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Mars Will Send No More

~ Comic books, art, poetry, and other obsessions

Mars Will Send No More

Tag Archives: short story

short story draft: The Beekeeper

23 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bees, ceres, food, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, short story, writing

photo taken at Smith-Gilbert Gardens

Meteor Mags: The Beekeeper
© 2023 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

Episode 40 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

When Patches becomes inconsolable about the extinction of one the most important species in the solar system, Mags realizes she needs to solve a central problem of human existence: what to eat.

4,300 words.

All I want, and all I need,
all I crave is a good pub feed!

—The Chats; Pub Feed, 2020.

🏴‍☠️

2029. Vesta.

“Tarzi!”

“What is it, Mags? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Patches! I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Come and look. Please.”

Tarzi had not often seen Meteor Mags cry. He followed her to her room as she wiped tears from her eyes.

Patches lay on Mags’ bed. Her eyes appeared dull and cloudy. A bowl of food sat untouched by the bedside.

“I’ve never seen her like this before,” said Mags. “She hasn’t eaten for days. She’s hardly moved and hasn’t cleaned herself at all. I got her to take a few sips of water, but that’s it.”

Tarzi sat on the bed beside Patches. He ran his fingers over her head, from nose to neck. Normally she would purr at his touch. But she offered no response. “She doesn’t look so hot, Auntie. Is she sick?”

“How can an indestructible cat get sick? If her cells are invulnerable, no virus or bacteria could injure her.”

Tarzi thought for a moment. He speculated. “We aren’t really as simple as just animal tissue, are we? We have more bacteria cells in our bodies than we do human cells. And our mitochondria are, like, not even human. They’re more like ancient bacteria living in our cells. Maybe something that’s always been a part of her is just… out of whack?”

Mags sat in her chair, rested her elbows on her knees, and put her head in her hands. “Hell, I never thought of that. Just which parts of her are invulnerable? Which parts of ‘her’ are her, and which ones aren’t?” Mags grabbed a cigarette and lit up. “Fuck. Baby kitty, can’t you tell us what’s wrong? Anything at all?” Mags began to cry again.

The nictitating membranes slowly slid away from Patches’ eyes. Her pupils rolled toward Mags without moving her head. She let out a single mew.

“Oh, baby, of course. Anything you want.”

“What did she say?”

“She wants her tablet.” Mags stood and rummaged around the room. “Hell if I know where it is, though.” She opened drawers in her desk, looked under the bed, and moved books and albums around on her bookshelf. “Where is it, Patches?”

Patches did not answer.

“What if there’s something about her tablet that made her sick?” Tarzi asked. “You’re part cat or—or something, Mags. What would you do with something that made you sick?”

Without hesitation, Mags said, “I’d fucking bury it. Dig a hole and cover it up like shit.”

“Oookay then,” said Tarzi.

“A-ha!” Mags threw open her closet door. On the floor inside sat an enormous pile of socks, bras, skirts, and whatever else Mags had not felt like washing that month.

Tarzi had never known Mags to be disorderly, unless it was immediately preceded by “drunk and”. Then again, he had never rummaged through her closet. He watched with amusement as Mags got down on all fours and dug through the pile to the bottom.

“Found it! Good call, Tarzi. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, if that’s what’s making her sick. Let’s have a look, then.”

Mags turned it on. Her eyebrows furrowed as she studied the web page it brought up. She touched the screen and examined the browser history. “That’s weird.”

“What is it?”

Mags handed him the tablet. Patches’ eyes followed listlessly as it passed from Mags’ hands to his.

“That’s funny,” said Tarzi. “I recognize most of these pages. I wrote them. Co-wrote, really.”

“You wrote the stuff that’s making her sick? What the fuck, Tarzi?”

“Mags, these are pages from the Anarchopedia, or the pages linked to in their sources sections. They’re all about the exact same thing: honeybees.”

“No one has seen a honeybee in nearly ten years now.”

“I know,” said Tarzi. “I wrote this. It tells all about how the bees died out around 2023. Hell, I barely have a memory of seeing them outside as a kid, but now I don’t know if it was real or just one of those things you think happened, but only imagined. Damn,” he continued, “from her browser history, it’s like she looked at hundreds of pages about bees. You don’t think she understands all this, do you?”

“I know she does. I mean, not all of it. But—how do I explain this?” Mags sighed and sat back down. “Listen. Do you remember when Patches and I were caught by that octopus? And how it told me all the stuff about the lab and everything?”

“Yeah. You said it was like telepathy or something.”

“Right. But it wasn’t just a conversation. It wasn’t like being on a phone call, and I ask you how your day was, and you tell me how it went, and I say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and then you say whatever. It wasn’t like that at all, Tarzi. We shared our minds. We shared everything we had ever known or thought or felt. I lived her life, Tarzi. And she lived mine.”

“You mean Patches knows everything you know?”

“Yes. But not perfectly. At least, not if what she’s going through is anything like what I’ve been through. Think about how much information and stuff a whole person’s life is. You can’t just upload all of that in an instant and suddenly be an expert.”

“So it’s not like ‘Whoa—I know Kung Fu’?”

“Right. Your brain needs to process all that. And it takes time to sort it out. I still get things that come to mind, and I know they’re Patches’ memories surfacing all of a sudden, not mine. Or like, I have a dream, and it’s not my dream. It’s one of hers. You know?”

“Not really. It sounds confusing.”

