| [ | Tags | | | 1993, 1oct1993, albert_lunsford, creative_commons, fiction, pennis_mold, piro, plinth_mold, slfiction, stanleylieber, tab1, violet | ] |
1OCT1993
2729 words by Stanley Lieber
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"That's no whale."
"Sure it is, sir."
"No."
Piro had not yet been informed about the lighthouse. He stood on the bridge of the carrier and surveyed the scene cautiously, not rushing to judgment. He took in the particulars of the situation before venturing forward, hoping to avoid the unhappy possibility of issuing conflicting orders. Something in him sensed that this was an unusual situation, one that called for careful handling. His instincts, he guessed.
"That cannot be a whale."
Absorbed in disbelief, Piro realized that his reasoning had not been made clear to the command team of the carrier.
"A whale is not green," he explained.
"But Pennis, he's up there, right now!"
"But Violet, I don't care!"
"Come on now, sir, you'll be okay once we get you up on your feet. You can't allow a little seasickness to scuttle the whole mission."
"Negative. I've ruined some of the leaves."
Pennis Mold tried to wipe off his stack of leaves. The vomit had made them sticky, clingy. His shirt was also damp. It would take a while to extricate the devices, one from the other. Luckily, at least, all of them seemed to be functional.
"New paradigm. Synergy. I'm staying in bed."
"Pennis, sir, stand up."
"No."
Violet decided to take matters into her own hands.
Okay, I'm floating and I'm not-floating at the same time. Alternating, I should say. Accosted by a whale with arms. Arms that are, presently, dipping me in and out of the water at an alarmingly advanced speed. I'm thinking now that maybe this is not really a whale after all.
Before I know it the scene changes up and I'm being strangled by a large set of gray fingers.
I recall that, per mission parameters, I'm equipped with a variety of specialized tools. I react smoothly, activating reflex algorithms that in turn select an appropriate utensil for sawing my way out of the tentacle headlock. As the automated system goes to work, the not-whale's gripping apparatus gradually begins to loosen its hold. Perhaps having thought better of snacking on highly trained covert agents, the not-whale withdraws its remaining tentacles, and I make the most of a bad situation by allowing the current to pull me the rest of the way out of its reach. As I'm floating off, I login to my side-arm and lob a couple of rounds into its bulging, unblinking eye, wondering where a foul creature such as this houses its genitals. Wondering, also, if its genitals are larger, or smaller than, its brain.
After inadvertently swallowing a bit of sea water, I discard my ruined sawing tool and wade towards Plinth's ship, preparing to sync my temporary chronometer with it's time server. Scrolling, I see that the crew has just finished eating. The percept team will be light on men for another thirty minutes or so, depending on their local union agreement.
Hoisting myself onto Plinth's ship, I traverse the railing and immediately drop to the deck, pressing my face against its cold, slick surface. Probably for too long, as sixty seconds later I'm still catching my breath. I'm taken slightly off guard, startled, when Piro sets to screaming in my ear about an impending comms disruption.
Did I just black out?
"Piro to P. Mold, it looks like we're going to have to abort."
"Nonsense, I'm pro-life."
The men in the green microfiber suits held their expressions, ignoring Plinth's uncharacteristically flat attempt at humor.
"I can only guarantee channel integrity for another twenty seconds, sir. Less, if the enormous green squid off our portside bow chews the carrier in half."
Plinth turned to his attorneys. Then he thought better of it and returned to the men in the microfiber suits, who remained inscrutable as before. A number of alternatives spun through his mind until he abruptly halted the evaluation loop, manually copied a single data structure into his speech buffer. Discarding the false starts, he parted his lips and began to speak in his customarily assured and controlling tone, but was interrupted by the unfolding of events.
The crashing of a particularly large waved causes me to lose a few words, but I'm able to follow the gist of the conversation. Piro had said that the not-whale was, in fact, green. Puzzling, as it certainly doesn't look green to me.
Jarred by this incongruous data, I'm overcome by the sudden awareness that I can't remember ever having seen colors outside the overlays in my visor. Amazingly, I think that I may actually be -- when not running in enhanced mode, anyway -- color blind. How in the name of the Green could I have never noticed this? How could this possibly have been overlooked during the course of my career?
It boggles, but these are definitely questions best pondered post-mission. After a few quick adjustments, I can see the squid in what I will now assume is a true-color representation.
It's spamming big. And it's definitely green.
Color blind. It figures this is the sort of thing I have to discover in the field.
