Sanction

by Roman McClay

  His coder dosed him with 5mg of an endogenous narcotic analgesic for the pain in his contused muscles and the broken arm. 500mg of caffeine analog was parachuted in as a potentiator and to effect the next two hours of his downloaded mission. He had decided, before even seeing the house, to trek the 2,000 meters to the east of the compound to stash his Sgt and resupply; but his lack of boots, the rough topography and terrain, and, he thought, carrying this heavy bastard, would make that mile seem like five.

  As his head broke the surface of the water the heat from the burning trees warmed his front and the light from these flames lay down and then reflecting, got up, stood up, off the heavy snow pack all along the expanse. His land was now over 400,000 acres beyond the Colorado divide and there was nothing but conifers like Blue Spruce, Juniper Pine and, some islands of Aspen that stood up like hairs on and above the black of this large swath of Colorado skin. Low on the surface the scat, tracks and hint of the second largest elk herd in North America for many kilometers in each cardinal direction spread out as he walked out from under the lake.

  His concrete, steel and carbon fiber home was atomized and now a mere black footprint of ruin was smudged in the snow and tree cover.

  The air was filled with a fine black dust from the vaporized structure and the collateral damage of too close evergreen Pine and black and white Aspens. As the two men emerged from the lake that dust fell upon their wet bodies then ran in rivulets down and off their skin as the lake water mixed with it and was shed. The vexed admixture ran from the Lt's black tattoos as if they were melting or dissolving from his skin; yet the art remained despite this effluvial stream; remaining despite this leakage as if perpetually replenished from some inky source within him.

  The tattooing coverage was so complete, monochromatic and uniform that it appeared as clothing: a fully black right pectoral, shoulder and right arm with only a worn cog-wheel terminus on top of his right hand with three holes in the tail and the Emile Zola quote, Allons Travailler , stamped into it; his left side was dominated by large squares and irregular polyhedrons of olive drab and black and gray in military digital camouflage pattern, broken up only by replica badging tattooing to look like patches sewn onto a BDU coat sleeve.

  He had tattoos of patches of black runes and grey fishbones, and 7 of 8 Bushido values in white like raised scars.

  The left chest was swamped with a huge tattoo patch in the shape of an all-noir scorpion, his medial deltoid had upon its center a circular patch with an Osprey head in cubist-style, it too in solid black. Within the perimeter of the tattooed patch lassoing the seahawk’s head was Shakespeare’s line from Caius Marcius , in latin : Cur me vultis mitius; mendacium domino meo tibi vis naturae .

  Under the pectoral subsumed in stygian ink, with the right nipple, untattooed, placed inside the black like an opaque eye in the head of a relieving Leviathan, invigilating the tableau of his body -just below the lowest layer of that monolithic tattoo- ran the script like the trailing but taut rope of the harpoon in its flank: Immortal then; immortal on land and sea...

  His legs moved above his feet and his feet moved on and through the snowy shore; each thigh had a downward flying Valravn , one black and one dark grey; holes drilled in where hearts would lay; ink spatter and running drips as if empty holes could bleed.

  His body's run-off water ran to his leg, and those legs were just now sloughing off the lake; the streams of blackwater began to stutter and break apart into imbricate -then lone- drops as they were shed from his advancing gait. Two slate and lamp-black pineapple grenade tattoos grasped his calves, bannered with fuck on his left calf and off on his right.

  Bleak, tenebrous portraits of first The Author, ribboned with a quote on the blackness upon his left hamstring; on his right, George Klauba's avian Ahab populated the skin. The lettering, for me the white whale is that wall; shoved close to me, was tattooed in American typewriter font around the harpoon, red hand and black hat of the fowl autocrat. All these marks ran with the same liquid and dim soot as his body above; and still all these black-cowled scars retained their saturation. He walked with a slightly wider gait now to help balance his load.

