A Girl and Her Fed

It’s that time again! 20 spots available, first in, first out. Please allow 2-6 weeks for delivery. Instructions are in the image, but please email me if you would like additional clarification.

It’s Star Wars season again! I’m a huge fan of Ahsoka Tano. She’s got a lovely character arc in Clone Wars, and seeing her in Rebels? Dang. Every so often I poke around the space between these two series and see what she was like.

(yes, I know there’s an Ahsoka Tano YA novel. Let me have my version. She kills more people.)

She had thought she was doing pretty well for herself, all things considered, until the man at the station had held out his hand to help her down from the shuttle. He was a perfectly lovely Kiffarian, with blue tattoos cresting across his shoulders and peeking out at her from beneath his dark hair. She had pressed her hand into his and returned his smile, and as they parted? Those old words, that old familiar litany? It sprung from her tongue as if it had been lying in wait.

The Kiffarian gave her a weak smile as dropped her hand and backed away, his eyes suddenly anywhere and everywhere else. It was a familiar reaction; she had done the same herself when she had run up against the devout. It didn’t matter how they were devout, no. The galaxy had a thousand different religions, and all they had in common was compliance. But her faith had been different, hadn’t it? Her faith had been strong enough to move mountains, crush starships—

This is a short story I did for Geeky Giving, a charity working to promote research in “Parkinson’s, ALS, traumatic brain injuries, brain tumors, Alzheimer’s and more.” They were kind enough to let me do an AGAHF short story for the charity anthology, so I did Jenny and Shawn: Jenny because she’s the researcher, Shawn because he’s been hurt. The story’s copyright has reverted to me, so I’m posting it here for everyone.

The man on the other side of the bed was sweet and kind and completely insane.

She didn’t know how to feel about that. This uncertainty bothered her more than the act of sleeping with a crazed man. Five years ago, she would have been mortified with herself, with the idea of intimacy with someone such as Shawn. Even if he wasn’t her patient. Even if he was more than a friend. Today, he was just…Shawn.

She didn’t let herself think about it—she’d find fear down there, and maybe something else, something that could chase the fear away but leave them both forever changed.

Instead, she stared at the ceiling and pretended she couldn’t hear her machines call to her.

Shawn’s mental voice was strong, and ran as crisp as a winter river through her mind. “Go,” he said.

“I thought you were asleep,” she whispered aloud.

“You’re too noisy. You should go. Go be with them.”

She rolled over to face him. He had cut his hair himself last week and had done an awkward job of it. Someone had given him a buzz cut to tidy him up, but aggressive neurosurgery and skull-shorn hair paired poorly. She traced his scars with her fingertips, feeling the bumps and twists of the ridges of his scar tissue, and beneath that, his drowsy tangle of emotions.

“They miss you,” he said in her mind. He reached out and traced her own scars, hidden beneath her short brown hair. “I’ll miss you, too, but I want to sleep.”

“All right.” She kissed him on his shoulder, and felt him drop out of her senses as his implant went into passive mode. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Take your time,” he muttered into his pillow, his voice cut down to nothing from lack of use. “I remember having more energy after sex.”

“You remember sex when you were twenty,” she said. Their clothes were a single knot on the floor; she yanked on loose ends until she had reclaimed her pants. “We’re getting old.”

Gentle snoring.

The other members of the collective slept around them, rooms and buildings and miles away. She felt them around her, off-line but still present in the back of her head, four hundred souls who shared their thoughts with her during the day but kept their dreams to themselves.

She opened the door to the crash room and stepped into her lab. It was a medical suite in name only, stuck beneath a crumbling mansion in what once had been a wine cellar. Federal funding only went so far: the government could front the costs for the cutting-edge technology that had gone into their heads, but resources for infrastructure and development? Please.

She didn’t mind. She had built her own diagnostic laboratory by scavenging equipment from storage, or buying what she couldn’t borrow. The room served double-duty as an emergency ward, but the worst injuries she saw tended to be exercise-induced, and not too many of those.

It left her plenty of time for her own projects.

Her computers whirred to life around her. There was no need for clunky access codes; they recognized her and welcomed her home.

“HELLO, JENNY.”

Theirs was a woman’s voice, false and mechanical. Most days, she told herself that they couldn’t feel, that she was projecting her own eagerness to get back to work on her machines.

On nights like this, when the rest of the collective was sleeping and she was nearly alone in her own head, Jenny wasn’t so sure.

“Hello, ladies,” she said. “Ready to play?”

A human brain sprung up around her in reply.

