by Nas Hedron
“It’s in my hands. I can make a call and get the Suerte off your back.” I turn to him and look him in the eye to make sure he understands the next part. “And at any time in the future I can make a call and put them right back on your fat ass.”
“What do you want?” he whispers, grinding his teeth.
“In exchange for your life? I want you to take a fifth of your estate, whatever that is, millions anyway.”
“You fucking bet it’s millions.”
“And I want you to set up a charity, to be run by an arm’s-length board that you can’t control or influence, on behalf of the street kids of Mexico City.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“And Tijuana,” I add impulsively.
“You’re serious.”
I spin quickly and punch him once in his huge paunch, just because it feels so good to finally do it. He crumples to his knees clutching his belly.
“Yes, I’m serious. Do it or the Suerte will be putting your handprint on a wall.”
“Fine,” he gasps, trying to catch his breath back. “Fine, whatever, just get the fuck out of here and make sure they don’t come near me.”
For the first time in a long time I smile.
“Suits me.”
I start toward Jenna’s van where Prender’s been waiting behind the wheel, then stop and turn back.
“Oh Max, I’ll send you a list of names, the people who’ll be on the board, you understand?”
He’s on his feet now, but still bent over, hands on his knees like a tired long-distance runner. He glares at me, but he nods.
“And I’ll send the name of an accountant. You’ll give him access to all your books so we can figure out just exactly how much a fifth of your estate is. You’re gonna make sure he gets access to everything, right?”
“Fine. Get the fuck out,” he croaks.
“Don’t make me doubt you, Max. Don’t ever make me doubt you.”
I get into the van.
“Drive.”
But Prender can’t wait to ask. He puts the van in gear but keeps his foot on the brake.
“Gat, how the fuck did you get Alan to believe that the Suerte were after Max?”
“They were, now drive.”
He releases the brake and we roll down the driveway.
“You told me yourself that they weren’t.”
“They weren’t—until I called Suarez and asked him to put Max on his list, subject to me being able to take him off the list again.”
“And Suarez went along with it?”
We finally leave the estate and I look out at the road ahead.
“I’ll pay for it someday, I’m sure.”
I leave all the beauty and ugliness of Cloud City behind me, feeling cleaner with every kilometer I put between me and Max’s poisoned palace.
I shouldn’t feel good, I suppose. As Suarez says, Max is busy hurling himself off the edge of the world. Poor Alan will be decommissioned over the edge, Porsche has been shoved over it, James Jerome pulled over it by the Dogs.
Nonetheless, maybe I’ll succeed in pulling a few people back from the brink. I think of Damita and it occurs to me that tonight, for once, I might sleep in something like peace. I have no idea how Vicente Suarez will levy the debt I owe him but for the moment, with the prospect of a dreamless night ahead, I don’t really care.
Facts in the Fiction
Introduction: Mad Dogs and Robot Men
If you're like me and you enjoy getting a look behind the scenes of movies and books, this section is for you.
Luck and Death at the Edge of the World is a work of fiction, but many of the details in the story come from the real world. In this section I'll talk about a few of those details and provide links to more information for anyone who's interested.
You can find additional materials and updates to this section at www.LuckAndDeath.com, which will continue to evolve.
Notes Regarding Links:
All of the links are functional as of the date of publication and I've tried to link to the most stable pages I could find on any given topic so that the linked material won't disappear. If you find a link that needs updating or replacing, by all means drop me an email at [email protected] .
Using stable links often means using Wikipedia and other sources that, while not perfect from the standpoint of scholarly erudition, can be counted on to be around into the foreseeable future. Where possible I've included other links as well for those who might want to go a little deeper.
Where a link connects to something other than a web page, like a PDF file, I've labelled it. All unlabelled links go to web pages.
One: A City in the Clouds
In Luck and Death, Max's home is Cloud City, a dream-like estate that's been turned into something of a nightmare by its owner's madness.
When I created Cloud City, I had a number of real world precedents in mind. Here are three of the main ones, starting with the most recent and working back to the oldest and most important of all.
Neverland Ranch
The most recent of the estates I looked at when I conceived of Cloud City was Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Even more than Max's home, Jackson's ranch was explicitly designed to insulate everyone inside it from the outside world...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Two: The Robots Go to the Dogs
One of the mysteries about the attempt on Max Prince’s life is how the would-be assassin got past the Dogware.
Like many things in science fiction, Dogware is an extrapolation of current technologies. It incorporates several real threads into one fictional system:
nanorobotics,
robot swarms, and
military robotics.
