SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was lying on my back in bed, doing the usual thing I do when I can’t get to sleep, which is nothing. Straight-edged shadows crept across the ceiling, accelerating and whipping across, then slowing down again as cars drove past on the road outside, headlights at their brightest on the unlit road. I don’t sleep very well sometimes, especially lately, but I don’t make it worse by letting it get to me and fighting it.

This house that used to be home is now just a large box made of some smaller boxes, connected by hallways. I live here because it’s better than sleeping outdoors. Also I keep my stuff here, not that I have much stuff worth keeping. But when it comes right down to it, I don’t so much live in this place as haunt it.

A home is someplace you can feel protected and comfortable. You surround yourself there with diversions and symbols of peace and kinship and brighter memories of history. My history has been revoked. My future has been shattered. There’s nothing left for me here but debris.

Maybe it’s just the house that’s dead, while I’m still alive. These things being relative, it’s hard to tell which is which. I want to move on, but I don’t even know what that means.

On my back in the bed, I watch the lights and shadows move on the ceiling and — well, I’d say daydream, but it’s definitely nighttime — imagine that the lights outside the window are from a spaceship coming in for a landing in the high grass out front, or perhaps weaving between the thready pines to find a convenient place to hover by my second-storey window. The light brightens to an almost daytime glow as the lock turns and the window slides up. A wind enters second, behind the light, and blows the curtains and some dust around the room, and the next thing to enter is another shadow, followed by the shape that cast it.

In this dream-vision, I am unable to move. The dark figure that has come in through the window fills the room with a presence, the same way that even the smallest snake can fill a room so full that almost everyone wants to leave immediately, even though the snake is in no way threatening. The fact of its existence is enough to make all other details unimportant by comparison.

I can no longer feel the bed beneath me, so I must be floating. I still can’t turn to look at my visitor, my examiner, my judge. The room turns around me. Am I being carried toward the window?

If I were to leave, to be taken aboard the craft outside the window and removed from this place, I would not be missed. I fill no niche. I have no job, no close family. I would just go into the light, and vanish, and be forgotten. I have already entered into my afterlife.

Am I dreaming of the beginning of a new adventure, a fantasy of a fresh chapter, of a clean, break, of abandoning the wreckage to the waves of entropy, or simply escape? The light brightens as my feet orient toward the window and supported by my dream, I float through it into a blinding white light. There is one last dark circle, a black hoop comprised of a thin slice of yard and dark sky. Passing through it entails a brief heart-stopping agony, and then I am on the other side.

The room was gray when I next woke up. The weak early sunlight didn’t want to be in my bedroom any more than I did. The air was stuffy. The window was closed. The floor was covered with a scattering of discarded clothes. Just my luck. I was abducted and delivered to a new life that was, in every way I could immediately see, absolutely no better than my last one.

No matter. At least I knew the routine. I would shower and dress. I would eat and put on shoes and leave my box full of boxes and make the rounds of my usual haunts. But this time I would look for all the tiny details that my imaginary abductor might have gotten wrong, those tiny little details that would be cracks where I could dig in my nails and peel up the layers of debris and dust that were obscuring my new life.

[*]

This one time I was sitting at my desk waiting for the phone to ring. More accurately, I was waiting for Murphy to make the phone ring — Murphy being the evil machine in the basement with the phone numbers in it of all the people we’re paid ten bucks an hour to annoy.

Here’s how it works. Murphy calls the number at the top of the list. Poor bastard #1 isn’t home, or doesn’t pick up, or whatever. So Murphy calls the next number in the list. And so on — until someone actually picks up. Murph has a split second to listen to the line to tell if it’s a machine, and if it is, it can hang up if it wants. But if someone answers, then the next one of us whose phone isn’t busy has ONE RING to pick up our end of the connection and read from the script Murphy shows us on our monitor. One section has info about who we’re trying to talk to, while another has info about why we’re harassing the poor schlub — either trying to make a sale, or get ’em to take a survey, or asking for money to cover an outstanding debt, or maybe it won’t bother any of us humans up here at all and it’ll just connect them to a recording of some kind.

Murphy, when it’s in peak form, can handle initiating thirty-two simultaneous outgoing calls, and, once connected, can hand them off to our telephone system, which supports more than two hundred and fifty. And yes, we have two full shifts and a third that runs about half-mast. We can handle somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 calls per day.

That’s an awful lot of daily misery we’re responsible for.

Murphy isn’t perfect. Murphy will connect me to a fax machine sometimes. Murphy will flub the handoff to the main telephone system (“Monroe”) sometimes, or maybe Monroe runs out of lines or has a bad one in the rotation, and the call gets dropped. But Murphy’s favorite way to screw with me is to connect me with someone and show me a bogus script. Or no script at all. I’ll get a page with no personal info on it for who I’m supposed to talk to, or a script that’s in a language I don’t know, or sometimes both sides will just be blank, leaving me talking to someone who I don’t know who it is about … nothing. Monroe can tell if I hang up on someone, as opposed to when they hang up on me, and I’m supposed to hang up on them if Murphy goes wrong, but when I do, I’m supposed to hit a button and fill out a quick form saying what happened. And sometimes that button doesn’t work either, and then I get written up and then I have to try to explain to my supervisor how busted — or maybe just malicious — Murphy is.

