The Word Is - Part 3

hard time imagining it.”


“That's the thing about me, sweetheart,” I chuckled, “I tend to surprise people a lot.” My fingertips rubbed my temples for a moment, that pain having doubled back with a vengeance, as I knew it was going to. “I hope you're not wishing to catch some deep dark secret from my past you can use against me. You should know by now I'm far too cold for that.”


“We'll see if that's true or not, Trip,” she giggled. They really were a well-matched pair of interrogators. Even though I knew she was trying to give me the soft sell, she had an easy way about her that deflected all the stress and tension that her partner brought with every glance. I could see why they worked so well as a team together. She cooled it down and he heated it up.


“So why are we here?” Janus asked. “What so important about this moment in time that it's your first memory in a memory lock?” A gust of wind kicked up suddenly, and there was a rustle behind us and a muffled shriek. All three of us turned to see a young woman, face down in the snow, a bag of groceries scattered around her. Behind us, a door opened and closed, and footsteps approached.


“Oh my god,” a voice from behind us said. Janus and Apathe turned to look, but I knew I didn't need to. I knew who was approaching. The younger version of me ran through me, just reaffirming how intangible I was, and over to the young woman on the ground, “I saw that through the window,” younger me said as he crouched down to help the woman up, getting her out of the snow drift.


“Goddamn it,” she said, as she started to gather things up. “Look at this mess.” It was so hard seeing her like this – so young and full of life. But I couldn't let them see a moment's weakness on me, so I stomached all my emotions in and watched my younger self help her pick things up and out of the snow and into the remnant of the paper bag that had ripped as she'd fallen.


“Doesn't look like anything got loose, so you should be okay. Guess there's an upside to everything being bagged these days,” young me said. “Here, let me give you a hand. You live in the building?” God, I looked so much younger. Leaner, thinner, more optimistic. It was hard to believe I was ever that naïve. It was me at 19, long hair down past my shoulders in a bushy ponytail, a long goatee that went down past my collarbone that was braided with a silver skull in it, dressed in ratty jeans and a Hawaiian shirt that made me look like I'd walked out of a Hunter S. Thompson story. “I'm Trip, I live in the front apartment on two. I was painting out the window and I saw you fall.” The story sounded so corny coming from my lips, but the young her either didn't care or was too distracted.


“I'm Anne,” she said as she put the last of her things into the bag, scooping it into her arms. “I live up on four, in 428. I swear I thought this bag was sturdier than that.”


Young me took it from her and folded it against his chest. “Here, let me help. It was probably just the wind that knocked you off your feet. Let me guess – first Chicago winter?”


She snorted a bit, dusting snow off of herself now that her hands were free. She was dressed in a giant, bulky overcoat and had on thick snow pants over whatever pants she had on underneath, and her dark hair was underneath a giant woolen hat. “Is it that obvious? I'm a freshman over at...”


“Northwestern,” the young me interrupted. “Yeah, I figured that. Most people who live this close to campus generally do. C'mon, I'll help you carry this inside.”


“A girl?” Janus said, disappointment evident in his voice. “I had hoped for more from you, Trip. After all the trouble we went through to get you, after all the stories I've heard for the last several years, I certainly didn't expect you to be sentimental about some girl you met in college.”


I couldn't help it – a slight smirk crossed my lips. “Wait for it.”


As young me and Anne started walking up the stairs, I turned to look across the street. It gave me a chance to see the young man walking into the lobby of the building across the street, the market which Anne had just come from. For years, she'd been haunted by the timing of this. Behind me, the two were reaching the door of the building, and just as young me placed his hand on the door, the market exploded.


I'd seen this explosion a number of times since then – on replays traffic cams, a webcam in one of the windows, and even filmed in high definition from one of the sickos involved, but it didn't make it any easier. Still, I didn't want to look away from it. The world slowed down as the building turned into a fireball, the young man who'd just gone in been covered in C4, with a layer of nails, bolts and metal ball bearings, and I could see a number of them flying through the air towards the front of my building. I slowed the memory down enough so that I could find it, one metal ball about the size of a dime, and pointed to it. “You see this? This single metal ball is where it all begins. This is what begins the whole thing. Everything you've ever wanted to know about me, about what drives me, what motivates me, why I've been on this endless, relentless, crusade... it

The Word Is - Part 2

around, trying to make me spin, but it wasn't going to work, not yet anyway. “Your friends call you Trip. You are 34 years old, and have been single for four months now since your last girlfriend, Tabitha, moved cross-country to take a new job. She offered to try and make it work long distance, but you told her...”

“I told her long distance was too much distance,” I interrupted. “And that it wouldn't work.”

He cocked his head, both of them pausing in their steps. “That's correct.” It seemed they were expecting me to be more off-balance by their level of information than I was, but this is the kind of thing they prepare you for in my line of work. “She was broken up by it...”

“...but not surprised,” I finished.

