The Eternal Coast part 3.4 Entrust elves ably to her supine ally
From: 888infoghost@blackdance.mf
To: dropboxanon@offramp.sb
Subject: Entrust elves ably to her supine ally
For they shall take back the night. They steal from shadow to shadow, and never speak the truth of what it is that they hope to achieve, but with quick glances flash darts into the souls of those with whom they dance in inappropriate ways. Oaths they cannot break, no matter how sorely they would wish it so.
Instead they wait, patiently, eternally, that the wheel will turn and they too will move, proudly, in sunlight, to claim the prize they covet so dearly and for so long. They hide their desires not wisely but too well. The hunger within them so obvious but suppressed.
These then are the times when the tears fall.
If Genevieve knew on some subconscious level that she had walked back to her quarters, hacked Deepdark’s email server and sent an email full of apparent gobbledygook, she forgot almost immediately after shutting off her PC again. Genevieve was not even sure what an email server was and hacking was something she had seen in the movies, being performed by pale skinny people.
Over the following weeks she became forgetful and clumsy and would frequently arrive somewhere with no memory of going there.
A month later she was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
The eternal coast 3.3 propagated on a sunbeam
Goldeyes stared into her soul and plumbed its depths. And as he came out, he left a little something behind. A spore, something to remember him by, propagated on a sunbeam.
It glittered in the darkness of Genevieve’s psyche, shredding her memories of the moments before, so that she was unaware of what had passed between her and the prisoner. Except on the most primal level, clenching her guts like a fist as she stared at the man with his sun-starved, wormflesh and his eyes that sparkled coldly like jewels.
She had to fight her gag reflex as she continued the shift and was only too happy when it was over and she could wash herself clean of the itching, wriggling feeling that had bored into her flesh.
The eternal coast Photography
Seagull on a rock
Broken bucket on the beach
Stuff on the beach
Rockpools
There is more of this. But these are probably my favourites!
The eternal coast Part 3.2 random muscle
His gaze locked with hers and suddenly she couldn’t move her body. Certainly her finger was unable to reach down and touch the alarm button mere millimetres below it. It just twitched as if from a random muscle spasm.
And images were flashing before her eyes, memories becoming vivid as if she were getting lost in the past.
Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the break up with her last girlfriend, because she could not share all her secrets. But still random chunks of her past were triggered by unbidden neural impulses and hormonal secretions.
This was what it was like when you were about to die. Your body relaxed to ease into death and you searched for something to save you. But Genevieve had no reason to believe she was going to die.
A man couldn’t kill you just by looking at you, could he?
But then, Goldeyes was not a man.
Mike Mazeman lives!
Author’s note: a quick break from the Eternal Coast. Mike Mazeman was the superhero I created as a boy. Originally based on the Flash (he could run really fast), he later adopted bits of Captain Britain in his design and a goodly dose of Greek mythology. I’ve been thinking about reviving him as a comic strip, with a unique starting point. And that starting point is below, because I don’t want to see it in someone else’s comic and have to say, that was a good idea when I had it.
He woke up on a street corner with a bad taste in his mouth, salty and sweet. A painful lump, probably an insect bite, nestled between his shoulder blades and he had three day’s growth on his chin. His eyelids were heavy and his right knee throbbed.
There was only unnatural saturating orange light that made everything the same colour. Where it did not fall there was darkness. The sounds around him were of vehicles and distant muffled music, strange clatters and yowls of animals but mostly silence. The large empty silence of night, when life was stilled.
The eternal coast Part 3.1 continuous scrutiny
Genevieve Duvall stared at the man called Goldeyes and found him beautiful, in spite of all she knew of his dark past. Maybe because of. The more you stared at him, the more you realised just how wrong he was in his design but just how interesting a design it was. And that he could be there, some thirty years now, and maintain his cool when he was under continuous scrutiny made him seem all the more inhuman and all the more superhuman.
Sometimes she would stare at his lips and think about how it would feel to kiss them. (Cold, she felt sure, and tingly.) They were harmless little fantasies. There was no way that they could ever be fulfilled. Which made them all the more enjoyable.
After all, she couldn’t talk to anyone about them. Not down here in the sub-sub-basement of a secret UN facility for dealing with supercriminals. If even a whiff that such an institution exists was leaked to the left wing press, Deepdark would be shut down in an instant. Half of the prisoners had not had a trial, and those that had had not necessarily been found guilty.
But there were times when laws and due process were simply an obstacle to justice and peace. You could not - could not - allow your understanding of what was right be compromised by structures that were meant to stop things that were not right from happening.
If that had been the case, Winston Churchill would have gone to jail to pay for the people he had allowed to die.
No, there were times when you had to squash someone or some group into the ground.
Or pin them up like an exhibit in some human butterfly collection.
