I still have nothing to say.

Last night I went to the Spanish Moon. There were many pretty ladies therein. The prettiest lady was the lead of "The Eames Era"

mike waugh briefly mentions the Eames Era

She has the most expressive eyes ever. She was channeling Debbie Harry takes an improv suggestion from Paulina Porizkova. I had to remove myself from her sight; she was literally hypnotic. I can't tell you about their sound - the sound monkeys had it muddled and fucked up - however, I caught a portion of a song that A. mentioned was about sleeping with your college professor. I had to leave the room again.

Kate was there - as was Teresa - Sam and Noah's band, reception is suspected, played. They've emerged as bona fide rock stars - for what it's worth - girls were going apeshit for Sam and, to a lesser extent, Noah.

I ran into Julie and met her boyfriend Chris. We talked about Africa for a while. What a dark continent it is! John was there and Jack, who shares my birthday, 8/30/77. I learned about some sad news for a Killogger who lost someone close to him recently. Sam gave me a great idea for a shirt. It's been a couple of red-letter months for shirts (1) I had a blast at Michael's Bar Mitzvah (2) This David Bowie shirt I'm due to receive which states "I fucked Mic Jagger"

I told a bunch of girls about how I spewed vomit up on that girl off of Bourbon a few weeks ago. The recounting caused one to snort coke and rum out of her nose - that's such a satisfying result. I displayed the scars on my arms and back from the burns. I'm going to have to see the dermatoligist (but first I have to learn to spell derramitilogist) - I have done some real, irreversible, scarring damage to my skin. My shoulders and upper arms look like the uncle from Hellraiser after his third or fourth meal.

Driving home I realized that I had left my house-key in the house. I slept in the car. I hate sleeping in cars. I had a pleasant dream about someone with really expressive eyes teaching me how to play poker.

Why play poker, when we can just fuck, I asked her.

Then I woke up.

Friday, August 27, 2004

Gauge

"Drop your sidearm and disengage."

Blink. Click.

"Drop your weapon soldier."

How long have I been holding this gun? Was I angry? Whose temple is this thing pointed at?

Sure, I stammered.

The plastic grip was clenched in my sweaty grip. The barrel was poking into someone's ear. He muttered something about being sorry for stealing. In his eyes I saw my reflection. Extreme terror. I couldn't remember how I ended up like this. What happened?

"Look, just place it on the floor. You auto-reacted. It's OK, it happens. This punk was stealing food. I'll take care of him."

Food? I snapped into position over a coupla cartons of food rations?

My finger...was locked in a readied mode. A twitch and I would've fired. At this starving soul who probably had loved ones to feed. I turned the weapon away and pointed it at the other voice.

"No. No one is taking care of anything. We made a mistake. He's taking the boxes."

"Like Hell he is!"

I was staring down the scope at another uniformed individual. A huge hulk of a human being, a cropped skull, a cruel face.

"We're not cops. This guy is starving. You stop him, so help me, I will pull this thing until it clicks empty."

He holstered his piece and grunted.

"Bleeding heart prick. The reason we have half of the problems we do is because you people let these scum survive. He and his brethren die and crime and disease will end. He's an inferior and..."

Click. Click. Click. Click.

"Holy shit, you just shot that guy. Oh fuck, you gotta stop shooting man! I'll put the food back!"

How many rounds does this thing hold? 17? Yes, 17....

The figure holding the boxed was frozen, drenched in sweat.

"Oh man oh man oh man...no, look, don't shoot me man, I have a family!"

He dropped the boxes.

"I'm not shooting you! I shot HIM. Pick up the boxes. Pick them up! Why the hell would I shoot you? You're starving, you have to live. This..."

My foot kicked the limp body on the floor. It made a squishing sound because of all the blood. I'd never seen so much blood. I can't believe my hand moved from a head target to the gut. one to the dome and 16 to the torso and stomach. I could smell the stench of defecation, stomach juices.

"This guy has eaten enough. He don't live no more. Ya know?"

I slumped over and sat down.

"Take as much as you can carry. I don't...This has no purpose....why are we guarding FOOD?!"

"Hey, mister, take it easy...OK? God bless you."

The gun hit the floor. It was hot. I was sick.

"Tell your family some of us are defecting. Look for my face."

I removed a small knife and etched two cuts on my cheeks. One on each cheek. Parallel to the eye.

"OK. OK. Mister, you're bleeding."

I know, I whispered.