The screwed-up Murphy/Monroe combo has gotten plenty of competent people fired over the past couple of years, and that’s not counting supervisor incompetence or malice, like when they’re supposed to disconnect you from the system when you’re at lunch or on break, but they reconnect you before you come back and you rack up “failures to pick up,” which are nearly as unforgivable as hangups.

So when Murphy rang my phone, the screen snapped on and showed me the usual stuff. Kinda. I’m used to there being gaps sometimes or an old script we hadn’t seen in forever, but the script didn’t seem familiar. As I picked up, I heard the trailing “for quality assurance purposes” recording that was occasionally played when it took a few seconds for one of us to pick up, or when Monroe was feeling particularly sluggish finding an open associate. If it took too long, it would go straight to some horrific light jazz stuff that would hopefully stun and hypnotize the joe on the other end into not hanging up. But the script server knew I was online, so I was waiting for it to tell me it was my turn. Meanwhile I looked over at the script.

“Mr. Aan?” I asked. My ears went into autopilot waiting for something that sounded like an acceptable for on acknowledgment while my eyes flicked over the the script. Oh no.

“Yes,” came the response. I braced myself for the new weirdness and bulled on.

“My name is Leslie and I’m calling on behalf of –” and I’m not supposed to tell you who we contract for. You can imagine that many of our clients prefer to give the impression that we work directly for them. But I can tell you it gave me a chill all the way down to my spine. So anyway. “– and I’d like to offer my condolences for your loss, both from myself and from our entire organization.”

“Th-thank you,” he interrupted.

“Mr. Aan, I’d like to ask you, is there anything that we can do for you here, anything that you need?” The script here said to make a note of everything they say in the feedback section, which was just an open text box, though it mentioned that if it was profanity or abuse that we could just summarize.

“Well, actually…” he started. I braced myself. “We need four five-gallon tubs of cow blood for the rites, and, well, we’ve called around to all of the butchers and there just isn’t that much available. If we had a truck, I guess we could drive out of town….”

I started typing. “Twenty gallons of cow blood in four five-gallon tubs, Mr. Aan?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

“When do you need the blood, Mr. Aan? And what’s the address where you can take delivery?”

“No later than three days from now, Leslie. Friday afternoon.” And he gave me an address, and I confirmed it.

“Mr. Aan, I will pass along your request immediately, and someone will call you to confirm whether we can help you. Again, we are all very truly sorry, and we wish you the best for the future.”

I hung up, finished up the notes, and hit “submit.” And then I waited. And waited one moment more.

Then Murphy rang the phone, and I dove right in.

“Mrs. Abbot? My name is Leslie and I’m calling on behalf of the XXXX Corporation. I’d like to offer my condolences for your loss, both from myself and from our entire organization.”

“Th-thank you,” she replied.

[*]

This one time the twins were both sitting up on the sofa and trying to give each other this ratty old stuffed bunny. I could imagine why neither of them would want it — it was old enough to vote and get drafted and buy beer, though it might not be able to grow a decent beard without the help of whatever fungus might be growing on it at any given moment. It’d been ripped open and unstuffed and restuffed and had ears and eyes sewn back on and done about as many stints in the washing machine as my cousin Bob has done in jail, but those brief absences let me know what to expect if it ever disappears for good.

It’s basically a sponge for soaking up whatever oozes out of the twins, and I guess about ten or so previous owners as well, plus about a million unnameable puddles it’s encountered during its lifespan. As long as it’s been in the family, it’s been an important part of training developing immune systems. It’s like an heirloom sourdough starter.

Right then I loved that awful thing because it was making them laugh. The Man calls it “Pestilence Rabbit” and won’t touch it without gloves or a fresh one of those baggies that he takes with the dog when they go for a walk. The twins know his weakness, though. They try to touch him with it and make him flinch. And that makes me laugh too. Which The Man does not appreciate. Lately he’s been trying to change its name to Mercy the MRSA Bunny, and I have to admit it’s catchy.

I no longer remember what color it was supposed to be. It’s freakin’ bunny colored. It may have started out blue or yellow or tan, but now it was one of those colors a designer would charge you a thousand dollars to smear all over your walls, something that would change based on lighting and whatever your color your chintz throw pillows were. I was tempted to take it down to the hardware store with the fancy color-matching paint-mixing system and see if they could manage it. Maybe I could patent it or trademark it or whatever and license it to the high-end nail polish companies. “Raggedy-Ass Bunny” could be the new hot color at all the nail salons.

But anyway, I watched the bunny hit the floor and continued to look over from time to time while my show was on to see what the twins would do about it. They could climb down and get back up by themselves, though they weren’t so big that it wasn’t a lot of work, whichever way they were going. One of them was standing up and bouncing, now, and the other … was just gone.

