Diabolical Plots – Page 31 – From Inspiration to Ink…

DP FICTION #53B: “Lies of the Desert Fathers” by Stewart Moore

The Abbot’s eyes stared up at the ceiling. The reflections of blue-robed angels flew across his gray irises. Not much blood had spattered on his face. His chest was another story. The stains had finally stopped spreading from the rents in his brown wool robe. I noticed a smear near the hem of my long skirt where I stood too close.

Revulsion erupted in my throat and I clamped my hands over my mouth. I could feel the dampness of the blood on my leg. I fought the urge to tear the bottom of the skirt off. I needed to stay calm. If I panicked, all was lost.

On the Abbot’s shaven scalp, the lights of his implanted sanctifications still blinked, attempting to change the thought patterns of a dead brain. One finger slowly twitched. The motor cortex must be getting extra juice. I focused on that. A simple, physical issue in the neurological wiring. I could fix that. I slowed my thinking around that problem.

For some reason, the Abbot’s other hand held a saw. That problem I couldn’t solve right now.

Light from the overturned lamp shone on the wall behind the Abbot’s desk. There Saint Dymphna’s painted neck stretched out to meet her father’s sword in frozen, ecstatic martyrdom. I locked eyes with her, my hot breath seething through my fingers. She could be calm. I could be calm.

A shadow moved across Dymphna’s face. I almost turned and fled, but it was only a tarantula crawling inside the fallen lampshade. It hurried out across the wooden floor, so new the room still smelled of varnish in the dull evening heat.

The spider investigated the bloody chisel. Finally, it decided against crawling over the blade. It ran toward the monk in the shadows by the door. He stood so still, all I could see of him was his multicolored winking sanctifications, forming a halo around his head.

I smiled shakily, my gorge still in my throat. “Come here, please, Beta.”

Uriel Beta stepped forward shyly. He was a young man with a scar down his right cheek. His scalp and face were clean-shaven. What a change he made from when I first met him in prison, with lank dark hair and vomit-encrusted stubble.

Now, his hands were sticky with drying blood. I had found him desperately performing CPR on the Abbot.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Beta’s eyes went blank for a second as a blue light between his eyes flickered quickly. That implant stimulated his anterior cingulate cortex. His pupils contracted again. “…I’m Uriel Beta, a brother in the Order of Saint Dymphna.”

“Who am I?”

Again the momentary blankness. I couldn’t reduce the processing time for his sanctifications any further. That was why he had to be here, in the Order’s tightly sealed compound. He wouldn’t last a minute back on the streets, where his old friends, his victims and the police would all be waiting for him.

“…You’re Doctor Abigail Wainwright.”

“Good. Now lie to me, Beta.”

“…I can’t.”

“Try.”

Beta’s mouth worked, forming the beginnings of words, only for his sanctifications to start blinking more rapidly. Intracranial magnetic stimulation pulsed through his anterior cingulate cortex. Sociopaths have low activity in that region. Finally he let out a shuddering breath.

“…I can’t, Doctor Abigail. …The words won’t stay in my head. …It’s like they’re written in sand, and the wind… it blows the sand away, and what’s left is written in stone, and it’s the truth.”

“Excellent. Now: did you do this?”

Beta stared down at the Abbot, and at his scarlet hands. He knelt down, heedless of the blood on his robe. He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. A yellow light on his forehead faded on and off, stimulating his orbitofrontal cortex, giving him sympathy for the dead man he couldn’t feel on his own.

“…No,” he said at last. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But we have to find out who did this. I’m going to have to call the police pretty soon, and if we can’t give them the murderer, they’ll have to investigate. That means asking questions, and you know how the police already feel about this place. They might even try to force you to leave.”

Beta’s lights flickered. “…Yes. I understand. …We’re all very grateful to you, Doctor Abigail.”

I remembered how Beta had been when I met him: a monster seeking only his own immediate gratification. I set my jaw.

I looked over the monitors in the corner of the Abbot’s office. The lone guard was still in the booth at the entrance to the compound, oblivious. There were no guards inside the Order. We didn’t need any: no one wanted to get out. Besides, guards would have brought their own agendas, their own ideas of regulation and punishment, inside this place, and that would ruin the delicate work I performed here.

The rest of the monitors showed empty rooms and halls, but I knew where everyone was. It was nine o’clock: time for compline, the last service of the day. I held out my hand. “Come with me, Beta.” He took my hand and stood. I didn’t mind the blood. What kind of neurosurgeon would I be if I did? I took him over to the sink where the Abbot got water for blessing, and washed our hands.

Beta scrubbed at his fingernails as his tears ran down the drain. “…He was a great man. …You and he together made me whole. …You were like my mother and father.”

I squeezed Beta’s shoulder. “I know.”

We left the Abbot’s office, and I locked the door behind us. In the hallway, the ceiling lights reflected in the dark lacquered floors, as if we were hopping on stepping-stones in a frozen river. The adobe walls slowly released the day’s heat. The air was close, and sweat beaded on my forehead.

From up ahead came the chanting of the gathered monks. I recognized the canticle at once: the “Dies Irae,” “The Day of Wrath.” I mostly knew it from funeral services. An ill-omened thing to have come up in the lectionary for today. I saw Beta’s pupils dilate, and I knew it wasn’t just the dim light. I’d given all the brothers an implant in their anterior insula cortex. It gave them an experience of being one with each other when they worshipped together: a reward for their commitment to communal life. Now the music was taking hold of Beta. I gripped his arm.

“Uriel Beta, I need you to stay with me now. You’re the only one here who can’t lie to me.”

Beta looked at me with a slowly fading smile. He shook his head hard. “…I’ll try.” We continued down the hall. The chanting grew louder. Beta, struggling with the music, fighting its insistent communion with his brothers, started a whispered conversation to try to stay present with me.

“…Why didn’t you make it so we all can’t lie to you?”

I laughed quietly. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. All psychopaths need stimulation of the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. That just reverses the particular manifestation of their disability. There are many ways to be a psychopath. You were a compulsive liar; now you compulsively tell the truth.”

“…But do I deserve any credit for that, theologically speaking?”

“That’s not for us to decide. You’re not hurting anyone anymore, and that’s the important thing.”

I remembered the photos of his victims, and shuddered. I was acutely aware of being alone with him, but I knew I was safe. Turning off the brothers’ sex drives had been the easiest operation. A simple matter of cutting off that pathway between the amygdala and the hypothalamus. I had to, or we’d never get anything done.

Beta and I emerged into the back of the candlelit chapel. Darkness filled the circular stained-glass window, giving just hints of deep reds and blues. On the woven altar covering, flowers with lush green leaves bloomed in the desert.

Without the Abbot, the brothers still knew the rites. The slow chant of the song went on and on. The harmonies were rough: I could work no magic with musical talent. But the joy they felt as they sang, or droned, or howled, hummed through the floor. Beta trembled. I put my hand on his shoulder. He smiled beatifically.

Counting Beta and omitting the Abbot, there should have been twenty-two monks in the chapel. It only took a moment to know that one was missing. All I could see was the back of their shaved heads, each blinking with its own constellation. That was enough: I knew each of their implants better than I knew their faces. I had spent hours placing each one. There were Uriel Alpha and Gamma; there were the Raphaels, all six Gabriels, the Michaels…

My breath died inside me. Cold rose up my back despite the heat. I squeezed Beta’s shoulder hard, and he looked at me hazily. “Sariel,” I whispered. “It’s Sariel.”