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Monday, August 23, 2004

Fumble

Two rings and a leather band adorn my left hand. I can't type wearing any of those items. There was a time when I could.
It was already late in the game and I was down by a few points back then, years ago. I wore bondage bracelets on both hands and at least seven rings. My long fingers pounded away on a laptop. Television broadcasts, broken down and coded for content, subject, and time. Local news broadcasts in markets across the country. Hours a day. I could feel the nodal points in the data making crisscrossing patterns in my brain. I was fully connected. The box was tuned to national newsfeeds. An earbud in my left ear pumped dub. Sweet, classic, instrumental dub from a well-known Jamaican recording studio. The rhythm helped me keep the pace. My entire being felt like a dolphin in water. Slick, adept, in my element.
The last day I reported in, I tossed a disk at my professor. The work was flawless. Until that moment, it was my greatest work. I'd even managed to squeeze in time to write two screenplays and hammer out two feature stories. He asked me about the work that the disk contained. I sighed and explained to him that I corrected the major (and minor) flaws in his research design. I told him I did it because I didn't care if he was made a fool...but that I wouldn't turn in any work which made me appear a fool by proxy. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead, followed by silence. Then a halting sentence came from him.

"Can you...show me...what you did to fix it?"

I told him that the flaws had been in his design for over two years.

"Tell me you didn't present this stuff. Please tell me this is not making its way into a journal all jacked up like this! Your statistics don't even add up!"

He replied that he had presented.

"Well, I don't want my name anywhere near it cool? Yeah, I typed a small two-page manual of sorts so you don't have to fumble around and screw it up. It's on the disk."

He took a look at the data. I'll never forget the reflection on his eyes. He nodded that it was as flawless as it was going to get.

"Make sure I get my paycheck for the next two weeks. I quit, but I want my money. We're even as far as I'm concerned."

Something sounding like "sure" came out of him and he handed my a signed form so services could cut me a check. I left him in his office, baffled.

He was a known flake and I was the first person to have had him found out. Others followed.

All in a day's work.

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Thursday, August 19, 2004

Exemption

Many moons ago, when I was a cadet at the academy...we had a formal social engagement to attend. Every guy in the barracks found a date at the corresponding female academy close by and started chatting away. It was the first time any of us had any real contact with educated women. Yeah, we had dates in the slum worker villages we were picked up at before indoctrination, but this was real. All young males, the first time in a proper date situation. The rush we got from talking to these girls. They were so gifted, wordly, breathtaking. For once, our drab lives had color. Other than the fields of gray uniforms in drills, standing at attention, populating every event. I managed to obtain a sharp suit from a Haitian tailor through an off-world contact. It cost quite a bit but it left me with enough credits to take this girl on a date proper. She had the most wonderful voice, the most wonderful smile. I was smitten. I'd hoped it was the same thing I heard in her voice, but I'd never know until the big night.
We were allowed a few hours off base after the dance, so I staked out a small cafe...something decidedly out of the way in a small villa. We counted the days until the dance. For most of us, we found classwork and assignments trivial. Heck, we were young, bright guys. We were all in love. Each of us thought our own situation was unique, special. It was the first time I saw many of my fellow cadets smile. And after the war started, it was the last time. Some returned home with scarred faces, bitter, unable to smile again. Some fellows, my only memory of them was the smile. They came home in corpse bags.
The night came. We all showered and shaved, got dressed, and clowned around in common areas. It was such a playful time. We could all forget our pain for a moment. Some young cadet sold a cache of fresh flowers and made a mint. It paid for his trip home to see his dying mother...so cliched, it was poetic. The convoy taking him home a year later sustained heavy fire and he finally made it to his mother, in a cemetary plot beside hers. In the years following, every new cadet donated money so their gravesites would always have fresh flowers. We all loved our mothers, our families. After we bought flowers that night for the social, we filed into a line at the administrator's desk. It was manned by a woman from the girls' academy. Each guy stated the name of his date and was given an identicard with their names on it. It allowed them free passage for several hours. An hour of nervous sweat later, I reached the counter and stated our names.

"Exempt," she said.

"How do you mean?"

She sighed. "Your date couldn't make it. Look sweetie, I don't want to be the one to break it to you, but, she didn't want to go, I guess. She's unavailable. Her teletext communicator isn't responding. She said to give you this."

She handed me a slip of paper:

Jake, I wish I could explain why, but I can't make it. I hope you understand. The time I spent talking to you, I'll never forget. Another day, another time, another life...I hope and pray I'll see you.

"You can take the card and just leave base by yourself, if you want to. C'mon, it'll cheer you up."

