Sometime, mon, you just know the path you on not meant to be. Was like that when Boss Mon poke me with that big baton right there in front of all thems others.

“Treat me with respect, mon,” I say. “I come here all the way up the river from Nola to work for you. Mama pay scratch big time to get me here.”

“Got zero respect for you,” say Boss Mon. “You in Free City, now. Ain’t no Big Easy. You mine, Mamaboy, and when I say kiss my ass you better know where to kiss.”

Him poke me again. Bastard. I spits right in that Sergeant’s eye. Gwazil can punch me, take me to brig, but I spits in his eye again if I gets my chance.

Brig not entire mal. Is where I meet Mandy Raincrow, who filch can off some civvy barskive. Mandy okay for little girl, but she too young to be here talking all rambo hard-ass like some macho spesh4s. Too much vids. Too much hard knocks on that girl’s noggin. When I meet Mandy, I know is time to get gone. Time to get her gone too.

Mandy take to me right away. Say she like my Street, tho she don’t understand it much. Cause, I say, is part No’leans Street, part Matnik, part Rasta, part King’s bloody English. So you’s gots to know four different languages to understand Yanis Chatterjee. She laugh.

“I know a little Tsalagi. I could teach you, then you’d know five languages.” She wink at me and smile. Was the sweetest smile, that. Had to remind myself girl trèz-zan, too young for me. Ti Sè, I call her, so I not forget.

Thems mostly keep fis and nègs in separate blocks, but Level 2 brig overflow from wild weekend, so Ti Sè in the next cell to me down where they keep Politis in Sub 1. Big grey blanket hang there for her privacy, but she pay it no mind. Wags her naked ass at me, at the guards. I see thems like to get a piece of that.

“Ain’t you got no shame, Ti Sè?”

“What’s shame get you ‘cept a red face and a bad feeling? Mama says a girl’s got two things to survive, her wits and her pussy.”

I just shake my head at that. I not be judgmental—you gots to do what you needs to gets by—but what kind a lesson is that for a mama to teach her ti fi?

No’Leans exist no more. New No’Leans, where Mama live, once they call Baton Rouge. Some types call it that still, but most ones who lives there comes from old No’Leans, from times when the seas was rising up to drown her. Freeport, where Mama live on south end of New No’Leans where the great Mississip enter El Gulfo.

Daddy, that no good bastard, come from far Caribe isle of Matnik. His peeps origin vi Indus and Afrik and France and places like thems. Many ans past. On Matnik, big fire mountain go off fore I born, Daddy, no good bastard, flee to save him skin, tho some say not fire mountain but shenanigans make him skidattle. Not know for sure, but I bet on shenanigans, truly.

Sergeant call me Mamaboy. Spose some truth that. Never know my Daddy, just thems stories Mama tell. I not like the way she treated by him, sisters treated by him, not like the way Mandy treated by thems mens either. Men’s got no right to treat womens like that when they just trying to get by, take care of thems family, and make some kind of decent lifes for thems selves.

But thems worlds a hard place, mon. Even thems of you thinks you gots it easy, you just living on that big wave and that wave gonna take you under one day. All just passing. Counts on it.

©2012-2013, Duane Poncy

The post Degrees of Freedom – Chapter 2 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

The arena stinks of fear and human sweat. Hearts pump to the rhythm of pounding fists—whap whap whap—frenzied spectators cheer on their woman, their man, bring on the blood, they cry, bring on the blood.

Then the blood comes.

I’m not usually squeamish, but I turned away, nauseous. Not the blood, but the bloodlust, repelled me, sent my eyes wandering back into the frenetic crowd, settling on the middle-aged blonde woman, who, like me, seemed uninterested in the spectacle. The woman whose eyes I met appeared human, but I knew she was not. There was a familiarity in those eyes, even through all the filters, the filters of the Memories, the filters of time and distance, the filters of my own cryptic design.

I allowed myself to stare at her for too long. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me. I hoped not—she would be trouble. She had been trouble before, in an earlier time. If she recognized her old lover, she gave no clue.

I ignored her as I surveyed the crowd, searching for a certain special person, someone hungry enough to be loyal, at least for as long as the money flowed. Places like this drew those sorts, street-savvy hustlers who know their way around the alleys and back ways, who know the language of the city’s subcultures.

Earth is as backward and filthy a planet as any I’ve visited, and that includes more than I like to admit. But a fixer for the Convergence can expect to see the worst, I suppose, and I wasn’t just any fixer, I was the target of the influential House of Djeneh’s wrath, so I expected to be assigned the worst of the worst. I’ve tried to appeal to fairness from my superiors, but at home there is no chain of command, no court of justice, that is not under the sway of that venerable House.

I refuse to take responsibility for the death of Jovijh roh Djeneh. As his partner, I tried my best to have his back. But I’m not prescient, and as hard as we try to be thorough, we can only see the things in our line of vision. I can hire more eyes and ears, but, in the end, the only ones I can trust are those attached to my head—even these old friends have been known to betray me. The deaths I do take responsibility for will haunt me for the remainder of my days. Ironically, Jovijh played a role in that tragedy as well. Jovijh and Ren nar Qadj, the female we both loved.

I never expected to see her again, especially in a pisshole like this at the end of the universe.

A wild cheer from the crowd told me that someone had hit the floor, or that blood had been drawn, but I refused to look again at the sordid action in the ring. My eyes were fixed on a figure at the back of the arena, near the exit. A young, skinny, hyper-attentive male. His military khakis bore the insignia of New America Corporation. I could tell a runner when I saw one, his skittish eyes darting this way and that, looking for a face he could trust, a sanctuary. And this young fellow was running from just the right nastiness—the very organization I was assigned to investigate.

I made my way through the crowd, taking my time, so as not to draw attention to myself. As I neared, I knew that he had spotted me. Something in his eyes, his posture, revealed a man on the verge of flight. He couldn’t see or know about the detail of New America mercenaries lining up behind him in the dark hall.

“They’re waiting for you out there,” I said as I sidled up to him, blocking his path to the door.

“Who?” His frightened eyes sought a way past me.

“Your compatriots in uniform. The ones you are running from. They’re not going to let anyone out without checking them off their list, I think.”

“Fuck,” he said, barely audible.

“I can help you,” I said.

He looked me up and down, harumphed in derision. I am small in human terms, and as I appeared human to him I’m sure he was less than impressed with my physical presence.

“Nobody can help me, unless your some kind of fucking angel or something.” He spat on the concrete floor.

I pulled back my jacket, revealing the Skurge tucked into my belt. The Skurge, a human weapon used for crowd control, is very effective on its targets.

“You polis, mon?” His accent was distinct. Some sort of regional dialect.

“In a sense,” I said. “But I’m here to recruit you, not turn you over to those brutes.”

I could see a momentary flash of hope in his young eyes, quickly replaced by cynicism—a certainty, perhaps, that he was, as they say here, about to jump from the pot into the kettle.

“Shall we depart for some establishment more accommodating to conversation?” I said.

Without waiting for his reply, I removed the Skurge from my belt and sent a pulse down the hall, where the mercenaries were conveniently lined up like fish in a row—another quaint Earth idiom. The young hunters crumpled to the ground in physical distress, and the crowd behind us began to go wild with panic, agitated by the back-wave. I grabbed my stunned young soldier by the shirtsleeve and dragged him to the outside exit.

By the time we had burst out of that grimy warehouse into the open air, he had regained some sensibility, and we fled that place until we reached a commercial district, where we paused to catch our breathe and allow our vital systems to relax. The young man collapsed to the sidewalk outside a darkened establishment, leaning his back against the concrete wall. I joined him on the filthy ground, studying him for a moment. I had only been on Earth for a short time, my first experience with humans, but I could tell this was a very young one, barely out of the nest.

“I’m Mojh,” I said, using the shortened name given to me by another young human who had trouble pronouncing Mojhdjeh roh Sejh, my full name.

“Yanis,” he said. “Yanis Chatterjee. Thanks for getting me out of there, mon. Owe you big time.”

“You owe me nothing, Yanis. But I would like a few moments of your time, if you will.”

He returned to his feet. I could see his legs were still shaky. “No ‘fense, mon, I don’t work for no gwazil. Thanks anyway. Like I say, I owe you.”

A curious phrase, I thought. Another idiom. One with no meaning. I stood next to him, now, as he was about to walk away. I still had the Skurge in my palm, and I discreetly turned down the setting.

“I’m sorry,” I said as his legs buckled and he fell into a heap. “I really do need to talk to you.”

They call this place Free City, a name so thick with irony, it is as palpable as the smog which suffocates it. What humans call freedom is a slavery of the worst sort. It is the freedom to live in misery, whether it be the misery of poverty or the misery of the soul. This so-called “freedom of the individual” maintains its liberty at the expense of life itself.

Humanity’s failure to rise from this squalor has resulted in a planet on the verge of extinction. I have no special feelings, good or bad, about these creatures. I have met those with promise and those who are no more evolved than dogs who fight over rancid remains. I am sympathetic to those among the Guardians who believe it a kindness to end this misguided trajectory now, before it spreads. But I am a loyal servant of the Convergence. As such, I will accept the judgement of the Memories.

I helped Yanis to his feet when he began to regain consciousness. That was after I had removed his jacket and tossed it into a nearby receptacle. There was a tracking device of some sort in its fabric. I learned within hours of arriving on Earth to expect these espionage instruments everywhere. The humans seem oblivious to their ubiquitousness. I was desperate to get Yanis off the street, knowing his soldier friends would be out looking, not at all happy with the surprise I gave them at the boxing arena. We stumbled along the sidewalk for a time, his weight an awkward burden, when I saw a alcohol establishment open ahead of us. I dragged him, only half unwilling, inside to an unoccupied corner table. I ordered two beers from the attendant.

I noticed that Yanis was once again considering flight, and I put my hand firmly on his.

“Yanis, listen to me. If you run they will catch you. They won’t be happy with you. Do you understand?”

He nodded his head, pulling his hand away, but his eyes remained defiant.

“I’m willing to pay you well. I have a place you can stay where you will be safe from New America Corporation.”

“I tell you, I not work for cops.”

“I said I was like a cop. My job is investigating problems and fixing things. I’m a fixer.”

His eyes narrowed, his look mistrustful. “You not work for the mobs, eh? Not want that either.”

“No mobs.” I said, although unsure what a mob was in this context.

“Then, what kind of problems do you fix, fixer mon?”

I had to think about this. I didn’t want to further frighten him. “Let’s say some organization is behaving unethically—”

“—Unethically? What’s that?”

“Doing something they shouldn’t be doing.”

“Like piss in public, or something?”

“Like unprincipled cloning. For instance. Or slavery.”

He snorted. “What planet you from, mon?”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“What?”

“That I’m not from this world?”

He began to laugh too loudly, drawing attention to us. “You a hoot. Look, mon, ain’t we all just fucking slaves?”

I looked at him with a soupçon of respect. At least someone on this planet recognized the truth.

“I have one thing to ask if I make this deal with you,” said Yanis.

“That would be?”

“A girl, Mandy. I want to get her free from that place. She only thirteen. She got no business there being mercenary.”

“Is she your…” I struggled for the term. “…girlfriend?”

“She my friend,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can promise that, Yanis. We have to find her, first. And a way in. She has to want to come. We have to get to her before she is sent away to an active unit. These are only some of the factors to consider.”

“I find her. I convince her. Have to try, anyway, mon.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll try. But I can’t promise.”

“But we try? You swear?”

I nodded in affirmation. He seemed to be satisfied with that. He willingly followed me back to my apartment as I explained to him his role in my mission—reconnaissance and translation for the most part.

“You need soldier, I kick-ass. Mandy kick-ass, too.”

I smiled at his childish enthusiasm. The last thing I needed was a couple of kids playing heroics.

I settled Yanis on the couch, and retired to my room where I locked the door and relaxed my filters. This was my first time on a planet which hadn’t been thoroughly integrated into the Memories, and keeping personal filters up in public took its toll on my psyche. I was fatigued, mentally and physically.

I now had time to consider Ren nar Qadj. What could she possibly be doing here on Earth? Guardians and assimilationists had arrived, attracted to this new and controversial candidate world. I recalled her sympathy for the assimilationists during our early school years, but I believed that she had revised her opinions after entering the post-student world. By the time of Jovijh roh Djeneh’s death and the scandal of our affair, she had acquired a quite conventional outlook toward the integrity of the Convergence.