  The fires burned in the snow in a ring and all along the shore; so, he edged east around and away from them toward the GPS beacon 1409 meters from his current position. He strained under the weight and the increased respiration and muscle catabolization triggered an augmented testosterone dump of 50mgs. This increased muscle strength and attenuated pain and soreness associated with fatigue and muscle failure. It also improved mood function as the PGC read the brain feedback report noticing some inhibited dopamine reception. It added a recursive dopamine dump as the testosterone made its way from the glands to his brain .

  The Lt had shut off his own recursive thought pattern, choosing to allow only the priority command items to enter his cognitive field: a loop of body awareness, environment and vector awareness and updates on Sgt Harvey. Additionally, he sent out GPS and status pings for his other people every 45 seconds but decided to shut off any non-response updates to avoid the increased cortisol and epinephrine dump associated with fear and loss; an endogenous response to the unknown of fear, anxiety and increased risk-taking were unhelpful to him now. In the event of a signal acquisition he’d be notified; only good news would be relayed for now.

  He could not afford to feel depressed or sad or terrified; or take unnecessary risks due to the feeling of anger or isolation in the face of a superior enemy. And his coder would do for him what his brain would not, on its own, be able to do.

  The tree cover thickened as he advanced, and he began to weave slightly between the Poisson distribution of these Pines; creating a slalom effect. In his mind short bursts of images of him snowboarding the continental divide off US 6 near Loveland -then in the backcountry along Berthoud Pass; then again in the off-grid areas of Rabbit Ears pass near Steamboat- all staccato style entered and exited his thought pattern despite the governor the coder had been asked to employ. He shook his head as if they were flies swarming his ears or cobwebs sticking to his face. But those webs of emotion and incipient feelings clung to him and the swarming flies of images stuck to that lattice work thus spun.

  He remembered the freedom he felt on that soft deep powder, the frisson of being in nature and away from the cuidad . He seemed a totally different, inchoate person in his memories; barely embryonic of his current full wing-span self. Even then he had known that his idea of fun was beginning to depart from the people around him. He could not find joy where they did and they, too, saw none in his pursuits.

  Those trips into the wilderness were reconnaissance for him; he knew he was preparing to leave the city; and leave the entire gestalt phenomenon of the collective experience. He was no good at parties, he said to himself and smirked. It all seemed like forced merriment; like people hung out and did things to prove to each other they were having fun; but no actual joy was felt. He doubted this rebuke of people immediately.

  They did laugh; they did bounce around like electricity shot through them each time another person acted like a clown or paid attention to them even in the most casual of ways; they shook hands; back slapped and grinned at each other like baboons. Maybe they actually did enjoy each other; maybe they weren't faking it, he admitted. He, too, had social impulses, but they just weren’t able to be fulfilled by the class of people he knew, or had known. Maybe the kind of person he needed just wasn't invented yet; maybe he wasn't yet who he needed to be either .

  That humility and self-critique brought him back to reality; he began to shift his weight in preparation for the oncoming slope of the forest.

  He began the descent down a 10% grade threading through the thin Aspens that grew on this eastern slope. They were white too like the snow on the ground they punctured, and in the aggregate the Aspen’s black scars looked like a negative image of time delay shots of the cosmos: the all black void blurred with idiopathic stars and nebula. But here the unlit tiger stripes of the trees were the o
nly source of dark depth against the increasingly menacing white and wrinkled brow of the snowbank and white Aspen foreground .

  He looked down as his left leg buckled slightly in the dry snow; he saw holes off to his left like piercings in the skin of the surface snow; a small mangled twig rising from one like the corkscrew barb that Queequeg described to his captain. “Elk,” he said aloud as he looked up from the tracks that seemed to continue on away, then behind him; turning his head any further would shake his tenuous balance. He pressed on.

  He was 989 meters away now; his feet were so cold and themselves harpooned with small twigs and brambles; the flotsam and jetsam of the forest floor. Frost bite would normally be a concern but the coder would send respirocytes to increase blood flow to the feet despite the corollary heat loss that normal blood flow restriction was designed to vitiate. It was a matter of re-prioritizing long term health over short term loss of homeostasis. Evolution, he thought, never seemed to think long-term; only in terms of short-term gains; not that it thought at all, of course .