Nanorobotics
Nanorobotics is a branch of nanotechnology, which deals with creating materials and devices on molecular scales. Manipulating matter at the level of the molecule allows you to create materials with specific properties and to build microscopic devices that can be deployed for very fine work, sometimes inside our bodies...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Three: Mutant Diseases Spread By Hard-to-Kill Bugs
One of the things that’s changed about the world since Gat went into stasis is the prevalence of new infectious diseases.
Like the Dogware, though, this is really just an extrapolation of current trends – I’ve taken existing problems with regard to infectious diseases and the insects that can transmit them and intensified them by adding the problems that come with the Fall.
Putting aside the Fall, though, both of the basic ingredients that Gat describes actually exist already: we have overused (and misused) antibiotics in treating ourselves and our livestock in such a way as to create antibiotic-resistant infections and we have overused pesticides with the result that we have created pesticide-resistant insects that can infect us with those diseases...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Four: Ghosts Living in Shells
In Luck and Death, a "shell" is an artificially produced human body into which a person’s consciousness can be decanted.
Using a shell can provide a survival strategy for people who are aging, injured, or ill, or can be used to provide a person with an optimized body, like the military shell Gat receives when he enters the California National Forces. She
lls are expensive, though, so it's not something that's available easily.
The notion of uploading a human consciousness into an artificial body seems inherently science fictional--even moreso than nanobot swarms--but in this area, too, preliminary research has begun with the goal of making uploading a reality.
For an overview of of some of the issues involved in whole brain emulation -- that is, creating an exact, functional model of a person's brain and embodying it in an artificial device -- you might want to read the paper Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap, by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom. It's available here in PDF...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Five: Alan the A.I. + Alan Turing, Human Being
In Luck and Death, the artificially intelligent entity that governs the security system at Cloud City is named Alan.
Alan normally lives within the Cloud City security system itself, with no need for anything like a human body. After the attempt on Max’s life, however, Alan is decanted into a human shell to make it easier for Gat and his team to interact with him. This temporary body is, in effect, a user interface.
The shell that Alan chooses for himself is tailored to look like a real person, British computer pioneer Alan Turing. To understand why, it helps to know something about Turing’s incredible life...
The Short Life and Awesome Times of Alan Turing
Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912. As I write this (in August 2012), the hundredth anniversary of his birth has just passed. This is the official Alan Turing Year, celebrated with events in more than twenty countries. Turing died by suicide on June 7, 1954, just before his forty-second birthday.
In his brief life, Turing accomplished more than most of us could ever dream of doing. He didn’t do it alone, but it’s probably not going too far to say that world history and the current state of technology would have been drastically different without him...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Six: A Down to Earth Dharma
One non-technological aspect of Luck and Death that will be new to some readers is Gat's secular dharma practice.
In this context, dharma refers to the body of teachings of Siddhattha Gotama (also written Siddhārtha Gautama). Gotama is often called the Buddha and the principles he taught are the foundation of Buddhism. Gotama was a real person who lived in the Indian subcontinent around 500 BCE.
To have a secular dharma practice means to apply the dharma to your life, but in a naturalistic manner. This generally means practicing meditation and studying Gotama's insights into human experience, but without any dependency on belief in the mystical elements associated with traditional Buddhism, such as reincarnation...
The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos. The commercial edition is available on Amazon.com (and all other Amazon sites) and Kobo.com.
Preview: Felon and the Judas Kiss
About the Book
Click to get your copy of Felon and the Judas Kiss instantly from Kobo or Amazon.
Read samples and get bonus material on the Felon and the Judas Kiss home page.
____________________
Dave 'Felon' Fellows is a cheerful sadist. He thrived during his time in the California National Forces, especially during the incursion into Tijuana for 'civilian pacification.'
Calvin Hearn lost his mind in the brutal Tijuana operation, and although he's much recovered since then he's still haunted -- awake or asleep -- by the ghosts of that massacre.
Now Felon is an LAPD officer, while Hearn is a pastor ministering to the Angeleno homeless, and together they're at the center of events that could soon tear the city apart.
____________________
One: Keep the Krill in Check
Felon enters the St. Francis Mission dragging a cloud of bad memories behind him like a viscous miasma. Ghosts, sombras, and yaojing. Terrible sprites and polluted spirits. Haunted things peer out: curious, hungry, angry, anguished, avid.
Inside the mission is a small meeting room: wooden floors polished smooth by years of footsteps, orange curtains blocking the front windows, mismatched chairs in place of pews, dust motes drifting in the air. It’s tidy, well-kept, but it isn’t much. There’s a pulpit at the back, around which a tiny crowd is gathered.