While I was looking around, she came running back in from the hallway, where she could never have got to without me noticing, and then there were three twins — one bouncing up and down on the sofa, one climbing into the loveseat, and … one on the floor between the sofa and the shoved-back coffee table, starting to cloud up because she couldn’t find the bunny.

I got out of my chair as the one looking for the bunny faded away. And then the one bouncing on the sofa vanished. The bunny was limp on the carpet, next to the sofa leg. The twin on the loveseat was looking at it making that fist opening-and-closing thing they do when they want you to give them something, and then she looked at me like she was starting to realize something was wrong. I picked her up and studied the little clues that changed every day to tell me which one she was and … she was both of them. The shape of the left ear, the self-inflicted scratch on the shoulder, the way she held out her leg when I picked her up… Every sign I looked for to know which she was was there. She was both of them.

I found myself starting to doubt how many children I’d given birth too. It was like a nightmare or something. I was starting to freak out.

I bent down to pick up the bunny so that maybe at least one of us could feel better, and, as my shadow fell across it, I saw it drift mauve, then bluish, then maybe something brownish, like old bones. I checked with my baby to see if she was looking at it, and when I looked back, the bunny was gone.

This was nuts. I was going crazy. I know these guys don’t let me get enough sleep, but still….

I set her on the sofa and got down on my hands and knees to see if I had nudged it under the sofa or table and looked up just in time to see my other baby climbing up onto the other end of the sofa. I looked up and there they were, Lisa on one end and Jillian skootching her way onto the middle cushion and … Mercy the MRSA Bunny was right on the floor between my knees. Not under the sofa. Not under the coffee table. Where I should have seen it the whole time.

I gave them the bunny and they were happy again. I, on the other hand, was breathing hard, like I’d just been through the most harrowing thing I’ve ever been through in my life. I was shaking. I went back to may chair to sit down, and I knew for sure there was a fresh glass of red wine in my future.

It was like we’d been cycling through different scenarios, different realities, for some reason, trying to get back to the one we could live with.

Whatever. I had my babies. They had each other and the bunny. We were all home. I didn’t give a damn about anything else.

[*]

This one time I was headfirst up past my shoulders in the guts of one of the most overdesigned inkjet printers it has ever been my distinct lack of joy to service. Imagine a set of steady streams of pulsed fifteen-micron drops from six nozzles with ten-micron diameters with a tuned timing system to put static electrical charges on each every drop that’s intended to not hit the page, being deflected by a magnetic field and hitting a knife instead and draining into a waste bottle, while the droplets that are selected for the page have to hit a rotating cylinder of specially coated paper that’s doing 500 revolutions per minutes for reasons I can’t clearly comprehend….

Of course these things are popular as medical imaging systems, so it’s pretty important to make sure all the dots that the doctors are looking at are actually part of the image and not just some random blob from a malformed droplet or whatever. This means I spend most of my time driving to hospitals, or sometimes flying to hospitals, trying to sync up with an overnighted box of parts to swap out, with the climax being wrapped up in a pair of too-hot coveralls and performing messy surgery on patients no less delicate and stringy with goo-filled tubes and squidgy on the inside than the human patients down the hall in surgery. Except my insurance is cheaper.

Only much of the time the problem is with the computer that’s attached and sending the images to the printer, so I have to be up on every ancient and esoteric piece of crap that’s ever made one of these printers work — plus whatever latest and greatest sleek and evil monster looked good in the glossy brochure that they hope will work but in fact no one bothered to check.

But the point I’m building up to is that machines that are this sensitive are sensitive to lots of things. And you’d be surprised how many calls I get where I have to ask, “Really? Tell me, do you know if the MRI machine was doing a scan at the time? Yeah, I know it’s in the other corner of the building in a shielded room, but can you check anyway?” And frequently it’s not in another corner of the building, because you tend to want the printer for the imaging equipment to be somewhere near the imaging equipment. Especially if you leave that up to a space planner instead of anyone with any familiarity at all with an MRI scanner. Also, shielding tends to be retrofitted by whoever was the lowest bidder.

But there’s this place I keep going back to, and yes they have an MRI, and yes it’s almost certainly an issue, but I can’t see how it would be the kind of issue that causes the things I keep getting called out there to fix. I’ve climbed into and out of their printer maybe a hundred times, replacing the firmware (and the chip it resides on), various control boards, power supplies, cabling and connectors, you name it. I’ve reinstalled the software on their controlling computer. I’ve carried image files back to the office to make sure it’s not how the files are being rendered.

On the lighter areas of the prints, where fewer of these fifteen-micron dots hit the spinning paper, they’re pointing out faint but definitely recognizable images of faces. Or occasionally abstract and unrecognizable shapes. Sometimes words or fragments of words. I print these files elsewhere and it’s just noise. I print them a second time on this machine, the one I just climbed out of, and I get a different face, or maybe a sheep’s head, or a skyline from an unfamiliar city.

I’m familiar with pareidolia — and I can admit I only know the name of it because of this damn printer. The tendency to see faces or other recognizable shapes in clouds or woodgrain or a grilled cheese sandwich…. But I don’t see this stuff nearly as much coming off of other printers. And when they’ve mailed me prints, I see the same things elsewhere, under normal office lighting, under incandescent bulbs in my house, outside in the sun.