Beta’s eyes widened. I pulled him back into the shadows. “He must be somewhere where he can’t hear the service, and can hide from the cameras,” I said. “Where?”

Beta thought a moment. “…The library. The special collection. There’s one corner the camera can’t see. We all know about it.”

“Let’s go.” We retreated from the chapel, back into the dark hallways.

Sariel. Our celebrity: Samuel Hutchens, the one serial killer I’d attempted to sanctify so far. Once I controlled his temporal lobe epilepsy, the rest had seemed fairly straightforward. I’d named him for the angel who taught humans about the moon. It matched the cyclical course of his murders.

Beta slowly opened the big oak door that led to the library. It creaked the tiniest bit. I prayed that only we heard it. Inside, green glass lampshades cast a watery light with pools of white on the ceiling. Books encased the walls. The shadows of shelves collected darkness. They gave off the odor of heat and paper.

I took off my shoes. We tiptoed along the shelves to the end of the row where the books about the Old Testament joined those of the New. The door to the special collection stood closed. On the floor lay a copy of the Lives of the Desert Fathers. Very slowly, I slid it out of our way with my foot.

Beta took hold of the door handle and looked back at me. I nodded. He gritted his teeth and threw it open.

Sariel stood in the corner, his nose in a book. He was a short, stocky, middle-aged man. His head was encrusted with sanctifications, like a phosphorescent reef. He looked up at us. His eyes gleamed in the dim light.

“Doctor,” he said softly. “You’re here late.” His accent was aristocratic Southern: Savannah, I knew, from his records. He sat down at the reading table.

“Why aren’t you at compline, Sariel?” I asked.

“I’m finding greater enlightenment here.” He closed the volume and turned it so I could see the cover. Neurocybernetic Behavior Modification. My first book.

“What’s that doing here?” I asked.

“The Abbot thought it was important that we know what we are.” Sariel ran his finger along the crevices of the brain on my book’s cover.

I sat down carefully across from him. “And what are you?”

“Spiritual beings, freed from the thorns of the flesh. Human as human was meant to be, human as in the Garden of Eden, free to praise God eternally until senescence. At which point we will resume the practice in heaven.”

I smiled. “That’s what you’re meant to be. You’re supposed to be better than the rest of us.”

“That’s what the Abbot thought, at least.” He looked at me from under heavy lids.

“Sariel… Have you seen the Abbot today?”

“No,” he whispered, his finger still moving over the convoluted lines. “Not personally, I mean. I saw him at worship this afternoon. And at noon. And this morning.”

“Then why aren’t you there now?”

“Because I’m tired!” he shouted. He picked up the book and slammed it back down. “I’m tired of feeling one with the universe whenever we sing a minor fifth. We’re slaves to your damned brain-machines, and I have had enough.” He reached down into his lap and brought up a tool. My whole body tensed. It was a vise grip. He set it gently on the table. “Eating and f-f-f… mating.” He spat out the word with the force of the interdicted vulgarity. “That’s what it is to be human. So how human do you think I feel, Doctor?”

“Where did you get that?” I asked, stalling for time.

“The workshop. You wanted us to be productive, after all. Idle hands, and so on. You were so sure of your work, that we wouldn’t use the tools to hurt each other. And you were right, of course. I couldn’t hurt another person now, even if I could want to.”

“Then what are you going to do with it?” My voice felt strangled in my throat.

Sariel’s fingers walked over his sanctifications like the legs of a pale spider. “I believe I know now what each one of these things does. This one, for instance—” He tapped a tiny box with a blue light on the left side of his head. “—This one regulates the communication between my amygdala and hypothalamus, so I can’t feel sexual excitation. This has been a particularly painful loss for me.”

He picked up the vise grip and closed it on that box. I stood up. “Jesus, don’t do that, Hutchens!”

He stood too. “Don’t come closer, either of you. I know what will happen. It’s like a fishhook: it does more damage coming out than going in. But it doesn’t matter, since I’m already dead to everything important in life. I’ll give you this, Doctor: you made the death penalty look good.”

He ripped the sanctification out of his head. Most of the implant tore off inside his skull, but the wire came out crusted with pinkish-gray neocortical flesh. Blood pulsed down his scalp. His right arm instantly flopped down at his side. He had torn straight through his motor cortex. He looked down at the useless limb.

Sariel grinned. “If your hand offend thee, cut it off.” His voice was thick.

“Beta, stop him!” I shouted. But when I looked back at him, Beta was shaking. His eyes rolled back into his head. He collapsed against the table and flopped onto the floor. His sanctifications scraped against the hardwood. I turned him on his side. His breathing was ragged but clear.

“And if your eye offend thee, pluck it out,” Sariel said. He gripped another sanctification and ripped it out, destroying Broca’s area, the center of grammar. “Interesting. Is. Feeling. You. Good. To me. Look. Feel… normal, almost.” He giggled, and ripped out another and another. Twitches writhed under his skin, contorting his face. His good hand trembled, so he had trouble getting at a sanctification at the back of his head. When he pulled it out, his right eye blinked furiously.

He was now blind on that side. I slipped around the table that way.

“Where… Go?” Sariel choked. He searched to his left, but like many people with damage to their left occipital lobe, he ignored his right completely. He brought his shaking hand to the center of his forehead, trying to get a grip on the winking red light there.

I grabbed the vise. It came easily from his loose fingers. I threw it away. He howled. Blood streamed down his face. His arms flailed out blindly. I grabbed my book off the table, a heavy tome full of illustrations. I swung it at the back of Sariel’s skull. I had to hit him three times, ruining more sanctifications as well as the book’s cover, before he fell down and lay shivering.

Beta moaned and tried to sit up. I knelt down and supported him. He looked around blearily under the table and saw Sariel’s bleeding head. Beta smiled weakly, then threw up. I moved to block his view of Sariel, and slowly he recovered. “…Not much good, was I?”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I turned up the activity in your mirror neurons to give you more empathy. Empathizing with that was just too much.”

“…I think I’m okay now.” I helped him stand up.

“Can you stay here and watch him?” I asked. “Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself any more?”

“…Yes. Are you going to call the police?”

“No.” I patted Beta’s arm. “It’ll be all right. I want to see if I can can save Sariel.” I sighed. There probably wasn’t much left of Sariel to save. I had worked so hard on him. “I’ll be right back.”

I left the library, retrieving my shoes as I did so, and headed for the Abbot’s office. I had to make sure it was undisturbed for the police. Soft chanting still drifted down the halls. The unity of the sound made it all worthwhile.

I passed by a small shrine for Saint Dymphna in the hallway. A single votive candle flickered under her portrait: a young, pretty, red-haired girl. The patron saint of the mentally ill. I wondered who had lit the candle. I thought of the men in the chapel, brains malformed at birth, who had never had a chance to choose the good at all. I freed them from that. I made it possible for God to save them. I opened the doors of Heaven.

Saint Dymphna’s ghost of a smile was not really reassuring. Neither was the crimson line across her throat.

I stalked down the hall. The brain is a physical system, I told myself, running over the old arguments in preparation for dealing with the police. A human brain is run by chemicals and electricity. You can measure it, alter it, even hold it in your hand. For God to change the flow of electricity in these men’s brains would have required a miracle, a bona-fide miracle, no less than splitting the Red Sea. And God doesn’t work that way anymore. Just read the news.

