by Chris Kelso
Receive your free publishing guide
After a meeting, you will receive your guide in eBook and e-mail attachment.
Reviewed manuscript
We will review your manuscript and pass it along to Mr Mephisto himself.
Full-service publisher
Our professional agents will edit, proof, create cover art, implement limited, defined promotional campaigns and take book orders from online stores. Since consumption of books in digital format is a rapidly growing distribution market, Mephisto books are available in digital as well as traditional print. The bottom line is, you are a genius; we know it, you know it, now let’s make the sure the public knows it . . .
Terence hovered his paws over the keyboard tabs and clicked on the e-mail address. He composed a query letter and attached a document with his favourite story, ‘Human Digging up Bones in Soul’.
—Hello
I write stories. I just learned speak. But I learn quickly. My stories are good. You will like them.
T
Terence clicked send. He felt confident and, sure enough, a reply came zinging into the inbox minutes later. If he still had a tail it would have been wagging, his phantom erection stiff and true.
Dear T
We read your stories with great enthusiasm and awe. As divine agents acting from the true will, we would like to meet with you to discuss a publishing strategy. Where can we meet?
Best
M
Terence yapped with joy. Getting published was so easy! To think Phil moaned about being a writer, allowed it to ruin his relationships and bring about the onset of junky botulism. Terence didn’t understand how anyone could fail at writing! Here he was, a Labrador with limited spelling ability, a near-certified published author! He was going to be the first dog writer. He typed up a message and arranged to meet at the park the next day.
3.
Terence sat in the park. A shadow etched towards him.
—Hello Mr Mephisto—he barked instinctively.
A voice emerged in response like a choir of demons.
—Mephisto is not one thing; I am just the civic intelligence, the face of Mephisto.
Its breath was of soil, damp and eternal, one with the alkaline earth—but the corpus was different. There was nothing organic about it. It seemed to’ve been cobbled together with old Pepsi cans and television sets stuck on a nebulous non-channel, filled between with some acrid heavy duty adhesive. It motioned forward in a slithering cube of gelatinous matter. Temporary eyes blinked open then disappeared beneath the body of the bubbling, shapeless amoeba-thing. Mistake of the elder gods . . .
—Well, hello all the same.
It bled fluid from every pore, viscera eked from the ducts—viscera eyes looked out at him with a cannibal’s hunger. At least it seemed to understand Terence’s inarticulate barking.
—You’re Mephisto?—Terence asked.
—Mephisto is a network of individuals. Did you know that the mind doesn’t end within the prison of the skull?
—Um . . . no I didn’t—Terence resisted the urge to clean his genitals.
—We act in concert to accomplish goals beyond individual agents to fulfil the hive wants, the propagation of information. In other words, the ultimate collaboration!
Terence wasn’t convinced. He felt uneasy being out in the park without a leash on.
—Mephisto is aware of the dynamic evolution of knowledge between entities and eventually, through networking, we achieve distributed cognition.
—I don’t . . . I’m just a dog . . .
—Mutualistic symbiosis, a knowledge ecosystem. We hope to increase the emergence of systematic acuity through stigmergy.
Terence squinted in confusion.
—You’ll be connected by hyperlinks and your neurons and synapses will be replaced and amalgamated with the super-organism.
—I’m not sure this is what I was expecting . . .
—Things rarely are. You will get published, you will be part of something that commands respect. The leash is off.
—The leash is off?
—We just need to attach the vector—don’t worry, it has no taste receptors so it won’t enjoy the feeding process too much, we promise.
—That’s good to know . . .
Mephisto materialised a tick-like creature engorged with blood.
—This will help transmit the virus into your system that leads to amalgamation.
He placed the wriggling arthropod onto the back of Terence’s head. He felt it burrow deep into the fur behind his neck.
—But, what do you look like? I mean, the real you? The one up in the control centre; every organism has a navigator, or was that just human myth?
Mephisto sucked air into its maw, fluid bubbled in an exasperated throat.
—It, that is to say I, Lem, look more like a mole-rat. I’m rodent-like anyway, wrinkled skin. My eyelids are mere slits which suggests I have poor visual acuity when not assimilated with Mephisto.
This knowledge warmed Terence. It was good to know there was a simple animal up there just like him. He could really be part of something and succeed. He felt the vector bore through his flesh. This is the last time Terence would think for himself . . .
***
In the main nerve centre of Mephisto, both hemispheres discuss the latest readings of their newly amalgamated drone. They exchange dialogue via the colossus.
LEFT—His own brain is half the size of a human, which is remarkable given that a dog’s brain is relatively tiny in comparison to that of a human being. The MRI suggest Terence has all the things we look for in Mephisto. He has intelligence, servility, and a desire for reward, but there’s something else . . .
RIGHT—Okay, what is it . . .
