MPC

Meridien K - Chapter 33: The Spiders In The Rain

2012-01-30T00:01:00.005-06:00

--my turn to get shot.

Therandom odds were in place: Routine patrol, low probability of contact, my firsttime driving in ages, the AV popped a bolt on the undercarriage, everyoneprivately freaked for a second before I pulled over so I could check it, woodson all sides but that was normal, myself the first out and turning to bend overand then I saw a spark off the door of the AV, didn't even register the soundof a single gunshot, didn't feel the bullet pierce me somewhere in the gut,pass clean through and ricochet while everyone snapped to, as the ground suddenlyturned into soggy bread, knees all wobbly and a sloppy collapse against the AVand onto the ground, oddly concerned about keeping blood off the vehicle.

"You'llbe fine, MK."

Cafnot one to bullshit me. If I was dying he'd tell me I was toasted. And if I wasdying he would've left me there, out in the open, but he dragged me behind thecover of the AV and then ran off where the rest of the guys were headed, into aclump of woods where some Chinese had set up what was probably a hasty ambushgiven how abrupt we had showed on the scene. The last thing the Chinese wereexpecting were the ambushed fools running into the woods as the aggressors,turning cat-and-mouse into cat-and-bears, all of the Chinese halfway up intrees without a good way down, 716ers down in the brush, wiping them out. Itmust've been late enough in the game for them to know us, know we didn't havethe air support to light up the whole damn forest in a bonafide Americanpyrotechnic spectacular.

Icould see most of it from looking underneath the AV. I thought about myrecurring fear about taking cover behind a vehicle, since there's always thatgap between the lower chassis and the ground, and a good-enough crackshot couldshoot you in the feet and render you gimp. I was flat on my back, andaforementioned crackshot could've popped me in my grape-jelly brain.

Noone was around to say anything. They were all in the woods. I had the bum luckto be on the ambush side of the lead vehicle. But I had the good fortune totake one in the abdomen and not my skull or anywhere respiration took place.

Bleedingout on the ground and set on fixing myself up. The memory of classes that wereso boring, kind of shrugging off that whole This Will Save Your Life Somedaywarning and, hell, I was in the business of doing just that. I managed to slideback, reached the rear AV door, pulled it open, grabbed the medkit in therecessed panel.

Gunshotsstill to my left, past the vehicle, in the scrub.

Toooccupied to consider myself Forgotten. Feeling the entry and exit wounds, ahand sticky with living, pulsing blood. Going through all the mental tricks ofdelaying shock. Caf was right, I wasn't dying, but I was going cold, and I wasbleeding too much, and dirt and grit was getting into the wound. No time to be picky,at least the bullet was in and out, nothing to yank free from a mess ofentrails. Stabbing myself with a local anesthetic until I couldn't feel mywaist. Then swabbing away the blood, my chin tucked into my chest to look atwhat I was doing as I dug the needle into the area near the wound, crap suturesthey'd have to rip out anyway. But no dice I'd go rigid and blue in goddamnChina. Fixed up enough, tying the bandage as tight as uncomfortably possibly,hearing the gunshots wind down, waves of panic spiking and receding when no onewas coming back, like maybe The Claw won.

Andthen 716 back, the full count. My first real realization why the Regs thoughtwe were assholes, or how a total lack of visible compassion can give off thewrong idea. Not like I was expecting any bedside manner. It's just that whenthey came back, Caf and Gremlin shoved me into the back of the AV like I wasdead weight, and a few argued over who would drive like they were kids pushingand shoving over who got to push the elevator button. No chatter heading back,same as always, but I must've been projecting something, no one looking at me,like I was already a corpse. It was only much later, years later, that Irealized they were all upset because one of Their Own was hit and might have tosit out a few missions to recover, same as the bummer vibe I felt wheneversomeone else had their turn to get stung and sit on the bench for the next fewops.

Thelong, bumpy ride back to FOB Whatever. The numbness de-numbing, the immediatesharp pain of the first few minutes after a gunshot wound replaced by a dullpain; everyone says they prefer dull pains, well, go and get yourself shot andyou'll change your tune. Like having something hungry inside you, an animalgnawing on your innards, close enough to the medical reality of it, a neat holepunched through a few organs.

Finallyinside the wire, diverted to the giant medical compound. Pointman, driving, hada mumbled, muffled conversation with a Reg E-boy who pulled duty loggingarrivals and wouldn't let us in. Pointman seemed to get pissy and irate andconfused, and then he pulled out fast and I was still in the back, not a singleeye on me, my bandages getting wetter from a loose suture, Help, I'm Bleeding.

Wecrawled only a hundred yards. Full stop. The electrical engines shut down. Theback hatch of the AV opened. The other AV was parked behind, all four peeringout, the only sign of human-fucking-empathy they could muster, checking to seeif I'd gone from grey to that blue-grey of certain death.

Asquat, small structure I'd never seen before. Unmarked. A guy in camo-scrubscame out with a gurney as Caf and Gremlin hoisted me up. Supine, looking up atthat thoughtless sky. Craning my neck up, being wheeled backward, the Unitassembled there, a tableau of the remaining eight boys in black. I lifted ahand, a feeble I'm Okay gesture. Some returned it.

Pastdouble doors and into a windowless rectangle that looked like an abandonedbarracks moreso than anything medical. Another camo-scrubs guy showed andhelped transfer me onto a bed. They rattled off medical jargon and rolled meonto my side, took off the bandages, the sting of fresh air.

"Yousew yourself up?"

"Yeah."

"Cantell. Zigzagged all over the place. It'll hold for now before we poke aroundinside and glue you shut. Clean entry and exit at first blush. Just gonna giveyou a shot to kill off any possible infection. You scared of needles?"

"Ijust got shot. The fuck should I be afraid of a needle?" in thatunguarded, hostile tone you only reserve for strangers under a very particulartype of duress.

"Inthat case…"

Diggingthrough the cart nearby, pulling out a needle the size of the serial killer'sknife, trying to keep my cool, some prank, ha ha, but he filled it up.

"This'llsting a little. Ready?"

Astiff nod. The other guy tensed his hold, ready for me to buck.

"One.Two--"

Andthen that old trick, stabbing before the three. Grit teeth, still debris in mymouth, sand or dirt or tree pollen. Feeling whatever was injected spreadinglike a liquid cancer, bloodier than blood, an organism inside me unfolding likean origami crane into plain paper.

"Stayon your side. We'll get you some pillows."

Andthey disappeared. Me at the front of the ward, staring at a blank wall with, Isuddenly realized, my pants around my ankles but my black shirt hid everything.Pulling up my pants, unbuttoned, suddenly too drugdrunk to feel if I wasblocking the wound. I heard the guys go outside.

"Hey."

Couldn'tturn around. Looked up at the convex mirror and saw another black-uniformedfigure at the far end of the ward.

"Hey,"he repeated.

"Hey."

"What'syour Unit?"

"What?"

"I'm512," he said.

Myinitial silence. The shock of the gunshot and the shock of something that foryears seemed a cosmic impossibility, like in the whole of the Forces there wasjust one Unit, capital-U, and one number, Seven Six--

"Comeon, man. It's just a number. They only bring us Unit guys in here to getpatched up."

Hehad a bandage around his head. No blood. Probably banged on the back of the AVfrom a too-fast exit, something we had all done at one point, which ranged froma stinging forehead to a giant bruise to a mild concussion.

"716.Unit 716."

Imanaged to sort of roll over and looked at him with my eyes and not through thecurved mirror. I wasn't that seasoned myself, only seventeen or eighteen, can'tgive an exact figure, but the kid looked fifteen and it seemed the mostridiculous thing in the world, his uniform, his rifle propped next to him,trying to rationalize that when I was that age in the Unit I didn't look nearlythat green.

"What'syour name?"

Reticence.

"Comeon, man. Codename."

"MeridienK."

"Cool.What's it mean?"

Isuddenly didn't know and kind of let a long string of vowels pass between mylips and then, "What about you?"

"Southpaw."

Thekid gave a minor laugh and I knew an explanation was incoming.

"AndI'm not even left-handed!" he said.

Southpawreclined in his bed.

"Fuckthis place, man. I can't leave until I pass their cognitive sobriety test, andmy guys are out running the border, stirring up shit. That's what I signed onfor. Not getting locked down when I bump my head."

Relativetruth and, "Yeah."

"Youget shot? I've been shot. Sucks."

Didn'teven have to say anything.

"HeySouthpaw."

"Yeah?"

"Yousee any other Units?"

"Sure.Here and there. There are usually two per FOBs. Sometimes more in Camps, too.But all pretty inconspicuous."

Ihad more years on Southpaw but I took his intel at face value.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah.There's, I think, uh, 106, and 988, and, oh yeah, 303. I don't think there'sany logic to the numbers. That is, there aren't nine-hundred eighty-eightUnits."

"Where'dyou train?" I asked.

"Well…"

"Comeon. I ran the EOP in either western Illinois or Iowa," and my voiceslipped out like I was talking in my sleep.

"Allright, all right. About an hour east of Portland."

"Huh.What do you guys usually run? Movement to contact? Mapping satjams? Good ol'sabotage?"

"Yep.Mostly MTC which leads to, well, pretty much everything else," saidSouthpaw.

Lull.The bedsprings disagreed with each movement.

"Hey,uh, Mer--"

"MeridienK."

"Howabout a joke, Meridien K?"

"Okay."

Southpawsprang from his bed and came over, got six inches from my face, dead-eyeserious, and for a second I thought I was about to get shived.

"You…"said Southpaw, a whisper that had that low growl of rabid dogs. "You… everkill a man?"

Theouter layer of steel was permanently glazed on my eyes, though a cruel shiverwent along my whole axis, maybe the pain jump in my torso. And then Southpawgave up the scaryface, all teeth and sudden laughs, and as he went back to hisbed and jumped onto the mattress, I got the non-joke and had my own smile,"got it" as well as anyone can under the circumstances.

"HeySouthpaw."

"Yeah?"

"Twonecrophiles are sitting in a bar. One says to the other, 'I could go for a coldone.'"

AndSouthpaw with maniac laughter.

"I'mstealing that. It's mine now."

"Takeit. Share it."

Andthen that temporary joviality dimmed as my body deliberately began to shutdown.

Thatnormal loudquiet of the FOB: AVs rolling, distant shouts, marching, cadence,all prepping for something that, collectively, would be bigger than any of us,bigger than all the FOBs across the border, the Camps, the Air Bases, biggerthan the whole war and--

"Howold are you, Southpaw?"

"Oldenough," with a bit of menace that wasn't menacing at all.

Ilaughed.

"Thefuck's so funny?"

"Nothing.That sounds like something I would've said when I was your age," I said toSouthpaw.

(Chapter 34 coming Wednesday, February 1, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 32: The Day They Would Be Judged (Again)

2012-01-27T00:01:00.006-06:00

Everyone came off the Lander with an oxygen mask huggingmost of their face and a tank strapped to their back. The light hit them hardafter months in the cozy darkness of deep space, and it gave them a hard squintand grimace like they didn't want to be there, that kid reflex of I Wanna GoHome.

Nowords between Us and Them. Sizing them up, them gawking at us, truer Martiansthan any science-fiction comic, comfortable in the dust and heat, no need forexcess O₂, as acclimated as we'd get before we choked the atmospheresome more. All of us in different clothes, some in freshly-retrieved and-washed business suits, like we were trying to impress them. Instead it cameoff like a bizarre pageant. The old joke that in ancient sci-fi movies everyonewore uniforms because it was like we were all on the same team. Over the yearson Red, nothing could be less true. We were even more divided than on Blue,where, there, it was liberal and conservative, theist and atheist that split usmost; Mars was civilian and military, and, among the former, sticking to yourown branch of science if you were a whitecoat; god help you if you were one ofthe no-use civilians who tagged along for the ride; and, among the mil shop,there were the enlisted and the officers; even sharp divides between privatesand pfcs, pfcs and specs, specs and corporals and all those million differentvariants of sergeanthood.

Butthey didn't know it as intimate as we did. Maybe they saw it in our eyes, likewe somehow radiated this We Don't Want You vibe. No one was openly glad to seeanyone except Intihar, whose brother came off the transparent jetway with aleashed dog in its own doggie-molded surface suit, and if the ice, then, soondidn't break, guns might've gone off as we killed them all and stole their foodand hooted and hollered and threw rocks at the Lander. Ben and I stuck close toa cluster of natives, not eager to introduce ourselves as the crazyMountainmen. Those stories would come later, hopefully after Ben got his damnrocket, because I was getting pretty close to guessing what he wanted it for.

Thecivilians came out, the men and women, no children despite the rumors, andIntihar's brother and their dog. The Soviets immediately swarmed them, brokenEnglish to Intihar and Intihar 2, cooing Russian at the dog, a permanentaffection for space dogs; space-dog Laika has shrines in the motherland, is anational hero, somehow odd for a name that translates to "Barker."

Therest all filed around the side of the ship, where a panel of the gargantuanLander lifted up and sort of spit out their whole living quarters, which seemedto have been taken from M3, hidden up there above the butterscotch. It seemedlike a straight-up Fuck You to some of us, a We Don't Want To Live Where YouLive tell-off, already before introductions or anything, but shit, none of usknew them, and Ben and I would be back up on the half-mountain soon enough,letting all the rest of the mils and civs and neo-zombies and lifers do thesocializing for us, spread the rumors, collect them, cycle them back throughour covert channels. With M3 boosting the civilian population past themostly-military M2, we figured being on The Civilian Side would be important.No doubt Ben would suddenly pivot and get all buddy-buddy with Elliott TheCivilian, playing his own marked Meridien cards, always scrounging for theangles, for a cache of favors.

Therequisite mil attaché trotted out, led by a surf-suited two-star general thatColonel Tibbits immediately intercepted, offered his crispest salute, abone-crushing handshake, and then he whisked the general away for thefifty-cent tour.

Therest of the procession was a twilight zone of logic, an LSD hallucination Inever had. Offloading: Horses and their handlers, more dogs, some American,some Soviet, dogs don't speak languages, do they? Cats in cages, birds incages. The Lander turning into a clown car as bigger and bigger vehicles cameoff, more Rovers, jeeps, then a backhoe and a goddamn full-sized bulldozer, notthe mini one we used to clear the road to the caves. Then a steamroller, then -I shit you not - a cement mixer. The gear kept coming and it didn't get anyless weird. Then came all the furnishings you'd expect for a small-town townsquare: Park benches, a stone fountain in four sections, a statue of, forwhatever reason, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Soviets had two, one of Lenin, oneof Stalin. Then in three sections, giant, embossed blocks pulled out by atractor, first "NEW," then "MARS," then "COLONY"in English and Cyrillic, none of them pussy European languages for themcountries too chickenshit to fly.

"NewMars Colony… whatever happened to the Old?" I said.

"Jesusfucking christ. If this was on the Lander, what the fuck is up on M3? The restof a city?"

"Lookslike it," I said.

Intiharfinally came over after the Soviets joined their comrades and stopped hoggingthe Intihars' dog. Our man was accompanied by a new arrival, suited up, thespitting image of Intihar passed through a lens that aged him about five years.

"Heyguys, this is Mike and Frank," said Intihar.

"Whichis which?" asked Ben.

"Oh,ha ha, right, yeah, Mike is my brother, Frank is the dog. Mike, this is BenMeridien and John Kraid. Guys, Mike Intihar."

Handshakesall around, genuine politeness given our friendship with Intihar was more realthan political, and by default that courtesy would extend to his brother. Andtheir dog.

"Meridienand Kraid. Like Meridienkraid, that planet, right?" asked Mike.

"Thefuck you know?" Ben demanded.

"Sorryabout that," said Intihar. "I told Mike."

"Butjust me, I swear," said Mike Intihar.

"Youtold Brian?" I asked Ben.

"Wewere having a few drinks one night and--"

"AndI wasn't invited?" I asked.

"Ithought you quit drinking!" said Ben.

"Idid! But you could've invited me!"

"Heyguys, how about you leave it on the mountain, hey? Anyhow," and a Intihargave a hand flourish like models showing off prizes on game shows and,"welcome to Mars, Mike. We call it Red most of the time," saidIntihar. "Mars just sounds too impossibly futuristic or something. AndRoman God of War, et cetera. Bad vibes. And we call the other place Blue."

"Youmean earth?"

Earthas E-word already, the same sting, the clenched-teeth reaction whenever someonesays - apologies in advance - nigger or cunt.

"Um…yeah," said Intihar.

Miketo Ben with, "So you're the man who wants to talk to one of our techs.Something about a rocket."

Iwas falling fast out of the loop, quickly recovered when Ben turned and gaveone of those I'll Tell You Everything Later looks.

Smalltalkfrom Intihar to Mike, "How was the flight?"

"Idon't even know, man. They just thawed us out like two hours ago."

"Noshit?"

"Ifeel fine, though. And Frank looks good, hey, Frank?"

Mikepet Frank's surface suit. Frank stared up at us, marginally colorblind butstill sensing something not right, probably the sanest of all us mammals.

"Gethim out of that suit. He'll be fine. Let dogs be dogs," said Ben.

Mikegave Intihar a Look, and Intihar gave Ben a Look. One of those Rules: You neverfuck a friend's ex-girlfriend, you never play another man's guitar without hispermission, and you never give advice concerning someone else's dog.

Butit seemed Mike considered the suggestion. And, given Ben, he'd push Mike overthe edge.

"Comeon, man. Look at me. Look at your brother. If you don't believe us, take offyour mask right now. You look like a cancer patient with it on."

Intiharwas never one to back down from a dare and it seemed his brother followed themold. Without hesitation Mike took off his fishbowl. He had that First Breaththat always scares the hell out of you, trying to fill your lungs withsomething taken for granted, something that isn't around, like going up to theRocky Mountains for vacation and taking a ten-mile hike the first day, wastedjust walking up the sloped parking lot to the trailhead.

"Justbreathe, Mike. You'll be lightheaded a bit but you'll turn out fine," saidIntihar, leaving out the caveat of you'll be fine… in a few months.

Mikebent at the waist and stood and he was all right.

"Christ.It's like when I'd panic and smoke to calm down the day before a marathon. Andthen I'd get my ass kicked in the marathon."

"Youran marathons and smoked?" Ben asked.

"You'vegot three daughters and a wife and you're on Mars?" Mike shot back with agrin, crossing a barrier he, honestly, didn't have much business crossing.

Iwaited to see if Ben had a knife stashed somewhere, since that moment, morethan any other time, would be the perfect opportunity for the first shanking onRed. But for whatever reason, Ben went with it, laughed a ha-ha ha-ha, like hecould shrug off the fact that his family roster somehow became public knowledge.If it was anyone else who made the crack, Tibbits or that two-star, Benwould've put a death-grip on their throat until their face went purple andtheir heart gave and they involuntarily shit themselves.

"Nowtake the dog out of the damn suit," said Ben.

Mikeand Intihar both worked at it, unzipping panels that had more zippersunderneath, locked seals to rotate, Frank squirming all the way through, andthen he was out, out in the open, already panting from the heat, first a noiselike he was going to throw up, then a hoarse breathing rhythm, rough but alive,finally visible, a brown mutt with a black pirate's patch over one eye and heimmediately smelled the ground and sniffed deep and sneezed and shook and wasfine.

Benbent down and talked in a voice I never heard before. It was like asix-year-old version of himself waking up on Christmas morning.

"Yeah!Good puppy!"

"He'ssix," said Mike.

"Alldogs are puppies," Ben said.

Benrubbed Frank behind the ears and Frank's tail moved so fast you could barelysee it.

"Sit.Lay down."

Frankcomplied.

"Yeeeeeaaaaah!"

Benlooked like he was attacking him. Frank rolled over and Ben vigorously rubbedhis belly. Frank then got up and sat patiently, tail still erect, wagging,waiting to play dominant-submissive with Ben some more.

Thesound of some sniffles and it was right at my ear. I turned and Intihar's eyeswere red and puffy like how eyes normally looked below the dustline, but he waswiping away tears.

"Ohmy god," he said, voice shaking like a burning leaf and, "god, I'm soembarrassed. I… I don't know. I just don't know," and he crouched and petFrank the dog.

Furflew off, like Frank was blowing four excess coats, probably a byproduct of thedeep freeze. But the hairs settled on the dust and blended in with thehard-packed rocky soil underneath and, besides, who'd get on our case to policeanything up like that?

Benkneeled again and put his face an inch from the dog's. It was like we alldisappeared, and it was just Ben and the dog on Mars.

"You'llbe fine, boy," Ben said to Frank. "Just you wait. You'll be allright."

Auniversal emptiness to that phrase, You'll Be All Right and Everything's Finesaid to too many cancer patients and housefire survivors. But Ben, somehow,said it with an assuring empathy. Nevermind that Frank didn't have to worryabout all this bothersome Consciousness.

Iwas waiting for--

(Chapter 33 coming Monday, January 30, 2012.)

The kind of notes I take while prepping Film 3

2012-01-25T14:16:00.000-06:00

Meridien K - Chapter 31: The Condition (Again)

2012-01-25T00:01:00.006-06:00

The room seemed to get colder each minute. Like a classicinterrogation seen a million times in a million movies. Wondering, then, howmuch time had passed. No clocks in the room, and when it was the only timepiecearound, I was irrationally wary of my own wristwatch. No sound. No hiss fromthe visible air duct. It could've been an hour or five minutes. I was nevergood at gauging blind time. And no double-mirror or cameras to monitor myreaction. I was alone.

Thedoor opened and someone in a suit came in with my file. When he sat across thetable from me, his tie flopped onto the table, and he pushed it down into hislap. He opened my file and read from it. I couldn't tell if it was a show or ifthe man, really, had never looked at it before.

"RobertMeridien Kraid," he said.

"Yes."

"Fifteen.You don't look fifteen."

"Oh?"and guarded, austere, probing whether or not to raise my shields.

"Relax,Robert. This isn't an interrogation."

"Seemslike an interrogation room."

Iwas playing it too obvious. I did that when I was nervous or felt threatenedor, in that case, both.

"Itdoes," he said, looking up from the file.

"Isuppose you want to give me the once-over, maybe the twice-over before you letme in. Make sure I'm not a spy."

"Andwhy would I think that, Robert?"

"Peoplecall me Bobby."

"Pardon?"with a tilt of the head, like he didn't hear what I just said.

"Mymother calls me Robert. Everyone else calls me Bobby."

"Thissays your mother is dead."

"That'sright," and my instant reaction, no recoil at the insensitivity, maybepart of a test.

"Partof the reason you're volunteering for a job that everyone knows could very wellkill them?"

"Idon't plan on getting killed, sir, but yes, if you must know, the death of mymother has caused a certain rift in my family that has led us to differentpaths."

"Isee. I also checked the file of your brother, Ridley. A captain about to endhis time with us. A solid record."

"SoI've heard."

"Youhear often?"

"Mybrother and I don't speak often, sir."

"Please,I'm not a 'sir,' Bobby."

"Fairenough."

"You'restill awfully defensive, though."

"Ithink that's the room's effect."

"Itis," he said with a laugh. "I just came in last week. You're my firstcase here."

"Case?"

"Icheck the file, ask you a few questions, then send you on your merry way."

"Ithought the Forces needed bodies and didn't ask questions."

"Well,Bobby, that depends. What do you want to do in the Forces?"

"Mybrother said you pick at the end of training."

Theman leaned back in his chair, stared at a particular point in the ceiling,looked genuinely unsure what to say, looked at me, kept his posture and bodylanguage open, tried to cut through my natural defenses.

"Yourbrother said that? What about Lieutenant Matakis who sent you here?"

"Youmean Seth?"

"Seth,sure."

"Yeah,he said the same."

"Sothat's what you want? Get on a southbound bus and go through gruntschool?"

"Iwas thinking of becoming an officer. Join the EOP. If it's still around."

"Oh,of course. But I beg pardon. I usually handle cases for enlisted men. You'rethe first officer candidate I've interviewed."

