The Dosquatch Says…

previous – Rocking the Ship

Zipp squinted and shielded his eyes. All he could see was the harsh glare of a bright light, and darkness beyond. He sensed eyes in the darkness. “Your line!” a voice hissed directly in front of him, ankle high.

He squinted harder, looking down for the source. “Zaphod! Your line!” Christ, who was calling him by his given name? “Zaphod Pierce!!” He heard a giggle to his right. He turned his head, eyes adjusting, and saw Lisa dressed in a red peasant gown. He looked down on himself to find an ornate suit of royal blues and purples.

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere,” he quipped, answered with laughing darkness. He continued on rote memory. His eyes, now clear, found the voice from earlier belonged to Ms. Herbert, his theater teacher. He lifted his arm to sing himself off stage, when Lisa suddenly jammed a large serving fork into his arm. The world dissolved into sparks and swirling color.

“… never know that their communications …”

Zipp pulled back on the fishing rod, happy to finally have a nibble. The fishing was terrible at this spot on the river, which meant it was quiet. He listened to the cicadas sing out their digital chirp for their mates and took in the scents of oak and pine and freshly plowed fields.

He felt a little awkward in a peasant dress… he felt sure there was a good reason he was wearing it, he just couldn’t remember. The nibble gave away as a fish popped to the surface and call his name. Disappointed, he reeled in the line and set the pepperoni stick to cast again. Raising it above his head, he reveled in the psychedelic light show that washed out his vision.

“… almost collided with …”

He cast the bowline to the pier. The attendant had put his pepperoni fishing rod down to help pull the boat into the slip. “Thanks, old timer,” Zipp offered.

“No worries,” replied the attendant. “I was raised to be charming.”

Zipp looked upon the Charming Lisa with fondness. Odd, though, he was sure he’d had to sell his yacht years ago as part of the divorce from his Academy sweetheart. Shaking his head, he left the attendant to tie off the bowline, and he move towards the gunwale to make his way aft. He reached for the grab while his yacht contorted harshly into a swarm of reds and purples and blues.

“… launched a probe but we interc …”

“FOCUS!!” His psy-ops instructor screamed. “This stuff takes concentration!”

Zipp considered all of this paranormal stuff hokum, but he was assigned here by OF because his test showed some tendency or other. He intended to do everything he could to wash out of this crappy post and get on with something real. He touched his social finger to his temple and, wide eyed, chirped like a cricket.

His instructor looked annoyed. “Zipp! Wake up!” Funny, his voice sounded different. Still, Zipp took that same social finger and raised it high in the air, to a colorful explosion.

“… trap on Luna that will …”

His alarm clock chirped loudly. “Zipp! Wake up!” Lisa yelled in a man’s voice. Chirp chirp, “Wake up, damn you!”

He looked over to the clock. 23:43 … why was the alarm going off at quarter to midnight? Chirp, chirp. Lisa was yelling again, “I really don’t want to have to come in there after you!” He groaned. She’d have to get over it. He reached for the snooze button, but recoiled at the electric shock it gave. His arm burned numb.

Chirp Chirp. “ZIP!!” He reached again, to searing pain. His eyes fluttered.

The remote monitor chirped, and Trent’s voice came through. “God damn it, Zipp, I know you can hear me!” Zipp found himself floating in the Converter bay, his arm broken and tangled in a piece of webbing. Consciousness began to settle, and he worked on extracting his mangled arm.

“Trent? What the Hell happened?”

“Welcome back. If you can get yourself to the bridge, I’ll tell you all about it.”

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previous – A Body in Motion

Trent acted fast on the controls, hoping he could catch more of the mystery object’s trail. His mind flitted for a moment to something he’d seen in childhood – some archive footage of something called Star Trek – and how they were always “tracking warp signatures”. If only it were that easy.

He knew, though, that anything that moved disturbed its environment, and even most of the way to Luna there were still enough trace gasses that there were eddy currents he may be able to track. Eddy currents that were fading at an alarming rate – his hands flew faster, until he had enough telemetry to launch a pinger probe to sniff the trail. It’d never keep up, but it felt to him like they would be much better off the more they knew about that thing.

He smacked the button, and the probe flew, and then its mission parameters after it. Seconds are critical when trying to follow a trail like this, and probes can be programmed on the fly.

Feeling somewhat better about that, he turned his attentions back to more pedestrian concerns. Checking the indicators, he punched in the course corrections to put them back on a path towards Luna.

Zipp still hadn’t answered or arrived on the bridge. Trent leaned back in his chair with a dejected sighed, and rolled his forehead into his palm, propped up by an elbow on the chair’s arm. His druthers were to consider Zipp more useful elsewhere and silent, but his sense of duty compelled otherwise.

He looked again at the negative scan result on the occupied decks, and scrunched his brow. Something’s happened to him, Trent considered. All crew were injected with a biometrics transponder chip, but access was governed by privacy laws. OF recorded only the portions of the feed that showed compliance with orders – like gym time – but the full feed could be accessed if needed. This seemed as good a time to need as any.

