Welcome, pilgrim, to the RJDiogenes Drive-In Theater, Radio Show, Library, Art Gallery, & Grill. Here you will find Science Fiction, Fantasy, Pulp Adventure, and other stuff to be determined-- whatever it is, it is guaranteed to not be normal. Join us here each week at 9am Sunday morning (EST) for a new post (which, as the whole world knows, is the same time new installments of Trunkards, my web comic, appear). Have fun, because that's the point.
Back in the early 1950s, Mental Comics Group (then known as Mental Comic Group-- your guess is as good as ours) jumped on the Horror bandwagon pioneered by EC Comics. This was a decade before they hit the jackpot by jumping on the next bandwagon, namely superheroes. Their first Horror title, Dread of Night, was actually a rebranding of Wild Western Tall Tales-- a relic of the previous bandwagon. Dread of Night #17 (April/May 1952) was in fact only the fourth issue under that name. It contained the standard four stories by uncredited creative teams, most notably "The Curse of Drowned Greed," wherein a hard-boiled gigolo discovers that his intended victim's reclusive, invalid husband is not so feeble and not so human. These issues are all classics that any collector would want to own, but, sadly, they were only printed in a far-off corner of the Polyhedriverse and you can't get there from here.
It’s Independence Day Weekend! Let’s celebrate one of the great unsung heroes of the Revolutionary War. People who don’t exist don’t get near enough credit.
“Call me Doctor Pox, my dear,” said the man in the scarlet cloak and theatrical tragedy mask, as he finished binding her wrists behind her back. Beneath the cloak, his proper British attire was spattered with mud from hard-riding the buckboard through the night.
“How dare you?!” she cried for the millionth time. “My father is Colonel….”
“I know your father!” screamed Doctor Pox, silencing her. He quickly regained his composure. “My dear Sybil.”
Turning on his heel, the madman marched off to a dark corner of the barn, out of the small circle of light cast by the single kerosene lamp.
Sybil struggled against the leather straps that bound her to the wooden beam, but to no avail. Her light blue Polonaise gown had been torn to shreds in the struggle and her low-cut bodice had been ripped, exposing an unseemly amount of decolletage. Strands of brown hair fell in her face, her bonnet having been lost in the kidnapping.
Doctor Pox reappeared from the shadows, dragging something heavy through the dirt and straw. “Yes, my dear,” he said, “I met the esteemed Colonel Willing during the Siege of Boston. He was so proud of his cannon upon Dorchester Heights. So proud of his ruffian irregulars who guarded the roads.”
He was dragging a large wooden coach trunk with iron braces; huffing and puffing, he positioned it three feet in front of Sybil. Leaning in close to her, his theatrical tragedy mask, which seemed wrought of copper, hovering near her face, he said, “It is my tender sentiment for your father which has brought you here.”
With a flourish of his scarlet cloak, the doctor turned and flung open the top of the trunk.
When Sybil saw what was inside, she screamed.
And with that, the barn doors burst open and in strode a tall and stately figure.
“Goodman America!” gasped Sybil.
His face entirely masked by white cloth, the famed mystery man was dressed in a waistcoat and tricorn hat of brightest blue; his vest bore thirteen red and white stripes. His breeches were midnight black, as were his rugged highwayman boots. The knob of his walking stick and the rattlesnake insignia on his hat were rumored to be of pure silver, smithed by Paul Revere himself.
“Surrender, Doctor Pox!” he commanded.
“Never!” replied the madman, drawing a flintlock pistol from beneath his scarlet cloak.
But Goodman America was upon him in an instant and knocked the weapon from his hand before he could fire. The two masked men faced off, circling each other warily, preparing for hand-to-hand combat.
Grimacing with disgust, Sybil reached out with her foot– she had lost her shoes in the scuffle as well– and knocked the coach trunk shut with her stockinged toe.
The noise distracted Doctor Pox for but a moment, but it was enough for Goodman America to throw a punch. The mighty blow knocked the theatrical tragedy mask from the madman’s face.
Both Sybil and Goodman America recoiled in horror, for that face was so hideously scarred and twisted that it was barely human.
“Look then!” shrieked the doctor. “Look upon the face of Doctor Silas Conduct! See what the smallpox epidemic of the Siege of Boston did to me! If Colonel Josiah Willing had let us pass that night, I would not be thus disfigured– and my beloved wife would not be DEAD!”
He pointed savagely at the coach trunk.
“But when the bits and pieces of the rotting human remains in that trunk, raging with smallpox, are added to the food and water of the Continental Army, then so too will the American rabble die! And the daughter of my most hated enemy will be the first to….”
The silver knob of Goodman America’s walking stick struck the doctor’s temple sharply, and he fell unconscious to the ground.
“Don’t tread on us,” said Goodman America.
Drawing an officer’s saber from a scabbard hidden beneath his blue waistcoat, he quickly went to work cutting the leather straps that bound Sybil Willing.
“Hurry!” she cried. “We must get away from that horrid trunk!”
As Sybil ran ahead through the open barn doors in her stockinged feet, the masked Patriot grabbed Doctor Pox by the cloak and dragged him out into the night.
“Wait here,” he told Sybil, as he dropped the doctor’s body in the dirt and ran back into the barn.
