Preview of my new novel (page 2)

OK, here's the latest version, with a bit appended to the end:

Chapter 1

NOBODY REALIZES WHO RUSSELL TRULY IS until they've spent a night in his company. He'll tell you all sorts of crazy stories, its like watching someone quote Philip K. Dick verbatim, until you wake up and you realize that you've been dreaming the whole time and Russell was never anywhere near you, because Russell is dead. Dead for nearly a week now, in fact, even though no one has ever found his body. "Evidence is for weenies," he would've said, the way he always says things, smarming up his insults and turning them into backhanded compliments. Like the way he found me, with the outer folds of my brain simmering gently in alcohol and other less legal substances on that road on May 6, 2019. My drunken ass was parked outside the Miller building downtown, where I'd landed up after a group of young thugs saw me for the easy prey I was, and liberated me of various personal possessions. All I heard was Russell saying, "Here is a perfect example of corporate flotsam, a cog rejected by it's engine," and then Russell is herding me down the street to a shelter, where we spend the night, him talking with me all the way through it like Jesus, only I never washed his feet. He must've seen the Future Synthetics logo on my shirt, and was probably all wired-up on the news for that day.
You can never be sure, with Russell. You are not his Apostle Peter.
You tell yourself, look, the man's dead, six feet under. Well, figuratively speaking, because for all we know his corpse could be in Low Earth Orbit, with Russell getting a stupendous last laugh twirling past the Chinese space station every few hours and interrupting people who are trying to shower with his amazing flash-frozen exploded eyeballs. Even the Apostle Peter would probably have laughed at the thought of that.
Not that they have windows in their showers, or anywhere else on the Chinese station. Portholes, maybe.
All space stations are advanced cans with humans in them, with a porthole here and there. In space the ultraviolet light will fry you, giving you instant sunburn, so you want very few windows, with a special, extremely expensive filter coating on them, a filter that gradually wears down in the corrosive confines of our solar system. In the old days when we were slightly more primitive they would coat those windows in a very fine layer of gold.
Up there, a flake of paint can kill you.
That poor Russian sod who thought he'd landed himself a sweet job painting the secondary Soyuz booster stage at the Russian Space Center back in the 1970s, bet he never thought he would kill somebody with an errant brushstroke. You wonder what it must be like, to be surrounded by so much nothing that you can see your whole planet and cup it in the palm of your hand like a woman's breast.
Russell would say, "Space is a place for people pretending to be something they really aren't yet, people pretending to be hi-tech, when really we're only cavemen sitting on top of big roman candles, wearing little mini-Earths around our whole bodies, just tourists. Space shouldn't let us primitive humans in, it should take us as an affront to it's dignity, he would always say, space belongs to the little green guys in their saucers, now they've got style."
This is your face, seen through gold.
After we spent the night at the shelter, my eyes sometimes popping far enough out of their sockets to rival those of the Russell of space, he says, "We should visit some friends of mine in Seattle," and I say, Russell, we're in upstate New York, how the hell are we going to get to Seattle? I don't have a job or a home anymore, Russell, all I own now are these shirts covered with Future Synthetics logos, you dig? "Why don't you have a house?" Russell asks, "every model citizen of our brave new future has their own little partition of a partition to spend their time in when they're not at work!" and I say, it was a part of my contract with Future Synthetics, they provided my lodgings, crummy as they were, in return for my frontal lobe, for at least 8 hours a day, with one day a week off. "We'll walk. Maybe I'll get all tight with a bus driver," is what he says when he strides out the door. Words like "beanpole" are completely inadequate to describe the once and future Russell, but in my immediate past he is a very tall person, six foot five going on Gulliver. Russell could cast a shadow on anyone on a sunny day.
"You see a lot of dandruff from my vantage point," he once told me, back in our salad months.

