Matt Gemmell

Target Demographic

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

“Can I interest you in a makeover, sir?”

The voice stopped Dawes in his tracks once his brain had processed the words.

“In a what?” he asked as he glanced in the direction of the sound, convinced he’d misheard, but he immediately saw that he’d understood perfectly.

The young man standing there had skin that was clearer and brighter than any twenty-ish-years-old boy in the history of the planet could boast, and as Dawson peered at him, he was almost certain that the kid’s eyebrows had been shaped.

Christ on a bicycle, he thought.

“A makeover,” the kid said, smiling with his perfect white teeth, and just a hint of some kind of moisturiser on his lips. “This new product has toning and anti-ageing effects, and it’s specifically formulated for male skin.”

Dawes reached deep inside himself to push down the disbelief and the irrational anger. Everybody had a videocamera these days. Sometimes it was good, but most of the time it wasn’t. You had to be careful.

“Son, do I strike you as the kind of man who wants to put some kind of ointment on his face? I was born in the ‘70s.”

“It’s never too late to start taking proper care of your skin, sir,” the kid said in a plasticky kind of way, and Dawson started to seriously wonder if he was wearing eyeshadow too. The kid had a thin vertical line shaved into one eyebrow, and had the kind of bum-fluff three-day beard that Dawson privately thought of as being the exclusive domain of people who were tragically under-punched.

“It’s not about it being too late, son,” Dawson replied. “It’s too early. Any time at all is too early. We’re men, for Christ’s sakes. Or I am. I can’t speak for you.”

Dawson saw the remark land in the lad’s eyes, but it never touched his face, and Dawson had to grudgingly give him a point for that. The kid had probably heard it all before.

Clearly not enough, though, he thought.

A part of his mind told him that the kid was just doing a job, and there weren’t many choices for young people these days, and society had changed and moved on. But he didn’t really care. He was definitely angry now. The kid was talking again.

“It can reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, and it reverses the dehydration and damage caused by sun, shaving, and harsh weather.”

Dawson sighed. “Son,” he began, sounding almost like an exasperated father, “my single shelf in the bathroom cabinet has got one bottle of aftershave, an electric razor, some condoms that are probably out of date, and my blood-pressure medication. The rest is the wife’s domain. I don’t trim my sack, and I let my ears and nose grow whatever they want to. My chest has more fur than you’re ever going to be able to put on your chin unless you go to a costume shop. I’m not your target demographic, or whatever the hell it’s called now.”

The kid at least blushed, and for a brief moment, Dawson felt guilty. But then the feeling went away, and was replaced by the more comfortable directionless anger again.

“Too much information, sir,” the kid said, with a smile still frozen onto his glowing, immortal-looking face. Dawson had seen pregnant women with less rosy complexions.

“You know what really annoys me?” Dawson said suddenly, unaware he was even going to speak until he heard his own voice.

“Everything?” the kid replied, finally gaining the courage to inject a touch of sarcasm, but it was tentative. Dawson pointed at him to shut him up, and continued speaking.

“What annoys me is that you’re squandering a goddamned gift,” Dawson said. “Maybe the greatest gift in human history, engineered by the hand of man.”

The kid looked at him warily, unsure which way this was going, but he kept listening.

“Here’s the thing,” Dawson continued. “That gunge you’re peddling is just make-up, or skincare, or whatever you want to call it. But we’re men. We’ve spent thousands upon thousands of years, generation by generation, father to son, building and maintaining a world that says one thing very clearly: men are good enough. In fact, we’ve built it to say men are fan-fucking-tastic, just the way we are.”

Dawson took a small step towards the kid now.

“We don’t need face cream,” he said. “We get to have wrinkles, and they make us look better; wiser and more experienced. We get to have grey hair, and white hair, and no hair at all. Wiser and more experienced. And we get to have dry lips, and call it toughness against the elements.”

Dawson put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “You see, son,” he continued, more quietly now, and with unbroken eye contact, “we are kings. Every last man, in his own home, is a king. We roll out of bed, put plain cold water on our faces, throw on whatever the hell we like, and we call it casual and comfortable and manly. When women do that, we call it a nervous breakdown. It is An. Impeccable. System. And this garbage you’re selling spits in the damned face of everything our forefathers fought for.”

The kid blinked, processing this information.

“Listen to me, because this might be the most important lesson of your life,” Dawson said, leaning in so that his face was inches from the kid’s frightened eyes. “Low grooming and beauty standards are our birthright. We don’t need any creams or conditioners or colours or anything else, because…?”

“We’re men,” the kid said, and Dawson nodded.

“Because we’re men,” he echoed. “And we are perfect, just the goddamned way we are.”

Teletype

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

“You’re not the usual kind we get in here, Mr. Blaine,” the detective said, and the scientist glanced up at him for a moment. The detective’s name was Kidd, and he’d already heard all the jokes about it a million times over. These days, when people looked at him, they didn’t make the jokes anymore.

“I imagine not,” Blaine replied. “And it’s doctor, by the way.”

Kidd nodded. “My apologies; doctor it is. Can you tell me why you tried to burn down your former employer’s building earlier this morning?”

Blaine looked down at the table. The interrogation room was surprisingly small, but only compared to what he’d seen on television. He supposed that it made sense. They had to fit cameras and crew into the rooms for the cop shows, after all — if they were even real rooms at all.

“I should probably be talking to a lawyer at this point,” he said, and Kidd folded his arms and nodded.

“Probably,” the detective replied, and Blaine somehow found the energy to smile. He’d expected to be discouraged from seeking legal representation, but a moment later he realised that he was almost certainly being recorded at this very moment, and the police couldn’t afford to ever be seen to be pushing people to waive their rights.

A long moment passed, then Kidd spoke again. “Would you like to contact your lawyer, Dr. Blaine? Or we can get one for you. It’s no problem, and it’s your legal entitlement. It’s also generally a good move.”

Blaine wondered if the respect that he now felt for the shabbily-dressed detective was all part of a plan to gain his trust, but he immediately decided that he was too tired to think through it. He was also too tired to care. The physical evidence was incontrovertible, and he was most certainly up on an attempted arson charge — or worse.

“Was anyone hurt?” he asked suddenly, appalled that this was the first time he’d truly considered it, and after several endless seconds, Kidd shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Fire suppression system, a janitor who’d had his coffee and was luckily in the room adjacent to the exterior wall where you started the blaze, and a slow night at the fire station a few streets away. You were fortunate. This would be a different conversation if any of the forty-eight people in there had lost their lives.”

Blaine studied the detective’s face, and he saw something that he could read as easily as an equation, or an emissions spectrum.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Blaine said, and Kidd raised a weary eyebrow, inviting him to continue. He did so immediately. “You’re thinking that the lab isn’t that big a place, and that most of the evacuated people were scientific staff, and that it’s pretty unusual to have so many of them working during the night.”

Kidd looked at him for a few seconds, then he shrugged. “You’re right,” the detective replied. “Did you arrange for them to be there? More people to get caught in the fire?”

Blaine laughed without much amusement, and shook his head. “And here I was thinking you were an intelligent man, detective. I had no intention of harming anyone at all. They would just be… collateral damage. The lab is staffed around the clock now. They don’t want to miss a single thing.”

Kidd took a seat across from Blaine, and clasped his hands on the table top. “Then what was the intended outcome? Just revenge against the company that let you go recently? That’s a pretty blue-collar story.”

“I was trying to do the right thing,” Blaine replied. “I don’t care about my job. I was glad to leave. I tried to shut the project down, but they forced me out instead.”

Kidd didn’t say anything, knowing that the man sitting before him would continue on his own. He didn’t have to wait long.

“And it wasn’t luck,” Blaine continued. “That the janitor was right there, I mean. I have no way to prove it to you, but I guarantee that he was told to keep an eye on that room at that time, for an undisclosed reason, by someone high up in the company. It’s already started.”

“Care to expand on that?” Kidd asked, finally taking out a notebook and flipping to a blank page, even though the audio and video equipment in the room had been recording since he brought Blaine in.

Blaine looked down at his own hands, which weren’t cuffed or otherwise secured. His seat was comfortable enough, too. None of the clichés of an interrogation.

“I suppose there’s no point in lying to you,” he said, “even though you’ll assume that I’m doing that very thing. So let me ask you something, detective: do you know what a teletype is?”

Kidd frowned, considering the question. “I think it’s a kind of very old technology,” he replied. “Like a telegraph. But more like a typewriter that’s split in two. You type on the keys at one end, and the words get printed at the other end. It’s pre-World War One stuff. No use today.”

Blaine nodded, impressed with the piece of trivia. “That’s more or less accurate, yes,” he said. “Now here’s another question: do you know much about quantum mechanics?”

Kidd sighed, and shook his head. “Not a thing. And if you don’t mind, doctor, I’m not really looking for a physics lesson tonight.”

“Bear with me,” Blaine said. “It’s my area of expertise, and you don’t need to know much — especially since you won’t believe a word of it. But it’s true. It’s all true, and I hope that at some point you might actually consider that possibility.”

Kidd set his pen down beside the notebook and sat back, folding his arms. He was willing to listen, at least. Blaine nodded and began to speak.

“You can look up something on your phone later: quantum entanglement. It’s a bit like the machine you just described, but for subatomic particles. Two particles, produced in an accelerator in such a way that they’re linked together. Whatever happens to one of them also happens to the other, instantaneously, and regardless of distance.”

Kidd was frowning again. “That doesn’t seem possible to me,” he replied. “Sounds like nonsense.”

Blaine nodded. “I know. It sounds that way to everyone at first. But it’s an everyday reality in physics, and in the universe. Whether you can accept it or imagine it or not, it seems to be true. But my employer — my former employer — has taken it a step further.”

Blaine leaned forward now, his gaze falling to the table top as he put his thoughts in order.

“We created an array of entangled particles in our accelerator, set up so that they can be read or modified by… well, by something that’s not too dissimilar to a laser, I suppose you’d say. A pair of arrays, entangled with each other. Eight particles per array, so sixteen in total.”

“So what?” Kidd asked, not unkindly, and Blaine nodded twice in quick succession.

“You can represent letters of the alphabet using eight bits of information — binary digits, ones or zeroes. There’s a particular pattern for A, and another for B, and so on. It’s how computers work, essentially. So you can use one entangled array as the keyboard, and the other as the printer.”

“Amazing,” the detective replied, his tone making it clear that he didn’t find it the least bit interesting at all.

“Again, bear with me,” Blaine said. “The major innovation was in maintaining the velocity of one of the arrays of particles, in a continuous loop around a linear accelerator, but retaining the ability to read their state while in flight. We kept them at point-nine-five-C.”

“Doctor, I’m sure this is very exciting if you’re a physicist, but I’m not,” Kidd replied. “I don’t know where or what Point 9-5-C is, or why you’re telling me all this.”

“It’s a speed. It’s ninety-five percent of the speed of light,” Blaine said, a note of frustration entering his tone. “Faster than you can imagine. And here’s the next thing you can look up on your phone: things travelling at speeds close to that of light experience time differently than things moving more slowly. Time doesn’t pass at the same rate for them. Do you see the consequence?”

Kidd reviewed what he’d been told. He was a trained and experienced investigator, and correlating or summarising information was easy for him, even if he didn’t actually grasp the finer details.

“I suppose it means that you type a letter on your keyboard particles,” Kidd replied, “and then they show up on your printer particles, but there’s a delay because of how fast one set of particles is flying around your accelerator machine.”

“Very good,” Blaine said. “I’d give you a solid B+ for comprehension, especially since it’s your first class. But to get an A, you’d need to add that the delay is significant in magnitude, and negative in sign.”

Kidd summoned as much patience as he could dredge up. “Blue-collar version, please, Doctor,” he said.

Blaine spread his palms flat on the table, and looked at the other man with an unblinking gaze. “The particles were created about two weeks ago. That was the final straw for me, when they went ahead with it despite my protests. Did you hear on the news about the big lottery jackpot winner last weekend? He happens to be the chief executive of the company. You can verify that yourself.”

The detective leaned forward and made a note to do just that, then looked at Blaine again. “Still waiting for that working-man’s explanation,” he said.

