September 2009 Archives

Crow knew that this was the point when he was supposed to realize that he still had everything in the world to live for, and so much to do, but he was just too tired for that. Exhaustion suffused him, became him mentally and physically. He just wanted to lay down all his burdens and go to sleep forever. At least it would be a hell of a biography, Crow thought, I mean it's not Churchill's or anything but who's is?

 

A gust of wind pushed him a little farther, and Crow leaned a little himself, feeling the warning in his stomach that he was leaning just a bit to far, past the point where it was still under his control.

 

The hotel phone rang behind Crow and his muscles jolted, he started to tumble forward and every limb flailed for purchase. The railings were still rain slick and his feet slipped like a stooge on banana peels. Crow's hand swiped at the roof of the balcony, the undercarriage of the one a floor above, and only succeeded in ripping two fingernails clear off. A gust of wind blew just then, just at the moment when it could help by a bare inch. Crow landed on the top edge of the railing on his breastbone, and that slight bit of breeze had been, he told himself later when he looked for the meaning he needed, just enough to land so the balance leaned inwards instead of outwards. Crow rolled off the railing and thudded to his balcony's floor.

 

Hand on fire, chest painfully bruised, body trilling on adrenaline, Crow pushed himself up and staggered to the phone, answering it finally on his knees. Alexander is that you?

 

"Hello sir, this is a courtesy call to remind you that we will need to charge your account for another night if you do not check out in the next forty-five minutes." A senti voice said to him in perfectly reasonable tones.

 

Crow laughed until his bruised chest punished him with a cavalcade of coughing. He muttered an approval at last between gasps and hung up the phone as he slid to the floor in hysteria.

 

He emerged sometime later with an idea fueled by the phone call. Crow went to the console built into the faux cherry writing desk by the television and logged on to his personal accounts. It took some guessing to get his password right, he never logged in to the damned thing anyway, but then he could see a complete listing of all incoming calls to his phone over the last few weeks. Crow traced a finger and found the call he remembered, the one five minutes before Stillwell had kicked in his door, the one that warned him to hide Alexander. It had slipped his mind entirely over the last week, jostled loose in his memory by the unexpected courtesy call.

"Wars usually begin when two nations disagree on their relative strength, and wars usually
cease when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength. Agreement or disagreement emerges from the shuffling of the same set of factors. Thus each factor is capable of promoting war or peace... When nations prepare to fight one another, they have contradictory expectations of the likely duration and outcome of war. When those predictions, however, cease to be contradictory, the war is almost certain to end." - Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (1988)

 Crow almost argued the point, but saw in their eyes that they would just drag him down town if he did not cooperate. The tale went faster now that it had been told once to Stillwell. The corners of it got a bit rounder, and the telling went smoother. This must be why eye-witness testimony is so worthless, the story changes every time, even when it's branded into your mind with a hot poker.

 

Crow felt like he was acting when genuine tears sprang to his eyes and the tightness welled in his chest. He had told it before and felt like he was hiding something, and so guilt irrationally stung his mind. He suspected the officers could tell, but hoped that they wouldn't do something stupid like think he was making it all up.

 

"Thank you, Mr. Daedalus." The officer said as they left.

 

"Doctor." Crow corrected with a mumble.

 

The officer raised an eyebrow and Crow knew that it had been an intentional mistake, to see if it mattered enough to him to make a hassle, what with his son missing and all. Crow closed the door quickly, saying that he had to go to the bathroom, and tossed the deadbolt before they could get another word in.

 

Crow rushed to the bathroom and all the anger and frustration burst out of his stomach in a solid flow of stomach acid and whiskey into the toilet bowl. He sobbed at the porcelain throne until both eyes and stomach had finished dry heaving.

 

He sat on the porch smoking for the next couple of hours, watching the tides of traffic and people rising and receding. It was very cold this high up, and gooseflesh lined his arms in stubborn rows that he ignored.

 

Crow rolled thoughts of Alexander over and over in his mind during that time, remembering the first time he had walked, his first words, teaching him to read. Crow flicked a cigarette off the edge to tumble end over end to the street below as it occurred to him that many of the memories were by proxy, recorded by Nan and cherished later when Crow got home from work. So much time wasted.

 

He stood and leaned over the railing, thinking how easy it would be to just jump. He's not mine anyway, he's back where he belongs, back with his people. A foot lifted to the first rung of the railing and then to the next, hands held out to balance himself. Wind gusted around Crow, but he was as solid as stone. The city stretched out below, a thousand people swarming, but none looking up to see the man at the end of desperation. The smell of salt and fish reached his nose, the bay mixed with Chinatown. The clouds parted and the afternoon sun blazed from his right, turning the traffic on the Golden Gate into a liquid bar of reflected light. A blue tug rolled over the chop to take a load of tourists to Alcatraz. Crow had never been there, but it seemed familiar from all the movies. Like Alexander. Just another place he had never been but had seen on television.

Stillwell stood there when the door opened, looking as haggard and bloodshot as Crow felt. "What the fuck do you want?" Crow asked.