Of course, that was all prior to the Breach. Our opinions in those years were the passionate philosophical debates of youth. Now we have bridged the interstitial foam and what was once academic has become the stuff of consequence.

I lay awake for hours, trying to make some sense of it. But in the end I was unable to concoct a reasonable narrative that would bring my former lover here, to this place, at this time. Perhaps, one day, we will cross paths again, and I will ask her.

©2012-2013, Duane Poncy

The post Degrees of Freedom – Chapter 1 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

The post Hello world! appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

The Compound, perched like an aerie on the edge of La Mesa de Los Muertos, overlooked Ciudad Esparanza with its red adobe houses aligned along radiating arterials and an ever-widening grid of streets like a spider web spreading out from the river on either side, slightly larger to the west and north with their giant industrial complexes. La Mesa—which wasn’t really a mesa at all, but a geological shelf about 350 meters up the face of La Pared Magnifica—retreated beneath the pounding rain of La Cascada and emerged again, smaller, on the other side of the great falls.

Gabe Proctor gazed out the cafeteria window at the tumbling water and wondered if it might be possible to traverse behind the falls, from one side to another—a more tangible puzzle than the theoretical one he had spent most of his morning trying to solve. Since joining the cloister twelve years ago at the precocious age of nine, he had often imagined jumping the railing and exploring, but courage always fled before the act. It wasn’t the physical danger that held him back, but the social ostracism of breaking the rules.

His thoughts shifted subtly from a vague fear to guilt over his many evasions—work, correspondence with his mother, Arkady’s insistence that he ‘grow up’, and this morning’s more palpable object of retreat, the imminent arrival of the Sofias. The Sofias reminded him of the hypocrisy behind his own privileged existence; it insulted his humble origins, somehow, in a way he didn’t fully understand. Gabe’s view of the Sisters was no secret to his colleagues, many of whom shared it, but avoiding the benefactors was frowned upon by some of these same peers, who viewed schmoozing as a public duty.

Gabe slid open the glass doors to the veranda and casually strolled out to the south gardens, as far as possible from the Compound proper, where he could feel the thunder of the falls and the promise of its cool spray on his face. Without further consideration, lest he change his mind, he grabbed the rail and swung himself over, landing on firm ground. Only fifty meters to the falls, but each step he took toward the edge felt like a step toward himself, toward some sort of independence.

Once there, he was unprepared for the sheer power of the water, and the incredible distance to the basin floor. His stomach reeled, his balance shifted, and he stumbled back from the abyss. He waited for the vertigo to pass and for his knees to stop shaking. It was as thrilling as it was unexpected.

His eyes followed the water-eroded contour of the shelf where it disappeared behind the spray, leaving a path, just wide enough to walk upon. Now, it had suddenly become a challenge, and he moved forward cautiously. Behind the falls, centuries of water carved out an indentation deep into the soft cliff, leaving a small, muddy ledge dangerously sloping toward the precipice. The narrow passage, a half meter wide, hugged the wall, and Gabe edged along in small, prudent steps, keeping his eyes on his goal until the ground felt safe again beneath his feet. A brief moment of triumph.

Beyond the falls, the shelf widened out once more to fifteen meters or so, and extended another hundred meters before narrowing and vanishing back into the face of the cliff.  The ledge was flat and grassy, with a few small pines and scrub oaks clumped near the wall.

He located a comfortable spot, pushed aside the accumulated acorns and small pine cones, and laid back in the grass. He decided to call his new hideaway Ugatayi, Cherokee for “seed place.”

For the first time in years, Gabe thought about his childhood in the hills of eastern Oklahoma. They had been hard but happy days with his parents and extended family, Keetowah Cherokees, a tradition going back all the way to his famous outlaw ancestor, Zeke Proctor. His parents were academics and cultural traditionalists, but not in the least bit religious; for them, as for the scientists who had educated him, the scientific method was all the religion they needed. It was all the religion Gabe needed.

The memory of his arrival on Sweetland had a bitter taste—his father had died crossing over. He and his mother eventually settled in Echota with several other Cherokee families. Carla taught Earth History and tried to keep alive the Tsalagi language at the University of the South. But Gabe became a lost, lonely child. He made the University library his home, and spent every waking moment hiding behind a book. So, it was no surprise that he first said no when the scientists came from Esparanza to offer him an elite education at The Compound.

But his mother had been insistent. “You have been given a gift, Son,” she told him. “It is your responsibility to develop it and use it for the good of the people.”

“I can do it here in Echota, Mom.”

“You can do better than that, Son.”

And so it went, around and around until he relented and, swallowing his fears, left with a guide for the long river journey to Esparanza. Gabe received a letter from Mom every Primerdía without fail, but he missed her terribly, and he missed his father, and he missed the Cherokee hills of Oklahoma.

In his quarters, later that evening, Gabe began writing a proposal. He knew it had little chance of success—return to Earth was essentially limited to the Sofias and the inner circle of senior scientists—but the more he considered it, the more important it became in his mind. The difficulty would be in convincing the Directorate that a junior quantum biophysicist had a legitimate reason to cross over.

One thing that might get their attention, he thought, was his work on neuro-entanglement and his theory about the origins of the mysterious disease, popularly called the saudades. A number of suicides over the past several months were believed triggered by this condition, named by the tiny Galician immigrant community, who described it as a sort of heart sickness. Saudades was approaching pandemic dimensions in the Communities. The theory was a long shot—it wasn’t much more than a postulation at this stage—but if he could conduct tests on some of the tiny number of permanent returnees, then perhaps he could learn something.

There were so many buts and ifs, and late in the night Gabe nearly gave up on the whole idea. He felt his intention was dishonest on its face, that his true motive was to justify a return to his childhood home. He could almost hear Arkady’s scolding voice: “Grow up, Gabe, it’s not about you.”

His mentor and substitute father, department head, Dr. Arkady Zharkov, had not been easy on him over the years. Gabe had a lot of trouble with this growing up thing. He was a twenty-two year old who had been denied his childhood, and he wasn’t ready for the responsibility entailed in that whole concept. It wasn’t that he didn’t hear the constant voice of his mother insisting that he had a duty to use his gift. It wasn’t as if he was running away from his responsibility. Couldn’t he go home to Indian Country and do useful research at the same time?

Finally, still conflicted, he put down his pen and climbed into bed. He could decide all of this tomorrow.

Languishing in the warm afternoon sun, Gabe recalled the day his research began on the saudades. He had been lost in reverie, staring at his empty monitor display. Rebecca Yoshito cleared her throat behind him, and his heart jumped into his own. He turned with a sudden, awkward movement, knowing it was Rebecca, yet expecting Arkady to be standing there, peering over his shoulder, bearing down on him with those judgmental eyes. Caught daydreaming again.

“Sorry, Gabe. I didn’t mean to surprise you. If you have a minute, I’d like you to look at something, tell me what you think.”

Gabe took a deep, uneven breath, letting it out through pursed lips. “Rebecca. Of course. I was…I don’t know…expecting someone else.”

She gave him a quizzical look.

“Sorry,” she said. “I should have knocked. Shall we?”

Dr. Rebecca Yoshito was the lead scientist in the Quantum Neuroscience Unit, his immediate supervisor. She gestured  toward the door, and Gabe followed her into the Biophysics Lab, curious about her unexpected request. She led him to a monitor with a series of quantum analysis arrays displayed as graphs.

“What am I looking at?”

“Brain tissue analysis—a saudades suicide. This…” she pointed to one of the graphs, “is the marginal division at the caudomedial border of the neostriatum.”

Gabe let out a long breath. “Is that statistically possible? Nearly 25 percent of the particles are in the c-trien up state.”

“Statistically improbable. I’ve run the test three times now on different specimens. Same results, more of less, only with differing quark states.”

“Does this have something to do with entanglement?”

“I’m fairly sure. But the quantum states should cohere post transference. I don’t know what to make of this.”

“Something is causing entanglement to persist.” He mentally kicked himself—nothing like stating the obvious.

Rebecca looked thoughtful, and she nodded her head tentatively. “Yes. But  why do so many exhibit the same trien configuration?”

“Okay, what about multiple entanglement? You know, one particle entangled with multiple particles?”

“Intriguing thought. Any idea how transference might cause such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” Gabe admitted. “We know so little about the technology. Maybe the process rewires the brain in some way. That’s not inconceivable.”

“I think it might be worth pursuing,” said Rebecca. “Would you be interested in kicking this idea around for a few days? See if you have any insights?”

He really didn’t have anything else going at the moment. It was a new puzzle, and that was the thing he liked the most about science, solving those intractable riddles. How could he refuse?

That had been fourteen months ago and he continued to be obsessed with the idea of complex entanglement. Thoughts of Rebecca’s initial discovery and his own developing theory played over in his mind when Ellie Fontinot emerged from behind the veil of La Cascada. Gabe sat upright, brushing the oak branches from his face. Damn, he thought, how the hell did she find me here? A graduate fellow and doctoral candidate, Ellie was also the department gofer, and her appearance meant someone further up the food chain was seeking him out.

“How did you find me?” he complained, irritably.

“Don’t get your shorts in a twist, Gabe.” Ellie grinned at him. “Everybody knows you come over here to be alone. Even Arkady.”

“Arkady knows?” It was a bit of a let down to find that his little act of rebellion was common knowledge—and tolerated by Dr. Zharkov.

“You jump the rail right outside the cafeteria window, for crying out loud. And besides, there are perimeter cams.”

“I didn’t think of that,” he said, sheepishly.

“Well, Arkady wants to see you, pronto, and he has Dr. Yoshito in his office.”

Without another word, Ellie disappeared behind the falls and left Gabe sitting on the ground, contemplating the meaning of his summons. Were they going to chastise him over his foolishly inadequate proposal? His absence from the last interdisciplinary staff meeting, more likely.

Absentmindedly, he picked up the handful of seeds he had gathered and dropped them in a jar beside him in the sand. Then, he closed the lid and replaced the container in the cliffside nook where he stashed it. He wasn’t sure why he was collecting seeds, it just seemed right somehow, some habit from his childhood when the trees of Earth were dying, and everything seemed suddenly hopeless.

Gabe arrived at Arkady’s office to find an unexpected guest, a stranger, seated with Zharkov and Yoshito. He noted the woman’s red robes and backed toward the open door.

“Sorry, I must have made a mistake,” he said.

Arkady quickly motioned him inside. “Please close the door, Dr. Proctor.” Gabe winced—he hated that rhymey Doctor Proctor. It didn’t fit—he didn’t fit. “Gabe, I would like you to meet Sister Artema. Sister is Mother Hierarch of Esparanza. She has taken an interest in your…uhm…theory of complex entanglement.”

Gabe stood, mouth agape, unable to utter a word. They had even given it a name. He interpreted Arkady’s “uhm” however as a signal that the senior scientists weren’t entirely happy with the idea, and perhaps a bit miffed that the Sisters had somehow got wind of it. At least Arkady wasn’t happy.

“Please sit, Gabe. Sister needs to hear your ideas explained in lay terms.”

“Yeah…yes,” Gabe stammered, then froze once more. He felt totally incompetent.

“You are wondering where to begin,” Arkady offered, and Gabe nodded. “Sister only knows the basics of quantum theory, and very little of our recent research. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the spin states you have been investigating.”

Gabe felt a slight sense of relief. Explaining basics would give him some breathing space while he figured out how to talk about his ideas. Arkady probably thought he was doing Gabe a favor by providing an opportunity to think things through for a lay audience, but in truth, he wasn’t prepared for this yet. His little scheme was about to backfire horribly.

“As you may know,” Gabe began, “we have long been able to measure a large number of distinct quantum energy states. This is the heart of qunit-based computing developed on Earth in the mid twenty-twenties, and it was this development which enabled the d-gates and other teleportation devices which are responsible for our existence here on Sweetland.”

Was he being too basic? Rebecca Yoshito smiled at him, encouragingly, and Gabe relaxed a bit. He still had no idea what to say about his half-cocked theory.

He started into an explanation of quinary quantum technology when Sister Artema cleared her throat. “So, young man, what does all of this have to do with the saudades?”

Here we go.

“You know about network theory and how the brain’s neurological system works like a distributed network?”

Sister nodded. “I think I understand basic network theory and social organization—a little less about neurology.”

“That’s the general idea,” he said. “When we speak of the brain, however, we’re speaking of a vastly more complex network. We need sophisticated algorithms to model it accurately.”

“And the saudades?” the Sister prompted again.