“It is. Tarzi, I had a couple times where I woke up since then, and for a minute I really thought I was her. Other times, I get this realization about something, one of her memories, like my brain is finally putting together the pieces of the puzzle and making a connection about something I ‘saw’ that day.”

“That must be weird as fuck for Patches.”

“Exactly. But I know she understands some of what she reads on that thing. Because she will ask me about it or tell me something about it. I explain some stuff to her, and some of it is still a bit over her head. But she’s getting more and more of it as time goes on.” Mags pulled another cigarette out of her pack and lit up.

“Alright, let me have one of those, then.”

“What? I thought you quit!”

“I did quit. But I am freaking out right now. Come on, Mags. This is no time to start pretending you’re a good influence.”

“Fuck you! Fine!” Mags laughed and handed him the whole pack and followed it with her lighter.

“If you tell Hyo-Sonn, I’ll call you a liar.”

“Mum’s the word, Captain Nicorette.”

Patches’ ears twitched at the sounds of Mags’ laughter.

“That’s my good kitten,” said Mags. “If we assume nothing about the physical tablet could hurt her, then there’s only one possible answer.”

“She’s upset about these articles.”

“She’s sad about the bees.”

Tarzi thought for a moment, puffing on his cigarette and frowning. “That’s a bit of a problem. Seeing as how they’re all gone.”

“It’s fucked, isn’t it? It’s half the reason all the food production has been moved indoors and mechanized, and why most people on Earth don’t have anything to eat but synthetic crap. All the plants we used to eat, they needed honeybees to pollinate them. We screwed ourselves on that one.”

“I know.”

“Right. You wrote the goddamned article about it.”

“But it gets worse. Just about every disease on Earth can be linked back to those shite foods they ‘grow’ now. The stuff that isn’t synthetic is still so devoid of nutrients, you’d have to eat three, four, maybe five times as much as someone living in the Stone Age to get the same nutrition. And when you have a planet full of poor, malnourished people, well—look at all the violence.”

“Look at all the prisons.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck that. Now I’m getting sad! Poor Patches!”

“What the hell are we supposed to do about it? Bring back the bees?”

At that, Patches lifted her head, stared into Tarzi’s eyes, and purred.

🏴‍☠️

2030. Svoboda.

Mags stood outside the aquatic tank on the Hyades and placed one hand on the reinforced Plexiglass wall separating her and Alonso from the colorful octopus swarm on the other side. She said, “They seem really happy here.”

“Home sweet home,” said Alonso. “Plus, they got more light in here than in that dirty-ass bilgewater in the cave. And the monkeys are always bringing them new toys to play with.”

“Toys?”

“Yeah, you know. Beach balls. Rubik’s cubes. An inflatable Richard Nixon sex doll. Just random stuff the old crew left lying around.”

“Do I even want to know why your crew had that stuff?”

“Probably not. But the octos like to play. They need a lot of tactile stimulation.”

“I’ll bet. So here’s what I need them to do, and I want you to stick around so I don’t get my brain fried, okay?”

“Sure, tía. I got your back.”

“You always did. Now we know my babies can read minds and influence thoughts, but I want them to try something else. I want them to find a mind. Or minds, if possible. Conventional wisdom says these minds have gone extinct, but I want to see if there are any left that we don’t know about.”

Sensing Mags’ intentions, the octopuses abandoned their playtime and coalesced into a shape resembling a dodecahedron. Their numerous arms interlaced to give the shape edges and form. Rubik’s cubes dropped by the dozen to the floor of the tank. Richard Nixon floated to the surface. His plastic effigy bobbed on the waves.

“Babies,” said Mags, “I want you to search Earth and see if you can find any bees. I don’t really know what bees’ minds are like, or how you’ll find them, but I’m going to think about them real hard and try to give you some clues. Okay?”

The octo-dodecahedron shifted its pigments into black and yellow stripes.

“Whoa,” said Alonso.

“That’s a good start,” said Mags. “Now shush and let me think.”

Mags pondered all she knew about the lives of bees. She knew they could see ultraviolet light invisible to the human eye. She pictured them dancing inside their hives to communicate the location of nectar-rich flowers to each other. She imagined their democratic process for determining a location for a new hive, the way they oriented themselves to the sun and wiggled their bodies, depicting distance and direction by scurrying back and forth according to that solar orientation. From those conversations, bees would vote and choose a new home. She thought of the male drones who lived only to mate, and the females who fed larvae, and the queen who gave birth to them all.

At first, the octopuses were confused by the enormous number of species who also pollinated plants, and the wasps who lived in similar communities. As they fed these images back to Mags, she mentally discarded the mismatches and focused on the insects she wanted.

How long the process took was measured only by the number of beers Alonso finished in that time. As he cracked open number five, Mags said, “Fuck me dead. We got a match.”

“You found a bee? Where is it?”

Mags shushed him again. For there was not just one bee, but hundreds and hundreds of them, and several queens. And for miles around them, no human minds existed—none save one. “Babies,” said Mags, “focus on that human and see if you can tell me where she lives.”

🏴‍☠️

2030. Earth.

Miles from nowhere in the North American countryside, Mags knocked on the front door of a Victorian-style house whose white and pale-blue paint needed scraping. The windows needed re-glazing. Much of the siding needed to be replaced. She knocked again.

An old woman’s voice reached her ears. “Quit your pounding! Who’s there?”

Mags flicked the ash of a cigarette onto the buckled wooden porch. “Yo, it’s me, Mags! I called you?” Her sensitive ears picked up shuffling movements, and the next time the voice reached her ears, it was closer to the door.