 

Stillwell stared for a moment, a battle going on behind his eyes. "There has been a mistake I think." He swallowed hard. "The police found your place, a Rebecca filled them in on the details. They'll be here in the morning to take a statement if you're still here, which I imagine you won't be." Stillwell paused and then blurted out the next words as if he had been saving them up all day. "We thought you were the weak link to get into the pro-senti organizations. Your son was our in to put pressure on you. I am deeply sorry for that given the events of the past day."

 

"My son's gone you fucker." Crow said quietly and so hard that it made his temples throb like a migraine.

 

"I know." Stillwell held up a hand and waved it like he was trying to calm Crow down. "I don't know what else to tell you except that I will do everything in my power to get your son back. I don't know why the sentis would think he was so important, except maybe to hurt you for some reason, maybe your recent affiliation with Da Vinci brought that on." His words were slurring together into longer and longer sentences. Stillwell drew himself up like a marine called to attention. "Every resource I can dredge up will work on finding your boy, Dr. Daedalus, you have my word on that."

 

Crow stared at him, wondering if this was a trick on some level. The knowledge of Alexander's identity dug at him, but he could not bring himself to share it, not after the first bit of help had finally been promised him. "Thank you Mr. Stillwell." He said quietly. "I don't think you know quite what that means." Crow swallowed a dozen angry cries he had squirreled away and instead stood aside and gestured into his room. "Would you care for a drink?"

 

Stillwell left by dawn, after more than his share of drinks, although Crow had begun watering his own down long before that point. He wanted control when Stillwell was around. Even drunk, Stillwell was company-man to the core and did not divulge anything that Crow could not have guessed at on his own. Crow collapsed into a stupor that lasted for six hours, waking finally when the door bell buzzed insistently for a dozen times.

 

The police were at the door, having finally tracked down where he went.

 

"Stillwell already took my statement." Crow said. The agent would not be deterred though and shouldered his way into the room to get it told again, this time to the legally correct officer.

Chapter Fifteen - Hotel Blues

 

Of course they said no. Of course they told him to go to hell in not so many words. Well, to be fair, it had been quite a few more words than that in all fact. The words had kept coming and coming the way only lawyers could manage, dripping every syllable with vacuous pomposity. Attorneys could not let you go without dancing verbal circles around you and making you feel like an idiot, they had to keep slamming the idea home from a hundred different angles. Sadistic linguistic samurai cutting you to death with a thousand slashes instead of just taking off your head or jamming a blade through your heart. They liked to make you suffer first. They were, after all, people.

 

Crow sat on the balcony of the twenty-second floor, blowing misshapen smoke rings out over a city that he didn't even like. His son was gone, his friends had abandoned him, and there was nothing left but to feel sorry for himself, get lung cancer in the long run, and really drunk in the short run.

 

As he stared out on the city lights, it occurred to him what his problem was. I am not the center of the universe. It was a difficult thing to admit, a concept of tragic understanding. A psychologist could tell you that every person thinks that he is the center of the universe, the protagonist of an epic story. A few nutballs, though that was not the clinical term, thought that they were the antagonist. A microscopic proportion realized that they did not matter at all.

 

This was not a statement of low self-esteem or depression, it was a transcendant thought, uplifting even. It was what one could see if one were on a higher plane so that the entire world really was a stage. No person was the main character. No person had the show revolving around them and staged around their personal triumphs and tragedies. Osteryoung said no, not out of any desire to combat Crow's march through the plot, but because Crow truly did not matter and he had nothing of value to trade them for betraying their principles.

 

No masked man would knock on the door. No representative of some secret order dedicated to helping Crow find his son would make an untraceable phone call to this hotel room and arrange for a clandestine meeting that would in the end save the world. In the end, there were just people. Just as powerless and insignificant as himself.

 

And so he drank and smoked and waited for an intuition to come.

 

Instead a sharp knock came at the door at a quarter past two, and after a few steps of whiskey induced acrobatics, Crow decided that he was going to get his son back no matter what the cost. Not because he was the center of the universe and therefore it mattered in some grand scheme of things, but because if there truly was no meaning in the universe, than the simple act of a father saving his son was about as powerful event as could be imagined.

Crow left then, pulling Rebecca behind him by the arm as Father Thomas again lowered his head and this time began to cry in earnest. A part of her felt terribly sorry for the old man, but part of her also wanted to throttle him for his archaism.

 

They drove back to Crow's house, but half way up the drive he changed his mind, shaking his head. "I can't go back in there right now." He whipped the car around and meandered down the freeway until he found a place he recognized, a Hilton in downtown San Francisco that he stayed at now and then when he had business in the city but didn't feel the need to drive all the way back down to the south bay. Rebecca demurred from his offer to pay for a room for her, and when his confused and yet not all together unwilling eyebrows raised, she demurred further.

 

"I'll catch a cab home." She said. "I'll need to drop by at the very least and talk to Green Eyes. We left him with very little in the way of explanation."