It was lovingly rendered in greens, and enlarged ten times life-size for clarity; if she looked closely, she could see the bright flashes of synapses.

(Which was something of a comfort—it was her own brain, scanned and digitized, and independent confirmation that your own brain is active is always welcome.)

The implant rested against her parietal lobe, a small metallic sliver smaller than the head of a nail. At this resolution, she could make out the microscopic filaments connected to it; these ran throughout her brain, the majority twining into her brain stem. Heat regulation had been front and center on the developers’ own minds; without it, the cyborgs would have cooked themselves within their own skulls.

She ran her fingers through the hologram. The silvery filaments covered her holographic brain like cobwebs, shining brightly against the green.

“Ladies, overlay image JED-1 over master.”

A second brain appeared, the same general size and shape as the first but made from blues instead of greens. The opacity of the green brain diminished as the blue brain was positioned over it.

“File: Jenny Davis, late night ramblings,” she said aloud. Talking helped. Speaking directly to her computers through her implant was good for clinical analysis, but it was late, and she was tired, and it was time to purge her thoughts so she could, maybe, get some sleep.

“RECORDING.”

“Thank you, ladies. Subfile: Background, general.” She began to pace around and through the hologram, checking for oddities. The blue brain was hers, too—had been hers, once, nearly seven years and an entire lifetime ago. Before the surgery, and the collective, and the alien oddness of hiveminds had all had their way with it. “Image JED-1, brain of a healthy 22-year-old Caucasian female. Ladies, highlight parietal lobe.”

A section of the hologram began to glow.

“Side by side, magnify, compare and contrast.”

The hologram divided itself again, blue and green enlarging to fill the room. She wandered through the colors, talking to her machines as she went, tracing lines and shapes and twisting flashes of—

“What’s this?”

Jenny swore aloud as her concentration shattered. Shawn flinched away from her sudden frustration and dropped to his knees.

“Oh, honey!” She knelt beside him and reached out through the link. His consciousness scurried away from hers, looking for an escape but unable to find it. “I didn’t know you were there. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her bare hands against his bare shoulders: she pushed positive emotions—calm, peace, belonging—across the bridge of their skin until he believed it.

He uncurled, looking up at her like a lost lamb.

“I thought you were asleep,” she explained. “You scared me.”

Shawn laughed at that.

She managed to coax him off of the ground, one arm around him to keep him steady. “Here,” she said aloud. “Look. Want to see something amazing?

“This is me,” she continued, pointing to the blue hologram. “You know those tests you hate so much?”

“The brain scans?” He shuddered, and the sensation of being trapped in a tight white chamber crushed against her. Of lying as still as death, of knowing the person on the other end of the monitor was looking for what was wrong about what the core of you…

“Easy,” she whispered. “Please.”

His fear let her go, slowly. It had managed to find the cracks in her own psyche and had set itself deep—What if these brain implants stimulate tumorigenesis? Or neurodegeneration, or arteriovenous malformation, or… An almost endless list of what could go wrong…

But there was the green hologram, brand-new and still perfect, and she told herself to put those fears aside.

“Well…” she began, “you remember during orientation, when we all had full medical diagnostics done? This is a composite image from my first MRI and CT scans.”

He stretched out a hand; it passed through the hologram, layering him in a blue the color of a summer sky.

“And this is me, too,” she said, pulling the green parietal lobe towards them. “From last week. Notice the differences?”

“This,” he said, as he pointed to the bright sliver of light on the green lobe. “Obviously.”

“What else?”

He grinned at her. A sense of pleasure at the challenge came back to her over their link, and she turned away on the pretense of gathering up some fallen papers. Too easy to forget that Shawn had once been in the FBI, that he had once been a brilliant up-and-coming forensic artist.

That experimenting with the human mind could have consequences.

Shawn didn’t seem to notice. He moved between the holograms, sorting and poking. His own digital renders began to appear as he worked; the holograms he created were more stylized than her own, freehand sketches hanging in the air beside her still images.

“Here,” he said, once done.

She wrapped her arms around him and stood on her toes so she could rest her chin on his shoulder. His sketches were playful, with arcs of white light moving across the lobes in quick streams. In some places, they caught what she hadn’t: Shawn’s sketches moved across regions that seemed no different than the others, with—

Jenny squinted, hard. “Are those bunnies?”

She stepped away from Shawn and moved into the holograms. A tiny cartoon rabbit popped out of a fold in her green parietal lobe and scampered across her brain. That first rabbit was followed by a second, then a third…more rabbits, an infinite number of rabbits, each scurrying with purpose towards different destinations.