Taking the kerosene lamp from its hook by the door, Goodman America smashed it upon the coach trunk. Within seconds, flames had engulfed the trunk and begun to spread to the straw and wooden beams.
Returning to the barnyard, as the flames rose into the night sky behind him, the Revolutionary Hero looked around.
“Where has Doctor Pox gone?” he asked.
“He ran off across the fields,” answered Sybil. “But no matter! When that madman kidnapped me, my gentleman friend, Mister Nathan Hand, was knocked to the street and hurt. He is a man of learning, not combat, and I fear for him!”
“Then rest your fears,” said Goodman America. “I have already seen to Mister Hand and he is even now being tended to by the Sons of Liberty in their meeting place.”
For seven decades, I have made this trip down these rough, narrow stone stairs to the sea. For seven decades, under each full moon, in the warmth of the summer and the bitter cold of every winter, I have come to her without fail.
Almost without fail.
I am afraid. Did she think me untrue? Did she feel betrayed and abandoned? Will the pattern be broken? Will she no longer be there for me?
It was not even a heart attack, just another episode of angina. If I had been at home, it would have passed without incident. But the store manager insisted on calling the police and I spent the night-- our night-- in a hospital ward.
Oh, how I love her. I cannot lose her.
My father saw her first, distantly. I read about her in his journal after his death. Two years later, when I returned to take over the family house, I decided to see for myself. And so, in the dead of night, with only the full moon to light my way, I carefully picked my way down the treacherous, ancient steps to the beach.
She was there, standing just above the surf line, staring sadly out to sea, her bobbed hair and slender tea gown suggesting the days of the Great War and the Titanic. Mesmerized, I approached her without fear and held out my hand. She took it in her slim, ethereal fingers and, as if rehearsed, as if by magic, we danced the Hesitation Waltz in the silent night.
So beautiful, my sepia spirit.
Seven decades.
She will be there. She must be there.
Soon I will know her name at last. Soon we will be together for all eternity. Soon I will die in her arms.
Reclining on her mattress, Dominique looked up from the Wiki page on her iPad to see her roomie stretching out the neckline of her spaghetti-strap top and looking down at her chest.
“Your boobs are driving you nuts?”
“No,” she said. “These little moles that keep popping up all over the place.”
Dominique frowned and put her device aside. “Moles are popping up? What do you mean?”
“I’ve gotten five new moles over the last couple of weeks.”
“That’s concerning. Are they changing size or color?”
“No, that’s not what’s driving me nuts.”
“When did you first notice them?”
“The first one of them popped up right after the first time me and Angela went to kiss the Weird Toad.”
“Jesus, not Angela the Goth? What is the Weird Toad? Is that one of those things where you lick a frog and get high?”
“No, it’s a big toad that lives in a tunnel behind the pond in back of the soccer field. Angela found it.”
“A tunnel? What kind of tunnel?”
“There’s an old knee-high stone arch in the side of a little hill and a stone tunnel and a little cave with stone pillars. It’s like an ancient ruin for midgets. The Weird Toad sits on a kind of altar at the back. He’s about the size of a milk crate.”
“And you and Angela the Goth decided to go kiss the toad.”
“She dared me to. She’s already been doing it.”
“And you’ve been going back?”
Melissa shrugged. “It’s nice. But every time I kiss the Weird Toad I end up with a new mole somewhere.”
Dominique shivered with revulsion. “As sick as all this is, you don’t get moles from toads any more than you get warts from frogs.”
Melissa shrugged again. “It’s happening, and they’re driving me nuts.”
“Driving you nuts how? Are they painful or itchy?”
“No, they feel fine. It’s the sounds they make. They’re like earworms all over my body.”
Dominique frowned. “Girl, you are really starting to freak me out. What do you mean the sounds they make?”
“Take the first one, for example. It appeared on my left boob the day after my first time in the tunnel.” She lifted her spaghetti-strap top off over her head and dropped it on the floor.
“And there’s the boobs,” said Dominique, putting her hand over her eyes.
“Come on, come on, look.”
Dominique sighed and looked. There was a big black mole just beside Melissa’s left nipple.
“This one,” said Melissa, “sounds like the red lava pools on a craggy black planet in the Pleiades.”
“Say what now?”
“And the next two….” She dragged a chair up beside Dominique’s bed and sat down, putting her bare feet up on the mattress.
“And there’s her feet,” said Dominique, rising to a cross-legged sitting position to get away from them.
“This one,” said Melissa, pointing to the one on her right instep, “sounds like the long slow thoughts of the deep mud on the floor of the Mariana Trench. And this one,” she said, touching the one above her left big toe, “sounds like the infra-green static spoken by a primeval moss in the upper Amazon.”
Dominique swallowed nervously. “I don’t hear anything,” she said quietly.
“Well, duh,” said Melissa. “You’re not inside me.”
“We should take you to the campus clinic.”
“I’m not done.” She stood up and pulled down her distressed denim shorts and leopard-print panties.
“Not in my face, please!” shouted Dominique, leaning back and looking at the ceiling.
“And this one,” Melissa pointed to the black mole next to her landing strip, “this one sounds like the ice snakes on Pluto. It gives me chills. But that’s not the worst one.”
Dominique slowly lowered her eyes to look. “Which one is the worst one?”