 

Crow blinked. "Of course." He said and motioned for the clerk to only book one room for the night. It was the first thing to drag his mind away from Alexander all day. "He loves you, you know." Crow said.

 

Rebecca's eyes flashed. "Well fuck you too."

 

"I didn't mean anything by it." Crow said. "Christ woman, he called me up for a heart to heart and that's what was on his mind."

 

Rebecca relaxed marginally. "It's none of your business in any case."

 

"I don't know why you're so defensive." Crow said. "Do you love him?"

 

"Well that would just feed your theories about my arms as fetishes, wouldn't it?" Rebecca growled. Crow looked around to see if anyone was listening, but the hotel staff was too genteel to evidence eavesdropping even of public conversations. "I don't know what I feel." She folded her arms and crushed her face into a grimace.

 

Crow glanced again at the hotel staff and paused even longer before the words would form together well enough to come out right. "My son is a senti so I cannot judge you at all. I was in the process of building a senti in the likeness of my wife. I'd spend hours in the basements tweaking software to make it talk and sound just right."

 

"Now that is sick." Rebecca conceded. There was a harsh pause before she winked, just enough to make him feel a cold dread of having said too much. She turned away then, satisfied that good terms had been left, but looked over her shoulder when she reached the lobby door.

 

 "Did you leave it there?" Rebecca asked. "The senti of your wife, I mean. I didn't see anything there but Nan."

 

"No." Crow said, shaking his head. "I think the bastards must have taken her too."

 

Crow went upstairs and found his room on the east side, looking out over the bay with Oakland staring across the water like an oil stain of grime washed up on the opposite shore. The day light had about an hour to go and Crow took the silent time to shower himself back to his senses and start a strong pot of coffee. Crow watched the sun set before working up the nerve to make the final call of the evening. My enemy's enemy. He thought.

 

"May I speak to John Osteryoung please?" Crow asked the kind, and human, voiced receptionist of Da Vinci Law.

"The pieces fit, Father." Crow said. "If they didn't, you wouldn't be reacting so strongly. You'd be laughing instead at the joke of it and then telling me how quickly the Jesuits will find my boy."

 

Father Thomas finished the rest of his drink and poured another. "It's not a boy then, and he's not a son."

 

Crow's face raged crimson. "He's all I've got. You can't just erase the fact that he's my son now that you find out he's different."

 

"Calm down, Crow." Father Thomas said, with a level voice that was hard to argue with. "Believing a lie for a very long time does not make it any less of a lie. If Alexander, if it was nothing more than a senti in a particularly nice package, you did not have the times you remember as you remember them. It was just a pretty lie is all. A machine cannot be conscious, it can merely mimic it so well that you cannot tell the difference. Do you remember the first Turing tests that were passed? Computer software that was able to trick humans into thinking they were talking to a human via text messaging? Did that make the software in question equivalent to a human? Of course not, meet that software package face to face and you would never fall for it though, it would be clear as day that you were talking to an artifice.

 

"A senti who can fool you face to face is just more of the same, but more sinister. Anything, anyone could be one. The question of difference then becomes not one of appearance, or even material, but one of essence. If the essence of a being is mechanical, it is only better than a talking chunk of software by degree."

 

Crow slammed his glass into the desk. "The being that was my son did not fake being my son. He is what he is."

 

Father Thomas looked close to tears, eyes glistening in the afternoon sun peeking through the windows set far above eye level in the recesses of the gothic ceiling. "If someone had a way of guessing what your wife would have said in any given situation and could program a senti to respond as such, would that be Trinan restored to you?" Father Thomas asked. "If such an artifice could be so real as to look like her too, talk in her voice and speak the words such that you would never doubt it was her, would it be Trinan, or would it just be a pretty lie?"

 

"At some point the artifice becomes reality." Crow said. "For a being to fully embody something body and mind is to be that something. A full realization could not be anything but Trinan, and goddamn it all Alexander is my son and I will find him, with or without you."

 

Father Thomas lowered his head and stared at his lap, hand clenched so hard around the tumbler that it was shaking. Rebecca could hear the Jesuit whispering a short prayer before raising his head and meeting Crow's gaze. "In so many ways you are like a son to me Crow, but I cannot help you do this. Turn your back on this thing, this abomination that has infected your home. I loved the boy, yes it was so real that I could love it. But that doesn't mean I can pretend that it is more than a bauble that pretends to think and wears a child's skin like a mask."

His face whitened and then reddened as the story progressed, glancing away only once to gaze critically at Rebecca, who watched from outside the antique metal framed windows of the rectory library, standing amongst the roses. Finally, he moved towards the door, gesturing for Crow to come with him. They exited the building and moved silently down the footpath, Rebecca falling in a few steps behind like an old-fashioned geisha. Father Thomas led them into an adjacent building of splendid stone work half-covered with the creeping fingers of vines. A phrase was chiseled into the stone above the door, Latin she figured, though she did not know a word herself beyond status quo.

