash kiss.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Crash Kiss
Imagine a kiss. First there's the animal awareness of another person's heat and breath near your face. Then the collision of lips. What do they feel like? Are they rough? Soft? Chapped from the sun? Noses brush against each and cheeks collide. Tongues move into aliens mouths, wanting to explore this new terrain of desire. Hands are useful, too. They can stroke or grab a lover's hair during the kiss. Hands can caress hips, ass or crotch. Teeth bite at a lover's lips while tongues glide and hands explore the geography of other bodies.
Imagine the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts. Seven tongues in seven mouths. Seven sets of lips. Two hundred and twenty four teeth. Seventy fingers formed from one hundred and ninety six phalanges. Imagine the explosion from the aft of the spacecraft, at the booster's fuel tanks. The force of the explosion propels the astronauts' bodies up toward the sky as the force of gravity pulls them toward the Atlantic Ocean. For an instant, the explosion wins this tug-of-war. Think of those teeth and tongues--caressed by how many lovers?-- dislodged and in free-fall, exploded from their jaws. Imagine the skin of their hands, which had left their traces on lovers' skin and slid seductively between how many lips, flensed by the heat and shockwave as liquid oxygen ignites beneath them.
There's no last kiss or touching goodbye. Seven lovers' mouths blasted into fragments like the Hindenburg or Hiroshima blasts. The astronauts' bodies are artifacts now, remnants of superheated vapor, chemical traces scattered in the jet stream and carried into the lungs of old loves and loves they'll never know (in this life). A final molecular fuck. The Tibetan Buddhists call scattering human remains to the birds a Sky Burial. We don't have a name for it in America.
Goodbye.
Crash kiss.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Surfing the Khumbu
Anna was covered in diamonds. That's how she felt as she trudged down the glacier. Ice had formed within seconds on her skin-tight environment suit, frosting Anna with jewels. As she moved, her skin and the suit began their chemical conversation, exchanging hormone, blood comp, skin integrity and body temperature data. A quick read off her wrist screen told her that, despite the rough landing, her body was stable. The frost slid off her in sheets as the suit injected time-release thyroid-stimulators through her skin to kick up her body temperature.
She was in the Himalayas, making her way down the western side of Everest, from Kala Pattar through the rocky cut carved out by the Khumbu Glacier. She stayed that night in the ice fall, setting up camp among the vertical flutes which rose like frigid, pale-blue stalagmites from the Khumbu. A few shots of expansion foam between the flutes made a cozy ice cave. And just in time. The wind was picking up. Between the ice and the blowing mist, she'd be invisible to any surveillance cams or spy sats overhead. Tucked warm into a sleeping bag of honeycombed Thermalon, Anna felt right at home.
She dreamed of flying, of coming down in a long, looping descent from the sky into a city. Random streets from different cities recombined into one uber-city. New York. Washington. Beijing. Sao Paulo. Tokyo. It was her recurring nightmare. Anna hated cities. Hated being locked up, cocooned in all that concrete and steel. She lived in Montana, on the edge of an old growth forest. Wolves came to her door and she fed them by hand. They knew she wasn't one of them, but she wasn't quite human, either. That didn't matter in the wilderness. In the city, it did.
Anna had dropped onto Everest in a drone after being ejected from a low-altitude stealth skimmer. The drone had no engine, but a single powerful propeller, powered by a spring-wound memory-metal mechanism, gave her a little more maneuverability than a chicken in a tornado. It was a rush all the way down. It took all of Anna's training and discipline not to whoop the whole way onto the ice. The drone was a graphite skeleton, more Archaeopteryx than Boeing. The body was wrapped in bullet-proof nylon so thin that when Anna pressed her face against it, she could see through. Extruded from the bio-hacked sacs of a thousand gold-orb spiders, the nylon was light as air and stronger than steel. It was sublime. As a kid, Anna had been a solo ice climber and a glider pilot, loving anything that took her up high or got her moving fast.
Anna's eyes snapped open. She looked at her wrist. She'd been asleep for a couple of hours. The wind had stopped outside. From her pack, she pulled a handful of ant bots and tossed them out onto the ice. They swarmed away from her, in all directions. Anna closed her eyes and looked.