“Then here it is,” Blaine said. “The printer particles, as you put it, began displaying information as soon as they’d been created — information that had been typed on the keyboard particles. But the information didn’t have to be typed at the same time, because of the speed difference: it comes from any point later. That’s how it works.”

Kidd had the definite beginnings of a headache. He scratched his brow. “So what you’re telling me, doctor,” he replied, “is that you tried to burn down a building with almost fifty people inside because you wanted to destroy a fancy kind of text messaging system—”

“Which sends its messages back in time,” Blaine said. “All they have to do is wait and see what happens, then send the information back to the origin point via entanglement. Warn themselves, tip themselves off, sell information about the future, and do whatever they like. And the longer it exists, the further they’ll be sending the messages back — always to our present era, about two weeks ago. All of future history is now in flux.”

He looked frightened now, and Kidd felt a chill in the room as the scientist spoke again.

“They knew I was coming, you see, and even if you choose to believe me, they’ll know you’re coming too. I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I can’t come up with a damned thing we can do about it.”

Inheritance

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The man who was waiting for him looked vaguely familiar, but Collins couldn’t decide whether it was because he might have met him as a boy, or just that the older man looked like the absolute stereotype of a university professor.

The man came forward, and cordially shook his hand. “So, another Collins, is it? Your family name is almost royalty around here.”

Collins smiled, feeling a little embarrassed. He was certainly the beneficiary of a degree of nepotism, but he had also earned every one of his qualifications and diplomas, and indeed both of his degrees. The fact that he had chosen to apply to work at the same institution that several of his forebears had devoted their lives to was simply a matter of tradition.

“Yes, sir,” Collins replied. “My father was always keen that I should follow in his footsteps.”

“And those of his own father, and so on,” the older man said. “What has it been, now; six generations?”

“I’d be the seventh, sir, yes,” Collins replied, not wanting to seem presumptuous. It was a preliminary meeting, after all, rather than an offer of employment, but he had to admit to himself that he wanted it to go well. The surroundings were grand, and even intimidating. The diplomatic service of the Foreign Office had kept the same headquarters for several centuries, enviably positioned in central London, and stepping inside was like travelling back in time to a better age.

“My name is Braithwaite,” the older man said at last, gesturing that Collins should follow him down a wood-panelled corridor. “I expect that your father might have mentioned me at some point.”

“Very much so, sir,” Collins said, now realising exactly who he was speaking to. The man had been his father’s close colleague, as far as Collins knew, and he found himself feeling more relaxed immediately. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“We’ll be working together quite a bit, you and I,” Braithwaite said, and Collins could hardly believe his luck. It seemed that the preliminary meeting had almost immediately become an assurance of employment, and in a government job with a respected and noble institution, no less.

They reached a broad door, and Braithwaite opened it, ushering him inside. The room beyond was ornate, lit just as much by various lamps as by the meagre sunlight coming in through the windows, despite it being the middle of the morning.

“Take a seat just there,” Braithwaite said, and Collins nodded and walked over to a burgundy leather armchair whose twin sat nearby, with a drinks table between. It was to this other chair that Braithwaite went, peering at a document he had been carrying the whole time, through the small spectacles that perched at the end of his nose. Belatedly, Collins became aware that the document was his own curriculum vitae.

“Well,” Braithwaite said after a moment as he set the document down, “this all seems to be in order. Not that it would matter very much if it wasn’t, mind you.”

Collins frowned, unsure what the man meant. He wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he also wanted to feel that he had earned his place in the world, and wasn’t riding entirely on his own father’s coat-tails.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Braithwaite said pleasantly, seemingly intuiting the younger man’s thoughts. “You’re here on your own merits, of course. But not the merits inscribed there. Your past accomplishments — impressive though they are — have very little significance.”

The man seemed to be waiting for a question, but Collins found that his mind was whirling with too many to ask. He had felt extremely comfortable a minute ago, and now he was profoundly unsure what was going on. Perhaps he’d been presumptuous after all, and somehow misunderstood the situation. But he had been very clear in his letter of application that he sought a post in the diplomatic service, as a negotiator. He’d even said so during the standard phone screening a week earlier.

The silence stretched out, and Collins cleared his throat. “How do you mean, sir?” he asked, and Braithwaite smiled.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the older man replied, “and allow me to explain. When I said that your name was held in high esteem within this institution, I wasn’t exaggerating. Or more exactly, your bloodline and genetic heritage. You see, your six predecessors — all of whom, of course, are also your ancestors — possessed a unique trait, which you share. They had a curious mutation in a portion of what we now know as the prefrontal cortex.”

Braithwaite reached up and tapped his own head, as if he were complimenting someone’s intelligence. Collins was none the wiser.

“A mutation?” he asked, and Braithwaite nodded.

“One that’s highly prized in any interpersonal context, and which is invaluable when involved in a negotiation,” he said. “And none of your family members knew about it before they started working here, because their immediate predecessors — their respective fathers — were sworn to utter secrecy.”

Collins said nothing, but he didn’t doubt a word of what he was hearing. His father had been an exceedingly private man, and so had his grandfather, but both of them had been given knighthoods before they passed away, and they had each been fiercely proud of their work for their country.

A memory surfaced, of his teenaged years, one particular evening when his father returned home from work. The younger Collins wanted to ask him if he could attend a party that weekend, at the house of a classmate, with the real motivation being that a certain girl would be there. His father asked him why he wanted to go, and Collins told him that he just wanted to spend time with his friends. His father had looked at him with both understanding and a measure of disappointment that he had never understood. The following evening, Collins found money and a box of condoms on his bedside table, with a note from his father to call if he wasn’t going to be home, so his mother wouldn’t worry.

Every child, at one time or another, had entertained the possibility — quickly dismissed as ridiculous — but in this case Collins wasn’t surprised to hear the next words of the man sitting across from him.

“You have the latent ability, young Collins, to read other people’s minds,” Braithwaite said. “And we’re going to activate it for you, then you’ll use it to tell us the deepest secrets of your opposite number in every negotiation you take part in during your impending and inevitably illustrious career.”

The older man sat back, placing his forearms on the chair’s armrests.

“It’s nothing less than your family legacy, and your truest inheritance,” he added. “Now, shall we begin?”

Living Outlines

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written a fair amount of fiction. 160 free weekly mini-stories, amounting to more than 200,000 words, and four novels (here’s my latest book, JINX!) totalling over 380,000 words. And that’s just the contemporary, published stuff.

Outlines are my planning tool of choice, at least for the phase immediately before starting to write. I’ve spoken about outlining on my podcast, but I’ve found that my approach has evolved a bit since then, and I want to talk about that here.

It’s important to realise that I’m not claiming my new approach is better, per se; I think it’s actually just a consequence of being at a different point in my development as a writer. As we learn, our needs change, and we should always be ready to re-assess our approach.

I write in scenes, not in chapters, only arranging scenes into chapters once I have a full draft. That’s a personal choice, and while I can highly recommend it to you, I know that some people prefer to plan in terms of larger story units like chapters from the start. That’s fine; it’s just not for me. I think it makes more sense to work out what the story is, write it, and then see where the chapter (and part) breaks naturally lie.

My prior novel outlines have been long, detailed things. JINX has an outline that’s five thousand words long, or about five percent of the book’s own final length. That’s a detailed plan for the whole story, arranged as a stream of scenes, each of which has a breakdown of each significant thing that happens — usually with notes attached. It’s a comfort during the writing process, but it’s also highly prescriptive. That approach works really well when you’re still learning to write long-form fiction, and learning which parts of the art of novel writing you can trust your instincts on.

The thing with outlines is that they’re a static representation of something that doesn’t end up being static, in most cases. Books change as you write them. Often, you don’t know what the book really is until you’ve written it, and you’ll always be changing things as you go, which will have knock-on effects. Outlines are living things, because books take on a life of their own.

My previous style of hyper-detailed outlining isn’t well suited for me anymore. I know how to write a hundred-thousand-word novel. I know what the challenges are, and how story arcs work, and how craft meets art, and how to feel out a scene, and all that stuff. I have more instincts now, and I’ve learned a lot. Deep outlining no longer appeals to me, for several reasons.

First, it’s a burden during the planning process, which is the time when you want to capitalise on enthusiasm and energy and raw creativity. Big-picture thinking doesn’t sit well with thrashing out minutiae. But that’s a minor drawback. More importantly, it doesn’t gel with how I write these days. I go with my instincts, because there’s a part of me that knows how to write a book much better than I think I can. Every author has a subconscious co-author, and it’s the real artist. I meet it half-way, or just trust its judgement entirely, because I’ve put in the work to sharpen it by doing things the hard way first. I’m not going to slavishly follow an overly-detailed outline.

My previous outlines go down to about six levels of hierarchical bullet points at their deepest, though that’s an extreme case, but I’d routinely use three or four levels of nested points. Now, my approach is different:

Make a top-level point for each scene. It can either be a summary of the scene (if I even know what that is yet), or the first thing that happens in the scene (my usual choice), or just the word “scene”.
Add sub-points for each other major thing that happens in the scene. Just one additional level of nesting; all as direct children of the top-level scene point. It’s fine if there’s just one sub-point for a scene, or even none at all.

What this gives me is a narrative skeleton, rather than a full story breakdown. If I need to add more detail to a given sub-point, I’ll let it run into a few sentences — but all within that point. I now outline to just two levels: the top level, and first-level children. If you trust your instincts, that’s more than enough to get started with. Just scenes with bullets.

This allows for a much more free-form approach when I’m writing the first draft. I begin a scene by copying its chunk of the outline into the manuscript (I keep each scene in a separate sheet in my writing app, which has numerous advantages including re-ordering, tagging with keywords to track the flow of conflict or point-of-view, and so on), then I take a couple of blank lines before it, and that’s where I’ll start writing.

What the simplified outlines allow me to do is defer adding detail until I’m already writing the scene itself. That’s the disconnect with an exhaustive outline when you’re more experienced; you either feel strictured by it, or you start to ignore the points that no longer fit. With the simplified outline, I can just take a quick look at a scene’s bullet points immediately before I’m going to write that scene, and add any detail I feel might be helpful at the time. No more problems with whether it’s up to date based on what’s already been written, in most cases.

Novels can change more when you’re writing them than when you’re planning them, believe it or not, and one of the big lessons of experience is learning to embrace that fluidity. I’m comfortable enough with it now, and so my outlining strategy has evolved to accommodate and enhance that inevitability.

In closing, a note on tools. Use whatever suits you best, but my current position is that I do my best brainstorming in a completely unstructured way, using (digital versions of) pen and paper. I use an e-ink tablet for most of my thinking now, but an iPad and an Apple Pencil with Notability is excellent too. I find structured tools like diagramming or mind-mapping apps too frictional.

For outlining, you can do it right there in your text editor or word processor if it’s brief (I only use one or two bullet points in total for each mini-story), but for novel-length works you should consider a good outliner with robust keyboard-shortcut support. I use Zavala these days, which is free and syncs between all the Apple platforms.

For writing and revising, whether it’s novels, short stories, blog articles like this, or anything else, I do it all in Ulysses. The most important thing, though, is just to get started writing.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, maybe you’d enjoy some of my books too.

In Endless Abundance

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

I wandered the desert for years, looking for the place.

The Empty Quarter is vast, and inhospitable, and deadly — no place for a lone traveller — so sometimes I would go with others. The nomadic people of the region had no interest in me, but occasionally I would find company in the form of an explorer, or an archaeological expedition, or treasure hunters, or just lost souls looking to become more so.

I couldn’t travel all the time, of course, because the journeys needed supplies, and camels, and those things required money. So I would work for six months or a year or two years, then embark once more across the sands. There were even times when I chartered a small aircraft and a pilot, in an attempt to speed my search, but the desert speaks lies when you walk upon it, and doubly so when you look down from above.

It was in my forty-seventh year when I set out for what I felt would be my last attempt, because my body had grown unreliable and weary, and my hopes had dulled. It made perfect sense to me that a resource often must be expended in order to gain more of the same, but that practicality became less comforting as I felt the cold more, and felt the heat more, and felt the pains in my limbs that came from a lifetime of mistreatment.

