Fresh Start

thethemeis: Let Down

theauthoris: Deadbeat

I've always dreamed of seeing the future, who hasn't. This isn't really the ideal scenario for doing so, but it's a silver lining. I could see my mum in my dad's arms, struggling to hold back her tears. Sure i'd miss them and as any parent will tell you, this situation is 10 times harder on them than it is on me. But we all knew there was no alternative, I'd been to just about every specialist I could afford to see and they all said the same, it was inoperable. It was either this or being dead within 2-4 weeks.

At first, when the doctor from the Royal London Hospital suggested it to me I thought he was joking. I'd seen reports of it on the news and in the papers, you couldn't miss them, but i'd assumed it was beyond anything I could afford. He explained that they were accepting a cross section of patients with incurable illnesses to be frozen with the understanding that they would be the first to be operated on once the methods had become available. It seemed as far as he knew there should be no reason why the deep freezing process should make any future operational methods any more complicated as all current test patients had awoken in almost identical physical state. The test subjects were mainly just for legal protection, I imagine if they had overlooked something crucial, they much rather find out by killing one of us than one of the soon-to-be-many millionaires and billionaires who would use the service. Either way, I had nothing to lose.

The closer it got to the date, the more excited I got about the prospect. I hadn't had a bad life, but it'd be a stretch for anyone to say that I had lived it to the full. They was certainly nobody that would really miss me, except for maybe my parents. I was only 33, if I could start again then who knew what I could do. They had no accurate estimates for the length of time it would take to find a cure for these things, but it was generally considered that what I had would take longer to find a solution to than most. The world could be an entirely different place by then, I could live out every child's dream. See unimaginable technology, travel at unbelievable speeds, maybe even experience space travel, who knew.

The day came and I went up to the centre, with my parents as companions. They administered various tests to certify that there would be no problems with my stasis. Then they checked that my brain tumour was severe enough and that there would be no other complications that they would have to resolve upon my "awakening", as they referred to it. And here I was standing in front of what was to become my home for the undeterminable future, in a hospital gown, with a mixture of sadness and excitement.

"Once you get inside the chamber you will feel very cold and after approximately 10-15 minutes you will fall into a deep sleep. You shouldn't experience any pain and once you have reach stasis time you fly past without you being aware at all. The next thing you know you'll be waking up on a hospital bed in the future and it will feel as if no time has passed at all. I will give you a few moments to say goodbye."

I said goodbye to my parents and entered the tank. Damn right it's cold. Having taken off all of my clothes I was seriously concerned for my extremities. I adopted the fetal position and began to wonder what I might wake up to find in what would appear to me to be a few moments time. Perhaps the world would become a more peaceful place, the Utopia that science fiction films are based on. Perhaps I was due to awaken into a world where I could no longer die of any physical illness. Perhaps technology would remove all jobs and menial tasks from our world. Perhaps....

"Hello. Are you awake, hello sir. Hello?"

"Err, where am I?"

"Hello sir. It is currently the year 2134, you are in the awakening room in the Royal London Cryo-stasis Centre."

"2134, really? What is the world like now? Am I cured now?"

"Well sir, the world is very different now, in many ways. I believe over the next few days you can learn  all you wish to about the differences between our time and yours. However, I also have some bad news for you. in the 122 years that you have been frozen  we have made many advances in the medical world, but unfortunately we haven't got much closer to finding a solution to your particular problem."

"So why on earth have you awoken me?"

"Well, although we cannot provide a solution to your problem, we have been able to find ways of combatting the majority of medical problems that faced people of your time. Because of this and the many successful and positive responses to the service we provide, stasis procedures have become very popular. The problem for our company is that space has become very rare in our over populated world, so i'm afraid that your pod has been released for a more significant investor."

"Wait a minute, you can't simply cart me out. I have a contract!"

"I'm afraid the contract you signed became obsolete after the legal reform in 2128. All legal documents made before 2078 were defunct from that date on. Now that our facilities are overcrowded we have begun emptying out all pods which are not financially backed. I'm afraid all we can offer you is a place to live for the remaining few weeks of you life."