LEFT—You might want to brace yourself.
RIGHT—Okay . . .
LEFT—It seems Terence has an exaggerated inferior, parietal region, advanced cerebral cortex, even a human-sized Broca’s area, which explains his speech.
RIGHT—So? He’s a smart dog?
LEFT—No sir, I would say Terence is not a dog at all, but rather a human being.
RIGHT—Are you kidding?
LEFT—A human being with expressive aphasia. Don’t get me wrong, he would be considered quite unfit to enter civilised society . . .
RIGHT—He looks like a dog to me.
LEFT—He tests positive for Pitt Syndrome, or ‘wolfman syndrome’. He also has Rosacea which would give his nose that elongated, wet appearance. He is human in every other respect.
RIGHT—So, how did he end up as a dog?
LEFT—Memory mapping suggests he was in the care of one Philip Kohl; an unemployed slave, obsessive letter writer, and chicken hypnotist. He perhaps kidnapped Terence and raised him as a canine.
RIGHT—Good lord . . .
LEFT—We did an FMRI scan and he often dreams of being a human. Neurofeedback shows Terence strongly identifying with slave males. His castration may have helped him relate to slaves in his dreams. He’s even started walking on two legs. You’d say he even looked like a human beneath it all.
RIGHT—We have to make sure he never finds this out. Break the last of his curiosity. Tell him his owner is dead. Take away his reason to ever leave Mephisto.
LEFT—But why don’t we just unstick him? We can find another desperate writer to absorb, a human one.
RIGHT—You know as well as I do that separation after fusion is a long, complicated, humiliating process for Mephisto. You know what to do . . .
***
When news came out of Phil’s demise, Terence couldn’t help but whimper—which was odd, because what did Phil really ever do for Terence? Take him away from his home? Have him neutered? He had also showed companionship and love. Phil was a slave too; he was just waiting for his message to come through from the State consigning him to a life sentence mining inessential minerals in one of the enclaves. It wasn’t Phil’s fault he was a lousy owner.
—You hear the latest?
—came a voice from the neighbouring cell. It was Lafitte. She was a rakishly thin girl with a blonde head of dirty, dry straw. Influences included Acker, Plath, and Anne Sexton. She too was an unpublished writer. Lafitte cradled a shrivelled baby in her arms that sucked her left breast into a dried-up bag.
—That Mephisto is really a communist composite committee called Stanislaw Lem, who was a parasitic extra-terrestrial life form who assimilated other organisms, an amorphous blob. It’s back, self-replicating like a virus, a reservoir host . . .
Terence licked his own anus clean.
— . . . But that’s just hearsay amongst residents who haven’t received their full psychosurgery.
Her child, Persephone, had been born inside the Mephisto bowels—the first of a new jilted generation to be raised in its confines. She was a true phenomenon given that she had been thought into existence rather than conceived. Frankly, Terence thought it was cruel to breed inside this monster, even if it did encourage collaborative thinking. Lafitte often raved about how her child would be a genius, born within the super-organism. Persephone had been reared on information since the day of her birth. That’s why Lafitte claimed she took in so much of it; her drug starved baby would scream all through the night if it didn’t get its second hand fix. There was some truth to this.
—No, what’s the latest?—Terence asked, barely half-interested.
—They’re synthesising a new strain of information, twice as hallucinogenic.
—Why would they do that?
—Apparently it’ll encourage us to collaborate faster . . .
Terence didn’t get too excited. Lafitte was far from a reliable source and her claims were usually erroneous. She specialised in speculative fiction.
—Who told you this?
—Raymond Hogg and I had a shared vision last night when we were on it. We saw the plan; we’re crucial to the skein of the Mephisto organism.
Terence gave a suspicious look.
—It’s true! Didn’t you know that’s how they communicate with us now?
—What?
—They blend the experience of two amalga-mates so they can have shared visions. It’s the next big thing. Pretty soon all the public service announcements will happen through mutual transcendentalism.
—I haven’t had any contact.
Persephone gargled, her inhuman eyes were pupil-less and milky, her throbbing brain engorged with culture.
—I was going to ask if you wanted to share an experience tonight . . . with me?
Terence became awkward. He really didn’t want to share anything with anyone, especially a crazy cook like Lafitte. Being sexless was anti-social that way. He was, however, touched by her sentiment and he’d have been lying if he said he didn’t enjoy the feeling of being wanted again.
—Maybe.
It seemed so easy for Terence to become amalgamated with the Mephisto body, leave his human owner Phil and finally get his work published. It soon became apparent, however, that it was something else. Optimists believe Mephisto’s ultimate motivation was to wage guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, run unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of the Slave State’s censorship policies, repression and, above all, play out elaborate media pranks as a form of art. Terence felt like he was comfortable with what these people said Mephisto represented, at least he was a published writer now . . .
