SRF Heavy Industries

Zombiesque, the new DAW anthology that carries my story “The Confession,” got five out of five stars from reviewer (and zombie fiction fan) Kelly over at Daemon’s Books. Zip on over and take a look:

I’m a huge fan of the Zombie genre in… well, anything really. When I got my copy of ZOMBIESQUE in the mail I think I may have squealed out loud and jumped up and down a few times. The zombie phenomenon wasn’t always around, but now that it’s here to stay it seems like everyone is just craving more of the undead. And you will find them with a vengeance in the pages of Zombiesque.

The book is a collection of 16 short stories from various authors. There are stories of zombies that we all know and love from the classic Romero stumblers, to zombies types that we’ve never seen. There are stories of people that purposely turn themselves into zombies for fun, and stories of zombie cheerleaders.

[ ….]

While those two were my favorites out of Zombiesque, there wasn’t a bad story in the book! Whether you like your zombies eating entrails and brains, or if you like to see a softer side of the undead, there’s a story for you in Zombiesque!

She makes special mention of Seanan McGuire’s “Gimme a Z!” and Tim Waggoner’s “Do No Harm,” both of which seem to be turning out to be crowd pleasers.

Thanks bunches to Kelly, and here’s hoping you agree with her!

[*]

This one time I was maybe on my third day out in the woods. The food in my duffel was down to maybe fifteen packets of instant oatmeal and a sack of venison jerky I had bought for a different trip a couple of months ago. I’d nearly forgotten about it. As long as I had that stuff in the bag to avoid eating, I would never be starving. Just, you know, deliberately getting skinny.

And if I was shy a tent stake, there was at least one piece of jerky in there that could do the trick. Another was just about perfect for putting an edge on and using for a razor when it was time to clean up and walk out of the woods. If that time ever came.

I’d had some in my hand when I discovered a rattlesnake. When she just slithered away, I couldn’t decide whether it was because she thought I was going to stab her with it or offer her a bite. You get the idea.

In addition to the food, or possible food, I had a change of clothes, two plastic bottles full of water, three identical .40 caliber pistols and a box of rounds, maybe close to a hundred, and maybe $180,000 in tens and twenties. The bag was heavy, is what I’m saying, and that’s an awful lot of not-food to be slogging around in the woods with.

The scam was more tedious than interesting. Two hundred thousand in cash was supposed to buy half a million in counterfeit twenties of a grade for use overseas where people weren’t as particular about serial numbers or bleach pens. But $20,000 in cash bought $200,000 in a better grade of counterfeit cash from someone in a huge panic who had the right paper but was iffy on all those different fiddly inks. Well, $20,000 in cash and about ten pounds of chopped-up newspaper. So a couple of swaps later and maybe a few more days in the woods and a hike down a section of the Appalachian Trail and I’d wander out in some podunk townlet, rent a room somewhere, register an LLC, buy a web domain, buy a business license, and pretend to sell stuff online until I could explain the deposits. I’d even pay my taxes.

The guy in a huge hurry got twenty grand for a plane ticket and a quick vacation and all of his uncomfortable evidence taken off his hands. He’d be happy enough. The guys who were expecting two hundred grand of clean cash now had, at least, ten thousand pieces of paper of the right grade to do something a little more impressive. If they did fifties or hundreds, they’d get way more profit than the cash in my bag. I hate to leave people with nothing.

It was a big change from working Wall Street, but somehow this felt … cleaner. Knock a couple of zeroes off the end of the numbers changing hands and it was only criminals you were stealing from. At the previous levels, it was corporations and governments, and, while you were still screwing with criminals, /they/ were slinging around money skimmed from taxes and pension plans, and just about always there was at least one starving grandmother on the business end of the stick.

I didn’t have enough money to retire on, but it was enough for a fresh start and maybe some legitimate investing. And if I had any luck, I could still retire someplace overseas in a year or two. Or, I dunno, get a legitimate job again.

And hell, if you ignored the smell, I was probably in the best shape of my life. The scenery was amazing. I got to sleep when I felt like it. I could set fire to things if I wanted. Other than the ground being cold, hard, and more than a bit lumpy, and being hungry, and drinking water that was largely what you get from flushing the giant toilet that is the forest floor with the occasional rainstorm, and needing a shower, and feeling like I had been beaten by a giant with a sack full of car tires and also generally exhausted, this was a vacation.