The crowd isn’t much either, seven homeless and a pastor. The pastor wears jeans and a t-shirt, running shoes on his feet. The homeless – a young couple and five friends – wear whatever they have. The memories surrounding Felon begin to fill up the room. They have a characteristic odor: death and gun oil.
The people at the front notice, turn. The homeless can’t see the nightmares, but they can smell the stink of bad karma. In any event, they don’t need spiritual repugnance to make them uncomfortable: they take in Felon’s uniform and the LAPD motorcycle helmet held loosely in his left hand. They shuffle, then begin to file out through a hallway that leads deeper into the mission. To a back door, Felon guesses. No one uses the front door – they’d have to pass him and his haunts to get to it and no one wants to do that.
He watches them go, looks upward at nothing in particular, raises his arms a little, then lets them fall back to his sides in a listless gesture of exasperation. He shakes his head and looks down again. Walks slowly toward the pulpit, still shaking his head. The pastor watches him, waiting. He can see Felon’s ugly writhing wake, but keeps his face expressionless all the same.
“Well fuck, father, I didn’t know there was a wedding.”
The pastor is tall and thin, with light brown skin and an Afro that’s begun to recede a little from his high forehead. His most striking feature is a pair of huge, expressive eyes that seem to brim with a variety of contradictory emotions: filled with good humor and limned with sadness, gentle and a little stern at the same time.
“I’m not a ‘father’ Dave, that’s the Catholic Church. I’m non-denominational.”
“Whatever. Okay.” Felon waves a placating hand, and the phantasms swirl in its passage, the smell of smoke wafting. “I did check the sign is my point. Out front. Didn’t say anything about a ceremony today.”
Pastor Calvin Hearn cocks his head to one side, assessing the man in front of him. The memories cling to Felon, covering his face in a caul of unwatchable images.
“They don’t put up signs and send out invitations, Dave,” Hearn says softly, “they’re homeless.”
“Well then I guess they can start up again as soon as I’m gone, seeing as how it’s so informal” Felon says. He intends this to be rough good humor, but there’s a sour expression on his face.
Cal Hearn sighs. He’s trying to keep his temper under control and so far he’s doing a pretty good job. He seems more tired than angry. He gives no indication that he sees the brutal visions Felon’s dragged into his place of worship, profaning it.
“What do you want Dave?”
“Me? Nothing. LAPD wants some information, though, so here I am.”
“Information about what?”
“Some homeless have been doing these little break-ins. It’s all nickel and dime stuff, stores that can’t afford modern security. Wired alarms, antiques. Homeless show up, smash a window or two. Before the P.D. can get there they run off with some food, bottles of booze. Maybe clothes, whatever. Honestly? I could give a shit. There’s murders out there I could be working. Chief doesn’t give a shit either, but he’s gotta throw the people a bone, you know?” He shrugs. “Shopkeepers, fishmongers, what hav
e you. Let them know he isn’t only looking after the big corporations.”
“He isn’t?”
Felon gives a humorless smile, points a finger.
“Dry wit, Cal. Dry wit. With a straight face too. Fact is, the Chief doesn’t care any more than I do, but it’s an election year. President is up in Sacramento with the CEOs of the 500. He needs a majority in the Council of Electors, so he’s horse-trading and threatening and bribing and pulling skeletons out of closets and pouring booze and paying for hookers and all the other good stuff that makes California a great and democratic nation. He needs a majority, two-hundred and fifty-one minimum, and for that he’s gotta convince them that he can preserve the civic peace, right? Disorder is bad for business, hombre. So his bogeymen spread the word: keep the krill in check. Last thing he needs is a simcast story about how some gang of homeless in L fucken’ A have decided to just take what they want.”
Hearn eyes Felon, lets a pause hang in the air. He puts his hands behind his back. To him it feels like an authoritative stance, defiance of the ghosts and fears that dance in the air in front of him. To Felon it makes the pastor look like he’s handcuffed.
“And how am I supposed to help the President win re-election?”
Felon shrugs again.
“It’s your neighborhood. Last break and enter was two blocks from here, liquor store on Yucca.”
“So?”
Felon gestures around him with his arms.
“So every street-rat in the area comes here, everybody knows that. They lip-synch a few hymns, snore through a sermon, and then you feed them. Sometimes, as I discovered today, you marry them to each other. You know them.”
Hearn rolls his eyes. It’s getting harder to appear blasé as Felon’s ghosts call to his own, to the memories buried deep inside him.