Not just arcs of light, then.

“There are cheetahs somewhere,” he said. “And horses, too. They don’t show up as often. I used rabbits to show the most frequent movement.”

Sure enough, a streak of light emerged across the green expanse before her. A herd of wild mustangs, manes and tails flowing together as they ran, moved in a single stream.

“Damn,” she said softly. “Baby, this is really beautiful.”

She felt his cheeks flush. “It’s just a clip from a YouTube video,” he replied. “I didn’t have time to render each horse.”

“But you drew the bunnies?”

“One of them. The rest are a copy-paste job.”

“These are neural networks,” she said, reaching out to touch the mustangs with her mind. They blurred beneath her thoughts: she hastily moved her mind away, scared she had damaged them. The herd reformed and continued its journey. “Your bunnies are action potentials. The horses—” Out of the corner of her eye, a tiny feline body bunched and shot across the hologram at an incredible speed. “—and the cheetahs are electrochemical neurotransmissions.”

He laughed aloud, a wild, coughing sound. “I can’t remember freshman biology,” he said. “All I know is that the green brain has more wildlife than the blue one. A lot more wildlife.”

“That’s because the implant’s been changing us.”

White light in her head, so bright and sudden it took her a moment to realize her words had stunned him. Shawn stood, motionless, before he turned and fled to the comfortable darkness of the crash room.

“Oh, no, no, Shawn honey…” Jenny hurried after him. If he managed to make it under the bed, he’d be there for the rest of the week. She reached him in time to lay both hands flat on his back and pushed—calm, belonging, peace—across their joined skin.

He let her pull him away from the bed, but no further. They huddled on the floor in a sad, uncomfortable pile, and she felt a spot on the knee of her jeans grow damp.

Shawn was crying.

“There’s always some good that comes with change,” she said gently.

He looked up at her, eyes wide and desperate, before curling in on himself again.

“You didn’t break. You got a little bent, but… Here,” she said. “Come back to the lab. I want to show you something.”

Bad days turned him mulish, but this was a good day: she was able to coax him off the floor and as far as the doorway. They stood in the void between rooms, cold tile beneath their toes and warm carpet under their heels, as the holograms spun before them.

Jenny pointed. “You said you noticed how there was more wildlife in the green brain?”

“…yes…”

“That’s because our brains—this part of our brains, anyhow—is more active than it was before we got the implant. No, not just active—it’s thriving! Want to guess why?”

His attention was fixed on the holograms, but the easy scorn of an eyeroll passed between them.

“Humor me,” she said. “I’m going to have to explain this to people who aren’t in the collective at some point. Help me find the right words for this.”

“Because we’re using our brains in new ways,” Shawn replied, his mood pulling itself a little higher. “Talking via a link, or this—” he said, and pushed sensations at her.

Unseen fur, coarse but soft, surrounded her hands. Beneath that was the heat from a living body. With these came the memory of a beloved family dog, long dead but not forgotten.

“Exactly,” she said, blinking back her own tears at the loss of a pet she had never met. “We’re the first humans to have been augmented in this way. It’s causing us to think and act differently. We’ve got these new skills that we’re just beginning to put to use. We’re barely seven years into this experiment, and there’s already observable growth in the parietal lobe. Can you imagine what we’ll be able to do after—”

“Wait, Jenny, wait. Brains grow? Don’t we… I thought we started shedding brain mass once we turned eighteen.”

“That’s Hollywood science,” she said. “Outdated and chock full of errors, but it still fits the script. The reality is…”

—rabbits, horses, and giant cats, speeding over an expanse of green in endless knots of light—

“The reality is, we’re miracles,” she said to him. “Human beings weren’t meant to be networked together. We shouldn’t have the ability to survive as part of a collective, but we do. We change—we grow. We’ve barely begun to understand how we can do any of this, but the more we learn, the more we can use that to grow.”

Shawn broke away from her and stepped into the lab. Greens and blues moved around him, coloring him in a digital sea. He was still naked; the scars across his wrists were nearly as white as the glowing animals.

“What about me?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m not…” Shawn’s hands clenched uselessly. “I’m not who I used to be. Does this mean I can go back to how I was, or will I…”

He opened his hands and let his mind pour into hers.

Memories. All of them, from the moment that his own mind broke under the weight of a new reality to living in the fear of staying as he was, unable to change, unable to grow, a roller coaster of emotions that threatened to tip off of the rails—

Too much: she cried out. Shawn lost focus: the memories faded.