I reached the Abbot’s door and unlocked it. All I knew was, I saw sickness. I’m a doctor. So I healed it. What else was I supposed to do?

I walked around the desk. Two pools of sticky blood marked where the Abbot’s body and the knife had been.

I looked up. Uriel Beta stood in the doorway. Behind him, the other monks filled the hall. They sang quietly. I had mistaken volume for distance.

Beta’s left hand held something the size of a large rock. When he stepped forward I could see what it was.

“Uriel Beta, what are you doing with that drill?”

Beta looked down at his empty right hand. “…I’m not holding any drill, Doctor.”

“You can’t lie to me, Beta. I know you can’t.”

“…I’m not lying, Doctor. You did your work very well. See?” He waved his right hand languidly at me. “Nothing.”

“What about your other hand?”

“This?” He looked down at his left hand. It stayed very still. The knuckles were white, except the one on the trigger. “…This isn’t my hand. This is God’s hand. I don’t have any control over it.”

“Jesus. Beta, you have alien-hand syndrome. I should have known it was a possibility, it’s associated with disorders of the anterior cingulate. I stimulated that region to help your empathy, but I must have overloaded something somehow. I can fix it, Beta, I swear I can, but you have to give me the drill.”

The tarantula scurried in front of him. He knelt down.

“God doesn’t want you to take this,” he said softly. He triggered the drill and stabbed it through the spider’s body and into the floor. He never took his eyes off me as he did it. “But don’t worry. He doesn’t want to kill you either. Not like the Abbot. The Abbot wanted to saw off God’s arm.” He pulled the drill out of the floor and stood. “God only wants you to know the happiness we feel.” I realized he wasn’t pausing before he spoke. He believed what he said absolutely.

I saw blinking lights in another monk’s hand. It took me a moment to realize they were Sariel’s bloody sanctifications.

Beta’s left hand tested the drill. It whirred loudly. He stepped forward. There was nowhere for me to go. For the first time I really saw the window bars from this side.

“He’s going to sanctify you, Doctor,” Uriel Beta said as the other monks surrounded me. They grabbed me and pulled me to the floor, singing the whole time.

“You’re going to see what we see. What you gave us.” Beta knelt down over me. “Thank you, Doctor. We all thank you so much.”

I heard a sound. I couldn’t tell whether it was me screaming, or the drill. I looked up at the shaved heads all around. A cloud of blinking lights surrounded me, pulsing in complex rhythms. I knew each blink and flicker.

They were all working perfectly.

Author’s Note: “Lies of the Desert Fathers” was born out of research in the hard doctrine of original sin, that no human can achieve godliness unaided. But who knows what helps towards saintliness might be available after 50 more years of technology?

Stewart Moore began his peripatetic career by graduating college with a degree in theater, following which he directed a production of his play Henry and Beckyin New York City. Later, he earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Yale. His researches there led to the publication of his first book, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt (Brill, 2014). Turning from nonfiction to short fiction, he has been published in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow (The Beastly Bride, 2010) and Paula Guran (Halloween, 2011). He has also been published in the magazine Mysterion (2018). He lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter and an odd number of cats.

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TV Review: Eerie Indiana (1991-1992)

written by David Steffen

Eerie, Indiana was a 19-episode episodic young adult SF/Fantasy show that aired on NBC in the 1991-1992 television season. It was followed in spring 1998 with a 15-episode spinoff Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension on Fox Kids (which I’ll touch on briefly but is not the focus of this review). I watched it recently for free on the Roku Channel which I could access without any streaming subscriptions on my Roku streaming device.

Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) and his family recently moved from New Jersey to the odd small town of Eerie, Indiana. Maybe because of his outsider perspective, he seems to be almost the only one to notice that Eerie has a lot of weird things happening that no one can explain and most people don’t even seem to notice, and he declares that it’s the center of weirdness for the whole universe. Because no one believes him, he is determined to investigate and document every weird thing he finds. He makes best friends with a younger boy named Simon (Justin Shenkarow) and in each episode they investigate some new weird thing they’ve come across. There is some continuity that grows as the series goes on, especially in the development of secondary characters, but it is largely episodic, each episode stands relatively well on its own.

The very first episode sets the tone for the level of weirdness. In that episode, Marshall’s mother (Mary-Margaret Humes) buys some Tupperware-like food preservation containers that can keep food fresh for an extraordinary period of time. But as the episode goes on, Marshall and Simon learn that there are also person-sized containers that the saleswoman uses every night on her family and they haven’t aged in decades. It’s that kind of weirdness with a fun sense of humor that made the show what it was.

I particularly like the secondary cast member, known at first as “the boy with white hair” (Jason Marsden), a troublemaking but charismatic older boy living on his own. My greatest disappointment that the show didn’t run longer is that I was interested to see where his storyline would go, it seemed like they had some ideas in the works for him.

This family show is fun for all ages–some of the dialog and plotlines and delivery of linesare a bit simple at times, probably aimed for a younger audience in general, but the weird and novel premises like the one above make it surprising and fun for everyone.

In 1998, Fox ran a 15-episode spinoff series called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension which as the title suggests is in an alternate universe from the original series. There is a small and poorly-executed link with the original series in the form of a distorted video message from the original Marshall and Simon explaining the situation, but of course since the original actors for Marshall and Simon are too old at this point they just reused some footage from the original and distorted it enough so that they could record new voices over it. In this other dimension, instead of Marshall Teller, the lead is Mitchell Taylor (Bill Switzer), and instead of Simon Holmes the other kid is Stanley Hope (Daniel Clark). And Mitchell’s family and everyone is all sort of the same as Marshall’s but sort of not. I found this made the reboot very hard to get into because I kept comparing the original to this one and finding it lacking. I think the show would’ve had a better chance if it had either brought back the original cast and just had them older, or if they had just completely started from scratch with completely new characters, this sort of half-continuation made it hard to watch and we gave up after a couple episodes.

So, I would recommend the original 19-episode series for fans of the weird, but probably not the 15-episode reboot.

TV REVIEW: Stranger Things Season 2

written by David Steffen

Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast. Following the success of Season 1 on Netflix, 9-episode Season 2 launched in October 2017, and the third season is scheduled for July 2019. I reviewed Season 1 here.

Season 2 takes place more than a year after the events of season 1 and in the meantime things have apparently returned to (mostly) normal after Will Byer’s (Noah Schnapp) odd disappearance and reappearance–only a handful of people know the truth, that the local government agency disguised as the power company opened a hole to another dimension (the “Upside Down”) that let a vicious dimension-hopping monster (the “Demigorgon”) into our dimension, who abducted Will into its own dimension, and killed several others before it was killed itself with the telekinetic powers of a girl called Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) who was herself a result of experiments by the power company.

As seen in the prologue of the last episode of Season 1, Will is not free of the Upside Down yet. He is no longer physically there, but he has been having periodic episodes where he seems to move back and forth between our world and the Upside Down. His mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and their friend Police Chief John Hopper (David Harbour) have been taking Will to therapists employed by the power company to treat what they think is post-traumatic stress disorder, but the visions seem so real it’s hard to tell if they could have some reality to them. Will’s friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) want to help him however they can but they don’t know what’s wrong.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, their friend Eleven is still alive and living in secret with Chief Hopper, kept a secret to keep her safe from the Power Company.