“You won’t kill anyone, will you?”

Mags frowned. “Not unless I have to. I’m here about the bees.”

There followed a clackety racket of various locks and chains being undone, then the door opened. It revealed an elderly woman with long, grey hair gathered into a ponytail. She wore an old-fashioned nightgown even though it was three in the afternoon, and a pair of slippers. She held a Glock .45 in one hand. “As long as you can behave.”

“I’ll be nice. I promise. May I come in?”

“I suppose. You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?”

“All the way from fucking Ceres, baby!”

“I will not have that language in my house! And put out that cigarette!”

Mags stubbed out the fag on the sole of one combat boot and flicked the butt into the street. “I’m sorry. You know, you remind me of my gramma. She was one hell of a—one heck of a woman.”

“Did she keep bees?”

Mags raised an eyebrow. “You could say that. We had this huge farm, and Gramma was always banging on about how we needed to take care of her bees.”

“She sounds like a wise woman.”

“Delores, you don’t know the half of it.”

The old woman holstered her pistol. “Come in. Would you like to see the hives?”

“I’d love to.” Mags stepped into the foyer and watched with some bemusement as the weathered door slammed shut behind her and the equally weathered Delores set all the locks and chains back into place.

The old woman’s arthritic hands struggled with a final deadbolt.

“Let me get that for you.” Mags latched it into place.

Delores said, “You seem like an awfully nice young woman, despite what I’ve heard about you on the news.”

“Thanks,” said Mags. She looked around the ramshackle décor and the walls of peeling paint. She inhaled the odor of decay. Disorder and decline. But if her senses saddened her at all, she gave not a sign. “Have you lived here long?”

“My husband bought this place fifty years ago, rest his soul. Why don’t you come out back with me?”

Mags took her hand and followed.

Compared to the decrepit interior, the backyard was a celebration of life and greenery. Magnolia trees and holly bushes bustled with birds, and all kinds of flowering plants thrived in the sunlight. All around them, honeybees carried on their daily delight in a constant buzz from one flower to the next.

In the center of that symphony stood the last three beehives on Earth.

“Remind me,” said Delores, “how you heard of me.”

“It’s a long story,” said Mags. “It starts with my cat, and my nephew, and a whole hell of a—a heck of a lot of research. But from what I can gather, you are the last of the beekeepers. The poor little bastards—the—the buggers died out a decade ago. But somehow, you kept them going.”

Delores rested on a concrete bench. “It wasn’t easy.” She held a hand to her forehead, rubbed her temples, and let it fall away. “All these years.”

Mags sat beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I know. I’m not as young as I look, Delores. I’ve been fighting this stuff for longer than you’ve been alive. And somehow, it seems like no matter how much I try to make things right, they just go wrong so fast that I can’t keep up.”

The shoulder in her hand shook in silence, and Mags did not interrupt.

Delores wiped her tears. “What exactly do you want?”

Mags brushed stray locks of hair away from the woman’s face. “I want the same thing you do, Gramma. I want bees. I want bees who thrive. Bees who bring beautiful plants to life, and the crops I need to feed people. But I need these bees in the Belt.”

“The asteroid belt?”

“The one and only. I just set up shop on Ceres, and we intend to grow our own food. We don’t have any interest in depending on Earth for our food supply. But for that, we need crops. And for crops, we need bees. And for bees, we need a queen. Several queens.”

“You want to take my queens?”

“No, no,” said Mags. “Not all at once. But if you can give me one to get started, and I can come back a bit later to get a few more? Then Ceres can develop its own self-sustaining hives. We can do something that’s never been done before in the Belt.”

“Will you make a garden?”

Mags laughed. “Delores, we plan to make a crazy tall building that houses thousands of hives under the care of a full-time staff. I can’t say it will be as pretty as your garden, but it will be awesome in its own way. It will help feed so many people. I can show you the plans.”

Delores was quiet for a moment. “That won’t be necessary. But I have two requests.”

“Anything you want.”

“One, you’ll send me pictures.”

“Absolutely.”

“And two, you’ll name it after me.”

Mags smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. And listen, I’ll get some people out here to fix up your house. You’ll never need to worry about a mortgage or taxes ever again. Anything else you need—getting food and stuff delivered, whatever—you just let me know.”

“That’s very kind of you. But I—”

“Look. My gramma would haunt me for the rest of my goddamn life if I did anything less.”

They sat in silence in the garden for a number of minutes Mags did not bother counting. All around her, the cycle of life buzzed undisturbed in splashes of sunlight and birdsong and the cool, spring breeze.

Miniscule ants carried on their wars and empire building. Plants converted sunlight into their bodies and stretched out to receive the glowing source. A snail crawled to a single drop of water on a leaf and drank from it until it was gone.

Some time later, when the shadows in the garden had changed their angles, Delores set her hand on Mags’ leg. “Help me up, dear. I’d like you to meet a queen.”

“I think,” said Mags, “I already have.”

🏴‍☠️

On the way back to Ceres, Mags held a tiny wooden box in her hand and peered through the wire screen on one side to see the insect inside. The enclosure held a few drones, too—the male bees whose only purpose was to mate with a queen before dying.

Soon, in the newly christened Delores Cunningham Institute for Agriculture, they fulfilled that purpose.