Her world rebuilt itself in pieces. The floor came first: she had fallen to her knees. She concentrated on the patterns in the tile until she found the walls. Where there was a floor and walls, there was a ceiling…

She stood.

Shawn hadn’t noticed. “Is this me?” he asked. “This?! From now on?”

She closed her eyes and thought about impossible conversations. Then: “Ladies?”

The holograms stopped spinning.

“Replace current images with new holographic display. Show SEF-1 and SEF-46, parietal lobes only. Side-by-side comparisons.”

Blues and greens vanished; blues and greens returned. To the untrained eye, nothing had changed; the wildlife was gone, but the silvery rectangle was still there on the green brain, and the same flashes of light chased itself in purposeful patterns across both.

“Here,” she said, as she joined Shawn in the center of the room. “This is you. Your earliest scans are blue, and the most recent scans are green.”

He stared up at the twisting holograms. She felt his attention dart across the details, focusing like a laser on anything distinctive or different…

“They look just like yours,” he finally admitted.

“That’s the problem, baby.” Jenny pulled him close. “If you had typical neurological damage, it’d show up on the scans. Whatever happened to you, it’s…harder to find.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Mental illness can be caused by emotional, psychological, or physiological events, or a combination of these. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the causes of known disorders. Since your condition is almost unique, we’re flying blind.”

Sorrow. Loss. Anger—You’re a doctor! Why can’t you fix what’s wrong with me?!—and fear.

So much fear.

“We’ll get there,” she promised, as she pushed her own fear down below where she could feel it. “You’re responding well to medication and therapy. It’ll take time, and trial-and-error, and…and more tests, I’m sorry. None of this is easy, but we’ll make it work.

“You might never get back to who you used to be,” she admitted, as his heart hammered in her head. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t get to where you want to be, now.”

“I can do more tests,” he said quietly, even as the white chamber rose up again in his mind.

cross-posted from kbspangler.com

Sometimes a story gets into your head and refuses to leave.

I can usually perform a minor exorcism in the form of a short story. I’ve got a bunch of these furious little demons sitting on my desktop, or making the submission rounds to genre magazines. Stoneskin was supposed to be one of these short stories, a one-and-done. It’s…uh.

Well. Life happened. Stoneskin comes out this week.

Three thousand years from now, galactic transportation relies on the sentient energy field known as the Deep. Its immortal human emissaries call themselves Witches, and they control how the Deep is used. When eight-year-old Tembi Moon wakes on an unfamiliar world, she knows the Deep has to be involved, but to leave her home planet and become a Witch herself? No, that life isn’t for her.

Or so she thought.

At sixteen, Tembi takes her rightful place with the other Witches. They believe the Deep is a tool; Tembi knows it’s a person with its own hopes and dreams, and a wicked sense of humor! With a war coming that could cost the lives of millions, Tembi has to find a way to convince the Witches that the Deep wants them to join the fight.

Because something worse than war is coming, and the Deep needs its Witches to be ready.

STONESKIN is a prequel to the DEEP WITCH TRILOGY, coming soon.

I like Tembi Moon a lot. She’s not my usual kind of broken character. It’s nice to spend time in the head of someone who–with one very violent exception!–is a generally healthy person.

In contrast to Tembi, the universe itself is pretty freakin’ broken. The majority of the hundreds of human-occupied planets are thoroughly encased in the norms of what they think of as “Earth” culture; many of the residents resent this, as well as the institutions responsible for preserving it. In Stoneskin, Tembi’s a little too young to fully appreciate what’s happening, and she’s got a few problems of her own to manage. In the sequels? Tembi’s in control of the primary galactic supply chain. She knows what’s going on, and she’s older, wiser, and angry!

The full text is available on Thursday, Sept 21, 2017. You can read the first three chapters for free by downloading them at Gumroad.

Preorders are available, too! (I’ll update this list as the links go live)

Amazon Kindle (US)

Amazon Paperback (US)

Amazon Kindle (UK)

Amazon Kindle (CA)

Amazon Kindle (AU)

Barnes & Noble Nook (US & Other)

Smashwords (US & Other)

Kobo (US & Other)

Our store (non-DRM electronic files)

As always, please purchase from the store which best suits your needs and reading preferences, not mine! If you want Tembi to get her sequels, please leave an honest review, and tell other readers about Stoneskin.

This ask is referring to this strip, in which Lincoln’s ghost in a skin suit (yes, I know what I just said) has just gotten off of a plane after an international flight. He probably teleported into the bathroom in First Class, and rode the rest of the way in style.

