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This is a previous version of Chapter 7 - Gravity.
7.Gravity
I woke up to the smell of meat
cooking over an open fire. It smelled savory until I peeked out my window and
realized it was feral dog being roasted over a metal industrial bin.
I had been missing doses of my
antidepressants"hell, I was completely out"so I shook and cramped unnaturally
as I lay on the mattress.It was always
worse in the morning.I stepped out of
the view of the doorway and could hear murmuring from Grundel’s room.
Whisper and Erika were there,
talking quietly.
“Morning,” I said.I was ignored.
“So, tell me about this Escher,”
Erika asked.
“He’s the leader,” Whisper
said.“That’s all you really need to
know.He founded everything you see, and
he’s in charge of the Strangers.”
Her voice sounded the least bit
excited for the first time since I’d met her.I idly wondered what her role here was.Was she Escher’s girlfriend?I
imagined sex with her would be like going at it with a bag of ice"all sharp
edges and cold, forbidding places.
“Where did Escher come from
then?” Erika asked.
I wished Erika wouldn’t be so
curious about him.I was, too, but it
made me feel inferior.It made me think
that maybe God felt this way about airplanes and the Internet.
“I heard he used to be rich,” Grundel said,
“and gave up his life of luxury for this.But Whisper has known him longer than just about anyone.”
Whisper only nodded her
head.It was clear she wasn’t going to
divulge the story.
“Well, if she won’t talk,”
Grundel continued, “I only know"”
“Shut up, Grundel,” Whisper said
calmly, almost kindly.He immediately
quieted himself.
“He organized this … this
society?” I asked from the doorway between the two rooms.
“Some of us used to have jobs like you, and
all of us are rather disenchanted with the system.All of our homes and property fell to the
Orange Zone and eventually went Red.Do
you know how many people were left out in the cold, in the Anarchy?Let me tell you a secret about anarchy,”
Grundel said.“It’s only anarchy for
about five minutes.Then, the biggest
guy realizes he’s King"or at least until two guys band together and think they
are.Escher? Well, he’s about 1,000
guys.Escher with a few thousand guys?
That’s not just tribal warfare anymore"that's a f****n' army,” Grundel
said.Then he looked at Whisper and
stopped talking.
“Escher is a force of his own
nature,” a high-pitched, nasally voice said from a corner of Grundel’s makeshift
home.I hadn’t noticed him before, of
course.
“Sneak,” Grundel uttered
sarcastically.“I hate you, Sam.”
I saw Erika’s green eyes refocus
fuzzily as she realized that a fourth person had been in the room for some
time.
“Nice to see you again, Clark,” Sam said, taking a step forward and shaking my
hand.As soon as I touched him, his
presence solidified in my mind.
“I’ve seen you before,” I said
vacantly.“In TasumecTower.”
“Yeah, and I told you this was
going to happen… and it did.You
shouldn’t try to keep things from Escher.”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you take a walk with
me, Clark?”
I nodded again.I knew I should have been terrified, but
somehow I felt pretty comfortable around this guy. By his very nature, he
appeared safe and non-threatening.
Erika began to protest, but
Whisper laid a hand quietly on hers, letting her know she had no choice in the
matter.
The morning light played strange
tricks on the Orange Zone.Where it had
seemed alive the night before with campfires and small gatherings on every
corner, it was now completely empty and seemed deserted.It was easy to imagine how the police had a
hard time tracking the Secret Society of Strangers; half the suburbs in America looked
like this.
“How do you do it?” I asked,
looking to my left and right, then to my left again, and finally finding Sam.
“Disappear?” he asked, smiling.
“Yeah.It was pretty amazing.”
“I bet you’d be pretty good at it
yourself… well, I mean if you had the proper tools.”
“Why do you say that?And what do you mean by 'tools'?”
Sam pulled a rusty, ruined
compass from a chain on his belt.“This
helps,” he said, “but there's more to it than that, of course.”
“How does that help?”
