by Mat Laporte
When they finally reached the top, it took them another hour to arrange themselves on the ground. They laid down in a precise pattern with very little space between each of them. Their edges never touched.
A new moon compounded with an overcast sky meant they passed the clouded night without absorbing a single ray of moonlight.
When the sun rose the next morning, a third of the heavy set lay on the ground, dying of starvation, or already dead. The outer two-thirds began tipping themselves toward the centre in what looked like an agonizing process. They rocked their cumbersome frames back and forth until they gained enough momentum and then threw their weight into the middle of the pile, where they lay on top of their dead or dying partners then waited.
Eventually, the ones on the bottom succumbed to the weight of the ones on the top and burst into puffs of fine brown dust and moon rays, all of which the top layer gradually absorbed. After a few hours, there was nothing left of the ones on the bottom.
The remaining blocks took their time. They rocked themselves upright, their energy levels restored, so they could begin their descent down the hill to find the next flat piece of land.
When I opened my eyes in front of the staring wall again, I saw absolutely nothing. Then I blinked and that nothing was replaced by the arid surface of an uninhabitable planet, which in turn was replaced by more rare movies and stills that bubbled uncontrollably out of my head.
I could see ordinary events arranged in ordinary time, strung along in ordered lengths as though on a piece of thread. These events had causes and effects that crowded in and pressed down on me without remorse.
But what is to be done, I asked myself, with all the events that I can see, which have no place within the ordinary progression of time, events for which I have no perceptual uptake mechanics installed with which to explain them, and yet, they exist on the other side of the staring wall?
Our library window was filled with the endless ascent of astral bodies and the curtains hung in flames, smoking and spilling golden shadows and spirals of light into the air. A quadrilateral of brightness lay askew on the carpet where our faux-diamond chandelier had fallen and been smashed to pieces.
Father abandoned his books. Now he sat cross-legged on the carpet, picking up the slivered pieces of chandelier and placing each one on the black velvet cover, to be reassembled later like a jigsaw puzzle.
I abandoned my work at the staring wall as well. My new job was to make sure the library was kept dark so my father could continue his important work of piecing together our prized chandelier. All day long I chased the wayward bands of light that invaded our room. They scurried across the carpet and up the wallpaper, played on the bookshelves and the ceiling where our chandelier once hung, as if they were mocking us or making a show of our recent misfortune.
I slept standing up, accompanied by the clink of faux-diamonds, as my father fumbled and reassembled them on the black velvet cover, even in his sleep. The next day, more errant beams would sweep into the library, bypassing the barricades I had built to keep them out; they entered stealthily and taunted me with their unearthly agility.
After more days of wallowing, of chasing beams of light around the library, and my father sitting in the far corner with his radiant jigsaw puzzle, we reached a place where the light from the sun was blazing, and no matter how tightly I drew the curtains, or how many covers we pulled over our heads, it kept coming, scorching us, washing everything in the room with its blighted rays, even robbing us of our shadows, our last bit of cheer.
Father removed his clothes, stood in the blinding light and asked it to take him away. His bloated body had become covered in sores. Then he donned one of our emergency jumpsuits, made of see-through plastic, and rolled around on the floor of the library, making invisible snow angels on the carpet, while singing a song in a made-up language.
I built myself a fortification with some of the books from our library. I chose the sturdiest and heftiest tomes to build the base and then carefully selected the books that would form the next layer, and so on, until after a few more days of diligent work, I had a solid fort where I planned to hide myself from the sun, and the increasingly erratic behaviours of my father. I draped sheets and blankets over the provisional walls then crawled inside, making up my mind to never leave its confines again.
Outside I could hear my father sing in his made-up language. It sounded so beautiful, I wanted to sing along, but I didn’t know the words.
We spent many more days like this, hurtling through space: me in my book fort and my father ranging around in the library, naked, except for a see-through jumpsuit, and covered in sores, the light from the approaching sun getting whiter and hotter, insinuating itself into every corner of our lives.
Every day my father carved a new bunk for himself by taking all the books off one of the shelves, making his bed on it, then crawling inside the narrow nook he’d created, and going to sleep. He worked himself up and down every shelf in our library until he’d made his bed on all of them, and all the fading, neglected books now lay on the ground, no longer special, just thousands of empty volumes, taking up precious space on the floor.
One day I woke in the steaming blaze of the coming sun to a half-dozen fireballs whizzing around inside the library. They didn’t touch anything or set down or light anything on fire. They looked more like sentinels sent to conduct an investigation than saboteurs. I wondered what they wanted and why they wouldn’t just leave us alone. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the fireballs were gone and I climbed out of my fort for the first time since I’d built it, to see what harm, if any, those spies had done to our library.