I’ve got to start posting over here again. Anyhow. If you, like Mr. Washington, are fed up with absolutely everything everywhere, I've made you a social media icon that's free for public use.

As of May 2017, this is the current in-universe AGAHF chronology. The book that’s most likely to come out next is Hope Blackwell #2: ATTACK OF THE CHUPACABRAS okay no that’s not the title. I’m saving it under the working title of “Spanish Mission” but that’s a little too twee to set to a nice typeface. It’s almost done, and should come out sometime this summer!

I’m also working on Josh Glassman #2, Rachel Peng #5, and the Helen of Sparta book.

Helen of Sparta would come somewhere before Greek Key. The Helen book isn’t a priority for me. I’m going to try and shop it around to agents, but I get the feeling the mass market appeal for Helen, Murderqueen of Blood, just isn’t there. I’ve gotten several chapters into it and I’m enjoying the writing process: it will see the light of day at some point, but it’s most likely going to be a sunk cost project and I have enough of those.

Josh Glassman #2 has several chapters done and I poke at it when I get free time. I’m thinking this novella will hit around Christmas.

Rachel Peng #5 is…tricky. This is the book where THAT BAD THING happens to THOSE CHARACTERS and I am just not in a good place, brain-wise, to handle THAT EVENT with the grace it requires. However, since I started writing this one before Digital Divide, the entire book is roughed out. I can’t use any of the early draft copy, but the outline is there for the scavenging. Once I start working on it, the text should fall into place.

To clarify, there are seven books planned in the Rachel Peng series.

There are eight novellas planned in the Josh Glassman series.

The Hope Blackwell series is bizarre and bonkers and fun, and I have no idea where it’s going, which is a lovely change of pace for my poor obsessive mind.

There’s one Helen of Sparta novel planned, but it’ll be a long one, because Trojan War.

In addition to this workload, I’m also keeping the comic going. Part III of the comic will start by 2019. There’ll be another time skip–15 years instead of 5–and the characters will reflect this.

And I’m also rotating a bunch of short story submissions to different magazines, because writers need a shiny portfolio if they want persons within the publishing industry to take them seriously.

So, I was at a convention…six years ago? Seven? Anyhow, it was in Baltimore, and I was supposed to meet up with some of my best friends in the entire world who I hadn’t seen in ages, and this mid-20s-something fellow comes up to the table and starts talking to me about how he works for the government and how he’s actually working on the same brain-to-brain technology that is the hallmark of OACET. Which was, of course, the exact moment when my friends text me and some other fellow decides to crowd out the first, and an alarm went off in the convention hall.

All was chaos. By the time things were under control, the first fellow had slipped away. I still don’t know if he was serious or if he was fucking with me. I honestly hope it was both.

Anyhow. Brain-to-brain telepathy will be a thing. But, as is true of many of Musk’s more ambitious projects, he’s overpromising an idea. That’s cool. You have to start somewhere!

I think a brain-to-computer implant will be developed and put into production, probably within our lifetimes. But it won’t be the OACET-type implant (aka: telepathy) that Musk describes. As much as we talk about how brains are their own “computers,” that’s slapping two very dissimilar objects together in a clumsy analogy. The idea that we can create–within the next decade, no less!–a chip that (1) is safe and small enough to go into our brains; which will (2) allow us to talk to each other; while (3) also letting us talk to computers is buuuuuuullshiiiiiiiit. Purely the stuff of science fiction.

Why? Let’s look at some of the themes in the Rachel Peng novels. Particularly the scene in State Machine where she talks about how difficult it would be to bring a modified version of an OACET-type implant to the general public:

Security: How do you prevent not only those outside forces that would tamper with the implant and its host for nefarious purposes (or simple giggles), but also keep the zillions of thoughts you don’t want to receive from strangers, friends, and family out of your head? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my brain directly targeted for advertising or for Facebook posts from That Racist Family Member. We haven’t fully reached the level of technological proficiency needed to selectively target desirable versus undesirable content on the internet, using devices we know and trust, so how would we do this in an unfamiliar computer/brain interface?

Convenience: I’m two years overdue for replacing my phone. I’m not implanting anything in my brain short of a device that would literally keep me alive unless you can promise it’s state-of-the-art and will always remain so.

Accessibility: Rich people who can afford this nonsense will be the first early adopters. The trickle-down process will cap out pretty fucking fast, because elective brain surgery will be cost-prohibitive for most of us. Then you’ve got a class of humans who are TechnoLords versus a class of humans who are average schmucks, and just guess which of those groups is bigger. And angrier. And was plain fed up with this shit even before technomagic got involved.