Maybe I'll go and live with my folks for a while, in Kansas, I shout, as he walks down the road, looking for bus drivers in need of short-term relationships, no strings attached.
"There's nothing I like more than a man with a huge, hard hollow lump of tin with wheels on it," he says, leering like an eighty year old ogler at a cabaret show, standing there at the bus stop. After a few minutes of waiting, his travelling lover fails to arrive, so Russell says "Plan B," and we begin to walk down the steaming highway that leads to Seattle, on the other side of North America. Minutes ago it was raining here, and now we can smell the road as we tread on tar suffused with the excretion of oceans everywhere.
Saying Russell is crazy would be an insult, in the same way as telling Chopin that he could hold a pretty good tune, but he just wouldn't cut it for American Idol, no sir, we want someone young and fresh, with that mysterious X factor, and you, sir, are over one hundred and fifty years old.
Plus, your hairstyle sucks.
The public loves that X factor, even though no one quite knows what it is. It's like a kaleidoscope, everyone sees something different. In a previous lifetime, Russell tells me, he was a professional X factor thief. He hid all of his ill-gotten gains under floorboards in old abandoned houses and then one day when he was shot in the line of duty reincarnated as a fully grown man and went back to the houses to retrieve all his stolen X factor. "X factor tastes like the sweat that pours down Britney's collarbone when she's singing in front of a billion people," Russell would say, when queried about it.

"Where are we, after we leave capitalism behind?" Russell asks me, as we walk and I dejectedly stick out my thumb, hoping against hope that someone will pick us up. Even a hog truck would do, right now. Better pigs than the long road.
Buggered if I know, I say, and Russell says "Surely we couldn't have stopped evolving once we hit democracy," and I say, you're right you know, what happened after that is we started to trespass on the grounds of the Lords and Dukes again. Russell ponders this for a moment, scratching his stubby chin, then he says, "Can a flea trespass on a part of the dog that's owned by another flea? More importantly," he deadpans, "does the dog give a shit?"
Even more importantly, does the dog know what a flea is? Maybe dogs only know about itchy spots.
"One day they'll make a movie about us two, you know," I hear from in front of me later that afternoon. Russell's sparse frame stretches ahead of me like a Japanese devil, all shadow and no substance, powered by the falling sun. We've been walking for hours and hours, and my feet are beginning to ache. Suddenly I understand that the most painful thing my feet have ever done is to walk out of that room where I was downsized, this time yesterday.
Gather your personal effects, they said, and please leave the building immediately.
It's a security precaution, you see, so that irate employees don't do things like hosing the entire company network or sending pornographic video clips to all the important partners and other people who were in the right place at the right time.
Unlike me.
So I stooped and put my little toys and other indications of my obviously recaltricant nature into a pathetic cardboard box, wrapping up my own retrenchment present. Christmas has come early this year for over three hundred people dismissed today. I hear someone whispering on the phone, looking at me, giving me that look you give your dog when he goes to get put to sleep as I walk past the desks, box tight against my chest. I'm stripping my suddenly useless tie from my chest. Climate controlled air breathes onto my lower neck, calming me down a little, as I go out of the door and head straight into the modern day ritual of absolution, getting drunk.
Russell skips past, screaming "We'll be like Bonnie and Clyde, only without a car and with more man-on-man sex scenes!" at the passing cars. You see all those little car-people driving past in their cocoons of plastic and tin, thinking, that guy is such a weirdo, what a fruitcake, etc.
None of them are real.
What is real now is this road, the ochre sun, and my cardboard box, filled with silly toys and useless personal electronic devices.
The budget for lubricants alone will be triple that of Star Wars, I say, laughing. He can make you feel that way, like nothing matters except the stupid joke you just shared with him. That's his gift. You know, we'll need lots of bullets and possibly some bazookas to make it to the cinemas and not just be an art-house movie, I tell him as I catch up to him. Russell looks at me in his own funny way and tells me, "One step at a time, big guy."
It's very important to always remember the lowest common denominator, my grade school teacher once said, in my own personal Triassic Era. She was more right than she could ever know.

