Lee tried one more time to make it a go.
The silence in his thoughts when alone with her told him otherwise.
He was sad.
But glad.
Nine days…
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Tiny yacht, big feet
Raubine’s legs wobbled on the floating dock.
A sign on a boat read, “Work like a captain, Play like a pirate!”
Her eyes tracked the flight path of a large white heron, hoping it was a whooping crane lingering on its journey northward.
She looked down into the water where aquatic plants surrounded the dock.
No fish.
She set her rod and reel inside the starboard rail.
Raubine missed her father and their fishing trips in warm weather.
She wanted him here now, telling her the best way to cast and draw fish out from under the dock.
He always caught enough to eat, never more, never less.
She choked up.
She could barely remember how to hook a worm so she asked advice at the bait and tackle shop on the highway, three short blocks from the dock.
They sold her a cardboard cup of nightcrawlers and a few artificial lures to try out.
She stopped by the adult beverage store and bought two six packs of craft beer, wanting the high alcohol content to drown her sorrows for the weekend.
Stepping down into the boat, she looked across the small bay where the local yacht club marina was hosting a Mother’s Day Gala featuring local celebrities auctioning off an afternoon with them on a two-hour regatta.
Raubine took a deep breath.
She and her father had sat on this dock how many times?
She grabbed the mast and sobbed.
Had he been gone five years already?
She looked at all the boats on the water.
The last time they sat together on the yacht, he had told her about the radiation poisoning he had suffered at the nuclear plant, guessing it was going to shorten his life. They laughed it off because, no matter what, they were going to outlive every fish they caught that day.
Raubine removed the moorings and pushed off, leaving the sails furled. She’d paddle around the bend, out of sight of the regatta, to a spot her father loved.
It didn’t take long.
She dropped anchor.
From inside the hold, she removed a large tackle box and opened it to reveal it was a container for her father’s ashes.
She poured his ashes into the water around the yacht, crying the whole time, knowing he was where he always wanted to be.
Raubine pressed her arms to her chest, wanting her father’s hug one last time.
There had been many men in her life but no one like her father.
She closed the tackle box and picked up the rod. She still had time to catch something for dinner.
Balboa, balance, balayage
Oje bounced on his feet, ready to teach beginner’s Balboa.
Across the room, Andielle and Nosaj warmed up, preparing to teach beginner’s Lindy Hop.
A robot whirled by, balancing on two wheels.
A typical Thursday in Rocket City.
An elderly man wearing fly fishing gear wandered in, dripping wet.
Hairdressers filled all the seats along the wall of the small auditorium.
The audio engineer adjusted the room’s sonic centre to a spot 2.667 inches below floor level.
A cricket chirped in the grass patch growing in the old cotton mill gutter hanging by a single rusted strap from the roof’s edge.
Dancers stood in suspended animation, as if waiting for a clue, a sign, a signal.
Every set of states of energy acted as if it was separate from the other.
Yet, radio waves and cosmic waves passed through almost everything.
Photons traveled as if on an intentional mission.
A deflated birthday balloon gathered dust on a rafter.
A pair of dancer’s shoes fell off a table but no one noticed.
No one noticed the shoes slip quietly behind a blackout curtain.
No one noticed a bumper sticker for the defunct Organisation For the Finalisation of Alien Liberation (OFFAL) remove its backing and let the shoes step on it.
No one noticed the robot roll onto the shoes.
No one heard the cricket get eaten.
No one saw the fisherman disappear into thin air.
The hairdressers uncrossed and recrossed their legs at the same time, saying the word “Balayage” in a Swedish accent.
The dance lessons ran in reverse.
The audio engineer turned into a bare bear puppet.
A cat which had been hiding in a corner leapt into the air to swallow a parrot that flew into the room on a tropical breeze.
A woman stood in the middle of the room, watching it all, missing some. She saw randomness is as much an illusion as determinism.
She picked up an imaginary flat rock and skipped it across the room.
The room rotated around Earth’s axis, appearing sideways to a space observer, leaning gravitationally at a wrong angle.
The woman smiled and slipped through dimensionless space into another time.
Some thought her crazy.
She was a shape shifter, belonging nowhere.
She liked it that way.
The sets of states of energy called humans did not comprehend what had just happened to them, living through the moment as if it was socially and physically normal.
Personal notes
Lee stood on the foyer of Guin’s house, taking in the group dynamics between the three women in front of him, facing away — Guin, Matym and Cyvik.
Their biweekly dance practice over, they were talking about a party the next night.
Matym was about to head to work.
Her eyes were red, her eyelids raw and swollen. Earlier in the evening she had whispered to Lee, “Why have you ignored me all week?,” with tears pouring out.
