Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  When she ran, I shouted after her like a puppy.

  That desperation shouldn't surprise me. It's been several incarnations since I felt anything soft or good or sweet. Bonita was just as dirty as I was but her sweat smelled clean, like perfume synthesized from the pungent earth. She wore only a pair of shorts that were too big for her. I thought I recognized them as mine. It was an American brand. Her breasts were perfect, smooth and small, works of art. And there was the obvious evidence in our nest that we had made love, more than once.

  I think we've been together before. I think that what I assumed was a dream of Jan after the previous interrupt was actually some trace of Bonita. Her or someone else. But why would any of the locals come to me? Because of my decorative coloring? I may be the only black man in a hundred miles.

  It would be ironic if Bonita had been drawn to this hilltop by some vague memory of it being important, and that when we met we simply acted on our attraction. Enemies when able to think and speak, lovers when reduced to an animal state.

  Enemies. Someone tore down the power line running from the cafeteria and sabotaged the generators. Number six is a total loss but I can salvage its auxiliary tank, though there may not be any point if I can't find more fuel. They crawled under the fence, I think, at the saggy corner. More fucking work.

  If I save Bonita she'll love me. Jan did, for that same reason. Anyone would.

  #

  Losing too much time to interrupts, my hair's a great Afro cloud and the damn moon's not making sense, still waxing. Still! I have to write this down to keep from running in circles when I am lucid. Half insane even then, not sleeping. So close to beating it.

  You've already patched together a computer, it's under the armor, stop tinkering with it.

  You need to fine-tune your transmitter. The EM hitting us is bizarre, too short, 170 down to 25nm. Maybe Wolsinger was right.

  #

  The cone works. I'm under it now. Day Three. I've been trying to build a portable version with the few scraps available. It will be very heavy. The generators sound like they're running OK but there's no way to walk out there and check. My biggest fear is that someone will get through the fence again and damage them, turn them off. The noise they make is a liability. I know we still possess curiosity in the animal state.

  When the last interrupt stopped I was with Bonita again, making love, close to peaking. She shut her eyes as if to escape me and I paused, but her rhythm increased, maybe involuntarily. Then I slowed again to tease her. She turned to face me and murmured and groaned. We kissed like teenagers. It was wild and raw, far better than with Jan or anyone else ever. But climax was anticlimactic. Desire faded and awkwardness came over us. I tried to make her stay with words and gestures, tried to show her what I was working on, but she kept shaking her head. She ran.

  #

  Day Five. I just don't have the gear necessary to build a smaller model, and I never had another power source anyway. I'm going to lower the strength of the broadcast, shrinking the safe area to conserve fuel. I think I can push most of my supplies outside the cone and hook them in as needed.

  #

  Day Nine. I'm not alone. I can see a clearing and the edge of the lake from here and sometimes the locals come up the hill, but they won't enter the building even if I yell, or pretend to be hurt, or sing...

  Bonita smiled at that, staring through the fence at my window and moving as close as possible, but she didn't seem to recognize the doors for what they were. Why not?

  Our nest was here in this same room.

  Maybe it was me she didn't recognize.

  I've been studying them. No one talks but there is simple communication, hand gestures, squawks and grunts of impatience, pleasure, agreement. They cooperate. Fortunately, the previous civilization wiped out most of the predators, it's always warm here and the jungle seems to provide enough nourishment for all — and the trees and brush are also shelter from the worst of the ultraviolet.

  I didn't mention that I'd lost weight. The desk belly is long gone, but I wasn't starved during the interrupts. In fact there's some evidence that I gorged myself. Obviously I was getting plenty of exercise. Hunting and gathering? And making love. Physically I may be at my best in ten years.

  I'm so restless now.

  Yesterday I saw Alex Blair playing a fetch-and-chase game with three others. They laughed like kids.

  #

  Day Seventeen. It's not ever going to end. Even if I had unlimited food and fuel, I can't stay in here forever. Now that I've finally had a chance to breathe, to think it though, I wonder what I'd hoped to accomplish. Escape to a cave and slowly starve there? Study the interrupt phenomenon and create a set of charts and graphs that nobody will ever see?

  My biggest fear isn't that the generators will fail — it's that I'll improve my shelter, jury-rig a more permanent protected area, and sit alone in it as the sun flares forever.

  I'd have my memories, but would there be any worth keeping?

  If I quit now, I win as much as I lose. Bonita. Friends. I want to be a part of their Eden for as long as we have left.

  I'll scar my forearm with a short message, in case there are moments of waking confusion and fear. Then I'm going to unchain this journal from my wrist and destroy the generators. I think Dad would be proud to see me pitch a Coke bottle full of gasoline all the way from here.

  END

  Afterword

  Unlike "Pressure" and "Snack Food," the core concept behind "Interrupt" was something I purposely developed instead of having it spring whole into my imagination. Some stories are more work than others. I admit I enjoy it when my subconscious does most of the heavy lifting, but the stories that are the hardest work can also be the most satisfying.

  I was between projects at the time. I'd been reading about our new solar observation satellites, and obviously I have a bent toward apocalyptic settings. But I didn't want to burn the world to a crisp. Larry Niven did that expertly in "Inconstant Moon." So I began to play around with different ways a solar storm might affect civilization.

