Friday 29 June 2012

Miles and Miles

thethemeis: What Happened Next?
theauthoris: LiamD

    As he walked through the heavy fire doors into Heathrow Departure Lounge 81, Miles Henderson glanced timidly toward the smooth, steel machine that towered above all else on the opposite side of the room. At approximately two and a half metres high, the device was admittedly not a great deal taller than himself, yet this particular object held certain ominous connotations in Mr Henderson’s mind. The room itself was barely as large as his lounge at home; it wouldn’t take him long to reach his destination. Briefly suspending his slow, deliberate walk toward the Instagrater Terminal, he stopped in the centre of the room and took a deep breath.

  ‘Take all the time you need, sir.’ the smiling attendant in the blood red uniform suggested. ‘And remember, it’s perfectly natural to have second thoughts. If at any point you decide that you no longer wish to go through with it, you only have to say.’ She flashed him a smile with her full red lips that Miles was sure had given many men before him the courage to walk through the terminal without a single look back and surely, if Miles wasn’t fifty years her elder, he may have felt the need to prove his own manhood. But while there were many downsides to growing old, one of the few aspects he enjoyed was a seemingly unconditional kindness and sympathy from young ladies, regardless of how he acted toward them.

   He thanked her, and as she moved back toward the lounge entrance to greet her next customer, Miles nearly jumped at the low drawl which addressed him from beside the terminal. In his pensive state, he had momentarily forgotten about the most important member of staff in the building.

   ‘Good afternoon Mr Henderson, my name is Jack Eastleigh and I’ll be your pilot today.’ He held out a hand and Miles shook it firmly. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been so busy that I didn’t get a chance to read your customer records. Have you Instagrated before?’

   ‘Not exactly…’ Miles murmured, mostly to himself. In a sense he had done it before. In his mind he had run through the Instagration process thousands of times. The short walk to the local terminal, the quick I.D. scan and baggage check-in, the ever-so-brief wait in the now frankly redundant waiting room, the chaperone to the terminal and the brief chat with the pilot before stepping into the Instagrater and being on his merry way. There was but one detail about the process he didn’t know, a question that had plagued him for the forty years that this technology had been around and had made him walk away from his current location time and time again: What Happened Next?

   What bugged Miles the most about this question was that nobody knew the answer for sure. It was impossible to prove. To describe the process as teleportation, to simply say that the Instagrater zapped you from A to B would be the epitome of over-simplification. Despite the commercial attempts at a friendly name for the service, it was the science behind the transport that Miles had come to half-understand and half-fear. An Instagratee, once ready, would be sealed inside the device and literally disintegrated. At the exact same moment of being disintegrated the ‘passenger’ would be reintegrated inside an identical Instagrater at their chosen destination.

   It wasn’t even these technicalities that Miles feared exactly; billions used the service every day and he had not once even heard a whisper of the reintegration process going wrong. Miles’s fear was a more philosophical one. As a man who had been raised by well-meaning Christian parents (an ideology he later rejected entirely), Miles found it incredibly difficult to reject the notion of the human soul. That is not to say he believed in an afterlife and an all-loving God (as mentioned, he rejected the ideologies - later came to loathe them), yet he struggled to accept his conscious mind and sense of self as by-products of his physical body, molecules that could be destroyed and recreated without him noticing. As far as he was concerned, the walk to the Instagrater could well be his last. Sure, an exact copy of himself would walk out the other side believing the whole process went swimmingly and go on living his life, but what consolation was the continued existence of an (admittedly perfect) clone to an original who had ceased to exist?

   When all was said and done, Miles was afraid to die and for that he could not reasonably be blamed.
So he had never gone through with it. Once he had even entered the Instagrater itself (surprisingly bare on the inside, he noted at the time) before the fear had once again become too much and he had turned tail, fleeing home. That had been the winter of ‘56, nearly twenty years ago now. Then it was thoughts of Kate, his dear companion who he couldn’t bare to part with, that had stopped him from taking the trip.  Now she was gone, peacefully at least, but gone all the same, and with her, the last of his family and true friends.

   Yep, he thought to himself. No one left now, I wouldn’t be anywhere near this thing if they weren’t.

   ‘Let’s just be done with it.’ grunted Miles and without a further word he walked inside the terminal,  prepared for the worst. The steel doors closed smoothly behind him.