“As you may know, animals teleported to Sweetland have also suffered the so-called saudades—something which resembles clinical depression on the surface. In our animal specimens this often results in physical wasting. Several months ago, Rebecca—Dr. Yoshito—discovered a strange anomaly in the neurological systems of these animals and in the samples from suicide victims. It’s…well…it’s at the quantum level.”

Gabe looked pleadingly at Rebecca, who came to his rescue. “While analyzing brain tissue, I found a large portion of the anomalies were in the MrD, one of several areas associated with memory.”

“What do you mean when you say they are at the quantum level?” asked Sister Artema.

Gabe picked it up. “When Dr. Yoshito observed particles from this region of the brain during quantum analysis, she should have seen a random distribution of observable quantum states. Instead, what she found was that nearly twenty-four percent of the particles we inspected seemed to be in an identical—presumably entangled—state.”

Sister Artema seemed puzzled. “I assume that twenty-four percent is unusual.”

“Those results are not statistically probable without some sort of additional factor which is missing from our current theory—”

“—meaning our old formulas are inadequate,” Rebecca finished. “As you can see, if these observations hold out, we may be looking at rethinking much of what we know about quantum biology. Gabe…” Rebecca was turning the conversation back to him, and he felt the blood draining from his face. This was it.

“I’m proposing that there is a particle X, a unique combination of entangled baryons which acts something like a distributive network—one particle entangled with many, which are, in turn, entangled with particles throughout the neural network. When we observe a particle which is entangled with particle X, we fix its state, and that, in turn, fixes the state of multiple particles entangled with particle X. It’s the only way I can bring the theory back in line with what we see.” He was floundering, but Sister Artema regarded him with a keen interest.

“So, young man, back to the saudades.”

“Well, this all leads me to conjecture that saudades is a result of this odd entanglement, probably associated with the teleport gates. As you know, on Sweetland we are all essentially quantum clones—except for the Borns—split at the quantum level. We expected these quantum states to cohere—that is, disentangle—once transference was complete. This doesn’t seem to be what’s happening—they are persistent. Without doing research on Earth, I have no way to determine if the effects are local to Sweetland, or if we remain connected to our—I’m not sure how to say this—our original components on Earth, which are no longer connected to living beings.”

That somehow felt creepy, and Gabe shuddered when he said it. He saw Arkady roll his eyes. His department head wasn’t buying it.

“It’s just a postulation,” he explained. “I need empirical data before I can even develop it into a proper theory. But it’s more than a stab in the dark, and the situation is critical.”

Sister Artema looked at him thoughtfully.

“We are in complete agreement there, Doctor. So, you are proposing a visit to Earth in order to obtain this empirical data?”

He looked from stone-faced Arkady to Rebecca, who nodded her encouragement.

“Yes,” he said. “If I could set up some experiments on the other side, I think it may help me obtain valuable data I need to confirm my hypothesis and further develop the theory.”

Sister Artema smiled a slight thin-lipped smile.

“Thank you, Doctor. I now have a much better understanding of your work.”

Gabe felt as though he were being dismissed, and looked to Arkady for confirmation.

“Thank you, Dr. Proctor,” said Arkady. “You may resume your…uh…valuable work.”

Upon returning to his quarters at the end of the day, Gabe discovered a letter in his mail slot. The envelope had the stamp of the Mentoring Office, and he knew before opening it that it was a student assignment. Brooding, he ripped back the envelope, but left the letter inside. He wondered if this was Arkady’s doing, some sort of revenge thing, before he remembered the previous autumn and the pretty young woman from the Mentoring Program, “We have a flock of new inductees coming next spring,” her smile melted him, “and we really need JSes to mentor them. You only have to commit to six months,” and he had signed something, he didn’t recall the details, he was too caught up in her beautiful brown eyes. He sighed. He didn’t quite understand his resistance to mentoring a new student, maybe that minuscule grain of hope he held out for going to Earth, and the unpleasant prospect of abandoning a student mid term.

He pulled the letter from its sleeve and opened it.

Dear Dr. Proctor:

The Mentoring Program is happy to announce the assignment of a new batch of students to their mentors for the coming term. Your new assignee, Raoul Carpenter, is a very promising young man, joining us from Salida del Sol, a tiny island village on Île de Paix. He is interested in the biology of indigenous species, but he desires special mentoring in quantum neuro-physics.

Sixteen year old Raoul is the first of several native born students to be entering The Compound over the next few years. Like Raoul, many of these students will arrive from rural communities, and will have only second-hand knowledge of Earth. For this reason, we thought they might relate better to younger scientists, like yourself, who have lived most of their lives on Sweetland.

Please contact me at your convenience to set up a mentoring schedule and an initial personal meeting with Raoul.

Thank you, Gabe. You are performing an invaluable service to this young man, and to the Communities.

Sincerely,

Marianna Dumas, 

Director of Placement

Gabe read over the letter a second time. He had been in the Communities most of his life, hadn’t he? And yet, his childhood in Oklahoma seemed so much more vivid to him, somehow. He wondered what it was like for the Borns. The boy wanted to study biology, the letter said, but Gabe didn’t think there was a Biology of Indigenous Species program. For just an instant, he wondered why not, before his mind drifted back, lazily, to the girl with brown eyes.

©2010-2013, Duane Poncy

The post Entanglement – Chapter 3 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

Sometimes in his dreams he lies in a field beneath an other-worldly sky, Bridge in his arms, smelling of earth and sex and the perfume of unfamiliar blossoms, her belly pregnant with their child. The sun is rising, casting a deep red glow across the eastern sky. “I’m so happy you decided to stay, Joe,” she says, as the purple shadows retreat into the morning twilight. Then he hears a whistling sound somewhere in the distance, gradually growing louder until it seems as though it’s in the room with him, and he is in the bedroom of his Portland apartment, and the woman in his arms is Allison, not Bridge, and then, once again, the world explodes around him.

Joe Larivee wakes screaming in terror, sweat pouring from his body. He snaps upright in bed, head between his trembling hands, trying to reassure himself.

The nightmares come with increased frequency. He seldom remembers anything about them afterward, just that cold, horrible fear. The terror itself he has no trouble identifying—it’s the terror he felt seven years ago, the night the bomb exploded in his apartment complex leaving Allison lifeless, her blood splattered everywhere, on the floor and the walls and the ceiling, on his naked arms holding her as the light left her eyes. That and the subsequent horror of witnessing countless friends and comrades slaughtered before his eyes, the aftermath of two bloody wars. He’s resigned himself to the nightmares.

But tonight, he awakens from that dream remembering Bridge before the wars, her small, emaciated body lying in his arms in a Seattle basement, the horrible pain and despair he had felt those many years ago. And, like a miracle, he had found her afterward again on Sweetland in her new body. Jessie had been there, too, and he had spent four short, exultant hours in that alien place before he was compelled to decide between that world and this.

Outside his window, the sun was about to rise on a clear, May morning, outlining Mt. Hood in orange-red haze. In the bathroom, he examined his face in the mirror, noting the haggard look, the sagging skin around his cheeks and jowl, his balding pate, graying at the edges. He felt as old and tired as he looked.

He took a shower to rid himself of the night sweat and dressed for work. Several appointments were scheduled this morning with various citizens’ committees concerned about the recent changes in the Ministry of Wellness. As the Minister’s Ombuds, he took the flack when unpopular decisions were made, but on the flip side he had extraordinary influence on whether those decisions stood or fell. It wasn’t a perfect system. After a decade of struggling with consensus decision-making—and its endless meetings—the people of Free Cascadia had finally given some of their democratic power over to the bureaucracy. But Free Cascadia, as a loose federation of city-states, held stubbornly to its libertarian-socialist ideals, and if pronouncements became too unpopular, the citizens would still toss Joe and the Minister and the whole bureaucracy out on its ear.

Joe arrived at the office early to find Melissa Monroe, Chair of Biological Research, in the break room sipping tea and nibbling on pieces of shredded pastry leftover from the previous day. He sat at the table across from the pretty, young, caramel-skinned woman.

“Joe,” she said. “Just the one I wanted to see. Do you have a moment?” There was hesitation in her voice—it was something personal, something she feared would be sensitive. What was the old phrase? Walking on eggshells.

“I always have time for you, Mel. I came in a bit early this morning, in any case—not sleeping well.”

“Nightmares, again?” Joe nodded, and Mel placed her hand on his. “I’m sorry, Joe.”

“It’s okay, Mel, really, they’re part of who I am, now, I think.”

It’s just, he stopped himself from saying, the dream is fading, and I don’t know if any of it—the death, the sacrifice—means anything, anymore. He looked into Mel’s sad, dark eyes and smiled. Jessie would be her age now, a grown woman. It had been the one downside of working with his daughter’s best friend, being reminded of Jessie every day. He had foreseen that problem when he recommended Mel to the Department Collective. She had turned out to be one of his most valuable colleagues. She had become something of a substitute daughter as well.

“Joe, are we still on for tonight? You know, Benson High…the Sisters?”

So, that was what the hesitation was all about. He had nearly forgotten her request, made several days ago—wanted to forget, actually—but he had promised. He nodded unenthusiastically, unable to completely banish the scowl.

“Joe, this will be good for you. I knew I’d have to convince you. You need to be around people who understand. We’re not the only ones who have loved ones on Sweetland. There are millions of us. We can support one another.”

It’s the religion crap I can’t tolerate, he wanted to scream. But who was he to deny Mel her comfort. The Temple of New Life wasn’t the only thing that bothered him; after all these years, he no longer believed in Sweetland, either. With no letters or news in seventeen years, nothing about it had become real for him; the Jessie he knew was gone, and he was resigned to the fact that he would never see her again. What did it matter if there was a planet out there, across some vast incommunicable distance, if it was inaccessible, if his daughter was lost to him, if he had no way of knowing whether she was safe or not, alive or not?

Joe watched from his office window as Mel discon’d from her node, gathered up her bag and jacket, and made her way down the corridor in his direction. He hoped somehow she had changed her mind, but when she arrived, he knew he had no such luck. He gave her a forced smile as she took his arm, and together they walked out into the Portland rain.

The old high school gymnasium was packed when they arrived. Mel led Joe to a side door where they could push their way to the front of the stage. Inside, a current of apprehension charged the crowd. People talked in intensive whispers. He picked up fragments, but the gist of it eluded him.

“What’s the excitement?”

“A rumor’s going around about a messenger from Sweetland. We’re hoping to learn more tonight. Everyone’s nervous because the only way that could be possible is if they somehow have a d-gate online.”

“Or they’re spiriting them over from those New America d-gates in the US.” His sarcasm was thick. Too thick.

Mel put her hand on his arm. “It’s hard, Joe, but if you could just suspend disbelief for the evening. What you experienced on Sweetland was real, damn it.”

For just an instant, it came back to him, those four hours he had spent with Jessie and Bridge so long ago under that strange sky, the alien air smelling of exotic spice. He had been pushing it away for so long; and what if it was true; what if he could somehow talk to Jessie again?

“I wish it were that easy, Mel. I don’t understand why all of this has to be wrapped up in religious mysticism.”

“Because people have been burned by science. Science can’t fix everything—and science can’t explain everything.”

“I can’t believe you’re attacking science, Mel.”

“Joe, I’m not attacking science. I’m attacking historical excess. I’m attacking the conceit that science can discover an answer to everything. All of the mathematics and quantum physics will never figure out how something can be created out of nothing. So, what is that eternal something, Joe? What is it?”

“I don’t know, Mel. I don’t know that it matters.”

“The thing is, for millions of people, it does matter. They need to believe they know what that thing is. It’s called faith.”

“But, you’re a scientist, Mel. Why do you need faith?”

Mel didn’t answer, and he decided to just let it be. There was no point in working himself up any further.

A woman wearing a red robe approached the podium, and a murmur of excitement filled the room. The woman was exceptionally tall, with blond hair and striking, chiseled features. Joe guessed she was about his own age, fifty-five or so. She tapped the microphone to verify it was on.

“She’s a Sofia…the red robe,” Mel’s tone of reverence gave him a chill.

“Good evening,” said the woman. “I am Sister Norea. I am here this evening to bring good news, and to give a warning. But first, let us have an invocation of the spirit.”

Here we go, thought Joe. He looked around uncomfortably as chanting voices filled the hall, drowning out the angry and impatient grumbles of the less-that-true believers.

Holy Spirit, Mother of Chaos, descend upon us,

Illuminate us with the True Light of the Pleroma. 