She slid the passcard to me and I slowly put it in my pocket. The nervous sweat was replaced by a particularly morose feeling of loss.

Exempt.

Suddenly, the flowers didn't seem so fresh anymore. I gave them to a gentleman behind me in line and he thanked me profusely. I went to the wall of my bunk and put another hash mark on the wall. That one made 6 marks.

Later that night, drinking at a small hole in the wall, I looked at the picture of her I'd been holding in my pocket for weeks.

I'm exempt. Services not required.

At a stop on the way home, I wept. I wept for the missed chance. I wept for the photo I left on the counter at the bar.

Fuck it, I thought. Tomorrow's another day to turn it all around.

Anything can happen.

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Friday, August 13, 2004

D-Tox

Go away I croaked.

The fifth day into a full-on junk kick. Junk? What junk was I on? It didn't matter. The doctors gave us stuff when we first left to do covert ops, stuff that would make us run faster, absorb pain easier, respond in aloof fashions, deny ourselves tears. We knew, at least on some level, we were being severely drugged. During the first two weeks, all we did was laugh and drool. My group was sequestered to some remote cabin. Nothing but snow, small provisions of alcohol, protein bars. It was during the time in which we were to be getting used to the "side-effects." It wasn't until the third day in that cabin that any of us could remember where we were, what we were doing there, or even vague guesses at what we took. Antidepressants, tranquilizers, painkillers, speed...something that felt like all three. My nose started bleeding after the second week. Headaches. A doctor flew in from time to time. My nosebleeds were noticed and I was given a small bottle of pills to take until they stopped. That was seven years ago.
The fifth day out of the woods, my nosebleeds were returning. I woke up in a pile of bottles containing remnants of domestic sleeping tablets, melatonin, and some anti-nausea substance. Pages of a journal were strewn about. I’d been writing furiously for days, hallucinating. Pages of word salads followed by passages of beautiful coherence, immense lucidity. A clock hand ticked in the corner, an odd stutter. The clock was smashed and one hand refused to give up an attempt to move forward. I checked the answering machine.

Don’t ever call me again.
Go see a doctor.
You don’t give up do you? The answer is no. You made me promise.
If you don’t stop bugging me, I’ll make sure they come and get you with a big net and a straightjacket! Take your thorazine and unplug the damn phone!

They were all more or less the same. Five days. Dammit. I lost five days. The mail had been piling up. I took a shower. It was the first day I could remember seeing the iris of my eyes. The two-week stubble came off stubbornly with a new disposable razor. I prepared a bowl of cereal and milk, locked the front door, and disconnected my phone. It wasn’t until a few hours later in silence that I noticed the television had apparently been smashed and quite dead for some time.

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Friday, August 06, 2004

Cutter

"I'm in the sixth chamber. The door won't release. Please advise."

Silence.

"Stuck in sixth chamber guys. Copy?"

Pause.

"Yeah, we copy. Look, the locks are too complicated for us to open on the outside. You'll run out of air."

"What's that mean?"

Pause.

"You're gonna have to cut yourself out of the chamber."

"With the arc cutter? I don't have any eye protection. The heat, I'm not gonna breathe, man!"

"Just close 'em eyes and hold tight. We'll get a response team in. Start cutting. Air is limited. Check your gauages."

"Hey."

"Yeah?"

"Go fuck yourselves."

Stuck in a chamber in a ship. Abandoned near a small moon, drifting. We were searching for survivors. Thermal scans showed nothing. Zilch. It was a jump job. Airlock to airlock. Didn't need a mask. Didn't bother. The escape pods were already gone. It was going to be a salvage operation at best. Out of curiousity, and greed, I started checking storage chambers. Pilfer the good stuff first before anyone else decided to nose in. The deserters of this ship figured as much. They turned the chambers into death traps. They opened, sensed human weight ratios, and promptly closed. I had a handheld arc cutter. Like an arc welding rig. It was used as a cutting torch. Some sick fucks used it in torture and interrogation. We were psych ops. And we were unregulated more or less, while off-world. There's no Geneva Convention in space. You got pinched, well, you got pinched. We ran like loose cannons and we ran fast. I seemed to be in the minority: rehabilitation. If you raise a detainee's spirits, or a patient's spirits, they're more likely to talk. And they're more likely to let you know they really don't know anything. Galvanic stopped working decades ago. Voice monitors, eye movements, measured by machine, gave a fuller picture. So did brain scans. Some poor saps were completely confused and didn't know anything. I knew that. My reports stressed it. The rest of the ops group usually ignored the reality of the situation. Oftentimes, I was relegated to cleaning up the damage, repairing splintered psyches after whatever damage the rest inflicted. Regardless, being part of the unit, I always had blood on my hands.

