Phase 2
I couldn’t help but notice that the subject of editing has cropped up a lot on tw*tter this last couple of weeks. This might be a result of the nanowrimo (if I have that right), lots of tidying up going on. In a timely coincidence I have been listening to Burroughs tape cut-ups and indulging in some cutting up of my own, on my (virtual) ‘wheels of steel’.
All of this cutting and mixing has me thinking about that old chestnut – editing. For my Friday Flash this week, in a painful and time consuming experiment, I have taken all of my previous #FF(es), pasted them into a word file, mixed them up, shook them about and remixed into a new flash. Hopefully it stands up on its own and if you’ve been kind enough to read my past posts it might raise a flicker of recognition and perhaps a chuckle.
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‘We are in midst of a universal recession’, so they keep telling me. This is not the most reassuring phrase a girl can hear having drunkenly caned her inheritance on worthless deep space real estate. To be specific the ‘guppy’ shaped Mars moon – Phobos.
I figured there was two ways to resolve this knotty problem:
1) Slowly hemorrhage the last of my cash and settle back into a dope inspired agoraphobia and daytime TV addiction.
Alternatively,
2) Take the last of said funds, hire a rocket ship, some terraforming machines and reconfigure the landscape of said real estate in to prime, radiation free habitat.
Despite the initial urge, to take the personal oblivion option, I plumped for the latter. In times like these one has to adapt ones practices, shit happens.
I found my ideal business colleague in Captain Tomaso, who I had met in a chance encounter in the bar of a cheap hotel in Kings Cross. The Captain had found himself in dire straits, having blown his deep space pioneering profits on a number of risky investments, sponsored celebrity breast augmentations and arms deals. He was my kind of guy.
Hastily putting together a cut-throat team of corporate astronauts, we took to the skies in Tomaso’s bright yellow spaceship with go faster stripes – jet engines engaged, flame on!
Space travel, as it turns out, is tedious as fuck! Off we boldly went through light years of tedium and copious amounts of fags. To pass the time Captain Tomaso and I liaised frequently and intimately, which ultimately resulted in our two kids Polly and Max. Deep space travel it seems has a strange effect on childbirth and our offspring grew at an accelerated rate. It was around this time that I stopped sleeping.
Some insomnia induced blackouts later , we reached my own little patch of the milky-way, Phobos.
Phase 1 of my business plan was to come in, remove any unwanted residue, unstable tectonics and former inhabitants, then get busy with the terraforming. The only spanner in the works was the mystical diagrams we found carved into the Phobian regiloth, no biggie.
Phase 1 started well, on program, on budget; so some of the crew disappeared, also no biggie, I could deal with that in Phase 2.
We first ran into real problems when Tomaso failed to co-ordinate properly with the crew in regard to their share scheme. Phobos is a long way for a contractor to go without getting paid, but you can’t do everything right?
After the crews first pop at a bloody mutiny, Tomaso requested that he return home to Bavaria in one of the escape pods. For services rendered, the corporation (me) promised to ‘make full redundancy payment at the statutory rate’. Yeah right.
Polly and Max were so very distraught to see their Mother upset at losing her colleague, business partner and lover. Maybe I shouldn’t have given the kids guns.
Following the sad demise of my former colleague; came that whole thing with the Great Gak, leader of the native critters, who, as it turned out, were the artists behind those mystical diagrams. I would of never have thought they could cause so much trouble, wrecking the machines, even killing the armed squad I sent in, I mean, seriously no-one could of seen that coming, I was in no way liable.
With the crew now dead, the machines destroyed, I guess the kids saw my business plan and their inheritance pissing away at a rate of knots. Not standing on ceremony they took off in the yellow space ship with the go faster stripes. I couldn’t blame them, if I hadn’t been detained at the wrong end of a spear, I would have done the same.
My internment consisted of many, repetitive, Phobian length days, constructing pyramids in honor of the Great Gak. The odds of my being rescued rapidly deteriorated 6:1, 13:1, 23:1, 100:1.
