Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-04

by Penny Publications

  "Fucking priest. Fucking... you know what? I... he said I had the brain cell capacity of a Bob's Big Boy McGriddle—shit, then he just starting calling me an asshole over and over." Drake seemed half-angry, half-amazed. This was good, this was better, this was fixable. Flores grinned and pulled a can from the plastic grocery bag, handing it to Drake. Let fury have the hour.

  "He started in like he was the Wizard of Oz," Drake continued, worn down and sweating. "Called himself 'The Eschatological Jiminy Cricket of a debauched and despoiled age.' I tried all the talking points, but nothing worked. He called me a 'fucking hack amateur out to steal the specks of soul left to the honorable dreamers.' Said we were the whores of a corporatized Babylon. He... well he said a lot of shit. There's nothing worth anything usable, no FTL travel, or fusion energy, or ways of weaponizing the sun." Drake seemed to change gears. His anger was burning off into annoyance. This, again, was good.

  "That's not how it works, brother-man, not how it works." Flores had also wanted a lot of those things and more to come true when he started at Delphi. Unlock some ancient star gates and let us travel through the oblique angles of the multiverse. Harness the computational power of a solar system pulverized and turned into CPU. Live forever. Flores had done his homework after his second interview, when gainful employment was palpable. He read short stuff trawled from torrents, or wiki'd Hugo-award winning plots until he felt conversant in every beautiful, nerdy idea ever passed down the pike.

  Flores was one of the first wave of new companions, after the government gave up on Delphi and sold the whole works under a broadside of public ridicule. Post-Stochastic Inc. recruiters pitched the job as a chance for skilled recruits to use "their unique quality— plus interpersonal communications abilities," which in the cant of the recruitment ranks meant "sales." He could talk Jesus off the cross, so Flores thought he was looking at some monster incentive bonuses. Pay off his community-funded job retraining, get some equity on a house, maybe buy a better car. The states hadn't been on top for awhile, but everyone was buying bits and pieces of 'merica and the canny knew those chunks still held value. Maybe he could afford to buy into a sweeping new currency fund fiefdom as a hedge knight, swearing fealty to whatever fourth generation laird held the title to an island of loose capital.

  Instead of selling, he was listening, as the brilliant dead sold him the table scraps and varietal cuts—all the stuff no editor could find a place for in their flesh-and-blood lifetimes. Weird things. Oddities likely only to injure a potential reader's sense of equilibrium were of no use in the traditional publishing sphere. Inside Delphi, these were the incantations the company hoped held power over the boundless future. The government believed these dead sages could think their way to a future where the nation would be powerful again. When the Mad Priest was informed of that, his laughs had burned out several listeners, or so the story went.

  Wayward chunks of government monies were used to capture the imprints of the freakiest and farthest-seeing. Here at Delphi gorgeous dreams were hatched and matured and usually died malformed, often all within an afternoon. The pedigree of a group called "Far Thinkers for the Near Future"—who were supposedly building a "utopian retirement community for the imagination"—was mocked up before a score of the most wonderfully weird died. Their souls were captured at the point of death. Well, not souls really, but Flores had some poetry and liked the sound of that.

  Thus suspended in dream space for all time and projected into tasteful sitting rooms (or smoky backroom lounges, or the corner booth at some shit heel bar), good ideas could flow out of them, fonts of weird visions and dreams for what could be. Like all writers, these oracles liked to talk, often about themselves. So people like Flores kept them talking. Drank tea or coffee or Jack with them, smoked if need be, whatever helped. Like the spice mélange, the conversations must flow and from this river canny researchers were hopefully panning out the gold. Step 1: Capture the ghosts of big thinkers past. Step 2:??? Step 3: Profit.

  "When's the good stuff?" Drake poured the rest of the beer down his throat, and motioned for another. "I want to talk to The Lady of Heaven. I heard the Blogger could talk you into open-sourcing a lap dance." Flores handed a cold one over and gestured at the bramble of old, burnt-out units, down to the not-quite-ascheap cheap steel bunkers on the far side of Gernsback.

