The Beacon, launch

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

beaconCoverIt is with great pleasure and zero ounces of pride, that I’m announcing the release of The Beacon. This is included as a free download from this site, or if you want you can go buy it off of Amazon to read on yr kindle. Whichever works for you. What is The Beacon and what is it about? Let me attempt to summarize.

Occasionally things that are close and familiar can grow grotesque with time and shifts of perception. The original intent of a product grows distorted the further the origins of the product exceed the present moment. When we examine the toys of yesterday or read the works of authors long dead we interpret and experience these products through our current cultural sensitivities and expectations. The Beacon is an attempt to forecast the perceptions and interpretations of long-dead intellectual property. What was once a cultural phenomenon is subsumed by the characters unique views and present circumstances.

The plot is irrelevant. The language is obtuse. As a written work it is opaque.

It’s currently “under review” by Amazon. So that’s exciting. Once it’s live on there I’ll include a link and a way to DL it for free, cuz I mean really?

We’re all people, an Echo Chamber(wt) excerpt

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

Cargo Bay 14 writhes like the stomach of a dead raccoon. Inside each intestine, maggots flourish and churn. Chubby shuttles slide along routine canals and stop at discrete intervals. When back hatches align with the caution lines of the loading docks their doors spring open and remote loaders stuff recycled caff and vital aminos into their gape.

 

Azul peeps her eyes through an access grate. Servos whine as the remotes shove objects into the holes of the shuttles. She watches the shuttles for a couple time units, eyes trying to zoom and enhance until – there, just behind the grey loader with the chipped caution stripes. She thinks, “Zarrrnnaa.”

Zarrrnnaa moves like wine through a crazy straw. As she is sucked from one robot to another the movement starts wither here head eyes face before twisting down to her shoulders, arms, elbows waist wrists, thighs, calves and feet. The ingrav units in the cargo bay are at less intensity as elsewhere in the ship to make the loading process less of a burden on the machines.

Zarrrnnaa floats to the next loader robot makes some minor adjustments and with a swirling twist dodges the spider whip data cable that spins out of the incoming data shuttle. Zarrrnnaa ensures the line is connected securely to a stack of servers, likely a new batch of SimEnts ready for mass distribution aftermarket testing on Spectacular Deee.

Azul sends a meme to Zarrrnnaa and watches as the supervisor fairly seizes with laughter at the unexpected pairing or bizarre poetry and sense bundle information.

“XD that was too much”

“Yassss”

“Wyd”

“I’m in your house”

“Huh?”

“Right behind your ear…”

“No.Staahp”

“Yaup”

“:person-shrugging-skintone4:”

“Knock knock”
Azul knocks on the grate and sends a snapshot video to Zarrrnnaa. Zarrrnnaa looks up towards the grate and places the palm of her hand over her face with a soft smack. She gestures and the grey chipped loader jerkily removes the grate and then drives it back into place after Azul swims out, over, and down to float near Zarrrnnaa.

“Can we :->: :EXIT:?”

“:thumbsup-skintone4:”

 

Zarrrnnaa floats ahead of Azul and palms an access panel open. They drift inside and the doors sizzle shut behind them as their feet sink back down. A time unit passes as the airlock rinses and cycles. Zarrrnnaa sends death and dying. They step out into a loading maintenance corridor the glows red. Further down service technicians consult work orders and burn holes in the side of their necks with chems.

They can open their mouths to speak now they’re out of vacuum and Azul is the first to blurt, “I want in. I’m down. Fuck the system. I have a plan.”

Shuffling Upstairs (Echo Chamber excerpt)

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

There are no doors street level. Three story hovels and miscellaneous hostels spew derelicts into the streets at the base at a minimum safe distance of 200 meters.

Polly narrows her eyes at a stack of coffee shaded conapts.