It was in this pit of despair that I had my epiphany, realising, in a moment of insufferable boredom and unrelenting fatigue, that the last moments of your life are no time for cowardice; I tore my right eye out. Holding the bleeding orb up to my captors’ cephalic eye, I screamed in defiance ‘no-one fucks with this bitch, on my patch!’
It seems the Great Gak responds well to self-harm in the face of adversity, after some physically agonising Phobian bonding sessions, Phase 2 of my business plan was enabled.
Phase 2 involves my private army of Phobian natives armed to the teeth and set to work on key strategic points across the United States of Mars. A few governmental takeovers later and bam! The subsequent inter-galatic wars that I have programmed will ensure that, what was once a worthless rugby ball-shaped rock; will become some prime-ass intergalactic investment.
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This flash was brought to you by sentences, words and general steez from these previous posts:
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/12/03/cause-and-effect/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/09/24/shit-happens/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/09/03/human-resources/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/10/07/a-story-of-my-early-days/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/08/26/undo/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/07/02/snagging/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/05/13/doctor-mckenzies-dipswitches-scratchy-flash-wip/
http://squidinkinc.com/2010/06/04/the-house-of-math/
Plus some words to fill in the gaps.
If you’ve read all/any of these then you have my sincere thanks and, when I see you, the drinks are most definitely on me.
cause and effect
X flicks a disposable lighter in front of his eyes obscuring the starlight with a bright orange flame. The echo of ignition leaves a visual echo of light across his retinas.
‘Stars’
Flick
‘No stars’
‘Stars’
Flick
‘No stars’
X’s girl D joins him in the garden she wears heavy plastic clogs and drags her feet in a way that her mother would have hated. D watches X repeat his star blanking ritual several times before interrupting, ‘got a light?’ she asks, planting a cigarette between her thin lips.
X lights her cigarette, then pulls a cigarette from behind his ear like a cut-price conjurer palming a coin, ‘ta-da!’
‘Your full of tricks tonight’ D mumbles from behind her cigarette.
‘It’s a magical night’ smiles X, he traces a figure of eight in the air with his finger, ‘behold’, a small spaceship appears on the palm of his hand. The ship is bright yellow with white go-faster stripes, the ships jets glow with a warm red light, illuminating his handsome face.
‘Cool ship, where’s it going?’ asks D.
‘The Cephalic region’ X asserts, pulling the car back as if primed to launch from an invisible catapult.
‘What’s Cephalic?’ D asks.
‘It means on or near the head!’ exclaims X launching the ship toward D’s head.
‘Hey!’ squeals D, the little ship bounces off of her head and ricochets off into the night sky.
‘That wasn’t very nice’ she said rubbing the side of her head, ‘no nookie for you tonight’.
On board the DSS Cephalic Rover warning sirens blare and red lights flash, plumes of smoke fill the bridge.
‘Damage report’ Captain Tomaso coughs into the comms mic.
‘Lost port engines in the collision sir, we can’t maintain containment stability’ Petro the ship’s engineer yells back through crackles of radio static.
‘Initiate emergency landing procedures’ the Captain cries, sweat pouring down his face. All Captains undertake emergency scenarios in training, but on such a cushy routine flyer, he had never expected to put his training into practice.
‘Emergency landing procedures!!’ Petro barked his orders across the engine room, ‘all crew to positions’.
‘All crew to positions’ the Captain re-affirmed, the crew stopped running chaotically around the bridge and braced for an emergency landing.
Duck tentatively slid his hand across the frost-stiffened grass toward the small of Karen’s back. This had been the first time they had been alone together, and where better than to be smoking dope on Perry hill. The hill he had always thought of as his special place away from the world.
Karen breathed a contented sigh, expelling a vast cloud of hash smoke into the cold air, this is the moment Duck thought, it’s now or never.
‘Captain, it’s Petro, the landing gear is blown, it’s going to be an uncontrolled land…’ Petro’s last words were snatched away by the roar of the ships engines exploding. The comm cut to a deathly silence.
‘Petro… Petro?’ The Captain strapped himself in, he had to be brave for his crew and for himself. The last seconds of your life are no time for cowardice. Taking a deep breath, he activated the comm. ‘Ladies and Gentleman, our engines and landing gear have failed, we are going to crash, may I say it’s been a pleasure serving with all of you… may the Gods help us’.
