skonen_blades

As you
So much
Yellow page through
The different we
Us over there
In greener grass
Flower petal kisses
Brushing ghostly
Sent through
Eyes half-lidded with love
Our fogged perfume comfort trance
Hand painting wherever we go
The flock of it following us
Into every building
And privately
Secure hands on willing hips
We lifeboat in the dark
Too hungrily

Or you turn to find
And change the channel
To sink and
Swerve into the sting
Watching it darken
Curdle sour into
Coliseum Friday nights
Rainy sidewalks capturing
Our reflections fighting
Perhaps the flowers of bruises
The blades of words
Our claws hungry for throats

If there’s a multiverse
And every decision creates new realms
If everything that can happen has happened
If our alternate universes
Are for better or worse

I still prefer it here
Sweet blessing of smooth sailing
Solidity of an average
Not given to thin heights
Or crushing depths
But only tasting each

A good us
Commonplace but no less special




tags

An older piece I spruced up.

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Hitler’s daughter was ruling with a penchant for experimentation.

She talked of a future where Aryans were recognized by their deeds and initiative, not by the colour of their skin or hair.

Controversial and beautiful, Hitler’s daughter was short with the same dark hair as her father.

She administered the shot that killed him in his hospital bed. Grey-haired, drooling, and given to fits at the end, it was the ministry’s decree that he be put out of his misery by his then sixteen-year-old daughter. The photograph is famous. Her chin is tucked into her chest and her straight black hair is falling over her eyes as she depresses the plunger on the syringe. The resemblance to her father in that moment in unmistakable and is belied only by a twinkle in her eye. His hand is grasping at the front of her uniform. If one squints just right, the shadow from his clawed hand coupled with his bent fingers almost form a swastika.

Chancellor Hilda.

German medicine had come far. Top in the world when it came to longevity drugs, plastic surgery and prosthetic limbs. However she banned experimentation on the poor and homeless.

“There were still discoveries to be made”, she said, “but only by using the guilty”. The subtle accusation hidden in the statement by lumping the scientists in with the subjects was not lost on the scientific community. There was no doubt about how punishment would be meted out. The scientists would end up on their own bloody tables if they dared dismiss her rules in their dark laboratories.

She said that the future lay not in compassion but neither did it lie in brutality. She said in a historic speech that, “some things, while fragile, were still valuable to the empire. Even degenerates can see the beauty in the world of our new Empire”, she said. “Let them paint.”

The conquered Europeans had intermarried and mingled with the Japanese and Russians. Half-breeds were tolerated. The resulting beauties with their Slavic cheekbones and epicanthic folds had started to supercede the outdated Aryan ideal.

The first mixed-race officer of the SS had a medal pinned to his chest last week, for instance. The young ones, no matter their race, were anxious to serve for the glorious 4th Reich Europe, citing that their inner Aryan was probably more faithful and loyal than many of the meek and tender blue-eyed ghosts of German heritage. Such inflammatory rhetoric caused controversy but also brought attention to their fearless attitudes. It would be stupid to turn down manpower determined to help the empire and this was a new age, she said.

America’s economy was failing and while it was not economical to fight them conventionally, it was in everyone’s interests to wait and see how long it would take that country to starve. Some of the political commentary in today’s newspapers were calling it a Kalter Kreig or ‘cold war’.

She, herself, had a penchant for the folk music of the defeated Americas and allowed their import into the underground. American polkas and neo-jazz movements were sweeping through underground Europe. The Reich youth, like any youth, were embracing anything controversial that would anger their parents.

She is the face of The United Reich Territories. She is feared and loved.

She has charm greater than her father. She is patient.

Heil Hilda.





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This was the punishment chamber. They called it the ‘wish list’. The new multiverse viewer made it possible to view into alternate dimensions. A search engine had been set up to map these infinite possibilities. You could enter ‘cancer cure’ or ‘faster than light drive’ and see what came up. The holographic display would light up around you, putting you in the room with what you’d searched for.

The punishment chamber was reserved for the worst offenders. The people in the lab who refused to follow the rules, the ones who thought they could choose their futures, that all things were possible. These scientists were a problem to the experiment.

If they weren’t necessary, they were fired. If the necessary and they refused to accede to a number of demands, they were brought to the punishment chamber.