"Itseems like I'm the first for a lot of things," I said.

"Isthere something fundamentally wrong with that?" the man asked.

Ididn't say anything.

"Letme tell you this, Bobby. I'll tell it straight. You know a fair deal about theForces. You know about the war. But what you don't know, what your brotherdoesn't know, and what Seth doesn't know, is that we're looking for specialcases. Certain young men for certain assignments."

"What,like you're looking for operators?"

"Notexactly. You fit a Profile, Bobby. You have a certain…" and his handsshaped like he was holding a ball midair and rolling it back and forth, midair,between his finger, "Condition."

"Doesn'teveryone?"

Backto the file and, "Your voluntary medical records show a tendency towardobsessive compulsion, bipolar disorder, a cluster of anxiety disorders, andschizoid personality disorder. Do you know what this means?"

"Ina general way or a DSM VII way?"

"Both."

"Areyou saying the Forces doesn't want me?"

"Theopposite, Bobby. Think of it this way. Don't think of your Condition, yourProfile, your whatever, don't think of the negatives. Think of the positives.Someone borderline OCD knows their details. Someone with bipolar disorder, whenin a sustained hypomanic state, functions at the height of their abilities. Aschizoid person is very detached. These can be admirable qualities."

"Youwant hopped-up, cold-blooded killers?"

"Ofcourse we do, Bobby. I'm not going to lie. But you also happen to score in theninety-eighth percentile in most of your testing, a few cases in theninety-ninth, which usually means a perfect score. Your prelim IQ screeningplaces you in… well… let's just say there aren't a lot of people like youaround. And you're young."

"Impressionable."

"Let'snot make this malicious, Bobby. You're here on your own free will. What if Iwas to tell you that you could quit at any time? That at any point duringtraining, deployment, or leave, you could walk away?"

"What?"

Ashrug and, "You don't like training, you don't like killing, you seesomething that fucks you up inside, you get a minor wound, whatever, and youcan walk away at anytime."

"Ifmy legs get blown off can you wheel me away?" I asked.

Asmile from the man that, for whatever reason, was polite.

"DoI need to explain further?" the man asked.

"Whywould you let that happen?"

"Becausethe Forces are changing, Bobby. You think we want to keep kids enslaved totheir contracts and drag down morale?"

"Idon't know what you want."

"Wewant people exactly like you, Bobby. Smart, self-motivated individuals forspecial assignments. Special units that operate under little authority so theForces won't have to babysit. Units that can go out on assignments for days,even weeks at a time."

Helet it hang out there in the dead space.

"Wemade some changes to the EOP. At the end you're not part of the Forces proper.You're… something else. But you get college training, military training, theworks. And no timelock contract on your end. Does this sound like somethingyou'd be interested in, Bobby?"

Isaid nothing, chose my words carefully, though he knew I'd say it.

"Look,I'm not an experiment. I'm not a labrat."

"Noexperiments. You'll be a Forces guard, same as the rest. The only experiment isthe Unit."

"Anexperimental unit?"

"Elevenother young men, like yourself. Training Stateside for a year or so beforeexpedited deployment."

"Andare they--?"

"Theyfit their own separate Profiles. You'll go by codenames. You'll never knowtheir real names. They'll never know yours. If you want to share, fine. But I'mguessing you wouldn't or won't. My apologies for speculating, naturally."

Isaid nothing for a while. It was still his move. I signed up for one thing andhe was pitching another.

"Look,Bobby. You're still in this room, listening. It means you're thinking aboutit."

"Itmeans I just haven't left yet."

"Andyou don't have to make a decision today and--"

Maybetoo eager and, "But I can quit? Anytime I want?"

"Anytime."

"SayI'm on the bus to Basic and I decide to quit."

"Thentell the driver to turn around."

Theair duct hissed and the room stayed the exact same temperature.

Istood. He stood. I crossed the distance around the long metal table. The echoof my footsteps dying against the walls. I extended my hand, shook his, nothingominous, no Satanic pact.

"Iquit anytime I want," I said.

"Youwon't want to," he said.

Ilooked down for the form to sign away my mortal soul but there was none.

"Don'tI have to sign something?"

"No,Bobby. We do things differently now."

(Chapter 32 coming Friday, January 27, 2012.)

Congratulations to Terrence Malick

2012-01-24T13:17:00.000-06:00

On behalf of everyone here at MPC, we're all absolutely thrilled that Terrence Malick was nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for his breathtaking (and our 2011 favorite) The Tree of Life. It seemed impossible because he wasn't nominated for a DGA award, and getting an Oscar nom without a DGA nom has happened very, very few times. So while it might not equal a win, it's a magnificent achievement for a man who made a film about family, human nature, and the entire universe.

Also fantastic: The Tree of Life's nominations for Best Picture, though the Academy, at press time, was unable to come up with the laundry list of producers attached to the project. (Producers are awarded the Oscar for any Best Picture.)

Even more fantastic: Though X-Men: First Class/Winter's Bone's (ha!) luminary Jennifer Lawrence (and one of JDK's indiecrushes) only announced the major categories, Oscar.com has the full list. And lo! MPC favorite Emmanuel Lubezki was nommed for Best Cinematography (as he was for Malick's 2005 epic The New World).

Best of luck to the aforementioned. It takes an enormous amount of courage to make a film like The Tree of Life in the studio system.

Random: Pretty hilarious that the only picture they could scrounge up of Malick was his on-set photo during the making of The Thin Red Line, which could've been taken anywhere between 1994 and 1997. Before his surprise presence with Christian Bale at an Austin music fest last year, seeing Malick (or just finding more than a handful of pics of him) is about as rare as seeing a leprechaun riding a unicorn underneath a triple rainbow.

One last thing: Glad I bought my Blu-ray/DVD of The Tree of Life when it came out, since every future pressing will have NOMINATED FOR/WINNER OF THREE ACADEMY AWARDS blah blah blah. But those apparently sell more copies of a movie, so if that means more people see The Tree of Life, then it's a necessary evil.

Meridien K - Chapter 30: The Day They Would Be Judged

2012-01-23T00:01:00.007-06:00

A kick to the ribs more vigorous than usual. Not nightbecause I smelled coffee. Closed eyelids, Martian sunrise like arapidly-preheating oven. Grunts on my behalf, still tired from a long night,wanting to sleep under my desk an hour or two longer. Confused because it wasusually viceversa, back on Blue and Ben asleep or hungover or still drunk, medoing the shoulder-shake, the Ben Ben BEN until he woke but instead:

"John!Get up and take a shower!"

Risingin an awkward way, avoiding the big bump of the makeshift desk as I crawledout, wiped the dust off my eyelids before I opened them. Benjamin ScottMeridien, clean-shaven, hair cut, stood there in a fresh white dress shirt withthe sleeves rolled up to his elbows, in wrinkled but proper khakis and hisnicer pair of canvas hiking boots.

"Thefuck?" I asked.

"Youforget, chief? You're going to miss the circus."

"Oh,shit."

"Thatright. Oh, shit."

"Why'reyou dressed up?"

Trademarksmirk and, "Because I need to make a good impression so I can bum somefavors, of course. Now get the lead out. Scuttle is they'll be here in twohours local."

Igot up and slammed half a cup of black coffee from a tin can on a hotplate, sohot I had to wrap my sleeve over my palm to lift it and sip its nectar. I wentoutside and stretched, looked over my dominion, that gaping Red plain going onout there forever, past all the dry lakebeds, the hills, the haze of distantmountains, Olympus out there, still unclimbed once we shrugged our shouldersand moved on to redder pastures. I walked along the rock wall to our shower,stripped, showed my nakedness to the spirit of the world, rinsed in thelukewarm trickle of water, scrubbed, lathered in the hardwater the best I couldwith diluted shampoo.

Outsidein the plastic bin Ben had laid out an outfit similar to his, my blue dressshirt somehow ironed, given it had been wadded up in my pack the whole of thetwo years on Red. Khakis rust-colored from the impossibility of avoiding thecolor of the world, like how you can't get grass stains out of jeans. Idressed, moved to our lesser half-hut where a scrap of mirror hung over awashbasin. I took the scissors and snipped away at my beard and hair, removedthe Mountainman from myself and became Dr. John Douglas Kraid, PhD. Finishingoff with the electric razor with a minuscule charge, not wanting to shave cleanbecause I always cut myself and I wanted the scruff to remind everyone that itwas still Mars.

Iwent back to the lab-office-living-quarters. Ben sat in an off-kilter lawnchair outside, looking out past the cliffs and down to the Settlement and theM2 Base. Some people already called it a Colony, if the Settlement even met theprereqs for that criteria. More like the outdoor grounds of a terminalsanitarium.

"Lookin'shark," Ben said, barely turning.

Ipulled up my splintery wood chair and sat next to him. He handed me aclosed-top porcelain mug of still-warm coffee fixed with sucrose.

"What'sthe drill?" I asked. "What's the angle?"

Benshook his head.

"Noneof that. Just go down and say hello."

"Whatdid Intihar say?"

"Intiharsaid not to scare them but to get down there before rumors kicked up about thecrazy men up in the mountains. Apparently we're quite famous back on… well…Elliott say anything?"

Along sip and, "Nope. You expected something? I feel bad for the kid.Probably still asks permission to use the latrine. He doesn't have the heart tostand up to Tibs."

"What'sthe load?"

"Horsesor some crazy shit. The ship's half American, half Soviet. The latter broughtdogs. One's named Laika, of course. A lot more women this time. They figure wehave enough scientists so it's mostly straight-up civs. I heard there's afertility doctor. Guess some asshole wants to be first guy to bust his nut andplant a seed on Red. This seems more like a sight-seeing tour. Mothership'sstaying in orbit and sending down a Lander. There's talk about turning M3 intoa space station in sync, like how we turned the moon into a fancy rest stop. 3prolly wants to hang up there so the mil guys can quest for water so they canfuel the Lander to go back to momma, and for M-Whatever and all that shit to goback home once they show up and offload and take the tour. Like Red is justsome place to come and gawk at. Maybe we could go into business building achairlift ride up Olympus? Charge visiting CEOs a thousand bucks a pop. Fuckit. When we’re among the unwashed masses we should visit the lemonade stand andbuy some pirated Hollywood DVDs. God. I love America."

Ilooped a tie around my neck and thought better of it. Then I set it on my deskand wondered where the hell Ben found a necktie. Outside we both took the ragsnear the Rover and brushed off the solar panels, took the tarps off the tenderspots where the dust fucked it up. We got in and didn't bother with theseatbelts, we knew every bump along the road, knew when to hang on to therollcage.

"Let'sgo join the natives."

Benwas still trying to ride all the way down the half-mountain without touchingthe brakes. It was like playing chicken with himself. I was used to it, sheerdrops and certain death and all, not much different than doing the same thingon bikes when you were a kid, except instead of a skinned knee you'd end up asa fresh corpse. It was our calling card, anyway, going so fast we kicked up awake big enough for the Settlement below to think a duststorm was coming. Andthen the long winding switchbacks we had carved on the hillside, tires lockedand drifting around hairpin turns like rally racers, finally down to our ownprivate road - though not paved like those over by the Base - that encircledour half-mountain and split off to caves where a rotating squad wentunderground to look for water. Ben pulled the handbrake and brought the Roverto a hard stop that summoned a wall of dust.

Whenit cleared, Intihar was there, holding a handkerchief to his face. I hadn'tseen him in a while. He suddenly didn't look so doughy-faced anymore. Istood up and he grinned, probably knowing with me around there'd be about fiftypercent less bullshit and shoulder-punching than if it was Ben alone. We shookhands.

"Howyou doing, Brian?"

"I'mdoin' swell, John. Real swell. Excited about the landing."

"Yeah?Anything special."

"Mybrother's on the ship. He brought our dog. Can you fuckin' believe it?"

Benstood there and gave Intihar a hard stare. But instead of muscling him later hejust threw it out there, I didn't care, it was sort of public knowledge, and Iwas over it, it happened, and it happened to a lot of people.

"That'sgreat, asshole. You do know that John's brother is dead, right? So wipe thatgrin off your shit-stained face," said Ben.

Intihar,even with a bad Mars sunburn-tan, went pale, said, "Oh, shit, John, I'mreally sorry, I didn't know and--"

"Relax.Ben's still in asshole mode," and a turn to my counterpart and, "Butaren't you supposed to be nice to these fine folks from the homeworld?"

Benspat on the ground, said, "What homeworld? Home's up on themountain."

"Hey,Brian," I said, "Ben here is trying to convince me he doesn't have anagenda for these M3 types."

"Comeon, Ben, you're so full of shit," said Intihar. "You told me youwanted to hook up with their aerospace engineer and build yourself a rocket.Talking about it like it's some Gravity's Rainbow shit. To what end, I don't fucking know. Send off fireworks orsomething equally dumb."

"Lasttime I tell you something I don't tell anyone else," said Ben.

"Whatabout Elliott?" I asked with minor incredulity, having long since targetedElliott as our man concerning those affairs.

Benwith another ball of saliva for the ground and, "Yeah, what about him?That's worked out really dandy for all of us. We want an informant and we endup with a timid mouse."

Iwasn't in the mood to debate. I looked around the Settlement, still separatefrom the cement barracks over at the makeshift Base, both of which wereprobably as hot and dusty as our own shack. It wasn't early, but most of the M1leftovers were waking up, most probably on different parts of their Blue-Redadjustment clocks. They looked at us with the same weird detachment as theywould a full-fledged, bug-eyed Martian as they made their way toward theShowers and the Mess over at the Base. From the opposite direction came abusload of the cave crew coming in from an overnight spelunk. Morning everywhere,or at least the morning routine; people going for their coffee same as we hadours.

Anothersyrup-thick Benjamin Meridien plot: What did he want with a rocket? Why suggestcutting Elliott loose when, eventually, we'd need another mind like his? Westarted walking toward the Base and the new strip, leaving the Rover behindbecause we'd get an earful if we kicked up any more dust.

Onlywaiting remained, nothing else to do, really, except gravitate toward the Mess,where everyone congregated and had their own bits of gossip that Ben and Inever cared for. Inside, we encountered the usual stray glances of the mil guys,standing guard for no reason other than that it was their assignment. Ourreputation preceded us, Men of the Mountain, or worse: rebels, rogues, goons,know-it-alls, no room in our hearts for the American flag stitched on theiruniform sleeves. Inside, Intihar got in line for chow and Ben and I sat in theback corner. Everyone wore their Sunday best. Other than the work-a-dayprivates and corporals, who wore their fatigues, most others wore their ClassAs, all ribbons and medals, Colonel Tibbits with his colonel's hat that Icertainly'd never seen before. A tension in them, too, an electric current,like gearing up for a performance review or a meet with the goddamn DefenseSecretary. None of the M2 mil guys were wearing their surface suits, and mostof them looked like they were going to keel over.

"Lookat those motherfuckers," said Ben, reading my mind. "Huffing andpuffing and it's not going to help them. If it's day one for them with Red air,it's day one. Shit, when we crashed it was about twice as hard."

"Likebreathing through a straw," I said, that old echo, how we told our storyto the new people, how we told it over the comm to Blue for those who were intothat, for that nameless audience who could never talk back to us or heckle us.

"Nowit's like two straws," Ben said.

Intiharcame back with a synthegg omelet, freeze-dried apples, and powdered orangejuice.

"Man,"he said, making quick work of the omelet, "I can't wait for those hippiesthey have on M3 to set up a farm so I can get some fresh eggs and meat. I'm nota frugivore like you," with a plastic fork pointed at Ben.

"Well,don't get too comfortable," said Ben.

"Oh,I'm getting comfortable," said Intihar. "I went and re-upped withTibbits yesterday. I'll get bumped to sergeant and be on Red as a noncom forthree more years. Then, hell, I'll stay."

"Noshit?" said Ben with some genuine surprise, a gleam in his eye.

Therewas a sudden sink in my spirits, however juvenile; like Ben was captain of therecess kickball team and his first pick became Intihar instead of the default:me.

"Yeah.I love this place," said Intihar. "It's an alien planet! Howstraight-up fucking cool is that? Plenty of land. Pretty sunsets. Even if theyturn it into a giant gas station, at least I'll have been one of the firstsettlers, eh? I'll be as old as you farts if that ever happens. And, shit,women and pets and better air on the way, right? No nuclear wars in sight. No,well, war in the, uh, typical sense. And, obviously, why the fuck come here ifI'm just going to turn around?"

"Fuckin'A," said Ben.

Ichecked my watches. Then I checked them again.

"Patience,John."

"Sincewhen were you one for waiting?"

"Whenall you can do is wait. When that's all you can do, John."

(Chapter 31 coming Wednesday, January 25, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 29: The Known Universe (Again)

2012-01-20T00:01:00.006-06:00

One bang on the side of the prefab like the scuttle-scrapeof a mortar. The klaxons didn't go off and I gave it no mind until a secondsound matched the first. Horse and I were the only ones in the prefab; the restof 716 went off on a mission to find a shield for the turret or something.

"Youhear that?"

"Hearwhat?" said Horse, looking up from a thick tome.

Myown book down and a third very loud knock on the wall.

"Thisis bullshit," spit to no one.

Outsidein my Death black. Around to the rear of the prefab, positioned on a desertedlot for no-longer-there-even-though-they-were-there-the-day-before tents, weretwo crews of Regs, one near and the other in a strict formation away from mostothers. I had to process the sacks on the ground as bases and an overturnedcrate as the pitcher's mound and our prefab as the backstop.

Noone bothered to stop. A change-up and a Reg staff sergeant swung early. Theball went past the invisible catcher and smacked 716's prefab.

"Whatthe fuck do you think you're doing?"

Theremust've been traces of authority in my voice because they snapped to, like somebrass was prowling the back alleys of the FOB. They saw me and my uniform andthe pitcher called time and jogged over.

"Hi,"he said.

"Hey."

Heonly had a buck sergeant's stripes but he seemed to be in charge. I jerked athumb at the prefab.

"We'retrying to get some reading done in there. What? You don't have a fuckin'catcher?"

"What?I thought that building was empty."

"It'snot."

"Huh."

Thesergeant, unfazed, offered his glove and, "If you're in, it evens up theteams. Winners get off nightwatch for a week."

Noteven a look at the glove and, "I'm left-handed."

"Um…what?" like it was a logic puzzle.

"Thatglove is for right-handed throwers. I throw left."

"Oh.Um… you think you can manage?"

SuddenlyI felt all their eyes. It didn't seem prudent to retain my gruffness.

Anexcuse as good as any: "I'm waiting for orders."

"Oh,right, right, sorry, sir," and then to the firstbaseman, "HeyBlackmar! Go get something, uh, soft to, uh, absorb the impact of the, uh,soundwaves so this fine man can get some reading done."

I took a step back, ready to turn and let them forget my face.

"Sorryabout the noise, sir. Won't happen again, sir."

Notin a mood to correct all the Sir nonsense and, "Appreciated,sergeant."

Ilingered around the corner and watched the supposed Blackmar reappear with acot mattress, quickly folded in two and held in place by rocks. The sergeanttossed a pitch and it made no sound.

"Batterup!"

Andthen the staff sarge--

--atthe plate, bat touching the far end, that slow-speed check swing, bent knees,eye on the pitcher, eye on the ball, no guaranteed fastballs anymore at thatage, some curveballs that were mostly junkballs. I still swung at mosteverything. The pitch and I connected with the ball the wrong way, the alloyvibrating hard, stinging my hand like I grabbed hold of a live wire. Foul ball.Then a clean strike, a curve outside that wasn't a strike but I swung anyway,my long reach a match for my height. Batting gloves tightened, the wind-up,ball from the pitcher's hand, followed all the way in, my eyes almost down atmy cleats with the swing, the ball's physics-defying dance over my bat, astrike the catcher dropped, yells from the bench to run to first, those awkwardfew steps of the unexpected, bat still in hand before discarded, a few shortsteps before I was tackled from behind, face full of brown-red dirt,motherfucker didn't need to hit me that hard, claps for the opposition, back tothe bench, my mom close behind the chainlink fence with the spiral-boundscorebook, a big K on the diagram of a baseball field. Drab enthusiasm,solidarity with teammates, hell, not teammates, just guys who happened to siton the same bench, played in the same defensive field, neither teammates norfriends. To the back of the bench, my Newport Knights cap's brim pulled low tohide the tears, the fucking tears even though I was seven goddamn years old,too old for that shit, saltwater tracking down my dusty face, the look of mydad burning a hole in my neck, dad seated next to Ben Meridien, who drank anIrish coffee out of a covered mug, his three daughters dragged along for apithy attempt of a setup, Hey, Isn't The Guy Who Just Struck Out Kind Of Cute,You Know, John Kraid's Kid, Bobby?

Wewon but, hell, when was the last time I really felt I won? All the non-existentself-esteem of pre-pubescent depression. Back through the home team's foreignland to the known streets of Easthaven. My dad driving and my mom in thepassenger seat.

"I'mgoing out west next week," said my mom.

"Again?"

"There'sstill work to be done. And come on, John, it's not like you don't--"

"Fine,K."

"John--"

"Nono no, go. You have to. It's your job," and in a crude syncopation toapproximate a backward sarcasm, "Because, shit, we all know how important it is how wildlife reacts to radiation and how fast it comes back, because when all the real bombs fall and not some nuke waste in a goddamnsuitcase, we'll need to know what's safe to eat."

"Areyou done?"

Sittingon a towel because my ass was all grimy from slides into second on stolenbases, the one thing I could still do without fail, the Gift of Speed, dirtycleats shaking off their grime on the sedan floor that they'd make me vacuumthe next day. In uniform for a team, no, a Cause, a Cause I no longer believedin.

"Iwant to quit," I said to the front of the car.

Mydad, still driving, unintentionally veered into the oncoming lane as he turnedand looked at me.

"Whatdo you mean, quit? Quit what? School? Life? Come on, Bobby, be specific foronce in your life."

Thesilent disapproval of my mom, resigned to looking out the window at thenauseating rush of vegetation parallel to the roadside.

"Iwant to quit the team, dad. I don't like it anymore."

"Why?Because your batting average dropped from nine-hundred to three-hundred oncethe kids could start throwing curves?"

"Partof it, yeah."

"Youdon't have to be the star player, Bobby," said my mom.

"Thenwhy the fuck am I playing?" I asked.

"Hey!"said my dad.

"What?Ben says it all the time."

"Youshouldn't follow Mr. Meridien's example," said my mom, emphasis on Mister.

"Hisname is Ben," my dad grumbled, "and he has a doctorate. So if youwant to be proper, it's DoctorMeridien."

Gettingclose to home, wanting the conversation to end before it took place in a localeI couldn't escape, in the kitchen or living room or my cramped bedroom.

"I'llquit after the season," I said, trying to make a reasoned compromise.

"Bobby, honey,just because you struck out twice in a game doesn't mean--"

"Ifyou want to quit, go ahead," said my dad without any doubt in his voice,without any of those parental tricks that try to get in your head and make yousecondguess your own thoughts.

Butthen that across-the-middle look from mom to dad, that Shouldn't We DiscussThis Between Ourselves? look.

Ididn't need to try to hide a smile. It was only a quarter of the way throughthe season, early, but late enough to know I had gone from a baseball all-starwith a shot at a prep-school scholarship to a passable firstbaseman who simplylost the ability to strike fear into backing-up outfielders when I strode tothe plate. And not like the season was interfering with school or my dwindlingsocial life or the scant Quality Time left with twelve-year-old Rid. That lookfrom my mom to my dad more indicative of the growing rift in which my dad gaveus approval to, in my mom's opinion, run wild and focus all and everything onacademics. She didn't see that as a recipe for a well-rounded childhood. Thedisintegration of the American Family encapsulated in one look from thepassenger seat to the driver, simply in the proclamation of quitting baseball;in my mom's announcement of repeatedly going out to the Zone to work onsomething other Family Members (dad) didn't particularly condone; in openlyswearing; in feeling uncomfortable with those strangers in the car, who'd allget out of the car in the garage, bump into each other as we took off our shoesin the mudroom, retreated to our separate places in the house, my dad to hisoffice upstairs, my mom to her office in the master bedroom.