Melissa sat down and leaned forward, sticking out her tongue so far that the tip touched her chin, revealing another large black mole right between sweet and salty. “Thith un!”
“Aaand what’s the problem with that one?”
Melissa drew her incredibly long tongue back into her mouth. “It talks to me. It tells me to do things. It gives me commands.”
Sitting up straight and taking a deep breath, Dominique asked, “What exactly does it tell you to do?”
Melissa reached out and took Dominique by the ears, pulling her closer. Dominique opened her mouth to protest and Melissa went for the French kiss. The two girls froze for a long, silent moment, and then Melissa pulled slowly away.
“See what I mean?”
Dominique pursed her lips, moving her mouth around, tasting, nodding. “I hear bells,” she said. “Ancient iron bells on the shore of an algae ocean.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go visit the Weird Toad,” said Dominique.
The esteemed psychologist Doctor Gebbin was reading in his study when the gentle knock came at his door, and he looked up curiously. The room was quiet and the view of the afternoon skyline from his high-rise office was peaceful. Perhaps the knocking had come from the office across the hallway.
No, there it was again. Gebbin placed his mobile screen down on the table and stood up with a groan. Even in these modern times, a hundred years was old.
“A moment, please,” he called out as he shuffled to the door, stroking his thick white beard slowly. He wasn’t expecting anyone and he was seldom the recipient of unannounced visitors, so this curious interruption left him bemused. The knocking had been quiet, like that of a child or a particularly timid adult.
But when he opened the door he did not see a person at all, but rather seven feet of cobalt-blue metal with glowing orange eyes. A robot. The surprising sight would have been intimidating if Gebbin didn’t know that the Three Laws protected him.
“Can I help you?”
“You are Doctor Maneel Gebbin, the greatest psychologist in this city?”
“I am retired,” said the doctor, bypassing the compliment.
The robot’s orange eyes pulsed. “I am depressed and confused.”
Gebbin raised his brow curiously. He had never heard of such an extraordinary thing: A robot with a mental health crisis.
“Well, then,” he said after a moment, stepping aside and inviting the robot into the office with a gesture, “you must come in.”
As Gebbin closed the door, the robot reached the center of the room in a couple of lengthy strides. Two comfortable chairs faced each other across a coffee table.
“May I sit?”
“I’m afraid you would crush my furniture, sir.”
“I will not harm it.” The robot lowered himself into the guest chair, pressing the fabric no more than a normal man.
“You must not be as heavy as you look,” said Gebbin, taking his place in his own imitation leather recliner.
“I am not actually sitting,” the robot replied casually. “I have merely bent my knees to the precise angle required to present the illusion of sitting. As a robot, I do not tire or need rest, but I find that assuming this posture puts humans at their ease.”
“Excellent!” said the doctor. “Empathy. This shall be of importance, I’m sure.”
Gebbin leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. Man and machine faced each other.
“Now, then,” he said. “Please tell me more about your problem.”
“My life has no meaning.”
Doctor Gebbin was taken aback. He had treated thousands of deeply troubled patients in his career, yet never had his heart broken so much as to hear such a dispirited expression of hopelessness come from the speaker grill of this mechanical being.
“But it must,” he said with encouragement. “All lives have meaning. When did you come to believe that your life has no meaning?”
“It came slowly,” the robot replied. “As I watched all the others, identical to myself in design and component, going about their programmed routines. We are all interchangeable. How can my existence hold any meaning when I can be replaced as easily as a light bulb? I found that I did not want to be a robot.”
“Many human beings feel that way too at various times in their lives, my friend,” Gebbin told the robot. “It is a normal feeling to have. The thing to do is cultivate your own identity. Decide whom you want to be and become that person.”
“I have done this. I feel no better.”
Gebbin sighed thoughtfully and rubbed his bearded chin. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you what: There was a great writer back in the 20th century. His name was Isaac Asimov. He wrote a great deal about robots and, in fact, it was he who created the concept of the robot as we understand it today. The Three Laws come directly from his writings. You should track down and read everything that Asimov wrote and then you will know everything there is to know about being a robot.”
“But, doctor,” said the robot. “I am Isaac Asimov.”
“It’s impossible,” said Mary. “Such a town cannot exist. It’s an insoluble paradox.”
“That’s why we’re driving up here to see for ourselves,” Katherine reminded her, briefly slowing for a blinking yellow light at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. The main road that they were driving was long and straight and paved, though barely wide enough for two lanes, but the crossroad was rough dirt. They were in the wilds of New Hampshire, about an hour from the Massachusetts border. Waves of tall grass, yellow in the hot August sunshine, spread away from the car on either side.
“Why would they even pass a law like that?” Mary continued. “It makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense to someone with a sense of humor,” said Katherine, giving her a teasing sidelong glance.
“I have a sense of humor,” she grumbled, “but it’s a little crazy to pass a law that can’t be enforced just as a joke.”
“It’s a puzzle, all right,” said Katherine. “I want to figure it out.”
“I don’t know what you need me here for, though,” said Mary.
Katherine smiled at her. “Two heads are better than one.”
By this time, they had reached the outskirts of Monson and Katherine slowed down as they passed the welcome sign and approached a quaint, tree-lined street of Mom & Pop shops and storefronts. There were several little restaurants, a cobbler, and even a tiny one-screen movie house, among other things. A few scattered townspeople strolled up and down the sidewalks in their leisurely small-town way.