The explosion that had begun in the engine room shot up through the engineering ducts of the DSS Cephalic, engulfing the ship in a brilliant white fireball.
‘Karen…’ Duck edged closer to her, the alcohol and dope had fuelled him with an inflated sense of bravado and optimism. The voice of his consciousness had lost all sense of polite inhibition and now screamed at him ‘DO IT NOW, NOW MAN, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!’
Duck drew his arm back in preparation, poised to swoop around Karen’s shoulders in a grandiose romantic gesture. He would draw her to him in one swift and passionate movement, they would look into each other’s eyes, smile at each other and then…
‘Fuckin’ hell! Duck look at that!’ Karen shot to her feet excitedly pointing at a bright white light trailing across the night sky.
The light shot across the inky blackness and disappeared beyond the horizon of Perry hill.
‘Duck a shooting star, did you see? You have to make a wish Duck’. Karen waved her spliff maniacally in the air, showering the pair of them in glowing orange hot rocks.
Duck had already made his wish, but it hadn’t come true. It was in that moment that he knew their relationship would forever be platonic.
‘Buck up Duck!’ Karen laughed, thumping him on the arm, she passed him the joint and grinned, in the way only Karen could.
Perhaps, thought Duck, nursing the bruise forming on his arm, that’s a good thing.
a story of my early days
I very rarely post anything that isn’t in some way a fiction, I normally enjoy writing stories that (hopefully) leave the reader with something to think about, maybe even alter the way they look at the world. For a change I am posting something that is autobiographical, but retains the same aims.
Today I was faced (as I have been every year for some years now) with six teenage boys, hair cropped short, regulation white shirt and black trousers, ready to embark on their two years service as missionaries. As I looked at the boys nervously clutching their box of pamphlets, I was reminded of me at their age. I remember that feeling of excitement mixed with the feeling of nausea at the pit of my stomach. Recalling that particularly uneasy feeling, I decided to tell the boys a story of my early days in the mission in an attempt to lift their spirits. I told them of the event that, not only helped me understand the great things one can achieve as a missionary, but also shaped the rest of my life.
Seeing the look on their faces after I told my story, I thought perhaps I should write it down to share with others, so I’m posting it here on my blog. I hope you enjoy it and maybe you might like to send a link to anyone in the community that you think might benefit from it.
At the time I was at college, living in a shared dorm. In the room next door to me was a student from Bavaria (I forget his name now, which is terrible I know). Things weren’t going so well for him, he was flunking class and homesick, he would go days without leaving his room. I remember he would always play Smiths songs over and over; the sound of ‘Hatful of Hollow’ would drift through the thin walls well into the night.
After my neighbor hadn’t turned up to class for a couple of weeks, I thought I would drop by. I was eager to do a good deed by lending an understanding ear and perhaps even share some of the teachings with him to help ease his troubles.
After knocking for quite some time he eventually came to the door. Although I don’t remember his name, I will never forget the way he looked, hair tousled, dirty clothes thrown around his skinny frame and heavy bags under his eyes. His room was bare save for a mattress, a pile of dirty clothes and take out cartons.
I had been studying the ‘Miracle of the Seven Sisters’ at the time. Considering the stutter I had as a teenager the ‘ssstory of the ssseven ssssissters’ wasn’t the most dynamic one I could have told, but I managed to get through it fast enough not to stumble over my words too much.
He listened politely, but didn’t seem very interested. However, when I reached the part of the story about the fifth sister, how she at her time of greatest personal success, had sacrificed so much for her sisters, his ears seemed to perk up.
When I parted with him that evening, the record stylus was slowly cutting a groove into the label in the centre of the Smith’s album, so I knew I had made an impression of sorts.
When I was told that he wouldn’t be returning to class I became very worried that my teachings had fallen on deaf ears, or worse still I had led him down the wrong path altogether. I feared for him and even added him to my nightly prayers.