This is a short story inspired by a silly tweet I made while I was watching Sally Yates testify. Senator Klobuchar was asking her some solid questions, and I said I wanted fanfic of these two. So, here you go. As far as I know, this is the world's only Yates/Klobuchar fanfic.

The village was a slip of Georgia by the ocean, unremarkable for anything except the views and the sheep.

(And, if they were honest with themselves, the murders)

Amy had opened a bakery. Sally had her sheep and her knitting—they had been astonished to learn how sheep could fill the hours—but Amy had driven fifty miles up and down the coast and couldn’t find a single apple crisp worth her time. As she refused to live in a world without easy access to a decent crisp, she found an empty storefront on Main Street, rolled up her sleeves, and got to work.

At first, the locals had stayed away, but Amy had taught herself to make a mean peach cobbler and brown sugar was its own reward. As the months passed, the bakery grew legs and turned into the community coffee shop. There was art on the old wooden walls and tables that she and Sally had hammered together from shipping pallets over a rainy weekend, and the coffee was as close to free as could be found.

Most mornings, she baked and talked law with those who needed it.

Some mornings, about once a month, the little brass bell over the door would jingle, and she’d look up to find Sheriff Taylor in full uniform, his hat hanging crooked over his face.

Amy loved that hat. She smiled every time she saw it. That hat meant murder.

Taylor had been coming in for coffee without that hat for the past few weeks, but he was due. As she went to bed, Amy decided to get up before the sun and open the shop early, just in case.

Sure enough, as as she flipped on the lights, that little bell jingled.

“Morning, Sheriff,” Amy said, as if the hat wasn’t looming ominously over his eyes. As if it was a normal morning. “How’s every small thing?”

The Sheriff nodded to her. He was a good and honest man, as such things were measured, and he appreciated the effort of pleasantries. “Senator,” he said.

“Just Amy, please. I’m retired.” She found a clean pie tin and set him up with some cinnamon crullers.

He stared at the plate.

“Oh,” she said, and went to wrap up the crullers in a plain paper bag. “I’ll call Sally.”

Easier than it had been, getting Sheriff Taylor to take her to the crime scene. Much easier. Whole worlds easier! Those first dozen cases had been like pulling teeth, but she and Sally were closing in on a full year in the village and the coffee shop was now Taylor’s first port of call.

On that morning, their second was the morgue.

The Medical Examiner was a thin man prone to dark humor. Amy had brought him a few pastries, and on a normal day he would have tucked in while walking them through the latest homicide.

This was not a normal day. He let them into his suite, then went to sit with his head between his knees.

“That bad?” Amy asked the Sheriff.

“That bad.” The voice came from the pool of light on the other side of the room. The woman who had spoken was tall and thin, topped by a crest of short brown hair. She stepped away from the autopsy table and removed a pair of disposable black gloves. With the gloves gone, Amy saw the blood speckled across the sleeves of her shirt.

“It’s not the victim’s,” Sally assured them. “Martin got stuck in the fence again. I locked him in the barn and came straight here.”

Martin was their truculent ram who thrived on self-inflicted injuries. He had good genes and nothing else, and Sally would have dumped him on another farmer long ago if he didn’t sire the healthiest lambs around.

“Tell me about the body,” Amy said to Sally, as she joined her friend in the light of the autopsy rig.

“It speaks for itself,” Sally said.

It did. There was not much left of what had once been a girl. The face had been split into thirds, the body into quarters. Tatters of once-white fabric lay in ruined strips across the corpse, a mix of dried blood and red Georgia clay flaking onto the steel table.

She and Amy each donned pairs of fresh gloves and went to work. They were lucky—the body had not yet been cleaned. Amy found a scalpel and used it to lift an especially clotty piece of flesh.

“No maggots,” she observed. “No insect activity at all.”

Across the room came the sounds of the M.E. vomiting into his garbage bin.

“Wha—The person who did this was strong,” Sally said, turning what remained of the girl’s right foot over in her hands. “The weapon has three blades, each between six to eight inches long.”

Amy moved her body to block the Sheriffs view, and then held up her own hand so Sally alone could see. She arched her first three fingers and raked the air, mimicking claws.

Sally nodded.

They completed their inspection. The body was starting to smell of rotten eggs, so they bid the M.E. good morning and went outside into the clean morning sun, Sheriff Taylor in tow.

“We’d like to see where she was found,” Amy said.