   Inside Arrival Pod 81 of the LAX Instagration Port, Miles Henderson was recovering from a brief tickling sensation. Slowly the pod doors opened to reveal a room not entirely dissimilar from the one he had recently left. If the man now standing in front of him smiling hadn't been there, he would have sworn that he hadn't been transported at all.

   'Congratulations Mr Henderson!' the stranger in the casual blue jeans and smart white shirt jubilantly exclaimed. 'You've just successfully Instagrated. How do you feel?'

   Miles looked at him blankly. This perhaps was the one eventuality of the trip he had failed to prepare for. 'I feel like a stubborn old fool!' he exclaimed, though not without a smile on his lips, and promptly left the building.
   

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Life Just Went On

thethemeis: What Happened Next
theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   What happened next is that life just... went on. Despite everyone's flapping, despite all those so highly strung, despite everything that was intended to go so catastrophically wrong and all the contingency plans that had been conceived to mitigate it all, an eternity more of mundaneness just happened.

   The weather got worse, and then it got better. It got hotter, then it got colder, then it started again. Global warming didn't cook us all, nor did global cooling turn us to tormented stalagmites, forever frozen in an expression of terrified bewilderment. Aliens never visited, animals never grew intelligent enough to take over, and Jurassic Park never became a prophetic masterpiece. Religion didn't die out, but nor did it grow. Everything just hobbled along as it had done before.

   Gay marriage was legalised. And after that, no one who was heterosexual before suddenly became gay. No kids suddenly switched, and nor were "family values" eroded. People just lived, and they lived happily. People who were oppressed were not so oppressed anymore, and on the whole everyone went on with their lives just the same. Some people continued to be phobic, but that was mainly those too unintelligent to even be worth listening to.

   Microsoft didn't go out of business when the next version of Windows came out. All those predictions of public disgust and destruction of a behemoth technology company turned out to be just the ravings of obsessive lunatics. In actuality, critics hailed it as the best operating system ever installed onto tablet computers. It never beat the iPad in terms of commercial success, but by then nothing could. PlayStation kept grappling with XBox, Google kept on wrestling Bing, Coke stayed better than Pepsi, the East and the West continued to bicker, capitalism and communism each held on to their delusional followers, history continued to rewrite itself onto the future. 

   Tax loopholes were never closed. The rich continued to pay the same amounts as the poor, sometimes even less. The poor continued to wish they were rich, so that they could avoid tax too. Questionable expenses continued to be put through and approved by everyone with any authority working for any organisation with spendable budget, and no rules against any of it were ever paid any attention. Money became valuable, then it became worthless, then the next day it happened again. 

   The unintelligent continued to buy terrible literature, as did the intelligent. The smart bought as much printed slush as the stupid, and the thick bought as many masterpieces as did the clever. The best sellers continued to be only those novels that had started out as terrible fanfiction and ended up as terrible books, or else those novels that had just been released as major motion pictures or HBO TV series. The same old artists exhibited their paintings year after year, the same old critics complained that art wasn't art anymore, and the same old punters handed over their money to be in the middle of it all. Exactly the same could be said of any creative industry - nothing ever changed in the world of film, music or advertising to bring the human race to its knees, despite the warnings that it would. 

   Planes continued to take off and land, cars continued to pull off and park, and trains carried on stopping at stations and choo-choo-chooing between them. When they went wrong, nothing really changed. Problems were dealt with. People managed.

   The same scientific discoveries were made every year. Cancer and AIDS were never cured, but nor did they wipe out the human race. We learnt just as much about our universe as we forgot about ourselves; then we studied ourselves and forgot the universe, until it all balanced out. Some people forever cared more about hair gel than they did about DNA, and others eternally concerned themselves with dark matter, rather than KY Jelly.

   Football teams went up, and football teams went down. Basketball teams won, and basketball teams lost. Athletes rose, set world records, and then fell. Fans followed sport more obsessively than they loved their spouses, even though it still made no tangible impact on their day-to-day lives. For every team that fell from grace, another stepped up to take its place. 

   No teenage boy's life ended because he split up with his girlfriend. No female died of loneliness. The most romantic man never walked the earth, and nor did the swooningest woman. People lived, people died, people loved, people laughed, people danced and ran and cried and hated each other and created and destroyed, and none of them was any better or worse than any other.