SLEEPING UNDER THE STARS isn't all its cracked up to be. Luckily for us virgin vagrants it is the start of summer, normally a happy time in America, but it is also the start of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Russell is not the kind of guy that will ask you questions like, "So, where are you from?"
Russell speaks to everyone in the world when he talks, like television. "All of the world's most important information will never be on cable," he tells me. "This is because the networks will buy it and keep it hidden away forever in their vaults for fear of copyright violations." If you believe what he says, our whole history is being rewritten, one politically correct page at a time. By those people who still remember how to hold a pen and write with it, that is. Try being Chinese for a decade, and painting all your words instead of scratching them down in that weird way the Western people have.
When you're Chinese, words have dignity.
Chinese people have difficulty designing keyboards and character sets, because sometimes the barbaric option is the more efficient one.
"Where is your salary sleeping tonight?" he says, eyes shining brightly in the light of the probably illegal fire we have created for ourselves, with matches and sticks.
In an upmarket townhouse complex with walls twice as high as a man and a swimming pool, I tell him, glaring at the fire, thinking about my salary all warm and curled up under a roof.
It's true. People invented ceilings so they wouldn't have to stare at the stars every night before they fell asleep. Maybe that's why our culture places so little emphasis on leaving this doomed cradle of ours. We are babies fighting to remain underneath the whirling, colourful toys adorning our cribs. Even the Shuttles are thirty years old now, and they haven't flown for nearly ten years, because nobody can find the original Intel 8088 chips that control their navigation systems on EBay anymore. Grounded by the amazing backwash of technology, those monstrous wings sit quietly in their hangars now. Towards the end of the American manned space program, they were too afraid to even pull the circuit boards out of the panels in the nose anymore, for fear that they would cause more faults. One day soon they will start taking them apart as the greatest solvent of all, the mighty dollar, begins its acidic moneyfication of our mechanical Icaruses.
"Yesterday was the last day of your life, Jimmy," Russell says. "Think about it for a moment. You have no job, no house, and no possessions. In fact, if it weren't for your debts, you wouldn't exist."
Trust me, I say, debt isn't anything I'd like to live for. "So what do you want to live for, Jimmy? Do you want to live for that Ferrari that you will never have?"
And I say, who knows?
Was Russell right, are we the possessions that we will never own?

MY FERRARI WOULD HAVE BEEN CALLED Tiffani, after this girl I knew in my freshman year who was one of the most incredible lays of my entire life. Sometimes I think that driving a Ferrari that I own would be like that, like having really good sex. She spelt her name with an 'i' at the end, like a porn star.
You yearn to go back to those simple days when all that mattered was getting some, and passing your tests.
Those were the days before the HNIV reared its head, a mutated version of HIV that specifically targeted the spine, rendering millions unable to walk, and turning hundreds of thousands around the world into quadraplegics. Within a couple of years, the medical equipment industry responded, and suddenly I found my previously wheel-chair hugging body pulled upright by the enormous strength of a polycarbon exoskeleton discretely bolted onto my thighs and lower legs. Having an exoskeleton means you can walk again, and once my nerves have been regenerated sufficiently by Papillo treatments available only to the wealthy elite who can afford to pay for them, I might be able to have sex again. HNIV is notorious for taking out your lower spinal system first, and I was lucky enough to retain control over my bowels, at least.
Now you sit in an office pushing around paperwork for someone who you have never met, and probably never will. Some days it's like it would be nice to see a Russian mushroom cloud hanging over the city, anything to break the mind-crushing anonymity of being a paper servant.
How many millions of people have thought, have been educated that this is the dream life, paying your own way through the world, when in reality you are dependent on a thousand and one different international conglomerates just to eat every day? We have all run away from the circus to join the city, and we've gotten lost. We lost our way on the road to true enlightenment.
Now we have so much scar tissue that our skin is gone.
So you try hobbies and art and working out, and it never quite does it for you like being young again would.
And then one day you find yourself a straggler on the worn and beaten path to obscurity, another person swallowed whole by the faceless and shining maw of the corporate entity, a mouth bedecked in colour-coordinated couches and carpets. If you're lucky, someone like Russell might be able to rescue you. If you're not, you land up in Florida. Of course, all of these things end soon, Florida and rescuing, it's all running on a very tight schedule. No mysterious planetary party guest called Nibiru will gatecrash the Solar System and end life on Earth as we know it, leaving alive nothing more complex than bacteria. No, our end is a whole lot more boring than that, nowhere near Hollywood material.
Russell knows this, and he is also the only person in the world who knows how to stop this un-Hollywood like End of The World, so he roped me in to help. Remember when you were a kid and you shed a tooth, how you would keep tonguing the hole?
I am Russell's tooth socket.
It all has to do with Big Sister, with nanotechnology, with emperors and chessboards. Maybe I can help you understand why Russell did what he did, why he had to die, why he laid down his life for us.
My hand rubs this little palm-sized device that is recording my thoughts. The man who gave it to me was from the future, or so he said. Maybe he was just crazy, I don't know. He told me this Walkman-sized object can record brain activity down to the Planck level, and it's combined with an AI powerful enough to sift all that information and create a coherent stream of thought from it that can be played back at will, like a mind-movie.
Perhaps he lied to me, and this is just a piece of molded china. But lying here in the dark on a stolen yacht, with no way home at all, the way it fills my hand like a gun, I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth. I'll record for as long as I can, until I can't think anymore. When they detonated those bombs I was much too close, those warheads dosed me with enough gamma and X rays to fry half of my body's cells, leaving me too weak to even get up anymore.
But I can't be hallucinating that little blinking red block in the bottom left corner of my vision, can I?
Well, its all downhill from here, folks, but I'll keep recording and reliving as long as I'm awake, because people should know who Russell really was.