The Sheriff took them to a quiet grove in the woods they had visited a hundred times before. The spot where the girl had been murdered looked no different than any other grove in Georgia, but the stench of rotten eggs was here, too. Amy and Sally let the Sheriff grow bored and wander off on the pretext of a phone call, and then Sally took a vial of black powder from her purse.

“Iron?” asked Amy. “We’ve already tried iron here.”

“Obsidian,” Sally said, and opened the tube with a pop. “Earth didn’t work, so let’s try fire.”

The taller woman poured the powder into a miniature mountain, and dropped a lit match into its center. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the mountain of volcanic glass shuddered and tipped sideways, a thin line of molten lava crawling due east. They watched the lava flow across the ground until it had exhausted its fuel. It pointed straight as an arrow into the heart of the small seaside forest.

“Finally,” Amy said. “A place to start.”

The soft sound of metal on leather lit the grove as Sally took out the silver dagger she kept hidden in her boot. “We need to find that Gate and close it.”

Amy’s own dagger was light and familiar in her hand. “We will,” she said, as they left the Sheriff and the town behind them. “We will.”

Okay. here we go. Remember, you asked for this.

I’m having an impossible time writing anything political lately. I should be roughing out the plot on the next Rachel Peng book, but it’s all I can do to write about smut and chupacabras.

(Clarification: smut and chupacabras. Not smut with chupacabras. Two entirely different story lines that shall not intersect, not even under the influence of sexy music and candlelight.)

It’s not just the fifth Rachel book, either. Since Act II of the comic is ending soon, I need to be writing Act III, which will be set in 2030. The main characters will have different rolls in the government than they have in the current story arc. But…how do I do that, when I have no idea what’s going to happen next?

We’ve entered the Great Unknown of politics, and it’s not going to get better from here. The next few weeks, months, years? We could see a sitting President tried for treason. Not impeached–tried, found guilty, and sent to prison.

Whatever happens would affect the AGAHF universe. Not so much Act II and the Rachel books. As of the election, I’ve decided that those end in October 2016. The future, tho…

Let’s poke at why I’m having problems writing near-future sci-fi:

Best-case scenario is that things become stable. Someone in the role of President goes back to business as usual. Pence? Trainwreck of a politician, but at least his trainwrecks run on time. Ryan? Perhaps the most career-driven weasel in D.C. right now, and about as shallow and transparent as a single-pane window. Trump gets his act together and serves out his term? Sure, why not, since this is all hypothetical anyhow.

But all three of them might leave politics within the foreseeable future, because the evidence coming out regarding the GOP’s collusion with the Russians is coming fast and hard.

Then who’s in charge? Hatch? Tillerson? Do we throw up our hands and hold another election? Who the fuck knows?

And if you want scary (I mean truly, unfathomably scary–scary to a level we have never seen before in our lifetimes), consider the number of persons who still think Trump hasn’t done anything wrong. Nay, the number of persons who will always think he cannot do anything wrong, that the campaign and the election were conducted honestly, that all of the evidence against him is manufactured, that Trump and his cronies are being set up by a government who never wanted him in power.

I don’t know how many people are out there who believe this, but it’s not inconsiderable. Mainly because they are the outcome of a long-term conditioning process. Just this morning I retweeted a thread by Eric Garland which included these points:

The authoritarian - I no longer call them conservative - wing of US politics has spent 30 years propagandizing people toward paranoia.

Science is out to get you. Meteorologists are lying. History is fake news. Obama is a Martian. Chemtrails! It’s been a brainwashing.

We no longer have different opinions or ideologies, but entirely different sets of facts. All inconvenient facts are called lies.

The scary part isn’t that these folks have access to guns, or that they are dispersed throughout the country instead of concentrated in a single location. The scary part is that while they may hate “the government,” they won’t go after “the government” directly–they’ll come after us. The brainwashed sheeple, the lambs being led to slaughter… Insert your own ovis aries analogy here. The rationale will be simple foundation guerrilla rhetoric: anyone not with them fighting against the establishment isn’t innocent, and they will get what they deserve.

(Never mind that it’s much easier to blow up a school or a supermarket than the Pentagon.)

Will this happen? Who knows? Not me! I have no idea what’s going to happen. Again, the best-case scenario is that things become stable, but that looks increasingly unlikely. I suppose I could pick a single point and freeze my alternate history in that moment, and begin writing from there. However, one of the themes I love to play with are “reasonable what-ifs?” and right now the what-ifs are too many, too diverse, and not at all reasonable.