So I was lying on the ground where I had scraped together a pile of leaf litter, the sun having dropped just a bit too far to be of any use to someone trying to not break an ankle on a rocky trail. I’d scutted maybe two hundred yards downhill to be closer to water and found a spot where someone else had cleared out a pit for a fire. I had a healthy blaze going already, but I needed it to die down a bit before I could use the coals to heat some water. I had maybe an hour, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to lie down and veg.

I had half drifted off when I heard something through the spare pair of pants I was using for a pillow. Something through the rock that the wad of jeans was on. Something rumbling.

I could see a clear patch of sky through the trees up to the north, and hanging there was a star bright enough to be Venus, and that’s what I thought it was until I remembered that you don’t get planets in the northern sky unless you’re in the southern hemisphere. I’d been hiking for a while, but not that long. Maybe I was just a bit turned around. I fished my compass out of a pocket on the bag — and I was nowhere near as turned around as the compass was. It just wandered around and refused to settle down.

Meanwhile the rumbling got louder — loud enough for me to hear it without my head on the rock. And I could hear something else in it.

I laid my head back down. Moved the jeans, even, and just let the rock talk to me via bone conduction. And sure enough, it started to sound like a voice, like what you’d expect it to sound like if you taught a bear to talk and then muffled it with a pillow. And the point of light in the sky had gotten brighter, and maybe a touch yellow. And it was surrounded by a greenish halo, like I’ve seen with pictures of the aurora, only not like some vertical curtain. Just a halo. A huge one.

Then it lengthened into a streak and vanished toward the horizon to the north.

The growling got louder. I jumped up and grabbed my bag and started toward the fire, though I have no inkling at all of why.

And then the ground started jumping up and down and trees cracked and broke and fell down and I fell down and the rumbling filled the sky and it went on way longer than I had any care for.

And then everything quietened down and stopped shaking. For some reason I scrambled back to the stone and put my head to it again. And I really wish I hadn’t. Because what I heard through the stone then sounded like a bear that had been taught to speak, muffled with a pillow, laughing quietly to itself.

[*]

This one time I was walking out along the cliff, pushing the baby in the huge-wheeled off-road stroller. There was a defined trail along the edge for the most part, but the rail had fallen down in a bunch of places and in some of those places the trail kind of forked away from the edge and was a bit rougher.

Technically all this land belonged to my grandfather, but the cliff’s edge had an easement from the county to allow public access to the view. This was a bit of a sticking point sometimes, since that meant that the county was supposed to put up benches and trash cans and, occasionally, send someone to empty them. But the onshore breeze made a huge effort to empty them on its own schedule into grandpa’s acreage. Sometimes I just came out here to police things to some bare minimum and put the lids back on and make sure the county was up-to-date on where the rails were down and where the trail needed maintenance.

Other than tending the baby, it was the only thing I could make myself do to feel useful. And it was still a big effort. But if the weather was nice out, I would come out and retrace my steps through where I would go to think when I got to come up here to visit when I was a little girl. I spent a lot of time at the place where I would always stop to throw rocks into the ocean.

It was awful, but most mothers will understand that sometimes when I stood there, holding little Chloe, I wondered if I had the strength to throw her out beyond the rocks at the cliff’s bottom. Or, on worse days, if I had the strength not to. My life ended the moment she was born. Throwing her over and then following her would just … make things tidier.

There was this awful little overlook where a wooden platform had been constructed, at enormous lowest-bidder expense, to stand out over the water and allow you to look down to where the sea broke against the rocks. We had at least a couple jumpers there per year. Back when the tech bubble burst, I got into big trouble at my high school economics class when I turned in as a project a business model for setting up a stand here selling tickets to the steady stream of jumpers — and slightly cheaper tickets to people who just wanted to watch. And videos. And a souvenir stand. Concessions.

The mandatory therapy was an enormous crock. That was the first time grandpa had stepped in to “save” me. The most recent time being after my shitheel boyfriend bailed when I decided to have the baby, throwing away my art scholarship and any shot of moving with him to Vancouver. I couldn’t have moved back in with mom and dad, not when they were struggling so hard already. Not after all the fights. Not after I caught mom with her boyfriend. Not after he tried to add me to his list of conquests.

In my head the ticket booth is there. And the concession stand. And, as a concession to my old therapist, a combo confessional and counseling booth. In reality, I wheel us out to the edge, where the platform of the deck is nice and springy. In my head, I gather Chloe into my arms and take a running jump. In my head, the motion sensor triggers the camera under the deck to snap a commemorative picture and the kiosk computer emails a copy to the next-of-kin in the register with any final comments.