Viscera eyes bled into his mind, burrowed deep through the back of the skull, through bone tissue and matter until they reached the cosy caves of Terence’s sockets. The vector outline rested under his skin, giving him a second pulse. Everything Terence said and thought was being recorded by the Mephisto CCTV set up behind his own eyes. He’d been tampered with so much that he just couldn’t trust his own body anymore. They’d even fitted his collar with a bizarre device called The Bowlingual—a microphone transmitter with voice-print analysis that translated his barks. Terence grew accustomed to being awoken in the middle of the night and forced to undergo mutilating surgeries. He even thought that, perhaps, he was happier because of all the tampering.
But he knew, deep down he knew, that the huge lumbering monster he’d been absorbed into wasn’t to be trusted. It wanted him to implicitly adhere to its ideologies and sacrifice the creative part of himself. He wasn’t writing for himself anymore, reflecting his own inner desires or satisfying his own soul. He was a lobotomised lackey, an intellectual invalid working for a group who share their work. Mephisto was used by hundreds of artists and activists all over the Slave State and the Americas since the first failed emancipation, but the truth was that it was the monster who was using the artists. The Mephisto was more akin to a parasite that pulled in aspiring and naïve young artists to help feed its own ambition of world domination. Soon it spread to other Slave towns and cities, such as Wire and Ersatz, as well as countries outside the Slave-zone such as Austria-Germany, New Catalonia, and Soviet-Asia.
Terence’s ears had seized up into grotesque fleshy muffs. This wasn’t uncommon in the warrens. He observed Lafitte’s haggard appearance, her emaciated, stretched face, saw her cross-eyed vacant stare—and felt nothing but pity, testament to the intrinsic goodness of a life that never received much in the way of sympathy itself.
It occurred to Terence that he could still end this pattern of servility. The truth of the matter was that he was exhausted. The life of a writer had run its course, like how a jaded cop must feel when he’s seen one too many dead kids. All the awards that Mephisto won or was nominated for weren’t enough. Mephisto wasn’t enough. He crawled to the dark corner of the warren and lay there, the way a sick dog does when it’s ready to die alone.
There was the initial rush of hypertension, then the crashing of the sea, and then came the blitzkrieg of colours . . .
Lafitte watched on as her child kept sucking until it finally released its teeth from the punctured, lolled balloon of her left breast. Viscera eyes stare out from her hollow sockets as Persephone dies in Lafitte’s arms, face opaque as a film of creosote on the river. She died just in time, having drained her mother completely . . .
———————————————————————————
Philip K. Dick to the Slave State
(Attached for the interest of Slave State authorities, namely Baroness Un and her enabler Moog, is an intercepted, uncensored letter from subversive aggressor Philip K. Dick to the FBI on September 2, 1974)
—I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner—who is Mephisto’s official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner, and Suvin are foreigners but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). I will refer to him as Mephisto for the remainder of this letter. For an Iron Curtain Party group dedicated to State suppression and manipulation purposes, Mephisto is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles—and sometimes reads foreign (to him) languages and sometimes does not—to gain monopolistic positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science-fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has, in addition, begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates a [U.S.] publishing house which publishes a great deal of Party-controlled science-fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you, I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publ
ications of our professional organization SCIENCE-FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews, and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honours and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Mephisto as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Mephisto’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and it’s crude, insulting, and downright ignorant attacks on American science-fiction and American science-fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).
It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland (which incidentally is a city twinned with one Shell County, located roughly 500 galactic miles away in the 4th dimension). What can be done, though, I do not know.
END
THE STATEMENT OF TOM TRYOUT
1.
The birds would watch Tom eat. They’d gather on the pier and leer at him, white as almond blossoms, as if they knew something.
Outside—a staccato of fireworks
Tom Tryout observed the wound he’d made in his girlfriend’s belly. Its ripe rawness was almost vaginal, gaped to maximum resistance, leaking, budding ever outwards in ugly red shrooms of tissue.
Tom took out a syringe and dug it into the bar of Suzie’s semi-rigoured forearm. He descended the plunger then brought it back up slowly. He brought it up to view, studied the measure of blood that filled the gauge. The Gangles outside squawked. He smiled. Tom could hear Mr Kowalski outside trimming his lawn with that old busted-up mower of his, the one with the stiff pull-chain and shifting mechanical guts as loud as an ironmonger’s clank.
—I sure know how to pick ‘em huh?—Tom addressed no one.
He rolled up his shirt sleeve and pinched the flesh on his bicep until it became rouged with the colour of sudden circulation. Tom stuck himself with the needle, sinking the plunger till Suzie’s blood mixed with his within the great sarcophagus of flesh. Tom had an erection too.