This is one scary point in history, and I need more than three months to wrap my head around it.

I’m a few weeks behind on replying to this one: I’d apologize, but the administration has gotten so much weirder since then that it’s not so much this response is late but that it’s been marinating in its juices.

One of the things we have learned over the past week is that the Obama Administration received early intelligence that Trump et al. were meeting with the Russians for reasons other than normal diplomatic processes. Once it was clear that Trump would become the next President, Obama took multiple steps to make sure that the intelligence communities would have the resources required to address ongoing questions about Russian involvement in the election. These steps were taken with the assumption that the incoming Administration would likely be opposed to any substantial investigation into their own connections to Putin and Russia.

I’m definitely not “exulting” in what’s happening–what you’re seeing from me is schadenfreude as those persons who (are likely to have) hijacked the U.S. political process are being revealed. Because, if they did collude with Russia to influence the election, they have committed treason.

Look at that word–treason. Understand that it means that persons who are supposed to represent the best interests of the United States have instead made the conscious choice to work against these interests. That these persons have chosen to put aside the interests of their own country–which they have sworn oaths to serve and protect–and have instead sought to serve the interests of another. In doing so, they have not only betrayed the country in the abstract, but you and me, and our families, and our friends, and strangers living on the other side of the country we will never meet.

Treason is betrayal. It is a conscious choice to hurt us.

Personally, I believe that Trump et al. did collude with the Russians, and that many of their actions fall within my personal understanding of treason. Whether or not they have committed treason is for the courts to decide. But this is the first stage in bringing them to justice and holding them accountable, and as the facts continue to emerge, it is becoming more and more likely that at least some of them will be tried in a court of law. For treason.

Damn straight I’m feeling some wholly righteous schadenfreude.

I made a masthead for my friend Gary‘s Twitter page.

Short answer: yeah

Long answer: I’m a politically aware person and a student of history. Since the election, everything is...different.

“Not normal” is a phrase that’s been thrown around a lot lately. It started before the election, when Trump engaged in behaviors that would have gotten any other candidate in history yanked off the stage with a hook. (Remember when Howard Dean shouted a little too loudly and that ruined his candidacy?) And since the election, what would have been obscene behavior in any politician --let alone the President of the United States of America!-- has become common and, in many instances, celebrated. The same can be said of many of those who follow Trump, and their...uh...let’s just go with “embrace of divisiveness” to sum up what is essentially an enormous bonedry fuckpile of animosity towards anyone even slightly different than themselves.

But, as writers much smarter than myself have pointed out, this is normal. Persons from marginalized groups have been. Shouting. For. Years. about the deeply embedded mentalities that have allowed someone like Trump to take power. That social and cultural constructs that were becoming more progressive (Trans & queer rights beginning to be recognized? Gay marriage legalized? YAY!!!) were just a pretty veneer slapped over the rot beneath.

I didn’t listen. Before all this happened, I considered myself a woke liberal lady. But when conservative friends and relatives would say something about “those people,” I didn’t push back: I’d excuse myself and go to the restroom and hope the conversation would be over by the time I returned. Because these problems were fixing themselves, right? We were moving forward, not backwards, and my buddies would either catch up with the rest of us or atrophy out of existence.

Besides, I thought, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Look at this bullshit I wrote back in January of 2016:

I don’t think that staying silent is a good thing in and of itself. I strongly believe we each need to raise our voices and stand against problems that actively cause harm. But-and here’s the bitch of the thing-we live in a society. A society can’t exist without communication and compromise. One of the major themes in AGAHF (comic and novels) is that political polarization doesn’t help the general public. Everyone’s opinion is not valid, but that’s the magic of consensus, as the views of the majority are made valid by transforming them into law.

Well, I still believe in communication. I still emphatically endorse compromise, especially in politics, where we must sacrifice the perfect to achieve the good. But we’re now in a position in which extremely divisive views are becoming law. Not because a majority of the country wants them, but because a vocal minority took control.

You might have seen the statistic floating around that at the height of their power, only 10% of all Germans were themselves Nazis.

So, yeah. Life has overtaken me. Partially because I’m fighting depression tooth and nail. Partially because I’m now doing the protest thing, and the activist thing, and becoming active in my local political sphere--all shit that I should have done long before now, because, maybe, if I had, and if three million other people like me had, we wouldn’t be sandwiched dead in the middle of this joyless fuckpile right now.

And don’t get me started on Russia. Holy shit. Holy shit.

I’ll try and be better about updates, but it’s really all I can do to keep the comic going right now.

A new comic is up at the website!