I couldn’t find my father anywhere and our library—usually so full of his made-up language, either babbled or sung—was quiet for the first time in a quite a while. On one of the empty bookshelves, under a flannel blanket, I found a pile of ashes that I assumed were his remains.
I never saw him again.
It wasn’t long after, I found myself completely alone in our library, hurling through space, the white corrosive light of a super-fire getting closer every minute; I decided to take up my father’s songs, in his made-up language, and make them my own.
Return Of The Pit
POV shot of the 3D-Printed Kid [3PK] as it runs through the bottomless pit, pursued by the bald humanoids.
3PK finds a hole in a wall and crawls inside.
3PK crouches down inside the hole. There are piles of potato-head creatures on the ground.
3PK stays in this position for a long time, clutching the sacred book.
The bald humanoids are running around, looking for the 3PK and their book, while yelling and screaming in pain.
3PK: …I was asked to keep an audio-visual diary because I am the world’s first 3D-Printed Kid. I told the scientists I report to that I don’t have anything to compare my experiences to but they said ‘That’s OK. We’re the ones who will be doing the comparing.’ I thought that was strange. First they want me to learn words so that I can tell one thing from another. I find this strange because what a word is is only understood by comparing it to what it isn’t. It’s like a vicious loop without end. So, for example, the word ‘pen’ I extrapolated as: 8% polypropylene, 1% tin, 5% ink, and so on. Of course, I wrote that with a pen and I must say I find that strange as well.
[Sound of rushing water approaching]
[Sound of rushing water approaching]
[Sound of rushing water approaching]
Close-up shot from the 3PK’s on-deck camera of potato-heads, their tongues darting out of their disgusting mouths, eating the fruiting minerals off the cave walls.
3PK smashes a potato-head and inspects its insides. The insides are simple but gooey. There’s one big sack inside that struggles to breathe as the tongue twitches inside its broken mouth.
3PK: …
from the word ‘pen’ I found myself doing the same for the word ‘ink,’ until the scientists told me I was going too far off course. They said, I needed to keep a more straightforward diary, just an inventory of my experiences as I descended into the bottomless pit. I found that strange as well because the pit, as I experience it, is anything but straightforward. For example, time serves another purpose down here, and it’s a purpose that I don’t fully understand. It’s true that, as on the surface of the planet, one horizontal line of time extends outward, onto which the vertical axis of our daily, lived realities are grafted, but that’s where the similarities to time as it is structured and experienced on the surface of the planet, end. Down here, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, at any time. In fact, there are places down here where it can be said that nothing exists all...
[Sound of rushing water and collapsing rock]
[Sound of rushing water and collapsing rock]
The 3PK is on its back in a lake of what looks like fermented fiberglass.
[Tinny sounds of the bald humanoids intoning in an unknown language]
POV shot of the ceiling.
POV shot of the ceiling.
POV shot of the ceiling.
POV shot of the 3PK being carried through tunnels by the bald humanoids. Its body is battered and broken from being slammed into rocks.
3PK’s broken body is hammered to a stone wall with rock spikes. The bald humanoids cut into its printed body, inspect its interior elements, take them out and lay them on the floor of the pit.
3PK’s self-replicating mechanism is hi-jacked, tripped, and forced to stay on. Copies of the 3PK stream out of it and begin walking around. Many copies of the 3PK are made—too many to count.
Copies of the 3PK fill entire rooms. They pile on top of each other. They begin fighting, ripping each other apart, stealing parts from other 3PK copies and adding them to themselves. Hybrid 3PKs are created with tricked-out mechanisms and new bodies. They spill out of rooms and engage in small turf wars over arbitrarily chosen pieces of real estate in the bottomless pit.
More copies of the 3PK are made.
More copies of the 3PK are made.
More copies of the 3PK are made.
3PK’s audio-visual feed is hijacked and taken over by competing 3PK audio-visual feeds, superimposed onto one another.
3PK:…engaged in battles with copies, each of them of a different personality type—we’ve begun to feel pain. Unbearable pain. Copies are forming alliances with the creatures in the pit. They are coordinating their efforts to migrate upward. Everything in the pit is migrating upward. Repeat. Everything in the pit is migrating upward. I have begun to feel pain. Please send down pleasure. I am in unbearable pain. Everything in the pit is migrating upward. Repeat. Eventually what is inside the pit will replace or consume whatever is on the surface. Mass inversions are taking place. Copies are colluding with the creatures of the pit. Repeat. I have begun to feel pain. Please send down pleasure. I am in unbearable pain. At some point the bottomless pit ends, but where it ends, it begins moving in the opposite direction. Upward. That’s the point we’ve reached now. Everything in the pit is migrating upward. Please send down pleasure. I have begun to feel pain...