Chapter 2

MANY PEOPLE WILL ASK how one man could have caused so much controversy and speculation in just a year and a half, but they will never really understand how it all happened, because they weren't there at Russell's side all the way through like I was. If anyone ever finds this recording they might just learn things they really didn't want to know about their supposed saviour.
"So, Jimmy, where are you from?" Russell asks me, after the sun has gone down and the plane of the Galaxy makes a cameo appearance overhead, the oldest actor in history.
Kansas, I say, southern Kansas, the dry country, and Russell says, "It was a rhetorical question, Jimmy."
That isn't a rhetorical question, I say.
We're lying on our sides like homeless people. It's odd how you always think of yourself as a non-homeless person, even when it is technically true. All we need now are a pair of whisky bottles in brown paper bags to complete the picture, to seamlessly change our operating modes to Homeless Person.
Behind us, the highway seethes with the car-people of the night.
After we walked for what seemed like six hours, we came to this little clearing where the city ends and the sprawling suburbs begin.
Perfect targets for the Reds, these suburbs.
In the best fantasies of our ruling class, the Reds drool at the prospect of flattening entire square kilometers of soccer moms and SUVs, causing a necessary increase of the Defense Budget.
Nuclear weapons aside, suburbs offer many chances for virgin vagrants to lay their heads to rest, and this park does the trick admirably.
Russell stands up, stretching, then says: "Not a bad day's walk, Jimmy. How much juice have you got left in that skeleton of yours?"
Two days, maybe only one if we walk again tomorrow. "You know, we could take the train to Chicago if you like, Jimmy. I shouldn't have asked a man with carbon fiber leg implants to walk across the continental United States with me, in all honesty."
It's not like I have anything better to do right now.
Maybe I'm tagging along for reasons of my own, I tell Russell. Russell circles my park bench, black now in the damp darkness of the park, then mutters "No, you are looking for something, God knows what it is. Look," he says, voice sharpening as he gazes down at me, "I can't help you find it. Only you can find it, whatever it is."
I say, why, why not?
"Because the nature of your question is such that only one person can know the answer, and that person is you. So, no joy from me, I'm afraid. Maybe you should just get on that bus to Kansas, Jimmy."
No, I can't do that; I will be ashamed of myself. I am the pride and joy of my family, you know, the white sheep.
"Tell you what, strong man, let's go and find a fucking hotel or something, I'm freezing my ass off out here," Russell says, walking away from me. I get up slowly, easing my aching legs off the bench, and follow him.
I was always running after Russell, initially.

It wasn't always like that. I knew Russell years ago, from before the time when I had my narrow escape from total paralysis thanks to the HNIV virus. That's why I don't mind spending a night under the pollution-tinged stars with him - he's a good guy, a real friend. Except now he seems to have some crazy bug up his ass, as if something big is happening and he wants to get in on it.
So we walk down the quiet night road, Russell's permanent five o'clock shadow violently contrasted against his pale white skin by the halogen street lights every few seconds. He looks like he just climbed out of a laundry basket. Russell is simply not concerned about wrinkles in his jeans or heavy cotton shirt. Despite his scuffed shoes that look like he got them from the Salvation Army, Russell is still one of the best programmers I've ever met. He could code me under the table any day he likes. When he looks at you, it's like he sees straight through you, as if your soul is laid bare to his seagreen eyes.
But Russell has changed since the last time I saw him. He's constantly restless, a cat on a hot tin roof.
With midnight black hair, spiked up insanely with hair gel that is probably days old by now, Russell leads me through the empty streets. I curl up inside my jacket as a gust of wind blows past, shaking leaves off the trees and making me shiver.
Every now and then, my exoskeleton clicks, the sound of carbon on carbon.

