Catastrophe Jones

Sometimes I’m certain that patterns within patterns within patterns are the puzzle, and the puzzle’s solution. We’re spheres within spheres, made of spheres. Everything comes down to angle and trajectory while we spiral, accelerating either away from our beginning–

flashBANG

–or into our end.

squish

And maybe the reason there are discrete numbers and infinite arrays are the same reason light’s a particle and a wave. The same reason there’s black and white, and a whole lot of gray. The same reason there’s a thousand ways the sun shines, but a definite night and day.

Back and forth, back and forth.

I get lost, looking up at the stars, sometimes, thinking of you. Wondering where you are, and smiling my (our?) secret little smile. I always kept it quiet, except when I was screaming to the world.

You don’t even know who I am; the songs I can’t get out of my head kiss me to sleep and sing me the lullabyes that I pretend you wrote. Just for me.

They tell me hush, Juliette. It’ll all be over soon. Reboot comes in the form of a needle, a knife, a bullet. 75 years worth of scotch, smoke, unprotected sex and double-bacon cheeseburgers. Or for some, a quick and accidental push of the reset button. I dream. I gave myself a new name. I love. I fear. I hate.

Hush, Juliette, hush. It’ll all be over s–

Somewhere in the middle of the Twenty-First century, the first omnitranslator was contructed — it began as a bulky machine, about the same size as a breadbox, with input and output jacks at both ends; the jacks were to be used between various pieces of equipment in order to put information in one form into another. Sound to light. Music to text. Pictures to scent. Any kind of data, transformed, translated, rewritten cross-platform, as it were.

Maybe three years after its public release, as science improved upon itself and created thin, sweet chrome and electric blue versions of everything that’d been birthed from the loins of progress and fed on the tit of technology, someone was developing a port for the human body. An invasive surgical procedure would insert the mechanism at the base of the skull, screwing through the bone so that the wires would slip into the brain stem itself.

The brain works with electrochemical responses that simulate current through live wires — information passes from cell to cell like energy moves from terminal to terminal.

You see where I’m going with it, don’t you?

Maybe two days after the public release of the stemport, a pair of geniuses hook themselves up to the omnitran with the stemports, and nearly give one another seizures from the sheer force of foreign thoughts assaulting one another’s brains.

One small brain for man, one giant brain for mankind.

Add a ton of curiosity, a middling amount of funding, and distill off the vapors of conscience. Too much of that and people start thinking of the ramifications of their actions.

Progress only cares about the consequences it’s looking for.

Now there’s the dream drive, with a built in omnitran switch. Snap it into your stemport and share the visions of the living, the dead, the tripping, the sane. You can use the omnitran to try and make it all a little more easy for your head to comprehend, or you can take it, full on, and just ride the wave. You can buy anyone’s dreams, or download yours and sell them on the street. Have an erotic one? Give it to the pimp on the corner. That one where you’re free and flying? Sell it to the wiped out kids down the block, or the burnt out CEO in the corner office upstairs.

Just make sure you trust your seller — the dreams stick with you, sometimes.

And not all dreams are good ones.

He’s not afraid of heights.

Out on the ledge, shoes finding little purchase on the rain-slick concrete, he wonders, not for the first time, what the hell he’s doing.

Gloved hands curl tightly around the window-molding; sharply blue eyes are squeezed shut as the wind howls around him, plastering wet black hair against his forehead and cheeks.

The white shirt is plastered to his pale, wiry frame; he knows he’s seen colder winters, but at this moment, he’s chilled to the very bone, listening to the music of the storm as it shrieks around him, whipping through the canyons of glass and steel, screaming along, angry banshees dragging sharp claws through the night, hungry to touch and maul.

He’s not afraid that he’ll fall.

He looks past the toes of his shoes and blinks water from his eyelashes, trying to concentrate.

So far down that he’s not even sure he can see the rainswept streets for the water and wind that sting his eyes, he knows someone’s there, watching. Eyes on him.

So far down into the shadow that the dark has swallowed them whole. Unsatisfied with just that, it calls to him, sings and seduces and waits.

He’s afraid that he’ll jump.

He doesn’t sleep often, save for when he’s drunk so much that he can fall into something like slumber, that more likely resembles an unconscious stupor.

When this doesn’t happen, he lies awake in bed for long hours, fighting back memories and the strange thoughts that only really occur to you in the middle of the night when you simply can’t be arsed to get yourself out of bed, such as “Is the front door locked?” and “I wonder if I have any more scotch.” or even “Where’s my gun?”

Nights like this, when he’s not alone, he turns to look at her, while she sleeps, tiny and curled up next to him. So often, her hands steal close, seeking his, thin fingers curling around his. Calloused and scarred, his hands are very much a focal piece of him, capable and dextrous, quick and dangerous, deceptively hiding the shaking with nimble movement, or maybe, if need be, the other way ’round.

He’ll hold her hand in the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep, but he hates himself for the way he lets it hold him still.

The first words to register were “She’s dead,” and everything after that was a blur.

He doesn’t think he wept, but he might’ve screamed, and he certainly broke a lot of things–furniture, walls, bones–over the next few hours.

He doesn’t think about her anymore, not her name, her face, her smile, those sweet brown eyes or the shock of auburn hair that she kept short and wild. It’s been years since her, since the fight, since she walked away and never came back.

When it’s late and he hasn’t had enough, yet, to drink, to get him to the point where the world will hush and let him sleep, he remembers that night.

* * *

“So quit?” she had said, all spunk and sass and lack of responsibility. “What’re they gonna do, throw you in jail for turning in a resignation?”

No, darling. They’ll throw me in jail for the hundreds of lives I’ve already taken and could potentially talk about. If I’m not under their thumb and I’m a particular danger? They’ll kill me. We may live in a ‘land of the free’ where you think you have guaranteed rights, but it’s not like everyone plays by the rules.

“I can’t,” he tells her. “There are things that need doing–” he begins.

“–someone else can do them!” she yells, looking furious. “…or someone else can sit here while you do,” she finishes, shoulders slumping.

It was then that she took her jacket, and walked to the door. He only stared, lost in utter disbelief. Did she just end it?

The door closing was his answer.

* * *

“She’s dead,” the voice on the other end of the line told him, quiet enough for somberness, but without much emotion. “We’ve arranged you a short leave–” his department head goes on, but is interrupted.

“I want another assignment. Right now. Somewhere not here,” he says.

He doesn’t remember, unless it’s late at night and he’s particularly introspective.

It’s always there, in the back of his mind, always lingering.

He asked for this.