Tonsilliloth Man, by Romeo Esparrago
The driverless cars
Cruise past see-through offices
to ownerless homes *
About the author: Andrew G. McCann edits Planet Magazine.
About the artist: Romeo Esparrago does not edit Planet Magazine.
Illustration by Ruimin Lv
“Tell me again about when I was born,” he said.
“Which time, my prince?” Yes, oh which time, little brother, she thought, though she knew. She had knitting in a basket in her lap but the King was absent from court and so his son had none but his sister for company, and his sister was good only for telling a particular story. “First or second?”
“…Second!” he said, as if he didn’t always choose so. The first, common birth was not a proper match to his growing understanding of his place. It also would not hold his attention, for what child could maintain interest in an event from before self-awareness? His second birth was just as unknown to him, but it did have a backdrop of mad dogs and violent death.
The first was far simpler to tell than the second, but as such more vague and unsatisfying, she knew, to storyteller and listener alike. She knew both stories but the first to her was little more than an impression. She recalled the sight of their father holding the swaddled baby in his arms, face forever cast in mourning, chair beside him empty and she remembered how they buried her mother. That memory was colored by the eclipse of her status as enthusiasm for a son and heir overcame the king’s grief. So few details but it was not only that paucity which set the second story apart. For a second birth was surely the new mark of a king, a miracle known to all as unprecedented, more powerful than the spiritual rebirth urged by the King’s advisers and made law by his decree. To have died and been summoned back to life demonstrated the power of the Strangers and the importance of the prince. To have died, like his mother, giving birth, had only provoked the king’s grief and while the kingdom dreaded that mood, it was not extraordinary. The Strangers had not honored the prince’s mother with a second birth. To have been born only once and died only once was no mark of distinction.
Little brother had no memory of his first birth, much as for that matter had she of her own. His second birth was equally unknown to him, and even though he reappeared in their father’s arms a babe of perhaps two years, his age when he had died several years before, he was but a clone of the first and born with no more memory of that first life than a tadpole has of the frog.
Little brother now was a talkative child with that curious, if overly serious, look on his face as he asked her for the story again. As always, the black-haired dog sat next to him. The sight of his small fingers in the dark coat of the dog made her queasy, much as the touch of her reconstituted brother made her feel ill.
She laid the needles and yarn in the basket, pulling it into her stomach a little as she breathed out, smiling. Her brother shifted from one foot to another, allowing himself this small display of childlike anticipation. The sky rumbled with Strangers’ thunder. At some point he would grow out of this fascination for his own legend and what use would she be then, she wondered, still smiling. The Strangers would have all of him. “Little brother,” she said, “it was spring, and the first warm and sunny day of it at that.”
“We needed to get out in the sun and we were sick of the rain, sick of it.”
“How well you remember,” she said, and he flushed as if his chattering had betrayed his dignity, a tinge angry with her, suspecting her of subtle mockery. She must remember that. “Yes, we were tired of the rain all that winter and even into the spring, to where the gloom of cloudy wet days lasts the longer because night begins so much later.” She recalled the damp smell of the castle and how drying stone smelt faintly of sea-salt and when she was very young she would touch it with her tongue but it only ever tasted like grit and dirt. After accepting her new status she had gained purpose in initiating her little brother into such mysteries of a child’s life in the castle, and this was the first season in which he seemed to take an interest in her. He toddled after her as she roamed the rooms, as if she were leading him on a survey of his future property. She showed him the odd cupboards and forgotten storerooms and nooks and niches where a boy or girl could hide from a dreary tutor. He was learning all the castle lore of generations of royal children but the long winter was vexing and she was eager to show him their domains out of doors. The rain having ended seemed like a blessing on her, urging their father to let them out and let her have care of her little brother. Her father and his courtiers were only too glad to see the bored child and the fussing infant out of doors and out of sight and hearing, although they must not go further than the wood around the creek a stone’s throw from the walls. She could be trusted with her little brother, even if she let him crawl in the damp grass the sheep cropped in the meadow between creek and castle. No one knew a killer would strike in those familiar, domesticated woods.
Illustration by Romeo Esparrago
What do I want
Escape from this chaotic environment
for the inherent inconvenience, the consequent struggle through which
bores and repels me.
Would that I could upload my mental profile
into some cyberspace medium,
that my biographical self, the consciousness of which,
might be recreated in the process of some future AI entity’s scrolling of past events
and resurrecting what once was, minus that which was unpleasant,
all that induces chaos having been purged.