“If Escher ever wants you to
know, he’ll explain it,” he said.
“So how do you know I’d be good
at it?”
“Just your look.Hell, you noticed me, and most people never
do.”
“I’m very conscious of people
watching me,” I said.
“I’ll have to be extra careful
around you then,” Sam grinned.
“So how did you meet Escher?” I
asked as we walked slowly down the street.“Are you some sort of spy?”
“Better.” He smiled.“I’m shy.”
“What?”
“It’s as much about not noticing
other people as it is about not being noticed yourself.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Probably not.Have you ever felt someone looking at
you?”
“All the time,” I said.
“We naturally sense each other
out. It's sort of a mental check we subconsciously make before we have contact
with someone.It’s hard-wired into us,
and it shapes how we act around everyone we see. It’s why we feel comfortable
walking up to some people but feel the opposite way with someone else.”
“I don’t really feel comfortable
walking up to anyone,” I said.
“Anyway, I skip that.I never send out that feeler, never initiate
contact. Thanks to my tools, I am able to just not send out those unconscious
signals that other people respond to"sort of like how dreading being singled
out always gets you singled out.”
“That sounds too easy to work,” I
said.
“You say that, but it's not as
easy as it sounds.Try standing in the
corner of someone’s office for seven hours trying as hard as you can to not notice
the man sitting three feet away from you.”
“Beautiful women must be your
downfall,” I said, grinning.
“That goes for everyone,” he said
sagely, “but there is more to it than just that.”He lifted up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of
a small red fish on his wrist.“Before I
could disappear like this, I had to do something for him.”There was no question who ‘him’ was.“I had to sign my allegiance over to him, to
swear fealty to the Red King.More or
less, what it comes down to is that if Escher really likes you, he can give you
power.It’s not exactly that easy, but
that’s the simplest I can make it.”
“So did you get promoted or
what?”
“It’s different for some of us,”
Sam said.“Some of us are more.You don’t understand yet, and maybe you
can’t, but some of us have made huge sacrifices to follow Escher.”He self-consciously rubbed the tattoo as he
said this.
“Some of you?”
“Those of us who are closest to
him.”He stopped me in front of a
barred-up liquor store.
“I gotta ask,” I said.“Why are you guys being so…nice?”
“You were supposed to be executed
this morning, actually, but Escher called it off.That’s why Whisper was there.”
Sam snapped his fingers within an
inch of my face, distracting me for a moment.When I was finished blinking, he was gone.
I looked around, wondering if I
could spot someone that my senses refused to recognize.After a moment, I gave up and stepped into
the store.
The shelves had been pushed to
either side of the entryway, creating a makeshift cage for anyone who
entered.Inside, two men in thick trench
coats stood guard with guns in their hands.A fashionably intense man lounged in a royal blue bean-bag chair between
them.
I noticed that when he relaxed,
he looked a good deal older than I’d expected.He might have been in his forties.
"Hello, Frightened
Boy," his voice boomed warmly.
"Sir," I mumbled.
"Be happy to see me!This can be resolved.You can go back to your old life
soon."He reached into his robe and
withdrew a square of black leather.Inside, he withdrew my City Card and presented it to me.
I choked on that for a moment.
"After I've seen all of this?You'd
just…let me go?"
"Well, yeah.I mean, your old life has a rapidly
approaching expiration date, but you can enjoy it for as long as everyone else
will get to.And you won't be far away.
If you cause trouble, we'll come and get you again.No place is far from me."He put the card back in his pocket.“You’ll get it back when I have the
footage.”
"You think I’m a threat?I’m nothing.Look, man, I agree with you.I
think that government out there, what they’re doing, it’s crap.I hope you do tear it down.I think they have been screwing with us for
fifty years.I’m on your side,
man,”I blubbered.
“You think the government did
this to itself?” Escher asked.“Either
way, my domination is inevitable.The
pieces are already in place. Make no mistake, BanloBay
will fall.And after it does, it’ll
finally be a wonderful place.People
will trust each other, love each other.There is only one enemy that thwarts our progress.”