"Bummer!"

Mistakes and Regrets

thethemeis: Let Down

theauthoris: LiamD

   So there’s this guy I used to know. Let’s say his name was John. That wasn’t his real name, but for the purposes of this story we’ll roll with it.

   John and I had known each other for a long time, definitely since our teens, possibly even longer than that. At school we were pretty much inseparable, we later lived together at uni and even after that, when I would hear from everyone we used to hang out with less and less often, we were constantly in touch. You might say he was the closest friend I’ve ever had. Literally, I mean; he was far from the best. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he was a bad friend; his heart was mostly in the right place. But if there’s one key feature of his personality that I can remember (and I struggle to remember a great deal about him these days), it’s this: you could always rely on him to let you down.

   I don’t just mean the trivial things, like the countless times he’d get all excited about meeting up with the old gang and either pull out at the last minute with a poor excuse (‘My parents have gone out and I need to look after the cats.’ was a particularly memorable one) or fail to turn up without any warning at all. It was the big things too, he’d miss the special occasions. The many birthdays, weddings, once even a funeral. For what reason? Nothing more apparent than he couldn’t be bothered to crawl out of bed. I remember often speculating that he had problems at home, and maybe he did, but I also found myself wondering what possible troubles could justify his total lack of commitment to those of us he called friends.

   Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not pointing out John’s character flaws just for the sake of it, and I wouldn’t have stayed friends with him for all those years if he wasn’t fun to be around when I did see him. His chronic unreliability, though, is a large part of what this story is all about.

   I didn't see John for a good four years after our graduation in July 2008 (While it was true we were always in touch, we never actually met up in person). Doing so would have been largely impractical for either of us; following the bachelors degree, I stayed in Leeds to pursue a masters and later career in video game audio, while John journeyed the two hundred and forty odd miles back home to London and continued his specialised studies into differential geometry... Whatever the hell that is. 

   My own endeavours were reasonably successful. I managed to graduate from my masters with merit and six months after handing in my final project materials, I had landed myself a job in the games industry at Rockstar Leeds, if only in 'Quality Assurance' (the technical term for games testing). What followed were five years of drifting from development studio (Team 17) to development studio (Activision Leeds), as I would inevitably get laid off at the end of each product cycle. This isn't about me though; I won't go into too much detail. Suffice to say that a couple of those four years I spent in my early career appear to have been a complete waste of time, as many things tend to seem with the benefit of hindsight.

   Finally, in the early spring of 2012, I got my first job in game audio back home in London at Mind Candy. To celebrate, aside from moving all of my things back to my parents' house as quickly as I could, I organised a trip to the pub with friends I could no longer truthfully call close, but who were dear to me all the same. We had a lot of fun that night. I probably drank too much, as I often do on occasions of celebration, but the were no arguments and it was such a joy to once again be in the company of the kind-hearted and good-natured individuals I had grown up with. Of course, true to form and with his reputation somewhat preceding him, John didn't turn up. 

*

   The next day, after a long lie in and a cheeky Hair of the Dog, I made the considerable effort of the hour long bus journey to the bar that John had been working for part-time. By a sheer fluke, I arrived at the Rambler's Rest just as he was taking his mid-afternoon break. I bought him a drink, maybe to show that there were no hard feelings, though I doubt he saw any significance in the gesture. After we'd had a brief catch-up, talk turned to the previous night.

   'I'm sorry about last night, I really wanted to see everyone.' He stopped to sip his Carlsberg and I kept silent, wondering if there was an excuse to come. There was: 'I've been working hard on the thesis for my PhD. More recently I've found myself losing a lot of time because of it,' he explained. The PhD had been mentioned in passing during our catch-up. At the time, I couldn't even understand the title, let alone the subject matter.

   'Don't worry about it,' I told him. 'I know how time-consuming higher education can be, I struggled enough on the undergrad!' He chuckled briefly at this, a short laugh that sounded strangely deflated, then his face straightened. 