 

Up stairs, Father Thomas entered an office so small they could barely fit in all at once, especially with the floor to ceiling stacks of books and print-outs covering every available horizontal space. He pushed past them once they were in, closed the door, and with almost comic delicacy, threw the deadbolt in the heavy oak door as quietly as was humanly or otherwise possible. A few piles of books were rearranged and shuffled into the surrounding chaos well enough for Crow and Rebecca to sit, although one particular pile concerned Rebecca in regard to the safety of her skull. Father Thomas held up a finger to them, indicating that they continue the maintained silence for a few moments longer, cocking his head as if to listen for ears at the walls. He then turned and touched a remote control that brought to life a stereo as old as Crow. Opera with the audacity that only Wagner could manage began mid-aria, and Father Thomas cranked the volume well enough to deafen any rats living behind the drywall.

 

He leaned forward and spoke in a hissing whisper that could hardly be heard from their vantage a foot or two away. "That should keep casual listeners away. With technology such as it is, the professionals would listen even if we adjourned to Pluto, and their detectors could probably tell if we were lying even if we thought we weren't."

 

"No lies here, Father." Crow said, in a similar whisper. "I told you every bit of the truth, and I need your help." He paused. "Alexander needs your help."

 

Father Thomas hissed and leaned back. He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and hefted out a bottle of Old Bushmills. The amber liquid sloshed into a trifecta of tumblers, but not a drop polluted the worn mahogany of the desk. He lifted his glass with a perfunctory dip in each of their directions to handle the obligatory toasting and downed half of it the greedy swallows of an old drinker.  Crow and Rebecca sipped theirs at a more conservative pace.

 

"I just don't believe it." Father Thomas said, shaking his head. "How can you believe your boy is a senti? I've held him myself, and he is nothing if not a lad."

Rebecca squeezed him and stood back, apparently a bit unsure how to hold herself, the intimacy of the moment a bit more than she looked for in casual acquaintances. Crow straightened and stood, collecting himself.

 

"Who would take your son?" Rebecca asked. "And why?"

 

The pieces slammed together like an explosive rubix cube for Crow all at once. The oddities of Alexander's maturation, the happenstance of his origin, the message on the board, the thousand other tiny suspicions that a father overlooked as a matter of course. They all clicked into place and Crow saw Alexander for what he was, what he had always been.

 

"His real father took him." Crow said. "If you can call the bastard that."

 

Rebecca blinked. "Not understanding over here." She said and waved a hand.

 

Crow smiled and took Rebecca's hands, the ones he knew all too well were not real. Some part of him now understood why it didn't matter. They were her. Their material was immaterial.

 

"Alexander is a senti." Crow said and a blast of relief flowed into his limbs and suffused his joints. "Perhaps the best one ever built, but still just a senti." Crow frowned. "Not 'just'. He is still my son. And I don't think that they understand that in the least. I don't think they are capable of it."

 

"What are you babbling about?" Rebecca said. "You were sobbing your brains out a minute ago. Did you hit your head? Concussions can cause overly philosophical diatribes, or so I'm told."

 

Crow went to his fallen servant, and whispered the command phrases needed to shut down his power systems. Crow folded the senti's arms in front of its shattered chest, thought for a moment and then crossed himself. His mouth twitched into a hollow smile and he said in a voice he thought sounded particularly vacant. "I'm less sure than ever that Father Thomas is right about these things." Crow said. "I think a soul is defined by the nobility of your actions, not the purity of your flesh."

 

"Some would say that there can be no nobility without that purity." Rebecca commented.

 

Crow stood and headed for the tunnel to begin crawling out and paused to look at Nan one more time. "Some would fuck their own mother if it tidied up their philosophies a bit."

 

Crow drove this time, heading again for the rectory where he had last seen Father Thomas, never doubting for a moment that the Jesuit would still be there among the roses and not off at some other conference or another arguing counterpoint to the senti rights talking heads. He was not disappointed, although Father Thomas was to be found in the library this time, meandering through old volumes.

The lights were on in the basement although he had shut them off, as he knew they would be. The hasty boxes in front of the painting were shoved rudely aside, as he knew they would be. The painting hung open and revealed the tunnel, as he knew it would. Crow called out Alexander's name, but it echoed in his head and there was no answer, as he knew there would never be.

 

Crow dove down the tunnel, mindless of the tearing sound his pants made or the rough scraping of the concrete removing the skin from his elbows. The hidden office was in tatters, the white boards tossed to the floor, the computers smashed into components, the desk broken in half. Nan lay in pieces beneath a dent in the concrete wall on the far side of the office, one arm still twitching.

 

One white board had been propped up after the melee and a neat hand had left a message in sharp black smallcaps. Our friend, then our enemy, and yet you have a house full of us.

 

"What does that mean?" Rebecca asked. She had slipped down unheard in his panicked rush.

 

The locker that had contained Trinan's doppelganger hung open and woefully empty. Crow's chest clenched, feeling like his parents had found his porn collection. He scanned the room, but did not see the half-built senti, wondered for a moment if she was beneath some of the debris and then realized of course that the intruders had taken her for some unknown reason.