I’d been seeking any change in the dunes and the dust for weeks when I first glimpsed the unusual mound in the distance. Accustomed to tricks of the senses, I felt no particular excitement, but another half hour’s ride only brought the formation closer, and I could tell that it was no natural feature. I allowed myself some interest, if not hope, when I finally drew close enough to discern what seemed like an aeons-eroded pillar, and the crumbled remains of a low wall nearby. A huge amount of sand choked the area below, but it might have been a mine in ages past, and the surrounding region of desert was shaped unusually, falling into a subtle depression that served to hide it from all around.

I proceeded on foot, tying up my beast in anticipation of returning soon for an arduous task, as the place was surely a difficult water which could take days of digging. But that was a problem for later. I went down into the great valley of sand, foolish beyond measure and taking my life in my hands, and I moved even faster when I saw that there was a another structure down there, less damaged by the cruel sun and crueller winds over unknown centuries.

The ruined building below was small, and open to the elements at its front, but within there was still shelter even though sand was heaped upon most of the floor. At the rear, there was a door of iron and wood, neither material having endured especially well, and beyond it there were stairs. I hesitated, but there was nothing to be done. If the place of the pillars was below, then that was where I must go.

I found the mine, and I followed it for a long way, lighting torches as I went, and after a time it became a much older place, weaving to and fro until I discerned that I was no longer in a mine but in the outskirts of a city that had been buried beyond human sight during the times written of in holy books. Now my heart pounded in my chest, as I came to the end of a covered walkway and emerged into the dust-shrouded and oppressive gloom of a great square, which itself gave onto wide and deep steps leading gently upwards to the gateposts of a palace. Its walls were of hundreds of columns, stacked to the limit of sight, and there could be little doubt that my search had finally been a success.

The silence was total, even my own footsteps not carrying far, and I couldn’t see a single snake or a scorpion. The grand hall was a mausoleum, and at its end there were more stairs, made in the ancient style, which ultimately brought me to a throne room. The throne itself was of a black rock the likes of which I’d seen during my travels, lying broken at the centre of impact craters, laced with veins of gold.

And in the throne, there he sat.

As I approached, his eyes opened and looked upon me, still bright after millennia, and unblinded by the darkness I had temporarily banished. I greeted him using the old language, and he nodded.

“Peace is indeed upon me,” he said, “for this place holds nothing else.”

His voice was like the grinding of stones together, and I could see that his feet and legs were indistinct, having partly merged with the stone, keeping him forever sat there. One of his arms had suffered the same fate, but the other was laid upon the black rock as casually as could be.

“Then you are the ancestor of those who once lived here?” I asked, already knowing the answer, and the man using his remaining functional arm to gesture at his own body, as if it were all the evidence needed.

“I am King A’ad,” he replied. “And you are here to ask for a small piece of that which I have in endless abundance.”

I could only nod, because he already knew the truth of me. Having had a horror of death since my childhood, I had spent my adult years seeking a means to procure unnaturally long life. This gift was within the man’s power to grant, having been cursed to do that very thing.

“Know this,” he said, trying to lean forward even though it must have been a thousand years since he was last able to, “you may have no more than ten times that which was afforded to you by god, and the price will come due at its end.”

“The price?” I asked, and the man smiled a wicked smile.

“You will return here to sit in my place, and you will repay your debt a thousandfold.”

It was so long ago, and I was so young. Barely born. I accepted his terms, and when I came back eight centuries later, tired of life and every possible flavour of it, driven by a compulsion which couldn’t be ignored, he crumbled to dust as soon as I walked into his throne room.

Or mine, as it became on that day. I sit here in the dark, my feet already fused to the floor, and I think that perhaps sixty or seventy years have gone by; the merest fraction of my penance.

I am alone with only time, and the barest glimmer of hope I can retain is that someday, another may come here looking to cheat death and god, and I will entrap him here in my place.

JINX reviews are in

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

JINX, the third book in the KESTREL technothrillers series, has been out for a couple of weeks now, and the reviews are very positive indeed. Here’s a quick selection.

I've read all three Kestrel books, and this is the best yet. While the books are standalone, I've enjoyed seeing the characters grow into their own, and seeing the relationships between the characters change. The plot is tight and the action pieces have a real sense of place that really helps make them work.

★★★★★

I really liked this book. It was a super easy read as it constantly stayed engaging and kept things moving along nicely. It has the right mix of science and fiction to bring the plot to life without getting caught up in justifying itself. It's a highly entertaining action movie printed on paper. You'll enjoy it.

★★★★★

Very enjoyable and definitely a page turner. Suffice to say that I was in the middle of one of Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" books and put it down for a bit to read the first chapter of this, and didn't come back to the Reacher book until I was finished 3 days later! Recommended. Looking forward to the next one.

★★★★★

As well written and enjoyable as the previous books, and a lovely step back into the environment reuniting with existing characters and meeting new ones as well. Very enjoyable. Ended up re-reading the trilogy to enjoy it even more.

★★★★★

Thanks so much for the wonderful reception, and please don’t forget to post your own reviews or star-ratings on the online store of your choice — it’s hugely helpful to make sure the book is visible to potential readers!

If you haven’t read it yet, you can get JINX here, in the format of your choice:

Paperbacks are also available, either via Amazon or ordered from your local bookshop (ISBN 978-1916265257). And if you’re completely new to the KESTREL series, you can get all three novels as a trilogy pack, either as regular e-books, or as a special set of personally autographed e-books.

To find out more about JINX, read a preview instantly on this site, or buy it, go here immediately!

Next Day Premium

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Brian was running late, but that was nothing new.

There had been so many changes in the last year or two. First they started shipping some stuff without an outer box, to save on packaging, which was fine except that it made stacking the van much harder. Then they introduced the premium delivery option, which meant that he had to take detours from his regular, planned route to make sure the urgent deliveries all got there by the deadline. It took more time for him and every other driver, and used more fuel, and led to a lot more wasted minutes in traffic.

His employer was an e-commerce giant that sold everything under the sun. A few years back they’d split out their own delivery fleet, with branded vehicles and drivers’ jackets, and also the bane of Brian’s life: the little gadget they had to carry around at all times, which told them where to go next, what to scan and what to photograph, and how far behind they were.

They were always behind. Brian was paid a mere pittance per parcel, and his daily load for a 6 AM start could be three hundred parcels or more. Most weeks, he’d work six days, and on each of those days he usually wouldn’t finish until almost nine at night.

He couldn’t listen to audiobooks because he was stopping and getting out of the van every few minutes, or even more often. He barely had time to find a bathroom once or twice a day, and lunch was always eaten on the hop, crammed into his mouth from behind the steering wheel. One of these years, he would have a damned heart attack from it all. Then they’d replace him with someone else and nothing would change.

Brian felt his heart sink as the unmistakable nagging tone chimed from the device yet again. It was sitting in its dashboard mount, surveying its human slave as always, and there was a thick red border along the top of its display.

Next Day Premium delivery LATE, it said.

“Effing thing,” Brian said, fairly sure that in a year or two the gadgets would probably be listening for such remarks, and would penalise the drivers accordingly.

He’d gone over some broken glass a few hours earlier, and heard the sound he didn’t want to hear. It had taken a full ninety minutes to get the van to a garage that was open, and ultimately have the tyre replaced. He could claim a small amount of it back from his company, but by no means all — and the resulting delay had thrown off his deliveries for the day.

All the drivers called the premium deliveries No Damned Patience instead. They were supposed to be done by 1 PM, but management seemed to have no clue about the realities of navigating a city in a large vehicle, all day and every day, handling roadworks and rush hours and people who were slow to come to the door, or who lived at the top of six flights of stairs. Every delivery was unique, but they were sliced into equal time slots, with a travel time tolerance so tight that it practically encouraged them to break the law.

The display indicated that Brian still had dozens of parcels to deliver, but he knew there would be disproportionate hell to pay if the premium ones were made to wait even longer. It was already long past the 1 PM deadline, and it was starting to get dark. Evening rush hour was almost over, and he actually felt a small measure of relief when he saw that the address was on the outskirts, a mile or so into the countryside. It seemed vaguely familiar too, but in his job, everywhere was familiar.

It took ten more minutes to reach the quiet road, lined with hedges, and Brian immediately knew where he was. It wasn’t a very regular stop, but he’d certainly been here ten or twenty times over the last couple of years. A right turn between a set of stone gateposts confirmed his recollection, as he drove up a short approach road that was little more than a gravel-covered driveway, and turned around. The place had once been a farm, but was now a set of short-term rental properties, used by tourists as a base camp for going to see what the city had to offer.

The deliveries he made here were never to the owners, and always to whatever temporary resident was there for a night, or a week, or whatever. Things they’d forgotten when packing, and just decided to buy another one and have it delivered. He seemed to recall that he’d had to carefully manoeuvre the van past grocery delivery vehicles a few times too.

He parked and went into the back, finding the parcel right away because it had been staring at him all day. It was shipped in the manufacturer’s packaging, no box, so he could see that it was a large blackout blind; the kind that attached to a window with suction cups.

Probably got a baby with them, he thought.

He collected the gadget from the dashboard and got out, shut the van’s door to keep the heat in, and went over to the nearest building. It was glass and steel, only built in the last handful of years, and had a door that was painted bright yellow. There was a key safe screwed to the frame, and at the side of the building Brian could see a big red Audi with a roof box. He sighed, and pressed the doorbell.

He glanced around while he waited, appreciating the quiet of the surroundings. Beyond the light pollution of the city centre, the stars were already dimly visible above, dotted around the huge full moon, and he thought he heard a cow lowing from somewhere nearby. It was a nice place for a holiday.

The door was suddenly wrenched open from within, and a man stood there with beads of sweat on his brow. Brian just smiled, holding up the package.

“That was meant to be here six hours ago!” the man snapped, and his voice was strange. It wasn’t really anger; it sounded more like anxiety. Brian immediately didn’t like the situation at all, and he didn’t even try to hold onto the parcel as the man grabbed it from his hands.

“I’m sorry, mate, I had a flat tyre,” Brian said, holding up the gadget. “I just need to scan the code then that’s it.”

The man didn’t reply, nor did he make any attempt to turn the parcel to reveal the barcode label. Brian could see over the man’s shoulder that the little open-plan residence was a cave inside; every window had its blinds or curtains closed.

“I need to scan it before I can release the parcel,” Brian said, keeping the false smile on his face, but again the man didn’t respond. He was standing strangely; rigidly, and looking up at sky now too.

“Meant to be here before dark,” the man said, and there was pain in his voice now, replacing the anxiety of a few moments ago. His voice was also several tones deeper. Brian could see his own van reflected in the man’s eyes, because his pupils were almost completely dilated.

Drugs? Brian wondered, deciding just this once to skip scanning the parcel. He’d pay the company for the blackout blind himself if he had to. Right now, he just wanted to be away. He tapped a control on the screen of the gadget to mark the delivery as left in a safe place instead.

“OK, thanks, have a good night,” he said, not waiting for a reply before he turned and hurried back to his van. He got in quickly, pulled the door shut and triggered the central locking, then started the engine. Then he took one last nervous look towards the building. It was an action he’d regret for the rest of the life.

The man was still there, but he also wasn’t. The blackout blind parcel was in tatters, torn apart by claws that had erupted from his fingertips. His own clothes were rags now, clinging to a frame so much larger than it had recently been. And then there was the hair, and the teeth, but most of all there were the terrible eyes, reflecting the silvery light of the moon above.

The creature started to move, but Brian was faster, standing on the accelerator. There was a single agonising instant before the vehicle surged forward.

Delivery LATE, the gadget urged again, from where it rolled around on the passenger seat, unsecured.

“And it’s going to bloody stay that way,” Brian muttered to himself, checking the rear view mirror every couple of seconds as the stone gateposts dwindled rapidly into the distance behind him.

JINX is finally here

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it’s been a journey — but at long last, JINX is out now.

Five years, in the real world that you and I inhabit, have passed since the previous KESTREL book, TOLL. And in that time, of course, the world has changed.

When the pandemic hit, my wife and I had recently made a major life decision, and when lockdown came into effect in March 2020, even though we hadn’t told anyone yet, she was pregnant.