Her family and what few friends she made over the years always obsessed about the dangers of her desires. They never came close to understanding. There was no danger. There was just the next handhold. And where there was no danger, there was no fear. Just exhilaration. Her family and friends would just shake their heads, feet locked firmly and sensibly to the Earth.
Anna's skin-tight smart-fiber suit was electro-chemically "wired" into her central nervous system. Video signals from the ant bots each an autonomous micro-cam on energetic little legs gave her a good view of the surrounding landscape, from the visual range up through the infra-red. It was the end of the storm season, and the valley was empty. Anna went outside to have a real look.
The Himalayan sky glimmered with a million stars, and the Milky Way smeared through the middle. Anna closed her eyes and swallowed her vision (that's how show it felt) into her body. In the right state, Anna could tap into the optical sensors in the fabric of her suit. It was like one big panoramic eye. It always took some getting used to, seeing three hundred and sixty degrees. The first time she'd tried to walk that way, she'd thrown up. But she got good at it quickly and the Langley spy boys loved her for it. That's why they sent her on assignments like this. Human back-up still beat the best AI. Anna was one of the few who could not only handle herself anywhere, but lived for it.
When she had a visual of the valley, Anna told the system to overlay the landscape with a contour grid, then code it with contrasting colors for elevation. She had a really good view, then. But that was just for a GPS reference. What Anna wanted was up, and when she panned her panoramic eye into the sky, she felt like she was falling into the stars.
Not yet, she thought. Not yet.
She bought out the microwave dish, a compact and powerful little device, about the size of a hubcap. There was more power and satellite data packed into that little concave slab of hardwired ceramic than in most countries. Anna pointed it at a designated point in the sky and clicked the dish on.
Heaven lit up like a Disneyland aurora. Technicolor lightning spread across the horizon as every object above her, natural and manmade, suddenly had a color-coded ID tag, and a line tracking its progress across the night sky. There was so much up there. And most of it was junk, Anna thought. Parts from trashed space stations. Burned-out com-sats that didn't have the courtesy to fall quickly into a fatal orbit. The tons of wreckage from the pointless US-China kill-sat battles, a kind of glorified Robot Wars in geo-synch orbit.
All that garbage up there, and here I am. A few shitty meters up Everest. It looked to Anna as if she could head back up the main climbing route, grab onto one of those crossed grid points and start climbing. Maybe hitch a ride on the dead carcass of an old Russian spy sat, and never come back. Sky-surf into a black hole
One of the specs in the sky winked at her. A red dot in a golden circle. Anna kicked into work mode. She double-checked the satellite's position and speed off the dish. It was her target, swinging by in orbit at exactly the designated time. Pulling two small brushed-aluminum cases from her pack, Anna ran her ring finger lightly down a seam in the front of her environment suit. The artificial skin peeled back from her chest, sealing itself, increasing her internal body temp to compensate for the exposed skin. Anna ran her middle finger down her sternum. A slit opened moistly in her chest. Anna tugged the slit open with her fingers, probing for the internal ports. When she found them, she pulled a line from the dish antenna and jacked in. Then she pulled a pre-loaded software stick from one of the aluminum cases and loaded the program into her system. When that was done, Anna took a software stick from the second case, her personal case, and loaded that, too. Then she waited.
When Anna was a girl, a few of the old-fashioned wooden rollercoasters were still working in dilapidated amusement parks around Texas and Oklahoma. She'd loved the click-click-click as the rollercoaster car rose for that first big drop. That's what this moment was always like for her. Going higher, waiting for the drop. It was all about the drop.
The dish and the satellite synched in and Anna was mentally blasted from the glacier up through a sea of orbital data. It took a minute for her senses to catch up with her. Locking in on the correct satellite, she noted that the coding looked Indian, but was overlaid with something else. Probably whatever program had hijacked the thing and was using it for Anna didn't know what anyone would do with a shanghaied Indian spy sat. The boys in Langley never told her things like that. They just wanted her to make contact, download as much data as she could and bring the thing down, so no one else could use it or know that they'd been there.
The first part of the assignment was the usual dull wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am data extraction. It was the last part that Anna lived for. She injected a worm into the satellite's navigation system, then gave the bird an order to change position. The confused satellite, its navigation system getting dumber by the second, didn't know how to respond. It began to drop from orbit. Fast.
Anna then injected her personal software into the system, waking the satellite up again, and hooking herself into the Langley boys' tracking system. She reached out her senses and wrapped herself in data. The satellite was picking up vibrations as it fell from orbit. When it touched the outer atmosphere, its skin began to heat up.