Lee had hugged her, unaware he had ignored Matym, lost in his own feelings of loneliness and abandonment.
He opened the front door and tried to leave without saying a word, hoping Matym would have a minute to talk with Guin and Cyvik without Lee present.
He had danced for the first time with Cyvik that night. In fact, they hadn’t seen each other until Guin pushed them together, sight unseen, for a dance critique video.
Lee had pretended to be new at West Coast Swing to lower Cyvik’s expectations, then joined her in a mutual eye/body dance seduction that exceeded any expectations.
They had laughed and played during the 60 seconds of instant friendship.
They were both good at dropping their guard instantly.
The whole time, Lee snuck quick looks at Matym, sensing he was violating some unwritten understanding they had established a few days earlier in the dances they shared during weekly dance class.
Lee knew, on the dance floor, to be really good you give up your ego for the dance partnership. You make your partner’s life your own, giving her everything you have without reservation. Truly a performance of a lifetime.
Lee was still an introvert at heart.
He didn’t always have an unlimited resource of selflessness to share.
He chose carefully with whom he could share his true self, especially on the dance floor, highly vulnerable to rejection afterward.
But he was willing to take that risk if it meant one other person felt wanted, less lonely, desired as a whole person, if only for an evening.
He owed Matym an apology and more attention.
He didn’t know how.
Superchaotic theory strings
Even his wife called him Mr. Tran.
Everywhere he went, people treated Mr. Tran formally.
His upright stance, due to a titanium rod straightening his spine to “cure” scoliosis, gave everyone the impression he was a prim and proper citizen.
But Lym loved to have a good time, untie his man bun and let loose with his small circle of table tennis friends.
He lived for table tennis, studied table tennis videos online and often snuck away from his family for a quick practice session with his table tennis master.
His children knew nothing of his table tennis prowess.
His wife made excuses for his absence, quietly attempting to swallow her pain and accept her secondary status.
Until one night when she’d had enough.
Their two children were a blessing, the firstborn, Meilin, a ten-year old girl excelling in mathematics, their secondborn, Fu, a eight-year old son with autism who had developed a painting style of his own that sold well online.
Fu’s autism meant that he obsessed about topics. When he was sick, he yelled and cried out to a strange Norse god for healing, scaring the neighbours. Only Fu’s father, Mr. Tran, understood the foreign language and could say the words to calm his son.
Fu had a raging fever for hours.
But Mr. Tran left the house for a midweek table tennis tournament, expected to be gone for hours.
Mrs. Tran could no longer accept her secondary status, dragging her kids with to her mother’s flat in the same building, then heading to the tournament, where she quietly insisted Mr. Tran go back with her.
They rode in silence, unwilling to embarrass themselves publicly.
Back at the flat, Mrs. Tran served Mr. Tran a formal setting of tea.
“I don’t know how much this can go on. We are supposed to be equals but you treat me as if I almost don’t exist. I am worth less to you than this teapot.”
Mr. Tran looked at the tea leaves suspended in his cup.
“You are my wife. You are my foundation.”
“That’s what you say everytime we have this discussion. Your ‘foundation’ is falling apart. You walk all over me like a bamboo mat in yoga class.” Tears streamed down her face, splashing on the mobile phone screen, turning into tiny magnifying lenses, highlighting an image of the Tran family on holiday.
Mr. Tran stood up. “I do not have to explain myself. I do not ask what you do or with whom when I am not here.”
Mrs. Tran cried. “You…don’t…understa-a-a-nd!”
Mr. Tran walked around the table and squeezed Mrs. Tran’s shoulders. “You are right. I do not understand.”
She leaned her head back, pressing against his hands. “You act as if you don’t love me. Do you want to have a divorce?”
Mr. Tran stopped rubbing his wife’s knotted muscles and turned away. He did not want his wife to see a small tear well up in his right eye.
Table tennis validated Mr. Tran’s male ego in a way that a normal family with normal, everyday problems no longer provided.
His local fame as a midlevel table tennis star had attracted a small fan following.
He enjoyed playing in tournaments, glancing at the crowd cheering him on, looking at the faces of fans who adored him, taking smiling selfies after a big win or posing in mock dejection after a tough loss.
Mrs. Tran did not like crowds. Each day, she returned from her job designing IoT devices to greet her kids at home, feed them snacks and then exercise alone to streaming yoga videos, expecting another broken promise from her husband to be home in time for dinner with the family.
He turned around and looked at his wife bowed over the table.
“Do I want a divorce? I don’t know.”
Mrs. Tran looked up at her husband and smiled. “So you are not planning to divorce me?”
“I don’t know. I…uh…I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
Mrs. Tran frowned. “But that means you have thought of leaving me, doesn’t it?”