The next six months were as bizarre for us as they no doubt were for you and everyone else, but we had the additional element of hospital visits where I had to wait outside in the car, and a whole additional vista of concern regarding what consequences there might be if we caught the virus. When the time came for our son to enter the world, we had drama there too, with a last-minute dash to the operating room. I even got to wear scrubs. But it all worked out in the end.

The following three years were honestly the toughest I’ve ever experienced. My son is healthy and happy, and the world today is at least superficially much more like it was before that strange, eerie year or so when everything stopped. Our lives have changed irrevocably, of course, but we’ve settled into that too.

Suffice it to say that I apologise for the delay in bringing this book into the world, but I definitely had my reasons.

The first book in the KESTREL series, CHANGER, came out in June 2016. The second instalment, TOLL, arrived in December 2018, but let’s go back to CHANGER for a moment. The lead up to a book’s release involves a lot of small — and often annoying — tasks, and they take time, because many of them rely on things beyond your personal control. A month or so before the first book came out, I remember spending my days fiddling with promotional copy and web pages, waiting impatiently for paperback proofs to arrive, juggling the logistics of handling autographed copies that were going to every part of the world, and so on. But I had a little break on a Saturday in the middle of that month of May, because my wife and her sister (and a few friends) were going to a concert.

We live in Edinburgh, but the gig was in Glasgow, so we drove across and went to the west-end city home of the parents of one of my sister-in-law’s friends. It was a beautiful townhouse, certainly worth millions, and I kept myself to myself as the women went through whatever elaborate rituals of preparation they felt were needed. Then, when they all went out to attend the show, I stayed behind — entirely alone — in this unfamiliar place, because I’d be driving myself and my wife back to Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning once they’d all returned from the concert.

I had some dinner, and I walked around a little, but I felt a bit like an intruder and so ultimately I confined myself to the wood-panelled, high-ceilinged, very long living room. I think I had the choice of about fifteen sitting locations, including multiple sofas, but the place I chose was all the way towards the rear, at the bay window which looked out onto a tree, and some wrought iron railings, and not much else. There was a little table there with two chairs, and I think they must have used it for playing cards or something. I took my MacBook Air from my bag (the only thing I’d brought with me, besides my jacket, wallet, keys, and phone), and I sat down to write.

At the time, I had a weekly newsletter for members of my website, and I was working on the following week’s issue. I finished it quickly enough, and then I got up, stretched, and went to the kitchen to get some coffee. When I returned, I went to the bay window and looked out for a while, then I turned back to the table, properly taking note of its contents for the first time. I remember them clearly. There was a frilly tablecloth, upon which was a cheap black pen. There were two placemats, white with blue detailing. And there was a USB flash drive of bright green plastic; the kind that has a transparent cover on the top, with a slim piece of card behind it that you can slide out and write on, to label the drive’s contents. Someone had already done so, in black biro — presumably the same pen that was sitting there. I read the label.

JINX, it said.

I had my MacBook right beside me, ten centimetres away. It had a suitable USB port. I was alone in the house. I was intensely curious… but I was also raised to believe in respecting other people’s privacy. I didn’t plug the drive into the computer. I did, however, take a photo of the drive sitting on the tablecloth with the pen. I have it to this day, and I remain intensely curious about it, but at this point any actual revelation would surely be a disappointment. Whatever digital payload was encoded onto the solid-state storage, I think my version is more interesting. Probably.

I knew at the time, having just finished CHANGER and pondering future adventures for the KESTREL team, that I would one day write something about that flash drive. It turned out to be an entire novel, in the end, and I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you have the chance to read it at last.

It’s an interesting book, this one. I’m not saying so from a self-congratulatory perspective; that’s not what I mean. Because of the huge span of time that it’s been (at least vaguely) in progress — Middleshade Road in its entirety bisected the writing process for JINX — its nature has changed a bit along the way. It’s a very contemporary story, but it also picks up right after the events of TOLL, and takes things in some interesting new directions. More than anything, this book is for the fans of the series, giving the reader a chance to see more of KESTREL themselves, learn more about them, and flesh out their world.

I’d like to thank my wife, Lauren Gemmell, for her support during the writing of this book. I’d also like to thank her for not just giving me my son and new best friend, Calum, but also for physically manufacturing him as part of the process. That’s more amazing than anything I’ve written about by quite a large margin.

As ever, I’m extremely grateful to my first-born (and canine) son, Whisky the labradoodle. He’s kept me company, and kept me going, through the whole struggle. As I write this, he’s on the floor at my feet, dreaming his dog dreams, with twitching paws and the occasional muffled bark at things that only exist in his subconscious.

I’m grateful to Stuart Bache for continuing his excellent work on the KESTREL series book covers. It’s a note of pleasing serendipity that, despite my design brief being vague to the point of only mentioning the city I wanted to feature, he ended up choosing a background photo of a specific street that my wife and I have been along many times.

To my family and friends, thank you for walking the tightrope of knowing when to ask how the book is going, and when not to. Now would be a good time.

Enormous thanks as always to my treasured proofreaders, who don’t have to work often, but who do work very hard when the time comes. I’m exceedingly grateful to Lee Fyock, Regine Horteur, Anders Kierulf, and of course Lloyd Nebres. All remaining errors and inelegances are mine alone.

Most of all, dear reader, my thanks go to you.

You can find out more about JINX, and buy a copy, right here.

JINX is out now!

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thrilled to announce that JINX, the third book in the KESTREL technothrillers series, is out now! It’s incredibly exciting for me to be able to share it with you at last.

You can buy it right here, in the format of your choice:

Paperbacks will be available in a couple of weeks, either via Amazon or ordered from your local bookshop (ISBN 978-1916265257).

Here are some direct links to other Amazon sites too:

Here’s the description from the back cover:

SHE SEES YOU. SHE KNOWS YOU. SHE’S BAD LUCK.

Elite EU special forces group KESTREL are on leave when early one morning they receive an urgent summons. One of their own has been involved in an accident — or was it? Taking place virtually simultaneously with two other lethal cases of apparent bad luck, a common thread unites all three victims.

When Captain Greenwood and her team discover that the deaths weren’t by chance, they find themselves up against a new and terrifying enemy, directed by a seemingly all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, where they’re going, and many of their deepest secrets.

Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

To find out more, read a preview, or buy it (yay), go here immediately!

Menagerie

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The air was thin, but somehow the biting cold actually helped.

They had been travelling for more than a day, and the scientist was tired but also excited. His expertise was in climatology and geology, particularly in the analysis of ice core samples and surrounding terrain in order to determine the conditions in ages long past. He had become a leading expert in retrieval and thawing techniques, and was often consulted by universities, meteorological institutions, museums, and sometimes governments.

This was his first time being contracted by the military, though.

He had received a call six days earlier, and had then been collected by car from his office on campus. The destination had been a rented office building, where three men in nondescript suits asked him a number of questions, then requested that he provide a comprehensive list of equipment and supplies he might need for an extended expedition to an unspecified location, for an on-site retrieval consultation. They then showed him an absurdly generous number which indicated what he’d be paid. Finally, they made him sign a stack of documents that was fully ten centimetres thick. Four days of preparations later, here he was.

The scientist had been unsettled by the uniforms at first, but had quickly come to appreciate them, as they flew farther and farther south, then landed and switched transportation, flew even farther, then transferred to tracked land vehicles, and ultimately proceeded on foot. The climb had been long and arduous, in almost constant snowstorms, but the soldiers around him made it look easy. They also took excellent care of him, as if their lives depended on it.

“Is it much further?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the wind, and the team leader ahead of him half-turned, still moving, and shook his head.

“No, sir,” he replied. “We’re almost there.”

The scientist nodded, brushing snowflakes from his beard yet again. Sure enough, there was a cave mouth just becoming visible up ahead, and even though it was more than halfway up a mountain whose name or exact location he had no idea of, he was still slightly concerned about large predators. Once more, he was grateful for the soldiers, and for their very conspicuous weapons.

A few more minutes of trudging brought them to the shelter of the cave entrance, and inside there were three more soldiers standing far back, with a portable heater which had already began to draw large droplets of water from the rocky ceiling.

“Do you need to rest, sir, or are you able to continue the rest of the way?” the team leader asked, and the scientist just waved him onwards. There was no purpose in stopping now, and presumably there would be a better-equipped resting place at their main encampment, somewhere within the mountain.

They pushed on. Despite the walls being coated with ice, it was warmer here than outside, and the darkness was dispelled by powerful light beacons that had been set down at regular intervals. As they moved inwards and downwards, power cabling became visible, and the scientist swore that he could even faintly smell coffee. His stomach began to rumble.

Sure enough, a few minutes later they reached what was clearly a base camp, in a large cavern that was much longer than it was wide. There were at least a dozen tents of various sizes, military personnel moving around, generators, and all of the equipment he’d asked for. Towards the farthest point was a larger tent, currently open at the near side, which was obviously a command centre. It was to this structure that the team leader escorted him.

Inside, there were several lightweight collapsible desks and work-surfaces, holding assorted computer equipment amongst other things, and presiding over it all was a grey-haired man who looked like he’d been chiselled from the surrounding rock by a sculptor who hadn’t yet learned how to make curved edges. The scientist could see that the man was a General, and he could also see that he was waiting impatiently.

“Welcome, doctor,” the General said. “If you’re ready to take an initial look at the site, we’ll get that done before you have some lunch.”

The scientist was slightly taken aback, but he didn’t feel able to refuse, and he also didn’t want to show weakness in this environment, so he simply nodded. The General seemed satisfied, and the man donned an expedition jacket and led him out of the large tent and further into the cavern. Three armed men appeared to escort them, without a word from anyone.

There was an opening at the far end of the cavern, and it wasn’t a natural one, as indicated by the blast debris that had been swept efficiently off to one side. The scientist frowned, but didn’t remark on it. He was led through a short tunnel which was supported by metal struts, and then the party of five men exited into a brighter area. It seemed to be an ancient crater, frozen for aeons, which had once been open to the surrounding mountain range. Now, it was a spectacular crystalline space, entirely hidden from the outside world, and illuminated by powerful floodlights connected to the generators back in the main cavern.

“Is it some animal species you’re looking to retrieve?” the scientist asked, even as he judged the age of the ice formation at several hundred millennia or so. The General shook his head.

“Human,” the man replied. The scientist smiled, intrigued.

“It’s just down this way,” the General said, and they progressed carefully down an incline which led to a place where the ice wall met the rock at an angle, and there was a narrow but usable passageway between. The General led the way, then one of the armed men, then the scientist, followed by the other two soldiers. It took only thirty seconds to reach their final destination.

It was like a glacier, stretching away for a kilometre, and protruding from it was a sight that the scientist’s mind first refused to accept at all. He blinked, and looked again, then he felt goosebumps break out all over his body, despite his several insulating layers of clothing.

There was no way to tell its overall true shape, but it was black in appearance, with an iridescence that made it look almost aquatic. It was smooth in some places and sharp in others, and while its geometry was strange, there were parts of it which were at least familiar in broad terms. A section that might have been a panel joint, and something that could be an exhaust or vent, and an outline that looked very much like a hatch. But vast, like a skyscraper lying on its side, frozen alive in this forgotten place.

The scientist forced himself to look at the ice, and the rock, and to listen to his own training and education. The conclusion was inescapable. It had been here for a very long time.

“That’s… a vehicle,” he said, his voice only a whisper, but the words still echoed around him. “From a time when men lived in caves and hunted with spears. And they never spread to this part of the world.”

The General stood in silence, allowing the scientist to come to terms with what he was seeing.

“It’s a spacecraft,” the scientist continued, mostly to himself. “Not built by humans.” The General nodded.

“We’ve sent autonomous survey machines down into the ice,” the General said. “They’ve done some boring, taken some samples and footage. There are windows down there, or at least what passes for them. And you’re right about the cave men. A few of them, and animals that any natural history museum would kill for. Pairs of them. Quite the menagerie.”

The General walked forward, to where a part of the vessel stuck up from the ice. He kicked it with his snow boot, and the sound was resonant within the thing’s hull.