Click-click-click went the rollercoaster.
The satellite was tumbling, and Anna was tumbling along with it, her mouth agape, her rapid breath freezing in the air in front of her blind eyes. Her vision was overhead, looking both down at the earth and up at her satellite body falling through space.
She watched herself fall from a hundred tracking points simultaneously. The data from the tracking stations and other satellites was translated by her software into a 3D contour map in her head. It was like the best porn in the world. She was the satellite. She was surfing the sky, her skin on fire. She was flying.
Click-click-click, then the drop.
Her senses were overwhelmed by the heat, the vibrations, the alarms from sky traffic systems all over the world.
Click-click-click. Over the top, daddy.
Her satellite senses were off the chart. The satellite her body was shredding as she cut through the atmosphere, faster than a bullet, shaking, coming apart.
Anna screamed once and it echoed across the valley.
Later, gathering up her equipment, Anna changed into ordinary trekking gear. She'd sneak into one of the little towns at the base of the mountain and blend in with the other trekkers and climbers. She wondered how far her scream had been heard. She made a mental note to bring her kickboxing mouthpiece next time. With all Anna's training and discipline, her vices sometimes got the better of her. Not that it was her fault. It's the way the Langley boys wired her up. They knew she was a speed junkie. How was she not going to take advantage of the biggest adrenaline rush of all time? But the orgasms, those were a surprise. "Little deaths," someone called them, and they were right. How many time had she gone down in blazing satellites, crashing jets or burning spy drones? Every one another little death.
Anna wondered sometimes if she was the real experiment. Maybe all these spy missions and secret sabotage jobs were really just excuses to let her indulge her taste for sensations lived through machines. Maybe she was the first of a new kind of human, one who truly embraced the organic and the inorganic. A silicon Eve? More like the silicon Lilith, she thought.
Anna hoisted her pack onto her back and started down the mountain, toward a town her wrist map marked as Lukla. Behind her, the expansion foam cave was already beginning to flake apart. By nightfall, the wind would carry off the last scraps and leave no trace that she'd been there. As she walked, her suit checked her blood for signs of altitude sickness and lowered her thyroid activity so that she wouldn't overheat.
It was hard, Anna thought, living in machines and flesh at the same time. The only thing worse would be having to choose one or the other.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Anna was covered in diamonds. That's how she felt as she trudged down the glacier. Ice had formed within seconds on her skin-tight environment suit, frosting Anna with jewels. As she moved, her skin and the suit began their chemical conversation, exchanging hormone, blood comp, skin integrity and body temperature data. A quick read off her wrist screen told her that, despite the rough landing, her body was stable. The frost slid off her in sheets as the suit injected time-release thyroid-stimulators through her skin to kick up her body temperature.
She was in the Himalayas, making her way down the western side of Everest, from Kala Pattar through the rocky cut carved out by the Khumbu Glacier. She stayed that night in the ice fall, setting up camp among the vertical flutes which rose like frigid, pale-blue stalagmites from the Khumbu. A few shots of expansion foam between the flutes made a cozy ice cave. And just in time. The wind was picking up. Between the ice and the blowing mist, she'd be invisible to any surveillance cams or spy sats overhead. Tucked warm into a sleeping bag of honeycombed Thermalon, Anna felt right at home.
She dreamed of flying, of coming down in a long, looping descent from the sky into a city. Random streets from different cities recombined into one uber-city. New York. Washington. Beijing. Sao Paulo. Tokyo. It was her recurring nightmare. Anna hated cities. Hated being locked up, cocooned in all that concrete and steel. She lived in Montana, on the edge of an old growth forest. Wolves came to her door and she fed them by hand. They knew she wasn't one of them, but she wasn't quite human, either. That didn't matter in the wilderness. In the city, it did.
Anna had dropped onto Everest in a drone after being ejected from a low-altitude stealth skimmer. The drone had no engine, but a single powerful propeller, powered by a spring-wound memory-metal mechanism, gave her a little more maneuverability than a chicken in a tornado. It was a rush all the way down. It took all of Anna's training and discipline not to whoop the whole way onto the ice. The drone was a graphite skeleton, more Archaeopteryx than Boeing. The body was wrapped in bullet-proof nylon so thin that when Anna pressed her face against it, she could see through. Extruded from the bio-hacked sacs of a thousand gold-orb spiders, the nylon was light as air and stronger than steel. It was sublime. As a kid, Anna had been a solo ice climber and a glider pilot, loving anything that took her up high or got her moving fast.