In reality, I leave Chloe in the stroller and walk up to the rail, leaning into an onshore wind that smacks me with salt and threatens to pull away while I’m bracing on it. I lean over the edge.

In the long moment when I studied the ocean, I saw the surface of the sea as an enormous swelling membrane breathing up and down, gray and slate blue and scribbled on with white. Then it pushed upward higher, revealing the shape of a gigantic chubby hand under the surface, larger than a house, larger than any ship I’ve ever seen or even imagined. And then an arm, and a huge bald head — like a fetus the size of a city pushing against the placenta of the ocean’s pregnant surface.

I was horrified. Repulsed. The bonus, though, was that I no longer had any urge to throw in my child, or, Heaven forbid, jump in myself.

The sea was already full to bursting. And nearly ready to give birth.

[*]

This one time I was warm and toasty up in the fire tower, which almost never happens during the winter months. The place wasn’t incredibly well insulated, but we did our best any time we got the opportunity to bring up any improvements. The truth of the matter was that the tower was one large octagonal room, and four of the eight walls were floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and the other four walls were glass from about the middle of the walls to the roof. There really wasn’t much you could do to insulate that, especially at the top of a hundred-foot tower on the top of a reasonably tall peak in the mountains. The wind whistled through everywhere, and if you actually managed to shut it all out like you’d want to, you’d suffocate like a bug in a jar with no holes in the lid. The air was thin enough up here as it is.

But hey, we had our own lightning rod. And we were on the power grid since we convinced a local data provider to build a cell tower and a satellite uplink here. So we also get cable.

We used to get one particular local radio station really really really well, like in our fillings and eyelashes. It interfered with any method we had for communicating, anything with a radio. Hell, anything with a speaker. Even if it was off. We had them shut down, seeing as we were here first. A few of us that were stationed up here at the time may well have suffered some permanent damage from that. Like our eventual kids, if we can have any, might end up with an unusual number of arms or legs or tentacles. Or feathers. Or scales.

The reason I thought about it then was that the whole place got unbelievably warm when the transmitter was going, no matter what the weather. It wasn’t quite that warm now. But the wind had stopped, and that always just seemed unnatural.

Comfort wasn’t permitted. I set the rules for this place, being the one who had been here longest and the one who was guaranteed to be on staff during the months when campers were less likely to show up and set the forest on fire. When you noticed yourself getting comfortable, you did something about it. So I suited up, grabbed the binoculars, and made a round outside on the walkaround deck.

That was more like it. I spit over the rail, knowing a rock of ice would be hitting the ground by the time it got there. Assuming the wind didn’t grab it and take it to, I dunno, Iowa.

The clouds out here were strange, confused things. UFO saucers of mist that grabbed hold of peaks like they were afraid of getting torn free and lost. Clouds that looked like a jumble of body parts, butts and breasts and bellies and knees and elbows, sailing overhead in an underlit orgy. Even this high up we’d get impenetrable yellow fogs. Stormlight with no storms. At sunrise and sunset the Brocken Specter was a regular visitor.

This evening, this sunset, there was another sort of visitor to the peaks.

The wind was calm around the tower, but there was a cloud layer above us, masking most of the peaks. I could see the nearby ones on this range, but the ones on the range to the west were obscured. There were no snow-veils blowing off the peaks I could see, so whatever wind we had was above the cloud layer.

There was a disturbance in the cloud layer, though. Or more than one.

If you’re in a bathtub, like in a bubble bath that’s starting to thin out, you can paddle with your hands to make swirling eddies in the bubbles. Just drag a hand slowly and watch things swirl. Pick your hand up and do it again somewhere else. Tease the remaining bubbles into clumps set them against each other like icebergs at sea.

Looking north, I could see something like that. Stationary clouds with a sudden parting, sudden swirling, coasting to a stop. And again. And again.

It started as far away as I could see, miles and miles. And as I watched, it resolved itself into a kind of pattern. Two lines of trails in the cloud layer in an alternating pattern. Where there was a disturbance in one line, there would be blank smoothness in the other. It stuck me as annoyingly familiar, something I could puzzle out, so I stared at it, both naked eye and with the binoculars, watching the pattern develop and resolve and painstakingly slowly, work its way south toward me. It was maybe a couple of miles away, maybe ten minutes away by the pattern I was watching, when I figured it out.