   And so it continued.

   What happened next is that the everything stayed exactly the same. Forever more, planet Earth silently strived to convince the human race that the devastating endings they dreamed up for themselves were just make believe. It continued to turn, and they continued to ignore it. So fixated were they on panicking themselves with fictions of terrible pandemics and monopolies and injustices that they missed the lasting, glaring, obvious fact: life always has, and always will, go on; and the best way to endure it will forever be to enjoy it. 

Friday 15 June 2012

Erm...


thethemeis: Shame
theauthoris: Deadbeat


I just stood there starring at the floor.

“What the fuck man!”

The only bare section of carpet in which a complete version of it’s pattern could be seen was between the chair and the wall. Five and a half pattern lengths by eight and a bit the room was.

“Are you actually going to say anything?”

My fingers were dancing. It wasn’t their usual measured & co-ordinated jig. They skittered and tripped, frantically trying to work out the pressure growing in my pounding head. It was a futile effort.

“Do you even remember what you did last night?”

It was something to do with the kitchen. I’m sure there were many things, but the really bad one involved the kitchen. I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. I’d been confronted before I had the opportunity to check on the results of my previous night's actions. Perhaps i'm wrong. Domestic issues can be easily forgiven, he looks far angry than that. How long has that newspaper been under the sofa.

"You do this all the fucking time! You get so pissed up that you don't know what you're doing and you fuck it up for the rest of us."

This is definitely about more than the kitchen (unless i've broken his Jura Impressa 27, chrome). I must've done something to damage our reputation. That's always the problem when I get on the charlie. Nine times out of ten i'm the bomb. My wits are sharp, the girls love me and the guys hate me. But every now and then it goes horribly wrong and I come off as an absolute cock. Perhaps that's it, maybe I went rogue and fucked it up for the other guys who were onto a sure thing.

I switch my view from the floor to the new Sony 65" LED backlight TV, HD & 3D. The news is on, something about atrocities in some North African country. I know it's important to stay on top of current affairs, but I struggle to motivate myself to do so. Personal i've never found it that useful, my conversation is always built more around the moment. I wonder if always carrying things on your head like that has some sort of long term effects on the brain.

"So what was she like than, was it worth it?"

She? Who's he talking about. There was no one in my bed this morning. I say morning, it is nearly noon. Maybe she's already gone. Why would he be angry though? Unless... Marisa, she was there last night. I wouldn't though, would I? I mean, I definitely would! Who wouldn't? But I wouldn't actually. We have always got along though and she wouldn't have any problem doing it, not the way it ended between them. If it was Marisa then it's a cruel shame that I can't remember the night's events but still face the repercussions.

Thursday 14 June 2012

The Warehouse

thethemeis: Shame
theauthoris: LiamD

   ‘It’s a real shame y’know,’ a ridiculously stereotyped Brooklyn accent tells me as I awaken. Like most voices I hear for the first time, this one sounds familiar, yet I can’t quite place my finger on where I have heard it before. Perhaps I never will. Much of my body aches and a connection between my physical state and the passive aggressive tone of my acquaintance becomes apparent. I cautiously open my eyes and try to stop them widening in shock when they see the gun pointed toward my face, close enough for me to read the embossed ‘COLT’ and patent information that runs across the steel barrel. The hand inside the leather glove that holds the pistol steady belongs to a well-dressed young man with clean, slicked-back hair. If he wasn’t pointing a gun at a man bound to a chair who had been asleep not two minutes ago, I might have thought him respectable.

   ‘A guy with your… skills… could make a lot of money working for the boss.’ he tempts. In spite of myself, I have to disguise a suicidal snigger at his pronunciation of the last word, and how it could almost rhyme with paws. He pauses for a moment, perhaps awaiting a response. If so, I don’t give him one. Instead I think about the connotations of what he is saying. If someone has found out what I do, I can sure see the potential benefits of having me as a ‘friend’. The problem is, my little trick is far from reliable, and if these people are as shady as this gentleman implies, I doubt they would have much sympathy or patience on my ‘off’ days. My best hope at this stage is escape.

   ‘What’s going on? Who are you?’ I ask in what I hope is a confused tone. I scan the room in front of me, trying not to move my head too much. The last thing I want to do is excite his trigger finger.