🏴‍☠️

2031. Ceres.

Celina guided a dozen teenage girls on a tour of the DCIA in hopes of interesting a few of them in learning and working there. She began in the lobby. “Some of you already know about this statue of Delores Cunningham. But for those of you who weren’t involved with the project, Kala and her sculpture group at the Community Center carved this to commemorate the life of the woman who made all of this possible.”

She made a broad, sweeping gesture with both hands to indicate the entire structure around them. One hand held a tall glass of colorful liquid and chunks of fruit. She took a sip. “Even this Mai Tai. The citrus was grown right here on Ceres.”

If the stone rendition of the late beekeeper disapproved of drinking, it gave no evidence. It portrayed Delores sitting on her favorite bench in her garden. On one raised hand crawled a queen bee carved from asteroid rock older than Earth itself.

Sarah said, “Did you meet her?”

“Only once. On Mags’ last trip to visit.”

Another girl spoke up. “What was she like?” Most of the group had just come from roller-derby practice at the Community Center. Girls carried helmets and wore pads on their knees and elbows. Their t-shirts bore the names of various teams. The Planet Crushers. The Brawling Bitches. The Legion of Hell.

Celina found the names amusing. She had suggested some of them. Like so many of the children on the asteroid-mining frontier, the Ceresian teens had survived traumas no one should ever endure, and roller derby was one of the activities Celina encouraged to help them find their inner strength. If some adults on Ceres found the team names less than wholesome, Celina was all too happy to give them a piece of her mind. She was, after all, the oldest person in the solar system.

“Delores,” she said, “was probably the last person you’d imagine to be hanging out with Mags. She was gentle. Kind. Softspoken. Not at all like a certain magpie we know.” That got a laugh. Celina continued. “She was struggling in the last few months of her life, but when she walked into her garden, a light filled her eyes, and you could see the young woman she had once been, full of joy in simple things and the life all around her. That is her legacy for us. Would you like to see the rest of the place?”

She walked away as if she already knew the answer, and the tour group followed her—all except for Sarah. The lead singer of the Dumpster Kittens approached the statue and leaned in to examine the carved queen close-up. She stroked its lacelike wings with one finger and marveled at the delicacy one could achieve with hard, unyielding stone. She considered, for a moment, how that odd combination resembled the personalities of the two pirates who had taken her under their own wings.

Then she caught up to the rest of the group.

🏴‍☠️

Halfway through the tour, Celina showed her girls the floor of the building where engineers and biologists experimented with growing meat. “This,” she said, “is where we are building some cutting-edge technology to grow muscle tissue from animal cells. Soon, we’ll be having steak that was never cut from a cow, fried chicken that never knew a cage or was killed, and a bloody good fish and chips that was never pulled from an ocean or a farm.”

Trays filled with sheets of flesh bathed in liquid nutrients. Men and women in white lab coats and masks busied themselves with taking temperature readings, slicing off samples for microscopic examination and testing, and adjusting the nutrient feeds.

“Now I know this looks totally gross,” said Celina, “but compared to a factory farm or a slaughterhouse, this is nothing.”

One of the girls spoke up. “This is freakin’ crazy! Who came up with this?”

“Mags came up with it one night when we were out drinking.”

“What does Mags care? She’s not like, a vegetarian or anything.”

“No,” said Celina, “she certainly isn’t. Because of her fucked up biology—I mean, her unique biology—she needs meat to live. Do you know what an obligate carnivore is?”

“I do,” said Sarah. “Like cats. They need organ meat to survive.”

“That’s right. If you put a cat on a vegetarian diet, the goddamn thing will die. So the question was, can we meet that nutritional need without any suffering?”

Another girl said, “So it’s like cruelty-free cat food?”

Celina laughed. “That’s exactly what it’s like. But this isn’t just for cats. We think this tech will be a game-changer for feeding everyone in the Belt. A long time ago, when Mags and I lived with her gramma, we raised all our own animals, and they lived good lives. They enjoyed fresh air and sunshine. They were loved as much as any house pet. But the sad thing was, they still had to die. And that’s no fun for anyone.” Celina took a swig from her drink. “Unless you’re a total fucking sadist.”

“So how does it work?”

Celina said, “Some of it is really above my pay grade. But if this sounds like something you’d be interested in learning about, then you just let me know. We could use all the help we can get. Are you ready to see the next level?”

🏴‍☠️

On the top floor, the group encountered Mags and Patches. The felonious felines were behind a glass wall, beyond which was an open area swarming with bees. Mags was unrecognizable inside her protective beekeeper’s suit that made her shapely body a lumpy mass of white, but she waved to Celina and the girls.

Patches sprawled on the floor of the enclosure, nearly unrecognizable herself. Bees covered her bushy body in a writhing mass of insect movement that did not bother her at all. Her tuft-filled ears flicked away inquisitive intruders without any fear of being stung, and the black-and-yellow mass covering her torso rose and fell with her rhythmic purring.

Celina said, “I tried to tell them they don’t need to go in there anymore, but they wouldn’t hear a word of it. I don’t think Mags is even doing proper beekeeping anymore. She just likes to let Patches hang out with the bees.”

Patches slowly shifted her weight to let the swarm around her adjust, then flopped over onto her back without injuring a single insect. What had troubled her so greatly two years prior had become a source of happiness. She was, like so many Ceresians, content in her new home, with her new friends—with simple things, and the hum of life around her.

The Robots Are Reading Meteor Mags!

12 Wednesday Apr 2023

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

artificial intelligence, audiobook, DeepZen, lauren williams, meteor mags, Patches, robot, science fiction, short story

art generated by Midjourney

The robots are reading! An old friend of mine who produces audio recordings for the visually impaired recently posted a Wall Street Journal article about DeepZen, a company that samples professional voice actors and narrators to create robot voices that produce audiobooks.