In order to prevent moire patterns, the imaging software uses a stochastic process — random dots rather than a set pattern — to fill in areas that need fewer dots than solid ink coverage. It’s mathematically possible that any individual print could have accidentally built some kind of image in the noise, just really really really really unlikely. Like winning several lotteries in a row kind of unlikely.

After I climbed out of the printer, I grabbed the sheaf of suspect prints they’d been collecting and headed up to a board room where I could spread things out on a table. All of the faces I collected in one section, bodies and animal shapes went into another pile, landscapes and abstracts made another stack, and then I spread out the words and word fragments. There were about thirty prints in that stack, and I moved them around trying to see if I could make them makes sense as a sentence or a message. And I kind of did:

 
And then I snorted and put that stack away. But I never did find any other patterns in what was coming up in the noise.

[*]

This one time a handful of pigs built houses to live in and then a wolf with really bad breath came through town and knocked them all down except for one or two, and everyone tried to move into those houses simultaneously, and then there was what you might call a bit of basic unrest.

You can see the immediate problems with all this. Pigs all over the world do well for themselves without even knowing what a house is. Then they get the idea they need a house, and don’t really sweat what that entails. You have goobs on the city council inflate the housing codes to require materials their idiot brother-in-law has managed to corner the market on just to make their wives tolerable to live with, then you have contractors who know that the codes are B.S. just do whatever they think will make a house stand up because they all individually consider themselves to be geniuses but they’re really just good at building shams and bribing inspectors, which is often cheaper and inflates the profit margin, and the pigs just care about granite countertops, huge TVs, impossible-to-maintain landscaping, and enough “curb appeal” to make the other little pigs green, knowing in their little piggy hearts that if something goes wrong, it’ll all be someone else’s fault, which we all know is the thing that counts in a crisis.

Because if it’s someone else’s fault, that means the people who have done wrong are obliged to take care of whoever they’ve wronged, right? Because if there’s one thing pigs know about little piggy nature, it’s that those with criminal profiteering intent are big on fulfilling obligations to their victims when the chips are down.

And when the sheriff is dragging people out of a crowd, one at a time, standing on their necks, prying baseball bats out of their hands and trying to talk them out of the murderous rage they got when the aforementioned granite countertop fell through the floor and crushed the 58″ flatscreen in the basement boar-cave, also rupturing the home-brewing rig and incidentally breaking the leg of one of the piglets that was trying to scurry to safety, the sheriff has to listen to the same old litany of blame that loosely translates to the list of people the pig would like to take care of them now that they don’t have a house to live in: the wolf, which has already blown out of town, the builders, the contractors, the “insufficient” building codes, the city council, and the well-off/foresightful few who still have houses that are standing. Just about always there’s one individual prominently left off that list, and its usually someone with a recent bootprint.

I try to make myself feel bad when, while standing on the necks of the people who were kind enough to elect me to office, instead of feeling charitable, I really wish I was a wolf myself and could blow through this spontaneously organized, prey-concentrating farm, wilting the overpriced hairdos of all the wailing survivors and, I dunno, have a really big damn lightning-powered barbecue to celebrate the windfall of free-running piggies who suddenly have nowhere to hide. I consider beating myself with the bat I’ve just taken away because I can’t feel any sympathy and I know I should be hurting somehow, but unfortunately I was blessed with insight and common sense and a stress-triggered fight-or-flight response that evolution insists I have, while the majority vote of the diseased organism of which I am a sometimes useful part has promised an extraordinarily miserable decade or two as a reward for me if I use it.

So here stands the sheriff, with his boot on the neck of a distraught citizen, better damn be sure on-purpose-like holding this bat by the wrong end lest thousands of hours in batting cages take over his muscles by reflex and start swinging for the parking lot on the other side of the upper deck of the bleachers.

And then, because something has to give, there is a strange noise in my head and the world shatters into a million pieces and I start laughing and I know this is nearly as bad as swinging but I can’t stop. I can’t stand up anymore so I chuck the bat out into the street and fall down on the grass laughing like a madman, laughing and laughing and laughing at the stupidity of everything going on, everything mankind has ever done that makes this the thing that happens again and again and again everywhere in the world where bad things happen to civilized people and then a big wolf howl comes running down the street laughing the way wolves laugh, joining right in and screaming to the sky how funny it all is and then, apparently, they loaded me into that ambulance and took me to the hospital and treated me for a stroke which pretty much left me untouched except for the occasional olfactory hallucination and the tendency to laugh like a madman when I witness tragedy and human misery, except I’m really not so sure I’m not faking it and using the stroke as an excuse.

But … whatever it takes to keep me from swinging that bat, you know?

[*]

This one time I was sitting on the wall down at the park with a couple of my, you know, the guys I hang out with. We had each other’s backs in school when the gang stuff got bad, formed our own gang and all that stuff and acted tons harder than we were. That got us into more trouble than it was worth, but it kept some of the others off of us and kept some of us out of worse trouble, like if we’d joined up with some of the other gangs. Three of us were waiting for a fourth to get off work running deliveries, so basically we were just hanging around making people nervous, and that kinda sucks, because really we’d just rather enjoy the sun, you know, if it was going to behave today, and watch people at the park.

