Lightning strikes twice. It happens all the time. Big brick piles or lonely trees, power infrastructure, whatever is tall–or closest to tall–takes the hit.
There is a tree on a hill that’s taken many hits. Factually, it’s a thing that was once a tree. It’s carbon black, split down the middle from some great Zeus-bolt. Actually, the hill is more a mound. This is Michigan. Lower peninsula. Upper midwestern pancake all Fargo flat for miles past miles. The I-94 corridor somewhere between Ann Arbor and Detroit. No surprises, horizon to horizon, flat scrubby fields and the mounds where overpasses used to be. That dead tree is the thing that tells the driver of the old truck that smells like French fries to wake up enough to turn enough to get off the freeway.
Gas gauge reads a quarter tank, but the driver is empty. Dolores keeps raising the empty coffee cup. Pops her self in the mouth with the mug and bloodies a lip when she crosses the railroad tracks past the exit. She fidgets with the radio, like she’s going to find a new station after the twang pop and state news on endless loop. The weather reports are accurate again and they’re so damn proud of it that they’ll repeat them twice an hour. She follows the jig-saw of kept-passable county roads. She’s following the border of the reclamation zone.
On the left, the irrigators on insect leg booms roll over a freshly planted crop. On the right, the warning signs every quarter mile remind her what every school child knows (as a matter of safety): “we don’t go where the wild flowers grow. Look with only our eyes or we could get a deadly dangerous surprise.”
That’s bleak as fuck, she thinks. Dolores reminds herself that the kids still sing songs to remember the names of the planets and about tiny spiders in drainpipes and row boats. School kids in these parts learn little rhymes about UXO (unexploded ordinance), and Dolores can’t roll the windows down no matter how nice it is outside and how many times the weather report tells her it’s safe to.
The truck stops in front of the garage, but doesn’t rest. Something mechanical keeps click pop rocking. Around the farm, everything is clutter and productive chaos–the greenhouses and grow-tents the permanent and temporary and temporary-become-permanent structures. There are pods and modules and podules-on-stilts affixed to the sides of the old farm house. The fields feed a factory. The greenhouses feed the equivalent of a village. And the old subdivided house and surrounding trailers shelter a group of tribes, a gaggle, a herd.
Dolores stands at the top of the chicken-leg steps to her loft above the garage, not much bigger than an efficiency. Her “hut.” Dolores watches the workers exit and de-con and process tools and suits and respirators. Suits hanging, dangling till morning. Tools stacked. There is the smell of spring on warm air. There’s laughter, and no one hiss yelling about “noise discipline” (hasn’t been need for years). The whole place is bathed in that delightful “red sky at night” and the all the lamps on every building are lit, and no one’s hiss yelling about the energy or “light discipline” (hasn’t been need for either for years).
Gabriel, the old farmer sees her and waves. She returns it and turns to get inside before he can try to invite her to dinner with his and the other families and laborers. It’s sincere, kind, and wouldn’t come with pressure. That somehow makes her want to be around them even less.
It’s Spring, and she will have a day like this every year–a lost day that used to be a lost week. Spring is hard. It’s when “kings go off to war.” And every spring there’s some moment when every thing that seemed to be dead is quite alive again. There will be a day, the kind you’d like to bottle and keep a bit of. The air will be sweet, breezy, and right. The light will drip like honey down everything that pleases your eye. And for no reason other than the heart breaking beauty of the day, it will be that spring again–the one that made it hard to roll the windows down or sit at a dinner table with good company.
The shower is hot as she can stand it. She has to crouch to wet her hair. And when she’s done, the big woman hides from her reflection in the mirror. She heats bread with oil and garlic and cheese and pours hot sauce on the mess. It’s “trick” food. Force yourself to consume fuel because you need to food. She says the word “nourishment” to herself aloud because that’s part of how she does the trick of scraping enough dopamine together to get through this particular day when it comes for her.
She braces for what’s next: the lights flickering, the number stations, and for yours truly in the not-exactly-flesh. She’s really remarkable. And she’s writing down the script I’ve heard before the “reason train” (she’s even titled it thus on a little chain of post it notes because she’s the sort of person to prepare for debate with delusion).
She checks and re-checks the lock on the door, the blinds, the air filter on the HVAC system. Three. The rule of three. “I get to check three times, let the crazy out the barn thrice but no more.” And the lights flicker and her inner ear says she’s upside down and there’s the East German robot lady spitting numbers.
“That’s a good rule for limiting yourself.”
“Shut the fuck up. You’re a voice.”
“I think I’m a semi-solid apparition if you’re willing to look”
“Not today, Satan.” As she fills the cat food, tends to the litter, washes up. She hums to herself at the sink, head down. Wet hair curtains on either side of her face. “Nope. Nope. See you’re a hallucination wrapped around a complex delusion.”
“But I communicate with you in real time. You saw me last year. We’re talking, please. Dolores, just look at me.”