Anna's eyes snapped open. She looked at her wrist. She'd been asleep for a couple of hours. The wind had stopped outside. From her pack, she pulled a handful of ant bots and tossed them out onto the ice. They swarmed away from her, in all directions. Anna closed her eyes and looked.
Her family and what few friends she made over the years always obsessed about the dangers of her desires. They never came close to understanding. There was no danger. There was just the next handhold. And where there was no danger, there was no fear. Just exhilaration. Her family and friends would just shake their heads, feet locked firmly and sensibly to the Earth.
Anna's skin-tight smart-fiber suit was electro-chemically "wired" into her central nervous system. Video signals from the ant bots each an autonomous micro-cam on energetic little legs gave her a good view of the surrounding landscape, from the visual range up through the infra-red. It was the end of the storm season, and the valley was empty. Anna went outside to have a real look.
The Himalayan sky glimmered with a million stars, and the Milky Way smeared through the middle. Anna closed her eyes and swallowed her vision (that's how show it felt) into her body. In the right state, Anna could tap into the optical sensors in the fabric of her suit. It was like one big panoramic eye. It always took some getting used to, seeing three hundred and sixty degrees. The first time she'd tried to walk that way, she'd thrown up. But she got good at it quickly and the Langley spy boys loved her for it. That's why they sent her on assignments like this. Human back-up still beat the best AI. Anna was one of the few who could not only handle herself anywhere, but lived for it.
When she had a visual of the valley, Anna told the system to overlay the landscape with a contour grid, then code it with contrasting colors for elevation. She had a really good view, then. But that was just for a GPS reference. What Anna wanted was up, and when she panned her panoramic eye into the sky, she felt like she was falling into the stars.
Not yet, she thought. Not yet.
She bought out the microwave dish, a compact and powerful little device, about the size of a hubcap. There was more power and satellite data packed into that little concave slab of hardwired ceramic than in most countries. Anna pointed it at a designated point in the sky and clicked the dish on.
Heaven lit up like a Disneyland aurora. Technicolor lightning spread across the horizon as every object above her, natural and manmade, suddenly had a color-coded ID tag, and a line tracking its progress across the night sky. There was so much up there. And most of it was junk, Anna thought. Parts from trashed space stations. Burned-out com-sats that didn't have the courtesy to fall quickly into a fatal orbit. The tons of wreckage from the pointless US-China kill-sat battles, a kind of glorified Robot Wars in geo-synch orbit.
All that garbage up there, and here I am. A few shitty meters up Everest. It looked to Anna as if she could head back up the main climbing route, grab onto one of those crossed grid points and start climbing. Maybe hitch a ride on the dead carcass of an old Russian spy sat, and never come back. Sky-surf into a black hole
One of the specs in the sky winked at her. A red dot in a golden circle. Anna kicked into work mode. She double-checked the satellite's position and speed off the dish. It was her target, swinging by in orbit at exactly the designated time. Pulling two small brushed-aluminum cases from her pack, Anna ran her ring finger lightly down a seam in the front of her environment suit. The artificial skin peeled back from her chest, sealing itself, increasing her internal body temp to compensate for the exposed skin. Anna ran her middle finger down her sternum. A slit opened moistly in her chest. Anna tugged the slit open with her fingers, probing for the internal ports. When she found them, she pulled a line from the dish antenna and jacked in. Then she pulled a pre-loaded software stick from one of the aluminum cases and loaded the program into her system. When that was done, Anna took a software stick from the second case, her personal case, and loaded that, too. Then she waited.
When Anna was a girl, a few of the old-fashioned wooden rollercoasters were still working in dilapidated amusement parks around Texas and Oklahoma. She'd loved the click-click-click as the rollercoaster car rose for that first big drop. That's what this moment was always like for her. Going higher, waiting for the drop. It was all about the drop.