Science through the back door; is that what Mel was trying to say?  If so, this is what happens when science becomes religion—theatre, mystification, ritual, hierarchical order. No different from any other religion. He began to fervently wish he hadn’t come. It all seemed so wrong, and he felt a wave of embarrassment for being here—and especially for the enthralled Mel.

He closed his eyes, attempting to focus on something else, anything else. He imagined Jessie, thirty years old, living in a forest community tens of millions of light years distant. Somehow he could almost see her there with her children—his grandchildren. Yes, he wanted it to be true, but no trick of his mind could make him believe it was true. When he dreams, though, he dreams it is true. Jessie walks along a cobblestone street in a strange city, and there is a horrible sense of apprehension and loss in the air. The children. Where are the children? She looks back over her shoulder at the forest; the strange sun is setting, and it is the end of…something.

“…and now, the good news.” Sister Norea’s voice drifted through his reverie as Mel gently nudged him. “In five weeks, a Messenger will arrive from Sweetland. A young man born in the village of Meadow Springs will arrive in Free City, bringing important news—news so monumental, in fact, that the Temple is organizing a pilgrimage. I encourage every one of you who can to be there. We have reserved two meglev coaches to Free City, but we expect them to be booked up quickly.”

The crowd hushed for several seconds before a murmur rolled across the auditorium as the audience realized the meaning of her words. “It’s true. A d-gate,” someone shouted. “They have a working d-gate.”

Before an angry mood could escalate, Sister Norea held up her hand, signaling that she wasn’t finished. “It’s true. Scientists in the Communities have resurrected a few of the d-gates. And the rumors you have heard for years is also true. New America Corporation has secretly maintained large d-gates in East Missouri, Tennessee and Georgia. New America Corporation is building an empire in Sweetland’s West. It’s population is now many times that of the Communities. It is possible that, within a few months, a war will commence for Sweetland. The Sisters and Brothers of The Temple have tried our best to protect our fledgling offspring, but the enemy may soon overwhelm us.”

Pandemonium broke out in the hall, and Sister Norea waited as the mood of the crowd built to a seething anger.

“War,” someone shouted. “If they want war, we’ll give them war.”

“But there is hope,” the Sister’s amplified voice boomed over the crowd. “There is a plan.”

“What plan, Sister?” someone else shouted.

“You will find your answers in Free City. The Mother be with you.”

A phalange of guards took position around Sister Norea as she stepped away from the microphone and into the now tumultuous mob. The crowd shoved and shouted, some surging toward the Sister, but the guards, efficient and intimidating, held them at bay.

Clearly divided, the mass began to argue among themselves. “The Sisters have been lying to us.” “Why are they keeping us apart?” “Damned Americans, still trying to control us all…”

“Meadow Springs, Joe!” Mel shouted in his ear as they attempted to retreat toward the side door. “It’s someone who knows Jessie.”

Joe looked at Mel in astonishment. He didn’t know whether to be humored by the show he had just watched or furious at the shameless manipulation. This kind of talk was bound to stir up new anger against the U.S. and the New America Corporation. Relations were strained enough already. What purpose would it serve?

Grim faced, Sister Norea moved through the crowd slowly, flanked by her guards. When she moved in his direction, Joe deliberately turned away.

“Joe Larivee,” someone called, and he looked back to see a colleague at the Ministry standing at the Sister’s side.  “Joe, I would like you to meet Sister Norea.”

The guards enveloped Joe and Mel in their protective circle. No getting out of it, now.

“How do you do, Sister? It seems you’ve stirred up quite a row this evening.”

“Mr. Larivee, the pleasure is mine. I’m afraid it was unavoidable.” The Sister hesitated for a moment before continuing, “I heard you would be here this evening. I need to speak to you.”

Joe turned to Mel, who looked away evasively. He felt betrayed. They had set him up—but why?

“Of course. The Ministry’s ears are always available.”

“This isn’t concerning the Office of the Ombuds, Mr. Larivee. It’s a private matter.”

“Private? I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain. Is there somewhere we can escape the crowd?”

Mel pointed out the hall door, and the three of them, still surrounded by the guards, worked their way to the edge of the auditorium.

“Please join us, Ms. Monroe,” said Sister Norea when Mel stopped short at the door. “You will also be interested in what I have to say.”

The hall was empty except for a few stray individuals seeking the toilets. The din of the crowd inside was muted, but not Joe’s curiosity.

“So, Sister, what is this about?”

“Mr. Larivee, we need you and Ms. Monroe to come to Free City.”

“It’s not possible,” Joe said. “My job…I couldn’t.”

“I believe you will find the way easier than you anticipate. Please consider it.”

“Why, Sister? I am not one of your followers. Why should I do that?”

“Because,” Sister Norea said, “the Messenger is your grandson.”

©2010-2013, Duane Poncy

The post Entanglement – Chapter 2 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

Molly Whitedeer swung her leg wildly, missing the soldier’s head, but she managed to pull free of the strong hand gripping her ankle. She scrambled up the slope toward her nephew, Joey, who was now some distance above her near the top of the hill. Dislodged by the boy’s boots, chunks of crumbled shale showered down upon her, making her own flight difficult. But the falling rock suggested a tactic, and as she climbed, she began to kick shale into the face of her pursuer, who quickly fell behind, cursing as he dodged the hail of stone.

When she looked up again, her nephew had disappeared over the edge. Molly renewed her effort, striking ferociously at the loose shale, but the soldier had pulled down his visor and no longer bothered to avoid the debris. He headed straight up the hill at her. She switched tactics, again, focussing once more on the climb.

When the top of the incline was within a few centimeters, two pairs of strong arms emerged from nowhere to seize her and drag her roughly the remaining way up and over the edge of the embankment. Military boots, camouflage trousers—she had been outflanked.

Joey was in the grip of two other burly boys in uniform, one of whom held a hand over Joey’s mouth. The soldier let go, and the twelve-year-old screamed in rage. “Let us go. You have no right.”

“Why are you doing this?” demanded Molly. “What do you want from us?”

“Orders,” said a young soldiers who appeared to be in charge. “Ms. Cheng said to keep her grandson safe.”

Molly’s breathing stopped. Jolene Cheng. This hadn’t been a random attack at all. What did Cheng want with Joey? Why now, after all these years?

“We were perfectly safe until you came along,” said Molly, attempting to project all of the calm self-assurance she could muster.

“Might be, Miss, but Miz Cheng wants to see you just the same.”

Molly didn’t respond. Her father’s former wife was an ambitious woman who had never indicated any interest in the children, even in her own daughter, Jessie, Molly’s half sister.

Molly had never met her father. He wasn’t aware of her existence, as far as she knew. But his absence sometimes felt like a void in her core, fed only by Jessie’s wistful recollections, and she thought about him now. If only she could somehow go to Earth and bring him here, the little girl in her imagined, he would set things right. He would find a way to cure Mama’s sickness and stop this horrible war which was coming as surely as the sun would rise in the morning.

There were seven soldiers altogether, six men and one woman, nearly indistinguishable with their shaved heads and hard-set faces. The leader was called Private Cooper. None of them appeared older than Molly herself. Borns, she thought. They were Borns, like she and Joey, and that would explain why they moved so confidently through the forest.

After searching their backpacks, the soldiers snapped electronic anklets on them and warned them not to wander more than 30 meters from Private Cooper, unless they were prepared to experience “excruciating pain”. They were escorted by two soldiers in the rear and one on either side, with Cooper in the lead. Escape was out of the question.

The brisk downhill pace picked up and Private Cooper sent the woman and one of the men ahead down the canyon. His eyes reflected panic. Molly didn’t know what to make of it, but the soldiers were in a rush. She walked in brisk silence, listening to the sound of tramping boots and snapping branches. The trees near the western transition zone were what Mama called pines, although Molly knew that pines were Earth trees, so they couldn’t actually be pines or firs or anything like that. The party pushed through the underbrush until it reached the trough of the canyon where a small creek ran to the west. They turned west to follow it downstream.

When she thought the soldiers sufficiently distracted, she said, “I’m sorry, Joey. I didn’t think they would come this far in.”

“They’re Borns, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

She had counted on the fact that most of the settlers who had crossed over from Earth eighteen years ago, before they shut down the gates, had an unnatural fear of the deep Sweetland forest. It was an ominous sign if the New Americans were inducting Borns into the military. In a few years, when there were enough of them, they would be a great threat to the Communities, which had no army to defend itself—and until recently hadn’t needed one.

The radio on Cooper’s belt crackled, and a broken voice chirped for several seconds in an excited but unintelligible garble.

“Damn,” said Cooper. He halted the procession with a raised hand and motioned the other soldiers to gather around. “That was Roz. They found Sarge. He’s dead just like them others.”

“We told him he should let us handle this,” said another young man.

Molly listened, alarmed. “What killed him?”

The soldiers merely stared at her. Then Cooper said, “Whatever it is they see and we don’t, Miss. Some call ‘em Indians, some say enemy soldiers, but whatever it was ran through a whole outpost two weeks ago, killed every last man up there.”

They carried the body of the man they called Sarge down the canyon on a stretcher constructed from his canvas tent and loaded it into a flying machine that looked like a dragonfly with a fat belly. She had seen these so-called helicopters in books, but the airworthiness of the actual thing seemed strangely improbable.

The treeless landscape felt alien. The barren earth expanded as far as she could see into the western horizon, and it seemed to her, for the first time in a visceral way, that the universe was infinite, and she small and insignificant.

The big rotors began to turn, churning up dust, and one of the soldiers took Joey by the elbow and pulled him toward the helicopter. Molly tried to run after him, but Cooper clamped her wrist in his strong, unyielding hand.  Halfway there, Joey twisted away from his escort and shouted, “Molly!” before being grabbed by a second soldier. The men, one on each side, dragged him the remainder of the way to the helicopter as he continued to shout out her name.

She shook with helpless rage. “I’ll come and get you Joey, I promise. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Furious but ineffective, Molly struggled against Cooper’s infrangible grip. She kicked out at him with a viciousness that surprised her. But he nimbly avoided her boot and laughed. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?”

“Where are they taking my nephew?” Her plea was a terrible howl of pain. “I need to be with him. I’m responsible for him.”

“You ain’t responsible any longer, Miss. We’re going to take care of him, now.”

She raged again before collapsing in sobs, her flaccid weight breaking Cooper’s grip as she crumpled to the ground. There was nothing left she could do. They would take Joey away to Jolene Cheng, and they would do with her whatever they planned to do. She had no weapon, no tool, no strategy. She was just a village girl from Meadow Springs, unprepared for the world beyond the forest. The only thing she had to hold onto was this thing—this knot of determination—building inside her.

Just then the helicopter lifted off, taking Joey from her reach.

Molly waited in misery, sprawled on the dusty ground, until, at last, a green military truck with New America Corporation, Special Security Forces painted on its door arrived, and Private Cooper escorted her into the cab. The driver stayed behind with the unit as Cooper climbed in behind the wheel.

“Better buckle up, Miss. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

In the reflection of the truck window, Molly examined the haggard, brown-skinned girl glaring back at her with her hollow eyes and her shock of short, black hair, worry lines creasing her forehead. The girl in the window was someone she had never met before, a visitor from a harsher world, some mean future stealing up behind her, a future she didn’t want to face just yet.

She closed her eyes again, found herself lulled into uneasy cycles of sleep and consciousness, catalyzed by the heat of the sun, the jarring of the rough road, the boredom of endless kilometers of bleak, featureless terrain. By the time the highway smoothed and the scenery began to change, she had achieved an inner calm of sorts. Whatever she wanted with Joey, Jolene Cheng wasn’t likely to harm him—or Molly herself. The whole thing wasn’t fair, but fairness had nothing to do with the workings of the universe, did it?

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked Cooper.

“We’re going to Port Harvest, someone’ll pick you up.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know, maybe Ms. Cheng, herself, or someone who works for her.”

“Why won’t they let me go with Joey if we’re both going to end up in the same place?” Or maybe we aren’t going to end up together at all.

“I guess someone figured you’d be less trouble separated.” Cooper grinned. “Don’t worry, Miss, you’ll both be taken good care of.”

But I’m not free, am I? She wanted to scream, but didn’t.

Alongside the highway to the south, a turbulent river cut a deep channel through a flat prairie landscape, which was abundant in tall, yellow grasses rippling in the breeze. Substantial herds of animals grazed on this lavish food supply. They resembled something she had seen in the old books, but she couldn’t put a name to them.