I was watching the legs of an invisible giant wading through the cloud layer. And it was coming this way in glacially slow steps, walking along the ridge. And now I could see it was kicking sparks free as it walked, cloud-to-cloud lightning lighting the cloud layer in blues and reds from the inside.

I have never been more terrified in my life. I needed to get down. I considered the fast way, seriously. Then I considered the slow way, down the rungs we come up and go down when the shifts start and end, wondering if I could hold it together long enough to keep from slipping. There was a handrail and a belaying line for when the winds were really high, but I was beginning to resent the few minutes it would take to strap on enough rig to make it useful.

I went inside to the radio and asked for a weather update. And asked if anyone knew of a plane or helicopter that had the bad sense to be flying south on the ridgeline. I made the effort to ask the two questions with enough precious seconds between them to try to keep them from sounding like they were connected, to try to keep from sounding crazy, but I know I failed. I waited as long as I dared from a response from the rangers’ station, but there wasn’t any. At least not fast enough for my sense of impending doom.

And then, since I was basically already suited up, I got the hell out. I popped the trapdoor, clipped onto the line, and half slid, half rappelled, and goddamn nearly fell all the way to the ground and beat feet back to the treeline. By the time I turned around, the entire tower was stomped sideways away from the ridgeline, looking for all the world like a smashed mosquito.

I never heard it happen over the sound of my own heart hammering in my ears, over my own rasping breaths.

The Jeep was untouched. I went back and climbed into the cab, but it took me half an hour to remember what I had to do next. It was a long drive back to the rangers’ station in the dark.

[*]

This one time was actually thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, simultaneous only when seen through a perspective granted by one eye ninety degrees out of joint. A historian’s perspective. A futurist’s perspective. But simultaneous nonetheless.

A pebble tossed into a pond makes a splash. The splash makes a ring. The ring makes a series of concentric ripples. The ripples repeat and spread out, weakening, away from the center of impact.

Time is goofy and asymmetrical when we unspool it the way we do. Play it backwards and the ripples zoom inwards, strengthening, building to form a ring of spikes and a crown and then … and then forces conspire to eject the pebble. At that instant the water instantly smooths over on top, a placid mirror. A perfect mirror.

That never happens.

Imagine an apple made of water, with the impact sparking in the core, dead center. A confusion of cavitation occurs, a shock throughout, and then spherical ripples radiate outwards, core to rind, weakening, randomizing.

Now imagine only being able to see those ripples in slices a millimeter thick, one slice at a time. One tiny slice by the rind, barely as large around as it is thick. What happens there is discontinuous, weak, barely noticeable. The next slice is larger, but not thicker. The ripples are weak, but make a detectable pattern. But what is missing is the cause, the sense of the direction from which the disturbance came.

In the next series of slices, we see more ripples, more patterns, but nothing to resolve the mystery. Until you get to the center slice. There is the shock that changes the past and the future in spreading, echoing, and because of our habit of viewing time in thin little sequential slices, retroactive and proactive ripples that stack and cancel and reinforce and, as we continue into future slices, re-weaken and re-randomize.

Understand that the spherical apple of water, viewed in slices, is missing at least one dimension to be a useful metaphor for what has happened, is happening, will happen. Also keep in mind nothing is perfectly spherical, of a uniform material and density, except an approximation in a physicist’s equations to keep him or her from having to do more complicated math. The earth is involved, with all of its mud and rock and water and air and liquid core and twisting magnetic fields, plus the shadow in spacetime that the sun casts with its own gravity well and constant blowing storms. And more.

But the earth takes a direct hit. And it does it some time from now, maybe months, maybe a year, maybe a bit more than a year, and this impact causes — sorry, will have caused and will continue to cause disturbances radiating backward and forward into time that change and unchange and rechange events at the quantum level in ways I doubt we’ll be able to appropriately comprehend for a hundred years.

As this hit hasn’t happened yet from our point of view, I can’t at all predict whether we survive it. Or whether we all get completely, retroactively unwritten. Or if human history simply reappears, retroactively rewritten to have had a consistent existence throughout the duration of the trauma, like the surface of the pool after the pebble has settled to the bottom and lain there for hours, decades after the discontinuity, whenever and wherever that actually occurs.