  "You'll get there mah man, you'll—wait, you know what?" Flores shifted and got a big goofy grin, like he just figured out a dirty joke. The Talk was always tailored by the chieftain to his troops. Feigning inspiration could be effective, but you can only do it once in a great while or all the time. "Shit you're going to be good at this. It took me two solid weeks to get as pissed as you are right now!"

  Drake smiled, he liked that. "Pissed is good?"

  "Pissed is very good, my young son. Pissed means you are concentrating, and pissed means you are hungry. Pissed means getting access to Vogt and Dick, where you will no longer be called an asshole several times an hour." Flores was generous—he doled out hope. He also knew when a light bruising felt good. "I mean, you'll still be an asshole, though."

  Drake laughed a little, called him a "fucker," smiled. Flores kept a stony face for just a half second before letting the laugh out. This was going well.

  The first week was an unmitigated assault upon his dignity and ego, but so was selling cheap muscle cars to sunburned rednecks from the outer suburbs. Flores persisted. And through persistence he scoured himself of his piss-poor hucksterisms like an act of contrition, and when his time with the Priest was over he found he hadn't lost the gift for keeping someone on the hook. While their first instinct was to cajole and flatter, Flores and his fellows learned to combine the social courtesies of a geisha with the hard driving rap of a mule seller.

  The government had hired readers and writers. The Priest spit out the word "fans" through teeth clenched in a perpetual snarl. Sending in fans was pointless. They just wanted to talk about what the work had meant, what it felt like to create. "Tell me about what it felt like to really see it, to feel it. Where do you get those crazy ideas?"

  A disaster. Most of those guys were dead, rumor had it. Other conversationalists whispered of a quiet coup right before the government just threw up its hands, of talkers disappearing into the woodwork or locking themselves in parlors. Cafeteria opinion seemed weighted toward everyone just bugging out and changing their names, going back to their weirdo private lives.

  "Far Thinkers for the Near Future" had fallen apart pretty fast. An incurious public shrugged. Families of the deceased pressed their legal janissaries into battle, but pulled them back when approached by representatives of Post-Stochastics, Inc. Who knows what dire legal magicks the company used to keep them at bay?

  Being a private concern, Post-Stochastics cut to what was, Flores supposed must be, the profit. For while it took genius to build and maintain Delphi, one didn't just send the botanists to categorize and artists to wax rhapsodic when a new continent is discovered; a wise king sends the hard-bitten scum who want to survive. Who will make it out alive with a reliable map of the territory. And in case of natives, send in swindlers and con-men with shiny beads. Send in men like Flores.

  And hopefully, men like Drake. Who was presently receiving The Talk pretty well, in that he didn't seem to realize he was receiving The Talk.

  "I know how it's supposed to work. Get them talking, keep them talking, try to steer them away from talking about themselves after awhile." Drake was winding down. The first time in was hard.

  "Man, I once spent sixteen hours with one of the beards on the subject of 'Fans I have Boned' and it was so hot, I wanted a chemical shower afterward." Flores loved those coots sometimes, when it was like hearing your uncle talk about visiting Tijuana. Drake snorted some beer out of his nose. Things were looking up for Flores.

  "I know I'm not supposed to see how any of it works," said Drake, a bit sheepishly. "Counselors told me to take it easy and just listen and talk, not expect anything too big at fir
st."

  "I know and I know you know, son," Flores drawled with a SoCal Barrio accent so fake Drake pricked up a smile. "Do a few more days brother-man, and you'll fucking own this place. Just make sure he doesn't smile too big." Drake sniffled and accepted a third beer. Flores straightened up and cracked one of his own. "I mean, why do you think we put up that sign above his door? 'Dangerous Visions' is fucking right."

  * * *

  Wind Reaper

  Jon Hakes | 1216 words

  Hurricane, roaring up out of the Gulf like a drunken demon. Keller steers them straight into the teeth of it.