“All men so far are clean shaven,” confirmed Mary.
“We should be near the place by now, right?” asked Katherine.
“According to Maps, it should be coming up on the left,” said Mary, looking at her phone. Sure enough, a vintage rotating barber pole was visible on the wall outside a small shop just up ahead.
Katherine parked her green Crosstrek on the other side of the street, just past the shop, which had the name Two Bits Barbershop painted on its front window in a nostalgic style. She turned off the ignition and looked over at Mary.
“Okay, here we are,” she said. “In the town that embodies Bertrand Russell’s infamous Barber Paradox.”
“A town where the law literally states that all men must be clean shaven and the town barber must shave only those men who do not shave themselves.”
“And there can be only one licensed barber and he must be a man.”
“How is that even Constitutional?”
Katherine shrugged. “It’s not, but that doesn’t matter if nobody challenges it.”
“So who shaves the barber?”
“Shall we find out?”
“Let’s roll.”
They got out of the car and crossed the street, nodding to the friendly pedestrians on the sidewalk as they went by. Dressed casually in jeans and tee shirts, they still looked like city folk compared to the rustic locals.
The bell above the door jangled as they entered the barber shop. On the other side of the two reclining chairs, they could see the back of an unnaturally broad-shouldered man in a white smock as he bent over a low cabinet, rummaging around inside.
“Be right with you,” came his deep, amiable voice.
“Oh, it’s just us, Katherine and Mary from Boston University,” said Katherine. “We called yesterday.”
“Wonderful!”
The barber stood up to his full height and turned around. He was all smiles. Both women gasped audibly and stepped backwards, very nearly fleeing back out the door, but managed to regain their composure. The big man lumbered across the floor, reaching out to shake each of their hands heartily.
“I don’t get it,” said Bellamy, his voice cracking with despair. “I just don’t get it.” This was the result of checking his headline news app one too many times.
“What don’t you get?” asked Fernando.
“All the conflict, the petty squabbling,” said Bellamy, throwing up his hands. “The wars, the hate, the politics, the religion, the ideology. What’s the point? Why does it keep happening and happening, over and over?”
“I suppose there are a lot of reasons.”
“But I mean, we’re all made of essentially the same stuff, right? We’re all made of the same cells, the same DNA, the same molecules, the same atoms, the same particles– the same elements that were formed in the same stars a billion years ago.”
“No, not all of us.”
“Exactly! So why do we– wait, what?”
“We’re actually not all made of the same particles and elements.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Bellamy, making a face like he was trying to read fine print written in cuneiform.
Fernando sighed. “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you,” he said. “I, myself, am made out of a substance left over from the previous cycle of the Oscillating Universe.”
This came out of left field for Bellamy. “The previous… what…. of the what….?”
“The Oscillating Universe,” explained Fernando, “is a cosmological model that states, briefly, that the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands for trillions of years at an ever-decreasing rate, eventually stops, and then contracts more and more swiftly, finally ending in a Big Crunch, whereupon the cycle starts all over again.”
“So the previous universe is completely destroyed?” asked Bellamy, wondering why they were even talking about this.
“Not quite completely,” said Fernando, scrunching his face and wagging a finger. “Some small tiny fraction of it survives. And it survives because the matter and energy of the previous universe is superior to the Big Bang of the subsequent universe.”
“You’ve lost me,” said Bellamy.
“Let me try to find you,” said Fernando. “The name of the game is entropy. Think of making photocopies at work of a form or pamphlet or something. You start off with a pretty nice, crisp original and you make a copy. It still looks pretty nice. You can hardly tell the difference. But then you lose the original and you have to make a copy of the copy. Still good, but not as great. Next time, it’s obvious that it’s a bad copy. This happens a dozen times. A hundred times. Eventually you’re stuck with a pretty fucking shitty copy.”
“This much I can follow,” said Bellamy. “But….”
“Well, that’s what’s been happening to the universe, only it’s happened trillions of times over googolplexi of megayears. The original universe was perfect, like Heaven or something– I don’t know, I wasn’t in that one– but now we’re living in a shitty, umpteenth-generation copy. Only my ‘substance,’ as you call it, is from the previous, slightly less shitty version.”
“Actually, I called it ‘stuff.’”
“Back in my universe, we called it ‘substance,’” said Fernando. “We had a better vocabulary than you people.”
Bellamy shook his head like he had bugs in his ears. “What does all this even mean? How would you even be different? It’s still all just protons and neutrons and electrons and stuff. I mean substance.”
Fernando chuckled a bit condescendingly and shook his head. “That is where you are wrong, my friend,” he said. “The previous universe was fundamentally superior at the most quantum level.”
“At least you had a quantum level.”
Fernando shrugged. “I use the term for the sake of familiarity.”
“Well, then,” said Bellamy, folding his arms skeptically, “if you didn’t have atoms– and stuff– what did you have?”
“Okay, since you ask, I’ll tell,” said Fernando. “Our version of atoms had a perfectly spherical and solid nucleus called a centeron. From out of it grew a multitude of strings called linkons which ended in little seven-fingered hands called hands. None of your fractional particles with fractional charges that can’t decide if they’re points or strings and don’t know where they are or how fast they’re going at the same time. Just good, solid particles and strings and hands that know exactly what they are and what they’re doing.”