There was a brief interlude of silence, stillness, in contrast to the clatter that buttressed it temporally on either side. Piro looked around and the quiet seemed to be coming from the deck, of all places.
Directional silence, he thought.
Presently, the ambient audio resumed and a neon, flickering tentacle appeared above Plinth's ship. Continuing its downward arc, it proceeded to slice Lt. Commander Wetbeard's lookout tower cleanly in half. Comms silence followed as Piro, instantly refocusing his display, attempted to mitigate the situation by routing through a backup channel.
He blinked rapidly as his vision went to bluescreen for a period of seconds.
...
Cognizance returned, Piro began to notice streams of water on the windshield that were not abating after each passing sheet of mist. The deck of the carrier was sloshing now with... Of course. He vectored his line of sight vertically from the horizon and instantly achieved visual confirmation of his suspicions.
So now there was rain to contend with, in addition to the other problems. Piro drew his weapon and booted it up as he exited the bridge of the carrier. He realized, then, that with comms down, he would be unable to login. It seemed that today, everything would have to be switched to manual.
Fortunately, Piro habitually equipped serrated, as well as network, weaponry. He rotated out the crippled network device and attached a classical bladed instrument to his right arm.
Awake. Floating again, this time on deck. The variable terrain will complicate movement towards the forward cabin and bridge. It looks like the ship's taken some damage from the not-whale. Curiously, the percept team hasn't regrouped to try and correct the course drift. I wipe the blood out of my eyes and start moving again, forward as always, towards the target.
As I make my way past the final civilian stateroom, partial comms are restored.
Spam it, Plinth is no longer aboard. He's already transferred to another ship.
Intuitively, my gaze shifts to the Cold War-era aircraft carrier that has lately appeared off the starboard bow.
Piro located the appropriate elevator and returned to the deck of the carrier. Splashing through the rain, he approached one of the main guns from behind and relieved its pilot. Once strapped into the weapon he bore down on the enormous green squid, focusing his ammunition at the beast's underside. The dead pilot's body floated away behind him, his protestations about licensing rendered meaningless by the absence of conscious volition.
As if in response to the barrage of weapons fire, the squid embarked on a series of awkward physical maneuvers. First, its soft underbelly appeared to open up, forming into an uncertain grin. From out of this novel orifice, a flood of pink squares that turned into pink cubes that turned into pink bubbles were loosed upon the deck of the USS DOM DELUISE. Several forward members of the percept team slipped and lost their balance, went tumbling to the boards, rolling one over the other in a cacophony of limbs and bodies. Even so, each man tried to keep his wits about him.
"It's all pink on the inside," went up the call from the forward-most man.
"All pink on the inside!" echoed down the line.
Piro kept on firing, willing himself not to look away even as he shifted his aim and emptied the remainder of his ammunition stores into the squid's exposed right eyeball. Aside from releasing an excessive amount of smoke into the atmosphere, and a troubling amount of black ink into the water, Piro judged that the ammunition seemed to be having little destructive effect upon the squid. As he unleashed a brief salvo of explicit invective, the squid's enormous eyeball blinked, as if to mock his merely human attempts at violence.
"But, a squid cannot blink."
Piro understood then that words were not going to win the fight. Even from his heavily vested point of view, he had to acknowledge that the battle was not going well. Some alternate strategy had to be devised, put into play.
And so, what next?
Alone in the head, it was almost quiet.
Pennis eased his manually numbed stick back into his trousers. He watched with some interest as a milky white bead of his semen broke apart and ran down the door of his stall. He coughed, weakly. He'd given himself quite a workout this time; his heartbeat was still audible in his ears. Why did vomiting always make him so horny? Lost in thought, his eyes remained glazed over as he pulled up his slacks.
Exiting the stall, a glimmer of light registered in his peripheral vision, immediately snapping him out of his reverie. He noticed that across the counter, one of the Green certificates was blinking. Fumbling to wash his hands, he shook the moisture off and rushed over to see what was the matter. A small amount of water transferred from his fingertips onto the first device, causing a non-permanent deformation in the imagery along its external boundary.
After giving the leaf a thorough examination, Pennis moved on to the next one from the top of the stack. Then, increasingly disoriented, to the next. Finally, he doubled back to check his reading. The record presented here could not possibly be accurate. The narrative was inconsistent with the facts as Pennis knew them, had experienced them over the years and decades since being welcomed into Plinth's family as the youngest of the three Mold brothers.
And yet, the certificates all seemed to be in order.
It was, quite simply, astonishing.