Her legs lift over the soggy bottom of the threshold. Splintered and rat eaten cardboard splatters the tile floor of the apartment building’s entryway. Thirty pairs of shoes are scattered in clumps, brown, black, sneakers, guest slippers, dress shoes, loafers, house shoes, geta, crocs, and the wires of long rotted disposable footwear. Each discarded foot covering emanates a sorrowful aura the climbs through the dead roaches, stained moulding, and attempts to breach the antiseptic barrier of Polly’s Death’s Head boots. Her neon shadow falls through the door and darkens the tile. Flashing sprays of green, red, and cathode blue pour in the space between the woman and the door frame from the Pollo Campero across the street as the chicken struts along the marvellous marquee.

Green Fleur de lis wallpaper crawls in wrinkly ribbons down the back wall as Polly shuffles in. The process of unbuckling the deaths head boots reminds her to pop another stick of gum into her mouth to help cover the greasy smell of this apartment building. She also thinks about her sister, the last shower she had, the note she left, the men, women, and erotic others that who’s hearts she’s left bleeding and twisted in the crossfaded days of her younger self. The woman five years her elder, with the experimental music hobby, the range of middle-aged men, the boys, each of her firsts, and, as the left boot is removed, her days rooting in the garbage for stale loaves and ketchup packages, the extra clothes, her first encounter with Old Merve. This last flashback threatens to swamp her brain and she summons her tranquil place. “The beach. The beach. Think of the beach.”

The sky is a simulated blue. No birds foul the air. Waves and the subtle wind are the sounds that help drive the dirty memory from recall.

She lifts her boots and begins heading up the squealing stairs. As she pins the boots under her armpit she fiddles with a piece of gum. She squints while peeling the foil wrapping from the wilting green stick. Her feet on the stairs wobble without her eyes to keep balance.

The gum really likes the foil. It does not want to be separated and fairly communicates this nonverbally to Polly by adhering staunchly to the uncoated foil underside. She tries but is unsuccessful. Several stripes of foil cling yet to the gum before she loses patience and pops the piece into her mouth.

Pocket change, an Echo Chamber excerpt

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

The spire bisects the wastewater treatment plant and the community gardens maintained by the Deerfield Retirement Community. It draws in blood from these two sources like an enormous needle. Seniors and shit are suctioned up into the steel confines of the police spire. Filtered, shaken, milked and processed so that the sucking machine can live.

When Great Grandma Hildegaard passes, and the relatives are too busy to collect her remains, the beds tilt and she slides into the catacombs beneath the community centre like a B-movie trap door executing its best special effects moment. She slides under the well-tended beds of the community gardens to the tune of comical music and an animated commercial for toothpaste, bumping against walls, her dead legs flopping in the air. G.G.H. tumbles along a chute, along with G.G.J. and numerous other centenarians, until they clatter like bowling pins into a well-oiled gutter.

This intersection is where the proximity of the wastewater treatment plant shines in its efficacy. As the bodies collect against the grate, too large to pass through, so too do the nanomachines and artificial cleaners collect in great swarms from their nanohives in the inside-out uteri of the treatment plant.

G.G.H. herself would most likely have passed listening to the top forty of her heyday, even if she never really liked those songs, they would have tickled her Alzheimer’s into believing that today was a once treasured moment and the vast potential of her life lay before her like an unspoiled napkin. Great feast ahead, patiently waiting for the main course, and secretly pining for the decadent dessert sure to follow. If this scene is frozen grey across the eyes and cortex of G.G.H.’s deceased body then, in its passive state it does also witness the slow dissolving of its constituent parts as the nanomachines clip, shear, and snip molecules of flesh. The soft raindrops, bits of Great Grandmother Hildegaard, are removed from the corpus and join the effluvia jettisoned by the treatment plant.

Headspace, an Echo Chamber(wt) excerpt

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

“And let’s murder this heckin’ tree!” The forest shakes as, with a mighty chop, Vindrok’s sword smokes through the trunk of the nearest tree. Fairly 30 meters tall the tree stands upright for a teetering moment before it descends. Its branches crash against its siblings. “Break! Snap!” Vindrok shouts.