“What are they?” she asked Cooper.

“Ain’t you never seen cows before?” said Cooper.

“No. They’re from Earth, aren’t they?” Cattle. They were called cattle, not cows. They were bovines.

“That’s what they tell me. They sure make good burgers.”

“Burgers?”

“Yeah. Great big fat sandwiches. That’s what they grow them for.”

A queasy feeling moved into her upper gut.

“They raise them to eat?”

Cooper laughed.

“You sure are a strange one. Are all you Bols like that?”

“We don’t eat animals in my home. And we aren’t bowls, whatever you mean by that.”

“You’re a Bolivarian ain’t you?”

Molly laughed.

“That’s an old Earth term. It doesn’t mean anything here. Do they teach you that we’re Bolivarians?”

“Well, what are you then?”

“The Communities don’t have one simple ideology. We’re a pluralistic democracy.”

Cooper didn’t say anything more, and his face grew a scowl as he drove into the afternoon sun. In the space of his continuing silence, Molly closed her eyes once more and escaped back into sleep.

Sunset faded into night, and they came to a town, a long, sprawling affair with odd-looking, rectangular buildings, flashing lights, ugly signs everywhere. Eat Here. Motel—Rent for the Evening or by the Hour. Hottest Dancing Girls South of the Pecos. Cooper pulled the truck up beneath a plain, painted sign that read simply Donna’s Truck Stop. Cooper rapped on the back window of the cab.

“Roz,” he shouted. “Time for dinner.”

A shaven-headed soldier stumbled from the rear of the truck, stretching and yawning. Molly recognized her as one of her captors.

“This is Roz,” said Cooper. “We got a bunk in back. She’s been sleeping ’cause she’s driving night shift. You’ll ride up front with her.”

Roz grinned. “That would be a good idea, unless you want that horndog all over you.”

Cooper’s coarse laughter made Molly blush.

Donna’s Truck Stop turned out to be a café with nothing on the menu Molly could stomach but some greasy potatoes and a salad, which consisted of a pile of tasteless leaves, topped with disgustingly sweet, thick dressing. As the trio ate in silence, Molly picked at her food and regarded Roz, wondering if the girl had a little more intelligence and personality than Cooper. It couldn’t be worse, in any case.

After dinner Cooper clambered into the back as promised. Molly rode along in silence, the slow, bitter anger once again eating away at her insides as she agonized about Joey and about her sister, Jessie, who would soon be frantic with worry when she and Joey failed to return to Meadow Springs.

Molly’s focus soon turned back to Roz. She studied the girl in attentive detail, her pretty face and chiseled profile stark beneath her shaved head, driving in stoic silence, hands tightly gripping the wheel, eyes fixed on the road. Just doing my job, Ma’am.

Molly laughed quietly at the girl’s hard seriousness, which reminded her of old Dad Kohl when he was trying to pull a math solution out of his hat. A bit constipated.

“What?” Roz snapped.

Molly felt her face flush.

“I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just you seem so…focused.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“No, you just reminded me of someone is all.”

“Well, I guess I’ve been a little uptight.” Roz expelled a blast of air from her lungs. “This whole assignment kind of blows.”

Molly shook with sudden, unexpected fury. I guess you’d do something about it, if you wanted.

Dark road and night prairie tumbled behind them as the truck rattled down the interminable highway. Molly regarded Roz again, her face etched in the dim light of a rising moon.

“Do you ever think about why we Borns are different from the others?”

“Not really,” Roz said.

“But you know we’re different, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so. That’s why they sent us into the forest to get you, because the old guys are scared shitless. Not without reason, mind you.”

She didn’t have to mention Sarge for Molly to understand. She had been trying to put that incident of Sarge out of her mind. It didn’t fit into her picture of the world, of the forest, of the evidence she had gathered with her own senses during her seventeen years of life.

“About that. Nothing like that ever happens in the Communities. The adults are afraid of the forest, but no one has ever reported a massacre or mysterious deaths in the forest, as far as I know.”

“The immigrants see something. Out on the frontier, some of the old military guys like Sarge say they’ve watched squads of tall, dark-skinned soldiers or guerrillas moving across the hillsides at dusk. The ranchers around here call them Indians or something. Nobody’s paid much attention until recently.”

With a small stab of sadness, Molly thought about her mother’s elusive “Indians”.

“These things are real for them.”

“I hate to think about this too much,” said Roz, “but if hallucinations can kill them, can’t they kill us too? Just because we don’t see them…I mean those soldiers at Outpost 47 had real injuries, they didn’t just die of fright.”

Molly considered this. Maybe she should be taking these words more seriously, but it felt as though some old lifelong friend was being accused by a stranger of being a serial killer. She didn’t want to believe it, she couldn’t make it fit into her reality, and yet that old friend always did act a little strangely.

“Another thing that makes them different from us is the forgetting,” said Molly. “Do you know what I mean?”

“You mean like when we tell them how we see things, they can’t remember it for more than fifteen minutes? I always thought that was something that just happened when you got older.”

“That’s what I thought too, when I was a kid. There was this tree we called a mushroom tree, and they were everywhere around Meadow Springs. It’s trunk was soft and spongy, and it gave off a musty odor. It didn’t have leaves or needles, but its long, thick stems reached up into the sky, and there was something like a pod on the end. Now, you can’t find these plants anywhere in the Communities. When I was older, I asked my sister, Jessie, about them, and she laughed and told me I had a vivid imagination.”

“Yeah,” said Roz. “It’s weird how things changed and they all forgot. I remember these bright green things, like tiny parachutes, floating through Port Harvest every spring on the wind. The old fishermen called them flying jellies. Now there are green bugs called dragonflies, Earth bugs they say, the exact same color of green, but the jellies don’t come through anymore and the fishermen don’t even know what we’re talking about when we mention jellies. It’s like the old people have amnesia or something.”

“There were other things like that in Meadow Springs,” said Molly, “other plants and trees I remember, and small forest animals, but when I talk to the adults about them, they tell they never existed. I know kids have intense imaginations, but—here’s the thing—my sister is an ecologist, her work is to classify the native species. I remember her studying these things and writing notes on a notepad she carried with her everywhere. If I could find those notes I would hold them up to her face and say, See, but I think she burned her all her notes or something.”

“They don’t just forget, they want to forget,” said Roz.

“Yeah. A few years ago, I began to read Earth biology books, and I believe almost everything here—the plants and animals and everything—is from Earth, except a few spices and root plants we use in the Communities, like breadroot and nunaroot, which we’ve eaten forever.”

“Nunaroot?”

“Jessie makes the best nunaroot stew.” Molly felt a sudden homesickness and she realized she might not see Meadow Springs again. She thought about the forest she loved and how it had changed over the years. “Do you know how long it takes a forest to grow?”

Roz shook her head. “Not very long, from what I’ve seen. You know that outpost that got overrun, there were trees growing right through the buildings. We found one of those soldiers wedged in a branch five meters off the ground.”

“An Earth tree takes several years to grow that tall.”

Roz was quiet for minute before she said, “So, you’re saying they’re not really Earth trees?”

“Yeah.”

A light spread across the girl’s face.

“What do you think they are?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. But I think the forest or the world or whatever is not really our enemy, maybe we just need to understand it.”

Roz looked dubious.

“I hope you’re right about that.”

She is standing in a meadow in the familiar forest of her childhood, a forest of mushroom trees and faerie brush and sweet mistol, its succulent fruit exuding an overwhelming perfume that leaves her intoxicated. Juola, the girl who walks beside her, is tall and thin, not just thin in body, but thin in density, as though you could feel the morning breeze blowing through her. Juola speaks in normal, everyday Linguish, but Molly can’t quite grasp the meaning in the words. They have come to a clearing, and across the clearing a man stands in the shadows. The man reaches a hand toward them, and she knows suddenly who he is.

“Father,” she says.

She attempts to move toward him, hand outstretched, mirroring his own, but some invisible barrier is holding her back.

Juola continues to speak to her as though her father was not there at all. The girl is saying something about how the past determines the future through our memories and dreams, and how we must remember accurately, or our dreams will be flawed, our future misguided.

“And that is the purpose of the Memories,” says Juola. “Now, the time for sleeping is over.”

Molly jerked awake, troubled by the recurring dream. She thought about it for a long time as the truck rumbled along the rough highway, Roz silent beside her. Some part of her longed for the childhood simplicity she remembered, or thought she remembered, because she was no longer as certain about her memories. A brief sadness threatened to take her places she did not want to go. She felt trapped in a harsh present, and neither the past nor the future offered any sort of comfort.

Tears would do her no good now.

She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out her journal, a small book covered in sun-faded blue cloth. Utilizing the diminishing light of day, she recorded the details of her dream, then she began a letter to her father, a letter that had no hope of ever reaching him:

Dear Father,

You have never met me, nor I you, but you have been in my heart since I’ve been a small child. I have always dreamed that one day we would meet. My sister, Jessie, has told me a thousand-and-one stories about you. Although Mama never speaks of you, I can see your reflection in her sadness. I think her heart was broken when she finally realized you weren’t crossing over. No one here ever heard from you again, so we can only imagine about your life now. I like to think that you are happy, that things, somehow, have changed on Earth.

Molly choked up and stopped writing. She put away her pen and journal and watched the sunset until the last color had gone from the sky. Then she closed her eyes and escaped once again into sleep.

© 2010-2013, Duane Poncy

The post Entanglement – Chapter 1 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

Sargent Kolvin’s eyes shift from the left screen to the right and back again, too rapidly for his mind to process the alternating images. Slow down, he tells himself. Breathe deeply. He recognizes the anxiety attack, he’s suffered them before under stress. The problem is hyperventilation, more than anything. It’s this forest, something about it rattles him, something that doesn’t seem to bother the younger soldiers.

He focuses on monitor one, which tracks his squad as they spread out up the canyon. The surveillance drone, with its motion-sensitive cameras, hovers silently eight meters above the lead man, high enough to follow the movement of the two targets, and to keep an accurate position on each of the seven men in the squad. They were boys really, just turned seventeen and fearless, the way young boys are. That would be sixteen Earth years, he thinks, too young to be out here on their own. The targets are not armed, as far as he knows, but it isn’t the targets that worry him, it’s the hostiles in the forest, whomever or whatever attacked Outpost 47 two weeks ago. That’s where monitor two comes in—it watches his ass. But the drones have their limitations, and that magnifies his fear.

The forward camera on monitor one shifts rapidly, showing movement up a deep ravine. He touches his com switch. “Target to your right, thirty degrees, forty-five meters. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” comes the reply. “Closing in on Target.”

“Once you have them, get back here pronto, Private,” he says.

“Will do. Almost have them, Sarge.”

On the lower half of monitor one, he watches seven blue dots, representing his men, converge on the two red dots. Once they capture them, it will take another twenty minutes for the squad to return to base, and forty-five minutes more to clear out of the woods. That’s too damned long. Monitor two comes to sudden life, and he sucks in a deep breath. The cameras swivel upward into the treetops, and high in the branches a shape moves slightly, its outline too vague to identify. It moves once more, just a hair, and the sun glints off something long and metallic.

“Zoom in,” he says as the panic returns. The camera pulls the image closer—it looks like an Egyptian AP70. He’d seen a number of these anti-personnel launchers during his service in the Sinai Wars, too many to ever forget.

“Artillery,” he says under his breath, but it’s too late. He hears the shots and watches the camera follow two AP rounds hurtling toward him in slo-mo. Funny I see them so clearly, he thinks. They should have been a blur at 500 kilometers per hour. Paralyzed now by fear, he watches the miniature grenades rip through the roof of his canopy and explode in a circus of color, dispatching scores of nano smart bombs into the air to snuff out life within a fifty meter circumference. He doesn’t feel or see the minuscule projectiles entering his body to deliver their peaceful death.

©2009 – 2013, Duane Poncy

The post Entanglement – Prologue appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

The ancient TriMet bus lurched forward without warning, throwing Joe Larivee into the passenger standing behind him, upending Joe’s bag and spilling its contents. “Sorry,” he said as he watched his sandwich skid down the aisle toward the back of the bus. A skinny bare arm, red and pocked with oozing sores, reached out and snatched it.

Shit, no lunch today. He should have left it in the fridge at work. No checks had come on payday, the Agency was out of funds, and he was out of food stamps. And out of creds with the burrito man on Division, not that Arturo had had any edible tortillas anymore.