   'I do worry about it Liam, seriously... I have done for a long time.' I noticed he would no longer look me in the eye. I found his undisguised shame unnerving.

   'It was only a drink down the pub, mate. What does it matter if y-'

   'A drink down the pub, five birthdays, two weddings and a fucking funeral, of course it fucking matters!' He wasn't quite shouting, but a couple of people on the table next to us heard this outburst. They strategically walked over to the bar for another drink.

   'I know what you all think of me,' he continued, his usually dull brown eyes shining with tears. 'I don't blame you either, I'm an unreliable prick.'

   I had never seen him this upset. In fact, had you asked me the week before I would have told you he was entirely incapable of extreme emotions (and I only would have been half joking). I had no idea how badly this had been eating away at him. I was pretty speechless.

   'But I'm trying to change that, I will change it. After to-'

   'John, it's about that time again mate,' the barman called over. John wiped his face and nodded to him.

   'Sorry, I need to go back to work,' he explained. Something of a lifesaver from my point of view; this whole affair had been getting pretty awkward.

   'Look, before I go, we're having a barbecue on Saturday. The weather's supposed to be good and it's Mum's 50th next week. If you're really planning on turning over a new leaf, why don't you pop in and say 'hello'? I'll even do you a burger.' We knew each others parents fairly well, I reckoned Mum would've been happy to see John after such a long time.

   He grinned, eyes glinting. 'That would be perfect!' he exclaimed. 'My work will be finished by then, I'll be there!'

   'Ok, mate, but if you can't make it, it won't be a prob-'

   'Did you not hear what I said? My work will be done! I won't let you down!' He left me on that note to get back to his duties. I finished my drink pensively before saying my goodbyes and catching the bus back home.

*

   The week passed pretty quickly. After recovering from my pretty dire hangover, which seemed to have been exacerbated by the alcoholic top up at the Sailor's, I spent much of it indoors. Since most people I knew were in full-time work, I didn't have much options with my week between jobs other than sitting around playing my PS3 and watching the odd film. Not that I was complaining.

   In fact, by the time the barbecue came around on Saturday afternoon, I had forgotten all about inviting John over. At three o'clock, the food was ready for serving. Just as I had grabbed a burger and bap for myself, the doorbell rang. I remembered the guest I was expecting, though never really thought would turn up. From the garden I walked through the kitchen and hall, before opening the front door. The voice that accompanied the stranger's face at the door was oddly familiar.

   'I told you... I told you... I finished, I won't be a let down anymore!' At first I didn't comprehend what was happening.

   'Sorry mate, I think you've got the wrong house...' I began.

   'Liam... I told you, Liam... I said I'd be here. I didn't let you down!' Slowly I began to connect the dots. The defined jaw, the dull brown eyes, the prominent ears. But this man was forty years older than John, at least. This had to be some sort of bad joke. As I was trying to make sense of the situation, the grey haired, weather beaten stranger in front of me shuddered violently. He began coughing harshly, hacking up blood over the porch.

   'I... I didn't let... you down Liam... Did I?' he asked, between fits of choking.

   'No, John you didn't, you...' His whole body convulsed madly, stilled, then spasmed again for a further few seconds. This time when he stilled, he spoke no more. Bewildered, I felt for a pulse. There was nothing, this man was dead.

*

   Despite his ravings and our final exchange, it took me a long time to accept that the stranger was in fact John. After calling for the ambulance, I rang all of the phone numbers associated with him in my phone contacts, all of which went to answer phone or didn't connect at all. Six months on and I've still had no luck. Recently I've found more reason to worry.

   You may recall that I mentioned not having much memory of him these days. The thing is, up until a few months ago, I could have described John to the smallest detail. The clothes he wore, his hair style, his facial hair (or lack thereof). But now it's all a haze. You'll also remember that John wasn't his real name and that is part of this too; last week I forgot his name. Next week, who knows what else I won't remember. That's why I'm writing this all down, and hoping that I believe it all when I later come to read it, not just think it a mysterious tale.