   The room we’re in is some sort of warehouse, I’ve gathered that much. Behind my captor is a large, green-coated machine with a jagged metal feed tray that disappears into its belly and presumably connects to the long conveyor belt emerging from it’s rear end. It’s neighboured at either side by identical machines in a row which spans the entire width of the room – about one hundred metres give or take. There must be at least thirty of these beasts in total. From the messy spats of ink on and around each unit I guess them to be industrial printers. Whatever they are they clearly haven’t been used in a while, and that thought above all others scares me; I can’t think of many reasons to bring someone to a place like this.

   ‘If you don’t quit with that “Where am I?” shit, you get a bullet in your skull, capisce?’ This time I don’t dream of laughing, all the faux-humour from his face has faded and I’m left eyeballing an angry man with a gun. I nod slowly. His voice, that which was earlier so deceptively good-natured and breathy, is now harsh and nasal.

   ‘I’m trying to help you here, pal. Not many people get a second chance after crossing the boss.’ He sighs, as if genuinely distressed at my predicament, or perhaps at himself for losing patience, before continuing in his previous warmer tone. ‘Killing you… that would be a real shame.’ I feel my aching muscles tighten as he speaks the worst aloud. Is murder his priority? I’m not convinced, but the thought of it still frightens me. His eyes have something about them. They are the cold blue eyes of a killer.

   This may just be the worst case scenario playing out before my eyes. Even if I can loosen this rope that binds my hands together there’s no cover nearby, no getting away from a jerk of his index finger and the bullet that would follow.

   ‘Last chance, bub. Whaddya say…’ he is cut off mid-sentence by a shrill ringing coming from a nearby desk. After racking my brains I recognise it as the sound of an old-fashioned phone. The phone he answers is in fact ancient by todays standards, not that I have any idea what day it is…

   ‘Y’ello?’ he pauses after answering and makes subtle improvements to his mannerisms, some visual. ‘…Yeah I’m here with him now boss…’

   While he’s distracted I frantically examine my immediate area, there must be something around here that can help me escape a bullet in the head. I realise I’m panicking and force myself to calm down. Closing my eyes, I count to five slowly, then open them and take a fresh look around. Nothing too far away can help me, I’ve established that. What is there nearby? I come close to giving up hope when my head droops and I finally see it. There, on the floor no more than thirty centimetres to the right of my chair, is the solution to my problem.

   ‘…Are you sure? Think of the things he could do for y… …yes boss, I’m sorry, whatever you say… no boss, you won’t have to do that at all, I’ll get right on it…’ He turns back to me sporting a grim smile, apparently not noticing the serene expression that has replaced the flood of anxiety I had previously felt. His telephone conversation and morbid grin should leave me unnerved, but instead I’m feeling the enchanting pulse of excitement, maybe even with a hint of confidence.

   ‘Sorry, kid.’ He says. ‘Looks like you should’ve taken the lifeline while you had the chance.’ He raises the colt so it’s once again pointed towards my face, tells me one last time:

   ‘It’s such a shame,’

   then fires his weapon.

An Unusual Love

thethemeis: Shame
theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   A lot of people I talk to about this ask me if I've ever had sex with women, and if I think I'd enjoy it. Of course I have. Hasn't everyone? It was ok, but it's not what I want. It's not what my body needs. I heard someone say once, 'the heart just wants what the heart wants,' and that's exactly true. I can't change the way I am just to suit the warped perceptions of others. If they have a problem with what I enjoy in my private life, then that's their issue to deal with, not mine. They should mind their own business. I don't go barging into their houses telling them how to chop their onions.

   But still, the shame eats me up. I can't reveal to anyone new what I'm into. I'm sure a lot of people would be fine with it, but there's a heartless few who would scoff and judge and treat me like a freak, an animal that should be caged up. Only a few close friends know just how deep this goes. I certainly can't tell my parents, they'd disown me for sure. They're so hung up on what the neighbours think of them that I'd be excommunicated before I could even say, 'I'm sorry, but...'

   So instead, I'm writing it down. Once and for all, I'm admitting that the love that I've found in life is less usual than you'd expect from someone who is in every other respect as everyday and normal as I am. I'm telling the world, and if the world doesn't want to deal with it then that's the world's problem. I'm shedding the shame, so that others just like me can follow suit without fear or delay.

   Here it is, for you to get over:

   I am in love with my car.