“How did you find this?” the scientist asked, trying not to ponder the question of what else might be buried beneath his feet.

“Mostly by putting pieces together from ancient religious texts that were recently discovered in the Middle East,” the General said, sounding disinterested. The scientist frowned.

“Religious?”

The General nodded. “Holy books, and history in general before the modern age, are like the child’s game where you each whisper something to the next person, and it gets progressively distorted until it’s unrecognisable. Everyone in the damned world knows about this ship. They just don’t realise it.”

“I don’t understand,” the scientist said, venturing to step forward now. From his new vantage point, the ship’s hull had taken on a vaguely golden sheen, like a striated onyx. It was beautiful, and utterly alien. The General sighed.

“Take a good look, doctor,” he said. “You’re one of the first people in a very long time to clap eyes on Noah’s Ark.”

Banshee

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Miles knew the dog was going to stop. Some instinct common to both species, which somehow hadn’t died out in mankind just yet.

He usually walked the dog along the narrow roads between the fields, waving to his neighbours and the other folk, but when the weather was good he would bring the old animal all the way out here to the cliffs, and enjoy the view and the sea air. The weather was only moderate today, and it was later than he’d usually ever come out, but he had felt the urge for some reason.

The dog was getting on in years, and probably wouldn’t be around for too much longer. Miles had never given the animal a name, but the dog had never asked for one either. They understood each other perfectly, and each was the other’s best friend in the world.

The dog stood alert, one forepaw raised from the ground, and Miles knew that he had expected this. Why else would he have brought the dog on a windswept and cloudy evening, with darkness not far away, risking breaking a leg or his neck, just to look out at the sea that would soon be a black void stretching off towards an unseen horizon?

Why else would he have gone to the attic of his little farmhouse first, crawling right in, shifting boxes and sneezing away dust, to retrieve the small case he hadn’t looked at in the long years since he returned from the war?

Because a part of him knew. A part of him had known ever since the funeral a few days ago.

Half the county had been there, it seemed, and even a reporter and a photographer from the city. A great man had died, the last of his line, with a name that could be found up and down the land on libraries and lecture halls and theatres and schools. One of the old bloodlines, running back to the first settlers or so they said, respected and wealthy for untold centuries. The man had died a childless widower, cared for by some of the tenants of his own land, and everyone was in mourning.

The women had started their talking in the days between the death and the funeral, as women do. They had heard the sound — the keen — rolling in over the hills by moonlight. Some thought it was like a child, and some said a fox, or a cat, but those were only the most mundane of comparisons. The undertaker’s wife had said at church that it was like a demon, and old Cormac who lived on the last strip of worthwhile land before the road to the coast said that he had heard it too, and that the woman was right enough.

Miles had heard the tales all his life, just as his own ten-times-great grandfather no doubt had. He’d paid them little heed, but he hadn’t disbelieved them either. Some lands had already been ancient and strange on the day that men’s feet first stood upon them, and Ireland was surely included.

The dog looked back at him, asking a question, and Miles nodded. The animal didn’t move, though, waiting for its master at the edge before the start of the winding cliffside path. Miles caught up, and peered over and down, looking for any sign of life down on the sharp rocks and the seaweed-draped hollows and the coarse, wet sand below. There was nothing.

He put a reassuring hand on the animal’s back, watching its tail swish once and then stay upright. Then he started forward and downwards. The dog kept pace at his heel, and he was grateful for it all over again.

When they reached the beach, it seemed lighter because of the reflection from the water, and there wasn’t another human being to be seen. When the sound came, Miles and the animal both leapt back a full yard, startled.

He could understand what the undertaker’s wife had meant, because the shriek seemed to fill his blood with ice, and his heart skipped a couple of beats in his chest.

“Mother of Christ,” he muttered to himself, but he had been a soldier once, and so he was destined always to be a soldier deep within himself, and he pressed on. It took only a minute or two before they came upon it.

Miles had wondered if he might have to hold the dog back, but the animal had stopped a few steps behind him, forepaws spread and ready, haunches low, teeth bared and plumes of breath coming out of the sides of its muzzle like it was a steam engine. He knew that it would attack on a single command, and he also knew that it was terrified.

The thing lay there on the silvery sand, face down by the grace of God. It must have been nine feet tall if it stood up, and it had the general outline of a slender woman except for the wings, one of which was bent at an unnatural angle and clearly useless. What might have looked like long, dark hair from a distance was instead some kind of leathery continuation of the thing’s head, and at the end of all four of its limbs there were black talons that could disembowel a cart horse in a single slash.

The folklore was true in this case, at least, he thought. Some bloodlines had heralds as they crossed from this life to the next, and these strange, mourning devils would scream into the night for the recently dead until the fourteenth day had passed. But something had happened to this creature; maybe another wild animal, or the storm, or a lapse in attention. It would never fly again, and its shrieks now were at least half for itself.

Miles drew the pistol, freshly cleaned, lubricated, and loaded. He told himself that he was on an errand of mercy, but in truth he just wanted the devil gone from the earth. It seemed to sense him, and it began to lift its misshapen head from the wet sand to turn in his direction. That was all the prompting that Miles needed, and he fired three shots into the back of its skull, then three more into the places where a human being would have a heart and lungs.

The dog barked, once, and loped in a tight circle, staying well away. Miles waved it back anyway. The thing on the sand had already began to blacken, and would likely be dust before the tide came to claim it in a half hour or so.

Maybe they even came from the sea, in which case it was a fitting burial, and a return home.

That’s what he’d tell himself, he decided, on the many long nights to come when he would wake up in a sweat, ripped from a dream in which he’d hesitated a moment too long on the trigger, and been cursed to look upon the face of a banshee.

Addicts

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Her name was Harriet Duncan, and she was a psychologist and counsellor. Her first client of the day was slightly late, but that was to be expected, and she waited patiently in the comfortable, minimally-decorated room she had outfitted for consultations.

At four minutes after the hour, he arrived, and took his seat across from her while apologising for the delay. He had fallen asleep, he said, and been a little disoriented when he woke up.

This patient had been seeing her for several weeks, and was one of the handful of recurring types. In fact, he was amongst the primary demographic of those seeking psychological help: the contemporary, and virtually universal, type of obsessive-compulsive that had become colloquially known as a realphobic.

Most of them began their lives without a mental health condition, and then spent the next twenty-one years growing up and learning and living their strange existence, in a world where virtually no-one they met was ever older than them. They would see the silent, windowless skyscrapers, and at first they would wonder what they were. Then, when they reached the age of sixteen, they would learn the purpose of the hundreds of thousands of spires. Most expressed disbelief at first, but governmental information campaigns soon educated them.

The next five years, between sixteen and twenty-one, were known sarcastically — and also genuinely — as the Waiting Period. Until they acquired the final legal right that society could bestow upon them. Until they could apply for a place within one of the spires; a small cube-shaped chamber. Then, when they came of age at last, over ninety-nine percent of them would go in, and never again come out unless they later chose to have children of their own. Even that was becoming much less common.

Harriet looked across at the man who sat there, nervously running his hands over his own knees. Everything in the room was spotlessly clean — by its very nature — but he was still terrified about the possibility of what he called contaminants.

The compulsive disorder, and the anxiety, and the aversion to germs and grime, were exceptionally common. They were a natural by-product of the cubes. Harriet knew that the man would be like all the others, making a half-hearted attempt to pursue the course of therapy, before finally giving up after a few months or years. He would retreat into his cube, and never be heard of again. And she couldn’t blame him.

Why would you leave your own private universe?

The environment simulators had been perfected generations ago, and were now mass-produced, maintained, and overseen entirely by machines. They could be anything at all, without limit of apparent size, or even physical laws. Almost every adult in the world lived in one, technically alone, but perceptually in whatever scenarios they wanted to experience. There were even a perverse few who just lived in the cube without a simulation running, like being in prison, to make some kind of point about self-control or self-flagellation.

The problem with a perfect environment, or at least one that’s under your complete control, is that it very quickly creates a sense of horror at the idea of ever relinquishing that control. Of ever again being at the mercy of your fellow human beings, and how they might perceive you, or treat you, or judge you. With omnipotence in a virtual world, came the inseparable curse of an inability to live in the real one.

Harriet did her best to help some of them; she really did. As a woman of thirty-two herself, and unmarried, she saw it as her mission in life. Human society in pre-cube times still had all these same psychological conditions, but they had been rarer, and sometimes had purely organic causes. Now, in their near-ubiquity, they were largely the products of environment.

From time to time there were attempts to prevent or even delay the onset of cube occupation for the current generation of young people, but the outcome was predictable: the young themselves insisted, and rallied, and volunteered for their fate. They framed it as a deprivation and a cruelty, and the intractable problem was that they were hardly wrong about it.

She asked the man what had been on his mind lately, and after only a brief pause, it all came tumbling out. He had tried going out for a walk after their last session a week ago, and had made it only a little way down the street — the silent street, striped with the deep shadows cast by the rows upon rows of cube spires — before he had to turn around. By the time he reached his own building’s front lobby again, he was running, and by the time he made it back to the door of his cube, a hundred and eighty floors above the ground, he was sweating profusely and was sure he was going to have a heart attack.

Harriet nodded understandingly, and sighed inwardly.

The usual story once more. It wasn’t the fantasy or the wish-fulfilment aspect of the cubes that made them so irresistible to people; it was the malleability. The perpetual opportunity to offset or negate or erase negative outcomes. The option to redo, and re-try, until either the desired outcome was achieved or could simply be specified as a fait accompli. Together, it all offered an almost complete elimination of stress and anxiety, because it took away uncertainty and consequence. Unfortunately, the ultimate result was a corresponding massive increase in feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, and instability when out in the real world — an activity which was no longer necessary anyway.

The cubes took away all pain, and gave each person an entire world to shape. So, inevitably, they immediately turned everyone into addicts.

The session eventually drew to a close, with the man promising to consider trying his walk again, if he felt he could. Harriet told him she would see him next week, and that he could contact her before then if he needed to. She bid him farewell, and he vanished from the chair, ending the remote presence session.

Harriet glanced at the clock on the wall, seeing that she had a few minutes to spare, and she began to reconfigure her cube for the next appointment.

Naughty List

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

It was a little after two o’clock on Christmas morning when they heard the faint sounds.

First there was a muffled thump from the roof, and then the unmistakable scrunch of boots upon the thick layer of snow that had fallen the previous day. The sounds reached the top of the chimney, which had been bricked up years ago and no longer opened into any fireplace, and then there was something like a gust of wind. A moment later, they could hear the clunk of the same boots downstairs, against the hardwood floor of the living room.

The boy and the girl leapt from their beds in a haze of excitement, and scurried from the room they shared, mindful not to wake their parents next door, then they crept downstairs.

The man and the woman in the next room, attuned from years of parenthood, wakened by some obscure instinct, and heard the tell-tale sound of small feet descending the stairs. The man sighed, having expected this, and he knew that the day ahead would be long.

He moved to a sitting position in bed, his wife still lying down but awake, staring at him. He glanced at his phone on the bedside table, thinking of its ability to make videos rather than calls. Even though he was going to send the children straight back to bed, it would make for an amusing record of their harmless misbehaviour. He decided against it.

“Do you want me to come down too?” his wife said, the bedcovers still pulled right up to her neck, but the man shook his head.

He got out of bed, took his robe from the hook on the back of the door and pulled it on, and reflexively yawned. Reminding himself that he should keep an even temper, and that he had doubtless done similar things as a child himself, he went out into the hallway. He closed the bedroom door behind him, in the hope that his wife at least might drift back off to sleep.

The man quietened his step as he went down the stairs, and when he crossed the hallway and entered the living room, he saw the expected sight of his son and his daughter standing in front of the Christmas tree, and the unexpected sight of Santa Claus sitting in the armchair just across from them.

“It seems that your father has come to see why you’re not in bed,” Santa said, his voice jolly, as if the whole situation was the very best of jokes.

The children looked around at their father with guilt written all over their faces, and the man reached his arms out towards them. The girl ran to him, relieved, but the boy just returned his attention to Santa, who laughed.