   If I do forget it all, if I cast this writing aside, branding it dissatisfactory fiction, god knows what repercussions that could have. Which brings me to my point. I appeal to you, kind reader. If any part of this mad tale makes sense to you, I implore you to help me. Without you, I could leave one of the greatest mysteries, and potentially a great danger to mankind, undiscovered forever.

Liam Donnellan - 27th July 2012

Love in a Helicopter

thethemeis: Let Down

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   The sun beat down on the pair of them with little mercy, as they stood on the tarmac at Browning Airport waiting for the helicopter pilot to emerge from the outhouse. They hadn't spoken for hours, this young couple, so wrapped up were they in a petty argument they'd had about his mother, and the way she behaves at social gatherings. It's unacceptable, the girl had said, that you let her say those things to me. He'd replied, If you cared for me as much as you say you do, you'd understand that she's old and ill and I don't want to wake up one day and find out that she died the night after I argued with her about you. Like all youngsters, they had both been too stubborn to get it resolved. 

   And now, they were set to embark on an early evening helicopter ride over Gagarin Falls. What was set to be the highlight of their holiday, the most romantic trip they had planned, was marred by bickering that had spilled over to times it should not have wetted. And the boy regretted that.  

   He wanted to make it better. To make things okay again. To brush over the cracks and pretend, together, that everything was perfect. But he needed to know one thing before he could let go of the niggling irritation: did she really love him? Unconditionally? More than anyone else she'd ever met? It had always been a question that haunted him as he tried to get to sleep, what with her occasional musing about ex boyfriends, her incessant chatting about men at work, and her unbelievable stories about her circle of friends. And with the mood so low, he thought he might as well throw it out there, and see what she did with it.  

   When he opened his mouth to ask, the helicopter pilot waddled along to interrupt, awkwardly pulling his trousers up around his corpulent waist. Come on then guys, he said. Let's get you trained on safety.  

   The pilot didn't sense the awkwardness between them as he gave them their mandatory talk on helicopter safety. He showed them how to fasten their belts, how to activate their microphones if they needed to ask him something, what to do in the event of an engine failure; and they listened in stone cold silence. When he told them about the Jesus Bolt that holds the propellers on the roof, so named because if it snaps out Jesus is the only one that can save you, the girl laughed and the boy didn't. 

   The pilot turned the roaring engine on, and the girl climbed in. She seemed to be in higher spirits now, but the boy was still lost in thought. He stood outside the helicopter, deciding to get an answer to his question before he boarded.

   Georgina, he said. I need to know if you love me.

   What? She shouted, patting the seat next to her and struggling to place her headset on her head.

   I said, do you love me?

   What? I can't hear you.

   Do you love me?

   I can't hear you, Darren. You'll have to use your microphone. Get in.

   Do you love me?

   The girl loved him. Of course she did. But she had no idea what was coming out of his mouth, so she shook her head.

California

thethemeis: Stranger than Fiction

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   I landed in San Francisco on the Tuesday, suitcase trailing behind me and a hand-drawn and crumpled map to my friend's house gripped in my hand, and I found the book on the Thursday. After that, my trip as I knew it was over, and a whole new one began.

   I was sat in Starbucks, one of the two million Starbucks surrounding Union Square, when I noticed a leather-bound diary under a stool by the window. I'd seen no one sitting in that stool since I arrived and no one was sat in any of the seats around it; so I only had the staff to turn to, to identify its owner. I left my coffee and newspaper on the table, and bent to pick up the diary from its hiding place. Before I could open my mouth to alert the sickly-sweet teenager behind the counter about the lost property I had discovered, I noticed the engraving on the front cover: HAND ME ON, DON’T HAND ME IN. 

   Intrigued, I opened the book. 

   From flicking through the first few pages, I found the leaves to be filled with dated entries, each of which seemed to be a mix of instructions and accounts of experiences lived. Just as often as and then I... and then I... was written, a command like now walk to Sutter would appear. By now, I was too engrossed in the scrawl on the pages and the engraving on the front cover to hand the book in, so when the braces behind the counter noticed me standing nowhere near my own drink, reading a leather book I'd picked up from the floor, and asked me if I was okay, I just said yes and walked out.