This was the last year in school for most of us, but the school year kinda wrecked with the sun thing. We lost weeks while folks were trying to figure out if we were supposed to be going at night, but some of us had night jobs, and some of those jobs were for places that were still open, and then there was the stuff with the barricaded blocks and shooting all those looters and the general work of collecting bodies that people kept finding and trying to make sure those people actually died from sunburn or sun poisoning and not from something else and just, you know, disposed of where the sun would cook them and cover up a killing. Not everyone was up for stuff like that, so the boys and I helped out with some of that instead of finding out where school was supposed to be or whatever. Also we made the rounds checking on people and making sure they had food and water and stuff. When we could get away with it.

So for some of us the school year was going to run an extra month, some of us are just gonna take our finals when they’re offered and hope for the best, and we’ll all just do what we gotta. Same as always.

Six of the eight of us made it through it, and that was pretty good, considering. Those of us meeting up today were headed over to go hang out with the two that didn’t, over at the memorial park. Meanwhile we just watched the traffic. There were fewer cars. A good deal less honking. People were in a hurry still, especially outside, and the scorched park was just, you know, empty. 

We were all pretty sick of it. Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy — small ones, big ones. We were all like veterans of a war. We’ve seen some pretty horrible stuff, done some horrible stuff, some of us … made some horrible choices that nobody should ever have to make. We were all just ready to get moving again. So we’d made a plan.

Tonight when we go to the memorial park, we’re going to sow some seeds. We got an overhead map of the place and made a grid on top of it and, you know, the way those people fake those crop circle things, we’re going to walk around and make a design. But we’re going to do it with this grass seed that comes up really damn dark blue-green and is almost a weed. We’re gonna do it slow and casual and right under everybody’s noses.

I worked up a stencil of a trumpet player and made it really simple and easy, and that’s what we’re gonna put down on the grass down there. And then we’re gonna go around town and everywhere we see a place where we know someone who died, we’re gonna spray up a stencil of this trumpet player, with his horn pointed up defiantly at the sky, and we’ll end all of this with permanent shadows cast by the biggest jazz funeral ever.

Maybe it’ll catch on, maybe it won’t, but we’re going to get it started. Somebody has to. And I know if we weren’t down both of our trumpet players, they’d be playing them for real tonight.

[*]

This one time I was dragging the next roller forward, having already cinched and pegged to keep the god from slipping backward. My “helper” was astride the god. Six or seven birds had also perched wherever they could, taking the free ride. I was singing, but mostly to drown out the drunken yowling of my companion. Even the birds were quiet. Mostly in shock at the noises we were making.

I passed a sea-gray tortoise that was keeping up with out procession. It was the size of the largest stone I could carry in my arms. The tortoise was heading to the last stand of shade before the sun-greeting slope that was our destination. It would race ahead as we moved throughout the day, and probably turn back around and head back to the fish pool this evening, when dusk fell.

I dropped the roller and picked up one of the birds that was hitching a ride. It was too sun-sedated to react at all. I set it on the back of the tortoise and it flapped twice for balance, then settled down. Neither it nor the tortoise seemed to care. A couple of the other birds on the god edged away from me. My companion ignored me, continuing his ululating howl.

I picked up the roller and my song where I had dropped them and continued forward. I set the roller down at the front, stomping it down under the god’s heels. My helper rolled off the god and trotted upslope to the ropes and the cinching post. I moved down to the god’s head and dug my bare feet into the soil. I raised my voice as the signal and shoved. The god and the birds lurched forward as I shoved. Ahead, my helper took up the slack in the ropes and held the cinch tight. I kept a steady push going, singing loudly to concentrate my strength.

The sun had noticeably moved in the sky at my back by the time the next roller came free. I called ahead and my helper called back. He tied the cinch fast while I uprooted the pegs, carried them ahead, and drove them deep into the soil behind the ends of the hindmost rollers.

Sweat ran off of my arms and back in streams. I retied my hair-cords and found the gourds we had carried up this morning. I took a drink from both of them, water first, and noted that they were both mostly empty. I unwrapped the saltfish and nibbled, and took another drink from the beer. My helper was already back astride the god, slumped forward and most likely asleep. One of the birds pecked at his hair and he took no notice.

Ahead of us the angry sky was the same color as the sea. The evening rain would soften the ground and weaken the ropes. I had to decide whether to try for one more push. I rubbed the soil from my hands and stretched and felt the muscles in my arms and legs and back to see what they thought.

“Again,” came a voice from my face-down companion. One of the birds squawked, possibly in agreement. Ahead, the tortoise-rider had nearly made it to shade.

“It’s not like you would ride the god all the way back down the hill when the ropes break,” I replied.

“Again,” he repeated.

“I will throw you into the surf,” I replied.

“You had better,” he replied. “My skin is on fire.”