You might know I’ve produced three short audiobooks entirely on my own, but it was a time-consuming and challenging task even for someone with years of experience reading in public, engineering radio broadcasts, and recording my own music. And in the end, I thought the results were just okay, because I was so focused on the technical details and enunciating clearly that the readings themselves lack a bit of emotion.

So I thought, “What the heck? Let’s give the robots a shot at the hard work!” I chose the DeepZen voice of Lauren Williams—who has a British accent—and sent her a trial run of two short episodes from The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. After all, the series features female characters using slang from the UK and Australia, and profanities inspired by the classical pirates from England. Maybe Lauren could lend the proper space-pirate vibe to Mags’ outbursts such as “Curse me for a bloody papist!”

Now you can judge robotic Lauren’s performance for yourself. Below are the links to audio files you can listen to in your browser or download like digital pirates, absolutely free of charge. The first story is Reborn, where Mags sets up a genetics lab to resurrect some of her freaky space pets whose DNA she preserved. The second is Solo Tour, where the paths of Mags, a murderous cyborg, and one of her teenage fans violently intersect.

Click Here to Listen to Reborn.

Click Here to Listen to Solo Tour.

short story draft: Solo Tour

24 Friday Mar 2023

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in MeteorMags

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

fiction, meteor mags, music, Patches, science fiction, short story, writing

Meteor Mags: Solo Tour
© 2023 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.

Episode 39 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

Mags takes Patches and two of her closest friends on a tour of the Asteroid Belt to promote her second solo piano album, unaware that her enemies have planned to kill her.

3,900 words

Anger is a gift.

—Rage Against the Machine; Freedom, 1992.

Click Here to Listen to This Episode Being Read by Lauren Williams.

🏴‍☠️

The cyborg gripped Timothy’s throat with cold titanium fingers that promised to crush the life out of him before it had time to flash before his eyes. The teenager thrashed as hard as he could. The back of his skull found the club’s concrete floor and was far from happy about it. He couldn’t scream, but plenty of people around him were taking care of that.

If his brain had not been preoccupied with its imminent demise, he might have second-guessed just how far he was willing to go as a fan.

🏴‍☠️

Five hours earlier, Meteor Mags landed her ship on the asteroid Nemesis 128, a carbon-rich chunk of rock not wider than 178 kilometers in any direction. The corporation which first claimed Nemesis had filed for bankruptcy and abandoned all the equipment and sub-par hovels constructed for the mining families, along with the GravGens that pumped out an artificial gravity field approximating that of Earth’s. Like so many workers in the Belt in 2033, the residents of Nemesis owed their survival to a rugged determination and support from Mags.

She stepped out of her ship and planted her combat boots in the middle of a dreary spaceport. “Fucking hell,” she said. “I love what they’ve done with the place.” What light bulbs worked at all flickered incompetently and sprayed her shadow intermittently across the hull behind her in oblique angles.

Her sound engineer, Dr. Plutonian, poked his head out the door of the Bêlit. “Jesus, Mags. Do they even have enough electricity to power our equipment?”

“Leave that to me.”

Mags’ calico cat Patches bounded from the ship, pressed her ears backwards and flat against her bushy head, and howled.

Mags said, “We’ll get ’em sorted.”

The final member of her entourage appeared in the ship’s doorway. “I’m assuming this isn’t the scenic view you promised?”

“It’s one of them, Sarah. Would you help Plutes unload for a minute? Patches and I need to fill out some paperwork.”

Sarah was hardly old enough to drive a car on Earth, but ever since Mags had rescued her from being eaten by aliens in 2029 and taken the young woman under her wing, she’d formed her own band as the singer for the punk-rock sensation Dumpster Kittens, and she was no stranger to loading and unloading. “Get on it, then. We only have five hours ‘til showtime!”[1]

Mags departed with a flick of her tail and lit up a smoke. Patches followed suit, stopping every so often to sniff random objects and scratch them with her impervious claws to let everyone know she had been there.

Plutonian said, “I guess this is why we get paid the big bucks.”

Sarah laughed. The sound was brighter than any light in that decrepit port. “I always knew you were only in this for the money.”

His eyes following Mags told a different story, a story Sarah knew all too well. She was, after all, a telepath.

🏴‍☠️

Mags returned longer than a minute later and found all the equipment unloaded. “Listen,” she said. “They’ve had some problems with power, and I’m going to fix them. I need a couple hours to install our energy system at this rock’s poles. Patches is coming with the two of you as security. I can’t have my band wandering this godforsaken rock without a bodyguard. If anything goes horribly wrong, call me.”

Plutonian said, “We’ll make it to the club. Just make sure we have time for a proper soundcheck.”

Mags kissed his cheek. “I doubt anything about this tour will be proper.”

Patches leapt onto the black box containing Mags’ piano. She stretched out, licking one paw and rubbing it over one ear.

Sarah said, “Your chariot awaits.”

🏴‍☠️

The first time Timothy heard Meteor Mags in 2030, he was thirteen years old, and he pleaded with his best friend Brian to turn off the music. In the storage closet that passed for Brian’s bedroom in the dilapidated shack Brian’s parents called home, a tattered boombox blared.