In years of these discussions, Mr. Tran had always argued that he loved her dearly and hadn’t once thought of leaving his beloved wife. He had hit a turning point lately.
“Perhaps. I don’t know for sure.” His thoughts were half in this conversation and half working out a strategy that his master had developed to take advantage of Mr. Tran’s wider hip stance.
His wife saw his unfocused gaze and knew he had left her mentally. She was used to the look. Anything she said, he would forget or ask her to repeat several times.
She sighed resignedly. “Never mind. You have already left me. Divorce won’t change that.”
Mr. Tran looked down at his wife. He had missed what she said. “We need to talk. I am not ready for divorce. But now I need to take a walk.”
He patted her on the back, grabbed his jacket and walked out, thinking he might catch his master for another practice session — they had an important regional tournament to prepare for.
Bangalore, bang a pot for rain
Rasheed’s sandaled feet kicked up eddies of dust.
Rasheed.
A new class of citizen.
The very touchable.
Rasheed’s genetic material contained highly classified information, trademarked, copyrighted and verified as authentic and genuine by the WTO and the World Court.
Rasheed was the latest and some said greatest ever wetware creation.
Neither male nor female.
Truly genderless.
Or genderful, depending on the right setting.
Rasheed could march like a soldier or saunter down a hallway like a svelte cat.
Rasheed worked for the ISSANet as a sentinel, guarding and protecting advances in science and technology against people and machines from all walks of life who wanted to slow progress.
Rasheed also guarded self-independence, programmed from birth to exhibit sufficient erratic and eccentric behaviour to prevent being worshipped as a god, able to change body and facial features in unfixed, almost random intervals to appear as different people, registering on the ISSANet as a new person periodically.
Rasheed coordinated with other sentinels, meeting with them at outdoor religious festivals, high-tech conferences, bars, hotels, restaurants, food trucks, homeless shelters, family homes and other places where transient, mobile workers were apt to gather.
Some people called them the Whisperers, noting their habit of sitting close together, inclning their heads toward one another with no audible speech heard by nearby observers as the sentinels communicated to each other.
It was a cultural programming flaw.
The sentinels communicated through the first ISSANet direct node-to-node connection built into the sentinels, a proprietary implementation of NFC. They were supposed to talk at the same time but the programmers only coded the sentinels’ mouths to move when in close proximity to each other.
The sentinels were aware of the flaws.
They weren’t robots.
However, any individual attempt to change their core programming always resulted in the ISSANet overwriting their personal hacks during systemwide updates.
They had submitted change requests.
They also had a sense of humour and saw change requests as a kind of street-crossing idiot button — they knew the programmers were overwhelmed with change requests and would implement changes at their pace or the pace dictated to them by those with more influence in the ISSANet.
Rasheed looked at a water truck attempting in vain to meet the increasing water demands of a growing Bangalore.
Rasheed knew how to pull water out of thin air, how to convert raw materials into any substance one wanted. Given an unlimited energy source and vast wealth to pay for infrastructure changes, one could do anything.
Rasheed laughed.
All these natural-born wetware entities walking around with their inefficent water management systems. How much longer would they last?
How long before the ISSANet covered the home planet, Earth, with only programmed wetware entities? Would they all be sentinels? Would any sentinels be needed at all?
Vinyl siding or cedar?
Lee talked with another realtor.
“So, anything you haven’t told me about this place I need to know about?”
“Anything in particular you’re wanting to know?”
Lee looked around the open floor plan of the small two bedroom house. Should he gently inquire about the realtor’s evasiveness, ask why the house had been on the market over 700 days with barely a drop in the asking price?
Lee reached into his pocket and pulled out the thick mobile phone.
“Wow, that’s an antique!” The realtor motioned as if using an old Army field radio.
Lee laughed. “Yeah, I know. I gotta replace it one day.” He made a circle with the phone as if looking for a radio signal, walking around the room a few paces.
Although the realtor knew Lee was purchasing his second home in as many months, she didn’t know that Lee was setting up a large communications network, connecting the houses as a giant transceiver.
He tapped on the phone screen and looked at the summary report generated from his sweep.
He was satisfied with the results.
“I only have one question. What kind of deal are you offering on closing costs?”
The realtor smiled. He hadn’t asked her about the uneven flooring or the odd slopes in the small yard that hid the entranceways to a large cavern in that part of town, making it difficult for her to sell the house to potential buyers with smart appraisers.
She didn’t know that was the very reason he wanted the place but he wasn’t going to tell her.
Lee still had a lot of packing to do, deciding what he was going to move where.