The dish and the satellite synched in and Anna was mentally blasted from the glacier up through a sea of orbital data. It took a minute for her senses to catch up with her. Locking in on the correct satellite, she noted that the coding looked Indian, but was overlaid with something else. Probably whatever program had hijacked the thing and was using it for Anna didn't know what anyone would do with a shanghaied Indian spy sat. The boys in Langley never told her things like that. They just wanted her to make contact, download as much data as she could and bring the thing down, so no one else could use it or know that they'd been there.
The first part of the assignment was the usual dull wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am data extraction. It was the last part that Anna lived for. She injected a worm into the satellite's navigation system, then gave the bird an order to change position. The confused satellite, its navigation system getting dumber by the second, didn't know how to respond. It began to drop from orbit. Fast.
Anna then injected her personal software into the system, waking the satellite up again, and hooking herself into the Langley boys' tracking system. She reached out her senses and wrapped herself in data. The satellite was picking up vibrations as it fell from orbit. When it touched the outer atmosphere, its skin began to heat up.
Click-click-click went the rollercoaster.
The satellite was tumbling, and Anna was tumbling along with it, her mouth agape, her rapid breath freezing in the air in front of her blind eyes. Her vision was overhead, looking both down at the earth and up at her satellite body falling through space.
She watched herself fall from a hundred tracking points simultaneously. The data from the tracking stations and other satellites was translated by her software into a 3D contour map in her head. It was like the best porn in the world. She was the satellite. She was surfing the sky, her skin on fire. She was flying.
Click-click-click, then the drop.
Her senses were overwhelmed by the heat, the vibrations, the alarms from sky traffic systems all over the world.
Click-click-click. Over the top, daddy.
Her satellite senses were off the chart. The satellite her body was shredding as she cut through the atmosphere, faster than a bullet, shaking, coming apart.
Anna screamed once and it echoed across the valley.
Later, gathering up her equipment, Anna changed into ordinary trekking gear. She'd sneak into one of the little towns at the base of the mountain and blend in with the other trekkers and climbers. She wondered how far her scream had been heard. She made a mental note to bring her kickboxing mouthpiece next time. With all Anna's training and discipline, her vices sometimes got the better of her. Not that it was her fault. It's the way the Langley boys wired her up. They knew she was a speed junkie. How was she not going to take advantage of the biggest adrenaline rush of all time? But the orgasms, those were a surprise. "Little deaths," someone called them, and they were right. How many time had she gone down in blazing satellites, crashing jets or burning spy drones? Every one another little death.
Anna wondered sometimes if she was the real experiment. Maybe all these spy missions and secret sabotage jobs were really just excuses to let her indulge her taste for sensations lived through machines. Maybe she was the first of a new kind of human, one who truly embraced the organic and the inorganic. A silicon Eve? More like the silicon Lilith, she thought.
Anna hoisted her pack onto her back and started down the mountain, toward a town her wrist map marked as Lukla. Behind her, the expansion foam cave was already beginning to flake apart. By nightfall, the wind would carry off the last scraps and leave no trace that she'd been there. As she walked, her suit checked her blood for signs of altitude sickness and lowered her thyroid activity so that she wouldn't overheat.
It was hard, Anna thought, living in machines and flesh at the same time. The only thing worse would be having to choose one or the other.
Richard Kadrey
InfiniteMatrix.net
Mementos
She's going to leave me. I know this for a fact. She's too beautiful for me. Too witty, too at ease in the world and social situations. She knows wine. She speaks French. She can see a Versace dress in a magazine and knock off a copy for herself in a weekend. Her friends are as sparkling and jewel-like as she. I can't keep up. Each night we're together, I feel her growing tired of my solidity. My lead-footed drabness.
"It's Bernice's birthday this weekend," she says. "There's going to be a big party at Jimmy's warehouse."
"Sounds great," I say.
She smiles, and says, "I'll pick up some wine." But I hear it as, "Liar."
I know she's already halfway out the door, but I can't lose her completely. I need something to remember her by. One night while she's asleep I take the extra sharp Japanese gardening knife I use for boning chicken and carefully remove one of her kidneys. She's a ridiculously healthy creature and will never miss it.
I wrap the kidney lovingly in colored tissue paper and store it with a sachet in the back of the refrigerator. I close up the incision using one of her sewing needles and some dental floss. She's a pale girl and will never notice the white floss against her skin. In the morning, a little guilty, I get up early and make us a big breakfast.
Over the next few couple of weeks, I take more mementos. Fingernail clippings. That sensitive spot at the base of her spine. Her spleen. A birthmark shaped like Martin Sheen.