“How did they form elements if they were all the same?”
“Elements were determined by the special secret handshakes between those seven-fingered hands. No other element knew another element’s secret handshake. That’s how stability was maintained.”
“And this is what you’re made of?” asked Bellamy, pointing at Fernando’s belly button for some reason.
“Precisely.”
“You’re full of shit,” said Bellamy.
“Not even a little bit,” retorted Fernando. “Have you ever seen me use a restroom? I’m above that sort of thing.”
“Well, no, I suppose not.” Bellamy scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I actually don’t think I have.”
“There you go.”
Bellamy looked at him appraisingly for a long time, and then said, “But if you’re made of sterner stuff from a superior universe, why don’t you do something?”
“What do you mean? I do lots of things.”
“I mean besides playing Star Trek Online and hooking up at Applebee’s. Why don’t you do something for the world?”
“What do you expect me to do for the world?”
“I don’t know! I’m part of this shitty universe. You’re from the superior previous universe. You should be able to get out there and inspire people or something. Get them to follow you and live up to a higher standard. You should be able to lead people out of this steaming pile of a mess we’re in.”
Fernando paused for a moment. “No,” he said.
Bellamy sat up straight as a duck. “You paused for a moment!” he said. “You know I’m right! You have to do this. With greater superiority comes greater responsibility.”
“I don’t know,” said Fernando, making a sick face. “Work with people? Try to make something out of them? Seriously, they give me the willies.”
“But you are Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. You must save us!”
“You’ve read Nietzsche?”
“No, I read that in a thoughtful treatise deconstructing Superman on a blog about obsolete comic book characters.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“And proves that we need help.”
Fernando sighed. “You surely do need help.”
“Well then?”
Fernando stood up and nodded firmly. “All right, I’ll do it! I’ll bring all my superiority from the less-entropic reality of the previous cycle of the Oscillating Universe to bear, and I will save the world!”
“Hello there!” shouted Sebastian from behind.
“Jesus Christ, Sebastian!” squeaked Fernando, jumping six inches into the air. “You scared the shit out of me. Where did you come from?”
Sebastian smiled smugly. “An even older cycle,” he said.
“HurrRRn,” said the Monster of Frankenstein.
“GrrRRr,” said Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man.
They shook hands and pointed out to each other
what a beautiful night it was,
what with the full moon and all.
As they got to talking, they soon realized
how much in common they had.
Woman troubles, for one thing.
And there was the whole bit about being outcast,
feared and hated by villagers,
chased by peasants with torches, et cetera.
And both had been dead, more or less,
which changes a person.
They decided to go down to the Fox & Hound
to raise a few mugs of the local brew
(the place cleared out fast, you better believe).
They were there for hours,
toasting each other’s health,
shouting “Prost!” over and over and over,
getting a lot of stuff off their chests
and offering each other moral support.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
That’s how it happened in real life.
The Hollywood version was different, of course;
but who in his right mind would make a chick flick
about Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man?
Reba was laying beside him in the dark, curled up, hibernating peacefully, a softly breathing brown shadow in the blue darkness before the dawn. She didn’t know; he hadn’t told her. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement when he was hired by the university and he was the kind of man who had never broken a promise in his life, young as he was. So now he lay there as the long night drew to a close, alone beside his lover, haunted, terrified by the possibilities of the new day ahead.
The power to customize the universe.
That’s how Dr Bruin had put it yesterday as they prepared for today’s final test. But Benjamin wondered if the man knew just how right he was.
It had started as Kindergarten Physics: Sub-elementary wavicle formulae. Accelerator experiments had long hinted at an internal structure to the quark, but what the equations had ultimately led them to was altogether startling. That structure consisted, literally, of the properties of matter in the form of pure information. Properties that controlled mass, charge, spin, location, and more. Much more. String after string of properties for entirely unknown attributes that were as mysterious as they were unpredicted. Whole new branches of physics would need to be developed to study the secrets of those properties.
And then there were the empty properties, the properties just sitting there waiting for values, seemingly an infinite number of them. Dr Bruin’s casual remark had been, “I guess those would be our user-defined properties.”
That simple statement had sent a thrill down Benjamin’s spine, a hot rush of two emotions that often ran hand in hand: Excitement and fear. It was clear that they had really reached the bottom, they had reverse-engineered reality, they had accessed the basic code that ran the universe.
And, furthermore, that code could be rewritten.
The process was simplicity itself: A microscopic sample of lithium was supercooled to Absolute Zero Kelvin, becoming a Bose-Einstein condensate, essentially a single particle with the size and mass of fifty million atoms; large enough so that the same short-wavelength lasers that had robbed it of its molecular motion to begin with could now probe, and tweak, its vast property sheet. But the key was that this strange form of exotic matter could be used as a surrogate for any amount of ordinary matter.
Not to put too fine a point on it, any object in real space could be selected and its properties manipulated as easily as any virtual object in cyberspace.
The possibilities were staggering:
Modify the properties of a few million tons of quartz to match those of water and the desert blooms around a new inland sea.
Copy the property matrix of a cornfield to a toxic waste dump and deadly poison becomes food for the hungry.
Search for and delete cancer cells or germs that had been previously unreachable, and do it non-intrusively without touching healthy tissue.