The siblings spill to the side as hefty branches press the weight of years against their tender limbs. Forceful maturity bends and cracks off their reaching arms. They clatter to the hair crowded floor while the trunk continues its descent. Large arms drag and claw against the siblings.

The trees scream as their limbs are ripped off by old hoary hands, grasping claws, and woody nails. This giant that falls, this older sibling, cascading tresses lank as life gushes out their torso. The siblings cringe and cower as the dying body of their old pushes them aside.

Some siblings fall flat against the planet before even the sibling completes their descent. They weep into the dirty ground; sappy tears stick to the dead hair of the family.

Vindrok howls in triumph as his greedy nostrils dig deep the charcoal reek of the smoked tree. Roots from trunk smoulder after his furious axe cut.

“We’re going to burn all these offenders until they give up their lords!” Vindrok is a solid point of fury amidst the bodies of the cringing and dying family.

The trees continue to peel from the ground, their roots flinging earth into the air with plaintive snapping. The Old continues to fall, drags its leaves through the stratosphere. Dazzling green blades burn fluorescent orange as they scream across the infinite reaches of the sky.

“Though your family is slain all around me your crooked broken hearts are non-functioning. So, each death proves your abominable nature. It isn’t I who murders your family with burning sword.” His voice echoes through the canyon of trees. Echoing against their dense trunks further and deeper into the Hercynian wood.

The dirt and hair move aside as branches plunge down. Each cracking penetration forces aside detritus and loam. Drippy chunks the circumference of Jorge’s thighs explode from subterranean worms as the trees slice through their lengths.

San Pedro

Posted on by Arthur Challenger

Polly shakes her head at the taxis occasionally slowing by to entice. Frustrated honks glide off into the rain. She strides past derelicts, street heavies, and closes her eyes tight against the wall of graffiti that hems in San Pedro.

Fibrous cylinders fountain like fast forward spaghetti from a prehistoric non-vascular aquatic life form that resembles a toilet paper roll. The cylinders collide mid hologram with a trophy touting lion’s head sewn to the prehensile breasts of a mother kangaroo in whose pouch a tangled mess of electric wires squirm and sizzle. Their googly eyes flying out over the street in clumps of four. Behind the Kangaroo a long vanishing point type rainbow stretches back to the primordial past where giant sloths feed Jesus goldfish crackers. A sagebrush jack rabbit, cartoonish and cute, supports a pack of boner pills that dance along the animal’s tongue. Balloon letters bleed from the rabbit’s asshole, “Best of Luck!” As the sea spaghetti wriggles ever up the walls of San Pedro they encounter the level wherein no birds dwell. Figures of aged folk, in an early Raphaelite style swoon over benches their outstretched dying palms filled with dripping bird seed. Crows knacker silently and gurgle down the seed which wriggles in their distended bellies. Though the horizon of the San Pedro walls imposes a creative restraint on the gang of artists responsible for the duelling graffiti, each has interpreted that final moment uniquely.

From the East, the wire joeys braid together as nautical vessels of war, gliding through a mine rigged dark up towards the surface. Torpedoes launch from tubes and spring forth hyperbolic flower arrangements of surveillance clouding chaff clusters. Their broad hulls brush spiralling crustaceans and squid aside as they move upwards towards the white-capped limit of this space.

From the West, a bounty of grotesque deformities, long-limbed torsos astride abominable sets of twelve legs with each ending in a cracked yolk wherein curdled foetuses blow bubbles in the first and last breaths. Test tubes crack open upon smoking wounds in disembodied arms. Ink spills from a sodden cloud at the upper limit. It rains down from above and as the drops fall they transform into a series of political caricatures of the hated politicians of the day. The multi-limbed beings spread out in the rain, some bask and others shelter under one another with the occasional hands wriggling digits at the submarines rising above.