Chapter 3

Crank hated it when the coders ran the core processor mesh at full power while he was outside working with the bots. Every time they did an uncomfortably hot bubble of water would suddenly surrounded the station, forcing him to retreat inside. Although Turing's cooling system was marvellously designed, it was not congenial to external maintenance when the reactors were running at full power. Most of the time they idled at about ten percent of their true capacity as the coders pecked out line after line of new code, and then the mainframe would be fully powered up to test it once or twice a week. A mesh of processors containing more computing power than the eastern seaboard of the United States in a room not much larger than an average tennis court generated a huge amount of heat, as well as the reactors underneath that fed it juice and kept it cool, which meant that huge amounts of cool Atlantic seawater had to be run through the cooling system in order to keep the temperatures nominal on everything.
It had been at least a month since the coders had run Spine at full capacity. When they did that, everything outside Turing Station was jeopardized. After they ran Spine full bore for more than an hour or two it was not unusual to see dead fish floating around at the top of the station, instantly par-boiled by the superheated water coming out of the top of the station.
Crank's bone-phone crackled, and he heard Noami saying "Crank, get your arse inside the station, we're going to 80% power in 30 minutes." Noami's voice sounded distant and flat on the bone-phone, a tiny crystal embedded in his lower jaw for airless underwater communication, but he still recognized her. She was the only person in Turing with a British accent, acquired during her years at Oxford University's CompSci department. Although Crank had never seen what colour her skin was, he knew it was as dark chocolate. Underneath his shaven skull lurked an array of sophisticated hardware, powered by his own blood sugar.
A walking experiment like Crank needed quite a bit of introduction when new scientists arrived for the first time at Turing Station. HNIV had hit him hard when he was only a teenager, leaving him both blinded and paraplegic. Even then he had been valuable to the Government, but not even the most expensive Papillo treatments applied to his optic nerves could save his eyes - the damage wrought by the HNIV infection was too severe. So, Crank opted instead to have his useless eyes removed and replaced with soft rubberized balls containing dual radar processors. Combined with hair-thin carbon combs delicately laid into grooves cut in his skull by surgeons, they gave him wrap-around vision. He couldn't see colour due to the destruction of the part of his brain that dealt with vision, so his perception of shape and form became drastically different. Even Crank himself couldn't quite describe how he saw the world, but at it's most lucid, his world seemed to be composed of solid echoes, shapes embued with volume and internal texture. One of the great advantage of soundsight, as scientist who had invented it called it, was that he could sometimes see around corners and underwater. In fact, he saw several times better underwater than in air - to his "eyes", air had a vague, hazy quality compared to the solid resonance of water, which was why he preferred being underwater.
All of his paralyzed limbs were fitted with carbon endoskeletal meshes, vastly superiour to the type normally employed by paralysis patients, powered by a backpack that contained enough energy to keep him going for days at a stretch. Before his long run of surgical modification, Crank was a blind paraplegic, but now most normal people were quite helpless compared to him. He could bend titanium pipes two inches thick if he wanted to, and he found it somewhat difficult to drown. And he literally had eyes in the back of his head.
His most striking modification, and also the most difficult to see, was the fact that his blood had been augmented with billions upon billions of self-reproducing respirocytes, a very recent invention. Artificial blood cells a thousand times smaller than human red platelets, these cells gave him the ability to hold his breath for hours. Of course, it took considerable amounts of time for his body to replenish its supply of O2 after such a struggle, but it had happened before. He'd been instrumental in saving the lives of two scientists when one of Turing's research submersibles had dropped into the cold darkness below the station some years back.

Three Flipper-class bots followed Crank to the wetlock. Amongst the bots of Turing Station, they were giants, well over three times larger than even the biggest non-aquatic bot, but they were still only the size of Labradors. Entirely aquatic bots like the Flippers now trying hard to follow him to the wetlock didn't need to be light, as the bouyancy of the water they spent their entire lives in negated any concerns about their mass.
Instead of creating large, clumsy multi-purpose robots, the scientists of Turing perfected several different highly specialized designs over the years. First came Bob, a tiny cat-sized robot with simple manipulator arms, and a small onboard speech processor/volition processor combination. This combination allowed human operators to give Bob simple commands that he would follow to the letter. Bob had only a single small CCD camera to guide him around, but he still occasionally bumped into walls.
The Chopper class came next. Effectively a Bob with teeth, this class of bots was the first to actually do any really useful work, with a slightly beefed up "brain" to go with their welding and cutting manipulators.
Once the Chopper class was perfected, the scientists set to work developing the Flipper class, an entirely aquatic bot used to maintain the outside of the rapidly growing Turing Station. Essentially Choppers with fins and waterproofed electronics, the Flippers became indispensable tools for the small army of people who now had to maintain Turing Station.

Hmmm, the last chapter still needs a bit of work now that I read it again...hope you guys enjoyed it!

Preview of my new novel

Goshawk

SYN

SYN

Goshawk

SYN

Share this