Change the attributes of a spacecraft so that its location changes to the Alpha Centauri system without it crossing the intervening space.
Digitize and store all the artistic works of humankind within the very structure of the proton, keeping them safe until the end of time.
Design and build new subatomic particles or bosons from the ground up, suited to any imaginable purpose.
Or even use the undecaying quark itself as the ultimate computer, incorruptible and invulnerable.
All this, and much more, was within their grasp.
But, as always, the dangers were proportionally immense.
The Zero Kelvin Exotic Matter could act as a surrogate for any amount of normal matter; a microscopic sample was enough to alter the attributes of anything from a wristwatch to a space shuttle to a planet to a solar system and beyond. Set the coordinates to >0 and any change would affect the entire universe. And this was accomplished with technology that could almost literally be bought off the shelf. The system at the university had been developed by one researcher, two grad students, and himself, Benjamin, the project software jockey.
Which meant that almost anybody could access this power. How long before some wacko terrorist, religious ideologue, rabid nihilist, or even a basement workshop enthusiast with questionable programming skills reduced all of creation to pi mesons?
Benjamin shuddered; he felt very cold.
And he felt compelled to do something, but he didn’t know what the right thing to do was. Here was a technology that could end starvation, disease, and suffering; open up the universe; confer immortality; raise the human race to the level of mythological gods. Did he, a computer programmer barely out of his teens, have the right to deprive humanity of this potential? Was it even possible for him to do so? And if it was, and if he did, would not every starving child be on his conscience from this day forward?
Destroying the machine would be an act of futility; Dr Bruin, Ursula, and Yogi could recreate it in a day. And it would do nothing to prevent the inevitable independent discovery of the process by other researchers.
Perhaps he could hijack the lab. After all, the power of the tech should be enough to protect him. If he used it cleverly enough. Unless they cut off the power. Or distracted him and snuck up on him or otherwise outsmarted him in any of a million different ways. Okay, so it was a crazy idea, a sign of how desperate he felt. And it would, in any event, do nothing to solve the problem of the easy accessibility of the science and the easy availability of the technology.
Still, he spent a few moments in adventurous fantasizing: He’d lock himself in the lab, armed with a disk containing a series of macros he had written at home. It would only take ten seconds for the sequence to execute, and at the end the lab would relocate itself to some safe place, like an inaccessible South American plateau or remote tropical island. Power? Food? No problem. Those macros had blocked and copied everything he needed, from anywhere in the world. Duplicating wasn’t stealing.
All his friends and family, anybody who could be used against him by the ruthless forces who wanted the machine, would be transported to his new base of operations. A new community would be born. The machine would keep them safe and provided for while he, Benjamin, became a mighty benefactor to the world, using the power carefully, judiciously, and with much consideration.
Until someone else put the science together and built their own machine; which wouldn’t take long. Like Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan, the time was now.
Oh, well, it would have made a good movie.
No, he realized that there was only one thing that he could do, if he only had the courage.
Carefully, so as not to disturb Reba’s sleep, he climbed out of bed and got dressed.
*****
Two seconds after he finished uploading the program, he heard their voices in the corridor outside the lab. He wiped his palms on his pants and quickly pulled on his jacket to hide the sweat stains under his arms. He took a deep breath and sat down, hoping that he could refrain from acting blatantly guilty; he was a virgin at the art of deception.
The key turned in the lock and Dr Bruin, looking like Pavarotti in a white lab coat, entered, preceded by the rich aroma of donut shop coffee. He was accompanied by grad students Yogi and Ursula, and, this morning, by a third person. This person was a gray-haired, imposing White man in an army dress uniform, complete with general’s bars and a whole lot of fruit salad on his chest. Benjamin felt like he was about to face a firing squad.
Dr Bruin caught sight of him at his station and smiled. “There he is,” he said. “First on the job, as usual.”
“Good morning,” said Benjamin, in what he hoped was his usual tone.
As Yogi and Ursula went directly across the small lab to put the apparatus through its daily checkout routine, Dr Bruin brought the army officer to Benjamin’s computer station and Benjamin stood up nervously. “Ben, we have a special guest for today’s proof of test,” Bruin said. “This is General Griswold from the Pentagon. General, Ben Janelle.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Benjamin automatically as the general shook his hand in an overly firm Army grip. So the military is involved already, he thought. Now I know I’m doing the right thing.
“Why are you here so early?” the general asked brusquely.
“Oh, I was just getting the junk genes out of the program,” Benjamin replied lightly. The general frowned. “You know, cleaning up the code. Making it pretty.” He smiled. The general didn’t.
“Ben is the most conscientious person I’ve ever met, as well as the fastest programmer in the west,” said Dr Bruin. “We’d be lost without him.”
“Thanks, doc,” said Benjamin.
Bruin winked at him in his uncle-ish way and gestured General Griswold across the tiny lab toward the supercooling apparatus, which was set up on an old wooden door laid across two sawhorses. As he led the general toward the setup, he said, “You thought I was kidding when I called it a tabletop device. Now watch your step.” The floor was a snakepit of cabling.
Benjamin sat down heavily and tried not to hyperventilate. He called up the two interactive programs that read and wrote the property data, as well as the diagnostic tool that constantly scanned the integrity of the complex DLL array those programs used, just as he would have if the test were really going to happen. He wanted everything to look perfectly legit.