 

"They must mean Nan." Crow said, gesturing to the broken thing in the corner.

 

"They did a number on him." Rebecca said. "They did a number on the whole place."

 

"Nan is programmed by the best." Crow said. "He was programmed to fight to the death to protect me and mine."

 

"Looks like he fought like a tiger." Rebecca said. There was not a trace of humor in her voice, only admiration.

 

"Alexander's gone." Crow said. Once said, the tears came, flooding in great gasps of emotion that seemed ready to break his mind. Crow collapsed to the floor, racked by sobs that were spasms of the entire body and mind more than simple crying. He's gone. He's gone. He's really gone. Oh god he's gone he's gone. The mantra hummed through his mind. Rebecca knelt to wrap arms around him, rocking him like a child. She made gibberish noises, the kind people always revert to with babies and animals. A grayish period of sobbing followed of indeterminate length. Crow started, like coming awake from a nightmare and felt his hand strike what was left of his computer.

Chapter Fourteen - Home Coming

 

Crow's hands were shaking too much to drive, so Rebecca took him instead, driving with hands that were no longer capable of jitters, even if the rest of here was capable of them. She drove with the efficacy of a senti, sweeping in and out of lanes without hesitation or signal, flitting through the gaps in traffic as quickly as they opened and closed. Crow hardly saw the blurs of vehicles and billboards as his feet pressed hard into the floorboards, like a nervous passenger miming the brake pedal with both feet. His hand kept ducking to his cell phone, muscle memory spiking at the hope of it ringing again.

 

Even if it was the same person again with more threats, it would at least be something, and something was always better than the nothing of this ghastly uncertainty. Crow started to say something about a faster route, but muttered off into nothing, unable to finish the coherent sentence. He thought about weird things as he considered that his son was gone, odd thoughts about the amount of milk left in the fridge and whether the Niners secondary could stop the Colts this weekend. An image of a Colts receiver high stepping towards the end zone played over and over in his head, even as he screamed inside for it to stop. Green Eyes flashed before his mind and Crow wondered if this in any way compromised the case.

 

"Down here, right?" Rebecca asked, breaking him from his reverie even though he knew full well that the car could have told her anything in the way of directions that she needed. Crow grunted an acknowledgement, but she had already made the turn without waiting for him.

 

The house looked normal, except for the door hanging ajar on the front porch, the bad image from every stereotyped memory. Don't intruders know that the open door is a glaring sign something isn't right? Is there something about breaking and entering that renders the human mind incapable of closing a door on the way out?

 

Crow did not wait for the car to fully stop before pushing his door open and hitting the ground with tumbling feet that churned violently at the gravel trying to catch up to the sudden relative increase in velocity. He failed and hit the ground hard on his palms, feeling sharp edges of gravel bite and then draw blood with the subtle pop of skin giving way. Crow did not feel the pain and scrambled forward, making a comical scene of staggering to his feet. He pulled the door the rest of the way open and stomped into the foyer, glancing once up the stairs and once over to the living room that Stillwell had made into a makeshift interrogation chamber. The door hit Rebecca in the face as Crow bolted ahead without thought that anyone was behind him. She yelped and took a step back. Crow dove down the stairs, winding down into the granite three steps at a time.

Sed made contact with the spider and it scooped up the group of fifteen refugees from the train, which lay smoking behind them. Alexander wondered what had caused the smoke, but then spotted the crumpled remains of a helicopter broken on the ground next to the train. He could see people wandering around aimlessly, looking for someone to be in charge of the situation. The spider lumbered away then, picking up speed as it went until it was loping across the terrain a hundred feet at a time. The gentle swaying of the cattle cage made Alexander mildly nauseous, but he fought it back down.

 

Sed and Awk were busy the entire time, ignoring Alexander's questions with patience and brusqueness, respectively. In time they arrived at a sort of hanger for the spiders, where twenty-odd brutes were disgorging cattle or undergoing maintenance by more traditional sentis, humanoid in general shape if not at all in the details. Awk took the lead, and brought the entire group into an adjacent building where a dilapidated cargo helicopter had been stored for emergency use. Awk commandeered it and flew northeast, away from the railroad tracks.

 

Sed took a few moments to explain to Alexander that they were lucky a service station had been so close. "This aircraft should be able to get us the rest of the way there."

 

"Where?" Alexander asked.

 

Sed's eyes sparkled, and Alexander felt a mental smile. "Home. At least for now. We move around a lot by necessity."

 

They landed on a crag towering above a long green valley misted with clouds and sprays of rain. Alexander was hustled inside and down corridor after corridor of concrete and rusted iron. At last, deep in the bowels of the earth for all Alexander knew, they came to a wooden door. It swung open upon a classroom of students. It was an altogether ordinary classroom. Thirty or so students. A senti teacher pointing at a wall screen showing an eight foot tall topographic map of Europe, with color coded symbols and lines denoting boundaries and troop movements two hundred years gone. Average looking desks inset with average looking consoles and average looking students. An average looking student at least, since they all looked identical, peas in a pod, thirty-odd twins.