"Who?" I asked.
Escher paused for a moment before
he said, "It’s nothing to worry about. It’s not something you need to
know.”
We paused.I was happy with that, and I wasn’t about to
evoke any further conversation.
"What keeps me from floating
out of my chair?" Escher asked, changing tact suddenly.
"Gravity, I think," I
said.My head was spinning trying to
keep up with him.The sudden shift in
conversation was making me uncomfortable.
"What is gravity?" he
asked, suddenly the curious scholar.
"Newton defined it pretty well, I think.It's like you said"it's what is keeping you
in your chair."
"No!" Escher shouted,
standing up to illustrate his point."Newton
was my kind of scientist, because science is bunk"a waste of time and no better
than religion"but Newton
didn't try to explain why things happened.Newton's
theory of gravity only measures forces in this galaxy.He never said what gravity is or why it's
there. He only measured it.We still
don't know what gravity is."
"We'll know
eventually," I replied, somewhat defensively.I subscribed to science.
"We'll have a better guess
before long," Escher said."The Bible says Adam was placed on the Earth, and the first thing
he did was name things, categorize things.This is very telling. It is man's first instinct to explain, to
marginalize, and to assess threats.As
man becomes fat, man becomes bored, and when he takes this to the next level,
science is born.Man names the tree, but
the tree existed first.It exists
whether or not we call it a tree.Science is constantly wrong. It stays in one place, but the world keeps
spinning."Escher sat down before
he continued.
"Are you really sure a floor
can’t also be a ceiling?I stay in my
chair," he said, "whether or not we know why.Why?Because it has nothing to do with the universe.Science is obsessive-compulsive behavior from
a bored species, no better than putting all your peas in neat columns before
you eat them."
"But gravity explains the
entire universe."
"It's 80 percent wrong
actually," Escher said.
"But, dark matter""
"Dark matter is what?A variable in an equation that represents
what is wrong with Newton's
theory, that's all. It could be quantum loop gravity or causal dynamical
triangulated space time or super string theory.Or it could be because God said so… or none of it might exist and it’s
all a single imagining.
“What makes you think human
beings are capable of understanding the universe?Maybe our senses simply aren’t capable.We don’t expect a mouse to understand why he
is in a maze, do we? We only expect him to muddle through it,” Escher
reasoned.“Or maybe we’re all creating
the world around us as we move through it, but I’m creating it much better than
anyone else"or maybe it’s just all me."
"It's better than nothing,"
I said.“And because of science, we have
engineering.Cars, planes, trains"”
"It's infinitely worse than
nothing," Escher replied."People say religion is the great killer, that religion starts wars
and commits atrocities.Maybe so, but
science made them dangerous.Science
armed them.Science is a base instinct
of man, a way to keep him occupied and blind to the truth of the world.Science breeds ideas like drilling holes in
skulls to let bad spirits out.And even
worse, the need to explain things"the need to know what threatens us. That’s
how he controls us.That’s how he keeps
us afraid of our own shadows and keeps us from trusting one another."
"If science is crap, like
you say, then what is the truth?"
"Tessellation.”
You're not the truth, I
wanted to say. You're
insane. But you are surrounded by armed guards, and you're a volatile
terrorist, so I'll just smile and nod.
Instead, I said, "Science is
man's best attempt at making order out of the things around him."
"You've just described
religion as well, my new friend.You're
admitting that science offers nothing worth believing in and little worth
hoping for.‘Science will save us.
Technology will set us free!’Wrong!Science got us here, to
the end of civilization.It’s my turn to
take a crack at the problem."
He stopped talking for a
moment.I didn’t say a word, but he
seemed to expect this.Instead, he
studied my face, and ironically, I found myself wishing he would start talking
again.
“I need that footage,” he said to
me, changing tact again, making me think everything he said before was only to
catch me off guard for this moment.Every moment with Escher seemed to be like this.