   When I arrived back at my friend's apartment, I had a chance to read the first few pages more attentively. Apart from the diary entries, there was a page with a block capital scribble:

THIS IS NOT FICTION. 

IT'S STRANGER THAN THAT. 

   And sure enough, some of the entries were. They featured ideas and experiences I never imagined I'd have in my lifetime. Places I never knew existed. Activities I never thought plausible. My mind was made up - the next day, I would read one entry every morning, and live it out that day. Follow those instructions to the letter. I knew so little back then.

*

   I'd wake up in the Grand Hyatt. I'd wake up in the Clift or the Huntington, and have the taste of clam chowder and nicotine and sex in my dry mouth as I stared at a ceiling I'd never seen before. Not sober, anyway. This is where the book took me first: seducing the financial elite of the fourth richest city in the world. It's surprisingly easy, it said, for a good-looking twenty-something to find a spinster with millions of bucks in the bank just begging for some company for the night, if one waits around in a five-star hotel bar for long enough. My first few weeks in San Francisco were spent nursing a water at the bar of the InterContinental or the Palace, waiting for lonely fifty-somethings with money to burn and desires to satisfy to come and drag me away. And they always came. 

   I never had to buy dinner those days. They'd wine me, dine me, take me to shows, drown me in attention, and then swallow me whole back in their bedrooms. The next day, they'd invariably hate the sight of me and want me gone before they'd reapplied their makeup; but by then, I'd had my fill anyway.

   And as for having sex with middle-aged women, I won't hear a word said against it. I don't know if I'll ever experience anything as pleasurable as those nights again. 

   To detoxify after that near-month of debauchery, I was directed to cycle the Golden Gate bridge. Hire a bicycle, read an entry dated in mid-summer, and cross the bridge at midday. So with cheap brand-imitation sunglasses covering my eyes, my knees still weak from the copulation and a thin brown cigar hanging lazily from between my lips, I hired a bicycle and cycled to the bridge. Taking it slow to avoid a heart attack, I took in every metre of that damn bridge like my eyes were hungry sponges. I drank it in, recording it all in a brain that had never known such an experience. The cool air rushed past my pockmarked face and wound the smoke that trailed behind me into the sky in dancing ribbons, and I was revitalised. For a bridge with such a high suicide rate, it has the potential to make one happier than you could ever imagine.

   By the time I reached Sam's bar in Tiburon, I was apt to die from thirst. My legs wobbled with every step, and my arms were stiff from gripping the handlebars, and my veins cried out for their alcohol fix. I ate an entire crab and downed two pints of water before I met my first whiskey and swallowed the tongue of a Spanish girl who was passing through San Francisco Bay, having just won a campervan in Vegas. We spent the night in the back of said campervan exploring each other's anatomy, against the advice of the little leather book that told me to catch the last ferry back across the water before sundown.

   The next morning, I read the next page: Catch the first ferry back from Tiburon. Thank the locals for their hospitality.

   I could picture the grin on the author's face. It looked just like my own as I read it.

   The next month was spent in Chinatown. The biggest Chinatown outside of China. You could spend a year there, and not see it all. From all the nodding head toys in the shop windows to the delicious fishmongers, from Chinese Six Companies to the Japanese Tea Garden (where the fortune cookie was born), I ate and drank until my stomach inflated to twice its size. And never before had, and never again have, I eaten Chop Suey that tasted as good as that which I ate there, in the city of its invention. 

   Wearing jeans that were invented in SF by Levi Strauss, to supply gold miners with just the durability they required from their clothes.

   To nurse my hangovers every morning, I was directed to one of San Fran's three hundred coffee shops. Sometimes I'd boost myself with three espressos, and sometimes I'd go all out and have an Irish coffee. I don't want to go on about the inventions of this amazing Californian city, but Irish coffee is another one. This is what the diary told me, and I believe every word. Anyway, I'd sit every morning in the window of Peet's or Caffe Trieste (where it's said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote most of the Godfather trilogy), and watch the trendy and beautiful California girls strut past in the stunning morning sun. The diary informed me that I would be blown away by this view, and my eyes confirmed it.