Pennis shook his head, and then he shook it again. According to the evidence laid out before him, his brother, Plinth Mold, was the sole patent holder and undisputed trademark administrator of several key technologies which had been licensed to develop the sub-framework of the Green. Possession of these certificates would radically alter the texture of any future negotiations between Plinth's interests and the Green Consortium. Between Plinth's interests and anyone, anywhere. It was a remarkable collection of documents.
Pennis attempted, at this point, to deduce what his brother was really up to. He knew from long experience that attempting to puzzle out Plinth's true motives was an exercise in futility. Instead, he would focus upon the likelihood of various outcomes. Perhaps predictably, no matter which tangent his speculations followed, no matter what obscure avenue his suspicions swept down, as he neared that final, unified model, his concentration would crumble and he would be left with no theory, no explanation, only the visceral, irrational certainty that:
I want no part in any dubious intellectual property schemes.
He felt that, even in the absence of a convincing rhetorical argument, his objection would end up being appropriate. Call it instinct, he thought.
In the end Pennis sensed that, by resisting, he was merely prolonging the inevitable. For his trouble, Plinth would probably just shrug and set him up in a new job. Pat him on the head and tell him not to take things so seriously. Thanks to their father, the family still owned the government no matter what trouble the Mold brothers got themselves into.
Pennis resigned himself to chairing yet another board of directors, to unintentionally driving yet another thriving, multinational corporation into the ground.
He supposed things could be worse.
In the midst of all the action, a new thought occurred to Plinth Mold:
Why not just cut the budget losses and end it all now?
No sooner had the question formed in his mind than Plinth understood the thought to have contained its own affirmation. He was beside himself with surprise. Had events really progressed to the point where such a notion could present itself as an uncertainty, surreptitiously coloring his thoughts via some heretofore undefended, laterally obscured access point, avoiding all conscious realization of its presence until that awful, final moment when at last it was too late to object? He knew this concern was immaterial, given the nature of reality, but it bothered him that at this late stage in his development he could still be blindsided by a mundane, subconscious motivation.
Plinth pulled out his vintage pocket calendar and marked off the date. 1Oct1993. Later than he had expected, actually. Something had kept the cycle going this time, well beyond the projections laid down in his youth. He found that, quite surprisingly, he was not entirely in control of his emotions. Imagery of previous eras flooded his awareness at a pace he could not quite track. As the sensations passed, he replaced the calendar to his hip pocket and steadied himself against the conference table.
This fleeting nausea was troubling.
He considered for a moment that Piro, Thomas, the attorneys, the chef -- all of his crew -- would likely be lost in the transition to follow. In point of fact, all humanity would be dumped, unceremoniously dropped from memory. No record would survive. None would need to.
Except, he thought, for one.
The troubling unsteadiness returned and for a moment he considered aborting. Then he remembered his joke, from earlier, and began to laugh out loud.
"I'm pro-life," he said, apropos nothing.
Plinth's attorneys glanced up at him, arching their eyebrows professionally. The men in the green microfiber suits had, for the first time since he'd been introduced to them, altered their facial expressions. Rather than responding to the situation or his words, they were now laughing amongst themselves at an obscure joke which seemed to involve a goat and the manual to Photoshop 3.51. They showed no sign of having heard what he'd said.
Plinth Mold gazed at the humans with affection.
Without further delay, he spoke into his shirtsleeve and killed all processes of the Eternal September.
Bits of Plinth's boat were splayed across the surface of the water. For some reason, not sinking. Plinth reacted casually to this. He paddled over to a piece of debris and affixed himself to it in such a way that he could remain afloat without having to expend further effort.
Fingering his chronometer, Plinth discovered that comms were still down. Even long-range channels were unresponsive. He switched to satellite and got nothing. Inside, his servos were running blind without network updates.
So, he'd really done it.
Plinth continued to float there, alone.
The sun was up. Redaction Day, at last. The real whales had arrived by now and were beginning to circle the remains of the broken-up ships. Plinth ignored them and made a few final checks before accepting the obvious. Humanity, minus one, was gone. His Warm Reset had taken effect.
Plinth jettisoned the dead equipment from his makeshift raft and began to scan the area for signs of life. Eventually, he went into damage control mode, straightening the front of his shirt and slicking down his hair. He lit a cigarette and adjusted his eye patch. A whale crested nearby, displacing, and finally submerging, one of the scattered islands of refuse. Plinth was starting to get hungry. He discovered that somewhere along the line, he'd developed a painful erection.
Violet, the mother of civilization, should be floating along soon.
END BOOK THREE
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