The second season was very good, if not good as the high bar set by season 1 (second book, season, in a series is always the hardest because you don’t have the novelty and mystery of the first), there is much of the same mystery and action and emotion that made the first season great, but with a new adversary to face off against. I highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to watching season 3!

TV REVIEW: Stranger Things Season 1

written by David Steffen

Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast, whose 8-episode first season launched in 2016, and the third season is upcoming in July 2019.

The show begins in the year 1983, with four friends playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons at Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) house. When it’s time to go home, the other three boy’s Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) head for home on their bikes in the dark. The next day everyone realizes that Will is missing. About the same time, another kid, a girl with buzz-cut hair (Millie Bobby Brown) that no one has ever seen before, appears around town. The boys and others search for Will and as they investigate they find more and more signs that this is no ordinary disappearance, but someone seems determined to convince them that it is. Will’s mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), distraught over the disappearance of her son, tries to convince Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) of some of the hard-to-believe details of the case.

It’s hard to describe much more of the plot of the series without giving away major plot things that will be more fun to experience yourself. I only saw this recently on DVD as the new season approaches, and it was SO MUCH fun to binge watch. The writing and cast are great, the special effects are solid, I love to root for the kids, and against the villains, though I think the young girl is my favorite character.

It’s no wonder this show has been such a hit, I would highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to the new season.

DP FICTION #53A: “Little Empire of Lakelore” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

All the world followed pretty much the same guidelines for international trade and travel. That’s a very big gloss, but let’s say it was true. And it was, for the most part.

There was however, one exception. It was Little Empire of Lakelore. Little Empire of Lakelore had to be qualified by the word little, because simply calling it the Empire of Lakelore would be a misnomer. You see, there was nothing imperial about Lakelore itself, except for its air of superiority, which was manufactured much like the actual air itself. The air had to be manufactured and pumped out, and it wasn’t too costly to do so, given the marginal cost of opening a few more factories for that purpose.

Lakelore once was a small nation that sprung from a lake. It did not literally jump out of the lake. Rather, the resources that the lake provided helped stir a willing population into convening and interacting. Water, isn’t it a great facilitator of sociality? Like all liquids, especially alcohol? Now, if the lake was made of alcohol… wait I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Lakelore was once a beautiful paradise, as is every long lost lore of an industrial hellhole. Its pristine waters grew dark with sludge. Its birds and trees became coated with dust and fell into the abyss that once was the lake. And yet, with the industrial advances, industry also cleared some of this sludge and smog, so in the end, it was rather so-so dirty.

All the world around Lakelore was more enraptured by the possibilities that the digital upheaval had brought with it. Suddenly, media was everywhere. Everyone was posting pictures, commenting on this or other, taking videos of anything their eyes happen to fall on in the course of the day. Just as Lakelore itself had been saturated with pollution, so were the digital networks deluged with the clutter of everyday nonsensical detritus.

Lyon of Lakelore was against this. He was not Prince Lakelore for nothing, after all.

One morning, when reading a print version describing a select few of the digital hogwash that washed itself onto his breakfast plate, he folded that derivative of a newspaper (which though derived from content online, itself had a derivative digital version) and said to his father, “Father,” — (for he always addressed his Father as Father and not Dad, as royals do not make such a petty mistake) —”Father, I disapprove.”

“Of what son?” Lord Titanius of Lakelore bellowed. He was small of stature but his voice bellowed as if he was constructed mainly of bass organ pipes.

“Of all this,” he said, fanning his hand over the paper.

“What about it?” said Lord Titanius.

“It’s drivel. Insulting to be considered news,” said Lyon.

“Then what shall we have done? Shall we ban it?” said Lord Titanius.

“Yes, perhaps we shall,” said Lyon.

“That would be my decision not yours. Let me ponder over such a course of action,” said the lord.

He continued chewing his sausage, the juicy bits flying everywhere, and even hitting the wet nurse who was across the palace way.

Once he swallowed the sausage he said, “Okay, I thought about it, son. You made some good points. We will ban it.”

“Decreer,” Lord Titanius hollered out. “Decreer, decree this drivel banned.”

Decreer lowered his head, blew a horn to get everyone in the empire’s attention. Since the empire stretched for a good a few feet outside the palace grounds, one of the furthest farmers living in that empire who could only see into the royal courtyard and not into the rest of the palace, stretched his ears to hear.

“I decree this drivel banned,” said the Decreer.

That one farmer with his outstretched ears did not know what this meant, so he continued to move his hoe against a pretty pathetically barren lot.

“And look, Father,” continued Lyon, immediately after the decree.

“What is it?” said Lord Titanius now, a bit peeved. He had already accomplished so much in a day and was wondering why his son persisted on pestering him past his first sausage consumption.

“Why, Father, look at these photos,” said Lyon. He picked up the paper.

“Didn’t I just ban that?” said the lord.

“Yes, but bear with me here. Give me a one-minute pardon, as we will strike this off the record that I had mentioned this at all. But, look at these faces. These are random printings of people’s faces from around the world.”

“And what about them?” said the lord, careful not to look to carefully, as he did not want to be subject to the punishment of his own ban.

“Well, they’re looking straight at us,” said Lyon.

Lord Titanius managed a glance. “Yes, well, they are profile photos.”

And Lyon sneered. “But can you believe the insolence? They look straight at us as if they have no shame.”

Lord Titanius found himself nodding in agreement. “Yes, that is rather impudent, I must say.”

“Let’s have these banned, too,” said Lyon.

Two bannings, in one day? Isn’t that a bit too much work? thought Lord Titanius. He believed in work-life balance.

“Fine, fine,” the lord grumbled. He was not yet 3/4 into his second sausage, when the decree was made.

The not-so-faraway furtherest-away farmer put again his hoe yet again to strain to hear the message. When it was over, he continued his meaningless labor that would prove to provide little if any fruit. (But, he was producing vegetables, so it was okay.)

How will people then apply for visas? thought Lord Titanius. He said the same sentence aloud without further consideration. That’s how his brain worked, as an appendage attached directly to his mouth.

“Let’s have the photographer executed?” said Lyon.

“For what?” asked Lord Titanius.

“Why? He takes pictures of these folks facing us directly, like we’re some objects of their gaze,” said Lyon. “Obviously.”

“That’s insolence, son. Take back your ‘obviously’ statement,” said Lord Titanius.

“Let it be known that I take back the word ‘obviously,'” Lyon mumbled, quite used to this retraction.

“What will you have him do?” asked the lord.

“Why, be executed. Then we’ll have someone as photographer who will take photographs so the person in the photograph must look up at us,” said Lyon.

“Look up…?” said the lord.

“Yes, tilt their head up in reverence to us,” said Lyon.

“But such photographs won’t be accepted in any other region in the world,” said the lord. “How will our men travel?”

“They don’t travel anyway, Father,” said Lyon.

“Oh. Quite right,” said Lord Titanius.

“Yes, because if we even lose one man, our economy will collapse, just like our lungs ten years ago,” said Lyon.

“Well, good thing we built those factories, all in the palace,” said the lord.

“Yes, they were very compact. Just like those compact trash cans,” said Lyon. He pointed at one now, that was smoking. “Oh wait, that’s a factory, not a trash can,” Lyon said, correcting himself.

The lord used this distraction as an opportunity to not decree an execution of the photographer, because just as Lyon said, one man gone would spell disaster for their empire’s precarious economy. But, he did later send a messenger to tell the photographer to only take photos where the subject is looking up at the camera.