I have the early part of the graph, which is, I hope, symmetrical with the late half — if not perfectly symmetrical, then possibly at least consistent with some sort of frame-dragging hysteresis that eventually resolves to smooth water. But I don’t know how high or traumatic the central peak is. Or more disturbingly, whether we are a child, causally speaking, of the impact itself that will resolve away with the decay of the ripples or whether we are part of the smooth surface that once was, and eventually shall return and remain.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the conclusion of the past three years of my research. I have made available not just bound paper copies of my team’s paper as is customary, but also made available for download the gigabytes of raw data and huge amounts of intermediary analyses and even copies of the software we wrote to help compile and run our tests on the data. I beg, we beg, each and every one of you to try to find the flaws in our processes and artifacts in our analyses that would show that the phenomenon we’ve detected doesn’t really exist, and that there is no impending crisis, and that I have scared myself silly over nothing.

In advance I tender my resignation from any and all positions of authority and advisory boards and academic responsibilities the moment it turns out I have caused undue concern and embarrassed myself, my team, and my institution with a specter born of my imagination and unfounded fears. Please, I beg you again, prove me wrong. Disgrace is, personally, the best case scenario. And I have a lot of fishing to catch up on.

Thank you for your time and attention.

[*]

This one time I noticed that whatever it was I was noticing I started noticing more of. Oh, c’mon,  you’ve noticed it too.

Remember when you got your first car? There you are, terrified of getting smushed or running over babies or whatever, and the first thing that distracts you is you see your own car a lane over and three car-lengths up about to make a turn. And then you narrowly avoid smushing a baby and you forget all about it, until you finally make it out onto the highway, and there it is again! And eventually you make a game of it, keeping a tally of how many duplicates of your car you see every time you go out.

That didn’t happen to me for my first car, but that’s only because it was a rusted-out Corvair as old as I was. Happened for my second car, though, and for every car I got afterward.

Buy new shoes, something unusual, and there’s someone else wearing them. New purse? There it is! New hairstyle? Ditto.

When I noticed that it happened for everything, it was because I found a new mole on my shoulder. New moles are scary, but some of them are harmless, and this one turned out to be harmless too when I had it checked out. But it was sleeveless weather, and I started looking at exposed shoulders whenever I could, looking to see who else was copying my new style.

And I saw at least a couple every day. Sometimes a lot more than that. It’s like, even in an infinite universe, there just wasn’t enough details to go around. What clinched it was eventually seeing my rusted out old heap of a 60s Corvair again, and I knew mine had fallen to dust decades ago. It was like it hadn’t been carted off to the junkyard after all. It had gone to the Props department so it could be mothballed until it was needed again.

An old boyfriend showed me this weird math thing once, and I mostly didn’t pay any attention to it because it was the sort of thing pot-heads carried home from the head shops to hang on their walls under a blacklight. But he could make his computer draw the thing, painting it in all kinds of different colors depending on how he set it up. Sometimes it was all round shapes, sometimes it was all stringy and thorny. It wasn’t until I saw my Corvair again that I thought about it, because the one thing I remembered past the tacky colors and the blacklight posterishness of it was that he would point to some detail on the complicated thing and zoom in, and then you could see not only the big detail you zoomed in on, but a bunch of tinier versions of that detail all around it, and then you could zoom in on  one of those, and do it again, and again, and then eventually you’d just be lost swimming in a sea of whatever it was you zeroed in on in the first place.

He said you could zoom in forever because the picture wasn’t exactly two-dimensional. It was, like, two-and-a-half dimensional. And that when you pushed into it like that, you were wandering off into one of its infinite protuberances. It didn’t make any sense at the time, but the way that details kept cropping up again and again, I thought maybe I could use it.

I started with looking for a nose, like I had looked for my mole, a nose that was pretty familiar to me, until I started noticing it at least a couple of times a day. Then a chin. Then that nose in combination with that chin. Then what I imagined his hairline would look like today. And then ears.

It took nearly six months, but that’s how I found my brother again who had run away when he was sixteen.

[*]

This one time I was sitting in the jury box for a simple civil case — a suit to recoup damages from some fist-fight that had gotten out of hand when someone’s brother came over to beat the crap out of his sister’s abusive boyfriend. Medical bills, wrecked furniture, therapy for traumatized children that had been in the room, pain and suffering … and it was all bullshit.

This was my fifth time in eight years having to waste days — hopefully just days, in this case — or weeks, or even a full month for that murder trial six years back, watching two groups of people pick up different ends of the law to try to beat money or what passes for justice out of each other like dueling pinatas. I’d gotten coaching from friends and coworkers on how not to be selected for juries so they’d quit wasting my time and giving me nightmares, but I always played the strategies backwards.