Night.

Awakein bed, staring up at the invisible ceiling. Looking at all the separate partsin the pitch-black room, seeing only the LEDs from various electronics, thedifferent-colored stars of my universe-room. But we were on a giant rockhurtling through space and I couldn't even feel it, shut up in some bedroom insome town.

Iremembered when I was a few years younger. Back then I had a bad sleepwalkinghabit that I obviously couldn't quit by sheer force of will. But I was lucidthe whole time. Like those locked-in syndromes, except I was moving and my eyeswere open but I couldn't stop whatever it was that I was doing. Not that I wasmurdering captured woodland mammals in the garage.

I'ddescend to the cavernous main level of the house, lit dimly by rope lightingabove the cupboards, lights over the bar. My mind, half-asleep, fractured it asan impossibly-foreign, post-human landscape. My legs took me down to thebasement, turning on a CRT television to the station that played old multicamlaughtracked sitcoms that were as old as my parents. Jokes long past theirexpiration dates. Sitting there nightmare-eyed, unable to blink, to shut myeyes, to look away, to turn, to move. Paralyzed. Wanting to do something,anything, to jump out a plate-glass window and run howling down the street,terrorizing the neighborhood before a Police helicopter landed on top of me andpinned me down, SWAT teams coming out and unloading whole canisters of pepperspray in my face. I Want To Get Out And I Can't and watching old sitcoms, haha, he tripped down the stairs, ha ha, jokes about the war, the wars. Risingpanic, the pregame to full-on panic attacks foretold by a combination ofsleepwalking, night terrors and vicious anxiety, something that seemed possibleto cook up a heart attack in an otherwise-healthy seven-year-old.

Thinkingabout the summer, barely begun, knowing already that it'd end before I figuredout to do with it, all that Time discarded like paper bets at a racetrack.Thinking about some of the few things Rid ever told me about school, about how,god, about how he felt, how he said he was going to join the Forces aftergraduation because he was so crippled, so institutionalized, that he didn'ttrust his own free will, even if it meant marching into another giant Machine.Ridley: Not so much His Own Worst Enemy but His Own Worst Nothing, already soGone that I once overheard Mr. Meridien crassly joke that Rid wouldn't even beat his own funeral and--

Andthen when the curse had its fill of nostalgia-laced programming I'd turn offthe television and, still devoid of free will, retreat back to my room, pastthe closed door and the arrow pointing to both "DO NOT DISTURB" and"ASLEEP" on the homemade sign scrawled on Rid's door.

Mycloistered bedroom. Hands that weren't my own pulling the sheets to my chin,eyes locked open, staring up at the blackness, the conscious part of my mindknowing there a bumpy textured ceiling there; and I'd look past it, up into theattic, up into the smear of Easthaven city lights, then past that, to the upperlayers of the atmosphere, the magnetosphere, past the bright wash of the moon,all the way up there in that ether, the Void, feeling myself rise until,without knowing it, I was asleep.

(Chapter 30 coming Monday, January 23, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 28: The Endless Tower

2012-01-18T00:01:00.008-06:00

I had worked on a few doomed projects. The typical undergradfuck-all pursuits of cold fusion and perpetual motion, anything, really, tosolve the energy crisis and once-and-for-all end The Petroleum Age. Theoreticallightspeed travel. Cutting holes in spacetime or warping its immaterial fabric.Idealism followed by disappointment came with the territory. That decisivemoment of failure sneaks up on you and makes you realize all those late nightsin the lab or observatory or on a fucking-freezing roof were for nothing, thatyou're chasing invisible dragons. You try to fight it, keep going, even thoughthat nagging feeling falls like fog, that you're wasting the night, everynight, all that time that'll come back to you when you're old and dying,wishing you had that time for something else, anything else, spent with otherpeople, maybe; maybe even your disintegrating family, maybe doing somethinglike learning Russian or how to cook or how to tie nautical knots.

Thatmoment was much delayed on Red. The surroundings made it impossible to thinkthat anything we did was folly. Ben and I accepted the grim possibility that wewere simply laying groundwork, that once we died someone else would take ourplace. A few half-joked, half-real Death Pacts that we would destroy all ourwork before we kicked it, just because, well, Fuck It, let the next in linestart from scratch, same as we did, back when we were fifteen-year-old roguespointedly-questioning tenured profs.

Webuilt another shack up above the dustline, cleaner clearer air but too high upthe sloping mountainside for the Rover until we built a road proper. When webrought up mattresses it was a given that we'd eventually move in there and,like old times, sleep under our desks. From our new roost we saw ColonelTibbits pick around our old shelter, probably wanting to claim the scrapmaterial to use for whatever kingdom he was building by the old M1 crash, itsshards almost fully dismantled and cleared, a few more bodies pulled out forour redgrave cemetery.

Intiharhuffed it up the hillside to bring us supplies and fresh news and gossip everyweek. We were rarely heard from and we rarely went down. We were the Men of theMountains, as Martian as the dragon sky.

"Soap,shampoo, microwaveable chow, trash bags, and your precious fruit, Dr. Meridien.You guys need some razors? Those beards are looking fierce."

"Yousee a rank on this collar?" said Ben, pulling on his crewneck white T."Fuck that. Beards are noble. Besides, every time I get rid of one I can'tstop stroking my chin even though there's nothing there. And if everyone thinkswe're scary mountainmen, the beards will scare them faster."

Alaugh from Intihar, one of the few guys we both liked and trusted, and he tookoff down the mountain on a rickety bicycle to take orders from Lord Tibbits.

Typicalworkday, up there with a bandana over my nose and mouth since the wind was, forwhatever reason, blowing up, blowing all that red all over everything, havingto wipe my eyepiece every five seconds. Cold one second, hot the next, wearinga ratty hooded sweat-stained sweatshirt I kept putting on and pulling off.Goggles in my pocket but wiping my red, teary eyes with dirty hands instead,blinking away what I could, rubbing in the rest. Punching in coords on theworn-down keypad on the side of the gear base of the telescope, the whir of thecorrections, filtering out the daytime and staring up into a black sky, maybegetting lucky and seeing a faraway star. But usually pure black. It was likethe lens cap was perpetually on.

"HeyBen, what're the XYZs of that brown dwarf you found?"

Noresponse. I turned and Ben's scope was pointed down at the airstrip.

"Theregoes the neighborhood," he said.

Iindulged him and watched. In a cleared square was a structure that looked farmore semi-permanent than our pauper's Settlement. The walls were timber andenlistees were putting up glareproof metal siding. It was about as big as anauto-body garage. Another Reg rested a plywood board against the front, wherethere was an open counter. He spraypainted "PX" onto it from amilspec stencil.

"Gladto see the kids finally put up a lemonade stand," said Ben.

"Fuck,"I let slip from my parted lips, not quite sure it if was my own thought or justBen invading my head.

"Dominoes,"he said, letting me fill in the rest.

Eighteenmonths on Red and already he seemed sick of it; sick of the bloat and thebullshit and the politicking, not sick of the Mission, our Mission on top ofit. I was starting to feel that way, too, and I increasingly would when theystarted construction on what would become their permanent Base. Transportingterrestrial civilization one Lego at a time, faster than we could keep up theterraformation. Some of the guys from M2 still wore their surface suits withoutfail, day in, day out. They probably used the ghastly self-cleaning module whenthey hooked themselves up to a hose, which basically simulated a carwash insidethe suit, emptying the diaper and spraying antibacterial water all over theplace, leaving them wet for a day depending on the severity of the sunlight.

"HeyJohn."

Waitingfor M3 to come with animals and vehicles. The fantasy gaining traction as areality; an inevitability. Driving BMWs on fresh asphalt. Hang-gliding off themountains and soaring above the deep deep trenches. A few decades later, maybedoing the same under a blue sky, heading home to a suburban subdivision,identical starter houses, only different by mailbox number. More women comingover. And kids. A hospital so men could fuck their wives or their girlfriendsand have a baby. A grocery store with carts with that seat in front for kidsand purses. Banal talk radio on the commute to work, down freeways lined withsound barriers and giant pines peeking above the tops. Traffic jams andgridlock and carpool lanes.

Tryingto clear out the cobwebs of those Benthoughts that had a bad habit of worminginto my ears.

"John,you have to check this out."

Iwas facing the opposite direction, out at the vast expanse of Frontier we'dnever, ever tame. But Ben was right. I knew he was right. I always knew. Whilehe knew it as an omen, I had to wait to see it before that stomach-pit feelingsank in. Mars wasn't ours anymore. It belonged to earth.

"JOHN."

"What?"

Benwasn't looking down at the construction. His scope was pointed up and he wavedme over with as much urgency as a thirdbase coach windmilling for the runnerto sprint for home. I came over. Ben grabbed me and shoved me toward thesecondary viewer.

"You'regonna miss it," he said.

"Misswhat?"

Iput my eye to the foam eyepiece. That familiar blackness.

"AndI'm looking for…?"

"Lookharder, jackass."

"Zoomin."

"IfI zoom you won't be able to see it. Look. That bright spot. And then that otherright next to it."

"Youfound a star. Congratulations."

"Keepinglooking."

Thesecond bright spot shimmered. But not the normal shimmer of an eye trick orsome weird ether. And the initial bright spot stayed locked; didn't give thetelltale wobble of a mass giant fucking with its gravity.

"Whoa."

"Whoais right."

"Thefuck is that?"

"Waytoo big for an asteroid. And look, that star to the right is tracking left andlook! Now! Now! That spot is moving across that star in the background. It's abacklit planet."

"Jesus.Is this vis spec?"

Beneither didn't know or kept going and, "I kicked it to the machine usingthe Equation. We'll get a read-out on the spectra. Mass of the star and theplanet. Or planetoid. It could be small. But, shit, this isn'tJovian-sized."

"What'sthe distance?"

"Holdon. Let me check the bounce. Should be through."

Benrushed off to the shack and ripped perforated paper spitting out of theprinter.

"Twohundred light years. Or… uh…" and a necessary beard-scratch,"two-hundred million. Fuckin' zeroes… But man… it's blueshifting like a motherfucker. So much for dark energy."

"Impossible.No prospects are that close. We went through the whole damned book of loggedextrasolars. Could be gone. And fuck-all if it's like that Gliese bullshit.That was a waste of two semesters."

"Orwe might just be seeing this for the first time," Ben said.

"Inthat case, it's too far. It's dead light. Especially if it's two-hundred million out and not two hundred."

Benwent back to the scope, leaned in and scrolled through the near-vis spectrum.His mouth perpetually agape, a squint to his off-lens eye like he was engagedin casual voyeurism.

"Sincewhen are you the optimist?" I asked.

"SinceMars became a pile of shit with too much dust, terraformation that was fuckedup in the first place, and mil guys trying to muscle us around."

Westepped back. That orb in the sky wasn't going anywhere if it hadn't Gonealready. Ben was smiling.

"Thatit's, right there. Call it. Write it down. Meridienkraid. Finally."

Flashbackto sophomore year. Ben getting his parents' house in order when his dad movedand I was out a lab partner and co-author for a final project. We couldn'tcoordinate scope time or lab slots so I wrote a paper on a theoreticalextrasolar planet and gave Ben the head byline. We called it Meridienkraid, ifonly because Kraidmeridien didn't have the same offkilter lyricism. The paper -devoid of any hard science, endless pages of raw speculation like I had missedthe day on The Scientific Method - got a C-minus and almost cost us ourscholarships.

Andthen up above the dust, up above Planet Mars, there it was, somewhere far pastplain perception. I looked up at the ruddy sky, its stone face betraying thepossibility of anything else out there.

"Andhere I thought we were going to have to move to, shit, Europa or Ganymede orsomething," said Ben. "I'm not living on any fuckin' moon."

Westood there a while, in sheer disbelief at the staggering odds of anything. Ifelt it was like geometric limit: An equation that curves down along the X-axisand goes on forever about to touch zero, but it never touches zero. Or it'slike a huge lottery jackpot when everyone buys a ticket and some televisiondumbass says your odds of winning are about the same as not buying a ticket atall; but if you don't have a ticket, you can't win at all. There's Zero, andthere's Almost Zero.

Anddown below, no one had any idea what we had seen. They were mere figures in thedust; players in a game that had no rules except survival.

(Chapter 29 coming Friday, January 20, 2012.)

Meridien K PSA

2012-01-17T19:37:00.000-06:00

It's like knowing the cops are about to come bust up the party.

So it looks like Meridien K will be coming to the Amazon Kindle and I might make money. And so will Amazon. And they probably won't want this book up for free.

While I won't be taking it down right now, the second Amazon warns me, I have to.

So, yes, I am selling out. And it feels really good.

However, there will be many ways to read this book for free, if only because I can give out a few copies here and there. If you haven't already been informed, e-mail me, message me on Twitter, hit me up on Facebook, send a carrier pigeon, etc. You will not be denied your god-given right to read Meridien K.

That said, this post doesn't speak well at all of my complete disregard for agreeing to Amazon's terms. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?

If nothing happens, tomorrow will continue your regularly-schedule Meridien K.

Meridien K - Chapter 27: The Death In The Sky

2012-01-16T00:01:00.008-06:00

Six-Four powered on his headset even though there wasnothing to say. Nothing to report. We ran the mission. They knew we'd get itdone and we did.

Wehad been on marathons ops before but none that seemed like they had any effecton any sort of war or warfighting ability. That is, before dawn broke and awhole platoon of long-range recon Chinese woke up and stretched and thoughtabout morning chow and then hit the ground when every muscle in their bodygave, long before any conscious thought could seep into their brainstem that716 had followed them for four days and in the space of two minutes killedevery last one of them. They fell where they stood, thirty-six dead fromforty-seven shots, so close together it came off as one loud bang surrounded byits own echo.

Mycheeks hurt from smiling all night, waiting for sunrise.

Withouta word we booked the hell out of there. All stealth from the days-long approachwas gone; nine kids in black, running through twig-snapping, weed-infested,root-snaring woods for three miles and then a seven-mile jog to our AVs parkedin another belt of forest. We layered the camo netting so well it took anotherhour just to find the damned things.

Andthen out in the AVs and the open air, our breath caught. Six-Four got on thehorn and we waited for whatever they wanted us to do next. We weren't tiredanymore. It was early, and we were hungry for more contact.

Commschatter as we drove:

"Theline's dead."

"What?"

"Itrang, though."

"What?Someone, like, hung up?"

"DoubtI dialed the wrong freq."

"Whothe hell else is going to get a call from the number designated for thisprestigious Unit?"

"Maybeit's those mountains blocking the signal."

"Wait,is that a satcomm or line-of-sight?"

"Ithas an antenna."

"Doesn'thelp."

"Hey,I got one for you: How many Six-Fours does it take to make a call tobase?"

"Shutup."

"Watchit."

"Ha!"

"We'renot going to solve anything by sniping each other," with a very particular emphasis.

Jokingaround. One of the rare times. Sure, we liked each other enough in a coworkersense, but the mission came first. It always came first. And sometimes thatmeant no talking for one, two, three days, maybe a full week. We had beensilent over fifteen hours and it was a human reflex to shoot the shit and worksome life into our vocal chords.

Iremember it was sometime in our second year in the field, three total if youcount the year Stateside and then the big bird over to an AO they never fullytold us about, only the assumption that we were along the line between Chinaand Pakistan. At the time we were operating out of a meager piece of realestate snug up to the border. Another FOB Whatever.

Weparked side-by-side in the two AVs. Six-Four got through to one of our handlersand once he flipped up his mic he relayed the next step. Half of us - my AV -were ordered for movement to contact; driving until engaged by the enemy fortwenty miles ahead, given the enemy had scrambled our satellite pictures yetagain and they needed a ground force to check it out. They sent us because theydidn't know what to expect. Could've been a parking lot for tanks, a nuke silo,or cracked pavement choked with dandelions.

Inever got Command's real opinion of 716. We seemed disposable but valuable. Iguess if you might be going up against a hard fight, you send your best.

Wewere starting to get a rep around Tent City. Not that there was any braggadociorelated to all that. It's just how it was. How we were trained. That's probablywhy they moved us again, so we couldn't turn into military folk heroes.

Six-Foursecond-guessed himself and tried to get hold of Command again. He wanted toconfirm that his AV was staying at the designated point twenty miles out fromthe closest lonely OP, and that the other vehicle - mine, with Caf GremlinHorse Mars Pointman - was heading out another twenty to try and rustle up sometrouble. I stood up on the turret, sat on the top of the AV and looked out atthe spread of wilderness, grassland and woods that looked no different thanrural Illinois. I had been cramped in the pointless rear of the AV driving in,and since we worked on rotation, my name was up top for gunner duties. No onehad been killed on the turret, so I wasn't worried that I was manning anunshielded .50 cal that left my whole upper body exposed; the obvious targetfor anyone or anything with a bead on one lone AV. We weren't complete idiots,though; whoever was up top wore a helmet.

Pointmanwas behind the wheel, his notebook spread on it, writing down, probably, thatSix-Four was trying to contact Command, Six-Four's voice on a loop one AV over.Caf chewed gum in the passenger seat, looking through his weapon's scope andthen a pair of binocs, calibrating each to the same preset for a reason thatI'm sure made perfect sense to him. Gremlin furiously scratched at a rash onhis scalp. Horse, to his right, looked very uncomfortable at all the dandruffybyproduct floating in his airspace from Gremlin's grooming. In the rearmostseats of the AV sat Pointman and Mars, whose only real possible use back therewas to hand up more ammo or, if we were in a kill zone, to pull up the armorplates and shoot out from the rear hatch; that, or there was always theopportunity for a suicide exit, same as how Slug took a hit. From the sound ofit, they were checking and rechecking their guns and the gear. Not a bad habitfor idle moments.

Pointmantapped my leg.

"Headingout."

Istood from my sit, put my dangling feet in the stirrups and gripped the turret.The AV raced forward, tires spinning, electrical engine whining as we gave agood-knowing-you-if-we-die wave to the second AV, calming to a steady eighty orso miles per hour, fast enough to evade contact; also fast enough to run intocontact with your ass hanging out. I kept shifting my weight over everynearly-invisible bump in the grass. I leaned forward and looked through thetiny off-kilter scope I taped on the turret above the front sights, and thewoods bordering that long grass straightaway barely changed; a blur of foliageas we raced past.

Thetwenty miles passed soon enough. Where we were looked like where we hadstarted. Pointman slowed to a stop and turned off the AV. Not that kind ofreckless, nearly-throw-you-off-the-turret handbrake stop-turn Caf oftenfancied.

"Everybodyout!"

Ilifted my legs and slid down the back before Pointman and Mars opened the backand exited. We all stood there dumbly, kind of hoping for incoming fire so atleast we'd have something to do. Instead, it was like a road-trip gas-stationstop without the gas station and without the road. Caf went to the edge of thewoods to relieve himself. The rest of us gravitated to the front of the AV,where Pointman spread out the patchwork map of the AO. None of us were in charge.But it's not like we didn't have a fucking clue what to do without someonepulling rank. We all looked at the map, said our piece.

"Isay we keep going."

"Ordersare to stop here."

"Orderswere movement to contact. No contact."

"Movementto contact for twenty miles."

"Whichis it? Movement to contact? Or twenty miles?"

"We'lljust go the rest tomorrow, anyway."

"Someonecall Six-Four."

"What'she going to tell us?"

"Xthe call to Six."

"Yousee, right here? Around the bend of those trees about… two miles up? That'suncharted territory."

"Idon't know. That's pretty far in. Some of the farthest we've gone past theborder."

"So?"

"Okay.Put it to a vote. We move to contact?"

Fourhands.

"Backto the OP?"

Onehand.

"Undecided?"

Caf.

"Gearup."

Ifthat wasn't enough of a prompt, a shell burst thirty yards behind us. Closeenough for a full-body flinch, a quick spasm, all the moisture immediatelysucked from my mouth. The physical reaction you can never fully escape, but wewere all calmly, quickly loading back into the AV, and by the time a secondarty piece hit ten yards back and scattered shrapnel around our rear tires, wewere speeding forward.

"Dammit."

"Six-Four,this is the forward element. Taking accurate artillery fire. Searching forforward observers."

Wethought we were out of range once we got up to eighty miles per hour. But thenone made a near-direct hit just above us. Thank bog I was helmeted, as most ofthe hot metal rained down on my cover, though some of it took a chunk out of myneck and made me bleed out all over the back of the AV, left an uglyhorseshoe-shaped burn-scar. I was fine, though, as was my uniform; enough of ascrub and bloodstains fade on black. They said that you're so amped when you gointo a hot zone that you can get shot several times and not notice until theaction is over.

Werounded the corner and there was nothing. In true 716 fashion, none of us saidanything when a big, black, old-fashioned helicopter appeared over the hilltopsand revved up its miniguns. And there I was, a nice, ripe,soon-to-be-char-broiled piece of meat sticking out of the AV, perfect bait,perfect target. The gunship closed in fast. Under its wings were needlepointmissiles, and even with its miniguns, I saw a door gunner prone behind a verybig gun.

"Evade."

"Gremlin,see if you can speed-gun the helo."

"Yep."

Allcalm voices, like we could reason away the helicopter, beat it with logic, makeit disappear with words.

"Keepit steady. It's going to lock our pace."

Ittook a second before I realized it was my voice. I wasn't surprised, then,since I was the only one who could do anything about it. We were runningwithout CAS or armor, thundering down a straightaway, and it'd be about twentyseconds before they could get a lock on us, fire off a missile, watch thesmoke, then send in their boys to sort out the mess and recycle our scrap metaland liquefied bodies into soda cans. Or maybe just fuck us up with the minigunand leave it intact, so they could gather the total lack of intel we carried onour persons.

Justme up there on my .50. Racing through rote memories of training, rememberingabsolutely nothing about how to take down a helicopter with an AV-mountedturret. I could take a dropship, sure, aim for the energy cells, but a chopperabout to blow me up? I needed tactics for older wars; I needed the spirit of areincarnated warrior to guide me through something that could've happened damnnear a century prior.

Thehelicopter matched the same velocity as our AV, trying to sync up for a missilelock. It was like we were both stationary. I death-gripped the .50 and aimedwith the front sights at the top rotor, at the "Jesus nut" that heldit together. I fired and didn't stop. The ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk of a heavymachine firing heavy bullets shook my whole being. Tracers streaked toward andaway from me. 12.7mm bullets glanced off the armored top of the AV. Sparksagainst their rotor. Waiting for the drop of the missile from the wing, itscontrolled fire propelling it forward, sending us to that Void as defeated men.Recoil from our speed, the terrain, my hands shaking like Terra's hand tremorin fast-motion, cartoon speed, so fast they were blurry.

Andthen a puff of smoke, the bird tilted sideways, fell into the trees from abouttwo hundred feet up, went silent. No explosion. No fireball.

Ahard handbrake stop. I jerked forward and was hit in the gut by the turret.

Outin tactical formation. Abandoning the AV down there for whoever was around tosteal it. Into the trees. Fanning out. Ten-foot spread. Eyes ahead and on theground, avoiding excess noise even though any crash survivor would expect awelcoming party. Silent as the trees. The brown of the bark and soil and hintsof green from the high canopy, then the washed-out clearing of the crashedhelicopter. Bodies curled around guns. Gremlin fell to a knee and shot everyonehe saw in the head. One of them flinched and flopped, either a miraculoussurvivor barely conscious, or a last firing of the nervous system, or a wilyChink waiting to get the drop on some cocky motherfuckers thinking they canshoot a bird from the air and take everything with it.