  Memory and time sense are all that separate us from animals. Yes, we have opposable thumbs and walk upright, but those advantages wouldn't mean much without our self-awareness. The mind is our greatest tool. Lose it, lose everything.

  You can see my efforts to explore this idea all the way from my earliest story, "Exit," to later pieces such as "Long Eyes" and even "Monsters."

  In part, I suppose that's because I suffered three major concussions as a boy. I was aggressive in sports. Before my fifteenth birthday, in addition to the head bangs, I'd broken four bones either stopping an opposing player on the soccer field, fighting at school, or skiing. Just be glad you weren't my parents!

  I suffered the worst concussion playing ultimate frisbee in the gym. One of my teammates threw a low pass into the corner. No way was I going to let that frisbee go. Catching it, I slid beneath a table, then ricocheted my head off the table's edge into the hardwood floor.

  Some people don't retain their short-term memories during severe concussions, but I remember being inhibited. One side of my face went slack, and I had limited control over that side of my body. This was back in the early 80's, so my gym teacher had me walk it off instead of calling an ambulance — nice work, buddy — and I burst into tears when it was time to take the bus home because I couldn't recall where I was supposed to get off. I knew the bus was right, but I'd lost my sense of the immediate future and any ability to plan even minutes ahead.

  It was scary as hell.

  How and what we think is who we are. That's the core idea behind "Interrupt." The rest is good, standard sci fi; the outpost of scientists confronted with a mysterious danger; the misunderstandings and violence between them and an uneducated mob; a spot of romance; and their efforts to overcome the threat.

  Ultimately, that's impossible. The threat is too big. But I like to think there's a brave, lonely triumph Lloyd's fight to escape.

  The real questio
n is why do I keep torturing my characters this way?

  I wrote the following essay when Annalee Newitz at io9 asked me why the heck I'm such an evil puppetmaster.

  WRITING ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE

  I think we’re programmed for hardship. In my experience, human beings are happiest when they’re working themselves to the bone. Call me crazy, but from what I’ve seen people are more likely to feel adrift and unsatisfied when they have too much leisure time. Purpose is the greatest gift. Obstacles are good.

  Here’s why. For hundreds of thousands of years, life was brutal. It still is for a good chunk of the planet. The technology and wealth we enjoy in North America is a very new development in history, and I think we miss the challenges of day-to-day survival in our comparatively easy modern lives. Some people will even create problems if they have none.

  Everyone’s had a psychotic girl- or boyfriend, right? Well, lots of ‘em really are just nut-flavored bologna. They have a neurochemical imbalance or ate too many paint chips as a kid... but some people look for drama and emotional upheaval for reasons they can’t explain themselves, reenacting the shortcomings, chaos, or abuse of their childhoods.

  Surprise. These drama kings and queens might be exactly the kind of person you’d want at your back during the zombie apocalypse or the aftermath of a comet strike. Each of our nut-flavored friends is a sponge. They’re ready to soak up as much as trauma as anybody can dish out. They have the stamina, heart and depth to keep on slogging through the radioactive bugs even long after the last shotgun shell is gone.

  They’re not the only ones. I like to think I’m the kind of guy you’d give the keys to the bomb shelter and I’m extremely boring and normal — wife, kids, mortgage, bleh — ha ha — except to say that I grew up fascinated with books like Lucifer’s Hammer and The Stand.

  We like to be scared because we have a huge capacity for fear. The most basic element of storytelling is conflict because we respond to it.

  For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn’t so much about exploding helicopters and fifty megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

  Sure, the hot-sex-with-our-last-breath and gunfights are fun, too, but ultimately my novels boil down to the ability of some people — the greatest of us — to overcome any hurdle. I back my heroes into corners just to watch them wiggle free.

  We’re evolved for less food; more exercise; less sleep; less security; more paranoia. The irony is that as a species we’ve been incredibly successful. We’ve made it normal to have more food; less exercise; more sleep; more security; less paranoia.

  Look around. Humankind has remade the entire face of the planet, blanketing Earth with electrical grids, highways, super-agriculture, shipping lanes and aircraft, even wrapping the sky in satellites. It’s easy to complain about your bills or morning traffic or the neighbor’s neglected, ever-barking dogs (you know who you are), but these are fantastic problems to have.

  The grocery stores are loaded, we have the industrial strength to roll off three cars per household, and every other family has enough money to spare to feed two dogs and a cat even though they don’t have any inclination to walk Sparky and Spot every day and choose instead to leave their canines to noisily go insane, each set of dogs fenced off inside their own isolated little patch of suburbia.

  Anyone with a computer to read this blog is richer than 99.99% of the human beings who’ve ever lived, and yet we can’t help imagining what things would be like if we had to start over. Nuclear armageddon. Superflu. The living dead. Nanotech.

  Give me a wild scenario and some smart good guys and I’m happy -- just so long as the lights stay on and there’s iced tea in the fridge. I’d really rather not be sifting through the rubble for canned food and medicine while we keep one eye peeled for roving gangs of illiterate cannibals.