So what if it put me so far behind at work I could never catch up? This needed doing.

The law is a child’s sketch of justice, with big fat shaky black lines trying to draw the boundaries around what’s right and what’s wrong, and the sketch never fits the picture when it’s overlaid. Never. And then there’s the fact that it’s pulling teeth to get the law to show up and help you. And then you nearly need a trial to decide which laws will be made to try to apply, and the decision-making process has nothing to do with justice. It’s all about what can be made to stick. What could convince a judge or the twelve assorted pudding cups that make up the typical jury.

In this situation with the brother showing up to beat his sister’s boyfriend, I had plenty of sympathy. Involving the legal system is a last resort. It’s unchaining a lazy lion in a room you’re both trapped in and trying to fling enough steak sauce on the other guy. It’s expensive to get access to the lion, and it’s messy, and someone always has to pay for cleanup. And try as they might to make the courts accessible to poor people, rich people can always afford tastier steak sauce and more powerful squirt guns. And that’s the best-case scenario.

The law is just a thing. A club, a crowbar, a chainsaw, a scalpel. Justice comes from the hands of people trying to wield it. It can’t cross any of the big fat lines, and you wouldn’t believe the number of hands on the handle, the vast majority of which weren’t even present when whatever crisis occurred to invoke it.

And lately, the courts themselves are too worried about the costs of trials to be willing to hand them out as often as they might be necessary. It’s sick. It’s a trainwreck. And I can’t help but to come running with a stack of blankets and bottles of water and try to do my best to make sure actual justice happens.

Justice here was clear to me. The criminal parts had already been handled — the abuser sent to jail for three months plus some probation for beating on his girlfriend, who had since moved out, taking her kid and leaving his. The brother got a year’s probation and a $1500 fine for delivering a beat-down that, theoretically, should have been replaced by calling the police beforehand and waiting for them to decide to show up and arrest someone and turn over evidence to a district attorney who may or may not decide to seek prosecution, all of the above as time and manpower permits.

Again, justice has nothing to do with the laws involved. It’s illegal to just hit someone, but if the brother had been less brutal and/or had shown a bit more concern for the child audience and/or the general level of peace in the neighborhood, he would have gone unpunished. Maybe a month of probation with a “no contest” plea at worst. He was essentially preventing a future felony and everyone knew it.

And here he was, convicted domestic abuser, trying to screw money out of the not-quite-hero who delivered his beat-down. In actuality, maybe $2000 of ratty furniture and some home electronics of possibly suspicious origin, maybe twenty visits at $200 a pop to a therapist for his kid who he personally should have sent out of the room instead of trying to hide behind him. And what was this new thing? Twenty-five grand for the care and feeding of some lasting shoulder injury that could have come from anywhere, from any number of fights or overdoing it exercising or a bad hit playing pick-up football.

Frankly, I suspected a gambling debt that needed paying before he got another beat-down. I was sick to the teeth of the whole thing. Suing poor people is an act of desperation at best, because even if you get an award, the lawyers will eat most of the money that comes in and people with no money will never pay ever anyway.

And there is no justice in this. Just complicated, painful, and tedious legal dickery. Leveled by a monster against a man who had already paid too much for taking justice into his own hands. If there was any justice in the world….

That was what I was thinking when I looked over at the prosecution’s table and saw our convicted abuser guy with his head down on his arms on the tabletop, and it had been a few minutes since he moved. Was he really asleep? I kept looking, noticing that his gut was up against the table edge. I really should be able to see it in his shoulders if he was breathing. And what I could see of his skin was ashy and pale. And he was perfectly still.

Nobody else was looking at him. His attorney was showing the judge, and then us, the details of a stack of medical bills, taking care to read out every line so we all could make notes and add up all the little numbers for ourselves. I don’t know how long he had been sitting there not breathing. If anyone was going to try to save his life, they’d have to start soon. And yet, I couldn’t find it in myself to say anything to draw attention to him.

And so we sat there for another fifteen minutes as his blood pooled in his legs and his brain asphyxiated while we all dutifully transcribed line items for medical supplies and services into our notebooks.

Was that just? Was it legal? I don’t know. But it was what I could get away with, letting him sit there until the sound and smell of his bowels and bladder letting loose made us all take notice. His life ended, taking his dignity with it, in front of his child, no less, because I didn’t stand up and say anything.