  But if those short-term gains weren't good enough to promote long-term advantage then those gains would not be realized in the genome. That is the irony of biology. Private vice; public benefit, he thought. His coder imbibed this novel thought, Lyndon had not had it before and so the coder's blocking of analysis of his many recursive thoughts did not obtain to this. It then uploaded the Fable of the Bees and the Lt streamed it quickly as he continued to plod on with widening gait as the slope leveled out and his comrade folded more completely over his shoulder; Harv’s arms welded to the Lt's flank; his legs now rhythmically tapping his buttocks and hamstrings in time with Lt's stride.

  “Bare Virtue can't make Nations live in splendor; they that would revive a golden Age, must be as free for Acorns as for honesty ,” the Lt said aloud as the words populated his head. This last line rang in him pleasantly as he thought of Ahab mocking Starbuck’s mere unaided virtue as an impotent Christian luxury; the desire to be good in the abstract while failing to do anything that might require one's hands to get dirty. And maybe dirty hands weren't so bad Starbuck, dirty hands that might be washed eventually; after the whole body could recline in the larger resulting good that the hard labor of those hands had wrought , he thought. But, now, a phrase in the middle stanzas piqued him, but Kings, that could not wrong, because their Power was circumscribed by laws .

  He turned that phrase over and over like a pig on a spit-stake. Did Mandeville mean like Alexander Pope that, whatever is, is thus right? Was there no distance between fitness and truth? Did he think we all sovereigns and not ruled by kings -but are kings- and did he mean natural law when he spoke of laws? He had spent 20 years -he thought- building and building, sacrificing to build that refuge that was blown up and destroyed in less than a minute. And in between each roof raising, each nail embedded, each weld, each yard of concrete poured, each structure pored over, each dollar spent, shit, each dollar earned, he had, like Fedallah underdecks, kept thoughts of ruination and destruction close as cards -did he sleeve jacks or aces? he wondered- under his clothes : cards unused as unneeded as the deck kept dealing him winning cards; but grinning at the odds maker under his furrowed brow and sarcastic scowl.

  He was 303 meters from the rendezvous point now. The ash and smoke had stopped swirling around him as he was now far upwind of the blast. However, it was 0726 hours and the forecast for snow was correct; it was as if those looming grey clouds were disintegrating on these men, and on the trail ahead and their path behind.

  He recalled a conversation he had once; many years back. It landed on his brain like the snowflakes perched on his eyelashes; an annoyance disproportionate to their mass; disproportionate to the thousands of problems he had walking barefoot with an unconscious and injured comrade on his shoulder away from the blast site of his annihilated home. It's the little things that matter they say.

  “You never want to give a man like me nothing to lose,” he had said to his business partner Michael Swinyard.

  “Why would I do that?” Michael had asked insouciantly.

  “Not you, I mean, you in the indefinite or impersonal pronoun sense. One shouldn’t give a man like me nothing to lose. And Jeff, if he decides to take the scorched earth approach by calling the cops, then he’s essentially giving me nothing to lose.”

  “You could still lose your freedom,” Swinyard said in this memory and the 1,000 times Lyndon had recalled this conversation.

  “That’s my point, if he puts me in the jackpot and I lose my business and do time; when I get out I will have to do something. Because it’s not like I’ll have a million bucks and a loyal coterie of friends and lovers waiting for me. I’ll be destitute and frankly, revenge is; well, it’s something I kinda thrive on anyway. It's my métier ,” of course he was talking about Jeff, but Michael knew it was a general -all-purpose- threat. It was the crescent wrench of threats.

  The memory atomized and he saw snow and trees.