“Off you go to bed, both of you,” Santa said, and the boy took a longing glance at the brightly-wrapped gifts laid out beneath the Christmas tree, before reluctantly joining his sister beside their father. The man ushered them out, unsure what else to do, and he and Santa both listened to the sound of small feet on the stairs once more, much slower in their ascent than when they had come down only a few minutes ago. After several seconds, a door was closed.

The man turned to the intruder, momentarily at a loss for words, and Santa lifted himself from the chair to stand before him.

“Much better,” Santa said, “and your wife has just fallen asleep again too. Those little ones are such a blessing! You’re a fortunate man.”

“You’re not real,” the man said, sounding not entirely sure of himself. “There’s no such… I mean, I… we already got the children’s presents,” he finished lamely, too dazed to be troubled by his own inarticulateness, or the triviality of the response.

Santa laughed merrily, clapping his hands against his own belly. “Oh, so I see, so I see,” he said, gesturing at the Christmas tree and the many brightly-wrapped boxes around its base. “Everyone does! I haven’t been responsible for gifts in the longest time.”

The man knew that the figure was indeed Santa Claus, despite his protest regarding him not being real. He knew it in the same way that a cat knows a dog, or a monkey knows a tree. It was encoded into his very being, and he had absolutely no doubt as to the identity of the portly man in the vivid red and white outfit.

“Then why are you in our house?” the man asked, sounded suddenly young himself, and feeling lost for anything more authoritative to say.

“Well, it’s because you’ve been naughty, of course,” Santa said.

The man blinked at him.

“Those unpleasant words to your wife last week,” Santa said. “And your remarks about your mother-in-law too. You won’t be saying that sort of thing to her face when she arrives later today, will you? And that’s without even thinking about those cigarettes you keep in your desk at the office. And flirting with your secretary. Goodness me!”

“I, uh,” the man said, feeling ashamed now, as if he’d let his own father down.

“Just remember, I know absolutely everything about you,” Santa said. “I’ve known you since you were the littlest boy. How adorable you were! And I know everyone that you know. I could tell them anything that I wanted! I could write it all down and leave it on their dining table. Or at the office. Or anywhere at all.”

Santa pointed at the man, his face full of mirth and cheer, with rosy cheeks and kind, twinkling eyes. “Why, I could ruin your whole life! Wouldn’t that be a tragic turn of events. So have a think about it, and maybe we’ll see if you’ve been better behaved next year.”

The man nodded slowly.

Santa went over to the mantelpiece and smiled at the glass of milk, and the plate holding two cookies and a small carrot. He picked up one of the cookies and took a large bite, rubbing his belly appreciatively, then he took the carrot and winked at the man, pointing the vegetable at the ceiling. They both heard the distinct sound of a hoof, just for a moment, coming from high above.

“Ho ho ho!” Santa laughed, then he disappeared in a rapidly fading shower of sparkles, already on his way to the next house on his naughty list.

Flickers

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Harry sat in the church hall listening to the rain drumming on the cheap roof. There was a drip somewhere, sounding like it was hitting a bucket, but he couldn’t see where it was.

The church itself was a beautiful old thing that had seen better days but still retained most of its grandeur and sanctity, but the hall was a much more recent addition, thrown up at minimal expense, and somehow more draughty than the elegant pile of stone it was attached to. While the church smelled like varnished wood and old paper, the hall just smelled like disinfectant.

He looked around at the sallow faces. There were a dozen or so, including the man who was clearly in charge of the meeting. It was Harry’s first time, so he knew that he would be called upon soon. Some of the others were looking at him with vague curiosity, but most were just staring at the floor like they were hoping it would open up and swallow them.

Sure enough, the organiser finished whatever he was saying, then said that they had someone new tonight, and he gestured towards Harry and nodded. Harry slowly stood up, finding that he wasn’t nervous, but he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. He just let them hang at his sides, and he looked around the circle of chairs.

“My name’s Harry, and I’m an alcoholic,” he said.

“Hi, Harry,” came the reply from most of the others. Those who had been looking at the floor were still doing so, but he didn’t mind that. Harry took a deep breath, and started talking.

“I suppose I started drinking too much after I lost my wife a couple of years ago,” he said. “At the time it wasn’t enough; couldn’t be enough. Then it was for a while. Then it wasn’t.”

A few heads nodded, including the organiser’s. The man was wearing a cardigan, which was probably required by international law for these situations. Harry supposed it was meant to make him look non-threatening and nurturing, or something. He just looked like an ex-addict who had stolen a cardigan.

“I don’t have kids,” Harry said. “Thank god for that. I lost my job, lost my apartment. Family stopped talking to me for a while, but I’m working on patching that up. And I’ve got a part time job again now. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-two days.”

There was a little round of applause, which startled him, making him look at all of the faces again. The organiser looked genuinely proud, like a sap. Some of the other guys nodded with respect for a fellow traveller. Some of the rest just looked resentful, like they might offer to buy him a drink to celebrate.

There was a woman too, thirty-five going on fifty, dressed like she wanted to make some booze money. She was smoking, even though you weren’t allowed to. Nobody seemed to care. Harry sure as hell didn’t.

“I’m doing OK,” Harry said. “Feel like maybe the worst part is over. The first worst part, anyway.”

Somebody laughed, and the organiser smiled and gave a worldly-wise nod that he’d seen in a movie sometime. Somebody else coughed the way people who need a chest x-ray do.

“I, uh,” Harry said, losing his train of thought for a moment. He thought he’d seen it, just for an instant. In the far corner, beside a piano covered in a dust sheet that was at least fulfilling its purpose in life. He felt his pulse increase, but there was nothing there.

“Sorry,” he said. “I came here to keep on the straight and narrow, you know? Stay focused. Not slip back into…”

He tailed off. Again, but in a different corner, like heat haze over a radiator making the wallpaper twist and dance. Then the shadow too dark to be a shadow. Then gone again. He took a breath.

“You know what, that’s not why I came here,” he said, licking his lips in unconscious mimicry of just about everyone else in the hall. “I came because I wanted to ask if anyone else, when you started coming off the booze, I mean… if anyone else started to… see things.”

One of the men who had been staring at the floor the whole time looked up now, and there were suddenly patches of red in the middle of his pale cheeks. His eyes were a little too bright. And then another man. And another. He recognised the look from his own bathroom mirror. They were afraid. He looked straight at the man who had been first to look up.

“You’ve seen it too,” he said. “It’s something to do with the withdrawal or something. It lets you see it. See them.”

The man became even more white, then he licked his own lips and started to look around. The organiser was frowning now, and he started to raise a hand, clearly about to speak. Harry cut him off.

“They’re around the edges of things, right? Dark and fast. I think they’re here all the time. Something changes in your head when you quit drinking. They’re… sharp, and they’re quick. Not human. Shapes.”

“Flickers,” the frightened man sitting just across from him said, and it was like he’d opened a door with a snowstorm outside. Some of the others hunched their shoulders, and a couple even half-turned away. Harry could actually see the goosebumps on the arm of the guy sitting to his own right.

The organiser was saying something now, in his calm voice, but Harry wasn’t paying attention and told him to shut up. Because they were there again, halfway across the hall, flashing in and out of existence like an afterimage on your eyes from a bright light. But black, so black, and quick. First at one side, then another. He swore he could almost hear them, clicking and scuttling.

They knew he could see them. They knew. That’s why they’d come. Harry stepped backwards, but his chair was in the way and it tipped over. He distantly thought about picking it up as a weapon, but he would have preferred a bottle of whisky.

The man who had named the things was looking around, and his face showed naked terror. He could see them too, for all the good it would do. Harry looked at him, and at the organiser’s stupid, blissfully unaware face, even though one of them was right behind him. Harry licked his lips.

“They’re here,” he said.

No Response

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

It was a Friday, at least in most of the world, when it came.

There was no warning. No long approach from beyond our solar system, no amateur astronomers spotting something against the backdrop of stars. No flash of light, or distortion of space. When it arrived, it appeared suddenly, and it was already in our upper atmosphere. A few miles above the Pacific ocean, where there had been only empty air moments earlier.

A passenger on a commercial airliner actually caught the instant of arrival on video, and the flight had wifi, so the footage had spread across the globe by the time half an hour had passed, on every social network and every news site and programme. The video was broadcast intact, including the profane exclamation of shock that the phone’s owner had uttered. Almost immediately, panic began to spread.

Governments initially declared the video to be a fake, but there was also a sudden scrambling of military personnel and vehicles everywhere in the world, and so it took less than a further two hours for the leaders of most countries to make public addresses to their populations, confirming that an enormous vessel of some kind was now hovering over the ocean, and that no-one knew how it had got here, and that it was not of human construction.

Civilians were urged to remain calm, but they were also urged to return home and remain indoors. Supermarkets became chaotic scenes, as the flighty and feeble-minded somehow concluded that the existential and perhaps even mortal crisis could be ameliorated by the stockpiling of toilet paper.

The craft — if craft it was — simply sat there in the air. Fighter jets dared make ever-closer approaches, and naval vessels took corresponding sea positions, though not directly beneath. Satellites were repositioned to look upon its upper surfaces, and situation rooms the world over were packed with stressed soldiers and analysts every hour of the day and night.

It was only with the dawning of the following morning that something unusual was detected. The light of sunrise showed a distortion in the air at equally-spaced points around the thing’s surface, as if there was a vortex there. Generals and admirals panicked, prime ministers and presidents fretted, and scientists speculated whenever they were allowed to. In time, drones were launched, laden with equipment, in an attempt to discover the nature of the phenomenon and thus discern its possible purpose.

The readings took a handful of hours, and the analysis took barely the same amount of time. The conclusion was clear. The craft was scrubbing carbon from our atmosphere.

We tried to communicate, first via radio transmissions, and then via laser projections, and finally via directed loudspeakers, but all to no avail. The craft was producing no electromagnetic emissions whatsoever, and every attempt to open a dialogue, or even to send a greeting, was met with the same result: no response.

On the fourth day, the craft suddenly began to descend, slowly, towards the ocean surface. It took several hours to reach a height of barely a hundred metres above the waves. The Russians overreacted and launched a ballistic missile, to the horror of everyone watching all around the world, but the projectile was deflected before it could reach the craft’s hull, apparently by means of a targeted form of intense artificial gravitation. The craft made no retaliatory move, nor did it change its posture in any way.

Once it came to a little under fifty metres above sea level, small disturbances appeared on the water’s surface at regular intervals in a grid arrangement, over a distance of at least one thousand miles. The only affect on the hundreds of international navel vessels in their path was a very slight turbulence in the water, and again scientific equipment was deployed to seek answers. Again, the answers came: the craft was filtering the seawater, not just in the Pacific but globally, drawing out contaminants, industrial chemicals, microplastics, sewage, and even certain bacteria. It remained in place for nine days, and then rose to 1,500 metres and abruptly shot off towards Asia.

Interceptors were scrambled, more missiles were fired, but once again the weapons were useless; batted away and detonated moments later in mid-air, having caused neither damage nor delay. The craft came to rest over one city after another, sometimes remaining in place for a day or more, and sometimes for mere hours, going from India to China, and to every other country and then every other landmass. Its journey took weeks, tracked at every moment by every military and every intelligence department on the Earth. It pulled pollutants from the air, and from the rivers, and from the soil. It lifted miles of open landfill, and it somehow even drew up stored radioactive waste without exposing the wider environment. In place of all these things, it left vast cubes of pure elements, solid and inert, ready for whatever processing and use we might find for them.

And then, one day, it lifted up one final time but kept going, reaching the edge of our atmosphere. It paused for a handful of moments, and then it was gone. It did not fly out into space, and nor did it pucker reality and escape through a rip or a portal. It was simply there, and then it wasn’t.

It was years ago now, and we still speak of it every day. Politicians, and generals, and teachers, and children. There are theories and there are arguments, interpretations and disagreements, but there is consensus on one thing. As it cleaned the air and the land and the water, saving us from ourselves, even though it never answered us and never spoke, it did convey a message nonetheless, from whoever sent it here.

Our planet is important — but we are not.

The Value of Things

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The man sat quietly, looking out of the large window adjacent to his seat. The train was moving quickly, and the views were dramatic due to the hour; sunset was fast approaching, and the landscape beyond the glass was awash in golden light and shadow.