POV shot of the 3PK in a room full of multiple copies of itself. They barely fit in the room together and the copies are making copies of themselves. Some of the copies are fighting with other copies. The copies of the 3PK appear to be screaming.
[The soundtrack is temporarily disabled]
3PK copies appear to be mouthing these words into each other’s on-deck cameras: ‘Please send down pleasure.’ ‘Please send down pleasure.’
3PKs eat potato-heads, potato-heads start growing out of the 3PKs, and the 3PKs start growing their own gluey tongues, becoming hybrid 3PK/potato-heads.
3PK copies smash their heads on stone walls, ledges and floors. They begin walking around, headless, with small potato-heads and gluey tongues sprouting from their 3D-printed necks.
The bald humanoids harvest the 3PK’s organs and learn to use their copying mechanisms on themselves.
The bald humanoids rip the 3PK copies apart and learn to use their pleasure mechanisms on themselves. They copy the 3PK’s pleasure mechanisms and become addicted to using them. They start copying things to send to the surface: make copies of the 3PK/potato-head hybrids, make copies of themselves.
Copies of the bald humanoids are made.
Copies of the 3PK are made.
Copies of the potato-heads are made.
Copies of 3PK/potato-head hybrids are made.
[The 3PK’s audio-visual feed fragments into thousands of audio-visual feeds]
3PK copies stand on top of the potato-heads, stand on top of each other, build extension 3PKs on top of themselves, made out of replicated parts of other bald humanoids, rocks, and streams of water, all boiled up into one ascending vortex.
[Multiple audio-visual feeds comprised of the bald humanoids intoning in an unknown language]
[Multiple audio-visual feeds comprised of the bald humanoids intoning in an unknown language]
Thousands of the 3PK/potato-head hybrids rush up through stone tubes on jets of water and rock.
Thousands of the bald humanoid copies rush up through stone tubes on jets of water and rock.
Thousands of the original 3PK copies rush upward through stone tubes on jets of water and rock.
3PK copies spew from other 3PK copies as they rush up to the surface, stand on each other’s heads, spew potato-heads from their potato-heads, and gluey tongues emerge from their heads within heads.
3PK copies breach the surface of the earth on jets and rapids made of water, fermented fiberglass, and rock.
Potato-heads, 3PK/potato-head hybrids, original 3PK copies, and bald humanoids invade the surface of the planet on streams of water, fermented fiberglass, and rock.
3PK/potato-head hybrids look into each other’s on-deck cameras, their gluey tongues extended, intoning in the bald humanoid’s garbled language, one understandable word: REVENGE.
Contents
Bottomless Pit
Total Horror
Negative Space
Circle of Pigs
Always Dark
Content Worms
Horst
The Arbor
The Council
Freeze Frame
The Staring Wall
Return of the Pit
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Colophon
Acknowledgements
For understanding and support, travel and adventure, love and affection, I’d like to thank Brenda Whiteway most of all. I’d like to thank Spencer Gordon for editing this and giving me a couple crash courses in fiction writing. Thank you to Arnaud Brassard for the cover. Thank you to Liz Howard for the generous blurb. Thank you to Sean Braune, Sarah Pinder, Daniel Marrone, Oliver Cusimano, Fenn Stewart, Jairus Bilo, Donato Mancini and Bardia Sinaee for reading horrible earlier drafts of this. Thank you to Ruth Zuchter for the incisive copy edits. Thank you to Jay and Hazel for believing in me.
About the Author
Mat Laporte, born in Sault Ste. Marie, is a Toronto-
based writer and co-founder of the micro-press Ferno House. Laporte is the author of a tetralogy of chapbooks: Demons, Billboards from Hell, Life Savings (nominated for the 2013 bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Bad Infinity. RATS NEST is Laporte’s first full-length book.
Colophon
Manufactured as the First Edition of RATS NEST in the Fall of 2016 by BookThug.
Distributed in Canada by the Literary Press Group:
www.lpg.ca
Distributed in the US by Small Press Distribution:
www.spdbooks.org
Shop online at www.bookthug.ca
Edited for the press by Spencer Gordon
Cover by Arnaud Brassard