Trent knew opening the feed would trigger alerts at OF command, and the Ansible would almost immediately generate justification and compliance forms. A headache.

He typed in his command code, and watched the live feed from Zipp’s unit fill into the screen. Reading through the data, Trent noted that the endorphin levels seemed high, the beta waves seemed low, and the alpha and delta waves were competing for center stage. He wasn’t napping or high, so that only left injured and unconscious.

And then the bit Trent really wanted – the Converter bay? What’s that idiot doing all the way down there? Trent punched up the video feeds and brought a camera to bear. Zipp floated motionless, his left arm hooked at an alarming angle through a tie-down strap on the wall. He looked back to the biometrics. He noted that, obvious aside, Zipp wasn’t in any particular medical distress.

Trent opted to leave Zipp where he was for a moment. Leaving the bridge unattended precipitated this, after all, why immediately repeat that mistake? He turned his attention instead to the sensor logs of the object. The lack of sensor logs. There had been no EM, no RF, no thermal. No gravitational disturbances. In fact, of all the tools available, only two registered anything – the proximity alarm and the video feed. The proximity alarm was about as low-tech a tool as the ship still carried, and was not much more than a Doppler radar. If that thing hadn’t been moving, they could have plowed right into it without ever seeing it. The video showed what appeared to be an asteroid.

There were two problems with that. The first is that asteroids don’t accelerate away from gravity. The second is that asteroid don’t have scan jammers.

He Turned his attention to the Ansible’s feed, intending to at least acknowledge receiving the biometrics documentation, but there was none. He scrunched his brow again.

next – Psylent Lucidity

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previous – Mental Bridge

novel I'll never write

previous – Weighting Room

novel I'll never write

Trent was alone in the ship’s gymnasium. Grav plating drew a lot of power, and this was the only space on the whole ship where gravity could be turned all the way up to Full Earth. Everywhere else was set to “about a quarter” of Earth’s gravity – .234375G to be exact. There was a valid engineering reason it was 15/64 instead of a proper 1/4. Something to do with energy conversions and exponential growth, but he never could wrap his mind around it.

Gym time was mandatory on ship assignments. Extended amounts of time in low-G would lead to loss of muscle and bone density. As part of the entrance physical, the doctors would prescribe each person their own bare minimum full-G exposure to stave off loss, and it became part of a person’s Orbit Fleet orders. Failing to follow these orders, like all OF orders, was grounds for immediate termination.

So Trent was in the gym, but he wasn’t really in the gym. His body listlessly executed the cardio routine on the monitor. He had seen it so many times he hardly needed it to run, and indeed wasn’t paying attention to it now. His mind was still grinding through the OF orders. He had spent the past 3 hours on the observation deck, reading them over and over, to the point they were memorized. He’d come to burn off some gym time hoping in vain to distract himself.

The orders were absurdly short. “In direct response to aggressions from Luna, OF-Delta-7 is directed to Luna where it will Convert the aggressor.”

Something was very wrong with the orders. Even though every Delta class ship was equipped with a Converter, they had never been used. Use was supposed to require a unanimous decision from Congress. A congress that’s been destroyed, Trent thought.

It wasn’t the lack of authorization that bothered him, though. Certainly there were rules in place to allow decisions to be made, even in the face of disasters such as this. If the President is removed, the Vice President takes over. If the VP is removed, then it’s the Speaker. So on and so on. The list is long and distinguished, and we will have a leader even if we have resort all the way down to a floor sweeper in Des Moines.

No, it wasn’t the lack of approval, it was the speed with which the orders came. The second blast had barely struck when the Ansible spat out the orders. The codes cleared, and they appeared legitimate, but there was no signatory. No accountability, Trent thought. Who ordered this? Not Washington – that was nearly flattened in the first blast.

Trent turned off the cardio routine, and was moving towards the strength training stacks, when a voice came out of the air. It was Zipp. The voice spoke only two words, but they sent a chill up Trent’s spine.

“Bridge. NOW!“

It wasn’t anger in Zipp’s voice. Trent was used to that.

No, it was fear.

novel I'll never write

novel I'll never write

I don’t know. I’m not sure yet. I have some ideas running about my head, and enough of an urge for a change of fate that I’m going to take a run at it.

I’ll see how far I get. If – if – I’m pleased with the results, I’ll start trying to figure out how publishing and (more particularly) publishers work. For that, I may need a champion. The furback doesn’t suffer politics long or well, and tends to respond to rejection with a firm “Well, fuck you, too.”

We’ll see.

novel I'll never write

(screen is sepia tone, nearly black, very quiet almost unnoticeable ambient pink noise with a audio popping to set rhythm)

(Still sepia, details of grass fade in, camera pans up to some generic greco-roman ruins of some temple or another)

(Words fade in, short wide Arial-bold like lettering)

“WHAT IF…”

(scene morphs into a color shot of the same temple, pristine, more words fade in)

“THE GODS WERE REAL?”