The boys, though, paid no attention to the spectacle. Their predatory eyes were on each of the very few other passengers in turn, as they prowled the carriages like hyenas. There were three of them, none older than seventeen, but that was plenty old enough to cause trouble if they wanted to — and they did.

The man noticed them in his peripheral vision, and he had heard them approaching, but he give scant consideration to a roving pack of teenaged thugs. The boys were loud and crass and rude, but so were all boys at one time or another, and there would be more of the same to replace them, every year until the end of time. They would grow out of it, or they wouldn’t. It mattered little to him. He had seen it all before, more times than he could count.

He knew that their purpose was one of two things, as it always was for such people: intimidation or acquisition. The former was better, but still deplorable. Unfortunately, in this case he could already tell that their goal was the latter.

The only other people on the carriage besides the boys and the man were a solitary middle-aged woman who looked down on her luck and harried, and a boy even younger than the roving pack, also travelling alone. The young boy was farther from the hyenas than the man was, and so the man knew that the younger boy would become their primary target once they’d passed him. Young people had expensive electronics these days, and the lone adolescent would be easy pickings for three older boys.

The man took a calming breath, and took out his own mobile phone; a newer model. He also moved his arm such as to draw up the sleeve of his woollen coat, exposing his wristwatch, which cost more than any of the approaching boys would ever earn in a year without breaking the law. Their eyes finally settled on him, scanning like the vultures they were, and he knew the moment that they realised they had found gold amongst the silt of the railway carriage.

They wore the uniform of socio-economic demarcation and deprivation, and of juvenile delinquency: cheap black branded sportswear, though their only running would be from the police, and they had their hoods up even though the train was warm. They had their heads dipped to avoid the surveillance cameras, an instinct trained into them at a young age.

No face, no case, went the maxim of the modern young offender, the man knew.

The leader of the boys sat down heavily, directly across from the man. The other two took up sentry positions, blocking any exit from the group of seats in either direction. Both of the standing boys had one hand in a pocket, where bladed weapons doubtless hid. The leader, though, had his hands on his own thighs, and he leaned forwards. After a moment, the man met his gaze with an expression of utmost calm.

“Nice watch,” the leader of the hyenas said. The man nodded.

“It was a gift from my father,” he replied. It wasn’t true, but he wanted to give the boy an opportunity to show decency.

“Now it can be a gift from you to me,” the leader said instead. His comrades laughed, making a braying sort of sound. The man just tilted his head, pretending not to understand. The leader got right to the point.

“Give me your fucking watch,” the boy snarled, “and your phone and money.”

“No,” the man said immediately.

His voice was quiet, his posture was relaxed, and he looked deeply into the boy’s eyes. He could see everything that he needed to see, and he knew that the boy wouldn’t hesitate to attack him in order to not only steal his belongings, but to restore the boy’s own stature with the other hyenas.

“You want to fucking die?” the leader asked, but he asked it as if it was rhetorical, whereas in the present circumstances, it seemed to be a vital enquiry. Sure enough, the boy took a folding knife from his pocket, holding it in a way that showed he had used it for its intended purpose before.

The man watched all of this taking place, viewing it like a play he had watched a thousand times. He smiled a sad smile, and the boy across from him wrinkled his nose as if the very gesture was offensive to him.

“I’m not going to die anytime soon,” the man replied, and now he leaned forward too. The boy withdrew slightly, his body language telegraphing the fact that this was not part of the usual or expected scenario.

“You sure about that?” the boy countered, making a little stabbing gesture with the blade, but it was a weak and somehow impotent movement. He had lost the reins of the situation.

“I am,” the man replied. “Because I’ve lived well, and lived fairly. These things you want are just tokens of that. They’re not the rewards.”

He suddenly reached out and gripped the boy’s forearm, and the boy froze in place, completely unable to move. His young and clear eyes widened as the man kept talking.

“The rewards are your health, and the good regard of others, and your peace of mind. You have none of those now, do you?”

The boy who had been the leader, and both of his comrades who had now slumped into chairs of their own, felt a weakness creep over them. A sickness, shrivelling them from inside. They felt nauseated, and exhausted, and fragile. All of their vigour was gone in the space of a handful of moments. They looked ghost-pale, emaciated, and their eyes were sunken and bloodshot. None of them could even lift themselves from where they sat.

The man stood up, looking with resignation upon the faces that had been young recently, but were now those of people ravaged with advanced deterioration and some nameless disease.

Their true faces, he thought, seeing that the leader’s blade had fallen to the boy’s own bony lap, never to be picked up again. The man leaned down towards him, knowing it was the only way to be heard.

“I know the value of things,” he said. “You only know the cost.”

Kindle Scribe Planner

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been loving the freedom and the organic nature of having a notepad beside my computer again, albeit an e-paper one, in the form of the Kindle Scribe. I find it very conducive to flow and to contemplation to just be able to jot things down separately from my main screen, especially in a way that won’t tire my eyes, but which I can also retrieve data from when I need to. The device is going to be a huge help when proof-reading my books.

Since you can load your own documents onto the Scribe via Amazon’s Send to Kindle site or simply by sharing a document to any Kindle app, I made my own PDF daily planner template, to suit my loose and abstract way of handling my day. I created two outer columns for checkmarks, bullet journal-type marks, or just to accommodate the two positions of the Scribe’s writing toolbar. It looks like this:

The PDF is one hundred pages long, and you can download the template here. If you need more pages, you can upload it to your Scribe multiple times. It should also work on any other e-paper notepad, tablet, or PDF-editing app.

I hope you’ll find it useful. If you do, feel free to buy me a coffee. Thanks for reading.

Role Model

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Ruth was in the same meeting she attended at least ten times per week.

It wasn’t exactly the same, in terms of the attendees, or the topics under discussion, or the meeting room, or the time of day, or the duration — but it was still effectively the latest of a stream of duplicates.

The things that were the same each time were the the things that were most counterproductive. The lack of preparation by others. The lack of social graces from certain repeat offenders. The lack of a progress-first mindset, instead looping into endless cycles of confirmation and reassessment and goalpost-shifting. The lack of a sense of purpose, or of consistency, or of engagement in what was being done. The acronyms, and the taking things offline, and instructions by fiat from on high.

Then there was the lack of institutional memory, as the same paths were walked again and again. Ideas that had been deemed unnecessary or unwise even a handful of years earlier were resurrected, debated again, and flagged for follow-up, without anyone being aware that it had all been done before.

Anyone except Ruth.

She’d been with the company for more than twenty years, and had seen CEOs come and go, as well as those in every role beneath that level. She’d acquired a well-deserved reputation for vision, pragmatism, and the rare ability to synthesise technical, financial, and marketing factors to produce viable strategies again and again. Everyone knew her by name, as someone they occasionally saw in the corridors or participated in a meeting with, and everyone knew that she was very busy.

The thing is, she really wasn’t busy at all.

As organisational changes had gone from unprecedented to intermittent, and from intermittent to infrequent, and from infrequent to periodic, and then from periodic to constant, the likelihood that any one person in the company truly knew what another person outside of their immediate team was working on, or which groups they were involved with, diminished towards zero. As change-fatigue and economic unrest combined to force a certain inwards focus, and a blindness to whatever lay outside of personal and contemporary relevance, only someone with a historic — and continuous — overview of how the company worked would have any notion of the current organisational structure and priorities. Someone like Ruth, and indeed only Ruth.

It had taken some boldness, certainly.

When her own VP-level superior had announced his retirement, followed within six months by two of the directors who had reported to him, temporary changes to the management chain became semi-permanent, but still fluid. Reactivity, rather than proactivity, became the only reasonable survival tactic. And so one day, Ruth decided that she would inform everyone on her own organisational sub-group’s all-hands meeting that she would be taking over the responsibilities of the just-departed director. She said she would try to ease the transitions as much as possible, and she was looking forward to coordinating with everyone and finding the best ways to move forward.

No-one had actually given her this role, but no-one questioned it either. Because it was Ruth, after all. Surely she was the logical choice, and surely this move was long overdue.

Things had continued in that vein for another eighteen months, by which point Ruth had managed to gently pester both HR and Legal enough to make her self-selected new title and position legitimate in the company’s records. From there, it was a matter of simply being above reproach, and beyond question, which was an easy matter when you knew the company better than most people knew their own families.

Ruth was seen as the in-house contract killer for thorny project-management problems, or big-picture problems, or product-direction problems, or even issues around the perennial question of whether to handle underperforming employees by showing them the way, or showing them the door. Whatever the business area, as long as it was of interest at a sufficient level of seniority, she was front and centre.

Every director knew her coffee order, and she was a regular fixture as an interviewee in industry magazines and websites, as well as a coveted keynote speaker at conferences. She did it all — even though, in truth, she did almost nothing at all.

Ruth’s approach was to be fully present at maximum visibility: in meetings, listening and asking questions, and then delegating tasks. And then she would go to her office for the rest of that part of the day, and read books in digital form on tablet devices, holding a stylus at all times. Or she would write a shopping list or a home redecoration plan, piece by piece in individual emails, all on her personal accounts via the web. Or she would make personal phone calls with the door closed, having perfected the art of speaking quietly while walking around her dramatically windowed corner office, wearing a deep frown which bore no relationship to her emotional state. And then she’d repeat the whole production in the afternoon.

She tracked her actual working time, including meeting prep and any unavoidable follow-up, and her weekly average total was about three hours. It was the kind of efficiency of deception that was only possible when you were already a seasoned professional at doing the actual job you were now pretending to do.

She didn’t feel guilty; not at all. Ruth had served her time, and her presence absolutely helped people to focus on what mattered, and to get things done. She was probably still doing more good for the company than most of the other people there. She thought of herself as a kind of productivity mascot, or a role model.

Her role was just unofficial, and almost entirely inferred.

Second Screen

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using an iPad Pro as my full-time computer for more than seven years. I’ve always had an Apple Pencil, but my use of it has been hampered by something that’s usually one of the iPad’s greatest strengths: the shape-shifting nature of the device.

I’m a writer, and so I’m almost always using a keyboard with my iPad when I’m working. There are exceptions to this, for example when I’m planning or brainstorming or designing or proofreading, but at least ninety-five percent of my time overall is spent with the iPad either on a stand on my desk, or in its keyboard case if I’m not in my office.

Most of the time, it’s just too awkward to reach up, grab the pencil from the very top of the device (I use it in landscape mode), then write on a screen that’s suspended at arm’s length from me and at neck height. It’s possible, but not for more than a quick scribble at a time. I’m almost forty-five years old, after all. It hurts.

For almost as long as I’ve used computers of any kind, I’ve wanted an auxiliary note-taking surface. The problem with technology is that there’s usually too much of it, not too little, and everything is more complex than it needs to be because it’s over-engineered. I bear some responsibility for that; I used to be an (over-)engineer myself.

I have an external monitor, but I never use it with the iPad. It’s strictly for my lunchtime Nintendo Switch sessions at this point. I do want a second screen, but I don’t want it floating beside my main one; I want it flat on my desk, as the iPad sometimes is.

Every year or so, I’d look at the iPad mini, and balk at the price and the need to manage yet another device. What I really wanted was an external screen the size of a paper notepad, to just run the Quick Notes portion of iPadOS, without the complexity of all the rest of it. But even that would be too much.

When I really think about it, the pen and paper model is absolutely sufficient for what I actually need beside my computer. I don’t need notes that become integrated into my actual work, nor do I need a fancy task-management system. My must-have features are very simple:

The ability to write with a pen-like tool.
Battery life I don’t have to worry about.
Instant availability for writing.

The iPad Pro sort-of does the first of those things — if you install a screen protector that gives more friction than the device’s glass allows for. It definitely doesn’t do the other two, though the feature where you can tap on the locked screen with the Apple Pencil to open up the Notes app brings it close to the third point. Except that it’s still in a stand, at an awkward ergonomic position.