Memories of the emotional strain of a few weeks gently massaging his friendships fed his imagination while he tried and sometimes succeeded in giving the right amount of attention to the right people.
His was a public face, drawing attention wherever he went, including strangers somehow aware he was possibly someone they were supposed to know but couldn’t exactly pinpoint why.
Lee hid in plain sight.
He didn’t spend time explaining to everyone what he was doing.
One evening, he wanted to wander his old house, taking inventory of what to move.
Instead, he started meditating and then was offered dinner and conversation in exchange for a trip across town, reducing his time for counting objects.
Lee accommodated his friends.
He was a people pleaser.
He was both an immovable boulder in the middle of a stream, slowing eroding, and a willow tree swaying in a strong breeze, bending over backward but not breaking.
His plans outweighed him and his daily concerns.
Big plans lead to bigger joys.
Lee closed his eyes.
He looked at the 13-day boxcar window at the front end of a 12,057-day total until Mars was populated.
Lee smiled.
The plan was on schedule but he never doubted otherwise.
Empty Cells at Empty Tables
As an actor and comedian, as one who treats tragedy with a flair for the dramatic, life as a writing human contains all the necessary ingredients for decades of fun.
Barely raise the hint of sarcasm.
Avoid cynicism like the plague.
Treat your characters with care.
Make sure they have fun, facing death with a laugh and a last chance for escape.
I pause from the story in progress to consider, to sidetrack, to meander off the path, the possibilities of characters whose lives partly parallel people I meet.
To show that we want gender differences in cultural references because it is the most common body form we deal with.
Yet our spreadsheets containing cells, rows, columns, tables and formulae are gender neutral.
How often do we look at a chart of data and exclaim, “Damn! That’s hot!” or “[She/He] looks fine!”?
I explore the sexuality of our humanness to understand where we’re going with artificial intelligence.
Robots or cybernetic beings which don’t interact with us have no need for gender identity.
It is in that future context where I always live.
Out there, 400 marsyears from now, when our future selves are looking back at us, they will see this day, or the result of this day, in one form or another.
Trillions of state changes later.
Some days living here in the daily struggle of self, helping friends and family, empathising with them and by extension their friends and family (ad infinitum), and living in a projected future tests my ability to think objectively.
Occasionally, I give myself permission to take a break from being everything and everybody to myself at once, let alone to those I know.
As I have done the past few days, enjoying the usual luxury and freedom of wandering away to think and write, causing hurt feelings to those I seem to ignore, confusion to those I barely know, giving them, if they choose, something to talk about when they briefly take a moment to notice my absence.
I give my full attention when I can.
Sometimes I wander off.
I just have to be me.
Where I’ll end up in the next few weeks is anybody’s guess.
I’ve changed.
That’s all that matters for now.
Four hundred marsyears from now is a different story!
As You Wish
Guin walked around the room, mentally measuring the space she needed.
Members of Ursa Major and Canus Major had contacted her, asking her to increase her participation in their plans.
Guin had other plans.
But plans, even in one’s private thoughts, find their way into other people’s lives.
She calculated the gravitational field she wanted to generate, solely in her imagination, out of sight of the ISSANet (or so everyone thought, ever present as social media posts or the shadows in-between).
Lee opened the closet door in the small bedroom where his upstairs laboratory disguised the labyrithine lab hidden below, accessible only through a heavily-reinforced tornado shelter trapdoor in the floor of the closet.
Neither Guin nor Lee knew what the other was doing.
But they did.
Quantum physics explained a lot of the reasons why they were connected but weren’t.
In Lee’s thoughts, the argument of a Sicilian with Dread Pirate Roberts.
In Guin’s thoughts, a young man named Westley yelling, “As you wish!”
They worked out vectors in four-dimensional space without using calculators or computers.
They built not because they thought they wanted to but because they had to.
Had to because of love.
Love where engineering, science and dancing met.
Love for each other.
Infinite possibilities in infinite directions.
True eternal love.
Checkup
Lee tapped his smart watch which had reminded him to review the notes he’d taken years before while sitting with Guin and Trischnia, listening to their discussion of a spreadsheet that compiled the cost, investments and estimated sale price to make enough of a profit to make a living as an artist.
He looked over the notes.
In addition to making enough to sell her paintings at art shows, Trischnia learned from Guin how to calculate the expenses of a small used book store which would offer Trischnia’s artwork.
Shelmi had joined them, sharing her excitement about the Maker shop and her latest cosplay project.
It was in that moment that Lee understand he was in the Zone.
It was from that moment forward that he reoriented his compass to keep himself moving forward in the Zone, double checking with his friends along the timeline that their friendship had given him unexpectedly, a vision of an enterprise that included all 8+ billion humans…
To be continued!
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