Could this man have done everything that they said of him? Surely some of it was just attribution of crimes with no perpetrator identified.
She fidgeted slightly in her chair. Though ergonomically designed, it still managed to numb her. She let her eyes flick slightly to look at her fellow invigilators. They were all trained on Goldeyes like lasers.
She moved her eyes back to the man himself and gasped.
He was staring straight back at her.
The eternal coast part 3.0 only a resemblance
The man called Goldeyes was not a man and was not called Goldeyes.
And that was just a beginning to the lies, misconceptions and rumours that surrounded him. In truth, no one understood what he or it really was.
Certainly he looked like a man. But if you looked too hard you began to notice all the things that meant that it was only a resemblance. His fingers were too long for one thing. His eyes were a strange shape, the irises were too large and his pupils were too small. And his nose was just for show, he didn’t breathe through it or smell with it.
Unfortunately there was no way to figure out just what he was. On digital video, on analogue magnetic tape, on photographs, he was invisible. No form of surveillance could detect him, so he was locked into a clear plastic cell, lit brightly by floodlights, watched on all sides by the naked eye, twenty four hours a day. He rarely ate, rarely drank, rarely moved, making the vigil a lot easier. He just sort of hung there, his white white skin and hair catching the light. The one man who might have known had disappeared shortly after handing Goldeyes to the authorities.
What was known was that he had come out of the Soviet bloc. He had made a space for himself in the intelligence community during the cold war, whilst sidelining in the black market. His various operations, double crosses and false intelligence had left over three hundred people dead. But nothing led back to him. Only rumours and the testimony of the man who was now called Sam Morse.
The eternal coast Part 2.3 holy grail
‘All right,’ said Paul, clearly in a conciliatory mood, because normally he would have teased her about her over-precision and intellectual snobbery. ‘You’re going to agitate some sort of particles that exist at the quantum level to lock all the atoms in that area in a single position so that…’ He thought for a moment. ‘So that they don’t change and interact with the other atoms around them and lose energy as more information is entered into the system. Oh and you do this by manipulating the fact that particles are waves just viewed from a different perspective. And something to do with observation. Oh yeah, isn’t it called the Turing effect?’
Carol felt a brief surge of surprise. ‘You’ve been reading up.’ Then she smiled. ‘Wikipedia, was it?’
Paul held up his hands. ‘Guilty as charged.’
‘It used to be called the Turing effect,’ said Carol. ‘Nowadays they call it the quantum Zeno effect or watchdog effect. Constant observation of unstable particles can force the waveform to collapse and stay collapsed so that the particles are locked in place. The Indians managed it with a particle, but the effect always breaks down if you try it over a larger area because measuring systems fail to be perfect.’
‘I think that was what I said, wasn’t it?’ asked Paul with a faux concerned look on his face.
‘You didn’t even come close!’
‘Particles and quantum thingy and waves,’ said Paul. ‘I think I covered everything.’
Carol laughed and hugged him. ‘It’s a good job you’re not in charge of the project. Imagine going up to the funding board and saying, yeah it’s all about quantum thingy and waves. Oh, well, we’ll give you five million for that, if it’s got quantum thingy.’
‘Oh come on, the quantum thingy is sexy. That’s probably the only thing that they heard when you were giving your presentation.’
Carol laughed again, but mostly because he was probably right. A lot of science was not funded precisely because it was not considered sexy. Everyone wanted to be involved in making something new, in some breakthrough. Nobody wanted to do the grunt work of refining what was already there to make it better. That was how space travel had been neglected for forty years. Space had quickly gone from being a Presidential dream to being the province of geeks and conspiracy nuts. Quantum was currently a poorly understood holy grail that could heal the broken land, fuel a billion homes and fix people’s bodies and therefore guaranteed money.
‘So are they like those waves,’ Paul asked, looking over at the sea.
The sky was darkening off coast and the waves were rising and roiling higher. A good day for surfing, Carol thought, though Paul would never put on a wetsuit to go with her.
‘No,’ said Carol. ‘Not like those at all. Like radio waves.’
Paul grunted in the way that signified that he didn’t understand, but didn’t care to be made to. Carol decided to leave it, though she dearly wanted him to understand, so that they would have something else in common besides enjoying a bottle of wine, walking, protesting against war, and the time they spent in bed.
‘So have you seen enough?’ she asked.
‘I was hoping for trilobites,’ he said. ‘They’re meant to have a lot of fossils around here, right?’
‘Right,’ said Carol. ‘Let’s find a fossil, and then we’ll have some lunch.’
‘Sounds like a deal,’ said Paul.
And they continued down the beach until fat, cold raindrops started to spatter on their coats, and they ran back to the town and cover.