“But how about if they show their friends their photos? Then they are simply revering the person looking at their photo, which is only but a friend, and not royalty,” said the photographer.

“Insolence! Just do as I say!” said the messenger who had been running back and forth between the lord and photographer, passing the message to the photographer in short bursts of bellow, just as he was ordered.

It had not occurred to the lord, nor Lyon, that a different perspective and social standing could be achieved, simply having someone who is not them look at the photo. It never occurred that they were not the doer-of-the-looking-at-the-photos action.

The photographer sent the messenger to tell the lord that he needed a ladder for this purpose of taking photos from above since he was approximately the same height as the lord himself.

It was ironic, the photographer thought, because if the lord saw these people, most men would tower over him and so it would make more sense to have visitors, should there be any, take photos down-up, as in up their nostrils rather than from top-down of their foreheads. But, then again, logic itself had been decreed banned ten days ago, only to be reinstated two days ago for logical reasons, then banned again yesterday. The photographer cleared his head of these thoughts. He wasn’t sure if they were logical or not, since he now lacked reason to make such a judgment.

Then he realized all his photos were blurry anyway, because of the smog, though not nearly as opaque as a decade back. Those were the years of the black curtain, which was really indicating the air level, rather than political situation. The photographer used to literally lift the air, like a curtain, just a peek so he could point his camera and shoot at his subject.

The next appointment he had for photographing on his list was Lord Titanius himself, who did not like his previous photo. He was not a self-serving lord; it was only that the picture did not flatter him. Of course this kind of narcissism was banned, but who is to call it narcissistic?

When the photographer climbed up the ladder to be taller than the lord, that was mistake number one. Mistake number two was taking a photo of the lord reverently looking upward, so that he would always remain the subject to someone else who was above him who was looking at the photo. The third was that the photographer had been decreed executed, or so he thought he had overheard from halfway across the empire, so what was he doing taking pictures?

The photographer brought up these points to the lord, who was standing next to him, but they needed the intermediary of the messenger to repeat it back and forth between them because it would be unseemly if they talked directly. But then the photographer struck these comments off the record since he technically had no logic. “Let’s just drop this photo in the black abyss of the lake and call it even, okay, Lord Titanius?” said the photographer.

Secretly, they agreed on this. “This will be our little secret,” said the lord, staring at his photo. He was rather fond of this photo with his shiny forehead and long nose which though predominant was made altogether even more prominent — and it was mostly all he saw in his photo, since it was taken from above.

Instead he pocketed the photo, and let the photographer drop the negative into the black abyss, where it came out the other side positive. (And who keeps negatives anyway? Like people ever make prints from them! Or even know what it means nowadays!)

The Lord decided he would avoid Lyon for the rest of the day.

I should decree no more decrees, he thought, but then he was too tired for any further decrees.

Please just let me have some rest, he thought.

Too bad rest was banned three days ago, he remembered bitterly. He bit into his next sausage and washed it down with bitters.

Oh that’s why I’m so bitter, he thought, looking at his whiskey glass, remembering it was there. He twirled the glass until the ice clinked and took another drink.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Besides Diabolical Plots, her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge. She can be found on her website daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com and on Twitter @spireswriter.

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TV REVIEW: Chuck Season 4

written by David Steffen

Chuck was an action spy action/drama/comedy show, starring Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), who started as a down-on-his-luck geek working at the BuyMore fixing computers, when he ended up with a supercomputer with government secrets downloaded into his brain, as he has been used as an intelligence asset. And later in the series he got an upgrade to the software that also gave him various physical skills like martial arts. Season 4 aired from September 2010 to May 2011.

In this season, Chuck and his partners Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and Casey (Adam Baldwin) face a new adversary in Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton), a criminal mastermind who is still working with Chuck’s mother who he hasn’t seen since he was a child. Everything changes while remaining the same as the CIA takes over the Buy More and converts it into an official base, and builds out new areas that even Chuck and his partners don’t have access to.

While Season Three had started out shaky but got stronger, Season Four is reasonably solid throughout, new situations, expanding on Chuck’s physical abilities, and taking new steps in the relationship between Chuck and Sarah. The Buy More continues to offer the comic relief while also tying into the CIA plots, while also changing as the managerial structure changes and now Morgan (Joshua Gomez) is in on Chuck’s secret so manages to involve himself more and more. At the same, it’s hard not to miss the early seasons of the show where Chuck was clever but flighty and not physically adept. But the show has changed into something different, even if the first couple of season were special in their own way.

Well worth watching!

MOVIE REVIEW: Bumblebee

written by David Steffen

Bumblebee is a 2018 action science fiction film distributed by Paramount that’s a prequel to the Transformers film series that started with Transformers in 2007.

A war rages between two factions of intelligent shape-changing robots on the mechanical planet of Cybertron. The vicious Decepticons have scattered the remaining Autobots and driven them into hiding. Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), leader of the Autobots sends the Autobot B-127 (Dylan O’Brien) to find a place for a new base. B-127 lands on Earth in 1987 and although hunted there, manages to survive the landing but soon gets into a fight with a Decepticon that leaves him mute and wounded, and he barely manages to turn into a VW Beetle before powering down.

The Autobot is revived by 17-year-old girl Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld), who learned mechanic skills from her father before he passed away. Charlie’s family doesn’t have a lot of money and for Charlie that means lack of freedom because she doesn’t have a car, so when a junkyard dealer gives her the broken old Beetle for a birthday present, she sees it as a major opportunity.

Charlie befriends the Autobot and gives him the name “Bumblebee” and teaches him more about life on Earth, especially the importance of keeping his presence there secret. But when she revived Bumblebee, he emitted a transmission that has drawn a pair of Decepticons to investigate, and now Bumblebee is hunted by both the military and by the Decepticons. A neighborhood boy, Memo (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), stumbles upon the secret and Charlie tells him everything, and the three of them fight to keep Bumblebee and Earth safe from the Decepticons who would destroy them all.

Although I was not among those who hated the 2007 Transformers movie, I understand the criticisms of it and the sequels have only gotten worse from there (primarily because of tasteless unfunny jokes and military fetishism) to the point that I’d more or less given up on the movie franchise, at least until the creative minds behind it changed. Bumblebee redeems the series a great deal, making it much more of a character story than its predecessors and making me care about the characters again. The character of Bumblebee has always been a favorite character for me, one of the smaller Transformers and always an underdog and he was the best part of the 2007 movie. I loved that he got his own movie here and I loved the friendship that develops here between Bumblebee and Charlie, especially with Bumblebee as the bumbling newcomer to the planet who doesn’t know how any of this works. The acting is great across the board, and I really cared about Charlie and her grief about her father’s death and abouther quest to get a car to get some more freedom in her life.

I like Bumblebee’s new look, redesigned from the other movies, and they did a great job portraying his emotions through body language since for most of the movie he doesn’t have a voice and his face lacks the articulation to express emotion that other Transformers have.

This was a fun and great movie, a return to the fun and kid-friendly roots that the series had gotten away from. I highly recommend it, and I hope that there are more Transformers movie in the future that are more like this kind of film.

MOVIE REVIEW: Shazam!

written by David Steffen

Shazam! is a superhero action/comedy movie released in April 2019, distributed by Warner Bros Pictures, based on the DC Comics character first seen in 1939.