I groaned and turned it into the start of a storm-greeting song, calling the rain and daring it to bring hail and lightning. I dragged the free roller forward and threw it sideways under the cinch-ropes.

“You are a filthy demon,” said my companion. He got up and bounded ahead to the post to free the rope-ends and start hauling and bracing. “An ugly one!” he shouted back. “With the rotten split open head of a pig! Complete with maggots!”

He was well on his way to making a decent poet.

Thunder rowed in from the distant surf, oared by the lightning. The first huge drops of rain began to fall like drops of fat from a roasting boar. The sun glared in from the west and lit up the clouds with fire, painting the storm with pinks and golds and huge brilliant flowers in the hair of the clouds.

I sang to drown them all out and shoved for all I was worth, letting the rain cool the fire in my back and arms and legs. The god inched forward. Ahead, my helper dutifully sang back and kept the ropes taut. I shoved and I sang. After forever, when the sky was as dark as night and I could no longer hear myself over the storm, the roller came free.

I hammered in the pegs as the hail I had called started to come down, and raced ahead. I guided my way to the cinching-post by keeping a hand on the ropes. They felt sound enough. I made sure the ropes were tied in a way that they could still be untied when they dried out later. Then I went back and put the free roller in place. With luck, the drying ropes would pull the god forward on their own. Or maybe they would just snap. I trusted the pegs to hold, but tomorrow I would bring new ropes, just in case.

I didn’t notice when the birds had left, but they were gone.

My companion was seated by the cinching-post. I hauled him to his feet and threw him over my shoulders like a pig to take to market. He howled and wriggled and cursed, but I had his wrists locked in one hand and his ankles in the other. I ran as hard as I could for the beach and moments later, when I was in the water up to my thighs, I hefted him overhead and threw him out to sea. He screamed with laughter and I heard him splash when he hit.

When he came back up, I heard him shout, “I will sing the lightning down onto your head! You will split like a struck tree and your innards will fall down around your feet like a rope of wilted flowers!”

I laughed and dragged him out of the water. “I’d better carry you over my head for protection, then!”

We ran back upslope to get the gourds and the pack of soggy food. I draped the carrying straps around my chest and heaved him up onto my back for him to ride. “Sing for the lightning all you like now, war-poet! You will feel it first!” I told him.

And I ran all the way back to the village with him on my back, just in case.

[*]

This one time I was staring at the corpse of my future, hoping beyond hope that I had the capacity to bring it to life.

How does the old drill about the humanity of robots go? I think you start by removing a person’s hand. Replace that hand by something that performs the function well enough that there’s no serious impact to that person’s quality of life. Is that person any less of a person?

Then take the whole arm. Then a kidney. Part of the liver. The pancreas. A lung. Replace a chunk of the brain with a lump of solid-state circuitry that performs the exact same function. Replace both legs. Now lets stop and check.

If you’ve done a good enough job with your replacements, this guy might have different issues regarding maintenance and upkeep, maybe different sensations of weight or center of gravity, but is still more functional than some people who operate without a whole suite of parts, due to accident or congenital difficulties, who are still considered people.

Due to social stigma — and, I assert, no other reason — he might suffer some psychological difficulties about self-worth, about feeling human. But let’s say he can get past that. Now lets keep going. Let’s remove the head from the body and keep both parts functioning for a moment. Which piece is the person?

I don’t think it takes much thinking to decide it’s the part that remembers personal history, the part that speaks and imagines and makes decisions, that bears the bulk of the humanity. The body does a lot of expressing its state of being — body language, as it were — but only some of that is done without the direction of the brain. The body goes a long way to tell us how we feel, it turns out, and without that we really do feel a good deal less than human. But that’s just a warning to make sure any new body we’re using has those same mechanisms for reporting contact and position and danger of damage and health and status of any autonomic functions it’s performing.

So there’s a warning. Let’s make sure there is, in fact, a body — and that it chatters nonstop about where it is and what it’s doing. Even though there are people who are definitely people who are  paralyzed and physically unfeeling, who are in bodies that are essentially support systems for a brain trapped in a bone box. I don’t deny the humanity of those people at all, but I’m still shooting for an optimal, healthy case beyond the reach of pity. Provide a body, given the option.

Back to the head. We already replaced some of the brain with circuitry that performs the same purpose. Trust me when I say this isn’t beyond the capacity of current technology, seeing as a prosthesis for replacing the hippocampus has already undergone extensive testing and we’ve had for some time intracranial implants for helping to control seizures. If you think maybe that isn’t complex enough to mimic the more sophisticated capacity for memory storage and retrieval, for metaphor, for complex comparisons and contrasts, for decision heuristics — you’d be right. But for some of those we already have hardware and software that does the job in ways that do not mimic how meat does it, inefficiently and by accident of evolution. It really is just a matter of a few more years, not counting bureaucratic hoop-jumping. So lets replace the rest of it, taking care to read what’s already there, in terms of connections and stored memories and associations, and make sure the replacement has access to those as well.