I found out that the very day after I had talked to him, he had returned home to Bavaria. It turned out that he had several sisters himself, and his mother, alone after his father’s death, had been taken ill. Although I will never know for sure, I felt my teachings had helped him to make the decision to return home to care for his family.
It was this event that led to me moving into the community full time and some years later, taking the role of supervisor for the young missionaries. Not only had the miracle of the seven sisters had an effect on my neighbor, but also myself and (I hope) the many young missionaries that have been in my care since my graduation.
shit happens
‘Smoke some more fags’ my colleague urges me, ‘the ash makes it burn slower’.
My colleague and I are smoking z grade crack from a pipe fashioned out of a plastic coke bottle and a foil kit kat wrapper.
We are holed up in a cheap hotel in the crappy end of Kings Cross. Our crack smoking is interspersed with cheap booze, plus copious amounts of fags, joints and the occasional blackout.
It hasn’t always been this way, only a few years ago my colleague and I were in the peak of physical and mental fitness. We were corporate astronauts on a sponsored mission to Phobos. Hailed as the last true pioneers, explorers into the furthest reaches of space, heroes. That was until that whole thing.
As I start to remember the events that led us here I quickly down half a can of syrupy lager. Sensing my pain, my colleague hastily skins up.
Down on the street below the sound of the mob grows louder, jeers, the roar of flame, policemen shouting through megaphones, trying in vain to control the murderous masses.
‘Turn the TV up again’ suggests my colleague; shuffling over to the portable, I spin the volume knob as high as it will go.
The repeat of the comedy panel show we had been watching is interrupted by a news flash, we see our photos on the screen, shots of the mob outside.
The newscaster recaps the history of our mission, the launch attended by thousands of cheering people, our sponsors eagerly telling viewers that we are the pride of the nation. As the newscaster goes on to retell of our misfortune on Phobos, his face drops into a scowl.
‘Turn this shit over’ mutters my colleague, ‘and pass us the stuff’.
My colleague loads the pipe while outside the noise grows louder. I hear windows breaking downstairs, the police had lost the battle, or just given up, the mob were now entering the building.
‘Fuck it mate anyone can make a mistake right?’ says my colleague exhaling a lungful of smoke. ‘Here, try not to think about that whole thing’.
I smoke in rapid bursts, coughing hard, a deep bark that makes my eyes water. Regardless I smoke more, we had been abusing ourselves like this for about two months now, ever since we returned. A desperate bid to try to quell the nausea we had felt since the breakout, the breakout that we had inadvertently caused.
I toke deeply, holding the smoke in my lungs for as long as I can. Perhaps when the mob get here the narcotics might deaden the pain of a thousand angry Londoners beating the living crap out of us.
If only we hadn’t if only we had gone East instead of West, not found that box, not brought it back with us, not caused the…
‘Don’t, don’t think about it Ad, we couldn’t have known, it’s just one of things… shit happens mate’. My colleague snaps me out of the sickening spiral of thoughts that have looped endlessly around my head ever since we opened the box.
The voices grow louder now, I can hear footsteps thumping up the stairs, soon the room door will burst open, the mob will flood in. Any minute now the vengeance of many will descend upon us.
‘I think were out of fags Ad’.
Shit happens.
Human Resources
In deep space redundancy is a matter of life and death. The Corporation had issued a bombshell missive in regard to the fiscal downturn currently being experienced back on Earth.
Due to the current climate we have been forced to make some difficult decisions about the feasibility of the Phobos monolith mission. After careful consideration we have come to the painful conclusion that we will have to make some of our posts redundant. We are deeply sorry that it has come to this, however as I am sure you are aware we are in midst of a universal recession and unfortunately we will have to adapt our business practices if the corporation is to survive. We do hope that you understand that the choices we have had to make have been difficult and that your families will be compensated by a redundancy payment at the universal statutory rate.
I guess they meant that whole thing about difficult choices and the missive seemed sincere.
‘Old Silverback’ our line manger called us all into the canteen; I swear he had lost some hair overnight with the stress.