Now I ain’t your little girl
Now I ain’t your toy
Your life don’t mean shit to me
Something to destroy

“You don’t like it?” Brian’s parents were both working in the mines on the same shift, and he was enjoying a rare free hour to listen to music as loud as he wanted—or at least as loud as his limited equipment could handle.

“God no,” said Timothy. “It’s bloody awful!”

“It’s Meteor Mags,” said Brian, “with these guys called the Psycho 78s.”

“It’s a lot of screaming and bashing. Can we listen to something else?”

Timothy was not yet a fan.

🏴‍☠️

The week his parents lost their jobs in 2032—along with every other miner on Nemesis when the corporation went belly-up—Timothy hardly slept at all. Unlike Brian, he didn’t have a closet to sleep in, only the couch in the scant few meters that served as both livingroom and kitchen. He didn’t even have space to stretch out his legs.

His parents, still on erratic sleep schedules from their mining shifts, woke him up at random hours by plopping on the couch next to him to fight over which video to watch and careening recklessly toward the end of their final paycheck by converting it to booze and cigarettes.

It was like he was a ghost, so he left the shack without saying a word. He walked alone for hours, and all he had to listen to was the music on a small drive Brian gave him. In his earpods, the Psycho 78s blasted their single Whipping Boy, with Meteor Mags on vocals.

She sang about being so angry about being beaten down that you’d want to take up arms against your oppressors and keep on killing until the killing was done—or at least, that’s what Timothy could decipher amidst all the screaming and bashing.

The music wasn’t all that different from what he’d heard two years before, but it made a new kind of sense to him. He’d seen his parents turn from hopefulness to hopelessness on the cruel frontier. He’d lost hope himself and felt it replaced by a constantly churning frequency that felt like rage boiling under the surface of every minute of every day.

Somewhere in that mess of noise in his ears, he heard his rage reflected, focused, and redirected. And the fact that these people, these Psycho 78s he had never known or even met, had captured his feeling and brought it to life made him feel like maybe, just maybe, anything was possible.

Head-down in his hoodie and singing along as if no one could hear him, Timothy was well on his way to becoming a fan.

🏴‍☠️

Ninety minutes before the show, Meteor Mags checked her phone. “Bloody hell. What’s a bitch gotta do to get a few bars out here?” She shoved the tiny black box back inside her bra and positioned the second rod on the rocky ground before her. Holding it steady with one hand, she lifted a hammer above her head. Then she brought it down, again and again, until the rod was firmly embedded in the asteroid.

Nemesis was not the first asteroid where she’d installed her free-energy system, an engineering triumph made possible by her late friend Slim’s mathematical genius and Shondra’s manufacturing expertise on Mars.[2] But it was certainly the first hunk of space rock she’d lit up just so she could play a concert.

Nemesis was the first stop on her tour in support of her second solo album, 88 Light Years. And if the pathetic asteroid needed a boost, then she was damn well sure she was the one to make it happen.

As the clock ticked closer to showtime, Mags pounded the SlimRod one, two, three more times then slipped her hammer into a belt loop. A stolen cigarette found its way into her hand, and she knelt to flip the switch that would send a wave of energy from the north pole of Nemesis to its south pole, then back again in an endless wave that anyone with open-source equipment could tap into. And she’d made damn sure her concert equipment could tap into it.

She took a drag and let it leisurely escape her lungs below the star-splattered sky that hardly twinkled in the human-made atmosphere.

She said, “Power to the people.” A shockwave made the asteroid tremble as if from the notes of a bass guitar. The blast ruffled her skirt and caused a single lock of hair to fall over her face.

She smiled a wicked smile and finished her smoke before starting up the vehicle she had borrowed without asking from the spaceport. She was pretty sure she remembered where the club was.

🏴‍☠️

The day Timothy became a true fan, three ships from Mars landed on Nemesis. He had nothing to eat in the last five days except protein powder. He was one of the lucky ones. Many others died in the food riots following the mining corporation’s hasty exit. More had overdosed on heroin and fentanyl in their untidy hovels rather than face the future. Some died with lit cigarettes in their hands. Fires broke out and consumed what passed for Nemesian neighborhoods.

If his parents were still alive, Timothy had little hope of seeing them again. The last time he saw them was at the end of a hallway on fire, brighter than he could ever remember seeing anything before, so bright the paint peeled from the walls and bubbled like blisters. Heat choked his lungs and turned his skin red, and he fled.

It wasn’t a picture he wanted to see again, and hunger wasn’t doing anything to deaden the screams he couldn’t forget.

When the ships landed, he ran for them—just like everyone else. He didn’t stand a chance of getting close, of touching them. All around the ships was a crush of bodies, a tuneless song of shouting and weeping. A breaking of human waves.

The noise was nearly deafening. Drowning.

Timothy tried to retreat, but his feet and the ground had lost contact. A crowd surge drove him forward on a mass of elbows and grease and stink. He balled his hands into fists and used them to cover his face.

Volume challenged the crowd. It came from the middle ship of the Martian trio, a boxy ex-cargo ship called the Hyades. It looked like a semitruck trailer got fucked up on methamphetamines and crashed into a trailer park before being covered in graffiti—but a thousand times bigger.

“Listen,” said Mags.

The ship’s loudspeakers blared. The riot continued.

Mags covered the mic. “Dude, this is never gonna work.”[3]

Alonso leaned back in the pilot’s chair and threw his feet onto the console. “It’s bulletproof, tía. Just give them a minute. They’re probably so hungry they’d eat the assholes out of a chicken coop. Just talk to them.”