And before you freak out about that too much, consider that people suffer accidents of trauma and stroke all the time that loses them huge chunks of their own personal histories, and yet we still consider them people. Hell, we throw most of our memories away as we go and don’t ever give it a second thought. So maybe we get all of the memories and tendencies, maybe we just get the Reader’s Digest edition that covers all the high points, but for the sake of argument, lets say we get enough to be able to remember and recount shared experiences with at least the same level of accuracy as we do now, with the capacity to recall and handle emotional response, and continue on.

Assuming we get as close as we can get, and it’s closer than we get sometimes after serious injury or illness … Is the thing on the slab a person, and is it me?

Every evening, or at least most evenings, I lose consciousness. After some period of time, something gets up, wearing my pajamas, with a reasonably good grasp of my personal history, but not exactly 100% error-free, and capable of a good simulation of how I typically respond in typical situations and certainly capable of winging it in ways I’d hardly expect in new situations, and with access to all of my bank accounts and online identities and friends and family and colleagues. That thing is me, or only acceptably, incrementally different from the me that went to sleep, and everyone gives it a bye.

If I go to sleep and the thing on the slab gets up to greet the sunrise the way I would, under the circumstances of the trauma of translation, that are, for the sake of argument, less destructive than the traumas of injury or illness, have I made the transition?

I really, really hope so. Otherwise, someday I may die.

[*]

This one time I was listening to the drums from the lot next door — “Mama”, with her deep voice, the alto tones of “Second”, the quicker rattle of “Bowl”, the insistent ting of “Organ” (these are the names as I heard them from someone whose accent put any certainty about what I was hearing just out of reach) — as the sun was going down. Technically the lot was a church, with a tent of stitched-together tarps covering the largest part of the open space. Tonight I’m sure the lot would be full of people dancing and singing and praying.

I couldn’t relegate the drums to background noise, so I put down my book. There was no way I could be annoyed, though. I’d lived next to a church once that insisted on chiming bells at the top of the daylight hours, and that cycle didn’t quite match up to mine. Also, the “bells” were some recorded nonsense, amplified beyond the true capacity of the system to deliver. The snap of the system turning on was louder than the bells, and the undercutting sixty-cycle hum from the poorly tuned amp made me grit my teeth. Not that any part of the thing appealed to me, but it was poorly done, bordering on the cheesy, and that was hard to forgive.

I’d considered complaining, or offering my help to smooth out the kinks, or starting a collection to get actual bells installed, even, but as things turned out I’m glad I didn’t interfere. Somewhere there was at least one person who was happy with it, satisfied that he or she or they did something they could be proud of, and who am I to suck the joy out of that? Besides, the best I could really have offered was an ancient tube amp that warmed up a thousand times more smoothly but looked like old worthless crap, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have appreciated that or seen the value. And I’d miss the old thing.

These drums were worth listening to, however. The rhythms were familiar, at least by now, but also as elements that had sneaked into music I’ve been listening to for years. And also that was somebody’s prayer of invocation. I might be an asshole sometimes, and not on good terms with too many gods, but I seriously didn’t have it in me to take issue with anyone’s approach to comfort or hope right now.

The sun gave us a whole day of nearly normal behavior today, and that was reason for some amount of celebration and giving thanks. And praying for it to turn into a lifetime streak.

I could get behind that.

I considered going down to see if they would let me join them, but I wasn’t sure how well that would go. I lacked the cultural background to know what was going on, and frankly I was worried that the color of my skin could be an issue. I know the islands range all over the map skin-tone-wise, but I’m pretty damn white. I know they’d rather not feel like they were some kind of spectacle, and I guessed I could hear well enough with the window open.

It feels really odd to think that things might be going back to normal — for a given value of normal. We’ve already had some pretty amazing storms and everyone expects those to go on for a while before they taper off. Power’s back on at least in places. Some of the satellites survived, even. But food’s going to be pretty tight worldwide. It’s going to take decades just to catalog everything we’ve lost.

And nobody trusts the sun anymore. Nobody knows if there’s going to be “aftershocks” or even what caused whatever that was in the first place. I expect all the churches will be full for the next few months, years even, while we sort this out. And out this window, what I have to think of as my own church was meeting.

I kicked the only comfortable chair in my apartment up to the window and sank back into it, closing my eyes and relaxing into the rhythms. My right hand worked along as usual, tapping on my knee and the arm of my chair, and my left? Well, with my eyes closed, my left hand was keeping up just fine. When I sneaked a peek, however, it was still missing. The aches came and went in waves that I could grit my teeth and get through.

Maybe if things had been normal they could have saved it. If the hospital had had electricity and phones, if surgeons and specialists had been able to travel to get there, If I hadn’t had to wait five hours to make the trip and wait an additional six hours to get into an operating room…. Who knows? There are a billion people out there who lost more than a hand.

But when my missing hand was drumming, the ache went away. That was good to know.

The service continued for hours. After a while, Mama and the rest of her ensemble were put away and replaced by Grobaka and Tibaka, and I worked to pick out the separate rhythms.

In just a few minutes I was keeping up and, once again, free of every kind of pain.