And now I was stuck in a 7 by 4 container. With a lock no one could open. I felt my chest tighten. When I was in secondary school, I got trapped in a locker as a prank. I broke two jaws that night. The air almost ran out. Hyperventilating didn't help. The locker opened to laughter and I pounced on the first clowns that did it.

I clicked on the cutter. The light almost blinded me. I had to go on an approximation in my head of the area around the lock. The metal was thick. The heat kicked up. That awful smell of burning metal. The metal was too thick. This was going to take too long, I'd be cutting it too close. I took out a drill with my other hand and prayed it would burrow an air hole out of this tin can. My muscles flexed. Circular motion with hard pressure in one hand, direct forward pressure in the other. The sweat was already stinging my closed eyes. It was pouring from me. Like water torture and I couldn't wipe my brow.

The air hole came first and the drill hit the floor. I still had my eyes closed. Thirty minutes. I'd gotten halfway around the lock. The heat had already burned my arm, like a sunburn. And I forgot exactly what happened, other than I dropped the cutter without consequence

When I woke up, they were sawing from the outside. The hunk of metal was lifted out. The entire locking device.

I didn't punch anyone when the door opened. The crewman who sawed, I hugged that guy. I scanned the area outside the chamber and looked at the other chambers. They'd cut open fifteen others before they got me out. Fifteen. Bastards were carting gear out while I was stuck in a metal box.

An oxygen mask was placed over my face. My expression was resigned. Why didn't they can us psych ops? We were head cases, worse than the people we dealt with. What happened? How long ago did it get this bad? These were the questions unanswered as I passed through the airlock back into the ship. As I put my feet up. As I closed my eyes to rest.

It wasn't going to get better. It was going to get worse.

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Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Crash

Waiting in a public library for a fax. Some sort of legal documents pertaining to an automobile accident. My vehicle was totalled. Just...crushed. The at-fault Lexus SUV owner was able to walk away with only minor damage to her sick display of opulance. I was taken away in an ambulance. Disoriented, mumbling. A road crew pilled me out of the smoking wreckage. The burn caused by the explosive charges that deployed the airbag is healing up. It's not a pretty scar, though. In time it will fade, but everything that occurred that day will not. The accident was the tip of the iceberg. I hate permanent reminders. In the ER, my head was X-Rayed, my chest. Sent home with Lortab, Soma, and bandaged arms. I never wanted to see the interior of a car again. For two weeks, I had a twice-daily ritual of cleaning my wounds and putting on fresh dressings. Physical pain to take my mind away from the mental pain. Never quite works out that way. The day my car was retrieved and taken away for slavage, I sat behind the wheel. Eight months driving that car and too many memories inside. Too many memories I didn't want anymore. I placed my hand on the hood and told her goodbye. Bye. Go away.

Today is the first day I woke up feeling entirely peaceful. And now, in the silence of an Internet cubicle, I feel very small and alone. That peace is replaced with turmoil. There's a bodega around the corner. A few weeks after I arrived here, missing the food and smells of Little Havana, my benefactors took me there. The homesick feelings for my former home, my alien home, were reduced...it was wonderful, even if only for a moment. I remembered enough of the language to be remembered. Bi-monthly, I visit. My presence is often requested. The owners inquire about me. Visting the bodega is like visiting the family denied me, family excised from my life like a tumor. I will never return to Little Havana. No ray of Miami sun will ever touch my skin again. I will never wear linen. My Spanish will not improve further.

The wonderful thing about returning to a place you haven't lived in, in almost a decade, is that you remember why you left. I can't take the soil and the cypress trees with me when it is time for the next convoy to pick me up in five years. I can possibly take a small sapling. A deceased cypress knee. There are but a few things enjoyable here. I live blocks from a video store. A half-mile from the cinema. Blocks from the park...a place I don't visit anymore. In four days I don a tux. My sister's wedding. An usher. Then she leaves for school. And the house is empty again. Much like the nice gentlemen who left my head in March. They cleaned the place, painted the room white, leaving a few newspaper clippings blowing around the room, windows open. I was born here. Heart revived in San Antonio...a freak allergic reaction to an antibiotic I'd taken without consequence dozens of times. In the small space before the epinephine kicked in, I saw home. The bayou by the roadside. Then my body seized and I was back in Texas. I so wanted to come home. Months later, I got my wish.