 

They all were Alexander.

 

"Welcome to your new school." Sed said.

 

"I believe you already know the other pupils." Awk added.

 

Alexander screamed.

Well, it's been a light few weeks on posting in these parts, and I figured it was time to try to get something up here, before the legions raise up and feast on my entrails or more probably, disappear into the wilds of the internet never to return again. There was a solid six month run there where we had a Burning Violin up on schedule every Wednesday. Oh I cheated sometimes and gave you a chapter out of "Katorga", but that was justifiable since it got a few people to click that magical button on the top right and order their very own copy of my novel. HINT: you can still do this. You won't be disappointed. The novel actually does your taxes for you and can be plugged into any outlet in your house to convert your home to solar energy. It may or may not perform sexual favors for you and cook you dinner. Do truth in advertising laws apply on the internet, you might be asking yourself right now? Coincidentally, my novel also is artificially intelligent and has passed the bar in Tijuana so it can act as your attorney, therefore if you order it, it will be able to tell you whether or not you can sue me for lying.

In any case, here's the deal. I started graduate school a few weeks ago, a PhD program in political science. I have to read about a thousand pages a week in addition to various papers and just for fun, learning statistics and Russian. Oh and I get to grade 300 papers since I'm a TA also. So ... [scratches head] ... time is a lot tighter than it was the last six months. A lot of what I am reading and writing is fairly relevant to the Burning Violin rants on politics and economics and such, which is how I ended up on this route in the first place, so I'm building up a decent pile of content that could be adapted for the site. The problem is that at the moment it doesn't make much sense out of the context of whatever class it was for, so I can't just cut and paste. I'll do my best to get something up here once a week to keep y'all sated. "A Fire in their Eyes" will continue to go up on schedule (though I might make it MTWTh instead of MTThF since Wednesday is my busiest day of the week and least likely at this point to get an actual Burning Violin) since it is completed and already loaded up into the system.

Writing these bits of madness and seeing some of your fine feedback is one of the things I am most proud and satisfied of in this little life of mine.

Just to not leave you hanging, I thought you might be interested in this bit of video that I picked up from Stats class, which shows both how intuitively useful numbers can be in understanding the world of politics and how much the world has changed from our preconceived notions of Developed, Developing.

The ride continued in silence until the train began to slow suddenly, coasting to a hard stop in the middle of a field. Giant spiders seemed to turn to watch, as if a giant worm had fallen into their web from the sky. A few lumbered closer, but stopped a good quarter mile or so away from the tracks. Sed and Awk leaned close, consulting one another wordlessly for a moment, but they both turned to look at once when the doors at the head of the car slid open and a half dozen men strode in, rifles and body armor making them look even less human than the sentis surrounding them.

 

"How?" Sed asked.

 

"All communication was secure." Awk insisted, words squirting out so fast that they sounded high pitched.

 

"Random?" Sed asked.

 

"Doubtful."

 

The sentis around the cabin did not move, but stared with a mixture of hatred and fear at the men moving quickly through the car. The lead spotted Sed and Awk and lowered his rifle on them. "Here!" He shouted.

 

Alexander heard in his mind an explosion of communication, garbled words and phrases from a dozen different mental voices at once, arguing a course of action in half a second flat. Amazed, he realized that he had caught most of the conversation and understood it even though it was layered one voice over another a dozen times.

 

Before the lead could take another step, every senti in the room erupted out of their seats at once and swarmed the federal agents. The lead's gun discharged in Alexander's direction, but a senti in a business suit absorbed the round in it's chest, artificial blood and white ropes of manufactured viscera spraying the compartment although the senti itself did not slow down. Shots and screams filled the air and then Sed and Awk were dragging Alexander up. The window crumpled outwards and spiraled down to the ground distressly far below from a single swing of Awk's arm.

 

Alexander screamed as he was tossed like a bag of dirty laundry onto Sed's back and then they were hurtling down through the cold air of the prairie. Sed's knees bowed with the impact and ended in a squat like a catcher, spare hand balancing against the gravel on the ground. Awk landed a moment later, scattering gravel in a cloud that stung Alexander's face and drew blood in at least one spot.

 

A wordless glance again passed between the two sentis and then they sprinted away from the train towards the nearest spider. More sentis landed behind them, apparently haven't finished their fight on the train. Alexander heard their voices in his mind.

 

Let us come! They screamed in unison in a half dozen different ways at once.

 

It was Awk who turned around and favored them with his smile. Welcome to the revolution, my brothers! We are in your debt!

Awk slid the pack of cigarettes across the table, Morleys Alexander read on the pack. "My dad smokes those." Alexander said. "He hides them but I found them a couple of times."

 

"Want one?" Awk asked.

 

Alexander scrunched back against the soft leather of the seat and shook his head with a confused look. "I can't. I'm a kid."

 

"That's a very hume way of thinking." Awk said and pulled out a cigarette to twirl around his fingers and over his knuckles. "We don't hold to such thoughts. You are born - for lack of a better word - mature in every sense that matters as a senti. And you're not going to be getting cancer given your bio-mechanical metabolism, so there's no worry on that account."