  Owens stands over Keller's shoulder, his hot, oil-smelling breath pouring down like diesel exhaust. "Bastards."

  Outside, the other aircraft, all different types and configurations, are swarming. Vultures, for as far as the eye can afford to see. There are some crashes.

  Keller and the crew of the Yossarian ignore these, as best they can. They all know that the smallest distraction can turn them into the next small distraction.

  If you want to harvest a hurricane, to really squeeze as much energy as you can out of the beast, you have to have incredibly strong turbines to absorb a massive amount of kinetic energy. You have to have a large stockpile of low-maintenance, high-capacity flywheel batteries, because mechanical batteries are far superior to the chemical batteries that human beings have preferred for two centuries. You have to have a highly-efficient, integrated system that collects the maximum amount of energy possible from the surrounding environment, from the general static charge building up on the skin of the craft as it flies, to the lightning seeking to pass through the craft and head earthward. It helps if the aircraft runs off of the power it collects, without need of expensive (and rare) hydrocarbon fuels.

  It also helps if you and your crew are just shy of completely insane.

  The other craft out there likely use lower-efficiency turbines, scavenged chemical batteries, stolen hydrocarbons. In the technological arms race, the Yossarian is like a homo sapien standing just out of rock-throwing range and calling down a missile strike on the Australopithecines.

  "Holy shit!" Billy says.

  Keller glances up from the controls to see, for a horrifying instant, the swollen swarm of aircraft under the dark lid of the storm. "I need to know the exact second we max out!" he shouts over his shoulder.

  After far too many skittish minutes, Owens shouts, "Red!"

  Giving in to his instincts, Keller banks out in a long arc, hoping that he doesn't plow right through any latecomers. Two planes merge into one giant fire blossom in the right corner of his peripheral vision. He does not deviate, but grips the shuddering control column, lets the sweat pour into his eyes, and flies right out of the shockwave.

  Still a good twenty minutes from the coast, Billy reports that no one is following them.

  Keller lands them in an open field without incident. Owens grumbles that they are probably days from even the tiniest village. Billy scares up some rabbits for dinner. Other than the crackling of the fire, the evening is silent. No sign of other aircraft anywhere.

  In the night, they are taken. Soldiers, in black uniforms. Probably some sort of local law. The soldiers are forced to knock Owens unconscious.

  Keller asks the soldiers if he can lie down and sleep. The captain says yes. From the floor, Keller can see several of the soldiers' faces. They all look angry. Despite his exhaustion, and relief at getting out of the storm in one piece, he is only able to sleep for five or ten minutes at a time.

  Before the sun is fully up, they enter a town square, notable for how much it has been renovated and improved. Clearly, the town's inhabitants are trying to claw back the Old World.

  A light rain begins to fall.

  A woman with short, white hair meets them at the front door of a building marked: CITY HALL. She wears civilian clothes, rather than a uniform. She informs them that she is the mayor. Her voice is warm enough, but she does not smile.

  The mayor asks who is in charge, and Keller raises his hand right away. Owens looks like he was about to open his mouth and rat Keller out.

  "We've impounded your plane," the mayor says, "and we will be confiscating your batteries."

  "That's horseshit!" Owens says, spittle flying from his lips. "You can't—"

  He crumples under the force of a soldier's solid punch.

  "Unfortunately," the mayor says, "in this world, as in all the worlds that came before, might makes right. And we will do what we must." She looks honestly sad about it.

  "Do I at least get the plane back?" Keller says.

  The mayor shakes her head.

  "I don't think that's fair."

  The mayor considers. She gestures to the clouds in the sky, the slow, steady rain.

  "Do you know what that is?"

  He doesn't understand the question.

  "That's what's left of the storm you were harvesting."

  "I don't think so. That just isn't possible."

  His mind's eye sees an infinite swarm of vultures.