Ontop of the crash. No open flames. Only the burnt smell of electrical wiring andthe lingering odor of someone who had shit themselves in the fatal collision.It was all dark inside, some avionics under cracked glass. We pulled the deadfree and checked them for documents. Just the standard Surrender Card inEnglish, German, French, Russian, some rations, some good-luck talismans. Noneof that waste like family photos, letters home, letters from home. They wereprofessionals and we were professional scavengers, roaming the AO likevultures.

Pointmancalled it into Six-Four, who then called Command, who finally managed toanswer. Pointman sent the coords. Command said they'd check it out. They wantedus back at the OP. They usually did that after a skirmish, either thinking weneeded the downtime or they didn't want to push luck, especially after twogunfights in the same morning. They didn't understand us the way we did. Truthbe told, I don't think our Unit had to answer to them but we did anyway. As faras we knew, it was one lone nameless guy at Command who made sure we didn'tstray into the free-fire zones of adjacent units.

Wegot back in the AV and sped back to the waiting Six-Four and company. A fewminutes later a jet shrieked overhead on our opposite bearing. Still on theopen-air turret, I turned and looked. The tiny silver cross, speeding away,released something that, at that distance, was the size of a dot. Itdisappeared into the trees, and then a plume of fire incinerated everything ina hundred-yard radius. The sky bloomed, white light clogging the visiblespectrum for a second or two. The woods burned, then the jet made another passand let loose a spray of chemicals that put out the blaze.

Caftugged on my pant leg.

"Whatthe fuck?" he said.

"Whybother?" I said, and we drove on.

(Chapter 28 coming Wednesday, January 18, 2012.)

Mux093: The Best Winter Ever

2012-01-14T18:33:00.000-06:00

Not sure where you're living, but after Minnesota's hell winter last year, green grass and only scant melt-the-next-day flurries is fine by me.

Dropped in the Box.

Mux TRT: 46:27

Tracks:

1. Spoon - Don't Make Me A Target (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga)
2. EMA - California (Past Life Martyred Saints)
3. Battles - My Machines (Gloss Drop)
4. St. Vincent - Surgeon (Strange Mercy)
5. The Flaming Lips - What Is The Light? (The Soft Bulletin)
6. The Microphones - The Moon (The Glow Pt. 2)
7. Why? - Gnashville (Alopecia)
8. Metric - Gimme Sympathy (Daytrotter Session [Acoustic])
9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps (Acoustic)
10. The Wombats - My First Wedding (A Guide To Love, Loss And Despair / JLA's Best of 2007: Rock)
11. Echo & The Bunnymen - The Killing Moon (Ocean Rain)

Rookies:
Echo & The Bunnymen
The Wombats

PSA: I'm a big kick with The Microphones, The Who, and Echo & The Bunnymen, so don't be surprised to see guest appearances by those bands on the next few muxes.

Random: Rapidly approaching Mux100, which should hit on May 1, 2012. I don't have anything special planned, and I fully intend on continuing the Mux series with the same rules and schedule as before. I think, though, that I'll package as many muxes into a zip that the 1GB-limit Megaupload can handle, since I only keep the five most-current mixes in my Dropbox. I'll leave you on your own to scour my blog and find the tracklist. (Pro tip: Just search the Mux title in the search box and you'll find it from when I remixed all the muxes)

Meridien K - Chapter 26: The Silent Treatment

2012-01-13T00:01:00.007-06:00

"Why do you always have to be so negative, Ben? You'realways off predicting some doom-and-gloom future scenario. Think of thepositives. Think of how far we've come. Sure, they delayed the Mars mission tenyears, but because of that, we can actually breathe here. And no one thoughtit'd happen. We crashed and we lived. Now we're doing our jobs. And stillyou're moping around, avoiding the new guys - who are quite nice, by the way,except, well, the colonel - and you keep lamenting how Mars is going to shit.About how they'll commercialize it, and how tycoons will take luxury tripshere, jaunt around in a surf suit, take some snaps. You know what? Who gives afuck if that happens? We can find our own inhospitable place away from theequator and live like hermits and keep working. Turn a blind eye towardso-called Progress if it tears you up inside. Mars will never be earth. Wedon't want it to be. We won't build cities and separate countries andcontinents. There won't be a League of Nations. We won't be shuttling in nukesjust to make sure some of the Soviet boys play nice. It's the Wild West withoutall that gunslinging and sheriffing.

"Remindsme. I heard M3 is bringing animals. Dogs, cats, monkeys, horses. Horses, Ben!Can you imagine that? Jesus. Once a horse figures out how to gallop inpoint-three g and once they build likea, uh, super-horseshoe that can break down all these rocks, hell, that'ssomething to look forward to, isn't it? You always talked about the Frontier.What says 'frontier' more than horses? C'mon, slow down. Horses, cookouts,campfires, hell, maybe they'll let us bring some booze up.

"What'sthat look for? You don't wanna be a cowboy? Then what the hell has half of thisbeen about, Ben? Back in Easthaven and Newport you looked around and couldn'tstand the sight of everyone plugged into something other than the Real World.People sucked into books on the train, people on the street sealed up insideheadphones, no one to give you a straight glance, everyone crammed togetherwith no sense of togetherness.

"Ifeel it too. Partly why I came up to Red. Not start a community in thathippie-commune sense. But go back to something, I don't know, tribal orwhatever. Where you know everyone and everyone knows you. Where, shit, crappymaxims mean something, like how it takes a village to raise a child or whateverit is they say. But it's not in some rueful, back-in-the-day crap. Because ourback-in-the-day wasn't too rosy. Those were hard times that were ourgeneration's burden to haul. Same as how my sons are getting their hands dirtytrying to end something we started fighting before I was even born.

"Allright, all right. I know. I broke The Rule. No family talk. Just shoptalk aboutRed, remote terra, extrasolar, optics, wavelengths, lensing, relativity,sustainability. Hooray. Thrilling pillowtalk. But come on. You can't ignore thereality of it. Like when you're on a vacation and you have to keep remindingyourself how cool it is that you're so far away from home even when thesituation itself isn't particularly thrilling. We're on Mars, Ben. Look up at that haunted sky. Look down offthat cliff and see that red waste going off into forever. Remember the firstday we crashed, when people were thinking of ways to kill themselves and we sawour first sunset? Not everyone knew that sunsets are blue on Mars. Red skiesback… well… and blue here. And goddamn it was beautiful. And it didn't make a single person wistful of homeor made them want to leave... well, except the two who X'd themselves but, eh,whatever. It made them realize that we were on a New World, not a worthlessrock.

"Andit's not about the history books. About how John Kraid and Ben Meridien werethe heroic survivors of the M1 crash, or how they discovered theselfishly-named Meridienkraid, or were the first terrestrial-born humans tocross the heliopause… though, you have to admit, that last part would be prettyneat. Or will be. But we won't be aroundto read those books.

"Okay,okay, forget it. I think we're on separate pages. What I mean is: Fuck glory.Fuck it even though we deserve it. Yeah, yeah, I know, I don't mind that I'm -that we're - getting semi-famous overall this. We were probably front-page news when we crashed, though probably notmuch longer afterward once they interviewed a NASA suit who talked aboutcontingencies and sacrifice and whatever, and once it came out that we had noway to communicate, I'm sure the story died. But I wouldn't be surprised ifthey have, like, a reporter on M2. I wouldn't run it past that colonel to pullsome stunt like that to make him look good. One look at that dude and you cantell he'll eat untold buckets of shit to climb the chain.

"Stillfunny the way a piss arc goes in slow-motion. Christ, no, I'm not looking, Ben.You want me to plug my ears. I just hear it, and I have this mental image. No,not of your massive dick, Ben. See? You always end it too fast, you cram it inyour pants while it's still dripping. It looks like you pissed yourself.Technically, you did, I guess. Point-three g swings both ways. Like how Mons is three times the size of Everest butis, now, only feeling like the size of one Everest and fuck me, how did youconvince me to do this? Yeah, we can climb up, but can we climb down? That'd bein line with my whole life. Survivor of a massive crash on an alien planet,then a long, fatal fall trying to climb the biggest mountain in the SolarSystem. An easily-preventable death.

"Oh,jesus, are you serious? You want to fucking base jump off the summit? Oh,wonderful. Like the M1 crash didn't remind you that duststorms can seriouslyfuck up your visibility and, oh, I don't know, the chance of landing into aravine so deep you can see the Red core, might as well plunge into Marineris.Why I pulled you through grad school is beyond me, 'cause now I'm doing thesame stupid shit I used to talk you out of. Like breaking into the astrodepartment to get spare parts for your own rig on top of the dorms. And likethey weren't going to notice both A, the theft, and B, the stolen parts on yourhighly-visible scope right across campus?

"Oh,what, so past memories are off limits now? What's the limit? Can I talk aboutthe month in M1, getting here? Or is the Zero Point the crash? Or after? Maybethe first supply drop? Or, shit, last month when M2 showed? Fuck you, Ben,living off in Meridienland. You know, things happen in this magical place welive called The Present, not all off in your own superfuture."

Wekept the pace on the steep hike, along a rocky expanse leading obliquely up theside of the gentler face of the mountain. We were almost above the dustline. Itwas a hard trek, hauling gear and supplies. Neither of us gave, though. Westill were trying to one-up each other every moment on Red. Ben hadn't saidanything for hours. He was probably trying to save each dusty breath for itsmaximum worth.

Mycommunicator buzzed on my hip.

"Turnthat off," said Ben.

(Chapter 27 coming Monday, January 16, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 25: The Wars of Sheep

2012-01-11T00:01:00.007-06:00

No one ever talked about deployment. We signed up because wewanted it, and they knew we wanted it. No one there afraid to take the big birdover the ocean to the other side of the world. Especially now that we knew weweren't going to the desert and all the geopolitical mess of the past fiftyyears of Occupation. And we were all infantrymen, so it's not like we weresqueamish at the thought of what we might get into.

Itstarted at a point of systematic build-up. First the runs, then the rest of PT,weights and calisthenics and all, maybe some Greek mind-body emphasis withoutany mind stuff. That came later: Hours-long Classroom sessions studyingmilitary history, tactics, case studies of military operations gone wrong, somegone right. The guerrilla fighting that won the Revolutionary War. Attrition inthe Civil War. The trenches of Great-War Europe and all those nasty chemicalweapons. Modern mechanized warfare in War Two, Bastogne and the Ardennes, theBulge, Operation Market Garden, Barbarossa, the hell of the Pacific Theater,the relentless push of the Soviets on the Eastern Front once they regainedStalingrad. Dien Bien Phu, Hue, Khe Sanh, Langvei, Saigon, theshock-and-failure of the Tet Offensive, a wakeup call more than anything else.Declassified Cold War ops. The massive success of Desert Storm after Shield,airstrikes crippling the Iraqi Army, Coalitions deaths only about one-fifty,miracle numbers. The botched War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan,Syria. The quagmire of Iraq - Fallujah, Mosul, the Sunni Triangle, theinvasion, the surge, the drawdown, the full withdrawal, everything - and howal-Sadr seized control within the year we left. Yemen and Somalia, wholecampaigns run by UAV airstrikes. The China Problem, the North Korea Problem(quickly answered), vague details about the backroom China-Pakistan alliance,knowing that part of our job was to de-vague it.

Myfavorite part was Desensitization class because it was all theater. It wasmostly all Classroom, and even the few times they sent us out to the field tostage some benign mock-casualty response, each of us taking turns as wounded orcorpse or medic and going through triage, first aid, basic med, all thatmake-believe. It always came back to that lecture-hall-styled room, tiers ofdesks, lights dimmed almost in comic reverence, only thing missing was moodmusic. We watched slide after slide of dead bodies. It started with naturaldeaths of the Old, then progressed younger, more raw, forty- andfifty-somethings with weight problems and sudden heart attacks, tongueswrenched in violent directions. Dead teens, dead kids, dead babies, SIDS andall. We moved onto unnatural deaths, mostly car accidents, that old trot-outduring school proms for drunk-driving scared-straight PSAs, those grizzlymetal-twisted fuck-ups, like someone tossed a crate of tomatoes on theconcrete, bodies half-charred from gasoline fires, glass shards in a finemosaic caked in eye sockets in the close-ups. Murders and war photos. Gunshotwounds. Stabbings. Roadside bombs. Guys that, if they were miraculously broughtto life, would still be too fucked up to walk, to move, to think a clear thought.Shotgun blasts to the head, high-caliber sniper rifles scoring a perfectheadshot, maybe a sniper with a sense of humor, a bullet right in the eye, allpuckered up and black, puss-filled, dead and that grey fishbelly color of rotthat your primate brain tells you not to touch. Clips of executions. Bad,grainy, Arabic-only videos from fifty years back, dubbed a million times, along tirade about the West before the money shot, some guy getting his headchopped off with a dull ceremonial sword. Field execution vids that were all,for whatever reason, definitely Eastern Bloc. One in particular: A guy on theground, the videotaper with a boot on the guy's neck, the guy begging in somebackward Eurasian dialect, then someone comes in and stabs the guy in the windpipewith a serrated knife and saws through it, the guy convulsing all of a sudden,like life is an electrical current that, when severed, goes on the fritz. Backin time: SS videos of concentration camps. Masses buried alive with bulldozers.Handheld shots of the crematoria towers, spewing human ash into the air, can'thelp but imagine the cinematographer had a smile on his or her face. And thenAllied videos, post-snuff films, the same bulldozers plowing emaciated corpsesinto communal graves. Then a circuit of Vietnam films, the last war thegovernment allowed journos full access. Indiscriminate bombing and napalm.Free-fire zones in hootches that damn sure didn't look like Charlie was usingfor cover. Dumbfuck grunts unloading whole mags, draftees in birth-controlglasses constantly looking for an officer to tell them what to do. And you knowthat famous photo of the street execution of some guy? Well, that guy wasconvicted 'Cong, so even though he's all boo-hoo weepy he did enough shit todeserve one in the dome. That photo is actually a still printed fromdocumentary footage. You see death a million times in movies and games in vividtru-def, death so amplified that when it happens In The Real World, it seems soanticlimactic. So the ARVN guy with the gun goes up to the VC, barely hesitatesto raise his revolver, shoots the guy in the grape, a pencil-width geyserspurts out, and the guy crumples to the ground to bleed out. Looks weak, buthey, it's effective, it killed the dude, and at the end of the day it's reallyjust a scorecard, right?

Allthis was fairly pedestrian. I think we were all collectively waiting forsomeone to rush off to vomit and the rest of us would feel the proximityembarrassment. That never happened.

Mostother Classroom time was entirely different. It was more history than anythingand a half-baked attempt to keep us guessing where we'd get deployed. OurInstructor sat in the front corner of the room while the specialist, someDoctor, went through the class with a quiet, bedside-manner voice, and theInstructor kept shifting in his seat every other minute, knowing most of thelesson was bullshit. Over the year we were Stateside, we were inundated withanywhere between four and ten hours of that every day, running through enough historyof Pakistan, Russia, China, and all their proxy states. Enough for us 716ers toreceive honorary BAs in History. Then came Languages, which, even whenbalancing Dari, Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, and afew common dialects of each, didn't come too hard for us types. Again, weweren't bottom-of-the-food-chain last-resorters. If it wasn't the Forces, wecould've started our own companies or taught at universities or cured thecommon cold or some other shit if it weren't for certain elements of certainConditions and--

Andbesides, it's not like we had to be fluent. Just the usual "Put down yourweapon and you will not be hurt" and "Move!" and "Where isthe enemy?" and "Sorry to intrude upon your residence, but we arelooking for information" and the at-the-time strange but in-the-fieldsensible "I cannot tell you my nationality, but our mission here isimportant for the global community." Six-Four, second to Caf as thetalkingest motherfucker among us, really took to it, and not long into our timeat the Base he was speaking more gibberish than English.

Butthey had already tipped their hand. Granted, China has itself quite a storiedhistory, but we took our sweet time going through all the dynasties andemperors, and we practiced Mandarin and Cantonese far more than the otherlanguages. Wasn't hard to figure where we’d ship. But there was alwayssomething strange about it. Like we were supposed to chat up the natives aboutthe Ming dynasty? Would traditional Chinese horse-and-sword-and-spear battletactics have any play in Modern Mechanized Warfare? At least they didn't makeus read Sun-Tzu.

AndThe Base With No Name was its own vacuum. None of us had cars. They neverissued weekend passes to go out to town. We didn't even know if there was atown past those gates. We didn't even see the gates. We didn't know if"weekend passes" actually existed in the mil world. All I rememberedfrom the blurry dawn drive was that the middle-of-nowhere turned into afenced-in middle-of-nowhere. There were no newspapers, no television news, noidle talk among the higher-ups since, well, the only non-Unit men weencountered were our Instructor, the illusory Doctor, a few teachers, the low-Egroundskeepers who seemed to be serving the terms of small-scale punishment,and the shadow of Mr. Hawk (real name, not our invention) in his tower on theFiring Range. None of us had any idea why we'd edge up to war with China. Theyweren't part of any Terror War mandate; they spent every other year on or offthe five-seat UN Very Special Council, often hand-slapped for some human rightswarble; they still made the bulk of our manufactured goods; and they owned mostof our debt. Maybe politicians were tired of turning a blind eye toward their history-erasing,1984-copped bullshit. Maybe The PowersThat Be finally decided to stick it to them, disregarding - minor detail - thattheir standing army was twice the size of ours; and that in the past fiftyyears they had been buying up aircraft carriers and the usual Soviet bulk withno end in sight, not in any act of qualifiable aggression but more athumbed-nose tell-off of See? You're Not The Only Ones With A Big Stick.

Soonce we were ready, the Stateside whirlwind picked us up and threw us acrossthe Pacific. And just like that, twelve fifteen-year-olds went off to war.

(Chapter 26 coming Friday, January 13, 2012.)

Meridien K for Kindle - Coming Sometime

2012-01-09T20:11:00.002-06:00

It exists!

Meridien K - Chapter 24: The Intergalactic Warrior

2012-01-09T00:01:00.006-06:00

Up top, Ben kept half an eye on myself and Elliottrappelling onto a ridge below the lip of Valles Marineris. While most of thesurvivors were enjoying the creature-comforts of M2 like beds and showers andpainkillers, Ben settled on a seemingly never-ending supply of fruit. And uptop he worked his way through a tangerine, no attention at all to the rope tiedto the Rover and I held onto the hemp fibers and tried not to look down untilmy feet touched firm ground.

Elliott,above, looked at the rope, at me, at the bottomless pit.

"Isit, uh, all right to proceed, Dr. Kraid?"

"Yes,Elliott, it's fine," I said, having already answered over a dozen obviousquestions.

Hespidered down along the canyon wall.

"Twohands on the rope, Elliott! Two hands!" I yelled.

"Oh,sorry, sir, I mean, uh, doctor."

"Don'tapologize! Just keep two hands on the rope!"

Thetwenty-six-year-old Elliott took twice as long as me, and I was nearly twodecades older than him. His gig was propulsion, so neither of us had anybusiness crawling down into the deepest valley in all of existence. But we wereexplorers. We were exploring.

Benthrew the useless husk of his fruit into the pit. I watched it disappear.

"Ben!The fuck?"

"Idon't see a No Littering sign," from his perch. "Besides, it'snatural, right?"

"Onearth, buddy."

"Mr.,I mean, Dr. Kraid? Am I doing this right?"

"Fine,Elliott, just fine," and then back at Ben, "You think it's going todecompose down there?"

"Noway I'm going down there," yelled Ben, hands up in innocence.

Elliottslipped the last few feet and landed on top of me. I fell and, while thedropoff into the chasm was a good twenty feet out, my palms immediately coveredthemselves in sweat.

"Ohmy god, I mean gosh, uh, Dr. Kraid. I'm so sorry and--"

"It'sokay, Elliott," and I stood and brushed myself off for the ten-thousandthtime since landing.

Nodonkey rides down to the bottom but the erosion formed footpaths down into thatgape. I started walking and Elliott followed five feet behind. For once I wishit was Ben alongside, his attitude rotten and warped most of the time but atleast he wasn't eggshell-walking around me. And no matter how many times I toldElliott to call me John, it never stuck. He was like one of my students. And wehad picked him for the team anyway - Your Team, Ben would say, not Mine - andafter all the M2 excitement I thought it best to spend more time with the otherM1 survivors.

Along time walking down into a growing dark, the sun unable to penetrate the steepangle, headlamps on like coal miners groping through a cave-in.

"Whatexactly are we, um, doing? I mean, looking for?"

"Whatwe are doing, Elliott," I said, "is, if nothing else, admiring one ofthe largest natural features of the Solar System."

"Oh.I didn't know that."

IfI were Ben it'd be time for a Lesson, but I didn't know much about fusionreactors and quantum states and electron tunneling and everything that Elliottfound as natural as bipedalism. But in an oblique way, Elliott was right. Walkingdown there like it was a scenic hike but really a journey to nowhere, thevalley's wall shrinking to the periphery of our headlamps. Probably somelingering paternalism that caused Ben and me to adopt Intihar and Elliott asour mascots, our surrogate nephews.

Abad step, a tumble forward, a hard object slammed against my head or viceversa.

"Dr.Kraid!"

Ifelt the rock next to me and it was slick. A dusty hand up to my hairline andbrought into the bluish headlamp light and there was my mortal blood.

"Dr.Kraid, are you… hurt?"

"I'lllive to tell the tale," as my brain floated in its vat and righted itself.

"Dr.Kraid?"

Aboutto shout an incensed "What?!" at his endlessness, but I followed hiseyeline down to what had caught my foot. There was the big rock and, wedged inits shadow, a rectangular form covered in loose gravel. Our four handsunearthed it. It looked like a toy dumptruck until we brushed it off to findthe PV panels, a claw-arm, and--

"Nofuckin' way…" said Elliott.

--theblue circle and red ribbon-slash of the old NASA logo. Stamped beneath:INITIATIVE.

"Jesus,"I said as I stood and took a quick step back, like I had found a forgottenskeleton. "That thing was launched… back when… back when I can't evenremember."

Elliottyanked the front end out from under the debris and set it on a clear tract.

"Huh."

"Hmm."

Itreminded me of all the hopes as a kid that a comet would crash in my backyard,and from the crater would emerge a friendly robot probe, both of us staringcuriously at the other, Contact made between an earthling and an alien robot.

Initiativewas in good shape despite looking like it had been left in a closet for years.I brushed the panels clear; they weren't broken or cracked, not even scratched.

Ourtwo headlamps all over the thing until an electric groan sounded in itsinnards.

"Isit going to blow up? What if it--!"

"No,it's not going to blow up," I said to Elliott, though I had no idea.

Andin the space of mere seconds the right-side-up Initiative's wheels spunfuriously and it curved around the rock. It took a wide arc and hit the edgeabove the depths, went up on two wheels and churned on its side, rotating likea spinning top.

Idon't know why an impulse fired that sent me diving toward it. Elliott scrambledafter and grabbed my leg just as my fingers brushed Initiative, just before theheavy end tipped over the side and fell and fell and fell and didn't make anoise when it reached the bottom.

Upand brushing off the perpetually-dirty clothes I wore when I knew I'd getdirty.

"Shit."

"I'mso sorry, I shouldn't've grabbed you," said Elliott, slowly backing awaylike I'd lunge at him and toss him down into the pit in retaliation.

"No,"I said, "I'm pissed because we now owe NASA like a billion dollars."

Elliottdidn't get the non-joke until I flashed a smile.

Agreat shriek like a bird of prey and a silver load-bearing dropship came lowover Valles, heading in the direction of my hut.

Ben,invisible but inside echoing earshot, yelled, "Hey kiddos! Hurry up 'causeI think we've got a visitor!"

Noreason to keep going nor to immediately leave. The latter became the priorityonce I realized Ben wouldn't hesitate to take the Rover and strand us. So Istarted off quick to the rope and Elliott followed and caught up and walkedbeside me.

"Weshould do this again. It was fun," said Elliott.

Mymental catalog noted it as the first time anyone described Mars life as"fun."