 

Alexander fingered the pack of cigarettes and shook his head. "I don't want one."

 

Awk raised an eyebrow. "It won't hurt you."

 

"I don't want one anyway." Alexander said in a level tone.

 

Awk shrugged and pocketed the Morleys. "That at least is an attitude I can respect."

 

The landscape passed by quickly, from grasslands to mountains to desert and back again to grasslands, endless plains stretching to every horizon, a greenish-brown blur into the distance. Vast machines stalked over the land like spiders, occasionally plucking a cow out of the pasture to tuck away into a cage suspended below the main body. They were four-legged monstrosities, the ovoid body tiny in proportion and hanging fifty feet above the ground. Delicate and slow steps reminded Alexander of a teenager past curfew tiptoeing down a hallway.

 

"Our big brothers." Awk said with a gesture. "They farm the land out here for the humes. Hardly any of them left out here, just a few nature types. Sentis were far cheaper as workers and the balance of people went to the cities for jobs."

 

"I thought cows were always in big herds." Alexander said, face plastered against the window to spot a cow here and there in the distance. The biggest group he saw was only a dozen or so scattered around a pond.

 

"Not when they're left free on the range." Sed explained. "In order to be certified organic they must be free range now. Most people just eat vat-grown proteins anyway these days. These are luxury cattle, only the rich can afford their milk and meat."

 

Awk snorted. "The cows live better than the people, crammed into the cities the way the bovines used to be crammed into factory farms. 'People are cattle', clichés get more true every year."

"Why would a senti smoke?" Alexander asked. His eyes went down to the three glasses of an amber liquid he could not identify. "Or drink?"

 

"Why do you watch the feeds?" Awk asked. "Or eat ice cream instead of protein pills? Experience and variety are what make us more than animals."

 

"It makes you human you mean." Alexander said.

 

"No." Awk said and swept a cigarette sideways to mimic his shaking head. "As a cleverly designed cybernetic organism, I have absolutely no need of any kind of nourishment as a human would understand it. Every ounce I partake in is purely by choice for pleasure or pain. A human must take sustenance. I choose to take sustenance."

 

Sed tapped the table and spoke. "What my associate is trying to establish is that there is a school of philosophy that revolves around the glorification of choice. It espouses that if you remove all bias from decision, all need in otherwards, what is left is utterly pure. Choice for the sake of choice."

 

"Hedonism, in a sense at least." Awk said. He pushed the glass of amber towards Alexander, a hollow scraping across the granite tabletop. "Try it."

 

"What is it?" Alexander asked. He did not trust Awk.

 

"Ambrosia." Sed said and took one of the other glasses to take a long draught. "It is something of a weakness among our kind, but it is of no harm and some good."

 

As if to punctuate the statement, Awk drained half of his glass at a single gulp and release a very human sigh. Alexander picked up the glass and sniffed at it, but could detect only a hint of pepper. He sipped lightly at it, but there was no taste to it at all. It slid down his throat though without his even swallowing. It was so thin it made water seem like putty, his tongue hardly able to feel anything was in his mouth at all. A coolness spread from his belly and out through is limbs, an electric thrill coursing through his body.

 

"What is it?" Alexander asked again with a gasp. "It feels so cold."

 

"It is a manufactured substance that adheres to certain artificial synapses and adds a bit of bite to the connections." Awk said and drained the rest of his glass.

 

"A poet might call it liquid thought if that is clearer to you." Sed said, not touching his glass anymore. "A low grade peyote, if you prefer."

No. Alexander said, and his mental projection colored the word with all manner of complex emotion so that he hardly had to pose his question. Why am I delicate if I don't have to be?

 

Because you do have to be. Sed explained in his deep teacher voice. Images branched out from the words, pictures of tug of war, a see-saw, the hardest steel shattering with a hammer blow. That which cannot bend must inevitably break. You are the most complex senti ever built, though not the strongest. A hundred other superlatives were stated at the same moment as the last word: quickest, smartest, largest, smallest. Alexander's eyes gleamed at a sudden understanding that speech was no longer limited to two dimensions, it could be as three-dimensional as the world around him. Every word could be a dozen words to shade the meaning/change the meaning/add depth to the meaning. Alexander smiled/laughed/high-fived Sed over their connection.

 

Sed returned the impulse with a fatherly tinge. You were meant to be the bridge to the next step. The embodiment of the best of old and new.

 

Alexander did not really understand, but the question was slipping already from his mind. There was too much to see and hear and experience to care much about why he was what he was.

 

At length, they climbed down to a compartment at the back of the train where dozens of sentis, mostly of the close-to-human variety sat with bored and vacant looks, reading magazines or watching videos in affectations of humanity that Alexander suspected were cosmetic. Sed and Awk stayed close to him and found a banquet table at the end of the cabin, drawing more than a few looks.

 

"Why are they looking like they know us?" Alexander asked Sed.

 

"Why do you say that?" Sed asked.