  “I never gave a guy nothing to lose when I went to war with him; unless, as I pointed out to Kat one day, I was willing to kill him,” Lyndon said now in a new reverie. Michael and that memory faded and morphed like a centaur from bull to man. “These are the rules. You cannot humiliate and enfeeble a man in war unless you kill him. If you’re going to allow him to live, you must give him something to live for or he’ll be at your throat once strong again. These are Treaty-of-Versailles lessons; how to prevent the Nazis from taking power 101.”

  He stopped walking and adjusted Harv on his shoulder. He breathed in deeply and felt the cold air scour his nostrils and throat and lungs. Why was his PGC allowing these idiopathic thoughts to even come across? He began to reflexively re-send the protocol command but stopped and thought, why is the coder malfunctioning; is it damaged; is it even malfunctioning; or did I toggle out of direct-action protocol? Jesus , he thought, it was the least talked about and the best part of these coders: the ability to limit or eradicate discursive, recursive, idiopathic thought streams. The crazy non-linear, nonproductive and demoralizing chatter of the un-aided brain was what every human lived with 24/7 before these coders shut them down, but everyone focused on the self-diagnostics for medical and metabolic protocols, the interconnectivity with others via an internally embedded internet connect; the GPS locator, the rapid data acquisition and download.

  I guess nobody wanted to admit that the way their brain used to work was tantamount to crazy talk; but the reality is they were almost sane now. The chatter, the endless stupid self-defeating chatter was gone anytime one wanted it gone. But why the fuck was the coder allowing these memories in? Lyndon asked himself.

  He re-sent an action command to limit conscious thought to priority one and two protocols. Harv's bio-feedback ran from tip to top; pulse-ox; blood Ph; blood sugar; brain glucose; respiration and BP. Next, micronutrient levels and electrolytes levels. Then a ping on Bugzy flashed on his PGC interface.

  Location was 34 meters from building #4 and moving south by southeast at 9 kilometers an hour. Vitals within parameters; brain function nominal as well. Lyndon felt a swell in relief and pride at his Master Sergeant and felt the lachrymose eyes begin to occlude his vision; he then thought Bugz’s coder could have been damaged or hacked and that that ping could not be him at all; never mistake the map for the terrain , he remembered from Sgt Goff. He ignored any thoughts of why he had not heard from Chen’s coder.

  Lyndon sent a coded message to Bugz with a location ping and the text: You're up; Harv's down but not out; I'm 90%. Hit me back with code 94 access and I'll send our 20.

  He’d reached the buried shipping container; his cache of what he’d need to re-supply for a few days in the storm. He set Harv down on the cold dirt berm by the heavy doors; he pulled the old analog key from around his neck to open the lock.

  II. 2008 e.v.

  He got out of the shower of the 5th wheel, it was like a phonebooth and he hated it. He walked -without bothering to dress- to the window of the slide-out in
the living room of the travel trailer he had set-up in on the pad. They worked and lived on location, and rarely -if ever- left. Supplies were trucked in and one’s life was the work; and the work was here in the valley below four-corners of ridges in the Piceance at almost 8,800 feet. It all smelled like diesel and sounded like the straining of machines over the men themselves.

  He had worked to 2200 hours tonight; they had tripped out and repaired the mudtank all at the same time, so he and Harvey had worked together from 1800 hours to then. Once it was fixed, he had watched as Harv climbed to the crow’s nest and began racking back what was left of the string. He had to be up in five hours for his tour , and he felt himself floating just above the ground. Fatigue like this made a man meet his other side; as if the second man inside took over at some point and shook hands with the world as the first personality sat down and stopped hiding this other man for awhile and just hoped it went alright.

  He tried to look up to the stars but the angle wasn’t right. He stared straight out into the black and began musing on what commanded his insides the way work commanded his corporeal frame.

  Too much is made of great men's defects, he thought, then amended, or not enough is made of the connection, the welded joint that these abrading traits have to the very traits that make the man great in the first place. People want all lumber and no sawdust, all quick and powerful movement and no exhaust, all progress with no violence, he thought. He let his mind wander to the darkness and was glad for the cool of the water still left on his skin; he didn’t notice the shadow cast from his head on the wall .