“Who were the men on them?”
“Bad men.They deserved to die, and they knew why.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“No one else can know why they
died.There are forces out there that
could stop me if they had that sort of information.”
“I see.”
“That’s why you can’t leave until
I get those tapes.I know you probably
want to stop everything you know and love from being torn down brick by brick,
but be reasonable.If I have this tape,
I can prevent myself from committing an even worse disaster on BanloBay:Epoch.Epoch is a lot like holes in skulls.You get me those tapes, and I don’t have to go that far. Besides, Clark, it isn’t my fault you lost the key
that day.If you were competent at your
job, you’d be dead already, and I’d have my tapes.”
“Excuse me for my sloppiness,” I
said dryly.
“You do
want to go back to work, don’t you? To your life?”
I hesitated for a moment.
“Ah-hah!” Escher shouted.The sound was like a gun clap, and I flinched.
A day job wasn’t the only life
I’d ever known.Life used to be a lot
different, before the Collapse.
“What does that life in the
office mean to you?” Escher asked.“What
am I really destroying?”
“Fake laughter, cold coffee, and
gold watches,” I mumbled.“I ran for
three years during the Collapse.I was
in a suburb, and my parents culted up and went cryo.My childhood was spent surviving"really
surviving"like I was a gazelle and this was the Serengeti.Drinking water from drains, sleeping in dog
houses, and running from bandits who wanted to take whatever I had left.I’m only alive today because I see danger and
I avoid it.”
“Why do you think the world works
this way then?” he asked.
“I don’t know for sure.The Illuminati?The New World
Order?Someone must be responsible for
this.”
Escher laughed.Then he looked down at the cheap linoleum
checkered tiling on the floor and retreated to his half of the board, no longer
threatening to check my last few scattered pawns.
“You should think hard before you
establish in your mind that there is some terrible entity responsible for the
world’s evils.I would question the
existence of such an entity like you’d question the existence of God, because
you’re really elevating them both to the same place.No, the answer must lie elsewhere.
“I noticed something when I
injected last, and I think it may only be a hunch.I have decided to test it out, and this is
why you are alive.I’m going to tell you
everything.If my hunch was wrong, you
will die.If my hunch was right, we’re
going to be spending a lot of time together.”
I could have sworn I'd s**t
myself.
“I am going to tell you the exact
truth this one time, and I never want to strip away the gilded layer and show
you the ugly wiring beneath again,” Escher replied.“Everything you see and know is a
tessellation that sprouted from my mind, from my study of the seventeen
symmetries"the wallpaper groups.I spent
my life turning the Seventeen Wallpaper groups into complex figures of animals,
mainly Bat, Lizard, Bird, Fish, Cat, and Rabbit.There’s a Demon as well.Whisper is the Cat tessellation.That’s why she has the powers she has.Sam is the Fish, and that’s why he
disappears, slips underwater, right in plain view.”
Then Escher stood up and picked a
gun up from a nearby table.It was a
long silver pistol"the kind of gun so powerful that even a General would take
time out of his day to polish it. He pivoted suddenly, and the gun was in my
face.The seemingly endless tunnel of
the barrel was a cobra den, and I was just waiting to be struck.
“You should be wondering why I’m
not pulling the trigger right now,” Escher said.
I only gulped.
“The first reason is because I’d
still like that footage.”He took a
moment to clear his throat and pointed the gun just an inch to the left of my
ear, away from my head. “The second is because you’re the Rabbit, Frightened
Boy.”
If you'd like to download a copy of Frightened Boy in beautifully formatted .pdf or .doc, or even .epub for your Stanza (iPhone) then please visit
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Okay, so I finally able to finish it this far X_X lol
and my opinon is that this is amazing! ^_^
I love it so far, and can't wait to read more.
well done :)
I've written novels most of my life - I finished my first one when I was fifteen. It sucked; so did the next two or three. Then I went to college and got a degree in English and slowly my novels got b.. more..