Joe squatted to retrieve his belongings from the floor. As he rose, the bus pitched, and he braced himself on the back of the nearest seat. The SmartSpots above the bus windows flashed simultaneously in red, white, and blue. Make her happy tonight. Guaranteed. The spammers had struck again. “One-hundred-twenty-second and Stark,” announced the prerecorded voice. “This stop sponsored by Tommy Tonkin Bicycles by Toyota.”

An old woman rose with difficulty from the seat next to him and hobbled from the bus. Joe sat in her place. A large gaping wound in the plastic seat pinched and poked his buttocks each time the bus encountered a pothole. The young man beside him gripped a ragged backpack tightly against his chest. He looked frantic, his eyes darting between the window and the front of the bus, as though searching for an escape. Joe’s heart skipped. What’s in the backpack? Why is this boy so scared? That was what he was, just a boy with a few scraggly hairs jutting from his chin. Settle down, there’s a hundred or more reasons this guy might be scared. He looked too much like a jackrabbit to be a ’cider.

In front of him, a woman wearing buds jerked her head rhythmically to some fast-paced music. Tweaking. She was likely younger than he, but her teeth were gone, and her face was scarred with the pockmarks of an old-fashioned meth addict. Trash-tweaker. Not so many of those anymore, with all the new designer drugs. Plenty of his customers were recovered tweakers or had merely moved on to a drug more subtle in its ravages. This one wasn’t using a common methamphetamine. He suspected a derivative called black trash, or death, due to the speed with which it destroyed the mind and body. Some called it a suicide drug. Joe couldn’t imagine taking that exit. Why not just throw yourself in front of a bus, for God’s sake?

Next to the tweaker a young woman with wrap-around sunglasses, her head turned toward the aisle, moved her lips almost imperceptibly, her throat pulsing. He had a vague idea about the wraparounds: popular new hardware that tapped into the simulated worlds of the grid. Joe didn’t have much knowledge about that type of thing. Just another way for the advertisers to get into your head and sell you crap.

He sighed and pulled a file folder from his bag, “Connie Velasques” written in pencil on the tab. Beneath the name, the ghosts of Mary Snider, Tomas Sylvan, Letitia Jackson, partially erased; erased just enough so that a stranger would not recognize them. But Joe did. And he knew their children, and their ex-spouses and lovers, their job history, their drug habits, and their pain.

“You’ve got to remove yourself from all that.” Susan Miller’s voice echoed from some cubicle of memory. “You’ve got to mind your boundaries, Joe. You’re not responsible for the mess these people’s lives are in. If you hold on to all this suffering, you’ll drown in it.” That was five years ago, his first week on the job. Whatever became of Susie? One day, she just didn’t show. It seemed like a recurring script. Many new caseworkers didn’t last six months, but even old-timers like Susie disappeared without notice, worn out, unable to heed their own advice.

He returned to Connie’s folder. A routine check-in today to find out how Connie was managing at her new job, how the children were faring, if she was keeping clean. Connie had just kicked a seven-year heroin habit when his supervisors assigned her to Joe in January. She had done exceptionally well over the past nine months. School had started last week, so daycare would be less of a money sink while Connie looked for work or performed the occasional temp job. He had high hopes for her.

But Joe’s heart sank when the bus pulled up in front of the apartment building—the ambulance, the blue and red flashing lights of police cars, a knot of officers standing around an open door. The door to Connie’s apartment.

Another one of those fucking days.

Joe tucked Connie’s folder back into his bag and stepped off the bus. He hated talking to the cops. Uncle Louis had been a cop, and Joe knew a little too much of what went on in the back room. He didn’t like most of the young uniforms, just back from war, with their arrogance and their disgust for these poor people trying to survive on the broken streets—as if this wasn’t a battlefield, too. But here the land mines were everywhere, not just underfoot.

At least he was in popo territory and he didn’t have to deal with the clean-n-safes. The private security firms hired by the local business associations were Portland’s solution to social and economic breakdown. For them, he held another level of disdain altogether. The poor, less-organized East County businesses were unable to hire their own private police force. There would be anarchy here when privatization hit and the PPD was finally phased out.

Across the street, a blackwater stood sentry at the westbound MAX stop, clutching a semiautomatic. Even from a block and a half away, Joe could see the nervousness in his young face and the uncertainty of his footing. Waiting commuters eyed him with skittish diffidence.

Joe approached the popos with caution, flashing his identity badge to let them know that he worked for the Agency. He deliberately set out on a path close to the building so he could peer in the window as he passed.

“You got business here?” said the officer at Connie’s door.

“I’m her caseworker.” Joe looked askance through the window. Inside, Connie slumped on a couch, a rubber tourniquet wrapped around her arm, the hypodermic needle still dangling from her flesh; on the coffee table the lighter, the spoon.

“You were her caseworker,” said the cop. “Your docket just got cleared of one problem. This one’s gone to Sweetland, permanently.”

“She’s got kids at school,” Joe said, adding asshole under his breath.

“Well, I guess you get a paycheck then, after all.”

Joe swallowed his anger and nodded.

“You should go take care of them kids, now,” said the young cop, dismissing him.

Don’t argue. Arguing just gets you in jail. Or disappeared.

“I’ll do that. Thanks, officer.”

He retreated to the bus stop across the street, weaving his way carefully through the bicycle traffic. Out of nowhere, a group of young boys dashed past. A bottle flew through the air, landing at the feet of the blackwater, who raised his gun, threatening. Adrenalin rushed through his body as he ran the remaining distance across the bus lane. His heart raced as he waited for a bus to pull up to the stop, a wait that seemed interminably long. He stepped into the vehicle, and two of the young troublemakers broke from the pack, boarding behind him, taking the seat across the aisle.

Joe clenched his jaw and nervously wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Did you see that blackwater’s face?” one kid whispered excitedly.

“Yeah, chuck,” said the other. “He was friggin’ ready to piss his pants.”

“You boys should be a little more cautious,” admonished the sixtyish woman behind them.

“Whatever, Grandma,” said the first, but they became silent and left the bus after two more stops.

Joe exhaled slowly.

The General Dynamics Church of Christ Building housed the Agency in its basement. The chapel had been converted to corporate offices, but a few die-hard church members still met in an attic room. After losing their tax exemption, the church had succumbed grudgingly to the realities of Privatization. Soon the Agency would follow. In two more years, there would be no public sector, just the so-called free market; police, libraries, schools, churches, social services, all under the dictates of private profit. Joe could see the havoc being wreaked by the Free Market gods. There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing anyone could do. It was what they called a done deal.

A deep despair consumed him as he entered the basement and walked along the dim, shabby hall, its light green paint peeling and scuffed by the shoes of hundreds of weary people resting their feet against the wall as they waited for assistance—help that often never came. He slunk past Christi, the receptionist, signed in, and bee-lined to his cubicle to verify that Children’s Services Corp employees were picking up Connie’s kids. Then he discon’d and put in his buds, surfing to his favorite gridcast channel to zone out on some soothing music. No one would know, or care.

“Today,” said the news announcer,“the war in sub-Saharan Africa has taken a new turn. Nigerian federal troops, advancing on rebel camps, met no resistance. The camps were empty, claimed startled commanders. They reportedly found no insurgents, yet inside the tents, arms and ammunition waited, along with some meager food supplies and a handful of field computers. One British observer reported that, ‘it seemed as though the mothership came along and beamed them up. Very eerie…’ Meanwhile, in New York, to no one’s surprise, Governor Chelsea Clinton announced that she would run for President in the coming election. At a news conference announcing her candidacy, she stressed the need to combat domestic disorder…”

Joe removed the buds, put his head between his hands. All the children—and the missing rebels were children, because it’s the children who fight the wars, who go missing—like the children of his clients, never heard from again.

“To hell with this,” he whispered, almost silently. “To hell with it,” again, shouting this time, not caring who heard. He picked up a broken cup he used as a pencil container and threw it across his cubicle with a violence that startled him.

“I’m going home,” he announced to the office, making sure that everyone could hear. “Fuck this!”

Joe coasted to the curb and dismounted, pressed his bike through the vendors, hawkers, and hustlers who daily set up shop on the sidewalks, up to his apartment building bicycle corral. From Jessie’s window emanated the faint but unmistakable blue glow of her VJ screen. He clearly remembered going into her room after she left this morning to make sure everything was shut off. It was routine because Jessie inevitably left something on, and although he lectured her about the cost of electricity and climate change and the threat of further rationing, nothing seemed to get through to her. It wasn’t defiance, just forgetfulness. She had been like that since she was a little girl. Her Grandma Amy used to tease her, “You’d forget your head if it weren’t screwed on.”

So, what was Jessie doing home on a school day? Inside the apartment, all was quiet, except for the murmured voice emerging from Jessie’s room. He put down his bag and crossed the room to her bedroom door, gently pushing it open. Jessie leaned back in her chair, involved in some fantasy world, talking to the air, wearing a pair of those wrap-around sunglasses like the ones worn by the woman on the bus.

“Jessie.” No answer.

“Jessie,” a little louder.

No acknowledgement. Joe walked up behind her and removed the glasses. Jessie jumped and wheeled around in her chair.

“God, Dad. You scared the pee wadding out of me. What are you doing home so early?”

“The question is, Jessie, what are you doing home so early?”

He saw the look, the evasive movement of her eyes to the right; Jessie was about to lie. Instead of stopping her, he would let her spin her story. He would gently challenge her until she became caught up in her own web. It never failed; the fourteen-year-old was a terrible liar.

“I wasn’t feeling good.”

“So why aren’t you in bed?”

“Well, I wasn’t feeling that bad.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Just some friends.” The Look again.

“And what friends would these be?”

“Pox and Cedar,” she said. Names he’d not heard before.

“So, why aren’t Pox and Cedar in school? Are they sick, too?”

“I think maybe they’re in a different time-zone or something.”

“Jessie,” Joe lit into her, “how often have I told you that people you meet online are not your friends? You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them. They might not be kids at all. They might be rapists or terrorists or human traffickers. You don’t know what they are. Don’t you get that?”

She looked as if she were ready to cry or scream at him, Joe couldn’t tell which. It could go either way these days, but to his surprise she did neither. “I’m sorry, Dad. The kids told me about this sim on New Life. It’s really glitch. Everyone’s doing it.”

“So, where did you get the new hardware?” He held up the glasses.

“They’re citspecs, Dad,” she said. “You are so living in the past. They were selling them in the mall at SimWorld. They only cost $20.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. How can they sell them for so little?”

“I think the idea is to get people into the sims so they shop and buy stuff on New Life.”

New Life was the latest generation of life sims on the grid, not so much a game as a simulated world. For a couple of years now it had been the buzz among the Agency’s customers and some of his coworkers. Joe examined the glasses more closely and found they were slightly thicker than normal sunglasses with a tiny reset switch and two removable modules on the inside of the frame. They had buds built into the earpiece, otherwise they seemed quite ordinary. He grunted and put them down on her desk. Escapism. But probably no worse than some of the grid games kids played, or those stupid reality shows. Maybe he was being too harsh with Jessie.

“Jessie,” he said, “I just want you to be safe. You know that, right? Just don’t let anyone know your real name or where you live, okay? Be careful. And promise me you won’t skip any more school for this nonsense.”

“I won’t, Dad,” she said. “I promise.”

Joe closed the door and retreated to the kitchen. He pulled a beer from the fridge. He intended to zone out on the couch for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t want to think about work, or Connie Velasques, or Jessie, or the state of the world. He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep.

It was nearly 6 o’clock when Joe woke, his back stiff from sleeping on the couch. Jessie had covered him with one of Amy’s frayed old quilts from the closet. She could be a sweet and thoughtful girl. He probably should give her some slack.

Joe stood and stretched, a faint headache lingering in his forehead. He closed his eyes momentarily and rubbed his temples. He folded the quilt with care, laying it across the back of the sofa, then he washed, shaved, and changed his clothes. This morning he would prepare a real family breakfast. Maybe a couple of those rare and precious eggs he had saved in the fridge and some toast made from what passed for bread these days.

He took out the eggs and placed them on the counter. Then he pulled out the fred, the little infrared cooker stashed away at the back of the counter. He hardly ever used it anymore, except to reheat leftovers; most of their meals came in self-heating cartons these days. He set the table before knocking on Jessie’s door. “Hey, little girl, breakfast is cooking.”