Backat the rope, Elliott and I barely got a solid grip before Ben backed up the Roverso it sort of dragged us up.

"Where'sthe fire?" as I surfaced and didn't bother with the dust.

Benpointed. I looked and saw the heavy drop hovering around our place two milesout.

"Thatidiot is going to blow the damned thing over."

"CanI, uh, get a ride?"

"Getin, kid," Ben snapped at Elliott as I slid into the passenger seat andElliott onto the cargo webbing on the back. Ben peeled out and redlined theRover, creating a wake that wouldn't settle for days.

"Idon't want to be fuckin' homeless because of some asshole," Ben said,unprompted.

Wegot there in a handful of minutes. Elliott went to drop off the Rover toIntihar down by M2.

Themeaty dropship hovered too long and started to kick up big stones that bangedagainst the metal side of our shelter. We waved them off and they didn't getthe signal. It touched down but kept running. Some guy in a digicamo surfacesuit got off and the drop finally shut off. I looked at Ben and he was shakingoff his red dust-stained clothes to no avail. I looked similarly Martian.

"Thisain't earth. He does realize he's not camouflage, right?" Ben said.

Theman came forward, and there they were, right there, black eagles on hissurf-suit faux-collar.

"Gents,"he said, coming forward, his voice all fucked up through the external speaker,"allow me to introduce myself. Colonel Tibbits."

Firmgloved handshakes and a well-rehearsed smile. That close up, the resemblance tothe old colonel, his corpse somewhere down in the maw of M1, was unsettling.Like they cloned them on an assembly line at Officer Candidate School.

"Hello.John Kraid," I said.

"Dr.Meridien," said Ben.

Thecolonel cleared his throat. He was expecting something. We were clueless.

"Theproper response is, 'Fine to meet you, sir.'"

Benand I just stared. I'm sure our expression was exaggerated, coated in rust andrusty clothes and hacking it on a rock without terrestrial contact for over ayear. If nothing else, we wouldn't have applicable pop-culture references forsmalltalk.

"Excuseme?" asked Ben.

"'Excuseme, sir,'" the colonel corrected.

Moreblank stares all around, bordering on awkward.

"Themen didn't tell you?" the colonel asked. "This is a militaryoperation now. Even civilians are under my direct authority."

Benlaughed, scoffed, snickered, chortled, ran the gauntlet because, seriously…

"Whatever.Thanks for the meet," said Ben, and he doubled back to the shelter.

Abig vein appeared in the colonel's forehead, and all the muscles swelled in theright places on his skintight surf suit.

"Don'tturn your back on me, civilian! You know what a court-martial is?"

Benturned back to face Tibbits, couldn't help himself.

"Jesusfuck, will you space jockeys ever shutthe fuck up about your preciousrank?"

Istood there but kept out of it. Didn't move a micron. Didn't blink. Breathheld. Waiting for the two outlaws to quickdraw their six-shooters.

"Idon't want things to get unpleasant, doctor."

FromBen's throat rose this painted, built-up growl, like a dog getting a whiff of anew mailman and, "So just leave us alone, chief! You brought the wholegoddamn academy up here with proper supplies. What's wrong with two lone guyssneaking into the supply tent once a month and stealing too few things to getin trouble?"

"Youthink you're some tough guy, huh?"

"No.Just the only guy who can do my job."

"Andthat is?"

"Takeoff that silly-ass helmet and you take a wild guess. As for the rest, I thinkthe description is above your pay grade."

"Mywhat?!"

Itwas Ben's turn for incredulity, to explain his paramount importance, tobelittle the colonel while I just stood there. Ben headed to the shelter andstill couldn't help himself, kept turning to add another piece, and whilebetter judgment would have me intervene, it was nice to see Ben go off on someguy trying to pull a really dumb shake-up instead of Ben blowing up aboutspilled morning coffee.

"Look.Here's a pro tip. I don't trust anyone still dressed up for the dance. I don'ttrust a single fucker down there still in a bubble. Taste the goddamn air likethe rest of us and see how you like it. Ask the guys from the M1 crash. Andcall on the radio next time you're coming up in a drop. We have sensitiveoptics around that this little organization called NASA wouldn't want ruined. Wouldn'twant all this dust to fuck it up. I'm on channel one on the freq. One, likethis," and a too-easy middle finger, necessary gesture anyhow, and,"Dismissed, Tibs."

Benusually skirted the fine line between annoying someone and royally pissing themoff, and this time he decided to go with the latter. I followed Ben and I couldsee the colonel working up a retort, but he wisely opted to cut his losses andwent back to his drop. The drop hovered low and quiet on its stealth preset asit slinked away, slow enough to police up its own wake. Then it took off overthe hill and went down to the Settlement and the in-progress Base not far fromM2, sort of connected to it, like those trailers that have fold-out awnings foran insta-patio underneath.

Backinside our hot tin can, neither of us said anything about the encounter. Benfound it impossible to wipe off all the kicked-up grit, so he, fully clothed,stepped into the gravity shower outside and ran the cold water. In the gapbetween the drain and the bottom of the shower curtain, I saw all that redflushed down into a pipe that ran into a ditch a hundred yards east, wherelukewarm, silty water trickled out onto the deadscape. Mars' first lake: runoffsewage.

Withoutprompt, Ben, over the relative roar of the shower, shouted, "You thinksome full-bird colonel is going to give a fuck about extrasolar terraformation?Might've only shot myself in the foot if I wanted to get in touch with M2'schemist and get some rockets prepped for remote TF. But good idea getting allbuddy-buddy with Elliott. He could definitely do some favors for us."

"Thatwasn't the intention," I shouted back. "Besides, you think they'regoing to spare any rockets for something like this? Do they even have rockets?"

"Youthink M2 is going the be the last of the supplies? Sure, maybe a few peoplewill leave, but then M3 will come, then M4 and 5, all the way up to a hundredas far as I know. Mars is our only New World left. Give it a century and theatmosphere will be strong enough that we can safely land ships and standoutside without burning up or freezing or feeling like both nostrils are tapedshut. Maybe even those MIT whizkids will figure a way to reignite the dead coreto make a magnetosphere proper. Whatever. I don't care anymore. Used to it,really. Makes lifting heavy objects a lot easier than it used to be."

Bencame out soaking wet and stood under the skylight and waited for the sun'smagnified beams to dry him raw.

"Anddon't forget, JK, this job is as much me as it is you. Some people might assumebecause I drive the Rover and loudly make decisions that I'm in charge. We'reboth in this. Shit, you have more raw brainpower than anyone I know. Exceptmaybe your son. No offense."

Whichone? as an aborted question and I mumbled,"None taken."

Wewent outside to the ridge once Ben dried. I lifted up the pocket binocs I hadswiped during the chaos of offloading M2. I put them up, looked down, saw theSettlement same as usual, albeit a bit deserted. There always seemed to be afew people dragging their feet as they walked to the M2 site, where heavymachinery cleared the mars (on earth we call dirt earth, so why not?) and putup concrete barriers to serve as the outer layers of something or other. Thesepeople went over to the tent marked with a fat red cross. They went inside anddisappeared, but I knew what went on. Most of the M2 guys swore by theirsurface suits. Wore them day and night. Some quack doctor or medic or scientiston M2 insisted that the breathing conditions were horrid, likeIndustrial-Revolution horrid. He wanted everyone from M1 to take an hour of theday to breathe pure oxygen. I did it once. Quite a rush going from the low O₂levels of Red. But I didn't like it. Felt like a drug. Post-oxy dizziness farworse than any centrifuge. And, down there, it looked like junkies at a needleexchange or lining up for testers of the day's fresh batch of H. If some peoplegot hooked - on the O₂, that is - and kept coming back, they lostall that resistance, and a lot of them got sick, and I think I heard a fewpassed out coming down, were dragged into M2's sick bay where they seemed tostay forever.

Thosesort of things happened. We didn't keep close contact with the Settlementanymore other than juicy rumblings from Intihar, like when he scammed thelanding date of M2 off an emergency pouch he looted from M1's jaws and, forwhatever reason, only told it to us and his three mil brothers-in-arms.

Benwatched the parade below with arms crossed. He spat on the ground.

"Initiativeis dead," he said, certainly not intending the double-meaning since hedidn't even know what Elliott and I found. And Ben stood there, looking down ateverything happening in the valley, the valley that was once rocky andinhospitable but now Under Construction, Under New Management. We knew once thehousing was completed, the tents would go down. They'd fix the hole in theairstrip. Besides Ben and myself and Elliott and Intihar and all themeek-voiced survivors, it was like M1 never happened, or that nothing had evergone wrong. But Ben and I would be gone by then.

(Chapter 25 coming Wednesday, January 11, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 23: The Known Universe

2012-01-06T00:01:00.003-06:00

That unspoken pact with nighttime. Shrugging off that callfor all inside, all to sleep to wait till daytime. But the reality of it, themystery, that dark romance of night skies and night stars, bright full moons,your own world made unfamiliar by night dark and no color. And, out there inthe country, far from the light pollution of any gaping metropolis, the goldenband of the galaxy up there, hung on the backdrop of the closed-lippeduniverse, both impossible and immediate, the possibility versus the actual, thesame sky, more or less, that every man who ever lived has looked upon.Constellations half-remembered from grade school, patterns invented by men whenin truth there was nothing up there but a pale glow, distance, and nothing.Light is just the waste of stars. No bears and winged horses made frompinpoints. Just mean gas balls waiting to implode or explode, to die into itselfor indulge one last rampage, swallowing whole anything in its path, hungry formass. And planets too harsh to name. Oceans of boiling methane. Gas cocktailsso noxious you'd die before you could ask the question. Bright spots that wouldblind you in a moment. A cold, smoky vacuum to suck you dry, lest one of thegiant beasts of the system suck you in with lazy gravity, burnt in theatmosphere to ash and elements, raining down into unknown oceans, maybecreating life a billion lightyears from here, maybe an ultimate fate as anunheard, unfelt ripple in a placid sea. The promise of intelligent lifeunintelligible to us. Not kings upon thrones with armies and nobility, butant-people and tusked snake-dogs. No different than going into the jungle andtrying to talk to monkeys. Impossible but necessary. Our duty to our last god.

Iwent for walks at night.

Ihad never been on an Army or Forces base before, and my expectations were a bitskewed. I knew it was situated on a large-enough plot of land for live-fireexercises and mock plywood-and-cinderblock cities, but the rest? Sheer nakedspace. You couldn't even see the fences. I didn't even know if there werefences, was barely awake when we first arrived. At the least, I expected sparsetraffic along the main road, trucks hauling ammunition or recruits or supplies,some dropships making dry-runs, something other than the great giant nothingthat existed outside the barracks in that liquid memory of that brief eternityspent at The Base With No Name.

OurDrills and Classroom ended at eight, after which we were given the nights toourselves. Next-day activities started between ten and twelve; plenty of freetime to do whatever we wanted. Some guys holed up in the Base library, otherswent for runs, some hit the weight room or the range. Pointman alwaysdisappeared, probably back to the barracks to transcribe the day in hisjournal. Not like anyone wrote any letters home, though. Who would we send themto? Dead relatives? Families who had probably already adjusted to our variousabsences? To bulldozed houses in rezoned suburbs? The guys in the Unit neverbetrayed any of those possibilities. I never saw anyone head for a mailbox;never even saw if there was a mailbox.

Noteven Caf followed me out at night. The ground was dead flat miles in alldirections, excluding the pitted woods. The moon was bright but I still carrieda red-lens flashlight, the beam bouncing along the ground with each step, acommunicator scragged to my collar in case, well, in case they needed me forsomething.

Eachnight I picked a direction and walked. Sort of a mental endurance test, knowingthat each step I took was another I had to take back. Counting time in my head,watching the stars. I never cared much for that Void overhead. That was mydad's territory. I was a terrestrial, a son of earth, always would be. Shuttlesheading up to LEO or to the waystation at the moon base were no more specialthan airplane lights gliding off in the distance, careful to mind our forbiddenborders.

Almosta year in, itching for deployment, and I'd been drilled so hard I didn't walkanywhere without a knife and my AP. Probably about as close to any Reg Forceshabit as any. The Base, still, seemed built only for us. As far as we couldtell, there was only some skeleton personnel, our Instructor, vets turned intoClassroom teachers, the stern rangemen, maybe their collective CO, and thetwelve of us in 716. The grounds crew clipped the grass for us, maintained theprogramming on the sprinklers, touched up the paint on a building if the suncracked a coat, whatever. A year in, and the paint still seemed wet, the sodstill lumpy, like the whole of the Base had been forgotten.

Itry looking back on it without any sort of mental inflection. It was. It happened. It was far less boring than the sort of things my brother told methey made you do. No War Two-era punishment like peeling potatoes (neverhappened to my brother; just saying), no getting smoked by a zealous DI, nothree-a.m. wake-ups for a bullshit road march or firewatch, no agonizing waitsat the firing range while the Cadre policed it up and reset it for anothersquad, no purgatory of days-long Orientation where you catch whatever diseaseis going around, usually bronchitis for some reason, too many guys back fromthe desert and too many headed there. But not us.

Outon the practice slopes, in position by a dry creek bed, Terra's rotation asleader, one step along the hard mud before our Instructor reminded us ofnatural lines of drift and how to avoid them, lest you walk right into an enemyposition anticipating such poor patrolling discipline.

"Excuseme," said Terra, the absence of "sir" a reflex by now.

"Yes?"said the Instructor.

"Isn'tthis, uh, counter to the terrain we'll encounter?"

"Howso?"

"Becausewe'll be in, you know, the desert?"

"Youwon't be in the desert, Terra. It's a new war. New terrain. Not much differentthan here. Now are you going to move your squad or what?"

Atthe end of the Drill, we hooked up IR lights in a big rope-tied Y and signaledin the dropship. Our rides were always piloted by an older Reg dude, usuallydrinking coffee out of an insulated mug, like that was retirement or something.I was scared of heights even after I got used to drops. I always prayed they'dclose the landing flap - they never did - lest I see the earth rush past athousand feet below, good enough to entertain the self-snuffing thought ofreleasing a single harness clasp on a banked turn and float out there beforethe ground snarfed me up.

Anda few minutes later, that low hover that smashed the grass flat, made it hardas rock, 716 spit out a hundred yards in every direction as we got out for onelast tactical spread before we called it a night and went our separate ways.

(Chapter 24 coming Monday, January 9, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 22: The Neighborhood

2012-01-04T00:01:00.010-06:00

"Looks like some of them forgot that we all volunteeredfor this," said Ben.

OnlyBen and I stood on the bluffs overlooking the valley, the runway and theSettlement. A year on the twice-baked surface and the visual hadn't changedmuch. There wasn't the usual vista of the punctured strip and scatteredevidence of M1's end-over-crooked-end roll, its wreckage still cooking under the Martian sun; instead of that spread, there was an angular ship,just as big as M1, "Mars-2" or "M2" painted on everysurface, viewable from every angle. Whole, intact, uncompromised, parked on ourrunway.

"Allwe need is some ticker tape," said Ben, and it was one of the few times Iwholly agreed. We sort of snickered and he went on, "And streamers and aparade with firetrucks and the local grade-school girls' softball team tossingcandy from the back and…" scratching his rough chin and snapping into adifferent mode and, "If it weren't for their two-year contracts, I betthem candy-asses would hop on that ship and turn around in a sec."

"Yeah,"I said.

Freshfaces got off the craft. For whatever reason, the pod survivors, massed belowthe fold-out ladder leading to the red soil, were clapping. The emergingastronauts looked around like they had landed in a leper colony, the differencemagnified by their bulky second-gen surface suits in contrast to the sunburnt,dirty faces of those who stood in plain clothes on that alien planet. Theastronauts all looked the same in uniform; as alien as sci-fi explorers.

"Sothat's it," Ben said, forecasting, then outlining it all with, no doubtdeliberate, the middle finger on his right hand. "Build some permanentdorms, get the teams working, then before you know it there'll be strip malls,suburban tracts of identical housing, daycares, zoos, goddamn amusement parks,public fountains, billboards, ice cream parlors, chain burger joints, nailsalons, stupid fancy bars and dive bars when you... when you…" and he wassuddenly out of breath for a moment, a strong cough and, "when all youwant is a fuckin' drink. All that clutter…" and tailing off.

Benturned to leave.

"Isuppose they'll be looking for us. Will want to say hello," I said.

"Fuckit," said Ben. "Rest of the slugs will say we're the wild men of themountains, not worth talking to. Besides, I'll get Intihar to scam the supplieswe need. You get Elliott to make contact with the science team and see ifthey've got the salt. Otherwise, we're as good as we've ever been. And I likeliving hard. Fuck air mattresses and that shit. I came here to hack it. Livedeasy enough for all my life."

Wewent back down the ridge, down the half-shoveled, half-cleared path to ourrogue camp. We came across a few dumbbots we had displaced, who all seemed veryconfused with why they were trying to build a runway down an incline, but theydutifully crunched and cleared rock as their crude reprogramming dictated.

Downon the rock shelf we entered our hidey hole, a pieced-together hut of M1scraps, tarps, tent material and old clothes. Inside, the temperatureimmediately swelled fifteen degrees F. Arranged around were the loose clusterof "rooms," each the size of a large refrigerator box. We had ourkitchen, our conference room with two lawn chairs, and in the central space myplywood desk and Ben's sharp-edged metal desk. We kicked aside our sleepingbags, which were thrown down every night in whatever part of the shelter wasclearest. A year in the place, a year to fix it up and anchor it into theground, and I still had to wipe away a fresh coat of red-brown dirt-dust off myworkbooks every time I came inside.

AndI didn't mind.

Ishoved my scope into its changing bag. Contour fixes, eyeballs on my fingertipsand real eyes shut. I took out the front glass and stripped the telescope andcleaned it, mindful of the all-pervasive grit in the bag. I figured we couldscour M2 for better parts but no use junking something that wasn't broke, nomatter how much tape I wound around the whole thing. I had my own notes on thedesk proper, endless coordinates scribbled in an all-but-unreadable hand oncoffee-stained gridpaper. Directly behind me, close enough that our chairsalways bumped, Ben took out his star charts. One was the view from theterrestrial sky, drawn from memory, and the other sketched from clear nights onRed. He aligned his tracing-paper copies, marked a few points of interest ingrease pencil, Hmm'd and rubbed his chin, circled large blank swaths far fromthe colored ribbons of galaxies and nebulae, looking for something unseen.

Tryingto play it innocent and I said, "If M2 didn't forget our gear, we couldset up something in the valley and run full spectrum. Link up a few groundsats. I don't care how many mirrors I have to polish. But, uh, then we couldmaybe look for--"

"Don'tfucking say it."

"What?"

"Gravitationalyou-know-what."

"Lensing?"

"Fuckyou, John. If I can't see it with my eyes, it's not worth it. Too manylightyears anyhow. And nothing is near terrestrial mass if we have to see astar's fucking light bend from aJovian-sized turd. Jesus. How the fuck did you get published with thistripe?"

Benwasn't deliberately hostile about it and I said nothing. After I finishedreassembly we took our gear and loaded it in the Rover. Ben, as always, drove.We went up the hillside, zigzagging along the narrow switchbacks into the nearmountains, only a mile or two up, just above the dustline. Still getting usedto the bumps that lifted me out of my seat, the two-wheeled moments when theRover caught a loose edge and near went over but plenty of time to sit downhard on the opposite edge of the vehicle and get it righted and straight. Somelogic that if the crash couldn't kill us, we sure as shit weren't going to falloff a mountain.

Upon a plateau we set up. Both of us assembled our scopes on quadpods and screwedon the gears and set up the interface displayed on a flatscreen board off M1'smain terminal, rigged with an old CPU our part-time saboteur Intihar ripped offan M1 cooling monitor. The late Sorkin managed to install our software and geta fix on our exact point in the physical, known universe. Elliott translatedall the code from Cyrillic nonsense to English. The whole rogue idea weformulated involved hijacking the Kennedy probe and turning it into a deepspaceimager, but it was only one satellite, it worked only within line-of-sight comms,it wasn't in synchronous orbit, was running long parabolas on the near side,far side, whatever, and… well… I ignored that stuff and pointed my glass downinto the valley and the Settlement.

Sureenough, forklifts were rolling down an extended ramp off M2, delivering giantpallets of whatever. Right by the ship were bags of cement and piles of timber.That had been M1's plan all along but it didn't seem right. Everything suddenlybackward. Like the shipwreck was supposed to happen the whole time and this wasthe real show.

"What'sgoing on down there?"

"Offloading.I don't think you want to look."

Benturned and gave a naked-eye glance.

"Myquestion is, Why the hell was M1 so bulky compared to the landing strip? Unlessit touched down perfect, chance was it was going to roll anyway. Looks likethey changed that for M2. And didn't they say M3 was going to come and justorbit like a waystation?"

"Ithink so. But I think that'll come in tandem once M2 returns to LEO."

"What?"

"That'swhat I remember, anyway."

"Sosome of them are going back?"

Anunseen shrug and, "I guess. I mean, I don't know. Didn't get the wholebuzz. I think they're still looking for water to split into hydrogen for theengines."

Westayed on the hilltop and no one bothered us. I saw some guy from M2 start forour shack, but one of the survivors intercepted him and probably cautionedagainst an unannounced visit. Back to work: I kept punching in coordinates, letthe gears find the place in the sky, scanned it along a few differentwavelengths, wrote down my hardcopy of the data. Repeat. Ben and I worked untilit got dark, and then we worked some more.

Martiannight skies no different than any other semi-hospitable rock in the System. Youspend long enough up there in the dark and it's like that timelapse wheel ofstars, the cosmos so comfortable to roll and twist and smile bright starsmileswhile humans flit in and out of the image. At any given point, looking up, Ihad a hard time convincing myself that, within that great visage of stillness,we were simply hurtling through an emptiness far deeper than mere black.

(Chapter 23 coming Friday, January 6, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 21: The Routine (Again)

2012-01-02T00:01:00.009-06:00

It's like we were wearing uniforms. The uniforms of ourgeneration, at least. I had been half-in, half-out of school the prior year,working at an office, buried in a cubicle, switching between a school blazerand a white dress shirt and khakis and tie, three different-colored pens in mybreast pocket, blue black red. But that was over. It was a new place now.Everyone around looked like that, like me, like all the cogs and clockwork atthe bottom rungs of any major corporate machine, all the blank faces and sharpeyes of serfs buried under mounds of endless data, capable of far greaterthings. And we just sort of stood there. Standing next to our bunks with ourshoulderbags, most still wondering why the hell we were there, second-guessing,sure.

OurInstructor, probably eighteen or nineteen, only a few years older than all ofus, started near the door.

"Codename?"he asked.

Itthrew the first guy off.

"Uh…"

"'Uh'is not acceptable," said the Instructor with a smirk.

"Pointman,"said Pointman, and he was Pointman now and forever.

"You.Codename?"

"Horse."

Noother questions. Thinking of the prior meetings. When I talked with therecruiter there was no need for my address, my Social, a phone number,anything. Just a time when the bus would pick me up and take me to The BaseWith No Name located three hours west.

TheInstructor was one bunk to my left and I was tapped for ideas.

"Mars,"said Mars.

Afew steps and, "Codename?"

"Meridienkraid."

Noquestion and, "Too long. You're Meridien K," said the Instructor, andhe moved on.

Thatquick, and I was branded for life.

TheInstructor made his rounds, collected the rest of our names. He stood at thehead of the barracks and told us to put on our PT gear.

"It'sin your footlocker by your bed," he said after our initial confusion.