“Listen,” said Mags. “I brought some friends to—”

“My mistake. I think they’re killing each other.”

“Guys! I said—”

“Puta madre.” Alonso sat up and switched off the microphone. “Tía!”

“What?!”

“I got a better idea. Sing.”

She flicked her tail. “Sing?”

“Sing, you know?! Sing a song to last the whole day long? You motherfuckers will sing someday? Do you know what I’m—”[4]

“Count it off.”

He switched on the mic. What the Hyades lacked in aesthetics, it more than made up for in sonics.

Still, it was not Mags’ proudest moment. Fifty-three people died in the riot before the mob calmed the hell down and the people aboard the ships were able to begin distributing food, first-aid supplies, and emergency medical care.

Despite the bumps and bruises, Timothy survived. In fact, he ate better than he had eaten in weeks, even when his parents had been in charge of feeding him. At one point, he made it through a queue to a long table where volunteers handed out plastic bags containing soap, a washcloth, toothpaste and toothbrush, aspirin, and snack packs.

Timothy accepted a bag from a teenage girl on the opposite side of the table. Her long black hair had been woven into cornrows and bundled at the back into a ponytail. If Timothy’s ragged, filth-covered appearance distressed her in any way, she showed no sign—only a radiant smile followed by the words “If you need a doctor, we’re setting up a temporary facility just over there.”

Maybe, he thought, I should see someone about my burns. And all that smoke I breathed. He said, “I’m sorry, where?”

She stood to better point out the location. “Just past the—”

Mags interrupted by slamming a cooler onto the metal table. “I got an Esky full of fresh sangers, bitches! Hooooo!” She unlatched the lid, pulled out a sandwich sealed in plastic, and handed it to Timothy. “You need anything else, Sarah?”

“I was just going to show this guy where to find the doctors.”

“You okay, kid?”

Timothy recognized Mags from photos and wanted posters. She’d been singing in his earpods for days about all the things that made her sad or angry, with the insistent conclusion that she was strong enough to overcome anything life could throw at her. He stumbled over his words and failed to say anything.

Mags put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, mate. Sarah will show you. Sarah? You want to take a break? I can cover this station for a bit.”

“Sure thing,” said Sarah. She climbed onto the table and slid off it next to Timothy. “What’s your name?” She already knew.

Mags and Sarah had just made a fan for life.

🏴‍☠️

Thirty-two seconds before concert time, Mags showed up with a sorely depleted bottle of rum in one hand and a hammer hanging from a belt loop on her skirt. “Sorry guys. I ran into some fans. Did we do a soundcheck?”

“We as in me and Sarah,” said Plutonian. “Are you ready to go?”

“I was ready three days ago. Let’s kill it.”

Plutonian made his way to the soundboard, Sarah got comfortable behind her keyboard and microphone, and Mags took center stage at her piano. The smuggler unleashed a flurry of black and white notes as if she were brandishing a weapon before a fight. She said, “What is up, Nemesis? How the hell are ya?”

During the cheers and applause, Mags put one hand to her forehead like a visor and scanned the crowd. “Has anybody seen my cat? No, that’s not the first song. Patches!”

The fluffy calico had made herself at home atop the bar at the back of the venue where she graciously accepted petting and ardently dissuaded anyone who tried to shoo her off her throne.

Mags said, “Oh, there you are. Tonight we’ll be playing songs from my new solo album, 88 Light Years. Eighty-eight because that’s the number of keys on a piano.” Again, a flourish. “But this wasn’t a solo thing at all. Put your hands together for Sarah, from my favorite band: Dumpster Kittens!”

The audience exploded in a raucous response.

“That’s right,” said Mags. “Sarah did the harmonies and gorgeous keyboard work on my album, and we got your favorite pirate-radio DJ Doctor P rockin’ our sound tonight, so give it up!”

Without further preamble, Mags launched into Gun Yourself Down. Despite its morbid title, the hard-edged ballad encouraged the listener to ignore the haters and keep pushing forward.

She didn’t recognize the teenager who stood front-and-center at the edge of the stage, bobbing his head and swinging his long brown hair in time with the music. The last time she’d seen him, he was covered in dirt and smoke, half-burned and starved nearly to death.

In the year since Mags’ humanitarian visit, Timothy had—like so many survivors on Nemesis—pulled himself together and got on with life. He’d never found any evidence that his parents survived, nor any that they had died. He’d struggled to cope with that ambiguous loss, never knowing if he should let himself grieve or hold onto one last shred of hope. Gun Yourself Down had become his personal anthem. He raised a fist in the air and sang along.

Then everything came to a screeching halt.

🏴‍☠️

Twenty-three minutes before showtime, a cyborg landed on Nemesis. He arrived in a small ship that did not use the spaceport Mags had encountered, and he strode through the regolith with a singularity of purpose: to destroy Meteor Mags.

Much of his body had been replaced with titanium and machinery to render him super-strong and impervious to most kinds of harm. And because Mags had been known in recent years to tour with a bevy of telepathic space octopuses, he wore one of Earth’s most devious inventions: a helmet to block telepaths.

The cyborg followed pre-programmed map coordinates to the club. Asteroid dust surrounded him in a cloud that grew with each metallic footfall until he approached the door.

Two guards drew their pistols and shouted orders. The cyborg only granted them as much attention as was required to grip their skulls and fling them away like ants in his path. They did not survive the encounter.

He ripped the door from its hinges, tossed it in the direction of the two fresh corpses, and charged inside.