It was no secret what was in the chamber. All of them thought they could handle it. None of them could.

The best possible version of you exists somewhere. It’s a version of you with the best possible upbringing, the best possible diet, the best possible planet Earth. Health you didn’t know was possible radiates from a version of you at the peak of physical perfection. An earth where life expectancy is measured in centuries and your body stays young for the whole time. There is a love of existence in your eyes and only the suggestion of lines on your face. That furrow between your eyebrows is missing. The lines that show up when you frown are missing, too. A lack of worry and sadness has caused that.

The best you in better than you could ever be. It has advantages from the very beginning that you lack.

That’s what they show you in the punishment chamber. It’s the smart ones that come out cowed right away, ready to work and humble. The dumb ones laugh it off but it eats at them day and night until they also end up haunted and pliant.





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Dr. Ian Montrose of the Illinois delegation was the first to discover time travel. Originally, he had wanted to be a plastic surgeon. Physics, quantum physics, and the theories of time travel came more naturally to him, however, so that was the path he pursued.

He found that while he couldn’t actually send people back in time, he could vibrate their atoms in such a way that the years would fall away in a causality transaction that he claimed he didn’t entirely understand.

His machine made people younger.

When an older person was put into the chair, he or she could desire the amount of years that needed to be removed. With a quick flourish of the wrist, a lever was thrown, sparks flew, and instantly, the patient sat up quickly, gasping with fresh lungs and wide eyes that no longer needed glasses.

It was quick, expensive, and best of all, a person could come back in 80 years and do it again. Repeat business. To say that Dr. Montrose made money would be an understatement. He changed society.

For someone so smart, he was pretty stupid. The scandals that happened afterwards were attributed to his ignorance but it’s hard to believe that someone so intelligent had no idea about the horrific side effects that were happening in one specific alternate universe.

Those years weren’t just disappearing from the patients. They were being ‘swapped’. Alternate versions of themselves in the universe that became known as Earth02 suddenly found themselves aged 60 or 70 years instantly.

While eating breakfast in the morning, spoon halfway to their lips, liver spots would bloom on the backs of their hands, frailty would rush through them with a shuddering wave, and they’d gasp as the room became blurry. Young women on busses would scream as their hair suddenly whitened, as their legs withered, as their bones became brittle and their skin wrinkled.

In the middle of a fishing trip, a youth became forty years older than his own father right there in the rowboat while they both screamed. In footage that chilled people around the world of Earth 02, a seventeen year old fashion model in Milan fell on the catwalk, crumpling down, teeth falling out of her mouth, bones jutting out beneath dry skin, before osteoporosis broke her hip, her legs, her shoulder, and three ribs on the catwalk.

It was like time lapse film. You have to imagine the terror. It seemed to have no rhyme or reason to it. It seemed to be completely random. Earth02 had no idea why or how it was happening. It mostly seemed to happen to the young, affecting those between the ages of 18 to 24 most of all, making it all the more tragic.

The scientists on Earth02 worked hard, finding a trail of superstring atoms back to our Earth. Ironically, it was Dr. Ian Montrose of Earth02 that was the key to finding us. He worked hard and eventually found a way to cross over entirely from one dimension to another. That footage of the two doctors meeting for the first time is legendary. Our Montrose, blue-eyed with slightly darker hair facing down the Montrose of Earth02, blonde hair cut short above dark green eyes.

Once it all became clear, our Montrose was tried for crimes against humanity. He was found innocent but it was the trial of the century. The technology of the two planets was exchanged. The victims of Earth 02 stole their years back. The younger people that had been part of the Montrose treatments on Earth01 were hunted down in a bloody chapter of history. To stop the raids, the two planets agreed to pay out money to the victims of Earth 02.

For a while, the technology was seized and banned. Life returned to a tense form of normalcy. Research, however, continued. It was the possible fountain of youth. That kind of lure couldn’t be resisted.

Then we found the problem. Montrose had dialed the frequency of his time-stealer to that one specific dimension. There were theoretically an infinite number to choose from.

Dollar signs and evil thoughts filled minds.