No sound came from the room, so he pushed the door open. Jessie was sprawled on top of her bed, sound asleep. He watched her for a long moment with something that felt a little like sadness. A pretty young woman with her mother’s long, dark hair. She was growing up too fast. In a few years, he would be alone, and what would that be like? He didn’t want to think about it just now. He surveyed her room, still in transition from a little girl’s. Teddy bears and childhood games mingled with posters of pop stars and the paraphernalia of teenagers. On her desk, the screen of her virtual journal glowed. He walked over to turn the VJ off, and he picked up her gamer glasses. What did she call them? Sit specks? He pronounced it slowly in his mind. Then, with a little twinge of voyeuristic guilt, he attempted to peer into her world, but he saw only darkness. He placed the citspecs gently back on her desk. He noticed a slip of scratch paper there, “Gretel deVoid” and “Old Paris” written on it in Jessie’s scrawl.

It looked like some RPG. He smiled with nostalgia, trying to remember being a teenager, engulfed in online role playing games in the middle of the night. Things really hadn’t changed that much. He shut down the VJ and roused Jessie from bed. She seemed more groggy than usual.

“Up too late playing on the grid again,” he complained.

“Oh, Dad, do I have to get up?”

“I’ve fixed breakfast, believe it or not.”

She buried her head beneath her pillow, pulling the quilt over her. “I choose not to believe,” came the muffled reply.

“I have a riddle for you,” he said. “What has five bare toes, and is connected to a silly bone?”

Jessie giggled, and pulled her exposed foot under the covers. “Don’t you dare, Dad! I’m not a kid anymore!”

“Okay, sweetie. There’ll be no feet tickling today. But come have breakfast with the old man.”

“You know, civilized people consider tickling a form of barbaric torture.”

“Just preparing you for life,” he quipped. He regretted the words before they left his lips, but he couldn’t stop them. They sounded cruel and cynical and whining.

Jessie must have sensed his despair, because she sat up in bed and took his hand.

“Better times are coming, Daddy,” she said. “Don’t you always say that?”

“Yeah, sweetie,” he said, “better times will come.”

But, Joe couldn’t see how that was possible. Maybe in another life.

©2008 – 2011, Duane Poncy

The post Skyrmion – Chapter 3 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

She hasn’t placed the tap yet. But someone or something is already pinging her, searching for a chink where a tracer can be installed. She tries to not let it bother her as she waits for Maxi to scan the server code for a hook.

“Were in,” says Maxi. “Here comes the flood, hon.”

Data flashes across her VR overlay. Intermediate level code. She’ll have to get Stan to examine it more closely, but even with her relatively untrained eyes she makes out some of the references: grid nodes; high security government and corporate pipes; references to something called Sweetland; more references to Sweetland; something called Skyrmion. Code words?

“Tracer,” says Maxi with urgency.

Shit. She’s waited too long. She shuts down the tap, and a tingle of electricity shoots up her spine, a vague shock that ends at the base of her skull. Her head feels as though it’s about to burst, and pixels scatter into a rainbow of static. Without warning she’s sitting on her virtual office floor, her real-life head throbbing.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Something trig’d your mods, hon.” says Maxi in her syrupy Appalachian drawl. “Tried to boot you right out the back door, so I pulled you.”

The gorgeous, middle-aged brunette with a no-nonsense demeanor stands in the doorway behind Claire Deluna’s desk. Claire’s assistant, Maxine Magnolia, custom-programmed by KT Willow, one of the best hackers on the planet, more sophisticated than your typical out-of-the-box concierge, specially coded for the PI biz, a package with access to a number of corporate, law enforcement, and DHS databases. If anyone can protect her butt, it’s Maxi.

“How deep did they go?”

“Might have compromised your alias.”

“Shit. Any origin data?”

“Negative, darlin’.”

“But we captured good code?”

“Couple hundred k.”

“Okay, Maxi. I need you to trace those pipes. Find out everything we can about Mitologías and Futures, LLC in connection with something called Sweetland. Do a level six matrix search. Any possible relationship at all to our investigation, I want to know what we’re looking at here.”

“I’ll get right on it, darlin’. You know Maxi never sleeps.” Maxi winks and disappears through her door.

It was supposed to be a quickie, a simple in and out, a parent corporation checking up on its kids; that’s what Bigshot told her, that’s what she knew how to do best. But she feared the job had transformed into something else, something more difficult and dangerous. The damn pipes passing through the Bolivarian firewalls had trig’d some phantom feelers before she was even close. Not by a mile.

The Mitologías SA backend connected to a complex maze of pipes carrying data between a number of discreet servers. Some or most of those servers were behind the so-called Jalapeño Firewall, a tricky gate to crash. She’d copied the node information for Maxi to google and decided on a faucet capture. The faucet—the point where quantum encrypted data translated into readable code—is really the only option, unless you can find a leaky joint to exploit. These guys would have impeccable plumbing. They would know about her presence the instant she intercepted the quantum encryption key and rerouted the datastream. That was a given. But how did they get that tracer on her so damned fast? And how the hell did they trig her mods to send a shockwave through her body?

She hadn’t seen that coming.

When she had started out five years ago, a mere girl, she had expected backend snooping to be like the glamorous depictions in those cyber sci-fi movies back at the Turn, but it happened there were no whirling datastreams or fancy eye candy taking up unnecessary bandwidth here, no complex avatars slowing down the code; that was gamer fantasy, and this was the work world.  She was no code expert, but she had a special skill, an intuitive edge that helped her to access the gateways, recognize patterns, and eventually find the data she needed. It was the adrenalin factor, though, the excitement of waiting in the shadows watching, slipping in undetected to ferret out secrets, knowing you might be caught in a bad place, that made the game fun.

Now she was no longer so sure of herself. She had been in hard places before, but her targets had been small players, not transnational corporations.

She made her way to her old, battered forties couch, with stuffing spilling from the tear in the cushion. She had spent hours getting every detail of her office just right, including stains, paper-strewn desk, overflowing ashtray, half-empty whiskey bottle. Her clients, those few who actually came to her, always got a good laugh from the decor. Reclining on the couch, she immersed herself in Red Harvest, a Dashiell Hammett novel she had recently begun.

She really needed to make an escape from all of this. But where? How?

She awoke to see Maxi lounging in the client chair eyeing her. Maxi took a long sensual drag on her cigarette, releasing the smoke slowly, allowing it to billow out around her face. On some level the image of her sophisticated assistant laying back in the comfortable overstuffed chair, a cigarette between her full red lips, gave her an almost sexual pleasure. A hundred years of advertising and popular culture had done its work.

“Hey, hon,” said Maxi, exhaling a geyser of smoke toward the ceiling. “I have that research you asked for.”

“Thanks, Maxi. Go on.”

“Two of those nodes are data servers based in the Alliance of Bolivarian States. Two other pipes terminate on a sim farm called New Patagonia. Lots of typical tourist stuff there; it’s a bit of a New Life showcase for the Bolivarians. One of the nodes belongs to the Universidad de Simon Bolivar School of Science.”

“A research conduit?”

“Could be, hon. The other one is something called the Temple of New Life. It’s sim address is 54 Calle Tierradulce, New Patagonia. Data flow analysis suggests this node may be connected to its own agricultural complex, bigger than the New Patagonia server farm itself. The address is evidently a public interface, but I would guess most of the infrastructure is in the undernets.”

“Where does the final pipe go?”

“The end node belongs to D-Brane Technologies.”

That made sense. DBT was a Mitologías sister company, and the two had been the object of a months long bidding war between Futures, LLC, and the New America Corporation. Futures had paid the Bolivarians nearly twenty-five billion for controlling interest. D-Brane kept its products tightly under wraps, and they had two products on the market—both were citspecs mods which worked in tandem and used nano-neurostimulators to excite areas of the brain that triggered physical sensation. The tech had been out there for some time in the R & Ds, capable of engaging all of the senses in virtual reality, no longer just sight and sound, but smell, taste, touch, and programmable, synthetic drug-like experiences, some of it already actuated in the more affluent sims. The mods had become very popular among certain groups of young people over the past several months.

“What about Sweetland?”

“The term Sweetland came up a number of times.”

“Context?”

“All over the map, darlin’. The term has been in popular use over the past year, possibly the result of a guerrilla marketing campaign. The name is also being used for a number of disparate product lines. Rumors began circulating about six months ago concerning the nature of the new Mitologías product, code-name Sweetland.”

Claire raised her eyebrows.

“There’s speculation that its a new sim technology or some sort of nanotech breakthrough. But the bulk of the Sweetland buzz seems to be around this Temple of New Life.”

“What is this temple thing? An RPG? A religious organization?”

“Maybe both—the religious element is definitely there.”  Maxi examined her cuticles, then eyeballed Claire. “I found something else interesting. There seems to be an unusual correlation between the Temple of New Life and missing persons in the FBI database. The undernets are full of speculation that the Temple might be a cult of some kind.”

“No shit?” This was a complication she didn’t particularly care to hear.

Maxi batted her big eyelashes. “And I got very unusual hits on some of these Temple of New Life names, darlin’.”

“Yes?”

“We have clusters of recently missing or deceased. Over a thousand altogether out of some ten thousand names. That’s a lot, hon; way outside statistical probability. Most of them are young—under thirty. You have about two dozen from Phoenix, most of them reported missing or at the morgue. You have nearly an equal number of missing in both Denver and Portland, but no correlations at all to reported deaths. That’s why I say clusters. And here’s the really interesting thing—I found this article in The Albuquerque Journal. I quote: Seven bodies were found today in an abandoned storage facility. All of the youths, between fourteen and twenty-one years of age, were wearing cyber immersion technology devices called citspecs. They appeared to have died of starvation and dehydration. Police are investigating a possible suicide cult. Hon…” Maxi hesitated.

“Yeah, Maxi?”

“Hon, four of the seven correlated with that Temple list and all were wearing DBT mods, according to F.B.I. memos.”

The feeling returned—the sinking fear that she might be onto something she was unprepared to handle.

“Make an appointment with Andy Stephens, would you? I’ll go see Mickey Nines first thing tomorrow morning. I’m out of here.”

Bridge Whitedeer transluced her ocs and sighed. Some cautionary tic in her neural pathways nagged at her—your in way over your head, girl. But sheer exhaustion quashed the nascent protest; it had been a hard day, and it was time to put Claire Deluna to bed.

She always regretted leaving her avatar behind: that life for this. For this…what?

She gazed out her window over the darkening waters of what had once been the edge of downtown Seattle. Most of the buildings south of Pioneer Square remained, rising like drowned ghosts from the sea. A few people still lived inside these doomed towers. At high tide, they exited through windows just above the waterline and rode one of the taxi dinghies or homemade rafts created from plastic bottles and other floating garbage. When the tide dropped low, some donned waders and slogged their way to higher ground. At night, you could see their dim lights flickering in the windows. Other buildings leaned and twisted, undermined by the rising water which had flooded the Seattle underground and eroded their footing. Many older brick structures were clearly crumbling, and the city engineers declared that Smith Tower would likely go within the next few years. The skyscrapers further north still stood untouched by the advancing shoreline.

Seattle, protected by the Sound and the Olympic Peninsula from the worst effects of the rising ocean, had fared much better than other cities, such as San Francisco, where the strong tides pushed constantly at the western hillsides, pulling the old structures, and the hills themselves, into the sea.

Bridge hunched her thin shoulders and pushed her short black hair back from her eyes with scrawny fingers. She considered her reflection in the window, absentmindedly teasing the mods embedded like tiny jewels behind her right ear. She looked nothing like her alter ego, Claire Deluna. She imagined Claire was actually attractive, with her cute red hair, and breasts you could actually see. A girl with more moxie and flair than her real life puppet master. More suitable as a private eye. Bridge could never be an investigator in the real life world; who would possibly take her seriously? And yet, Claire Deluna was the best. Even someone like Mr. Bigshot knew that.

She continued to look out the window for a time, watching the lights and listening. The drumming had begun, its tribal rhythm calling out from the homeless enclaves and the drowned buildings, as it had every night since the beginning of summer. It seemed more insistent now as the weather grew wet and inhospitable. There was something indescribably comforting in it.

Finally, Bridge crossed the floor to her tiny refrigerator, grabbed a half-eaten sandwich. She sat at her little kitchen table and took a bite. Then she put her head down on the table and fell asleep.

©2008-2011, Duane Poncy

The post Skyrmion – Chapter 2 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.