“Oh no. No, sir. You can fuck right off” She walks to the little barstool in front of her electric piano. “There’s more gravy than grave about you, motherfucker.” And she plugs the eggshell headphones into the piano.
“I love Dickens.”
“Because you’re boring like him. Go describe mud for ages and pages.”
“Please, this may be the last time I can even try this.”
“Good. Be gone, ghost” And she cranks the volume and begins to play with vigor.
The apparition reaches grips and strains. Dolores ignores the sensation of cold at her left elbow, focuses on Shostakovich instead. She whimpers when the ‘ghost’ unplugs the cable to the headphones, stumbles, keeps playing.
“That’s beautiful.” Shut the fuck up. She’s rocking at her seat, not-seeing.
*
“I’m not a threat.” No one believes that Jonah. “Then sign me off so I can go back to work.” We’re obliged to have this conversation, says the counselor on the screen. The automated-insect arms, the robot equipment that provides urgent care sits idle at the ready on the walls. The screen that brings telemedical expertise bathes the giant man in blue light. “Fine let’s talk.” He sighs and slouches. Atlas with bad posture.
“What set you off?” Nothing ‘set’ me off. “Well, Jonah they found you hugging your knees in the locker room.” I can’t have a fucking panic attack? “You’re a large man. You knocked a supervisor over a bench fleeing the shop floor. You crossed the red line on two automated trams on your way out the door.” And? “It’s a safety issue, big guy” Don’t call me that. “Jonah, you meant no harm, but you could have been killed by a tram or hurt someone else. Help me understand.” Silence. “Jonah was it a sound?”
The mountain of a man sits straight, meets the doc’s eyes through the screen. “You’re about my age, right?” His hands are careful, precise, gentle as he folds his eye-glasses and places them in a pouch on his hip. “What did you do during the war?” We need to use our time for you, Jonah.
“Let’s trade, Doc. What did you do during the war?” I was drafted out of a psych residency at a civilian hospital. I had done med school. Use your imagination. Back to you. “I, being large, wore power armor and carried a shield.”
“Do you know what a screamer is?” I’m not familiar with every kind “It’s bigger than a baseball, but not much. And it’s powered by a Shulzie.” What now? “One of those little electro-mag’s. It hovers. It floats. It floats and then explodes, but not before.”
Handball. “We were talking about the war.” The Doc is confused but practiced in demonstrating patience. We are talking about the war. US grenades in World War 2 were supposedly the size of a baseball. He holds up his great palm as if cradling one. Because every red blooded American boy knew how to throw a baseball, and some could put a little heat on it. Mom was stationed at Ramstein when she had me. I grew up playing handball. “So you could put a little heat on it?” Yup. Spin, that’s the trick. And it just.
It doesn’t scream. It’s a clack, clack, clack. That’s the magnetron and whatever makes that compression wave. Nervous system can’t handle it. Screamers don’t scream. The people scream.
After a long time: “Did someone yell at work?” No, the oven did. “An industrial oven screamed?” Nope. Clack. Clack. Clack.
I’m going to recommend immediate reassignment. Are you open to agriculture?
“Do what you gotta do, Doc.”
*
This is Earth. No hexadecimals. Just Earth. I poured acid over silver, wiped a whole sheet of the great spreadsheet away. No silver, no clay tablets or papyrus, no metadata trail. Even in god’s absence it is the sin supreme to do-the-hubris–to try to do-a-god remains the greatest wrong.
That’s not what I did or what I’m doing. Just the opposite. Care. Intervention. Amelioration. Succor. These are the things I offered them-that-I-took-elsewhere. It was supposed to be one blue world and more than enough soil in a big red pot.
I did tend to you all and water you and sing to you. You grew, all three of you. There was the little blue world Earth and its two neighbors, the ocean world and the desert world.
All three told stories and wrote words. My little trio, all three of you split atoms. Two of you were always rather warlike, the ocean and the Earth. Imagine my surprise when it was the third that extinguished itself.
What’s worse, the ocean world ‘saw’ it. They’re watchers, them. Seven-to-eight legs, fast minds, great eyes. They’re listeners and watchers and builders. And they want to come see the people who’ve been beaming Bach and Chuck Berry and all points between (and past) into space since radio could sing.
You, my humans-for-true, you little shithead bipeds (you give me the worst fucking cute aggression). You are just the most precious little signifying mud. You are my babies, clinging to your space rock like lichen. Who’s my lichen? Yes you are. But you little motherfuckers are shitting on my rugs, and I can’t have that.
Company is coming to pay a visit. Your neighbor’s are on the way for a wary first-contact/shibboleth and you need to be your best–you need to be the ones they expect you to be.
They saw the first televised image: Hitler at the world’s fair in 36, and they watched the whole war. They were in transit–hibernating and sensor blind at speeds near/past C–for World War 2.5.
I lost any hope of reward for this stunt when the desert world blew up, ok. I need you to redeem this whole exercise. I need my humans, one piece of mud in particular, to act right. Destiny is calling emo farm lady. Pick up the phone or we’re all fucked.
*
END DOLORES 1