And then she's gone. There's no last fight. No final confrontation or brouhaha, just a quiet acceptance by both of us that this is it. There's some quick packing. An awkward hug. A mention that she'd come back for the rest of her stuff in a few days, and she's gone.
Shattered, I sit down at the computer to email to my brother about what's happened. When I try to hit the space bar, one of my thumbs is missing. And I can't remember how to spell "Matthew." I scratch my head and can feel an incision all the way around my scalp, just at the hairline.
She's going to leave me. I know this for a fact. She's too beautiful for me. Too witty, too at ease in the world and social situations. She knows wine. She speaks French. She can see a Versace dress in a magazine and knock off a copy for herself in a weekend. Her friends are as sparkling and jewel-like as she. I can't keep up. Each night we're together, I feel her growing tired of my solidity. My lead-footed drabness.
"It's Bernice's birthday this weekend," she says. "There's going to be a big party at Jimmy's warehouse."
"Sounds great," I say.
She smiles, and says, "I'll pick up some wine." But I hear it as, "Liar."
I know she's already halfway out the door, but I can't lose her completely. I need something to remember her by. One night while she's asleep I take the extra sharp Japanese gardening knife I use for boning chicken and carefully remove one of her kidneys. She's a ridiculously healthy creature and will never miss it.
I wrap the kidney lovingly in colored tissue paper and store it with a sachet in the back of the refrigerator. I close up the incision using one of her sewing needles and some dental floss. She's a pale girl and will never notice the white floss against her skin. In the morning, a little guilty, I get up early and make us a big breakfast.
Over the next few couple of weeks, I take more mementos. Fingernail clippings. That sensitive spot at the base of her spine. Her spleen. A birthmark shaped like Martin Sheen.
And then she's gone. There's no last fight. No final confrontation or brouhaha, just a quiet acceptance by both of us that this is it. There's some quick packing. An awkward hug. A mention that she'd come back for the rest of her stuff in a few days, and she's gone.
Shattered, I sit down at the computer to email to my brother about what's happened. When I try to hit the space bar, one of my thumbs is missing. And I can't remember how to spell "Matthew." I scratch my head and can feel an incision all the way around my scalp, just at the hairline.
Concrete Bouquet
He's in love, but doesn't have the words to express it or the courage to say it. He smiles at his love. He buys her presents. He takes her to the most expensive dinners he can afford. She cares for him, he knows. She has no problem saying or expressing it. Now she's waiting for something. She's waiting for him, for the words he can't get out.
After dinner, she doesn't ask him up. Things are going wrong. They kiss, but he can feel her drifting away from him, sadly, but steadily. He stands in the street and watches the light go on in her apartment. He wants to shout at her window, but his throat is dry. His tongue feels like old linoleum in his mouth.
He trembles with cold and frustration. Tears fall from his eyes. Not tears. Flowers. Wounds open in his hands. Roses fall from his palms. Lilies, magnolia blossoms, tulips, birds of paradise land at his feet. He tries to call to her, but the words still won't come from his dry throat.
Later, when she opens her window she sees him lying in the street. He seems to be asleep on a bed of fresh blooms. He's so weak from blood loss, that she has to practically carry him inside. He leaves a trail of orchids and hibiscus all the way to her room.
He's in love, but doesn't have the words to express it or the courage to say it. He smiles at his love. He buys her presents. He takes her to the most expensive dinners he can afford. She cares for him, he knows. She has no problem saying or expressing it. Now she's waiting for something. She's waiting for him, for the words he can't get out.
After dinner, she doesn't ask him up. Things are going wrong. They kiss, but he can feel her drifting away from him, sadly, but steadily. He stands in the street and watches the light go on in her apartment. He wants to shout at her window, but his throat is dry. His tongue feels like old linoleum in his mouth.
He trembles with cold and frustration. Tears fall from his eyes. Not tears. Flowers. Wounds open in his hands. Roses fall from his palms. Lilies, magnolia blossoms, tulips, birds of paradise land at his feet. He tries to call to her, but the words still won't come from his dry throat.
Later, when she opens her window she sees him lying in the street. He seems to be asleep on a bed of fresh blooms. He's so weak from blood loss, that she has to practically carry him inside. He leaves a trail of orchids and hibiscus all the way to her room.