The thing’s breath, hot and foul, touched the back of her neck. Muscles tensed as adrenalin kicked in. The predator’s shadow, crouched and still, hung just off to the right. She tried to judge the distance, but the other shadow, a little further out and behind, complicated the calculation. What had they taught her? Triangulate. She sensed the vircat tense, its movement nearly imperceptible. Perspiration rolled down her forehead. Time to decide. Now. She jumped, whirled around, swinging her long knife point forward toward the vircat. Miscalculation. The thing’s huge claw came down on her shoulder with a terrible ripping sound, and Gretel deVoid fell hard under the full weight of the cat.

The vircat disappeared, and she scrambled back to her feet. “Damn, I don’t think I’ll ever get this right.”

“You’re doing just fine, Gretel.” Toxine’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “Your calculations just need to come more quickly. Practice. Shall we try again?”

“I can’t. I have homework tonight.” She couldn’t believe she was saying this, homework had never decided her life before. But this was different, this homework meant something.

“Very well,” said Toxine, as the nighttime forest with its two moons faded, and the classroom at Universidad de Simon Bolivar rezzed around them. Toxine looked at Gretel approvingly. “You are a brave girl, you know, going off to a new world, forging into the wilderness.”

Gretel scanned the floor, self-conscious.

“How are things going with your dad?” Toxine asked.

“I haven’t told him yet. I still haven’t figured out how to get through his stubborn wall.”

“That will come. Now off to your homework, eh?”

“Thanks, Toxine.”

Jessie Larivee, aka Gretel deVoid, zoned from the grid and sighed. A silence had grown between herself and her father. She had let it go too long. Now, when she played the scenario in her head, she could hear his voice saying, “It’s impossible, you can’t get to another planet on the grid,” or “You’re only fourteen. You’re too young to make these kinds of decisions,” or maybe he would stand slack-jawed and silent before sending her off to her room. How could she possibly convince Joe Larivee, the proud luddite, that yes, you can go to another world, and no, I’m not too young, and yes, I would like you to go with me, Dad, but whatever you’re decision, it won’t deter me.

Talking to Jolene would be so much easier. Jessie had neither seen nor heard from her mother in nearly six years—how could the woman possibly care one way or another? But Toxine had urged her to speak with both of them. “You know,” she said, “you may be leaving them forever. You need to have closure.”

Toxine was at Masters Level and had taken Jessie on as protégé, helping her through the tough exam preparation. The Sweetland sim was as close to the real thing as a sim could be, and with the new citspec mods, you could smell the odors and feel the ground beneath your feet as though it was some solid, real thing. Even the claws of the vircat ripping through her shoulder left a lingering discomfort; not pain, exactly, but more like the scratchy stinging that comes when you reach barehanded through a blackberry bramble. Most sims had yet to be programmed for the new mods, but it was only a matter of time before almost every sim on the grid would be hyper-sensed.

Pox Americano, Toxine’s younger brother, claimed to have worked on the Sweetland sim, but Jessie didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She thought he might be a bit of a braggart. “You should try the glitch sex script I wrote for the Sweetland sim, cherie,” he had said earlier in the day in his cute Quebecois accent, and she laughed at him.

“I suppose you want to try it out with me?”

“You know, as the designer, I could show you how to get the most out of it.”

“A product demonstration. How romantic,” she replied, laughing. “Well, it so happens that I plan to remain a virgin until I marry.”

“You are a virgin?” He pretended astonishment. “What a pity.”

Jessie shook herself out of an evolving fantasy. Dinner. Homework. She had a bunch of homework for her immigration classes. Hormones would have to wait.

“Jessie,” Dad called from the living room, “please take out the recycling.”

“In a minute.” Jessie shut down the grid and waited for his objection. It came like lightning.

“Now.”

“Recycling on the Titanic,” she mumbled. When you’re drowning, why the hell are you bothering to sort the garbage?

She knew her futile resistance was an old habit from childhood when occasionally she got out of some onerous task or another. No more. And yet she couldn’t help herself. “You have a stubborn gene,” Grandma Amy used to say. “Got it from your Grandpa.”

Jessie sighed and with heavy feet marched to the kitchen nook where the recycling containers spilled over onto the floor. She rounded up the stray cartons and bottles and fit them into the bins as best she could, leaving a scattered few behind. Then she carried them down the hall to the back door. The grimy door to the alley stairway was reinforced with thick steel plates, and the lock disengaged with a heavy thunk as she turned the knob. She dragged the bins out onto the landing.

The mist that had been falling earlier in the day had subsided, and the gray Portland sky showed signs of clearing. The alley was wet, and standing pools of rainwater filled the depressions in the aging pavement. From the shadows came a voice she recognized, but the words were muddled and incoherent. She heard a rustling sound at the garbage dumpster. If not for the familiar mumbling cadence, Jessie might have thought rats were scuttling through the dumpster. She stopped at the top of the stairs so she wouldn’t frighten him. “Alan,” she called, “are you hungry?”

“Jessie,” came the pleading reply, “I’m looking for something to eat. You got something for me to eat?”

She still couldn’t see him, but the edge of his cart protruded from behind the fence that shielded the dumpster from the street. She set the recycling bins down at the foot of the steps. “If you’ll put these bins out for me, I’ll go get something for you.”

She returned to the apartment and tiptoed into the kitchen. Dad was oblivious on the couch. Nearly every evening, he came home and fell asleep or stared off into space. He might as well be a gridhead. At least on the grid, you could learn new things and interact with people.

She opened the fridge quietly. She couldn’t let him know about Alan. She had promised. Alan was one of Joe’s old school buddies. She had met him for the first time when when she was eight, shortly before he had joined the army and gone to fight in Africa. He had visited several times that year, and to a little girl he had seemed a kind, easy-going, witty young man. He always stayed late in those days, talking into the night with Joe, Frank and Amy. They would argue about capitalism and the wars and whether it was better to work inside the system or out, whether or not joining the military was morally defensible. Amy attempted to dissuade Alan from signing up, arguing that war is never ethically defensible, but Alan insisted that his options were limited.

“What am I going to do if I don’t join up. I got no work. I got no skills. I got no education. The army will pay for college.”

“It’s a chimera, Alan,” Amy said, prophetically. “I’ve seen those kids coming back, too damaged to go to school or hold down a job.”

In the end Amy lost the argument and Alan shipped out to Azania. Then about six months ago he had shown up again at their door while Joe was away at work. Alan had lost all of his quick-witted charm, and seemed dull and confused. “I been out of work,” he had mumbled. “I thought maybe Joe could help me—it’s a mistake. Don’t let Joe to see me like this. Please don’t tell him, Jess. I should never have come here. Promise me.”

Jessie had promised. It had been easy at the time, because she had a secret too, she had been skipping school, and it was a whole lot easier to just forget the whole thing than face getting caught. Then less than a month later she saw Alan in the alley, rummaging through the dumpster, and she offered him some food. She suspected that Alan was schizophrenic and maybe mentally impaired, but he seemed harmless enough. He began coming around on recycle days, and Jessie had taken to feeding him leftovers, if they had them, heating them in the fred. Sometimes she would take him a new carton of beans or a peanut butter sandwich. Then they would sit on the bottom step and talk while he ate.

There were leftovers from yesterday, and Jessie heated the sautéed veggies with tofu on brown rice, careful to remove it before the fred’s alarm sounded. It was some disgusting pre-packaged dinner, therefore uneaten. She was well aware of the irony—that the world was starving, that her friend Alan was malnourished, that there were days at the end of every month when she and her dad also went without, and yet here she stood, spoiled and picky.

“Got a nice hot dinner for you tonight, Alan,” she said as she descended the stairs. The recycle bins were still at the bottom of the steps where she left them. She would have to remind him.

“Alan.” No answer. Had he moved on down the alley?

“Just put it on the step, Jessie.” The voice came finally from behind the dumpster. “I’ll get it in a minute.”

Something was wrong. Alan didn’t just come around to eat. His loneliness was as acute as his hunger. If he hadn’t told her as much, she could see it in his face, hear it in his attempts to hold her attention. Many nights she awkwardly found herself interrupting him, saying, “Goodnight, Alan. Dad’s going to get worried about me.”

She put the dinner on the step and picked up one of the bins, carrying it around to the pick-up area. Alan stood in the shadows, unmoving, except for his hand, which he raised to cover his face. But not before she caught sight of the split eyelid and swollen, mangled lip. One side of his face bore a huge purple contusion.

“Alan, what happened to you?”

“I don’t want you to see me like this, Jessie. I don’t want to scare you.”

“What happened to you, Alan?”

“Some fucking gestapos beat me up. They kicked me in the face. They said that I was sleeping in their place. But I been sleeping there, Jessie. I been sleeping there since summer, fucking bastards.” Alan punched a fist in the air above his head, staring wildly at some phantom opponent. His voice was intense, but barely above a whisper. “Who had a fucking election and elected you fucking assholes dictator of the fucking planet? I didn’t have no chance. The bastards come down on me like a fucking blitzkrieg from the USA fucking air force. Like I was some fucking peasant in fucking Afghanistan or something. Jesus Christ, take me to Sweetland. Jesus Christ.”

Jessie stepped back. She had never seen him so angry before. “Take it easy, Alan,” she croaked weakly. He wrapped his arms around his torso and said, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” over and over, rocking on his heels until the rhythm of his mantra seemed to calm him.

Finally, Jessie extended her hand. “Come. Dinner’s getting cold.”

He refused to take her hand, but he followed her to the back steps. She brushed away the flies and pushed the plate at him. He grabbed it and began shoveling the now-cold food into his mouth, wincing at the pain from his injured face. She made a few attempts at conversation, but he stared down the alley blankly, his eyes glazed.

Then he vomited. The dinner he had just eaten spewed over the apartment stairs, mixed with blood and reeking of alcohol. “God, Alan, you need to get some medical help.”

“No, no. Leeches won’t help me. They’re leeches. Suck your blood dry. That’s what they do. They suck you until you’re dead. Fucking hospitals. Fucking doctors. Just wanna go to Sweetland. Can you help me go to Sweetland, Jessie?” His eyes were glassed over in a teary film.

“Alan, let me talk to Dad—you need help.”

“No, Jessie. Don’t tell Joe I been here. You promised. Remember.”

Jessie’s stomach knotted, and she was becoming nauseous from the stench. Think. What can you do? Her own eyes were tearing now. Take some time to think this out. 

“Wait here, Alan,” she said. “I won’t tell Dad. I gotta go get a mop to clean up this mess. I’ll figure out something.” She ran up the stairs to the building’s custodial closet on the second floor and grabbed a bucket and mop. As she filled the bucket, her mind raced. How can I convince Alan to find help? Is that free clinic on Burnside still there?

She dragged the bucket back down the hall to the rear door and pushed it open. Alan was nowhere in sight. She left the bucket and bounded down the stairs. “Alan,” she called. She looked into the dumpster cage, then ran down the alley to the street searching for his cart, calling out his name. He had vanished.

Jessie ate her own dinner in her room, picking listlessly at her food, Alan foremost on her mind. Dad would know what to do, but she had promised. Don’t be ashamed of mental illness, she wanted to tell Alan. But it would do no good, it sounded too much like one of Dad’s liberal platitudes.

Just behind Alan in her thoughts were the goodbyes to come: Jolene, Mel, maybe Dad. What would she do about Dad?

Pushing her food aside, she lay face down on her bed, clutching her pillow tightly to her chest. The sound of a drum circle drifting in from St. Francis Park seeped through her cracked window, comforting her. She tried to remember the first time she heard the drums—maybe last year, maybe before. At some point the rhythm became a nightly event. Whenever the drumming faded, other drums in the distance called back, saying, “You aren’t alone. We’re here with you.”

Her thoughts took her to school, real world school, pit school, where she hadn’t been since early September. It felt like going to a foreign country, but she had to say goodbye to Mel. Melissa Monroe had been her best friend in eighth grade, and over the summer Mel had lived off-grid in Eugene with her father. Jessie had abandoned Mel. Something about the whole Sweetland thing had made her withdraw from her old friends—the decision had been too monumental, too life-changing, too sudden and unexplainable. Now she felt guilty. If school seemed like a major distance, how could she measure the journey she was about to undertake? The enormity of her decision once again overwhelmed her, and she could no longer think about the life she would leave behind—about the possibility that her father might be lost to her.

Instead, she closed her eyes and lulled herself with the drumming, until she drifted off to sleep.

The post Skyrmion – Chapter 1 appeared first on The Sweetland Novels.