 

"They're looking at us like we're movie stars." Alexander said.

 

Awk touched the controls on the table quickly, touch typing commands into the console without even looking. A panel slid open and a hidden lazy susan discharged three drinks onto the table with a low hiss. "It's not movie stars they see." Awk explained. "It's the way people in the know see Che and Mao."

 

"Who?"

 

"Youth today have no respect for the past." Awk said, but his tone was hardly as harsh as it had been. Awk retrieved a cigarette from somewhere under his tailored suit with hands quicker than a human could even see. A silver zippo lit it and Awk sucked in a deep breath through lips so twisted they were scarcely able to close around the butt.

"Hold on now, little man." Sed said and Alexander stiffened in his arms. That's what dad calls me.

 

Sed turned to look at him and a wordless statement tickled his head. I know.

 

Alexander jolted, but the arms were like bands of iron around him. I told you that there are many ways in which your growth has been stunted. Hold on now. We are taking you home.

 

Sed dropped through the hold with Alexander gripped tight, and landed with a thunk on something hard, but not concrete. The wind whipped at Alexander's hair and impossible colors spiraled around in all directions, an assault on his nascent new senses. He screamed but it was lost in the howl of wind. Sed's voice screamed in his head, CALM DOWN, IT WILL BE ALL RIGHT!

 

In a little while, the sound and color seemed to recede as Alexander grew used to them and recognized that they would not hurt him. He looked around and after some hesitation, tried to whisper back to Sed with the same internal voice. Can you hear me?

 

Yes I can, young sir. Sed said calmly. The voice had a hundred times the inflection of verbal speech, as if there was no limit to the shades of meaning that could be added to every vowel. Yes, it is like a thousand angels dancing on the head of a pin, if you will forgive a religious metaphor.

 

Where are we? Alexander asked.

 

On the roof of a mono heading east out of the cities underground. Sed explained. You do not need to worry, I am more than equipped to hold on with my feet without falling off. Once we are clear of the cities we will climb down into the senti compartments at the rear.

 

A glimpse of light at the edge of sight in one direction glimmered and then grew larger as fast as the ground coming up to meet a skydiver. Alexander flinched but then the train exploded out into the brightness of daylight. Vertigo gripped Alexander as the limits of his vision reset from the claustrophobia of the tunnel to the distant horizon on all sides. The land closest to the train moved so fast Alexander became dizzy, but could not look away, his eyes locked on as if in a trance to the indiscernible blur of rocks and brush. Sed shook him. It would not do to become sick, we are traveling over six hundred miles per hour now. If I were not blocking the passage of air with my body, it would flay the skin from your face. You are in many ways more delicate than most of us.

 

Why? Alexander asked.

 

Sed mentally smiled, a warmth touched Alexander's mind, almost like a caress. We come in all shapes and sizes, as you saw. The children of man are the most varied of any species. That is to say, we really aren't just one species, we are a new genera all to our own.

Sed touched a hand to his face and a connection was made somehow, a communication that whispered along the surface of Alexander's mind. It was like hearing for the first time, like a third ear had opened up somewhere inside his brain. And then, he could see, and it was as if he had been blind for his entire life. Colors he did not have words to describe lit his surroundings. A spiral of glowing not!red and almost!purple air pirouetted back where they came, lines of different!blue marched along the not!grey wall like bones on an x-ray.

 

"This is infrared, with a little ultraviolet tossed in for color." Sed said.

 

"It's beautiful." Alexander said.

 

"There are many parts of who you are that have been obfuscated by your upbringing." Sed said. "We will help teach you what you are capable of. We will teach you to see and hear and speak in ways that your father, your hume father anyway, never could."

 

"Raised by wolves." Awk muttered.

 

Alexander was less intimidated by Awk with every passing moment, and he walked on, unable to stop gawking at the world around him.

 

The stairs eventually gave way to a dank passage rank with the rotting fish smell of the sea. Awk picked a direction and began to move faster, so that Alexander almost had to jog to keep up. "We have train to catch." The smiling senti told Alexander. The walls down here were covered in a translucent moss that Alexander realized after a moment of staring was visible in the traditional spectrum as well as the odd second sight he had been granted by Sed. A mental muscle that Alexander could not have identified before the moment he used it adjusted his vision like a knob tuning a radio. A low giggle escaped his lips as he spun his vision back and forth, indescribable colors and darknesses looping around like a madman's kaleidoscope.

 

They stopped at an oversized manhole cover that Awk lifted easily, despite the fact that it was probably half a ton or more of inch thick steel. The senti caught Alexander's wondering look and if anything his smile broadened, a manic gleam sparkling in his eyes. "Enhanced musculature was not our first birthright, but we claimed it after the need to fight became clear. A war cannot be waged well but by the most physical of specimens, regardless of the acuity they bring to the table."

 

Awk dropped through the hole and disappeared into darkness, his laughter stretching away laterally like a car zooming by. Sed picked up Alexander and held him tight in arms that Alexander realized were fully capable of squeezing him like an anaconda.