  END

  Afterword

  This essay could have been a lot longer, but I'm a fiction writer, not a professor. What I'd like to add is that since the dawn of recorded history, there's an alarming pattern in the rise and fall of civilizations. Sometimes they're overrun by larger empires or armies with better technology. Sometimes they decay from within.

  Luxury, complacency, and entitlement can be our worst enemies. It makes us lazy. Then we turn our deeper, unfulfilled needs on each other, inventing problems where they aren't any, an idea which leads nicely to this essay written for John DeNardo at SF Signal...

  ROSE-COLORED DEMONS

  For me and many writers, one of the most eye-opening changes since the e-revolution has been the rise and importance of book reviews on personal blogs and corporate sites like Goodreads, Amazon, and B&N.

  To writers, strong word-of-mouth is catnip. Even bad reviews can be useful in honing your craft.

  I spend a lot of time alone in a room with a laptop listening to the voices in my head. That sounds like a joke, but it’s a large part of my job description. There’s no one to hang out with at the water cooler in my office. Heck, there’s no water cooler! That’s why it’s especially cool to get fan mail or to have my Google minions find reviews such as: "This novella was so fast paced and action packed from the very first line that I was sucked in like a two by four in a F5 twister!"

  Reading that, I thought, Fantastic. She gets it.

  Capturing you is exactly what I want — to connect, to entertain, to make you a 2x4 in my tornado.

  When eight people say the ending is abrupt, that’s useful, too. My brain says to me, Okay, you thought you had every element in place, but you’d better add at least another paragraph to wrap things up. Readers want to walk away with a feeling of completion. Sometimes I move too fast, so I’m learning to take it down a notch.

  Even the people who hate a story are right. No writer reaches everybody, and it’s perfectly fair for someone to leave a low-starred review if he doesn’t feel like he got his money’s worth. That’s expected.

  But in today's brave new world of e-media, my inbox is also peppered with a steady dose of diehard political outrage, accusations, and messages from weird alternate realities.

  When I swap emails with my writer friends or when we meet up at cons, the new game is Who’s Been Burned The Worst. It’s almost funny.

  We all view the world through the lenses of our personal life experiences. Sometimes the world is rose-colored. Sometimes we're not even aware of how thoroughly our own demons shape our perceptions, so let me share some of the over-the-top experiences I’ve had with folks from the fringe.

  #

  The Illinois Nazi

  More than once I’ve received hate mail or nasty Amazon reviews for Plague Year because two of the main heroes are a Latino and a genius Jew. Worse, two of the villains are white guys. Obviously I’ve either turned on my own kind (I’m a white guy) or I’ve been so indoctrinated by the sinister liberal media that I don’t even realize what I’m doing...

  Here’s the thing. The opening chapters of Plague Year are set in post-apocalyptic California. I don’t know where our white supremacist friends live, but the West Coast is one of the most ethnically diverse areas on the planet. If everyone was forced into the mountains to escape a runaway nanotech plague, there’s zero chance it would be only sparkly blond Caucasians who survived. More to the point, among my best friends growing up were Hispanic and Jewish families. I knew I could pull off those backgrounds competently, and a diverse cast added a bit of texture to what’s ultimately just a rock-‘em sock-‘em sci fi thriller.

  #

  The One-Winger and the Classic Old Knee

  As a writer, it's both frustrating and intriguing to have the same novel condemned as a subversive socialist pinko screed and as a right-wing manifesto. Yeah, it's nice to strike such a chord. Every writer wants their work to resonate. But reading is a subjective experience. People bring a lot of themselves to the experience... sometimes too much.

  The One-Wingers
are careful not to mention race like the Illinois Nazis, but they don’t appreciate how the conservative remnants of the government are perceived by the heroes. By the same token, The Classic Old Knees are certain I must be a big fat Republican because the government is enforcing martial law and the tough Special Forces guys keep pushing the scientists around. It’s crude symbolism, isn’t it!?!?

  Uh, no. In Plague Year, the new U.S. capital is a Colorado town that originally had a population of 3,000 people. Now it’s been swamped by 600,000 refugees. There’s no food, no shelter, and if I was in charge I’d darn well have the few remaining supplies surrounded by Army units. That doesn’t mean I’m a liberal or a fascist or a purple polka dot Martian.

  I think it’s a very human phenomenon that individuals on far, opposite ends of the political spectrum are able to interpret the same story in different ways, seeing exactly what they want to see in order to support their beliefs.

  Sometimes the smallest minds make the biggest noise. That's because feeling angry is pleasant. It makes you feel important. Condemning a book as dangerous and shouting your warnings from the rooftops... let's call that the Revere Complex. Each of our archetypes the Nazi, the Winger and the Knee fall into this same category, a truth which might outrage them all over again if they realized it.

  #

  The Nutcake.

  Alas, these folks are even easier to explain. They’re nutty. Three times I’ve received emails or comments insisting that Plague Year was penned by someone else, namely the person contacting me, and that I stole the book before he or she could publish it. Unfortunately, other writers tell me such accusations aren’t uncommon, nor are personal threats. Welcome to my FBI file.