The eternal coast Part 2.2 reactionary science
An elderly man and woman were wandering down the beach arm in arm, chatting to each other. Their casual intimacy made Carol smile and forget her worries for a moment. Was this a glimpse of the future? Would she and Paul walk down beaches in their old age, arm in arm, wrapped up in layers of clothes and love?
Well, if there were any beaches in the future, perhaps they would. It was hard to know. Scientists were working hard on finding ways to retard the changes in climate that would submerge landmasses, or to find alternate ways for mankind and the plants and animals to live. But they were already years behind schedule from starting too late. The field was no way of fixing this either. It sought to preserve, rather than conserve; to keep things exactly as they were, rather than alter circumstances to create something better. It was reactionary science, not pro-active science. But ecological science always was. There was a strong belief amongst the general populace that natural was best.
But natural was living in caves. Natural was the females being raped, and the males battering each other to death. Natural was no clothes and not enough food and no stability. And maybe that was what was being posited for the future; it had been since Carol had been a child and was the reason she didn’t like science fiction.
(Most science fiction was either science fantasy, with no basis in reality, or anti-science fiction, peddling a luddite philosophy to supposedly intelligent people. The rest she found impossibly leaden in its prose and subject matter.)
But the reason she had become a scientist was out of a desire to build a better world. Man had already built so many artificial structures around the world, be it calendars, or societies, or roads, or philosophies, that for Homo Sapiens to go the whole hog and actually take control of the world seemed the only natural thing to do. Only a squeamishness from the vestiges of religion and a vertigo of ignorance was stopping them from making the world do what they wanted it to.
When they saw the benefits of the field, perhaps it would open the floodgates. Maybe then people would accept that genetic modification was the way forward for food and for human survival in an ever harsher world. Maybe then they could drop the ridiculous notions of Frankenstein and the Manhattan Project as the touchstones for representing scientists. (Frankenstein was fictional, for Pete’s sake, and built on a faulty premise. It wasn’t even a fair comparison.)
‘You’re getting your angry look again,’ said Paul. ‘It isn’t this Serena thing, is it?’
Carol shook her head. ‘You believe in what I’m doing, right?’
‘As far as I know what you’re doing,’ said Paul. ‘You’re going to freeze a section of the coast in time, so that the tide can’t erode it and to protect some rare bird that’s nesting there.’
‘Freeze time,’ said Carol through gritted teeth. But it was exactly how all the newspapers would report it.
The eternal coast - commentary
So, two chapters in and no end in sight.
We have a big decision here, and I’m not sure what’s for the best. When coming up with this idea, I thought it was going to be fan fiction. It did, after all, grow out of the wreckage of a couple of rejected Doctor Who novel proposals, and would fit nicely with the Doctor or another couple of time active agents who have been on telly.
But. But but but. I don’t know if I want to do that. After all, won’t that take the story away from me, if I have to kowtow to pre-existing characters and conventions?
However, if I don’t use those characters, I have to come up with a replacement plan. Which could be as simple as featuring the Physician or Tungsten and Emerald. Except that would be intellectually dishonest. I steal so much from real life and the news as it is, maybe it’s not that great a crime. Shakespeare made his career on borrowing other people’s stories and characters, or basing parts on real people. Kim Newman routinely bases his stories on other people’s creations to create a literary wall of sound effect. And Alan Moore borrows from here, there and everywhere, as does Neil Gaiman.
And people like Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis get paid for writing other people’s characters. But Harlan Ellison thinks it’s a crime and that all authors should work only on their own characters. As if authors can make a living that way.
Which reminds me. Time to acknowledge influences on The eternal coast. One is Christopher Priest. (Not the one who writes comics, but I like him too.) Christopher Priest is like a middle class, British version of Philip K. Dick. He trades in the same arena of shifting realities, that blur together until you can’t tell them apart, but unlike Dick, he doesn’t write compulsively. His output is more considered, his style more elegant and immaculate. He also pushes the boundaries of whether what he’s writing is actually science fiction, fantasy or just a particular genre of literary fiction (amongst whose number you could also count Paul Auster and Haruki Murikami) that deals with identity. Now I find middle class fiction on the whole to be insular and introspective and self-absorbed. It’s why my bookcases are filled with science fiction or writing by authors who are resolutely not English middle class. Middle class mindsets do not seek to understand the plight of others but think that if they feel guilty and help people out that’s enough. But Priest is so clever, so mindbending, that he binds me in his spell every time. I just read the Affirmation which is particularly wonderful, and that undoubtedly inspired, in part, the chapter we’ve just had with Carol and Paul.
Sam Morse is a pre-existing character of mine. Although his previous existence was in my super hero universe, where he headed up a special unit in the police force that dealt with superhuman crime, and Lois was his sergeant. Yes, it is a bad pun. That Morse is nothing like that Morse makes me wonder why I chose to give him that name at all.