The strain showed on the faces of the crew, the usually raucous atmosphere replaced with a sullen air of fear and desperation. Chinese whispers drifted cruelly across the room turning the artificial air into a dense fog of paranoia and accusation.
‘Old Silverback’ had just finished a conference call with the board when he floated uncomfortably into the room.
‘There ain’t no good way to say this so I’m just going to get on with it, the corporation has made five of our posts redundant’.
The unspoken malaise in the room grumbled into audibility.
‘It’s not right I know, but the corporation has promised to make full redundancy payment at statutory rate’.
The room erupted into a fit of bitching and moaning, ‘Old Silverback’ waited patiently for the mumbling to die down. ‘The corporation has left it up to us as to who to cut, I can’t see any other way of doing it ‘cept democratically, Nate, bring in the sticks’.
Boson Nathan Green floated in from the kitchen holding a vacuum jar filled with chopsticks.
The crew instinctively knew what would happen next, without speaking they unclipped themselves from the canteen benches and drifted into a single file line leading up to the boson. Each in turn taking a chopstick from the vacuum jar.
‘Old Silverback’ drew the last of the chopsticks and counted down from five. The crew held their sticks up at the end of the count. Each and everyone of them held their breath until they had surveyed the room, studiously comparing the length of their ‘straw’ to the others.
The five holders of the shortest sticks wept, hugged their friends, said a prayer and moved toward the airlock. ‘Old Silverback’ himself was one of the five; he led them in a dignified silence.
Despite the initial uproar, they had all known the risks. The promise of a lifetimes pay for a ten year mission, they had all been briefed on the contract terms. At least this way their families would be catered for, even if it was only at the statutory rate.
* In the boardroom back on Earth, the directors watched the unlucky five being catapulted into the inky blackness of space.
‘Well that went well don’t you think?’ the MD asked the executive directors.
‘Yes I think so, the savings we made will continue to maximise our profit margin’ replied the financial director.
‘Do you think they realised?’ the operations director asked.
‘How could they know we hadn’t budgeted for the full journeys resources? I am sure they bought that whole recession spiel’ the MD asserted. ‘How do you think they will take the news that there will be only enough fuel to bring two of them back with the monolith?’
‘They’re contractors, if they don’t like it we aren’t legally liable to give a shit’ replied the HR director.
‘That’s what I pay you for’ smiled the MD.
Confessions of an SF novel collector
I have a confession to make; I collect science fiction novels.
My obsession began around five years ago when my friend demanded I read Philip K Dick’s ‘Time out of Joint’. From then on I was well and truly hooked, my conscious floating deep somewhere within the universes of Messer’s Banks, Harrison and Lem. A constantly changing SF Masterworks cover had appeared where my face once was.
Sci-fi itself was nothing new to me; my childhood memories are punctuated by ‘2000AD’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Logan’s Run’, and Disney’s ‘Black Hole’. But my lifelong fascination was polarized when, after moving house aged 10, I inherited a left behind copy of ‘Spacewreck’. A glossy hard cover of crashed space ship illustrations, each image suggesting a wealth of untold narrative, which is forever etched onto my imagination.
It is perhaps due to the hours spent endlessly thumbing through my copy of ‘Spacewreck’ that I have always enjoyed eagerly browsing the crates of sci-fi novels that sat outside the second hand bookshops in Charing Cross. Each book preceded by the sometimes surreal – sometimes cheesy images, which suggest a narrative often more engaging than that which lay beyond the cover.
The Amazon sponsored credit card bill that had resulted from my new fiction addiction, had now given me a legitimate excuse for taking home a handful of these dog-eared curios.
Like all good acquisitive hobbies, my sci-fi novel collection has mutated into a fairly un-healthy obsession. Now the second hand bookshop is a mandatory part of each and every excursion, shopping trip and even holiday.
I have developed a set of terminal collector’s symptoms, cold sweats, racing pulse and excessive salivation now occurs on contact with the second hand book emporium. I have even worked up a system for my crate rifling. First running through the author’s names to pick out any of the highly prized items – the endless back catalogues of Pohl and Harrison or anything by the Strugatsky Brothers (my current holy grail). Then picking books by age, publisher and finally randomly browsing the selection by grabbing a handful at a time and shuffling through them like a deck of cards.