  "Then where's our storm?" one of the mayor's aides demands.

  "With all due respect," Keller says, "you people aren't making any sense."

  The mayor says, "Let me show you something else."

  She leads Keller to a truck. He can't tell if it's the truck that brought them in last night.

  They drive just south of the town, to a bluff overlooking the Gulf. Keller sees what appears to be a long line of statues, ancient monoliths keeping vigil. Then they turn a bend in the road, and, from the new vantage point, he can see that the statues are in fact squat buildings supporting hefty wind turbines. He is shocked and impressed all at once. With a halfway decent battery array, they might be able to pull a fair amount of energy from any storm that hits this area dead-on.

  The mayor hauls open the door at the back of one of the buildings and ushers him inside. Keller can't help but stare at the interior of the structure. These villagers know what they are doing. His eye catches on the array of batteries set low into a concrete sub-level.

  "Flywheel batteries," the mayor says, "similar to those in your plane, but of our own design. Mechanical beats chemical."

  So there it is. As much as the crew of the Yossarian likes to think of Keller as the great genius, the great innovator, he learned the fundamentals of all of his equipment from dusty books in boarded-up libraries. He supposes there must be dusty books in boarded-up libraries all around the world.

  His technical edge is gone, maybe forever, so all he can do is out-hustle the competition.

  He takes a gamble. "You've got some nice facilities here, but you are entirely dependent on the weather coming to you, coming directly toward you. Give me my plane back and I'll harvest for you."

  The mayor looks up at the motionless rotor shaft running inward from the turbine outside.

  Keller says, "The power in my cells right now will last you maybe four months, and then it will be gone. Give me my plane back, and I'll sell you power on a monthly basis—supplement what you are able to gather on your own."

  "We invested most of what we had in the turbines," the mayor says.

  "I'll give you a fair price."

  He desperately wants to find a way to convince her that he means what he says. She looks him straight in the eye and he sees something that he has not seen in a long time.

  "Okay," she says.

  Back in the town square, Owens snarls, "You son of a bitch!"

  Billy and the others look relieved.

  A year later, when he eventually has to kill Owens in an outland bar, Keller tries to make himself feel at least a little regret. He thinks he owes it to the rest of the crew to try to be a little more like the mayor.

  * * *

  It's Not "The Lady or the Tiger?", It's "Which Tiger?"

  Ian Randal Strock | 1989 words

  "You look depressed. Want to talk about it?"

  Archetypal bartender, but there's a reason for the archetype. "Not really. But I ha
ve a feeling I'm going to anyway."

  "So talk. It may help, and it certainly won't hurt."

  Pretty good archetypal bartender.

  "I'm an entrepreneur, a typical one. I can feel success drawing me forward. I know there's going to be success in here somewhere... or at least, I really hope there's going to be success. But this one is just as big a failure as the previous four. And after I sober up tomorrow morning, I'm going to have to let my staff go and tell my investors that this business, too, is just not meant to be. How many times can one man do that, and still be able to look at himself in the mirror in the morning?"

  Long silence; the bartender's losing points. "Oh, that wasn't rhetorical? Most folks in here, they ask questions, but they treat me like a psychiatrist, not really wanting input."

  "I'm not most folks. Most folks aren't serial failures at business."

  "You'd be surprised. But no, most of them don't launch their own companies in order to fail. Is that what you're trying to do? Fail? Do you have a certain number of failures in mind, before you find that success?"

  "What kind of jerk would I have to be to plan to fail..." Oh, I get it. He picked up on that "typical entrepreneur" bit. "You think I'm aiming for the same number of failures as the average?"

  "How could I possibly think that? I've just met you. But I have seen a lot of people sitting where you are, crying over failures. And in many cases, they're self-inflicted."

  "Now you're saying I sabotaged my own businesses."

  "And now you're looking to blame someone else for what was probably just bad market conditions."

  Bartender's stock heads back up. "You've got a point. Got a suggestion to go with it?"