🏴‍☠️

Mags had her eyes closed as she sang. The noise caught the attention of her sensitive ears. But if anyone was faster than Mags, it was her cat.

Patches leapt off the bar and bounded from tabletop to tabletop, spilling drinks and ashtrays every which way until she was in range of the cyborg. She launched herself at the monster, but he was faster and stronger than any human foe.

His backhand slap knocked Patches out of the air. She hit the concrete floor and slid backwards until she smashed into a table. Its drinks and ashtrays went flying, and the people sitting at it screamed and rocketed to their feet—as did everyone else who had been seated.

In the chaos, the cyborg stormed the stage.

Plutonian rose from his stool behind the soundboard and brought his Benelli shotgun to bear on the menace. But he hesitated to fire, because some crazy kid in the general admission area right near the stage had decided to pick a fight with the intruder.

Plutonian still had every intention of blowing out the cyborg’s brains or whatever combination of neurons and circuitry served the same function. He scrambled through the screaming and overturned tables and people smashing against him as they ran for the exits.

For the sin of interfering with its holy mission, the cyborg gripped Timothy’s throat with cold titanium fingers that promised to crush the life out of him. As the teenager thrashed as hard as he could, the back of his skull found the club’s concrete floor and was far from happy about it. He couldn’t scream, but plenty of people around him were taking care of that.

When asked about it later, Timothy couldn’t explain why he’d stepped into the cyborg’s path and confronted it. He’d think about listening to Mags’ music with his best friend Brian, and how after 2032 he’d never seen the boy again. He’d recall lonely days where he could hardly put a thought together because he was so hungry. He’d remember Mags putting her hand on his shoulder and giving him something to eat.

In the moment, he only knew that something awful was trying to take something beautiful away from him, and he reacted without even thinking.

His valor won Mags several seconds. That was all she needed. As the cyborg choked the young man, Mags brought a mic stand down on its head. Three times she struck in quick succession.

That got its attention, and it dropped the boy. In the half second as the monster raised and turned its head toward her, Mags grabbed her hammer and introduced it to the cyborg’s face.

Blood spurted from the wounds. The cyborg bellowed its rage and pain. Intent on Mags, it forgot about Patches—a fatal mistake.

Mags shouted, “Get through his helmet!” She and her cat had seen a similar device before, when Earth sent an assassin to kill them at the final Small Flowers concert.[5]

Patches landed on the cyborg’s head and set her invincible claws to work. In a flurry, strips of metal flew away from the combatants. The cyborg grabbed at Patches to dislodge her and finally succeeded. He flung her away. But the damage was done.

“Sarah,” Mags shouted. “Fry his brain!”

Sarah wanted to be a nurse when she grew up. She dreamed of a life where she could help people overcome pain and lead them to healing. She was, unlike Mags, a kind and gentle soul. But she had seen what their enemies could do, and—like Mags—had reached a point in her life where she would do anything to protect her friends.

The young telepath focused on the cyborg’s exposed and all-too-human mind, and she blasted it with all the force of the rage that fueled her music in Dumpster Kittens.

The cyborg gripped both sides of its head and made a noise no one who heard it ever hoped to hear again. It crashed against the edge of the stage and bashed its face into the structure. Then it reared up to its full height, went rigid as a stone, and fell to the floor.

“Good job, Sarah! You okay?” Mags didn’t wait for a response before she was cradling Timothy in her arms. Patches and Plutonian gathered around her.

Mags said, “Hey, kid.” She set the palm of one hand against his face. “You alright, mate? Talk to me.”

There she was, his favorite singer, right in his face. Timothy coughed and rubbed his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Mags?”

“I’m right here.”

He placed his hand over hers and held it. “Is that the best they can fucking do?”

Mags helped him to his feet.


[1] Sarah’s talents and courage were crucial to the crew’s overcoming a cybernetic mutant monster in Daughter of Lightning and a swarm of vicious space wasps in The Hive.

[2] Shondra being Mags’ not-really girlfriend and, after the events of The Martian Revolution, the President of Mars. She manufactured many things for Mags over the years, including the Bêlit and the K Drive.

[3] This humanitarian mission happened after Mags had released her remaining octopuses on Earth, as shown in Farewell Tour and Pieces of Eight. Otherwise, they would have been happy to use their telepathic powers to pacify the crowd from the safety of the massive tank they lived in aboard the Hyades while on tour with Alonso and the space monkeys as Small Flowers.

[4] Alonso paraphrases both Sing by the Carpenters (1973) and Sing by the Dresden Dolls (2006).

[5] As told in Farewell Tour.

318 by autumn kalquist

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by Mars Will Send No More in science fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

318, autumn kalquist, book review, books, defective, fractured era, science fiction, short story

318 - autumn kalquist book cover

In a future threatened by disease outbreaks, immunity will become a valuable commodity. 318 explores the horrifying plight of those born with a special immunity and imprisoned as dehumanized test subjects to be studied. This short story introduced me to Kalquist’s work and quickly drew me in. With crisp, clear language, it elicits an emotional connection to the suffering of the main character, known by her number 318.

Kalquist takes you right into the action and then fills in the backstory with dialogue and character memories. In the process, you become invested in the dystopic world she has created and what fate will befall her characters in Kalquist’s longer Fractured Era story Defective, to be released this Fall. With sympathetic characters and a frighteningly believable near-future threatened by disease epidemics, the 318 short story is one of the best short sci-fi works to come across my review desk in the last couple of years.

Buy the Kindle version for 99 cents.

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