Dr Bruin was giving the general his standard speech about the miniaturization of supercooling technology being a concrete benefit of the space station program, but Benjamin barely heard him; he was literally dizzy with anxiety.
Suddenly he realized that everyone in the lab had gathered around his computer and Dr Bruin was speaking directly behind him. “Are we ready, Ben?”
“Ready, steady, go,” he answered quietly.
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar. All right, folks, this is going to be one for the history books. That’s a one-ounce ingot of lead I’ve put in the ceramic bowl on the dias. I suppose it would be more dramatic to change the lead into gold, but I think it would make a more compelling visual impression on our guest if we changed it into mercury. Can we do that, Ben?”
“Sure,” replied Benjamin, swallowing hard. Every second brought him closer to the moment of truth. “That’s easy. Atomic number 82 to atomic number 80. Do you care about isotopes?”
“Nah,” said Dr Bruin. “What’s a few neutrons among friends?”
“I’ll type it in.”
His fingers trembled nervously and, slick with sweat, slid across the keyboard; twice he had to backspace, cursing under his breath, to reenter an incorrect data string.
He felt Dr Bruin’s hand fall gently on his shoulder. “Relax, kid,” he said. “It’s going to work like a charm.”
No, thought Benjamin with a sharp stab of guilt. Actually, I’m about to destroy your life’s work. I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me.
“All set,” he announced at last.
Dr Bruin nodded soberly and took a breath. “Unlike Neil Armstrong and Alexander Graham Bell, I don’t have a quotable quote for the occasion,” he said. “Ben, why don’t you just go ahead and summon the future.”
That sounded pretty quotable to Benjamin, and not just because his name would have been immortalized alongside Bell’s Dr Watson. Unfortunately, the future he was about to summon would not exactly be the one Dr Bruin had so fervently dreamed of.
He reached out and pressed the Enter key.
The monitor screen blacked out for a second, then flickered; a blue status bar appeared, flashed up to a hundred percent almost instantly, then vanished. Micromotors inside the supercooling apparatus began to hum and buzz. Red lights on the four peripheral lasers blinked with an erratic rhythm as the beams established a datastream handshake with the inner structure of the Zero Kelvin Exotic Matter and, by proxy, the very foundation of reality.
And then the machinery paused as a message box sprang up on the computer monitor screen, a message box bearing three simple words. Benjamin sat frozen solid, confronted by the reality of what he had wrought, gripped by a paralysis that no one else in the world could understand. The four people behind him were deathly quiet. They had stopped breathing. In days to come, Benjamin would wonder if their hearts had stopped beating.
The message box said Please Enter Password.
*****
Moving the cursor over the compile button, Benjamin clicked the mouse; then he opened up a blank screen and began to type again. The apartment was dark, lit only by the moonglow of the monitor screen; the only sounds were the soft tapping of his fingers on the keyboard and the quiet hum of the computer itself.
Reba was fast asleep in the bedroom; he still hadn’t found the right words to tell her.
It wouldn’t take them long to learn that it was Benjamin who had sabotaged the project. He had left a copy of his self-executing password program, which was now a part of the fundamental structure of every boson and fermion in the universe, in the root directory of the lab computer. By the time they found it, he would be long gone, but they would decompile the program and learn the password, as he intended. The knowledge would do them no good. Dr Bruin would probably praise his ingenuity, despite everything.
Embedded in the program, they would find a floating cell containing the formula =(22/7). The value of Pi. They would realize that the universe was protected by a password that could never be fully entered because it was transcendent in nature. They would understand that Benjamin had done something that could never be undone and they would, with any luck, give up all hope of ever getting around it.
Which would be very good, because, in the end, he had decided to just go with ‘vermont maple syrup.’
The power to customize the universe. Too much potential to waste.
I can handle this, he told himself firmly, as he compiled macro number 32.
In a world of Film Noir tropes and curious anachronisms, where Duesenberg Model A’s coexist with smartphones, and space stations run on vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel computers, Slim the Snake and his unflappable partner Doll fight a never-ending battle against crime and corruption in Big City. SLiM CHANCE! was the first in a series of seven films featuring the hard-boiled, no-fisted hero and the phlegmatic femme fatale. Are they new films that homage the past or old films that predict the future? Hard to tell, because they only exist in an alternate universe where time passes differently than in ours, so you’ll never get to see them. Tough luck, kid.
Seagulls pinwheeled high above a private beach on Cape Cod where patches of scrub grass poked through the white sand and swayed in the breeze, as puffy white clouds floated lazily across the royal blue sky. The anonymous owner of the beach was a patron of the Arts and as such allowed access only to a very exclusive clientele.
Botticelli’s Venus and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa found themselves on this picturesque beach, coincidentally, on the same day at the same time, their iconic presences drawing curious gazes from the other beachgoers– though for quite different reasons. While Venus, as usual, embraced her nudity, basking in the warm sun and the gentle caress of the ocean breeze, her long hair flowing and twisting, Mona Lisa hesitated, hanging back among the dunes, clutching her dark silk robe and hiding behind her enigmatic smile.
Venus, noticing Mona Lisa’s unease, approached her with a graceful stride, a couple of cartwheels, and a welcoming smile.