In 1974, a boy named Thaddeus Sivana (Ethan Pugiotto) is inexplicably transported to the home of a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who says he is looking for someone pure of heart to take over his duty to protect the world from the embodiment of the seven deadly sins who are imprisoned in statues in that place. The old man finds Thaddeus wanting and sends him back with nothing. For the next several decades, the wizard continues his search, finding no one who meets his criteria and an adult Thaddeus (Mark Strong) completes his lifelong quest to find the wizard again and free the seven deadly sins.

Meanwhile, in the modern day, 13 year old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a runaway foster kid on a quest to find his mother from whom he was separated when he was small. He has been bouncing from foster home to foster home for quite some time and has no intention of settling anywhere until he finds his mom.

He is assigned to a foster home run by Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans) with five other foster siblings, including Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) who is a superhero fanatic in a world that actually has superheroes (he has a bullet that hit Superman). Determined to stay aloof from his new foster family as he prepares to make his next break for it, Billy is magically transported (as Thaddeus was decades before) to the home of the wizard, who finds Billy worthy and grants him immense magical powers by saying the wizard’s name: “Shazam!”. He finds himself back in normalcy, except that the magical powers have changed him into a muscular grown-up body (Zachary Levi) in a permanent superhero costume with magical powers that he doesn’t know how to control yet. Driven to desperation by this turn of events, he returns to the foster home to recruit Freddy’s help, and Freddy is happy to contribute to this new superhero’s origin story.

I have generally preferred Marvel movies to DC movies and the biggest reason for that is that it seems like most recent DC movies (certainly with some exceptions) have focused entirely on the brooding and the dark, while Marvel movies seem to have figured out how to strike a balance between darkness and light. This movie, to me, shows me that DC can do that mix really well when they get the right talent behind the movies. There were quite a few darker moments, while the movie in general is pretty light some of the scenes with the villain and his crew of sins are likely to give some kids nightmares if they see it, much of the movie is about the growing friendship between Billy/Shazam and Freddy as they document and explore Shazam’s superpowers, and about the rest of the foster family. The movie does a good job with action, but what really makes it is the friendships and the family and the fun and love that comes from that.

Great movie, really enjoyed it, solid acting all around, great writing, there are a few parts that might be too scary for young kids. I highly recommend it.

DP FICTION #52B: “Bootleg Jesus” by Tonya Liburd

Out where rock outcroppings yearn to become mountains, there was a town cursed with no magic.

In this town, there was a family.

In this family, there was a girl.

She was nine, almost ten, Mara. Childhood hadn’t completely lifted its veil. She had an older brother, Ivan, who was fourteen, and whose voice was changing. Elsewhere, puberty would have signaled all sorts of preparations – acceptance into a special group home as much for his safety as for the general public – while his Unique Gift manifested. Watchfulness. Guidance. Training.

But not here.

Here the rocks, the soil, of the mountains had a special property that had been artificially duplicated thousands of years ago, and before that, the rock itself was transported. Here the rocks and soil prevented the manifestation of magic. There was no ‘curse’, really, of the dampening of magic – just something some said.

Everyone here in this town got along here by their wits, their brains, their strength – things were done from scratch if possible.

For what else had they to do here, this far away from civilization.

So, like everyone here around the age of puberty, Mara’s brother was special, yet not special, because of the rocks.

Mara would be special, yet not special like her older brother someday, like her mummy and daddy, like the rest of the adults. Like the people, families, who showed up sometimes on the outskirts, wanting to find a place for themselves here.

One day, Mara was playing in the house, and her father sent her to the yard. Some houses had garages, like hers, and some didn’t – like the oldest of the houses of the people who never had to arrive, who’d been here all along.

The garage wasn’t off-limits, and she was bored, so she went digging around inside.

One after another, she found an item, an item of before, before her family arrived, before she was born, and she discarded them.

In the back of all the clutter in the garage, there stood a bust of a Jesus. Unlike most busts and portraits of Jesus in the Western Hemisphere, this Jesus had brown skin and black features. It was supposed to give advice when priests and counsellors weren’t to be had. “They make them all blonde and blue eyed,” she remembered her mother saying disparagingly. “Like that’s how he was in that part of the world. As if he’d blend into the Egypt that was, if he was there. Hah!” And that would be the end of any religious discussion in the house. This Jesus was manufactured several decades ago as an answer to all the lilly-whiteness in the world, calling them Bootleg Jesuses, and one was bought by an ancestor so the family would remember they had a black ancestor as they headed into whiteness, white-acting, white-passing.

This Jesus had a heart on his chest that he presented to the world with rays of light—or in this case, neon rays—like in numerous postcards. His hair was dreadlocked. All of this was inside a metal box, made to be placed on a table, with no plug where it could be plugged in. So; what made it run?

Oh, she knew. It would run in any other place in the world, where magic ran free…

Where there existed people with Unique Gifts so powerful that they were considered gods…

She picked it up, and put in on a small round picnic table she had to unfold.

She smiled at it.

“Red and yellow, black and white,” she began to sing in her young voice, “we are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world…”

It was the only religious thing that she knew, because her mother insisted that if anyone told her that her Jesus was wrong, she was to answer by reminding them of that song.

“Jesus, do you love me?” Mara giggled.

She heard it sputter to life; it lit up. The dreadlocked head of the Jesus bowed up and down, up and down. Then stopped, the light illuminating its white robed chest going out.

Mara gasped, her mouth hanging open. Then she put her hands to her mouth and squealed.

“Mummy, Daddy, Ivan, Jesus bowed to me!”

“That’s nice, dear,” her mother said, and that was the end of that. But little Mara would never forget. The Bootleg Jesus became her favourite thing in the house, in all the world.

If one looked around, or even past the hills, there was one constant: goats. They climbed where man feared; they frolicked where man could tame them. So man ate them.

They made a soup out of them called “goat water”.

Mara liked to be outside, and so did her older brother Ivan and their friend Sydney, who visited them often, and one day they all had goat water outside, and they enjoyed it, and it became a thing for them. Goat water, outside. At the borders of the town. Where the wild goats were.

And Mara always brought the Bootleg Jesus with her. Everyone humoured her at first. Then, as the years passed, it became more of a sentimental habit. “Mummy and Daddy don’t have to come with us, Bootleg Jesus will watch over us as we eat and play… haha…”

Everyone knew it wouldn’t work, right?

Years.

They remove the veil childhood had over knowing how the world really runs.

Mara knew pain, now. She felt her brother’s.

Mara knew fear and hopelessness. She felt Sydney’s.

Mara knew dreams of being one with the earth, of feeling its ponderous power in her veins, of letting the power out through her to be free.

She and her brother ate goat water near the outskirts of the town. Sydney was absent.

Again.

Ivan’s knuckles were white as he sipped spoonful by spoonful, his eyes dark and fathomless, partially hidden by his dark hair.

Mara looked at him while she ate and winced. She was twelve now. She opened her mouth to speak.

“Ivan…”

“Don’t.”

She sighed, wincing.

They both knew why Sydney wasn’t here with them; she was apprenticed with Mr. Stewart, who demanded long and hard hours. Meeting together was a “childish thing”, a thing of the past. She had better things to do.

But that wasn’t true, was it? They both knew what was really going on behind closed doors, in Mr. Stewart’s house, to Sydney. She’d told Ivan, and then Mara; and Mr. Stewart was a friend of Sydney’s family, and they went back a long way. No one would believe her if she said anything, Sydney knew, what with her mother and her father and their fights.