Ithought it odd he didn't say "bunk," "rack," or"cot." And he didn't do anything stupidly cruel like give us onlyfifteen seconds to change or that old Marine Corps thing of Dressing By TheNumbers. I didn't exactly take extra time, but I was sizing everyone up as Iunbuttoned my dress shirt, took off my pants and put on the black t-shirt andblack shorts, neither of which bore any symbols or insignia, no marker of theForces whatsoever. I look inside the tongue of the boots and there was stampeda "13," my size, laced up and they fit with all the discomfort of newshoes. Most of the guys in the room were all facing the walls as they changed,whole rows of the backs of guys' grey boxer shorts as they bent over and put ontheir shorts, none of them visibly comfortable, probably the first time in along while they've had to change in semi-public, probably dredging up badmemories of gym class.

Itwas pretty easy, then and there, to see that the Unit had some cases in it, guyswith an obvious Condition before it became common knowledge that we were chosenfor our Conditions. But I'm not one to point fingers. In the civilian world Ihad my nightly cocktail of pills - The Family Curse my brother and I called iton one of the very few occasions we talked about it - since I refused to get mygenome mapped andor corrected or get a one-pill g-med to take care ofeverything. I didn't want to know if I was predispositioned for blindness orAlzheimer's and that wasn't too uncommon, that ignorance-bliss, at least backthen. Men in my family had a tendency of dying early of unnatural causes - themilitary, car accidents, One's Own Hand, limbs of our family tree drippingyoung blood - so I had no idea what was in store for the long haul. All thisconsidering I had just signed on to an organization well known for turning fineyoung men into corpses, albeit with ample compensation for anyone who made itthrough unfucked. Hell, even the partly-fucked guys who got one or two limbsblown off were still treated pretty good.

Ihad the codenames memorized as soon as they were said, and I was wonderingabout some of their picks. One guy called himself "Candy," and hedidn't look anything special, and I figured maybe it was like how a few Romangladiators called themselves weak-sauce names to lull their opponent into asense of false security, like they were going up for an easy kill. But ourenemy, as far as I knew, weren't going to hear our codenames, and I alreadysort of knew it was part of the plan of desensitizing ourselves to each other,so ifwhen Candy got popped (and he did), no one would give that much of a carebecause he was just Candy, not a first and last name and DOB and hometown andmom and dad and maybe a sweetheart tucked into all that past.

Sowe changed into our PT gear as the Instructor went over paperwork at the headof the barracks, waiting us out. It took a few minutes. All of us changing fromthat omnipresent work uniform of Business Casual into the training uniform ofthe Forces. The Instructor then said we were going for a short one-mile run andwe followed him out. Not in a single-file line, not in any order. We went outthrough the fresh paint of the hall, blue tape still on doorframes and ceilingedges and then out onto the nearby compound, where most of the newly-laidcement was roped off, lawns still sectioned into clumps of sod.

Allof us bunched up in the middle of the pack during the jog. No one wanted tostand out from the rest, either as a better runner or a laggard. It was only amile, but it was hot and sticky, and we were wearing black under a rising sun,and we were running in stiff new boots across uneven grass and a root-strewnwooded path. Me? I get on a treadmill and pound out a few miles, but anythingon physical terrain ups the difficult by a factor of ten. I felt thatblood-burn in the back of my throat only about a quarter-mile in. And then thatsickly feeling of your intestines bouncing up and down on each spring of a stepand the crash of a footfall. Throw in a sideache or two and that randomsensation of a sharp pinch on your heart and I pointlessly hoped we wouldn't domuch running. No luck with that: 716 built more like hyperlean marathoners thanReg packmules with all their vein-covered biceps.

Afew of the guys threw up on the hike, and that might've been our firstteambuilding exercise, I guess, whoever nearest going over to make sure theywere all right, helping them back into the pack as the Instructor turned andjogged backward and didn't stop but it wasn't in an asshole way. None of usreally said anything during the jog. We didn't call cadence or follow thecall-and-response of a halfway-salty running song. We had been transformed frompost-secondary loners and office biscuits and lab assistants into Forcesrecruits in the course of one morning, and it was still too surreal to collectany coherent thoughts. Not like it was a sinking I've Made A Terrible Mistakefeeling or anything, since our contract unequivocally stated that we could quitat any time. Any time: In the middle ofa run, the middle of Mess, the middle of a drill, in the middle of a goddamnfirefight; anytime, our recruiters crossed their hearts, and my older brotherswore on gravity it was the truth. A bit of a faint promise from him, but whileI'd never say it to his face, I trusted him.

It'snot like I was go-hung and trigger-happy the whole time; that thought of quittinglingered. It lingered only because it was a possibility. Even though I was onlya dropship ride away from going back to Chicago or Easthaven, I didn't want toquit. I never wanted to quit. So I never did.

(Chapter 22 coming Wednesday, January 4, 2012.)

Mux092: January 2012

2011-12-31T18:36:00.000-06:00

Starting off the year with a bit of a clearinghouse. The sequencing holds, but a look at the tracklist looks rather unwieldy.

Boxed.

1. Battles - Africastle (MPLS.tv session) (Gloss Drop)
2. The Roots - One Time (Undun)
3. The Hold Steady - Chips Ahoy! (Boys And Girls In America)
4. The Strokes - Barely Legal (Is This It?)
5. Sleater-Kinney - One Beat (One Beat)
6. Radiohead - Climbing Up The Walls (OK Computer)
7. Deerhunter - Saved By Old Times (Microcastle)
8. Phantogram - Futuristic Casket (Eyelid Movies)
9. Oneohtrix Point Never - Child Soldier (Replica)
10. Air - Alone In Kyoto (Talkie Walkie / Lost In Translation Soundtrack)
11. The Beach Boys - Surf's Up (The Smile Sessions)

In particular, "Saved By Old Times" and "Alone In Kyoto" have been in my pending to-be-added-to-a-mux playlist for at least two years. And "Surf's Up" been there even since I heard The Smile Sessions; but given the multi-suite nature of most of Smile, it's hard to cram a Beach Boys cut into the mix. Thus, it caps it off.

Rookies:
The Beach Boys
Oneohtrix Point Never

Meridien K - Chapter 20: The Mushroom Cloud

2011-12-30T00:01:00.005-06:00

None of us had any expectations. Or, if we did, they wereall pretty similar: pallet drops softened with parachutes, maybe tied up withribbons.

Butthe supply drops came in like fucking meteors. Ten shiny silver bullets, eachbursting apart and spitting five more pellets. No chutes, no advance warning.They shot down in metal capsules on a pre-programmed rocket with drop-offcoordinates that just so happened to coincide with our Settlement. After all, what the hell else did theyexpect was past the runway? In the process of crashing, M1 cracked the strip'sbarrier and smoothed out all that rough land beyond. Instead of finding betterground we established residence on the big black X for the drop.

Insultto injury, maybe. Everyone hoped costumed superheroes would jump out, ready tobeam us earthbound. Instead we got equipment wrapped in as many coats of eggcrates they could jam into the capsules, jettisoned with considerable forcefrom their ride, hoping to breach the Martian atmosphere without burning upafter our pre-arrived load presumably disintegrated before we set foot on redsoil.

Thesecond pod hit Sorkin. Landed right on top of him, crushed him with instantdeath, barely any blood. He and the other Soviet, Podrezov, were tokens, relicsto convince ourselves that the Cold War was sort of over, that Mars was a showof solidarity, a team of nations, whatever. Podrezov was the only one whowatched out for Sorkin, and now he was short a buddy and his English was as badas our Russian. There wasn't anything we could do with the bug-flattenedSorkin. Most of us scrambled for the berm at the end of the landing strip,right next to the gaping hole smashed by M1. Ben snapped into Hero Mode again,made suicide runs grabbing people off the campsite and driving them in theRover up to wind-carved caves that were only a few feet deep; better protectionthere from the Supply Drop From Hell than that wide-open ruddy butterscotch overhead.

Wethought it ended, and then another capsule shot down and obliterated one of thefar lean-tos. We took cover from the metal shards flung through the air. Thenwe waited a bit, decided it was safe, and then we shrieked and panicked andflailed when the last thing erupted and caused an explosion in the sky. It hadthe shockwave pattern of an H-bomb, and before I had time to consider mymortality, the visible blast passed right through me and I didn't feel a thing.

"Whatthe fuck?"

"Relax,"said Vedran.

Vedran,the best chemist of all us cross-disciplined PhDs, explained it was a scheduledCO₂ atmospheric injection; all that despite our obvious error ofpumping up the greenhouse to a level similar to an Arizona summer; not like wecould yell back at earth that they were doing it all wrong. We lost interestwhen we figured that at least it wouldn't make breathing any more labored.Then, having only been shipwrecked six months, we were used to but nonethelesssick of the huffing and puffing just to rise to full height and cross the gridof tents. Nevermind that Ben and I had shot hundreds of probes at Big Red and,in the space of scant decades, created something breathable out of, in alllikelihood, nothing. Maybe some upper-lower atmosphere difference between theirBomb and our smaller bombs but, hell, I wasn't a meteorologist; certainly not aMartian meteorologist.

Thecapsules were so hot they glowed red and we couldn't even touch them for threedays. Not that we were out of our minds with hunger or thirst, since we all hadtwice as much to eat and drink as usual, given half our team were pinned underpiles of rocks in one of the worst cemeteries in the Solar System. And thendear dead Sorkin freed up more resources. When we finally pried open the drop,it wasn't much. Food. Water. Blankets. Boy-scout supplies for building a bettercamp. The real hardware wouldn't show lest some Mars-2 appeared from themetallic sky and touched down on our uneven runway and offloaded bulldozers andearthmovers and started the process of building a quaint city center orsplit-level houses for everyone or--

Themil guys scoured everything, looking for a radio or some communication device,anything at all to ease their withdrawal from technology. They were adrift sincewe landed, all those years looking up a chain of command and suddenly having noone in charge past the timid leadership of their most-senior NCO, CorporalBrian Intihar. Or, worse, they felt dubiously led by Benjamin Meridien, a lowlycivilian scientist supposedly calling the shots. They needed brass. And if itwasn't a physical body on the rock, it might as well be a voice on the otherend of a radio.

Theyfound something and Ford took it, field-stripped and reassembled it beforeflipping the power switch, probably wedged in more dust than was alreadyinside, dialed in supersecret coordinates, pressed the transmit button andover-enunciated all his words.

Iknew the signal needed to bounce off the Kennedy probe, and that was on the farside of the sphere. They were so excited I didn't want to ruin it.

"Thisis Specialist Gregory Ford, survivor of the M1 crash on the surface of Mars.Request dialog with Command. Survivors total six-- fifteen, including myself.Crewmembers intact are Corporal Intihar, PFC Ellis, Private Zuniga, civiliansBoyer, Conroy, Vedran, Davis, Elliott, Soledas, Parish, Rolfs, Podrezov, Hsu,Kraid, and…"

Fordlooked around the loose cluster of us for his cheat-sheet. One month awake onthe ship and six roughing it on Martian rock and names were still heavy on thetongue, so everyone pinned on scragpads and affixed their nametapes from thesurf-suit locker in the throat of M1. Sewn names dusty but readable. Fordlooked at Ben up on a rocky shelf, who wore a pitted-out white t-shirt andfaced away from all of us, looking up at the hazy sky and the gasesintermingling.

Fordput a hand over the receiver and said, "Him. Up there. What's hisname?"

"Ben,"I offered.

"Benwho?"

"Meridien."

"AndMeridien," said Ford, back on comms.

Whilethey waited for a message that was never sent, never received, and neveranswered, I went up where Ben stood. His fine-tuned ears heard the whole thing.Nothing wrong with Ford's confusion. Just a little disappointing, maybe.

"Sixmonths on Red and the sonofabitch doesn't know my name?"

"Tohis credit, you don't wear your patch," I said.

"Ididn't come to Mars to wear a fuckin' nametag," said Ben, who then pluggedone nostril and let fly a snotrocket, if only to make visual his irritation.

(Chapter 21 coming Monday, January 2, 2012.)

Meridien K - Chapter 19: The Second Son of John and Karen Kraid -OR- The Latent Terror of Memory

2011-12-28T00:01:00.010-06:00

I didn't want to do it but I felt I had to. At least, my dadsnuck an idea so deep into my head I thought it was my own when it came to aboil. All the decent secondary schools were out there; all that college prep;all that arrow-straight drive for plump, juicy careers. I had the money.Correction: My family had the money. I simply didn't like the idea thatanything worthwhile in the Midwest gravitated toward Chicago. But there I wentand there I stayed for only as long as I had to.

The little things built up. Like erosion.

Ilived next to the maglev, which explained the exorbitant rent, which ascientist's son could only afford because of the life insurance and governmentpayout following my mom's death. My school was only down the street, so I neverhad to take the train, but I walked to school every morning and came home atthe exact same time, and it didn't take long to notice that the exact samepeople were standing on the elevated platform, waiting for the train in themorning and stepping off at night.

Aftera year it seemed like a joke. Some optical illusion. The same people, the sameexact order came off the train and down to the street level as I crossed to mybuilding. There was a tan-business-suited young woman in her 30s; ablack-suited man in his late 40s; and a probably-married couple wearing greyjumpsuits like they had shuttled in from 1980s Eastern Bloc factory drabbery,who seemed old enough to fall into a sack of bones right there on the sidewalk.And I'm not bullshitting you when I say that for the fouryears I lived in that building, I saw those same people get off thetrain every day, looking a little more tired, a little more ragged, maybe dyinga little, chained to something I never saw, slave to a routine that, from mydistance, didn't seem to be doing them any favors.

MaybeI was projecting. School wasn't my scene anyhow, and the people I looked atmight've been looking at me, studying me, me with that same stupid navy-blueblazer with a stitched MPBS coat of arms across half my chest, outer jacketschanging with the seasons, weighed down with a heavy bookbag, head full offacts and no idea how to apply them. Those transitionary years where you grow afoot in a year, wake up with a weak mustache once a week, voice dropping an octave,raging hormones magnifying all your restlessness and angst, magnified furtheredby attending an all-boys school.

Imostly lived alone. That itself multiplies any emotion since there isn't asecond party to talk you off the ledge. I went through a number of roommates,if by "roommates" I mean classmates I was gracious enough to letcrash in my storage-turned-guest room whenever they tired of school housing andwanted the hawk off their back for a bit so they could dabble in drugs and sex,the two inevitably linked. They must've thought the Bobby From Class - alwayswaiting to whisper some crack about the prof, goofing in the halls and thecafeteria, impersonating historical and contemporary political figures -transferred home to that apartment. I left Bobby From Class at school. Myfamily, alone, are much different people than when we're in public. We put on abrave face and are social and nice, but it's not our element. When we can getaway from it, we can. We're excellent fakers.

That'sprobably what caused the revolving-door roommate situation. Even having theirown room outside of campus restrictions where they could smoke, drink, gethigh, get laid, whatever, all was offset by a roommate-landlord - me - with adoor permanently closed and locked. And I imagined how all those leftovers feltwhen they tiptoed up, ready to knock, hand hovering over the door, risking anoutbreak of Kraid rage no matter if they were interrupting anything at all.Same feeling I had when I went up to my shut doors of my older brother'sfortress-room or my dad's office back in the million-year fog of Easthaven,that immortal suburb.

Notlong into secondary, getting up there in the years, was when the hardcorecollege-prep kicked in, around age thirteen through graduation at fifteen. Itwas a game, and the object of school was to cheat the system. Be part of somefuck-all after-school activity because it looked good on a transcript. I wasexcluded from involving myself in filler by dint of my otherworldly academicperformance. Still had to walk a balance, though. Sure, I was at the head of myclass, perfect grades, but I was loaded with death money so I wouldn't qualifyfor any need-based scholarships. No matter, I was MPBS' genius goldenboy withoffers from Cal PolyTech and UC Berkley and MIT and NASA MSL-JPL College (likeI'd meet up with my dad on Mars and pretend half our garbled lives hadn'thappened?) and the goddamn Ivies and Michigan State for some reason and allthat, but figure the number of those sort of kid brainiacs all across thecountry. Say there's one in every major metropolitan area, and you still havecompetition. I wasn't the competing type. But I wasn't trying to rest on mylaurels of academic conquest.

Mybrother Ridley was about to rotate back to the states as a Captain, and hedecided to opt out of re-upping with the Forces, right when they were droppingthe names Army, Navy, Marines, whatever, calling it all the United StatesForces since all branches had their specialized wings anyhow. There were rumblingsabout the Forces changing. How the government surplus of the past decade waspumped into what they were calling "military reform." About how theForces weren't the last resort of barefoot chumps living in Bumfuck, Arkansas,or another loser facing down a judge who gives him the ultimatum of Forces orJail. No: They were ready to shell out serious salaries for officers, coupledwith a benefits package for the rest of your life. Medical, dental, optical,psychiatric, any sort of specialist you ever wanted to see, ever. A mirror ofthe way the country was veering toward socialism on one end of that extremepolitical spectrum. Like they'd appease one hand with social programs and theother with a roaming war relegated to those bothersome regions of the world.

Riddidn't push me in any particular direction. I didn't press him for war stories.I asked how it was, living day-to-day. Me on my satphone in an expensiveChicago apartment, nervous to talk to my own brother, him pacing the desert ona monitored SIPR phone, looking down at the dirty dusty streets when he wasgetting short on his detail in Tehran.

"You,you'd like it," said the mechanical voice on the other end of the line.

"Howso?"

"Ordered.Structured."

Hehad started speaking in as few words as possible since he was about seventeen,a trend gleaned from the few letters - that we heard were mandatory - he sentback from mysterious overseas locations, in reality shuttling from Afghanistan,Iran, Pakistan, Syria… a real swell historical tour of the dawn of civilizationunder any other circumstances.

"Don'tknow if you're looking to get out of the country," Rid said, "but youwill. Guaranteed."

"Sowhat exactly do I--?"

"Talkto a recruiter," said Rid.

"Justlike that? Just walk in and--"

"Waita sec. Let me check something."

Thesound of ruffled papers and--

"Youknow the Forces office downtown, near Polk and Federal?"

"Yeah.I think. The one with the protests now and then?"

"Whatever.Go there on a weekday during work hours. You remember Seth?"

"Yeah."

"He'sa recruiter. He'll lay it down straight. I have to go, Bobby. My time'sup."

Adead line and I powered off the phone.

Toolong ago, too young, too dewy-eyed and baby-toothed and self-repressed toremember the big Why? concerning my entry into the EOP; that, or I still can'tget around to admitting the explanation beyond the question mark.

Thenext day, after class, I got on the maglev, shoved my school blazer into mybag, and went through all the idle motions of doing something I had never donebefore.

(Chapter 20 coming Friday, December 30, 2011.)

Meridien K - Chapter 18: The First Son of John and Karen Kraid -OR- The Oldest Man I Ever Knew

2011-12-26T00:01:00.007-06:00

My sons have, largely, remained a mystery to me. That soundslike something horrible coming from a father of two, but what reason do I haveto lie now? By nearly any standards of logic, they're dead, far away, and Ijust have a few memories of them. Not even any photographs. I'm not that sortof type.

I'vegotten past the Blame about it all. That I can't point a fat finger at theForces for snatching them up when they were fifteen and tossing them to theother end of the earth, to get shot at and mortared and rocketed and IED'd. Butwould I want the opposite? Prodding them to follow my lead and get buried in anaccelerated doctorate-from-hell program that runs you ragged eighteen hours aday and doesn't leave time to write homesick letters home?

Rid- Ridley M. Kraid so formal on paper - was back in Easthaven right before Ileft. I saw him a scant few times since his contract expired and he returnedStateside. It's stupid to say that going to war changes someone. Of course itdoes. So does spending six years of the part of your life, when you change themost, away from your family and friends and pretty girls in summer dresses.Part of me didn't know what to expect, and another tried to parse out thechanges, like what came from growing up, what came from becoming a hardenedman, what came from learning how to shoot and shooting and killing and clearingminefields and calling in fire missions without fucking up your grids and--

Ididn't know what to expect because my own brother, Ron, also went the route ofthe Forces but came back from Islamabad in a military-issue urn. He wasnineteen and I was nine, and my parents took it obliquely, and it became ourSad Family Story trotted out like a show pony from time to time, used as apithy excuse to avoid social gatherings, was incorrectly blamed for my firstsymptoms of what they thought was childhood schizophrenia, when I startedacting out and grabbing kitchen knives and lunging at my parents and trashingmy bedroom. They figured I was too young to understand; or I acutely understoodit and accepted it in my own violent way. Shit, if Karen hadn't done herhomework and knew I had a dead brother, I would've flat-out lied and said I wasan Only Child, something about how my parents felt it was ecologicallyresponsible. There isn't much to tell about Ron, really. I was young. But thisisn't about Ron.

Ridleydidn't need to learn anything else from me once he came back. All thosefather-son passed-down secrets weren't anything he needed or hadn't been taughtto him in training or from his NCOs. I barely knew how to change a tire orjump-start a car, let alone pull one apart and put it back together, or how toreroute the power if one of the cells was damaged by a miniature EMP. Not a lotof roadside bombs or magpulses in Easthaven. But all those were pieces of whatI'd later assemble and what I pinpointed as what really bothered me aboutRidley. I tolerated the long stares, or the blank stares, or the walks he tookat night, or the endless vials of pills on his nightstand, or his drinking, orhis swearing, or his anger, or secret telephone calls, screaming till he washoarse. He had picked up smoking, and for whatever reason I found itintimidating; myself, the wilting scientist home from a lab stool and facingoff against the tallest man alive, him standing over in the pines by thedriveway, not quite hidden, smoking like career smokers, that partial squint nomatter how bright the sun, a plume of smoke like an off-kilter metaphor aboutthe transparency of life during wartime, nice and cozy in the States andnotsomuch under the demon sun Overseas.

Iwas glad we only had to coexist for three months before I left.

Whatreally worried me was that, then, he seemed older than I was. That, in my pithyastronomer's terms to codify this, it was as if living in a theater of wartimeoperations had its own relative time, and while his body had aged anappropriate number of human years, his mind was ancient. He was an old man. Itwas so tangible that I felt if I took a photograph of him, the print would showhis True Self, all grey and liverspotted but no wisdom for him to impart, readyto Go if his breath slipped in the middle of the night, quiet death like thecreak of doorhinges.

Itmade certain some things. Overdue explanations that seemed so obvious. Like whyhe never got along with the neighborhood boys and how, as a kid, he'd say,"They're too common." From off a six-year-old that seems like humor,but Ridley said it with dead-faced seriousness. I used to think I had someroots of an arrogance he always seemed to project, like his intelligence gavehim a permanent, unalienable superiority, but it was different. Thoseneighborhood boys stared endlessly into television sets, memorized lines fromold movies, and Ridley drew intricate pencil mazes across giant scrolls ofpaper I bummed from the architecture department. In the winter he'd draw afloorplan for his snow forts before he built them. He calculated his battingaverage when he started playing baseball at age five. We played chess and Ialways beat him, but he always wanted to play. He concocted variations in whichpieces moved different ways. He changed the game. I could still beat him. Tohim, it wasn't about winning. It was about invention.

Itseemed, then, that the war siphoned off his ambition. Maybe he realized thatoutside the bubble of Easthaven, the world was mostly piss and shit, diseasedand vile, and any healthy nihilism hinges on that simple reality for anyonewilling to go to the Front or occupy a hostile country.

Ingrade school, he was sent home for getting into an argument with a historyteacher about the Civil War. Well, the argument wasn't entirely about the CivilWar. The teacher and the principal might've thought it was. But who would thinka ten-year-old to get into a bloodthirsty argument about human nature?

"Whatdid he say?" I asked in the principal's office, Ridley outside, unknownwhether he was still in earshot.

"Hesaid, 'If people were the same, they'd invent differences.'"

"Andwhat's wrong with that?"

Arare moment of fatherly pride. I wish I had the gall to speak up like that,Back In The Day.

"Heelaborated about what, quote, reallyhappened that caused the North-South riff. Then he somewhat launched into acomparison with disputes in Northern Ireland."

"Thatshows initiative and intelligence. I see no problem," I said, uncertain toplay the Confused-As-To-Why-This-Is-An-Issue Parent or the Concerned Parent.