Ideally there should be a fusion of both intriguing story and fantastic cover. But the ‘cover is king’ and quite often just a wild image and back cover synopsis to suit is enough for it to become part of my home dominating library.
Recently I was lucky enough to go for a holiday in Vancouver, where my
understanding girlfriend, (herself partial to the odd Harrison or Wyndham), allowed me to hijack a few days of our precious holiday in search of second hand bookshops.
Oh, and I found some. This is a shot of the sci-fi section of ‘pulp fiction books‘ in
Vancouver, just one of a number of the number of treasure troves I found while I was there.
You will have to excuse the shaky focus, that’s me quaking with excitement.
Cutting to the chase, here are some of the books I picked up both in Vancouver and in my more recent bank holiday trip to (the slightly less exotic) Kent Coast, which have got my heart pounding. These covers and tag lines also tie in quite neatly with some of my current sf writing obsessions…
‘Joymakers’ by James Gunn
Pleasure was the hedonists business. Hedonics Inc., started small. All you had to do was dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. Then everybody wanted it.
‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursula Le Guin
George must dream and dream again, forever seeking utopia, until the fabric of the existence must itself collapse…
Skylark of Space by E.E. Doc Smith
With his cold intelligence and the backing of a giant industrial combine, DeQuense and three others – two of them women – were marooned, countless light years from Earth, with only one chance in a million of ever returning…
Fourth Mansions by R.A Rafferty
a weird over-view of reality, in a story of:
Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity;
A laughing man living alone on a mountaintop, guarding the world;
The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century;
A dog – ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of an eye.
Undo
Spending my waking life in front of a computer combined with being a habitual mistake-ist made the undo button my best friend, no, my lover, no, my soulmate. No, undo.
I could not comprehend my existence without the ability to instantly rectify disastrous computing errors via the click of a mouse or the punch of two simultaneous keys.
Ctrl+Z.
I lived and died by the undo function, it saved my life more times than… undo.
So prolific was my use of the curly blue arrow, I found myself reaching for it in physical and social situations. My fingers floundering to find the invisible shortcut icon, to take back that bad choice, fix that broken plate. To be able to physically revert back to the moment prior to my mistake, to have looked after I leap.
I trawled the web like a furtive scholar in a gothic fiction, a sweaty Lovecraftian protagonist in a tireless search of secret knowledge. A search to obtain the power to undo. Google became my ancient leather bound library of alchemy, spells and science. After many sleepless nights I found what I sought, mystical circuit diagrams for machines to enable entry into parallel universes. Access to simultaneous existences where infinite possibilities of choice become corporeal.
The commissioning of my machine could not have come at a better time. One too many drinks after work and harboured secrets gushed out of my drunken mouth before conscious thought could kick in.
With one click of my virtual Ctrl+Z I was spared a night of sleepless paranoia.
The next day, my hangover inspired orgy of error, which would have otherwise caused a major professional malfunction…. soon null and void thanks to the my possibility flexing friend.
Undo
So reliable was my radionics powered undo engine, that I felt comfortable enough to purposely commit gross faux pas. I spoke my mind to figures of authority, spilt drinks on people who bored me and generally committed random acts of wanton negligence. It became a sport for me, I pushed new boundaries in the art of error.
Undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo.
Have you ever made a series of computational entries only to realise that they were in error? Felt the need to retrace your steps back, back, back until suddenly you can go no further? I have done this many times, experienced that sinking feeling, the point of no return, so many steps back until suddenly being unable to go no further. That terrifying moment, desperately clicking my mouse, sending toolbars into chaos and disarray. Sadly for me, such moments I had forgotten when designing my machine.
By replicating the exact conditions of the function, limitations and all, I soon found myself repeatedly hitting my virtual blue arrow until my machine froze and finally crashed.
Now each of my anti-social, business wrecking, intentional mistakes act out their unstoppable repercussions.
Desperately I flounder, reaching for that blue arrow, only to find it greyed out, an error message repeatedly flashing – can’t undo.