The next time they managed to meet to have goat water Mara stared at the Bootleg Jesus, a childhood comfort, accusingly.

“Weren’t you supposed to protect us?” she squeaked, not wanting even the wind to hear, so embarrassed was she to still hold onto this faint hope.

She slapped it.

Light and gears sputtered to life, and the Bootleg Jesus’s head went down and up.

Mara sprang onto her bare feet. A strong breeze blew up, and she held her long black hair down with one hand, her brown skirt back with another.

Ivan and Sydney looked her way, expressions curious.

She kicked it.

Again light and gears sputtered to life, and the Bootleg Jesus’s head went down and up.

“WHAT?” Ivan said, springing to his feet as well.

Mara fell to her knees before it, taking it in her arms, then setting it down carefully.

“J… Jesus, do you love me?” she asked it, her voice tremulous, her mind back in the cluttered, unused garage, when she still had her naïveté and her heart was untarnished by life’s darker corners. Where she’d thought about godhood.

The bootleg Jesus lit to life again, bowing its head. A tinny voice. “Yes, Mara.”

Ivan approached. “So what’s inside it? What’s the key thing that makes it run?”

“…You wanna open it up down to its nuts n’ bolts and destroy it to find out? Because I don’t see anyone here who knows how to take it apart and put it back together,” Sydney said.

And all the way home, Mara smiled a gentle, private smile, like she and the Bootleg Jesus that she held in her arms, all the way home, shared something special.

“Mara!” her brother called loudly.

She was in the yard, picking out some garlic for this evening’s meal of goat water.

“It’s not working,” he yelled. The Bootleg Jesus.

She got off her knees. “Let me try.”

In the garage, sitting at a table, she said gently, smiling, “Jesus, are you there?”

It came to life, white robe going bright, neon rays from the heart glowing, the head bobbing down and back up. “Yes,” it said in that tinny voice. Then the lights went out, and it stopped moving.

Ivan slapped the table in frustration. “See, it only likes you.”

Mara’s smile went wider. “Maybe because I’ve always had faith.” She turned to leave.

“Wait!”

Mara turned back.

“Ask it for me, then.”

“Ask it what?”

“Will Sydney and I ever get married? Will we get Mr. Stewart to stop?”

“Jesus…”

It lit up, head bowing. “Yes… and no.” It went dark.

Ivan bolted out of his seat and marched out of the garage, punching the door to the house as he passed.

The house rumbled slightly.

“What was that? Earthquake?” She heard her mother wonder out aloud.

“In this area?” she heard her father say.

Mara was the only person who went to the outskirts of the town with the Bootleg Jesus that day.

And the next.

Ivan came outside with Mara this time.

Ivan paced back and forth through the lush grass around the bust of the Bootleg Jesus. “So you work, huh? Huh! Well, then tell me this!” he pounced before the bust, snakelike, hissing.

His bottomless brown eyes shone like brown diamonds with the tears in them. “Then tell me what to do about Sydney. She hurts. I hurt. But she hurts more. People hurt her. I want her there when I tell my parents about us, I want her to be able to come out here with me whenever she and I want – what to DO ABOUT THAT?”

The bust of Jesus sputtered with light from within, the head bowed back and forth and a mechanical, tinny voice spoke. “Lose the battle. Win the war.” The light from within sputtered out; it went still.

Mara smiled. Ivan stayed, where he crouched, thunderstruck, fingers gripping green blades of grass, before the Bootleg Jesus.

The next day Mara was out, alone again.

Her bowl of goat water lay in the grass, the sun starting to descend. She’d been out here for hours, crying.

“Jesus…”

The Bootleg Jesus lit up.

“What… can I do about Ivan and Sydney? I mean, can I make Mr.Stewart stop?”

“Yes.”

“…How?”

“Force.”

“What do you mean?

The Bootleg Jesus’s dreadlocked head bobbed up and down, the whites of its eyes electric-white. “Do what your heart desires.”

Mara gasped. Hastily, she wiped tears from her eyes. “Will he die?”

“Yes.”

“Will I die?”

“No.”

“Is it worth it?”

“…yes.”

Do what your heart desires… crumble and destruction… death and victory…

Grabbing onto her dark hair from both sides, Mara raised her head and screamed to the sky. The bowl flew away. The ground beneath her rumbled, a nearby tree shuddering its green leaves.

Mara walked up the steps to Mr. Stewart’s porch—were those cracking sounds coming from underfoot?—and banged open the flydoor and inside door to Mr. Stewart’s house, the flydoor rattling on its hinges.

She saw Mr. Stewart inside. In a pair of pants and undershirt. He watched her approach.

He wasn’t one to mince words. “What do you want.”

She walked right up to his face. “Leave. Her. Alone.”

Silence.

He scowled.

Then Mr. Stewart roughly took her arm. And that was it.

Then it seemed like Mr. Stewart wasn’t trying to grab her, he was trying to let go. He started to shake. Then he began to convulse. His eyes rolled back ’til you could see the whites; he fell onto a couch seat.

Mr. Stewart had set something in motion inside Mara, and it wasn’t going to stop now.

She had been staring at Mr. Stewart all this time, and she had been hyperventilating. She couldn’t… stop.

Behind the house, she heard a teeth-rending crack. Mr. Stewart’s house seemed to have picked up on his shaking; she looked about wildly.

Mara ran to the door. As her foot stepped in the doorway, a crack split the floor under her feet in half. She jumped down the stairs, onto the ground. The split went into the house, and other cracks branched away from it, taking over the whole house. Windows splintered. The upper floor groaned like it needed to eat, and started caving in alarmingly, warping the roof. Neighbours were coming out of their houses, pointing, shouting and a couple were screaming.

She looked up, past the whole house, to the mountain face that was behind it. And saw the crack in the rock above. Rocks of various sizes were breaking free and pounding down on the house’s roof. She held her breath. The crumbling seemed to stop. Then she realized what it was that was making this all happen.

Her.

She let her breath out in a scream, a scream to release all holding back, all fear, to let the wild things out – or the wild things in. The cracking of the mountain behind the house thunderclapped the air, and huge rocks began to fall. The house rumbled down to its foundation, crushed from above.

People scattered, really screaming for their lives now. But nothing hit them. Nothing hit Mara, either.

Mara simply stared. All the pressures of growing older—and never being old enough for your autonomy—and the ways adults around her had abused that notion… all of it inside her. Calm.

She could smell the goat water being made by her mother from the front gate. She eyed a green onion in the garden as she passed and it unrooted itself, trailing her. Her mother froze as she ascended the back steps into the kitchen.

She’d heard, then. Seen. She knew.

The spoon her mother was stirring the pot with lifted from her hand and went into Mara’s. “Let me.”

Lips trembling, her mother stepped back.

Mara put the spoon down and took hold of the green onions still hanging in the air, turning the tap on to wash them. When that was done, she took up a knife—which caused her mother some consternation—and started chopping them, then put them in the pot to cook.

“You always cooked it for me… so many times… I know it by heart now.”

“…Mara…” her mother said, voice trembling.

“Yes?” Mara turned, fingering the knife.

Her mother swallowed.

Mara noticed her mother eyeing the knife and put it down gently. She smiled slowly.

