ecce terato

Hoove sat much of this time near the door through which they had entered.  The pulsing in his head that had begun the moment he’d heard Bremen address him by his nom de guerre seemed to echo and be magnified by this space.  Nor the pain high in his chest, nor the terrible slowness of the world around him. He was in its presence now, the whale’s.  That would have seemed important before, but now…

The story of HOWW’s ancient CEO was inescapable.  Samson Wilford of the Commons sang his epic wherever serfs couldn’t avoid their titular president’s image.  He personally owned more than one percent of the world’s wealth, not counting the value of his subsidiary companies.  A grand yet humble man, approaching a hundred and ten years old, bootstrapper champion who had a paradise under his aegis…

 “H-hey,” Hoove crouched over them where they lay, arm-as-pillow, in a corner.  They were not asleep, but the first day of withdrawal was a cloud in their head and a roar in their ears.  Nice Try’s departure felt like a caved-in chest. “You need to answer this.” Hoove gestured to his window, which Bremen had held close before dissociating too deeply and which was now on the concrete.  He…

When Bremen staggered up to the small camp, Nice Try was sitting up, still immobile but apparently able enough to see that she pointed a disappointingly human finger at the smear of blue around the side of Bremen’s face. They muttered, “You should see the other guy,” and moved on up to get some fresh air.  Maybe order a bottle of water to wash the whale brain off their face. They didn’t realize…

Calling a car didn’t end up working out.  Apparently a lot of things were still staggered by the outage, little things like the navigation and positioning systems in individual vehicles and people, and there were dead zones for sidecar service.  So, instead, they walked.  The walk was very different with the window mounted over their eyes, populating empty spaces with cheery plant life and walls…

Amber and black. Those colors were Bremen’s world for a moment outside of time.  Rich and bold.  Malign, but also comforting. Whether it was the concussion or high emotions overwhelming their meds, Bremen’s mind was a thick, soupy fog.  Their brain had thrown errors, and was struggling to reboot, as if it were also a computer and its software had been corrupted by the cloud tumor and was being…

Bremen’s last pill snapped with just a few pounds of pressure at the tips of their thumbnails, scattering what felt like incalculably valuable crumbs of faint pink chemical particulate away from their cot.  They couldn’t help but think of each of those flying particles as if they contained the entirety of the night’s necessary dose, now already lost. These past several days, Bremen had agonized…

The number of times Nice Try called their client a fucker over the next few days was prodigious.  No one got fired, though.  If he heard, he probably considered it “growing pains.”  When the next evaluation came around he was pleased with their progress, gave them a few tips on the kinds of imagery his marketers were hoping to work with, had nothing else to say.  It seemed the opportunity for a…

“Is it bad,” Bremen said.  “that a few weeks ago, I would’ve been happy to see almost the real whale, but now I don’t know if I’d be happy seeing the real one – now I feel like I can’t be satisfied if I never hear it sing.” “I don’t think it’ll sing while it’s in captivity,” Vernon shrugged. “Probably not.” He came by now and then to see what Bremen was working on, and they showed him the…

“Are you ready?” Nice Try clutched the window in her eagle-thumbed hand, proffering it cautiously. “You first,” Bremen said. “I’ll take the second shift,” Nice Try said.  “Look at the whale.” “You first.” “Look at the whale,” Beetroot groaned. Continue reading Sing the Blue – Chapter 32: Bremen sees the whale and also some other things

The young woman was talkative.  That happened sometimes, when people came to Horis. “I haven’t been to the city since…” she was saying.  “It’s been so long.  Everything’s branded.” They were already in the city, of course.  She lived in it.  But only in the low-rising areas at its edges, where the eternally crashing wave of city was only foam on the land.  It was a refuge for many who suffered…

The shelter was relatively large, but not enough so to accommodate all of the homeless serfs nearby who needed it at once.  The collective could not get in every night before it filled up, but they could at least rent lockers to store their supplies and sketches and, soon, finished works.  Of course, like anything, a Commons shelter had to show a profit each quarter or it was fair game for other…

Williams Kempston, apparently a big-name executive in the upper ranks of the Howard Industrial Dynamics corporation, personally owned a number of complexes across the west city, and plenty more across the globe.  This particular one, two miles and change from the shelter out of which the artists were now based, was his seat of operations.  The one in which he had a physical office, which he…

Dresden was awake the next time Bremen had a break from their Bauerdel job, but not in the mood to talk.  They were dehydrated and sore, and apparently the entire Divot was a serotonin stimulant zone, presumably to keep its weary conscripted workers from revolting – which meant Dresden could never be fully operational here.  Even so, Bremen found that they had difficulty looking at their either…

The next several hours had, in fact, been vital.  With shaky fingers and unresponsive cheeks, Odom had begun to enact the plan she had worried for years she would need to carry out.  Before Barker had even departed she had set a few bots on consolidating her virtual belongings – tens of thousands of microsubscriptions to different services, functions, and bots; the licenses for use of all her…