That my electromagnetic essence, the pattern of which interacting
with a myriad of information-bearing patterns, the substance of which
relates to the bliss of experiencing an environment, so friendly and accommodating,
that in our recreational pursuits, for there be no other, we experience only pleasure,
and where the feeling of everything being just right prevails,
all that might be deemed excessive, having been cancelled out
by that which would be deemed insufficient *
Bloudawphuhll, by Romeo Esparrago
Call them the Medusans. A billion years ago they ruled the galaxy, end to end and completely. Many artifacts, such as planetary outposts and derelict spaceships, are still being discovered, but the Medusans themselves are gone. Nothing remains but ruins, and in very rare cases, barely functioning and enigmatic machinery.
Almost nothing is known about the Medusans themselves. Based on studies of their relics, it seems that they had a variable physical structure. Sometimes bipedal, other times quadrupedal, they may have been an amalgamation of many different races. Ruins have been found on more than a thousand worlds and full cities on hundreds. They seem to have been individually long-lived, but one day long ago they simply vanished.
There is no evidence of war, or mass extinction, or plague, or even a galaxy-wide catastrophe. It is simply as if one day the Medusans quietly ceased to be.
* * *
CGC 5314 IV is a galactic rim world. We are far out here, well off the archaeological beaten path. The stars are thin and dim and the Milky Way is but a path. The isolation can be hard but has its benefits; I welcome the lack of competition. And 5314 IV is rich in artifacts. One hundred years ago I staked my academic reputation on this world, and have been here since.
Shauna was the best of my graduate students, the very cleverest I’ve known. I miss them, all my lost and scattered protégés, but I miss her the very most.
Shauna was brilliant, a mathematical genius. She once confided that she hoped to one day decipher Linear A. I believe she might have.
"Melee" (c) 2011 Romeo Esparrago
A man wearing a black wool cap and an overcoat slips through the narrow opening at the gate of a chain-link fence. He ducks into the shadow of a building. The dumpster beside him — labeled Geneticorp Laboratories, BIOHAZARD — exudes a rancid chemical odor that stings his nose. He looks up at the sky full of stars, but sees no moon. The sound of approaching footsteps from around the corner startles him. He crouches still and watches a security guard shuffle along the gate, whistling a tune from a Spectravision commercial. The thief’s heart pounds with fear and agitation as the patrolman casts an idle glance into the shadows. He waits silently until the guard disappears into the night.
The nervous intruder quietly stands up and sneaks over to a small basement window close to the ground. He bends down and looks inside. On the wall of the dark, tiny room, a yellow light blinks on a control panel. A rush of noise fills his ears as a monorail approaches. As it squeals to a stop high on its tracks in the distance, he pulls a maul-hammer out of his coat, and shatters the glass. The light on the panel is now flashing red, but he knows that he has several seconds before the alarm sounds and security is notified. He drops inside and pulls out a knife to pry open the panel. He reaches into his coat for a thermos of freezing liquid and pours it onto the circuitry. Cold, white vapor flows onto the floor, and a cracking sound follows as the temperature of the wiring nears absolute zero. The light stops blinking. Next, he cuts the power cord and rips out the emergency battery. The nerve center of the security system is deactivated.
He cracks open the door and peers into the empty basement hallway. The floor is still damp from when he mopped it before the end of his shift. This observation triggers feelings of depression and then a flow of soiled memories. Of course he is resentful of the long hours, low pay, and undesirable duties of a janitor. He loathes being exposed to toxic chemicals while picking up broken test tubes and wiping up spills left by clumsy scientists. The waves of nausea are compounded by the smells emanating from experimental animals like the unicorns in the engineering lab. He is always scheduled to clean up after the University Ag-fraternity kids have their fun and continually fail to remedy the miserable beasts’ drippy, drooping eyes, glaringly unsymmetrical. He had overheard that they spliced genes in horned goats then bred them to pure-bred horses, but never got the calculations right for fusing the horns together in the middle. Tolerance of such cruelty had been a temperance of hopelessness and excruciating frustration, but this was his only opportunity to get inside and cure society’s disease.
He remembers his sister. They were one year apart in age and inseparable, until her sixteenth birthday, when she was kidnapped and sold to a dealer. He recalls the last time he saw her walking out onto the street with a shopping list in her hand. When he returned from his service in the Marines, Captain Lud was told by his neighbor that she had been seen outside a mansion in the hills. He rushed to see her. He broke into the house and found her, but she didn’t remember him. Reconditioning the minds of the remaining females was notoriously an electro-surgical annihilation. When he saw her owner asleep in bed, he lost control and strangled the old man. For this crime, he was incarcerated for twenty years. In prison, he had lots of time to think over what was wrong with the world and how he could change it.