My critical use cases for an ancillary notepad are all disconnected ones. I want to jot down quick to-do lists just for today, which I’m happy to check off on the notepad itself. I want to write my morning pages — journal entries never to be revisited — to centre myself before the working day begins. I want to make temporary jottings if I’m on the phone, or to do a quick sketch so I can better understand something, then throw that sketch away. And if I really do want to incorporate those scratchings into my primary work, I am more than happy to do so manually and intentionally. It’s even beneficial to do so.

The only digital-era feature that would really enhance my life is being able to view my notes on my phone, in case I don’t have the notepad with me. I always have my phone, but I’m unlikely to take a notepad with me unless I’ve packed the whole iPad to go and work somewhere other than my office.

And, as a nice-to-have, it would be great if I could readily use the notepad for brain-dumping ideas that occur to me once I’m already in bed, without waking my wife by switching on a lamp, or having the glare of a backlit phone screen.

Given all that, I feel like a bit of a fool for ignoring the e-paper notepad market for as long as it’s been around. I should really have put the pieces together last year, when Amazon entered the market with the Kindle Scribe, a ten-inch e-paper tablet that’s like a big Kindle but with notebook features, using a Wacom-style EMR pen that never needs charged or paired. The device has a front-lit 300dpi screen, with automatic brightness and scheduled colour-temperature adjustment, to make the screen visually warmer during the hours of darkness.

Cut to today, where my wife has a multi-year unbroken reading streak on her beloved Kindle Oasis, has three paper notebooks on the go simultaneously (work, gardening, and a journal of notable things our son has said), and I was struck by the proverbial lightning bolt regarding an obvious potential for synergy on her birthday.

The Scribe does let you view its notebooks on any other device, via the ubiquitous Kindle app or indeed on Kindles proper. It does have forget-about-it multi-week battery life, and wakes in less than a second for writing. It’s front-lit e-paper, and easy to read regardless of the hour or the lighting, and it’s also currently at a price that’s wildly cheaper than any of the — substantially more complex and feature—laden — competing devices, almost none of which simultaneously provide iPad Pro-beating resolution and a front light.

There are lots of these devices now — from Onyx/Boox, SuperNote, Remarkable, and so on — but nobody has a ten-inch screen like this at remotely this price point. And yes, it’s Amazon, and the Amazon ecosystem, and you have to make your own decision about that. But looking at things more broadly, if you ever feel an itch, like there’s something suboptimal about your thinking setup, maybe it’s just that we got so focused on technology that we forgot how instantly usable and endlessly flexible paper is.

My wife’s approach was right, of course. I used to shake my head at the wealth of sophisticated machines available to her; a MacBook Pro, an iPad Pro, and an iPhone, but she’d always have a reporter’s notebook and a biro front and centre. The notebook served as a mostly-ephemeral bulwark, or at least a staging ground, for whatever she wanted to do. The closest I would get to her level of flow was when I removed the iPad from its stand but didn’t grab the keyboard case, and instead used the Pencil and a third-party friction-giving screen protector, in an app like Notability. I still do, and it’s great! But you can’t take spur-of-the-moment notes that way unless you already have the tablet in that mode.

I bought two of the Scribes, because I knew that one was a perfect gift for my wife, and I also knew that one would never be enough. I could tell that it ticked so many of the boxes on my own wishlist too. And my dear reader, since it arrived, I haven’t been without it. I also haven’t charged it since then either, and it only just dropped below 80% after four days. As for my wife, her Scribe has gone from couch to bed to kitchen to greenhouse to desk, and I’m pretty sure she’s started reading on it too. She’s used it even more than I have.

I readily admit that even at its current price (which I assume is for the Black Friday weeks), it’s still an expensive thing. An actual notepad would be two orders of magnitude cheaper. But I love technology, and I don’t want a pile of notebooks and pens. I want one notebook and one pen, and to never be afraid of sullying a beautiful, virginal piece of stationery with my unworthy marks. I also love new toys, and I’m too old to pretend otherwise or to apologise for it. I absolutely love this gadget.

In summary, I’ve learned something about myself. My absolute dream computer would be the computer I already have, but split into two parts, and both of them using a notional future type of e-paper with the kind of colour reproduction, saturation, and screen refresh rate we have on LCD screens right now. That’s a fantasy for the moment, but it’s a delicious one.

Coming back to today, my iPad Pro is a glorious thing as a tablet, and virtually perfect in that regard. It’s also a truly great computer for a writer — but I still want to scribble and note things down even when the iPad is being a computer instead of a tablet. I really need two surfaces. And an e-paper writing device is as perfect an ancillary notepad as an iPad Pro is a tablet computer. I can’t give any higher praise than that.

I feel like an idiot for not putting it all together sooner.

Talking to the Lights

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

The marina was always peaceful at this hour, and that’s why Jeremy tried to be tying up at around this time whenever possible.

Today was no exception, and with the last golden light of late afternoon upon the waves, he felt entirely at peace as he went around the boat setting everything to rights and doing his usual tidy.

His last charter of the day was thankfully a quiet and respectable affair; just a group of three older men wanting a shot at catching some wild salmon. They’d managed it too, after only a couple of hours out, and nobody had drank very heavily. There was almost nothing to tidy up, and to Jeremy’s great relief, nothing at all to clean.

He’d had a bad one a couple of weeks earlier, with a drunk bunch of twenty-somethings who seemed to view the whole idea of a fishing charter as quaint and amusing. In the end they’d just asked him to cruise them up and down the inlet and out around the bay for a while, and he’d been glad to oblige, but one of the girls and two of the boys couldn’t hold their cheap and sugary booze, so there’d been a mop and bucket job at the end of it all. It wasn’t Jeremy’s first, but every time he swore it would be his last.

Nobody who was born after the internet came along, he would always say. One time he’d mentioned it to an older customer, and had been told that the internet had actually been around since the eighties or so, albeit just in academic circles. He said that suited him and his new rule just fine, and both of them had laughed about it.

But young people had money to burn and nothing better to burn it on, so sooner or later he always took another charter from a party group, then dealt with the consequences later.

He sighed, pushing those thoughts away. Today had been just fine, the boat was squared away, and he wasn’t quite yet hungry or tired. He could afford to do his favourite thing, which was to sit out on the rear deck and just smell the air and the water, and remind himself that at any moment he could just turn around and disappear over the horizon if he wanted to.

“Feels like the whole ocean is yours,” came a voice to his right, and Jeremy looked around in surprise.

A larger but older boat was berthed in the next stance, and on its upper deck was a man who must have been seventy-five if he was a day. The man was still trim, but his face showed the work of the sun and the spray for decades past. His eyes were still bright, though, and his face was friendly.

“That’s exactly it,” Jeremy replied. “Now that the people who pay the bills have gone home, anyway.” The old man smiled and nodded.

They struck up an amicable conversation, initially about their respective experience on the waves and all of the places they’d each gone. Late afternoon became early evening, and Jeremy found himself on the man’s boat instead of his own, both of them sitting up top and looking out towards the blue-black waves, enjoying a companionable couple of beers.

The man’s name was Ed, and he had been in the merchant navy for most of his career, retiring ten years earlier to spend more time with his wife. She had sadly passed away the year before last, though, and so the old man found that he preferred to spend his time on the water once again, because it gave him the subconscious sense that whenever he came back, she might still be there waiting for him just as she always had been.

“Let me ask you something, youngster,” Ed said, and Jeremy laughed out loud. He was almost fifty, and it had been a long time since anyone had called him young. But he supposed that it was true enough, relatively speaking.

“Go on then,” he replied, and the other man nodded, but remained silent for a few seconds before speaking again.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen?” Ed asked, gesturing with the small brown bottle of beer towards the waves that were now almost black, with some of the stars visible above them.

Jeremy frowned, thinking about it. “I saw some ocean fire once,” he replied. “Little flame sitting right there on the water, like in a swamp. Creepy, but I’d heard of it before I ever saw it, and it went out quick enough. And one time I saw a little fishing boat way out; must have been forty miles from port. The kind of size you’d take out on a lake. Rods were still there, bait box, a thermos and a lunchbox. Nobody there.”

Ed nodded. “Seen some of those,” he said. “Coastguard mostly don’t do anything about it, do they?”

“I called it in after checking around a little,” Jeremy replied. “They said they’d look into it. I didn’t get the feeling they were going to look too hard, but you never know. I didn’t see any of their craft on my return trip, anyway.”

The two men were silent for a while, thinking, and then Jeremy spoke. “What about you, Ed? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen out there?”

When the old man made no sound, Jeremy turned to look at him, and saw that his weathered brow was furrowed, and his eyes had dulled. Something was troubling him. Jeremy was about to retract his question, but Ed seemed to sense it, and waved his hand.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ed replied at last. “And you’ll think I’m an old fool whose mind has started to go, or maybe that I drank when I was out at sea and made the whole thing up. But the only thing you’d be right about would be the old fool part.”

Jeremy gave a wan smile, intrigued, and knowing from instinct that this was not a time for a laugh or a remark. He waited, and soon Ed began to talk, his eyes focused somewhere out on the water they could now hardly see.

“This would be thirty-odd years back,” he began. “I suppose I would have been your age, come to think of it. We were out in the Greenland Sea, going east, a day past our last port. Was maybe three in the morning, and I was on watch. I didn’t mind it at all, despite the miserable cold. The aurora was everywhere. It was like sailing into space.”

I’d love to have seen that, Jeremy thought but didn’t say.

“There was another man on watch too, but he was below at the time, getting something to eat,” Ed continued. “I’d been alone for maybe ten minutes. I was looking out there at the sky, of course, not just the water. The sea was every colour from the sky, especially since there was some surface ice too. It was like jewels. More jewels than you’ve ever seen. Incredible. Beautiful.”

His eyes were unfocused, and he was clearly seeing the memory. There was the faintest smile on Ed’s face, and then his expression darkened. He frowned, and it was almost like a wince.

“I saw… something on the sea,” he said. “It happened quick. The water, it sort of… fell away. Looked like god had pulled out the bath plug, but too fast for that. And there was no current from it. It must have been a mile wide. Just dropped away into nothing.”

He shook his head, and took a long pull from his beer. Jeremy just watched him, questions flitting through his mind.

“And no,” Ed said suddenly, “it wasn’t a trick of the light. Wasn’t cloud shadow — clear sky. I could see it better than I can see you right now. A big piece of the ocean just went down below, leaving a hole. And it didn’t churn the rest of the sea at all. The drop-off was like a cliff-edge made of glass.”

“What happened?” Jeremy asked, and he was dismayed to see the old man’s hands shaking a little.

“What happened is that I heard something,” Ed replied, his voice quieter now. “There was no wind, and the sea was calm enough. Engines don’t make much noise above deck. So if somebody had clapped their hands two hundred feet away, I’d have heard it no problem.”

Jeremy nodded. “But that’s not what you heard,” he said, and Ed shook his head.

“I heard something down there, down where the water had fallen in. Something big. Like a vibration, deep, but I could hear it too. Nothing I could understand, but not just noise either. Words. Words like a… a mountain would speak. Or worse.”

Jeremy felt a chill run down his spine, and he knew that there were goosebumps on his forearms. “What did you do?” he asked after a long moment, and the old man made a choked sort of noise before shaking his head again.

“I turned and ran back into the wheelhouse like a terrified little girl-child, is what I did,” he replied. “I went below. Found my watchmate. Scared him half to death, and of course he insisted on coming up on deck right away. When we got back up there the sea was flat and quiet. No sign of it.”

Ed could see the question written on Jeremy’s face, and he shrugged. “I played it off as a damned joke. I think I wanted it to be a joke. I wanted to scream, too, and I don’t mind telling you that. But the lad told me to go to hell, and I laughed like a madman because if I didn’t, I think I would have cried.”

Jeremy looked away, allowing him a moment. Ed’s voice was taut, and it had wavered a little towards the end. No matter what he had told his long-ago colleague, he hadn’t been joking at all.

Ed drained the rest of the bottle and set it down harder than he’d meant to. It tipped over, and rolled noisily to the base of a railing post. Neither man paid it any heed. Several minutes passed, and Jeremy was on the brink of changing the subject when Ed turned to look at him. His face was pale, and his voice was a whisper.

“The aurora changed when it spoke,” he said. “Whatever was down there, it was talking to the lights.”