If the time-stealer was dialed to a random universe each time, we’d theoretically only steal life from one person in one alternate universe. That didn’t seem like such a big deal. Plus, it would most likely go unnoticed. It would be a strange report in that Earth’s equivalent of the Weekly World News and that would be it. If they noticed at all, it would be a scientific footnote at best. As long as there was only one, they’d never track it back to us.

Game on. The technology was ‘fixed’ and brought back online. For those that can afford it, people of both EarthPrime and Earth02 are now in the peak of health eternally. De-aging treatments are expensive, millions of dollars for each year removed. Black market time chairs are set up in South American alleys from time to time, reverting hundreds before police trace the power spike and shut them down. We’re partying.

The time chairs exist, stealing lives from other universes.




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Scientific experiments have proven that a person’s perception of time does indeed slow down when that person is involved in a near-death experience.

The threatened person’s body is flooded with adrenalin. The synapses fire at over six times their regular rate. Visual stimuli is examined in detail.

All of the senses are channeled through the cerebellum and catalogued for a way out, any way out, some way to survive. A side effect of this is excellent data recording and recall.

The channel scanner management took this data and applied it to their workers. The pay was great. The scanners themselves usually didn’t last very long. In most cases, the money they made was left to their next of kin. They sacrificed their lives to give some much-needed money to their families.

A scanner was hired, put into their chair, and told to look at the bank of television sets in front of him or her. The data would spool forth on all of the television screens at once. Every monitor would flare to life, sound on, channels changing randomly.

It was an influx of data from the universe.

We were far from the only world with television. Every since the first received broadcast in 2033, the others started pouring in. Apparently, our rate of development is normal and common. There are thousands of us sprinkled throughout the galaxy and we all discovered technology at roughly similar moments. We started receiving alien broadcasts close to the same time as our broadcasts reached the nearest systems.

We’ve started receiving broadcasts from older civilizations, farther away. There were tens, then hundreds, and by the end of this year, probably millions.

Like rocks thrown into a pool, the ripples are meeting.

They’re too far away to have a two-way conversation with but we can watch their shows.

They have scientific breakthroughs that we don’t. The scanner division scans their television stations for breakthroughs in weaponry or medical science.

The needles sink into the back of the scanner’s neck and the restraints snap into place. The eyes are forced open and the scanner is sent into a mode of Deep Terror. The most mind-numbing fear that it’s possible for a human to experience is funneled into the scanner through the drips. A complex array of drugs and surgical additions keep the heart from exploding or the lungs from collapsing. Going into shock or passing out from shallow breathing is prevented.

Scanners generally last about eight weeks.

Their terrified whispers are recorded as their eyes dart from screen to screen, taking in information as fast as possible.

We get about six valuable ideas a year and once in a while, a serious society-changing breakthrough. We can only imagine that the other races on far-away planets are doing the exact same thing we are. It’s a race.



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The rules were simple. No time manipulation, no transmutation, and no spell could be used twice.

Morden the Uneasy entered from the west quadrant of the arena on a massive floating bed attended by golem slaves made from flower petals. The metal caps on the stumps of her legs glimmered with diamonds in the sunlight.

I sat high up in the private viewing box with my client and tried to pay attention to the match. The arena floor was projected real-time on the table between my client and I in hard light. Whatever section of the fight I was paying attention to would come up picture-in-picture on a baseball card floating to the left of the action.

It was an expensive AV setup in the most expensive seat in the house. If this gross display of wealth was meant to impress me and keep me off-balance during the wage negotiations, it was working.

Khallista of the Red Flame entered from the east quadrant of the arena, wreathed in the red fire of her clan and already whimpering from the recent focal drugs that had turned her eyes completely black.

There were better skilled people on the craftlist above me that could have done the job that my client was asking me to do. I wasn’t cheap but this client could afford the best. I figured if he wanted a fall guy to use as bait for a trap, he would have sought out the cheapest loser he could find so I was curious why he picked me. Not the bottom and not the top and not a particularly fast riser.

I warily accepted his offer of more details over dinner at a Magic Pit Fight in the hopes of allaying my suspicion.

Rowst the Unbelieving staggered in from the ‘blue’ north quarter. He was blindfolded and dressed in nothing but a small toga, stained by the sores covering his body. A perfectly circular halo of small glowing fairies crowned his bald head.