It’s been months, and I still don’t know what to think about that. Not that I’ve lost any sleep.

[*]

This one time I was holding a baby that didn’t belong to me, looking up at a moon that would be full in a couple of days, and wondering how much time I had left.

It was a strange dream, but so was every day. My life had run off the rails a decade ago, and nothing mattered anymore, because nothing could possibly be real. I am sick. I’m damaged. Nothing that happens makes sense.

I can deal with life only as a series of moments that don’t necessarily have to be be connected. I live inside a dog’s head. Expectations are things of habit and training. Everything else is … jumping up to look out of a window of a moving train. I can hang on for maybe three seconds, make a coherent picture of what I see if I’m lucky, and then fall back. When I jump up and look again, the window might contain nothing from the previous time I looked. No connecting factors. So I kind of make the best guesses I can for how things got to be the way they are. I tell myself little stories I have to believe so I won’t feel crazy. I am the fastest mythmaker on earth, and the most prolific.

Many years ago I fell off the world of brightness and landed here in the world of shadows. It happened because something impossible happened, and it broke the world wide open like an earthquake will, and I fell through the crack. Sometimes when I jump up and look out through the window, I see the world of brightness behind the glass. The glass is cold against my hands, against my forehead, and I hear none of the joy and beauty through the sounds of the engine and wheels on metal.

The baby smelled like fresh bread, perhaps a hint underdone. Something told me that maybe it meant that the baby is sick — bad sick — but I’m sure that was just wishful thinking, something that would let me claim this stranger’s baby as my own. Its warm vapors were heady, but they hit stone. They hit the glass of the window separating me from the brightness I couldn’t reach.

The baby looked up at the moon, with blue-blue eyes that couldn’t possibly focus on something that bright and close and enormous. That was how I knew that the baby knew I was sick. I rolled him off my shoulder and made a cradle of my arms, holding him to the flannel of my shirt. I gave him one last cuddle and then held him out, and a stranger took him away. Probably the same one that handed him to me. I don’t know. It had been more than three seconds and this place was so full of people and things that I couldn’t be sure. I try not to worry about how much casual damage my disconnection can cause to this dreamworld, because what would be the point of that? In the real world, the mother would not have left, nor allowed me to hand the tiny boy to anyone else she didn’t trust.

Down here I know that sort of reasoning doesn’t hold. Down here I handed him to hyaenas that walk on their hind legs who will carry him back to their den, and they will be so grateful not to have to hunt or fight to feed their own babies. And I will have tamed one, just a tiny bit, with my tiny gift.

Down here the moon will be full in a couple of days and the disease in my blood will — not do anything special. The disease in my blood will kill me, but not today, not this month, not this year. It’s fun to think it’s like a werewolf virus or rabies, but the beast in me isn’t wolf. It’s just dog. I’m still a part of the human pack. I want to fetch slippers and bring the newspaper. I want to bark at danger and at strangers when I smell that they’re evil.

I want to sleep in their beds, or, failing that, on the floor somewhere nearby. I want them to see how happy I am with their scraps. I want to lick their hands and faces. I want to be beaten by them and know that they still love me.

It’s like licking the window, like trying to taste the brightness on the other side. When I close my eyes, I can taste the sun and the ghost of it fills my mouth like warm butter.

Has it been more than three seconds? What was I saying?

[*]

This one time I was standing on that level that overlooks most of the action at what has to be the busiest train station in the world and, therefore, the absolute worst place on earth to try to meet someone. I’m sure you’ve seen a picture of the main lobby area, or more likely even shots of it in movies, though I can only imagine how much it must cost to block off foot traffic and shoot there. You’d have to do it in the small hours of the morning, through it would still have some traffic even then, and pay to import sunlight from the other side of the world.

It wasn’t too hard to find a place to stand where I wouldn’t be in the way so I could look out over the floor and watch. The people here know where the views are and, if they’re in a hurry, which paths to take to avoid lollygaggers. Sometimes its as simple as keeping to the center of the walkways, only slightly to the right to make way for oncoming traffic.

I find it fascinating, as a man of science, to watch the patterns emerge. I study what has to be the most boring science on earth. Fluid dynamics — plumbing, to be frank — with a specialty of materials on the edge of being fluid. Sand, mud, high-velocity airflow, superfluids … and other related phenomena.