"Well,"said the principal, starting the same way twice in a row, adjusting hisglasses, an aborted cough and, "your son then proceeded to stand on achair, speak rather loudly, well, uh, he began to yell at his teacher. That he wanted to speak eye-to-eyeso that he couldn't be talked down to."

"And?"

"Idon't think you see how this undermines the way we run our classes," saidthe principal.

Karenlaughed when I told her the story, and, well, that was Ridley before the war.

Andafter? Can't really tell. He took that radio monitoring-and-transcription jobin Northridge three weeks before I left, potentially damning himself to alifetime of jobs based on his military experience. He was in our old Easthavenhouse as soon as my brother-in-law put everything in storage and I was out eastfor the last stages of prep.

AndBobby? Well, Bobby is a different story.

(Chapter 19 coming Wednesday, December 28, 2011.)

Merry Christmas from MPC

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

Meridien K - Chapter 17: The Dream and the Desert

2011-12-23T09:51:00.001-06:00

The non-volunteer volunteers - that kind of thing someoneelse volunteers you to do - were beingreal assholes about it, keeping the candycane gates down until athree-quarters-asleep Reg came over and demanded as much info from Six-Four ashe could invent. A challenge-and-pass we failed since, hell, they didn't tellus much, had to get a capital-O Officer to come and pretend to slap some senseinto the enlistee and let us roll in and park under the mortar roof next to theprefab.

Returningfrom night ops, back from the relative balminess of the AO to the sudden chillof nighttime desert. Stars above and all that romance. After-action vehicle andequipment and gear checks given the bone minimum before the steady shuffleinside and the collapse into sleep.

Tenminutes with my eyes closed and I knew the sandman wasn't coming.

TentCity, Camp Whatever. The US military prided itself on its night-fightingcapabilities, but by the looks of things, everyone who didn't pull the shortstraw for Watch were twitching happily in REM, praying for a porno fantasy, aface full of silicone and gaudy, floodlit sex and--

Itseemed safest at night. In pockets of ill-lit corridors, the black of myfatigues didn't look much different than Reg duds. I'd sneak around like astealth videogame, corner-peeks and cover-to-cover movements they never taughtus because, well, they had whole factories of spec-ops acers popping beet-redboners at the scent of a combat drop.

Thinkingof the droll routine of what had only transpired a few hours prior: We droveout in the afternoon, went two-hundred miles into the border over four hours ata cautious fifty mph, all the while parking and offloading and creeping up toelevated roads and bridges and blowing them to shit, no matter where they wentto or came from. Sometimes we met a Chinese element and waited for them todrive into the kill zone, precision-made IEDs like a lesson from all thatTerror just west of us, clean blasts and crystalline frozen-in-timedeath-moments for all those Clawmen. We did that until an hour past nightfall.No one fired a single shot. No one saw us. We didn't stick around for the People'sLiberation Army's cleanup crews.

Andthen I was back at Tent City in the dark.

"Buma smoke, corporal?"

Thejostle of a softpack, the mental image of the exchange, then a curt"Sergeant" so clipped it came out like "sarn't."

Myback to the wall of the PX, and around the corner two men lit up. Silence asthey got the burn going and a waft of secondhand smoke, a long time since a cigdangled from my lips but I always liked to linger by the smell.

Apeek around the corner: two silhouettes, one tall, one short. Their image pureblack, drained of detail by the perimeter lights that, for whatever reason,were pointing in. Two Regs standingthere and no one else, like they owned Tent City, like they were taking fivemikes off before gearing up and going to win the war single-handedly.

"What'skeeping you up, Hondo?" said the corporal.

"Yeah,well," said the sergeant, a long drag and, "Dreams, kiddo. Fuckin'dreams."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah,"and the sergeant had no finality to his words, was inviting the question.

"'Boutwhat?"

"Nothin'bad. Just Iran. Second tour. I'm walking down a street and it's all thesepeople and I've got my digicamo on and my carbine up against my chest. Andthese people, man, these people just don't fuckin' move, you know? Kinda true story, then, I guess. Fuck it,though, right? I'm like, uh, trying to figure what it, uh," and a fat wadof lung junk spat out, "what it, uh, means. You think dreams meansomethin', right?"

Noresponse and I visualized the shrug. They didn't say anything for twentyseconds and I headed back to the prefab.

Ican't abide people who talk about their dreams. Nighttime dreams, that is, notambitions or anything. It's just that it's so specific to the person, whybother telling anyone else? Sometimes I'd consider them secret, sure. There aredreams I've never told anyone about. Not because I hate people who talk aboutdreams, but because, to me, they were manufactured just for me.

So,jumping ahead a few years, this is what I was thinking when our dropshipcrashed, in that deadspace of thought after we hit the ground and before Iregained consciousness:

Thishappened sometime when I was thirteen or fourteen. The dream, that is. Not toolong before I was Processed for the EOP.

Inthe dream, I was standing in my backyard. Not my real backyard, no, it didn'tresemble it at all. But in the dream, it was my backyard. Nothing familiar. Just grass and a deck atground-level and I knew I lived there.

SoI was standing in my backyard. I started walking up the sideyard to the street.And then, quite suddenly, a white flash filled the sky in the distance a fewmiles ahead. I knew that there was a city out there, and I knew in my bones,knew as good as one can know anything, that it was the telltale flash of athermonuclear detonation.

Inmy mind I ran through the figures about blast radii and fallout and shockwaves.I knew it was futile but I turned and ran to my backyard. There was a woodenfence ahead, about six feet tall, and I was looking for anything to use tovault over it. Like that would help. But dream-logic has its own faults, justas logic does in the lucid world.

Ilooked over my shoulder. The shockwave was coming, enveloping the whole of thedreamscape and turning it inside-out, impossible to reconcile beyond thelethality of that invisible force that rushed out from the ground-zeroepicenter.

Andthen I knew it. It was all over. It would kill me. And I'm not one to bemelodramatic, but it seemed so fucking tragic. I was all alone in thatbackyard, in that dream-backyard that was mine, in that dream-house that was myfamily's, probably with my brother and mom and dad fast asleep in the deepnight. I had maybe a moment to think, only a moment even in a dream, and I knewthat everyone I had ever known or loved or hated or admired or never even metwould be gone forever, and there would only be Nothing, my short existenceended by something of a magnitude I simply had no power to contain.

Itwas probably the saddest thing I had ever wondered. Maybe that's only fromretrospect, waking up and realizing I never had a vital connection with anyone,that if that happened in the real waking world there wouldn't be that sadness.

Inthe dream, the shockwave hit. I fell. I hit the ground but kept falling.Beneath the grass, a gaping black void came up to greet me, and I freefell intothat abyss. Oblivion. It wasn't weightlessness. I wasn't liberated from mybody. I was falling. And I knew the sensation wouldn't last. That it was justmy brain firing off random synapses as the supersonic charge rippled throughthe rest of the dream-suburb and killed everyone in their sleep. It wasn't afade to black, the kind of death like falling asleep. But it wasn't the instantsnap of a gunshot to the back of the head, or the kind of instantaneousfeedback of getting knocked out, like when I collided with the catcher when Islid into home during a baseball game when I was ten, unconscious for probablyonly ten seconds but ten seconds I'll never remember.

Falling.

Mylast thought: I'm dead.

Iwoke up - from the dream, not the crash - in my apartment in Chicago. My roomwas maybe ten feet by ten, prison-cell dimensions. My blinds were shut, butthat sickly-yellow bleed of city lights came in and shined on the ceiling,bright enough to cast shadows. I stood up and I paced the room's confines. Feltthe cold wood floor stick to my bare feet. No cold sweat or anything. Just mypure, analytic brain processing, forcing myself to remember that I didn'tbelieve in omens, or premonitions, or even the possibility of a nuke strikeeven in somewhere as obvious as Chicago.

Ileft my room and the hall and into the giant main room of the apartment. Anapartment I often lived in by myself, without a single piece of furniture forthat enormous central space which I nicknamed "The Desert," like ittook a camel-riding trek to get from my room to the kitchen. I crossed theDesert to the kitchen, opened up the fridge and took the glass of cold water Ialways kept on the top shelf. I went over to the window. In the main room andkitchen I always kept the blinds open. I looked down at the two one-way streetsin front of my building, separated by a vacant cement lot and a cobblestonerectangle around a broken fountain, bordered by benches and elms in dire needof upkeep. It was summer and the trees were full of hypergreen leaves. The baracross the street was still open, still busy for a weeknight. People spilledout past the entrance, sitting and standing under the alcohol-brandedumbrellas. Taxis prowled for fares. It was all down there, bright neon love forthe masses, and the buildings to the south, the Spire glittering far down bythe shoreline, the main skyline spread out, too tall to fully see unless Istood up on the windowledge and pressed my greasy nose to the glass. And in thedistance rose the Willis-Douglas Tower, recalling a time when everything was assimple as its gaunt rectangles, when all those old places had their old names.

EventuallyI went back to sleep. And I never thought about that dream until I was knockedunconscious in the collision with the ground when our dropship crashed andkilled two of us. I don't know why I thought of it. You can draw a millionconnections and a million more disconnects. Even in the dust of the AO, so faraway from that blank past, that seemed to be the one enduring thread that keptme tethered to the Old World, back in the neighborhoods and public schools andFM radio. Sleeping in a plaster prefab and suddenly awake at night, thinking I hadthat dream but no, just another violent vision in my sleep, a restlessness inmy heart that made it beat so hard I had to wake up. I thought about that dreamtwice, and I haven't since.

Inever told anyone about it. I came close to telling my brother once, but wewere never close.

(Chapter 18 coming Monday, December 26, 2011.)

Meridien K - Chapter 16: The Land of the Giants

2011-12-21T00:01:00.008-06:00

It wasn't special or anything. Wasn't passed down from mygrandpa from his grandpa. No family heirloom. Not expensive but not exactlycheap. Not something you could get at a mile-long superstore. I tried to find aspecialty place staffed by old men with magnifying-glass visors, but I wasthinking of a displaced past before I entered the fluorescent haze of the mall.

Igot one right before I left. I tried to find a model that looked like my priorpiece, no numbers on the face, just twelve thin vertical lines. Looked all overthe store. The ones in fashion had enormous faces, metal bands, and gigantic,glaring numbers that glowed garishly in the dark.

Italked to a salesguy to find what I wanted. He fetched the manager, and themanager showed me watches that people had brought in for repair and had beenrefurbed and put up for sale if unclaimed for over a year. Well, for sale onlyif you asked, because they weren't exactly in a state of uniform condition:worn leather bands, the kinds with homemade holes dug out with pocket knives;chipped and scratched and scarred quartz faces; second-hands frozen in eternitybut everything else fine. But I was going somewhere where conditions wouldn'tbe that great, and so I picked one that looked pretty old, was guaranteed torun under the pressure conditions I specified even though I wouldn't be able tocash in that warranty. On the drive home I entertained a fake story about it,how it was passed down for three generations by three generations of men whohad been in wars. I could've made the story true if I gave it to one of my sonsand made him swear a blood oath to have a son and give it to him and make himgo to war and on and on and on for one more go-around until the burden wasplaced on that Last Male Heir.

Iwore it on the underside of my wrist, which, for whatever reason, gave me minorcred with the mil guys on M1. They all wore their watches like that. I don'tknow why they did it. Apparently it's called "World War II style,"but the only men I had seen wear it like that were old science teachers -invariably from a mil background - and guys who were really into locomotives. Ionly oriented it under my wrist so checking the time during a lame conferencewas much more inconspicuous, especially when I was onstage with all thoseblathering greybeards.

Thewatch survived hibernation, cracked in the Crash, still ran for a while, thendied. I figured, well, if a Mars day isn't twenty-four hours, the fuck I need awristwatch for? I wasn't superstitious or anything, but it became what youcould call a good luck charm. I still have it. Still worn on the underside ofmy right wrist and a timepiece on the top of my wrist that works, more or less,on the proper solar and stellar and sidereal days for where I am right now.

Sothat was one of the tricky things about adjusting to life on Mars and one that,as a human, you're powerless to change. It took billions of years for us toadapt to a twenty-four-hour rotation cycle, more or less equal parts sun anddark skewed a bit depending on the axis and latitude and season. Not so much onMars. It's only thirty-nine minutes different than earth, but it's a longerday. You try to keep up with that and, sure, you can fool yourself after amonth with caffeine and energy shots and stims, but you'll hit a crash on thelong haul. Some of the zombies (a foolish, borderline-cruel nickname Ben coinedin jest but it stuck) down at the Settlement took to the practice of keepingMartian time for about forty days and then crashing a whole day, assured sleepfrom heavy tranqs shot straight into the bloodstream. From the documents wepulled from M1, it looked like the official day-to-day plan was somethingsimilar to what we had stumbled upon, though we were supposed to be in thecomfort of our coffins and put into short-stage hibernation, not on the hardground or an improvised cot in a tent, trying to catch some chem-sleep Zs withthat wind blowing and the grit sounding like someone firing a nailgun at theside of your metal hut and the heat, my god, the heat that made you wake up ondamp pillows, made you feel malarial, like the planet, personally, made sure togive you something nasty and extraterrestrial, a personal Fuck You from thedead souls of Martian children.

Anotherof the unpleasantries was the complete inability to fool with low-levelhorticulture and have fruits and vegetables since M1's greenhouse turned to apile of glass shards in one crunch. We only had a dwindling supply of rations,which was where most of the original panic came in, but with half of us dead,there was enough to tough it out the window of X months until - still supposed,hypothesized, theorized, unconfirmed, couldn't be confirmed, really - a supplyre-up. We got enough protein from synthmeat, but eating the muscles of aheadless, footless, cloned cow that had lived its whole unknown life in alaboratory was still unsettling even for the most carnivorous of us.

Ibuilt Ben an unfairly-shitty opti-radio telescope from M1 scrap and, forwhatever reason, he was always lying to people about what he planned to do.Either he didn't want to mention climbing Olympus Mons or his plan to find anextrasolar planet, which would make the Mars mission seem a joke, a steppingstone, nothing important for Benjamin Meridien, Champion Explorer, Lord of theInner Solar System. The Soviets, in particular, thought he was just looking atthe sunset. I'll give Mars that: More colors in the sun-filled sky than earth,though you get sick of the rusty butterscotch hue right quick. But while thedaytime sky often had the color of a mud-caked earth sunset, a Mars sunset wasblue, and if you were on a weird sleep cycle and woke up to a blue sky, you hadto step out on those rocks and taste the dusty air before you realized whereyou were.

"Allthat dust in the air," said Ben. "I mean, what the fuck, man? We knowthere were oceans. Probably was like an earth twin until something fucked itup. Martians, maybe. We came pretty close to burning earth. Still have achance. Launch a few nukes and you'll get the air nice and crummy. Turns outterraformation isn't just pumping up the greenhouse gases. All thatmagnetosphere talk I heard around the labs was apparently on a bullshitmil-controlled need-to-know basis and, well, I sure as shit need to know rightnow. Hell. I don't know. I don't know a lot of things. But I do know what I'mgoing to do before the drop comes."

Istarted training with him. I didn't want to climb the mountain, but I didn'twant him to do it himself. Not that I was planning on dying with him. Not thateither of us planned on dying.

We'dtake the Rover out past the ridge and scan some of the lesser mountains andtackled foothills. Intihar came with us sometimes, gave us pointers on militaryPT. Loading ourselves with twice our body weight, hauling five-gallon jugs ofwater, rocks in our packs, gasmasks to fuck us up further, breathing throughhalf a straw, all brainpower diverted to prevent hyperventilating.

"Youget used to the pain, not the resistance," Intihar would say with a grin,watching us from the Rover, coasting behind us like a chase car in a marathonin case we collapsed.

Wedidn't tell him what we were doing, either. It's not like it was a secret oranything. All anybody had to do was ask. It's not something you volunteerwithout prompt.

(Chapter 17 coming Friday, December 23, 2011.)

Battles rock MPLS.tv

2011-12-19T20:03:00.000-06:00

Battles recently made a video with MPLS.tv and performed a live/session cut of "Africastle" off Gloss Drop. It was so brooding and epic that I ripped it and, now, am passing on that pleasure to you, my dear readers.

It makes a damn fine argument that Battles can take any song and make it mind-blowing if stretched out to eight minutes. And it sounds much more urgent and downright dangerous than the album cut.

So: Download this fine gem before I get sued.

Meridien K - Chapter 15: The Margins

2011-12-19T00:01:00.009-06:00

In transit. Driving back to Tent City and replaying it:

InModern Mechanized Warfare, the average armed encounter lasts, on average, undertwo minutes. Two minutes, on paper, doesn't seem like much. Not very long atall. But the infinitesimal amount of things that can happen in two minutes?That you, yourself, can do? All the things that go right and all the thingsthat go wrong?

Twoyears since Slug's death. Four years total and half of us were thinking we'd goon without a scratch, the other half counting down until the next random KIA.No one was wounded in that stretch, weren't any close calls. Then, in onesingle day, on the same op, Candy and Chronos bought it. It didn't help theluck-freaks that had, for whatever reason, decided to wear helmets that day,since both Candy and Chronos were killed from a bullet apiece that wentstraight through their helmets. That put an end to helmets for most load-outs.For the better, we supposed, less weight and full peripheral vision and all.

Thetwo minutes of Contact: Our AVs about a mile back, tucked in some woods,covered in camo netting. All of us exhausted from a brisk jog through thicketafter thicket before we finally scoped a guarded power relay outpost. Then thatroll of the dice: If you scope your enemy, they can scope you; if you shootthem at maximum range, you're probably going to miss; but if you advance, howwill you know when to start shooting?

Wethrew improvised tactics at The Claw. We called it a Gun-and-Run though we hadhardly invented it. Half of us would hang back and fire as best we could tokeep the Chinese's heads down while the other half booked toward the objective,all straight-line, no-cover sprinting. It usually worked. Advancing under abase of fire, we'd leapfrog with our other half until we had decent positions,set up three groups for sniping, support, and assault, usually split on thebasis of where we were standing. Tactics old enough for a War Two manual, butsome things just work. In theory, that is.

MyselfCandy Chronos were on assault. We got out from behind the trunks of gnarledtrees and went up the grass straightaway to the barbed-wire gate of thestation. There wasn't much of a vantage for any of the Chinese, just atwo-level access building with an uncovered walkway that barely peeked abovetheir fence. But a dozen guys poured out of it. I blindfired an entire mag -all that brass and primer and arcane stuff just wasted, utterly wasted - andloaded another. Bullets emitted that too-close snap past my head, close enough for a powderburn. I hadbeen in heavier shit but, by then, the difference was like a sunny day versus apartly-cloudy day; not much change, but it's outside your control.

Warsare fought on these razor-sharp margins. Like if I had strayed five inches tothe left toward whatever bullet kissed my ear I would've gotten one in thedome. Whoever held back to sharpshoot was picking them off left-to-right.

Iwas buzzing when I reached the gate, broke the crummy lock with my AP'sbuttstock and kicked open the chain link. I wasn't even aware I was suddenlyalone. I was on the hunt, rounding corners like I was about to face down agiant lit-fuse cannon about to blow me into Oblivion. I shot a few lurkers. Nonearby armor. No ninja tripwires or tricky shit. No heavy weapons oremplacements. No support. No radios or rank insignia any higher than what we'dID as a corporal and a lone sergeant. Just some guys standing watch over apower transformer, and us, just some guys in black following a dirt rut gleanedfrom a satellite photograph and the telltale satjam smear right where the relaystation sat, where they garbled our image to protect something, presumably,worth protecting.

Ihung by the buildings once I looked back at the approach and saw Candy andChronos face down in the grass. The other guys came up and didn't even botherto check. Just ignored them. Horse was going straight at them and had to jumpover Candy like he was a puddle in his way. It's not that I lost my nerve oranything. I had done what needed to be done. It was Caf's turn to take doors sohe took the doors, doors to maintenance rooms, to a room with a ladder goingdeep underground, to a room humming with switches and mainframes.

Six-Fourwas on comms, as always.

"Six-Fourto Command. Two friendly KIAs. No enemy prisoners. Objective intact. Markingwith strobes for aerial contact. Requesting a Graves drop. Then we're RTBwithin the minute pending splashdown."

Thecricket-chirp sounded in our headsets as his receiver turned off.

Theymust've been close because a grey-colored, diesel-powered, armored Gravesdropship soon materialized, touched down outside the perimeter and loaded Candyand Chronos before we had a word in edgewise, before we even saw themoverturned. They were spirited away into the ship and we, of course, never sawthem again. 716: Down to nine. Another odd number.

"Hey,MK, come on. Splashdown's getting danger close."

Imet up with the rest in the jog. We formed up in a three by three grid. Justlike training at The Base With No Name minus our losses from the initialroster.

Threedeaths in four years wasn't bad. Wasn't bad at all.

Allthoughts subsided for a moment as a deep concussion hit behind and we felt heaton our backs. We had seen and felt it so many times no one bothered to look.

Asilence for a while. Someone had to say it, so I said it.

"GuessChronos' time was up."

Mostof us laughed.

Ididn't say anything about Candy because I couldn't think of a pun.

"Nowwe'll all have to wear damn watches," said Terra. "If that man wasgood for something, it was telling time by the sun. Or he had the best internalchronometer genetics can buy."

Andthat was the only eulogy that Chronos would ever get.

(Chapter 16 coming Wednesday, December 21, 2011.)

Meridien K - Chapter 14: The Leper Colony

2011-12-16T00:01:00.001-06:00

The tents finally in order. Four rows of four huddlingbeneath the broken wall at the end of the strip, one-man shelters in therockless ruts carved by the crashed M1. Sixteen tents, some metal roofs orwalls but more or less all shakily made of surplus canvas; a surplus since westole the unused excess from the dead. That is, once we stopped using it tocover their corpses and finally just threw up our hands of What To Do andburied them under piles of rocks since the ground was impenetrable.

Butsixteen out there in a grid by the shelf of a long arced ridge abutting thestrip, the best natural shelter we could find that wasn't filled with theomnipresent basalt rockfield that defined the surface of Mars. And sixteentents for sixteen people because we were all unattached. No husbands or wives orgirlfriends or anything like that. Sort of the Secret no one wanted to talkabout or that everyone just assumed. We were loners. Weirdoes. Volunteering forthe most dangerous exploration mission since some European hot-shits decidedthat, nah, the world isn't flat, I'm going to sail past that horizon, and if itis flat, hell, I'll fall off and be remembered as a great, dead explorer.

Therewasn't much exploring going on. No one was really in the mood. Except Ben, thatis. Everyone kicked into a grim survival mode, white-knuckling it, shutting offtheir higher brain functions and holding onto what little they had. Especiallyonce they realized that the shit air wasn’t something you could fully acclimateto. It kicked your ass even if you only needed to climb over the hill to wherewe dug the latrine. Huffing and puffing just to take a shit. Everyone keptwaiting for that promise of a drop or a ship, so then we could stop ratfuckingthe out-of-the-way, too-risky parts of M1 and get legit supplies. Still no knowledgeif or when a manned or unmanned vessel or magic flying pirate ship would comewith something at some time, three orsix months, a year, maybe--

Benpulled a sharp turn in the Rover right in front of me. A nice cloud of red dirtall over my freshly- and laboriously-washed clothes. Just to piss me off. Thatshit-eating grin on his face.

"Let'stake a ride, John."

Idid a sort of look-around to see if anyone else wanted to come even though theyweren't invited. A week and I was still a bit sour with names. I onlyrecognized Intihar out of familiarity. I saw two mil guys that I knew were Fordand Zuniga, but I didn't know who was Ford and who was Zuniga. And there wasEllis, and that rounded out the four easily-identifiable mil elements, separatefrom the band of civs. I knew Vedran from the Rock, though with everyone elsecaked in muddy warpaint, no one stood out. They probably wanted it that way.

"Whatthe fuck you standing around for?"