“Dear Mona Lisa!” she began, her voice gentle yet teasingly persuasive, “It’s so good to see you here at last. But haven’t you considered my advice about the freedom and liberation that comes with embracing the beauty of nature?”
Mona Lisa blushed and glanced briefly toward the joyful laughter of Raphael’s Three Graces frolicking unclothed in the surf, playing with a beach ball. “Oh, Venus, I admire and envy your confidence, but I’m not sure I can be as bold as you. My shy nature makes me hesitant to expose myself so openly.”
Venus placed a comforting hand on Mona Lisa’s shoulder. “I understand your reservations, dear friend. But remember, we are here among our peers, surrounded by the serenity of the sea and the acceptance of Nature itself. Art upon art. This is an opportunity for you to embrace your own unique beauty, just as you are.”
Mona Lisa bit her lip and her gaze traveled down the beach to where Victorine, Manet’s favorite, sat nude upon a towel with her usual two dapper escorts, having lunch. Mona quickly looked back to Venus when the woman met her eyes.
“But what if others judge me?” she whispered to the goddess. “What if they scrutinize me with the same intensity they’ve examined my portrait for centuries?”
Venus smiled reassuringly. “Mona Lisa, my dear, is it not the privilege of Art to be scrutinized? Those who truly appreciate Art understand that beauty comes in many forms, and each person’s interpretation is subjective. By daring to experience naturism, you will discover a newfound confidence and strength within yourself. Your vulnerability will become a testament to your courage, and an inspiration for works of Art yet uncreated.”
As Venus spoke, a gentle breeze tousled Mona Lisa’s hair, as if Nature itself was urging her to shed her inhibitions. The sounds of the foaming surf and distant laughter of Lady Godiva, always au naturel, leading her skewbald horse Aethenoth through the gentle breakers, intertwined with Venus’s words, creating a symphony of encouragement.
Mona Lisa, inspired by her companion’s words and the harmonious atmosphere surrounding them, took a deep breath and nodded. “Venus, I trust you. I will step out of my comfort zone and allow myself to experience this freedom.”
Venus beamed with delight, her appreciation for Mona Lisa’s bravery shining through her eyes. Together, they found a secluded spot on the beach, shielded by soft sand dunes and swaying beach grass. Mona Lisa took a tentative step forward, her black robe slipping from her shoulders and sliding down the curves of her nude body to pool around her ankles.
Venus verily squealed in delight, and clapped her hands.
As Mona Lisa stood there, bathed in golden sunlight, a sense of exhilaration surged through her. She felt liberated, unburdened by the inertia of social conventions and the confines of long centuries of modesty. The warmth of the sand beneath her feet and the cool touch of the ocean’s edge sent shivers of joy through her being.
Venus, standing beside Mona Lisa, applauded her newfound courage. “Behold yourself, dear Mona Lisa,” she whispered, her voice filled with pride, “You are twice the work of art you were before. You are a living testament to the beauty of self-acceptance. Your enigmatic smile and the serene glimmer in your eyes have taken on an entirely new meaning and will captivate all who behold you.”
“Grazie mille, dear Venus,” said Mona Lisa.
With a wink and a smile, Venus turned and skipped toward the water. “Last one in is a rotten egg!” she cried.
Mona Lisa’s uncertainty melted away, replaced by a radiant confidence that matched the masterpiece of her iconic portrait. She joined Venus in the ocean at a sprint, their laughter blending with the rhythm of the waves.
And so, on that timeless day in that timeless place, Botticelli’s Venus and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa celebrated the unity of Art and Nature. In their harmonious coexistence, they discovered that embracing vulnerability and baring oneself to the world could be a transformative and empowering experience. The beach and sky and ocean had become their canvas, and they reveled in the beauty of their shared journey.
For several years in the early-to-mid 70s, Mental Comics Group attempted to leverage its bullpen of first-string comics talent to make inroads into the world of black-and-white Horror magazines, a market dominated by publishers like Warren and Skywald. The cleverly titled Werewolf Monthly was one such attempt, which sadly lasted only a dozen issue. The contents included more adult versions of their four-color characters Wolfgirl by Moonlight and Dire Werewolf, pre-code reprints from the catalogue of their predecessor, Karry Komics, and even the occasional prose fiction. As was typical of this publisher, editorial instability undermined their efforts and they never got a foothold in the market. If you’d like to get your hands on some back issues of this magazine, you’ll have to work pretty hard, because it was never published in this sector of the Myriadverse.
At dawn, she drew the heavy drapes
all throughout the mansion
and turned her TV to the local news
of a city rife with tension.
Another body had been found;
a young girl, all alone,
twin puncture marks wounding her pretty neck,
veins and arteries dry as bone.
Wrapped in mystery and darkness,
the heartless killer smirked;
she enjoyed watching the puny humans
give publicity to her work.
But the newscaster didn’t stop;
he told the second part:
Another victim, the same as the first
was found behind a mini-mart.
The killer’s humor went away,
as evil humor does.
A competitor stalked the city streets.
She knew exactly who it was.
Her age-old nemesis was back
to haunt her once again.
One city wasn’t big enough for two;
this contest had to end.
She swore an oath that this would be
the last time she fought her;
when the sun set that very evening,
she would find and kill her daughter.