“Well,” Apathe offered with a smile, “perhaps she just knew what kind of man you are. Or perhaps it wasn't working before the move.”

“It wasn't,” I said, glancing around. “Any chance I could get a chair or something? I realize I'm not actually here, but I have a feeling standing around might get awfully boring.”

Janus snapped his fingers, and when I looked behind me, there was a nice, plush comforter, as if there had always been one there. I knew how these games worked, and asking for something would make them push a little less firmly at the start. “Now you need to give me something in return,” he said, his voice calm as still water.

I cocked my head to one side, then nodded a little as I sat down. “Fair enough. It's not the typical five word cypher you're looking for. It's thirteen words.” The chair was comfortable as a daydream, easy to slip into and I relaxed just a little bit, leaning back against it, the pain between my temples starting to pass. I knew it wouldn't last, so I decided to savor it while I had it. “I know, bitch isn't it? What can I say – some of us take our security very, very seriously.”

Janus stopped his circling standing before me and Apathe continued until she was standing beside him. He turned to look at her, having to peer down because of the height difference. “Well we're going to be here a while, it seems.”

“Isn't there an easier...” she started.

“You know that if there was, we would have already tried it.”

She sighed with a slight slump, then turned to look at me. “You're going to be a real pain in the ass, aren't you?” she said, sticking her tongue out at me in a cute pout.

“We each have our parts to play,” I replied, “and neither of us gets to pick those. You knew what you were getting into when you took this job.”

“I believe in what I'm doing,” she said, that pout deepening.

“Honey, don't we all?” I laughed back.

“Enough,” Janus said. “I think we're synched enough for the first probe.” He turned to offer her one of his massive hands, and she slipped her small fingers into it as he closed those ebony hooks around her hand.

“What's the word?” she said, that phrase carrying with it the power of invocation, and my fingers closed on the armrests of the chair, bracing for what I knew was coming.

Janus closed his eyes, then opened them again, this time filled with a golden fire that burned and erupted from him like two headlights that focused on me like a pair of agonizing suns. I could feel the heat and pressure coming from them, and when he spoke again, his voice boomed with reverb and echo, thundering down on me like an earthquake. “The word is 'faith.'”

I moved nowhere and still accelerated to a thousand miles a second, my sight of the two forms blurring into a mishmash of colors and streaks until suddenly everything snapped back into focus, and suddenly the chair I was sitting in was resting on the corner outside of my college apartment of over a dozen years ago. It was snowing, although the snowflakes just passed through me, and I didn't feel any cold at all. In my head, I had known this was coming, but knowing something is coming and experiencing it are two entirely different things. The training had covered this, but it was still another thing entirely to be enveloped in it. I was taken aback by how accurate it was until I remembered that this was pulled from my own memories, so it was only as accurate as I remembered it to be, and anything I might have glorified or misremembered would be represented exactly.

“One down, twelve to go,” Janus said, stepping back into my field of vision. He was dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, looking very much the part of a football player out on his morning job. “I told you, Trip; everyone breaks in the end.”

“Yeah, well, it only gets harder each step you take,” I told him, looking down to see my own attire was now more akin to the kind of thing I wore in college – a t-shirt with some obscure band on it, that bulky tan canvas jacket I wore everywhere, and a pair of jeans that had certainly seen better days, but weren't so shredded that I couldn't endure the cold in them.

“Then we'll just have to keep taking those steps together,” Apathe said as she also stepped back into my line of sight. She was also dressed in sweats, but her hoodie had the name of the college – Northwestern – on it. Chicago in the winter was bitter cold, and I was glad we couldn't feel it. There were some advantages of being in a memory. “Funny, I read your file and while it said you graduated near the top of your class, I had a

The Word Is - Part 1

“Does your head hurt?” a voice asked me. It was a soft voice, in contrast to the hard pain floating in my head. My eyes were closed, and I knew that opening them was what was expected of me, but I've always been a general pain in the ass when it came to such things.

“No,” I replied, my voice dripping with sarcasm, “I'm just confusing utter delight with biting pain. I'm sure it'll pass.”

“Well, he's awake at least,” another voice said. A man's voice. Older, more hardened. Smug. I could just tell he and I weren't going to get along well. “You might as well open your eyes. There's no point in keeping them closed. It's not like we'll go away if you do.”

“I should be so lucky,” I muttered to myself. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes, and wasn't too surprised by my surroundings, which were nothing, an empty black. They hadn't built it yet. They were waiting on me.

“See, that wasn't so bad now, was it?” said the female voice, and I turned to look at her. She was a pretty young woman, in her mid twenties, easy on the eyes but certainly fit, the build of a runner or a gymnast, with coppery hair pulled back into a ponytail, a dusting of freckles on her face and a pair of deep blue eyes like cobalt. She couldn't have been more than 5'2” or 5'3”. She was wearing a set of hospital scrubs in a faded green, and she made even that simple attire look good. “I tried to pick a form you'd find pleasing, but without full access to your memories, all I had to go on was a pattern of your previous relationships and interests. That and your internet browsing history, of course,” she said with an apologetic smile. “But at this point, you have to assume we're going to know an awful lot about you.”