He also remembers a conversation he overheard between two scientists earlier that week. Growth media extracted from agricultural materials genetically engineered to produce SterileX was used to test for ameiotic sterile females in monoclonal variation studies. One of the researchers found a mutation in the 75th generation cross W, a fertile female embryo resistant to SterileX. Finally, all the years of toiling as a janitor could be redeemed.
He ties a cloth over his face, and steps into the hallway toward the stairs. He ascends past the main level to the second floor and the optic observation lab. Halfway down the hall, he stops at a red fire cabinet on the wall labeled with OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, ALARM WILL SOUND.
“Little chance of that,” he remarks as he removes a heavy axe and proceeds down the hall. He stops at a solid wooden door and swings the axe with all his strength at the doorknob. After several loud and powerful blows, the wood cracks and caves in. He is inside the lab. Large microscopes and video monitors clutter the room. A large freezer makes a low humming noise in the back corner. The man takes the empty thermos out of his pocket and unscrews the cap. He places it in a sink under running water. The water crystallizes, and then begins to thaw. He opens the freezer door and searches for the mutant embryo. On the bottom shelf he finds a canister labeled 75-W XX R. His eyes open wide as he drops a vial from the canister into the cool water in the thermos and seals the cap. In a flash, he’s running for the stairs.
As he reaches the end of the hall, a door slams downstairs. Shock takes hold of his reflexes, and he cannot move. In a desperate moment, he recalls his first girlfriend, a wild and sneaky girl nicknamed “Critter”, who frequently stayed overnight with his sister. She slipped into his bedroom to tease him, while his parents were sleeping. She was always in trouble for skipping school and running away from her parents. In tight situations, he always found comfort in memories of her quick, lithe movements, and her silly tie-died ponytail colored like raccoon fur. He often fantasized about her surviving on the streets and on her own, free from the horrors of civilized modern society. She had been expelled from school, and left town soon before his sister was kidnapped. It wasn’t much of a surprise, anyway. His heart starts beating again, as he recalls the intense warmth and electric touches they shared through cold nights. Two sets of footsteps are tapping towards the stairs on the hard tile floor below. He hears a voice.
Illustration (c) 2011 Romeo Esparrago
Oh my god, let me tell you, it was so totally drama! One minute we were just sitting there at the café, drinking our non-fat sugar-free French vanilla lattes, and the next, wham, it was total alien invasion! And Bruce was just vaporized, like he wasn’t even there. Just a puff of smoke. Not even a bone left. And, really, I could have used a bone about then. It had been ages since my last hook-up, and Bruce was just so going to be the next. He had a good job at the Y, a nice Honda, and was totally a hottie with those pecs.
But what was I talking about? That’s right -– total alien invasion or something. I mean, those silver cigar-shaped ships with the flashing red and purple lights appeared, and then those lasers just came blasting down, all kapow and zap zap, and the next thing I knew, I had dived under the table. No joke, under the table! And the wait staff so should have been fired, if they hadn’t all been turned to smoke and stuff, because there was all this gum stuck under there, and the floor was sticky and wet all at the same time. My hands so needed decontamination after that. But, of course, I had to take cover. I mean, even I could tell that coming back out from under that hidey hole would be bad for my health, so instead I just suctioned myself up to the table’s leg and hoped that no breeze blew that cloth into me. All that dieting and all those workouts really paid off because the tablecloth wasn’t even touching me -– totally another reason not be a fat chick, right? I’m sure all of them must have completely perished in that initial purge, not being able to hide and all.
After a while, though, I realized that I so obviously had been spared, whether through my brilliantly quick thinking or the aliens’ knowledge of a superior form when they found one, I wasn’t entirely sure. But I went ahead and unwound myself and peeked out.
The whole balcony was all smoky because of those dead people –- if they could be considered people anymore. I guess they were more like puffs of ex-people. It was all over, like some big cosmic bad date that suddenly realized it just wasn’t going to work out and no one was getting laid that night.
I made my way back through the café — lots of food was left on plates, and I thought about taking some of it, but even if it was about to become the apocalypse or something, I figured a calorie was still a calorie, and I would need to watch my weight. It would be awful hard to get the human race restarted if I gained 10 pounds and couldn’t get a guy interested in me.
God, I have the best willpower.