(scene cuts, bass heavy orchestra hit, grass detail fades in from black, camera pans up to a Nordic Valhalla like castle. words fade in)

“WHAT IF THEY’VE BEEN REAL ALL ALONG?”

(two heavy orchestra hits, pink noise starts rising and taking on a melodic quality, with a gradually quickening tempo. scenes start jumping with tempo – pyramids, cave paintings, churches, temples, crop circles, totem poles. sound swirling, rising, strings have entered the cacophony, and have driven up to a shrill whine, and –

screen black, sudden silence except for the faintest trace of the original pink noise, now sounding almost like a breeze)

(after a dramatic pause, more words fade in, faster fade than before)

“WHAT IF THEY STILL ARE?”

(black screen shows tarmac grain, camera pans up, very tight on truck nuts, differential cover, trailer hitch, starts pulling back, still up until a glossy black tailgate with “THE HAMMER” written very large and in chrome fills the screen. traffic noises have started building. camera pulls straight back, showing a comically large pickup stuck in freeway gridlock)

(scene cuts to the driver, a very Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler sort of image – this is Thor)

“Dammit, Daddy, we don’t have to put up with this. Why are we hidin’ anyway?” his voice is very Dubya-esque.

(scene cuts to the passenger, something in a Kris Kristoferson, scraggly, unkempt, with a DEEP scar forehead-to-cheek that disappears behind an eye patch – this is Odin)

(sighs) “Because we must. We exist only when they need us, and that isn’t now.”

(the freeway erupts into a smoke-and-fire crater in front of them, cars fly away to the sides. a humongous figure with fiery eyes glares at the truck, then leaps miles away in one bound)

(Thor, grinning smugly to Odin’s pained stare) “Huh. How about now?”

(tympani and bass orchestra hits – BUMBUMBUM-BA-BUM – scenes cut, showing various gods “awakening” in appropriate environments)

(abrupt silence, black screen – then fiery claws rip the screen. Metal music blares, scenes of battle and ruin flash too fast to see, ending with a full face shot of Thor with his battle hammer pulling a full overhead swing straight down in front of the lens. The last thing you see is the hammer’s head, filling the screen)

(title text)

GODS

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As a friend recently said, “I’m not sure where you got the writing ability.” Nor I. It is certainly not anything that’s been cultivated with purpose. I suppose it falls into the category of “gift,” though it feels presumptuous to call it that. A gift is given, so it’s not really a gift as such until I, you know, give it to others.

I feel it more as a quirk, like a hitchhiker’s thumb. It’s something that is part of who I am, but is of no particular consequence until I find a practical use for it. Words are like Lego bricks, things to be stuck together to make pretty shapes.

We are taught in school that it has rules, structure, and mechanics, but if that is what language is to you then it is a foul beast, indeed. Language can be a playmate. Rules are for accountants. Language is art. It has heft and rhythm, and if you feel these then the rules matter not a whit. Take your MLA and Frisbee it into the woods, you’ll never need it.

I understand that words don’t come easily for everybody. I suppose I might be squandering a gift. Words I have, but thus far I’m missing something. Perhaps it is focus, maybe vision. It could be a swift kick in the ass would suffice. I think, though, that some of the best advice might come from Stephen King’s “On Writing”. He says that, whatever you write, it won’t work if it’s not authentic. Write what you know, write what pleases you – not others, but for God’s sake write. Something, every day. Now, I’ve paraphrased that heavily, but the gist is accurate.

For the record, I have never read another book on the subject of writing that holds a candle to this. Some of the details are specific to him and his style, and he admits this right up front, but the spirit holds no matter what your style. This is the peek behind the curtain, the margin notes straight from a master. You’re doing a disservice to yourself if you have not read this book.

Back to the subject at hand, though, “You really ought to write a book or five.” I don’t know. I wonder sometimes if I have that in me. I look at art, and remember “the beauty of the statue is already there, all I have to do is remove the excess marble.” I find myself, when looking at a page, seeing scenes and turns of phrase, but not yet have I seen a finished sculpture.

Maybe it’s there. Maybe it has been all along, and I just keep pulling up short.

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Suspenseful. Breathtaking. Pulitzer-grade material. These are just a few of the words and phrases that will never be used to describe the scribblings of Dosquatch.

While the full works are truly masterful, and perhaps worthy of such praise, his continuing refusal to publish these, relying instead on the obviously formulaic excerpts, shall forever keep his art in the dim recesses of the literary community. His characters, having only a paragraph or less to develop, come off as flat. The dialog, while gripping, never leads anywhere, and the plots are left hanging like over ripened pears on a tree, to eventually fall with a wet thud upon the ground.

He has the potential, but seemingly not the drive to be one of the great voices of our time.
(Otto Weblink: xkcd)

Navel Gazing, novel I'll never write