   More rum and whiskey and sambuca and cheesecake later, my leather-bound advisor ordered me to ride a Segway down the second crookedest street in San Francisco. It instructed me to watch a film in one of the city's many old theatres. It had me eating seafood on Fisherman's Wharf, and riding those nightmarish cable cars up the steep hills.  It said I should eat at Tony's in North Beach (so named because it was once a beach, but now lies a long distance inland due to landfill), perhaps the best pizzeria in the world. It told me to bet ten dollars on the Giants, and hand the winnings over to one of the hundreds of homeless people wandering the streets. I did just that. 

   Did you know that AT&T Park is the windiest stadium in the world? It has a Giant fan in every seat!

   I can't claim that one. My beautiful tour guide told me that.

*

   And as the pages I had left to read thinned, I began to wish that there was space to add my own experiences. The things I'd done that didn't appear in my guide. Like when I visited the Castro district looking for fun-loving boys and girls (and regretted it, having feared for my life in the streets on the journey there); or the time I emptied the contents of my wallet into a homeless man's collection tin because he was hiding behind a handful of branches on Fisherman's Wharf and jumping out at unsuspecting passersby, much to my endless amusement; or when I ate Ghirardelli ice cream; or when I received a demonstration of the mechanical working of jail cell doors from a stunning drama student and watched the sun go down from Alcatraz island; or when I visited the sea lions at pier 39; or when I took a free dancing lesson in Union Square to a live brass band; or when I ate a breakfast burrito at the Cheesecake Factory that was the size of my leg...

   But there wasn't space. Right to the end, the entries took me to places I'd never even dreamed I would end up. And the book was right - if not that they were stranger than fiction, at the very least that they were better. Who needed imagination or falseness when the reality was this good? I took so much enjoyment in their contents, in fact, that it was only by chance that I noticed that the last of them was dated just a few weeks before I'd arrived in San Francisco. Just a month or so before I had stepped into this city where I now felt like I was born to live, someone else was living the life that I had been living over the past year and was writing the words that would allow me to start. 

   I felt like I had to meet them.

   I scoured the book looking for clues as to the identity of my own personal saviour. I scanned and scraped for an address, a website, anything. I even tore part of the leather binding off before I found it, written in the tiniest writing imaginable:

IF FOUND UNFINISHED, 

PLEASE RETURN TO M. TWAIN, 

CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE

*

   So I entered the shop, book in hand, holding it out in front of me as if to pass it to the lady behind the counter. I gazed from shelf to shelf, mystified by all the American cover art for my favourite books and puzzled by the absence of Mr Twain behind the counter, as if I expected him to be waiting for me to enter the bookstore, my tail wagging as it was. I must have looked like a child, lost in a supermarket. 

   'Can I help you, sir?' asked the assistant, looking up from her writing and smiling sweetly.

   'Erm, yes,' I replied, looking down at the book, 'is Mr M Twain here?'

   'M Twain?'

   'Yes.'

   'Mark Twain?'

   'I suppose. Quite possibly, yes.' I grinned foolishly at her, excited to hear that she knew him. 

   'Yes, we have Mark Twain. We sort our authors alphabetically by surname, so you'll find him under T.'

   I followed her pointing biro with my eye and reached a bookshelf, my heart sinking further with each heartbeat. 

   Of course. Mark Twain, the author. I should have realised. He was the one that said The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. And how wrong he was.

   I hadn’t found the author of my diary. I’d just found the next step he wanted me to take.

   'Can I do anything else for you?' the assistant asked, as I stood agape in the doorway of her shop. 

   Grabbing a Twain book, along with a Salinger and a couple of good Bukowskis, I placed the little black book in my pocket, and retrieved my wallet. 'I'll just take these,' I replied, before paying and shuffling out in a near-run.

   I went to The Daily Grill, ate the best New York Pepper I’d ever eaten, and left the little leather book behind.