Her father walked carefully up behind her mother, placing his hands upon her shoulders. “You’re… such a big girl now…” he attempted.

“Not so big,” Mara said. “Ivan and Sydney are older.”

“Yes, yes, that’s right,” her mother said, swallowing nervously again.

Her mother stood tall and lifted her chin, lips trembling. “We’ve never hurt you,” she said, trying to be strident.

“No… no you never did. Not you. Not Daddy.”

“You know you can always talk to us,” he said, a strained smile on his features.

“Not about everything, though,” Mara said.

Ivan and Sydney burst upon the scene.

“Mara!”

Mara’s head snapped to see her brother and Sydney behind her, coming up the stairs. The knife lifted from the counter to point at her parents in the blink of an eye. The house rumbled slightly. The air thrummed.

“C’mon, now, Mara,” Ivan said, a cautious laugh, “put the knife down.”

Mara sighed. The knife went back to its place on the counter. The air went still.

“You ain’t gonna hurt anybody now,” Ivan said.

Mara nudged her face towards her parents. “They think I might.”

“No they don’t,” Ivan said, his voice getting louder. “They don’t think you’ll hurt them. Right?”

They nodded.

“Ivan,” Mara said, “Why don’t you tell mom and dad what you wanted to say for so long now?”

Ivan’s lip trembled.

“Well?”

His gaze went to the white floor. “Not like this,” he mumbled.

“Now’s a good time as any.”

Ivan stepped forward, holding Sydney’s hand. He took in a deep breath. “Mom, Dad, Sydney and I love each other. I’d love to marry her someday and I hope that we can have your blessing… now that Mr. Stewart can’t hurt her no more.”

“You have our blessing,” Mara’s father said.

They stood in silence. Mara sighed, turning to look out the kitchen window.

“Well, now what, Mara?” Ivan said. “You have all the cards.”

“No I don’t,” she said softly. She turned back to the kitchen. “I can’t stay here anymore.”

“Why not?” Ivan retorted.

“Here’s a place where no magic can be, yet here I am, manifesting. There’s people out there who know what I can do. They’ll know about me soon enough. There’s places for people like me. You don’t see people like me in public for long.”

“Mara…” her brother started.

“You know it, and I know it,” Mara said. “I have to go.”

“What… what can we do for you?” her father said. Her mother looked near tears.

“You can give me a bowl of that goat water, to go,” she said. “It was always what kept the three of us together.”

“Anything else?”

“The Bootleg Jesus,” she said, a warm smile finally coming to her face.

“I can give you the backpack with the sleeping bag in it,” her father said. “Not like we needed to camp out here with the stars, the open sky…” he caught himself, and coughed.

“I’ll get it,” Ivan said, ducking out of the room.

Mara’s mother began weeping silently, then stepped forward to prepare the soup for her.

“I don’t want you to go,” Sydney said, stepping forward to embrace Mara. She shed tears on Mara’s shoulder for some minutes, before breaking away, wiping at her nose.

“Here, take my poncho,” Ivan said, coming back, dropping the items on the floor.

She didn’t hug her parents as she took the soup and outfitted herself, although her mother looked like she was finally unafraid enough and wanted to do it for all the world. She did hug her brother though.

“Where’s the… oh.” Sydney said as the Bootleg Jesus floated into view.

Mara walked out the door, and down the steps. The sun was maybe a couple of hours from setting, but still hung low enough to set an orange glow across the sky.

The front gate opened of its own accord, and Mara stepped out.

This was all she knew for her entire life. And, just like that, she was unfit to stay here. She’d always been a keen reader, and what technology they had—like television—she knew that it took a massive Gift to do what she’d done today.

The Gift of those considered gods. Townships developed around them. People worshipped them. But they were hard to find, and they might show up in the public consciousness for a while, but just like that, their presence winked out and disappeared.

But she was all of twelve. And yet unafraid.

She looked back to her home. All that stood between her and it was the Bootleg Jesus, bobbing in the air. And it was fitting, in more ways than one.

It started with you, she thought, looking at it, lit up and ready for questions.

Would she ever get the time to control her Gift? Would she be allowed to? How far did her Gift go? Would she ever find out?

She looked forward, to the sky, then to the ground. They were all that stood between her now.

A god.

Mara took one step away from home, and then another.

Author’s Note: If I recall correctly, it was the simplest of things – and this has happened before, for example, with the Ace Of Knives: a name of a player while I was gaming. They had the name Bootleg Jesus and it was a title and an idea generator. What is a Bootleg Jesus? etc.

Tonya Liburd shares a birthday with Simeon Daniel and Ray Bradbury, which may tell you a little something about her. She is a 2017 and 2018 Rhysling nominee, and has been longlisted in the 2015 Carter V. Cooper(Vanderbilt)/Exile Short Fiction Competition. Her fiction is used in Nisi Shawl’s workshops as an example of ‘code switching’, and in Tananarive Due’s course at UCLA, which has featured Jordan Peele as a guest lecturer. She is also the Senior Editor of Abyss & Apex magazine. You can find her blogging at http://Spiderlilly.com, on Twitter at @somesillywowzer, or on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/TonyaLiburd

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TV REVIEW: Chuck Season 3

written by David Steffen

Season 2 ended with a major change as Chuck ended up downloading a brand new version of the Intersect computer into his brain which not only lets him suddenly remember government secrets at convenient times, but gives him a wide range of physical skills, especially martial arts. No longer is Chuck just “the asset”, forever told to wait in the car and stay out of trouble. Now he has the combat skills (without actually having earned them through training) to be able to take danger head on. It had also ended with Chuck, Casey (Adam Baldwin), and Morgan (Joshua Gomez) all quitting the BuyMore, with Morgan moving to Hawaii with Anna.

Season 3 begins with much of that being rolled back–Chuck has taken some time off to try to become a full-time spy, even turning down an offer from Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) to quit and run away, but it has not worked out well, so he ends up returning to work for the BuyMore. Morgan’s dream to become a chef in Hawaii does not go well and Anna leaves him. Team Bartowski ends up reuniting, albeit with a much more awkward mood because some drama happened between them that you don’t know about yet. So, Season 2 felt like it was written as a series finale, and meant to give some sense of closure by ending an era in various ways, but when the writers began writing Season 3 realized they didn’t know how to write Chuck without the BuyMore, without Morgan, etc. So the first several episodes the season were very awkward and felt off, I think because they were trying to put everything back together without it seeming ridiculous. And especially with the relationship between Chuck and Sarah being kindof tense and bitter, I was starting to consider giving up on it, but it finally turned around became good again.

Despite the “putting everything back together again” feel, the season 2 finale did have a big permanent change in that Chuck does still have the upgraded intersection that lets him be an action hero. This changes the dynamic of the show quite a bit because he’s no longer the helpless one, and also that he has to learn to control his emotions for this part of the Intersect to work properly. Which, I have mixed feelings about, because part of the appeal of the show was that the male lead is not macho, is not aggressive, is prone to talking about his feelings at inopportune times during the middle of missions. After the first few episodes I think they made it work, and it felt like a solid show again, albeit a quite different show, it still had the parallel BuyMore hijinks, still had the comedy with the action, still had the relationship stuff between Chuck and Sarah.

And while the season is slow to start, some of the reveals and happenings later in the season are the best in the series yet. So, I’d still highly recommend watching, just trying to push through the first 3 or 4 episodes if it’s seeming dull.