I crashed here. In more ways than one. Look me up sometime.

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Blue Sunshine

I've been sleeping soundly, without nightmares. I was wired to a simstim deck for months, just so I could reach REM stage for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of images of dead children, exit wounds, hands with palms slashed open, chest shots, prison cell bars. I was detached from the deck per my release. It was promptly smashed on the desk of the administrator who determined that it had great rehabilitative effects and that it would serve me some good. Eight hours connected to that furnace of hell and when I awoke, I wrote and drew pictures like a schizophrenic all morning. This followed by a somber nurse dispensing pills in a small cup, tears in her eyes long gone. Her face was a pale and grey pallor. The pills were never the same shape or the same color. They didn't want us hoarding them and trading them. Two years ago, for a pack of Nat Shermans to pay off his cellmate, some ward of the state saved enough pills for a trip out. Bill Litowsky. Seventy-five assorted tablets, mostly tranqulizers. He had noticed the six color combination they were using by methodically hiding and testing the buggers. Now, no one sees the same pill twice. Taste the rainbow.

I was haunted by images of a daughter they said I had on the outside, one that I'd fathered but never saw. The idea was advanced so that I would have something positive to look forward to upon release. Eventually, they admitted that she was aborted weeks before I entered. It took two injections, one chair placed through a two-way mirror, and two bitten orderlies to calm me down. I held a stolen surgical scalpel to my throat every night, for two hours. In front of a mirror, for six month, until I didn't see death in those reflected eye sockets. I mumbled about wanting to be blind until my mouh refused to move. My cellmate, Charlie, had begged for the scalpel the entire time. I made him promise not to use it on himself. He didn't. He cut an eye out of the doctor who'd given me the bad news. He winked at me as they took him out. I found a note under his pillow:

"Eye for an eye, Jake. You can see clearly now. Charlie Svevo R-Q."

We snickered at the doctor we called Cyclops whenever we passed. The state wouldn't spring for a glass eye, the irony being that it was because the scalpel was his misplaced instrument. A year later, he took a head shot with a zip gun fashioned in the metal shop. The bullet entered through the patch. It was the perfect target. Cyclops was a sadist, anyway. That bullet turned his pristine white labcoat into a beautiful crimson color. The residents spat on him and emptied his pockets. A few hours later, his identicard was shoved under my lunch tray. It was my first and last escape attempt. Electrified razorwire stopped my efforts short. I was issued a wad of illegal currency, street clothes, and a pair of new jump boots upon release.

A year later, researching daily, there was no record of my capture, incarceration, escape, or release. Just the nightmares. And hash marks I'd etched in my skin, on my shoulders. One mark for each month. Psych ops notified me that I was considered AWOL for a time, but eventually declared a prisoner of war. I found the mental prison I was held in eventually. Old Charlie. It was in the Svevo Quadrant, disguised as a reservoir on the maps. A sixty year-old man with nothing but bile and hatred for the organization that killed his wife and only son, delivered a package to the hospital. In person, dressed smartly as a retiring courrier. The plastic explosives leveled the joint. The courrier was given a distinguished military funeral.

The recovery team brought me back a hunk of shrapnel from the hospital which they melted down and forged into a blade. One with edges designed solely to rip flesh into jagged pieces. A torture job. When I forget things, I hold the blade to connect the dots. Too many gaps.

There's nothing but blue sky in Svevo now. In my dreams, the sun is a like a cobalt blue orb.

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Sunday, August 01, 2004

A Man Apart

The title of a horrible movie I haven't bothered to watch...but I would to see Timothy Olyphant just move around and talk on screen.

But I am a man apart. My spaceship crashlanded here in December of last year. Couldn't get the damn thing working. The hell with it, I said. I don't have the tools to fix it. Even with all of my mechanical experience. My spacesuit was ripped up. I had to put out a beacon. A few weeks later my helmet had to be removed. The terrans were cordial. You can breathe the air here, they said, remarking that because I was born here, it helps. My lungs were already conditioned. A psyc ops academy recruited me. It was the best and only decision I had.

My interactions with the terrans are interesting but they are ultimately failures. Even transient, similar interstellar travellers miss the mark. Those that never left this soil have taken root. They thrive on the diseased and decaying soil. The psychopathology. They rejoice it. They worship it. They sing praises for their own demise by their own hands. When I arrived here, I had pity for them. I do not have those feelings anymore. This quadrant is slated for destruction as it always has been. Why not enjoy the party before the napalm arrives? There are beads...aluminum tokens...chemical dispensing buildings that never sleep, providing ethyl alcohol to further damage neurons.