My client sat across from me in the shadows. Whatever air of mystery he was trying to create for me was also working very well. I was very curious about his identity. Courtesy wouldn’t let me ask until he offered to talk to about it so I sat back in silence and continued to watch the players enter the arena.

Shorelocke the Dread Shadow entered from the south to complete the roster. He was cut from darkness. There was an absence of light around him. He was like a person-shaped hole cut in the fabric of reality. His glowing eyes stabbed out in twin beams of white, eager ferocity.

These fights were not to the death. They were for rights and rankings. This was a championship round, though, and sometimes accidents happened.

My client leaned forward into the light above the projection on the table. I looked up to meet his eyes and froze with the words I was planning to say dying in my throat.

A Fixer was staring back at me. I’d only heard legends. His pale face and dark eyes marked him out as a rare purebred human but that wasn’t the giveaway. He’d released the glamour for me to see in this moment so that I would be suitably awed.

He flickered with possibility.

He was staying close to the dimensions surrounding this one so his changes weren’t extreme. The different versions of himself were very similar to one in this quantum thread. His hair length varied a little from second to second. A scar would sometimes pop up on a cheek and then vanish. His eyes would go through a gradient of the colours he was born with as the moments went by. It made me slightly nauseous to look at, like I had motion sickness.

Very occasionally, a woman would flash through his features or he’d disappear for a millisecond as he passed through a universe where he’d died already.

He leaned back in the shadows.

I composed myself and asked him the question I’d been wanting to ask him since I’d been contacted.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because”, The Fixer responded, “you are unique. You know what you’re talking to, yes? You realize what I mean?”

I nodded. As someone that could extend their sense of self across an almost infinite number of dimensions as easily as a bird could extend its wings, The Fixer had a very special definition of unique.

We all have a double in almost every other universe. However, if you picture all possible realities as a spectrum, the differences between our universe and the other possible universes get more and more pronounced the further away you get from your universe of origin.

There are universes where I have a different haircut and a different job. There are universes where I am married.

Go further and there are universes where I was hit by car when I was six, for example, or choked on a chicken bone when I was seven. There are universes where my parents never met and I never came to be.

What The Fixer meant by ‘unique’ was that he had spread his dimensional-self wings and hadn’t found me. What he meant was that there was only one of me. Here. Only in this space-time continuum and only on this Earth.

I reeled. This was the end of one life and the beginning of another.

“You realize how valuable that makes you to my kind, of course. I only offered you a job to get you here.” He said. Languidly, he motioned with his index finger and I heard the doors lock.

“You are going to be added to The Zoo.” He said.

On the table between us, the Magic Pit Fight began to the crowd’s deafening cheer.



tags

Jacquelyn Hide, private investigator of the paranormal, had messages on her answering machine from alternate universes. She investigated crimes in this and other realities. She was a probability predicate. She was a whichdoctor. She was a Quantum P.I.

Other selves would come to visit her out of the closet in her office. That was where the hole was. Her daddy had been a genius and always wanted a way out. Her daddy was brilliant but was also always afraid that a nebulous “they” would come for him one day. He built an escape route in to the side of his lab.

One night her father woke up from a nightmare convinced that 'they' were here. He sprinted in his pajamas through his probability matrix doorway.

Jaquelyn never saw him again. She’d been home schooled by him but hadn’t ever believed in his paranoia. She was brilliant, though, and kept up with his research. She wasn’t as smart as him, however, so it was slow going. His office was littered with inventions and patents that she quietly published and used to fund her search.

She figured out how to make a safety line tracing filament of hardened possibility to guide her back to this reality, her reality, like a modern day Gretel. After that, she just went out searching for her father.

In other universes, she came across people who were also searching for people. She helped them. Eventually, she found this could be a paying gig.

A lot of people go missing in the alternates. Reality is more than a little patchy in places. She got good at it.

She’s still looking for father fifteen years later. She’s famous in several hundred realities now but she keeps herself out of the papers in this one. She employs sixty eight copies of herself out there on other Earths.

Every day the search for her father becomes more and more of a sideline.

But tonight she’s staring down at the blinking light on her answering machine through sudden tears of disbelief. She’s drunk and trying to force her shaking finger to play the message back again.

For a woman who skates through the doorways of choice and climbs the causal trees of unknown futures, she has trouble believing this is possible.

There’s a message from her dad on her machine.


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