Down below on the floor I saw my science in action. Clusters of particles, a largely Brownian distribution, calculating the best paths for the flows based on analogs to the forces that govern particles. Instead of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and electrostatic repulsion, you get the basics of elbow-room modified by the local culture’s idea of personal space. Instead of Van der Waals forces, you get people spotting and stepping into any available gap for the purposes of that extra little burst of speed and breathing room. You get laminar flow toward the centers of the main flow pathways and turbulence toward the edges.

Based on the performance characteristics, I could backfigure these patterns to find a mix of physical materials that would mimic these flows and help model buildings like these. The only tricky bit would be that invisible wall down the middle of the paths where the fastest people bump the elbows of people coming the other way. Duplex flow has always been a bit of a puzzle, especially with fluids made of small particles. You always get interference from those poor bastards trapped in the middle between the two high-velocity streams, spinning helplessly…

Like that poor guy.

After an uncomfortable moment, he sorted things out and was sucked along with the rest of the flow.

Meanwhile, out on the main floor, a million random, randomized faces. I couldn’t possibly calculate how difficult it would be to spot a man I hadn’t seen since high school in this humongous pool of noise, yet I knew I had a good chance. The problem was distraction. I didn’t know any of these people, most likely, but I kept seeing familiar features. A nose here, eyebrows there, a jawline flashing nearby, and a face that didn’t even exist on the floor would pop into my head. I was spotting people who wouldn’t be caught dead in this city. Or who were already dead.

I defocused my eyes a bit and just looked for familiar patterns of body movement. The man I was looking for only really had two different walks — one a head-down rush with his elbows slightly out, long strides that could eat up the ground if he was in the clear. Here that wouldn’t be much help to him, so I imagined what it would look like with him bumping up against slower, heavier particles in the flow, compression waves backing up behind him as he wasted energy trying to go faster. His other walk could be described as nothing other than a good-natured saunter, which would stand out here like a sore thumb.

It was strange to look down on all of this and see all huge numbers of people reduced to heterogeneous particles in patterns of flow. I tried to take a step back from all that, and that’s when there was a kind of snap in my head, and I did see it all differently. Biologically. Blood is a kind of heterogeneous fluid, certainly, and blood vessels are the typical containers and boundaries, but this looked a lot more like cytoplasmic actions interior to a cell, where theoretically randomized action powered the picking up and dropping off of bits of molecules and moving them around to where they were needed to the next stage of mitosis or for sodium or ATP transport or for the ejection of waste and surplus. If you’ve ever looked at a living cell under a large enough microscope, there’s no way on earth you could mistake the fact that it was alive and moving with some apparent will, random actions dissolving to reveal a purpose.

Out on the floor was an enormous organism made of my fellow creatures, transporting the ultimate resources from place to place: themselves. And even up here, even completely stationary, I was part of it.

And then my old friend from high school was behind me, slapping me on the shoulder.

[*]

I know it’s fairly easy for single people to be a bit bitter on Valentine’s Day. In fact, I lean in that direction myself, and I don’t mind admitting it. If you’ve ever been someone else’s special someone, this day throws the absence, either generally or specifically, into sharp relief. And that’s insensitive to nearly the point of being unforgivable.

And it’s ass-backwards.

If you go back to the story that’s rumored to be at the root of the day (well, as it is now, after all that bit about flogging all the young women of the town with bloody strips of raw goat hide), it’s not about being appreciated at all. It’s not about what love for someone else turns you into, what your own love, in your own head and your own heart, makes you do. The new thing that you become because of the love you have for someone else.

That really doesn’t require the involvement of anyone else. At least, not actively.

What *someone else’s* love makes you do is probably a lot closer to guilt. When you think about it. Guilt. Fear of disfavor, or rejection, or being thought of as inadequate, or of failing the test. And screw all of that. If that’s what someone else’s love does to you, then maybe they should keep it. Or maybe you should fix your own head so you can receive it in the right spirit. Or maybe your own love can overwhelm all of that so there isn’t any chance, much less fear, of failure.

Even so, it’s not about your special someone, or being someone else’s special someone. It’s all about you becoming the thing that your love turns you into, the heroics that you can perform that are usually just out of reach, which, lets face it, are just as likely to fail as succeed. It’s about love forcing you to make the attempt even though you’re unlikely to come through it unscathed. It’s about ignoring the consequences to yourself.

And maybe that sort of thing isn’t for everybody. At least maybe not every year. Maybe you need to have someone inspire that in you. But if *that’s* what’s missing, maybe that’s not such a tragedy. Love can make you do some really scary things.

[*]