“Naturally,” I said. I could see where bits and pieces of her derived inspiration from previous lovers I'd had – the button nose that Jenny had, the slight Scottish brogue that had haunted Kirsty's voice even after years of living stateside, the body was straight Natalie down to the slight wiggle of her hips. “So that'd make you 'good cop,' I'd guess, hm?”

She offered me a winning smile, fifty thousand watts on high, trying to win favor and get me to lower my guard down. “You really shouldn't try and think of it like that.”

I turned my gaze towards where I'd heard the other voice a little bit ago to see the second person. “And that'd make you 'bad cop' then.”

The man there was dark skinned, in his late forties or so, large and muscular, but not aggressively so. He had a gentle giant look to him, and stood at least four inches taller than me, and I'm no slouch in the height department. He, too, was wearing hospital scrubs, but he looked a lot less relaxed in them, his powerful arms folded over his chest. “I'll wear that if I have to, but she's right,” he said, “you shouldn't try and think of it like that.”

I put my hands on the inky black matte floor, or whatever it was, and pushed against it to stand up, with a bit of effort. The room was spinning a little, so I widened my stance to get a better balance.

“Easy there,” she said to me, “you've been unconscious a bit, and sometimes there's some disorientation along with the pain.” She took a step towards me, but I raised a hand towards her, palm out, to signal her not to come closer. “As hard as this might be to believe, we do care about your health.”

“My health,” I muttered. I spat on the ground, but the ball of spit disappeared before it reached the floor. “If you care about my health so much, we don't need to do any of this, now do we?” Looking past either the man or the woman was like staring into the abyss – only black nothingness peered back at me, space with no stars. “It's not like I'm here voluntarily.”

“Well then,” the man said to me, “you probably want to get out of here as soon as possible. And all you have to do to make that happen is to let us in.”

I scowled at him. “What do I call you?”

“What do you want to call us?” he replied, a smug grin on his face.

My scowl deepened. “Fine. I'll call you Janus, and I'll call her Apate. That'll do for now.”

“That's not very kind of you,” she said, a frown crossing her pretty face. “But I suppose it's your right to call us whatever you like.”

“It's not really going to matter much anyway,” Janus said. “Sooner or later, you'll give us what we want. Haven't you heard? Everyone breaks, in the end.”

“Well then,” I replied, my turn to have a grin on my face, “you won't mind me seeing it out until that end, now, will you?”

He offered a weary shrug, as if he knew this was coming, but there had been nothing he could do to avert or avoid it. “You're the one who gets to deal with all the pain.”

I glanced back at Apate, waving my hand around at the emptiness around us. “All a bit primitive, isn't it?”

She nodded, a touch glumly. “It always starts like this. It'll get easier as it goes along, more lively. Eventually you won't even notice the walls breaking down, and one day, we'll have everything we need from you.”

“Your name is Henry James Adams the Third,” Janus said as he started to pace around me, carefully, methodically, Apate starting to pace as well, the two of them orbiting me like moons, rotating around and

What's this all about then?

Like all creative people, I get distracted easily, by things like shiny objects, flashing lights, online games, cat videos and songs with catchy choruses. And that prevents me from doing a lot of the things I want to get done, so I'm giving myself a new challenge - one thousand words a day, five days a week. EXACTLY one thousand words a day, five days a week. That means that passages will break off mid sentence and pick up mid sentence the next day, or even the next week. I'm writing this book without a net, while I'm working on a couple of other novels and a handful of additional projects. I'm not going to advertise or point this blog out to people for a while, until there's a backlog and I'm sure I can stick with it. We authors are finicky people.

A handful of things to know: 1) I don't necessarily have to write 1k words a day. I can write stuff in advance and space out, so that I'm ahead of the game, as long as I'm posting a thou a day. 2) I don't have this whole story plotted out in my head. I have a concept, a starting point and some general characters, but this is Live Novel Writing, which means that stuff may have to get ironed out in post, so if you see continuity stuff, etc., I'll fix it when I'm throwing it all together to show to a publisher. 3) I have a published novel out already (which you can buy here for not a whole lot of scratch. 4) I'm planning on having a second novel (not a sequel to the first) out before the end of the year, on top of this project. 5) I like writing things in numbered lists. 6) I am not writing this book for you or anyone else, but I welcome feedback if that strikes your fancy, and it may influence the direction the story is going. 7) It may not, so take that for what it's worth. 8) I don't know how good the quality of this is going to be, but hey, we all gotta try something new sooner or later, so let's dance, internet, let's dance...

Now playing: "Bad Wings" by The Glitch Mob