When they found me here, working on basic psych ops training many years ago in the latter part of the last century, they treated me like Case. We won't kill you, they said, as they smiled. We're just going to burn your talent out neuron by neuron. Strapped in a back alley clinic on the outskirts of New Orleans, they laughed as I screamed. And it left. Entire portions of LTM. I remember seeing pinpoints of light in my field of vision for weeks. Taking the sedatives procured from a sympathetic dealer I owed money to. Biding my time until I could catch a rocket out of here. No matter what the cost. And it did cost. My copilot jettiosoned me somewhere over the East. Rescuers found me in the thick of the woods, talking to reptiles, eating roots, hallucinating. They said I had been there three weeks, alone, drinking from ponds. I was placed in another ship with the terminal destination of here.

"Don't bother fixing the craft," a med tech intoned. "It's built for one thing and one thing alone: to crash. Don't look back. There will not be another rescue squad. You've used all of the emergency credits allotted you. You're marked. Don't try to attempt to leave again without authorization. Sign here for your belongings."

I paused for a moment and whispered, "What do I have to do to avoid this sentence? Who can I cut a deal with? I've done this before. There's always a way to cut in line or get waved through. Just let me go. Turn your back, say I slipped out."

His response let me know just how insulting my statement was, how it was probably the most pathetic attempt he'd ever seen. He continued as if I were a ghost.

"Gaining the freedom to move will be earned with your own blood and tears. The sweat will always be a constant. You are expected to land DOA. A small calibre device will be included in your scant provisions. Shoot your way out or shoot yourself. We don't care at this point. You are considered a non-entity. If you choose to earn your way out, do so. The best survivors do it within 5 years if they stay in constant motion. Head cases like yourself usually stay in the craft for a few weeks before the corpse is found. Some of them block it out long enough to get moving. The prognosis is what it is, cowboy. You know that. Christ, how did you last as long as you did in psych ops before reaching critical mass? Wake up and live."

The speech echoes in my head. How long? How long have I got? Can they see inside of my head? Like looking at a broken wind-up toy? Is it visible? Maybe it's my speech patterns, my gait, the absent accent, asking for items that don't exist here. My first week I stumbled to a corner store and asked for a pack of Silk Cuts and a single bottle of Kirin. I repeated the request in Spanish and then French. Blank stare followed by a hand pointing at the caged door. Two months later, I watched cigarette smoke curl upward in the cheap apartment of a well-known prostitute in Mid-City, near the dog tracks where I sold portions of winning tickets to get by, decades ago as a small boy. She mumbled something about wanting to own a goat as I put on a jacket and walked out. The image of horns in my head. I felt my head for bumps, divets. I hadn't noticed the torrent of rain striking me. Somewhere in the rain, I remembered my birthday was the week previous. Two days ago someone pulled my middle name out of those burned grooves in my grey. This morning I remembered I experimented with polymer crystal growing material in water suspensions when I was fifteen. How much did they burn out of my LTM? When will I hear the electronic sounds alerting me to another rendevous for pick up out of this place? I hear them all the time in my dreams. The signals blare, I grab my boots, a backpack, a jacket, eye protection, a helmet...and I run to the source being repeated in the ear bud surgically placed in my left ear.

"East. East. East. Northeast. Bear right. Stop at the dead end twenty meters away. Run quickly. The spotlight will only be visible for a few more moments."

The silence in this small, pre-technological city is overwhelming. My communicator is so quiet, it seems broken. I checked it many times, even upgraded it. The odd, errant call, misrouted, blips on the monotone screen. Last night I brokered a deal...an old Western-Electric telephone for repair services on several portable computers. My trade in relics is still serviceable, much to my delight. The calls for things people cannot seem to find, however rare, adds to my current psychological training. I must keep things from the past to move forward. Large, round discs made of vinyl allowed me enough seed money to pilot out of here in the first place...to a destination similar to the geography of Mars. The fucking red stone. I curse myself for chosing the dust.

Tonight, when I am suspended in my cocoon, I will think about the possiblities for interaction I have here. The heat will abate in my sleeping unit. I'll be tethered to the world via coaxial cable, fiber, and a digital/cell grid. We have the world at our fingertips and no one in this godforsaken swamp state has anything worthwhile or coherent to say. Him me with your best shot. Nail me on the chin. My helmet is off.

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