[*]

This one time, back when I was a little elf, I was chasing grasshoppers out in the fields behind the little subdivision my family lived in. The baseball diamond, the next field over, was dry and little dust devils were running the bases. The grasshoppers were the size of my father’s fingers, or even larger, and the game I was playing was to charge through the grass at top speed, yelling and waving my arms, to see how many of the buzzing dollops of green and yellow-striped brown I could get aloft at the same time. I’d get three or four in the air in front of me then spin around, running backward, to see if there were any still in the air behind me. The record so far, for the day, was eight. I was frustrated because I was sure I could get twice that many if I could run faster, or maybe had a dog to help me herd them into the powder blue sky.

At the other edge of the field was an old man sitting in the grass. He had one arm up as if waving or pointing, and the his other hand was up to his face, like he was shielding his eyes and looking up at the sky. I decided to charge over and send some of the grasshoppers his way, though I was a little worried this would get me into trouble. Enduring a hail of panicked grasshoppers was a bit of an acquired taste as I had come to find out.

As I got closer, I saw that he had a pair of binoculars — and I knew for damn sure I would be in trouble if I made him drop them. My father had a pair that he treated as one of the most valuable things he owned. I skidded to a stop outside of reasonable grasshopper range to think about things and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. The wind sprang up and blew a grasshopper right at my head, so I ducked it.

From where I stood, I could see this wrinkled old man was kneeling on the grass, holding onto some kind of string tied to the sky. He was using the binoculars to look at, presumably, the other end of the string. I followed the string up with me eyes as far as I could, then skipped ahead a bit, straining to make out anything in the painfully bright blue beyond the little floating spots I’ve always been plagued with, but I saw nothing.

He motioned me over and spoke in a language I didn’t understand. One of the words sounded kind of like “kite,” and things suddenly made sense. He handed me his hefty binoculars as if he handed expensive items to five-year-olds he’d just met all the time, but I already had them in my hands before I realized exactly how stunned I was. They were far heavier than I expected, and my hands were sweating, but I didn’t want to just hold them in one hand while I wiped the other on some handy denim, so I just kept a white-knuckled grip, held them to my face, and tried to follow the string up. I looked around as well as I could, taking minutes and half panicked that he would become unhappy and demand them back any moment, but all I found in the sky was a daytime crescent moon and a puff of cloud in a big damn hurry. As far as I ever knew, he had the string tied to one of those.

He kept up a stream of steady incomprehensible chatter that, even if I could have understood it, was mostly lost to the breeze.

My arms were tired from holding up the binoculars to my face, so I handed them back before I got so tired they slipped from my sweaty fingers. At the same time I handed them over, he handed me the string that was yanking at his own withered arms. I’m sure all he wanted to do was wipe the binoculars off on his plaid shirt or maybe loop the black plastic strap around his wattled neck, but the next thing I knew was that I was being dragged backwards across a swath of staining, pungent grass by this string tied to the sky and that I would catch holy hell if I let this man’s precious kite, of which I still had only a garbled inkling for its existence, escape.

I bounced on my ass a couple of times, scattering more grasshoppers and knocking the breath out of me, but I took the opportunity to wind the string around my hand a couple of times and kicked off the ground the next time it yanked me, hoping to spin around and face forward so I could fend off the ground with my dirty sneakers. I started to worry a bit when the ground went a bit farther away from me than I could jump on a good day and was taking its own sweet time about coming back.

But, man, the grasshoppers were flying. As I climbed farther into the sky, I could see at least ten or fifteen aloft, and I wasn’t even chasing them and waving my arms. I wasn’t shouting either because I still hadn’t really gotten my breath back. Also, I had other worries.

At one point I was sailing backward again, because I remember watching the man stand up and turn around, looking for me. I remember the comical look on his face when he saw me sailing off. He stood stock still, propped up on his spindly legs, mouth hanging open, fists clenched in what remained of his white, wispy hair. He was probably shouting something, but I couldn’t hear it. And then he was pounding after me in a sprint, fiercely concentrating.

I only weighed about forty pounds at the time, but still the string was digging painfully into my hand. In my heart, at that moment, I knew he was threatening to flay me alive if I lost him his kite. Now I’m pretty sure I knew better. I also know now that I didn’t have the spindle that must have been bounding along on the ground behind me like a puppy in pursuit. All he would really have had to do to save his kite and, incidentally, myself was to step on it.

After a couple of thirty-yard bounces, I got snarled in the top of the chainlink fence that separated this field from the baseball diamond, my toes digging into the spaces in the weave maybe two or three from the top, but allowing me to drag myself down to the ground. The old man got to me just as I was in reach of soil.

The odd part was that as early as the day before, I was certain that fence had never been there. And the reason why I know is that I had been chasing tennis balls batted by a neighbor kid from that very diamond and had been devoutly wishing that there had been some kind of fence to keep him from knocking the balls so far out of the field. I must have run through the spot where I was snarled in the fencing at least ten times less than twenty-four hours prior.

Regardless, I thrust the string into his hand the second he screeched up, rolling the coil of cord off my purpling fingers. And while he stood there dumbfounded, before he could start shouting again, I bolted for home, dusting off my britches as well as I could without breaking stride.

[*]