Intothe Rover and off before I could strap on the harness. Already off on akidney-shaking ride across rough turf, an offroad joyride from hell. Ben wore apair of gaudy sunglasses that he made from crushed shards of the dark-lensedwindows of M1's observation bay, metal he twisted into a crude lens-frame witha pair of pliers, and a bunch of electrical tape. He was faux-handy like that.He pulled a handkerchief over his nose when the rust blew in and I just held upmy hand and coughed my lungs raw.

"Where'rewe going?"

"Relax.Plenty of charge on the cells. We could drive all the way to the other side. Ifyou brought sunblock or a hat, that is. Pretty hot today."

"It'salways hot."

"ReasonI brought you out here," said Ben, now consulting a hand-drawn map hespread out over the wheel and wasn't bothering to watch the rocky field ahead;apparently it became my duty to jerk the wheel before we hit anything big."The reason, John, is, at heart, you're a realist."

"Revelation.What else?"

"Thosemopes back there are going to sit on their asses. Some are dumb enough to thinkthe CO₂ cans we pulled out of M1 and released into the air are goingto make the atmosphere any less shitty than it is. They don't know up top it'salready ninety-five percent carbon D, don't know the difference betweengreenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect, and the nitrogen balance and, and,aw, screw it. They just need to fucking live with it. Christ. Like the more Idrive the same routes, I'll keep crunching rocks and it'll make it smoother.You have to do something to get something. It's like, uh, remember that book Walden? How that dude was in the cabin by himself and he'dgo down to a lake every day, and not long into it he found that he hadinadvertently made trails," and then Ben still stuck in his own thoughts,biting his chapped lips, then, "I just remember the dude was a totalfuckin' liar. He was like a mile from civilization and he had friends over whobrought him groceries and all this shit. He was a pussy, and you know I don'tuse that word lightly."

Tiredof Ben's game or games, plural.

"Whatdo you want, Ben?"

"Iwant you to build me a telescope."

"Why?"

"Why?Why, John, why? Gee, I don't know. So we can do our goddamn jobs?"

"Whatkind of telescope?"

"Thekind with a piece of glass at one end and another piece of glass at theother."

"Optical?I don't think there's even one down in M1. Can't find an extrasolar with that."

"Jesusfuck, John, always quick to conclusions. But think positive. Think lucky. Maybewe'll get lucky."

"Gravitationallensing, wave detection, crossovers, the CMB, Ben. That's it. You gotta dip into all wavelengths. That's the onlyreal way. Combinations all working together like a nice clean equation on ablackboard, and have you seen one of those around here? Those parts got smashedin the wreck. You saw them. I saw them."

"Iwant to start hearing more solutions than setbacks from you, John."

Benyanked the handbrake and after a suicide skid we halted ten feet from a cliff.We got out and Ben threw rocks down the sheer drop and watched them tumble in thelow gravity and smash apart in slow-motion five-hundred feet down.

"Youmight not think it, John, but those people back there look to us asleaders."

"No,they don't. They think of you as a cowboy and they think of me as an idiot fordoing stupid shit with you."

"Likewhat, John?"

Bendidn't intend it but he had backed me up to the ledge.

"Likethe time, John, when we crashed and everyone wanted to panic and we got out thesurface suits and tried to rescue the poor bastards in M1? Or the time when youand I went into M1 when everyone else was too afraid and we started hauling outequipment? When we salvaged enough water so we wouldn't die of thirst? When wemade sure, in our offhand spy way, that everyone was eating and wasn't sick anddoing that fuck-all doctor's job for him? Of finally deciding to bury the dead?Of, jesus, putting crosses over theirgraves? You and me, John, we might as well be the only ones here. Sometimes wejust need extra muscle to pull out the heavy gear still wedged down in themess. But they're just pieces of meat. Mouths to feed."

Abig rock Ben could barely lift, certainly wouldn't've been able to lift if wewere on earth, hurled over his shoulder down into the canyon where it collidedwith everything around it and created a dust cloud that reached halfway up thecliffside.

"Youand me, John, still have a job we can do. All the rest of these people needsatellites and contact with earth and laboratories and all that shit. No wonderthey're lumps. So are you going to build me a telescope or not?"

"Andwhere, sir, would you like this telescope?"

Benturned around and off somewhere was a gigantic wall of rock, physicallyimpossible to see the summit, even out there in the relative haze of distance.

"Upthere, John."

"Gofuck yourself."

"There,John."

"Youthink going up three kilometers is going to improve the visibility of planetshundreds of thousands of light-years away?"

"It'sabove the dustline, John. And we clearedthe major weather in a hundred-mile radius of the runway. And a little bird helped me reprogram the dumbbots tobuild a road up. And we don'thave to go all the way up."

"Nofucking shit, Ben. It's three times the size of Everest."

Benheld up a finger. "Incorrect. Slightly under three times the height ofEverest's summit."

Theman had done his homework.

"Thisis bullshit. You just want to be the first man to climb Olympus goddamnMons."

"Andwhy not?" with arms spread out in challenge.

"Becauseif you trip it's a long fucking fall down."

"ThenI won't trip."

Benwas already back at the Rover, scribbling on his map. I had to play the card.

"Ben.Think about Kate and your daughters."

Asharp look. A murderous gleam I hadn't seen before. The forbidden topicbroached. He played it right back.

"Thinkabout your boys," he said.

"They'reold enough," I said.

"Yeah?You know where the fuck Bobby is? Signed up with this whatever-the-fuck 'EOP'and disappeared? And if Rid's Stateside, my guess is he's still in Easthavensulking around your big house, waiting for a good suicide opportunity. Soundsabout right, no?"

"Fuckyou."

"No,fuck you, John. You don't think I know?You think it's going to be, Hey, girls! Daddy's back from Mars! Hugs and kissesall around! Didn't you miss me? and I fucking love them, John, not the way you can distance yourselffrom your boys and your dead wife and fuck you fuck you fuck you for the way you do it and you know exactly what I'm talking about."

Icouldn't find a rock big enough to throw at his face, didn't have anything sharpwith which to slit his throat so I just stood my ground. Ben couldn't stop. Hecould never stop himself.

"Youthink this is about Mars, John? You think this was ever just about Mars,John?"

"Youthink this is about escape? You think this is about doing something so greatyou get a, uh, uh, a grammar school named after you? Just look in the fuckin'mirror and flex and kiss your biceps, splash some water on your face and takestock of the situation. You're fuckin' crazy. Are you in, like, alcohol-withdrawalingpsychosis? Forget it! We're not climbing Olympus Mons! We're not building atelescope on it! We're not going to discover an extrasolar planet!"

Benlooked down at the ground and nodded at the iron dirt. Not in agreement of whatI had said but what he had in his mind. He looked back at me and, if there waseven a moment in Ben Meridien's life in which he was serious, that was it.

"Rememberthis moment, John. Remember it as the moment when you were wrong abouteverything."

Benleft in the Rover and I had to walk back to the Settlement.

(Chapter 15 coming Monday, December 19, 2011.)

Mux091: Apocalypse Soon

2011-12-15T00:01:00.001-06:00

In the Box.

1. Archers of Loaf - Web In Front (Icky Mettle)
2. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Stick Figures In Love (Mirror Traffic)
3. Pete and the Pirates - Knots (Little Death)
4. Los Campesinos! - Songs About Your Girlfriend (Hello Sadness)
5. St. Vincent - Cruel (Strange Mercy)
6. Phantogram - Don't Move (Nightlife EP)
7. Real Estate - Green Aisles (Days)
8. Radiohead - Lotus Flower (The King of Limbs)
9. EMA - The Grey Ship (Past Life Martyred Saints)
10. Battles - Race: In (Mirrored)

Rookies:
Archers of Loaf
Pete and the Pirates (propers to JLA)

See you in 2012, which will see the triumphant release of the not-so-triumphant Mux100. There was a reason I used three-digit prefixes; guess I'll have to stop at Mux999.

Meridien K - Chapter 13: The Man Who Stands In Shadow

2011-12-14T00:01:00.001-06:00

Caf next to me in the mess. Bunking next to me. Right afterme when we offloaded in the AO in AVs or drops. Firing right over my goddamnshoulder right next to my unplugged left ear. Shooting the secondary rounds onmy targets to confirm their incapacity.

Howdo you break up with a guy in a war zone? Other than getting him killed?

Inthe morning we all woke up at roughly the same time. Chronos cooked fake eggsin the kitchen in the back of the prefab. Pointman, near the door, answered itwhen a runner knocked and handed a fat envelope. We all circulated toward thebig round table in back and Pointman pulled out the documents, laid them out:

Satellitephotographs, topographical maps, linear maps, semi-transparent overlays,timetables, circled objectives, optional objectives, everything we alwaysexpected from our package, always delivered by a low-E runner, no higher-up whowas the string-puller, maybe, but we always had a choice to go or not to go.But everything was Go, never a No-Go; we didn't sign up to sit out missions.

Terraalways had the most questions.

"What'sthat, right there? That a group of rocks or something?"

"Terra,those are letters. MTC. Movement To Contact. Same as last year, the year beforeand the year--"

"Yeahyeah," said Terra with a dismissive swat.

"Rightafter the fourth POI, you see, right there?"

Iscanned the operational checklist and Points of Interest. We weren't driving.Getting dropped a few miles near the border, passing a mile from our usualcross point, where the trees made it hard for the laser fence to get anaccurate reading, and where no one gave a fuck anyway since the local wildlife,also, didn't give a fuck about sovereignty. We were taking out four guardtowers that served as OPs, two of which we had taken out a week earlier but wewere low on det, so it was intact and they must've restaffed it, I guess. Thenit was either humping it back or, if we were up for some derring-do, commandeeringan enemy vehicle, rolling clear past their checkpoints if we had one of theirrides, swift and silent before they got the joke and could call in the secondstringers, lest we botch the spy game and end up as burnt grass and smoketrails if any sizeable force opposed us.

Caflooked over my shoulder, intermittently spearing the scrambled eggs on thetable, close enough to stab me in the neck with his fork's tines.

"Let'ssplit right here. Team one this side of the table, team two the other? Caf,you're the odd man out. Pick a side."

"I'llbe with MK," Caf said, even though I wasn't assigned AV Leader for the op.

Weall showered and packed up and prepped for the dust-off time on the sheet; weonly needed to coordinate when we weren't providing our own transport. We tookour APs and gave them the once-over, and then we headed to the Armory where theReg supply sergeant looked the other way while we took all the dustycardboard-boxed NATO surplus FMJs we needed, a modest amount, nothing greedy,no one used them except us anyway. Z took his swollen 40mm rounds for thesecond barrel slung under his modified AP. Z liked grenades. Must've hadphysics hardwired into his brain, since I've seen him hit targets damn near ahalf-mile away, and you've got to have a golden touch to get the parabolictrajectory just right.

Walkingdown the main drag of Tent City, AVs pulling around us instead of honking andmaking us jump aside like how they treated the Regs. Some weird effect that webecame the ultimate badasses because we didn't care about being badass, aboutvarying degrees of badassitude. Sure, we had black uniforms, we carried ourguns without a strap since we had nifty magnetic braces on our back; we didn'thave a corpsman or medic; we weren't trained the same way the Regs were trained.Not that we held some operational elitism, thinking that we got the hard stuffand they sucked down baby formula. We were an experiment. A Unit given nodirect control except mission "suggestions," no rank among us, justtwelve guys - eleven once Slug took that poison pill - whose main job was toharass the shit out of the enemy along the border, most likely making feintsfor larger ops in the same AO. A special squad same as any other, especiallywhen the Camp was home to the telltale signs of SEALs, Delta, groups sogrime-black that the DoD didn't even bother denying their existence, andsafe-at-home citizens probably thought such cadres were fictional propaganda.Those Guys had their beards and Mideast garb and thick tans; none, for whateverreason, tried for a Chinese look. We wore black, and that seemed to make usmore terrifying than any ghoul remembered from childhood nightmares.

Upthe back of the dropship, into its guts. Warm seats; not the first load of theday. The pilots up front yawned.

"716?"

"Yeah."

"Youknow where you're going, right?"

"Suredo."

"Becareful. Chinks are getting trigger-happy to ace you guys."

"Thanksfor the reminder."

Cafto my left. I was looking down at my feet. My left boot and right boot werelaced differently. It bothered me more than usual. I already thought about thepost-op, getting back to the prefab and, first thing, fixing that problem,before Pointman's after-action report and the usual downtime to flush out thediminishing returns of the once-incapacitating combat highs. But that'd belater. Maybe a few hours, maybe a day. Maybe a few days. Maybe a week.

"Isure am glad we weren't sent to the desert."

Andall at once it rushed to the forefront, the bone-dumb disconnect that Tent Citywas in the hot sandy scrub but the AO wasn't. An extreme environ right up nextto a place like most backyards in the States.

Cafyelling in my fucking ear and I pretended I didn't hear him. So he yelled itlouder. The dropship was purring but not enough to fake deafness. And weweren't wearing helmets or comm headsets, and he knew I always kept my left earopen.

"Yeah,"I said weakly, then I chambered a round and made the guys up front real nervousso I flashed them a smile that wasn't fooling anyone.

Cafcould see right through it. But I knew he'd get over it. It was only the firsttime I ignored him, after all. I'd end up getting stuck with him for the restof my life anyway. He's still the only guy from the Unit I still see, afterall. The other guys disappeared. But I see Caf every day. Or, well, saw himuntil--

Thedropzone approached. The pilots let the ship take a dive and end at a lowhover. We were used to it. They couldn't scare us anymore. Out the back information and trees and cover and objectives, and I looked down at my damnboots and tried to remember when I laced them in the first place. Would have towait until we got back.

(Chapter 14 coming Friday, December 16, 2011.)

Meridien K - Chapter 12: The Broken Metal Beast

2011-12-12T00:01:00.009-06:00

No one spoke for a few days. Beyond the measure that therewas nothing to say, talking took too much effort. Most of our O₂tanks were punctured or expired, and once us brave souls took off our helmets,we realized that, though it didn't kill us, breathing the bastard half-earth,half-Mars atmospheric cocktail was like sucking air through a straw. Someexpected Ben and me to provide a magic fix, but all our toys were lost insideM1. The low gravity didn't make any physical activity any less of a burden.Everything ended sweaty, doubled-over, gasping for breath and staring down atall that iron-rich dust.

Weonly bothered with the unburnt corpses: the shells of those gut-pierced bymetal shards; heads or torsos or lower halves separated in the concussion andsafety belts sharp as razors; a few wholly intact and dead of a mystic mummy'scurse, no visible trauma, like The Horror of it all simply caused an instantevacuation of consciousness. Only one competent medical doctor survived and hewas nursing a state of shock, ineffective to figure how they died. We realizedhe wasn't moving at all when we spotted the urine stains on his light khakis,the burnt-out doctor cross-legged with his back to a wall under his teepee ofstripped metal from the pod.

Everyoneon M1 was dead. Of the twenty-four from the pod, eighteen made it out alive,and two slit their wrists and bled to death during the dark chill of the firstwindy, starry night. Sixteen left: Twelve civs and the four mil, no enlisteesmore senior than nineteen-year-old Corporal Intihar. No rank to pull. Ordercame pretty easily once Ben became the only one either stupid or brave enoughto descend into the ragged, sharp jaws of the haunted M1. He pulled out tentcanvas and rigged crude pulleys to get out big tires for the missing ordestroyed Rover, though the utility of that for our Settlement was negligible.The materials drop that was supposed to be awaiting us was MIA. We laterfigured that the atmosphere was stronger than we suspected, and it slowed thedrop enough to incinerate it in on attempted entry.

It'snot like Ben was any sort of leader, but no one else really protested or seemedto care. Most were living in the dirty hovel of the crashed pod. Everyonedisconnected. All the optimism of The Mission cooked off and left behind aragtag band of insomniac sleepwalkers. No one knew anyone else and figured itbest not to get familiar, since everyone had the impression that we were all goingto die.

Thetruth was pretty easy to digest: M1 had crashed hard and, bless his charred,death-smiling corpse, the Colonel-Pilot split us up, though he clearly intendedthe mothership to survive and the pod to wreck; no debate, we all knew hereally wanted stars to replace the eagles on his collar. M1 was wedgeddiagonally into the ground, so we couldn't just drop its cargo ramp andoffload. Everything important was somewhere in the wreckage and an absolutebitch to pry free once located. But it's not like we had a shortage of time. Afew took that whole Mars Sucks attitude at the onset, forgetting why they camein the first place, and they took their share of food, pitched a shitty tentaside the rock wall below the landing strip, counted down a rescue if they wereoptimistic enough that a triggered, still-intact distress beacon wouldmiraculously bring fresh, knowledgeable, happy-to-see-you humans in a short sixmonths.

Ichoked on "Hey Ben" in my throat a half-dozen times before it gotpast my dusty vocal chords and sounded off in the thin air.

Ruddy-facedand callous-handed, long since devoid of his surface suit, Ben turned and said,"You know, people think you're my sidekick. It's kind of pathetic."

"What?"

"Yeah,"and he laughed a laugh that sounded raw and evil and, "Look at all thesecondoms! All the women are dead! No matter. Weren't many lookers on M1. Atleast there'd be some interesting post-coital pillowtalk."

"Jesusfuck, Ben, no one's said shit since the crash."

Benlooked out at them: Fourteen others living out there like nomads, nothing to dobut pace and kick the dirt and thinking about news headlines back… well…

"Yougotta read it, John. You gotta look where it's headed."

"Thisisn't like fucking tracks in the sand, Ben."

"Thenhaul this shit-heavy water purifier thing out from the bottom of the pit. We'llget to drink our own urine. Don't get too excited."

SoI went down there with a grimy flashlight between my teeth, two ineffectivesplit shards of light courtesy of a cracked lens. I descended the rope ladderstraight down past the bad odors, refusing to turn my head to illuminate acorpse leering jackal-eyed, inches from my face. Down down down into the metalbeast, jesus christ how deep is this thing? Past what looked like fuel storage,a smoky outerspace smell, cracked fusion reactors, good god I need a fuckingGeiger counter, around a crude bend Ben had hammered from impassible metal,"CARGO BAY" in military stencil above an opening three feet tall, a desperatesqueeze under and then the crooked cavern, all that beautiful technology showedto the President and the leaders of other jealous countries, Mars Ho! and allthat empty showmanship, fuck me, shipwrecked not on a lush tropical co-co-nutIsle of Plenty with busty, grass-skirted gals but a goddamn planet, a deadrock, no way to talk to earth, Ben can go fuck a grapefruit and Hmm, I guessthis is it. Dragging out something half-glass, as heavy as I weighed, even achore in Mars gravity.

"HeyBen!"

Helowered cargo webbing into the pit and I secured the load. He started to pullit up and I grabbed hold to hitch a ride.

"Fuckyou, John, you trying to rip the only rig? Climb your ass up!"

Shit.Back up with the flashlight in my mouth, tomb smells, dried-urine smells, fecalsmells, no buzzing flies for obvious cues and my eyes clenched shut past allthat reek, no need for nightmares on Mars, cursing when I grabbed a handholdwith a sharp edge, deep lacerations stung by the fucked-up air, fuck fuck fuckthis shit, I launched those goddamn CO₂ probes, the atmospherepocket should be thick around the LZ or DZ or whatever-the-fuck, I shouldn't bewheezing trying to climb up a hundred-foot chasm in point-three g. Blood on my khakis once I got out of there and Benwas already taking a piss in the machine.

"Ican't go if you're watching."

Maybehe was right. About the situation, that is. Wasn't going anywhere. Didn't haveany desire to kill myself after the third attempted suicidee fucked it up andlabeled himself a permanent pariah for the next, oh, hundred years. Might aswell make the best of it.

So,naturally, Ben turned and smiled, holding a plastic container with clearliquid. He downed it, coughed, and handed me the half-full cup.

"Justwent down the wrong pipe is all," said Ben as he smacked his chest."Doesn't taste like piss, I swear."

Ikept eye contact as I sipped the liquid, used my peripheral vision to scanwhere Ben was most vulnerable for a kick - hopefully the groin - if he trickedme into drinking his urine. I tasted stale water.

"Heyhey, huh? Not bad. Only problem is I emptied a full bladder into that bad boyand all I got was a dixie cup of lukewarm water."

"Areyou complaining about the quantity or the temperature?"

"Both,"said Ben.

"Ben,"I said, "have you ever heard of astronauts drinking cold water?"

"Spaceis cold, isn't it?" he said.

"Technically,it's extremely hot."

"Bullshit."

"Whatever.But what do you think? They, like, put out a gallon of water through theairlock, holding it with some fishing line, reel it in and have space icecubes?Have a nice cocktail?"

"That'dhelp. Bad enough the showrunners made us quit drinking before we camehere."

"Jesusfucking christ."

"Quittalking like me. People will think you're my sidekick," said Ben.

(Chapter 13 coming Wednesday, December 14, 2011.)

JDK's The Best Mix Ever (2011 Edition)

2011-12-10T11:01:00.001-06:00

The annual bad-sequencing mixtape series continues. I split it in two: songs off albums that were released 2003 and earlier, and the rest from albums 2004 and later.

Apologies in advance for the frankensequencing on Part 1.

The Best Mix Ever (2011 Edition) (Part 1 of 2)

TRT 1:15:20

1. Sonic Youth - Teen Age Riot (Daydream Nation, 1988)
2. Pavement - Gold Soundz (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, 1994)
3. Broken Social Scene - Cause = Time (You Forgot It In People, 2002)
4. My Bloody Valentine - When You Sleep (Loveless, 1991)
5. The Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 1995)
6. Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (Thriller, 1982)
7. Boards of Canada - Roygbiv (Music Has The Right To Children, 1998)
8. Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides Everything (The Moon And Antarctica, 2000)
9. Green Day - Basket Case (Dookie, 1994)
10. The Magnetic Fields - All My Little Words (69 Love Songs Vol. I, 1999)
11. Brian Eno - By This River (Before And After Science, 1977)
12. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (Wish You Were Here, 1975)
13. Joy Division - Shadowplay (Unknown Pleasures, 1979)
14. Aesop Rock - Daylight (Labor Days, 2001)
15. Smog - Teenage Spaceship (Knock Knock, 1999)
16. Rogue Wave - Endless Shovel (Out of the Shadow, 2003)
17. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps (Fever To Tell, 2003)
18. Radiohead - The Tourist (OK Computer, 1997)
19. The Mountain Goats - The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton (All Hail West Texas, 2002)

The Best Mix Ever (2011 Edition) (Part 2 of 2)

TRT: 1:17:27

1. No Age - Everybody's Down (Weirdo Rippers, 2007)
2. TV on the Radio - Staring at the Sun (Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, 2004)
3. The Walkmen - The Rat (Bows + Arrows, 2004)
4. Japandroids - Heart Sweats (Post-Nothing, 2009)
5. The National - All The Wine (Alligator, 2005)
6. Why? - Fatalist Palmistry (Alopecia, 2008)
7. Spoon - The Ghost of You Lingers (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, 2007)
8. Junior Boys - Last Exit (Last Exit, 2004)
9. Liars - The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack (Drum's Not Dead, 2006)
10. Frightened Rabbit - Head Rolls Off (The Midnight Organ Fight, 2008)
11. Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened (Microcastle, 2008)
12. Wolf Parade - I'll Believe In Anything (Apologies to the Queen Mary, 2005)
13. The Thermals - Power Doesn't Run On Nothing (The Body, The Blood, The Machine, 2006)
14. Jay Reatard - Oh It's Such A Shame (Blood Visions, 2006)
15. Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies) (Funeral, 2004)
16. Battles - Race: Out (Mirrored, 2007)
17. Born Ruffians - Kurt Vonnegut (Red, Yellow and Blue, 2008)
18. Lightning Bolt - Dead Cowboy (Hypermagic Mountain, 2005)

Lightning Bolt is last so if you don't like them, turn it off.