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Beer Review: Evolution No. 3 IPA

March 29, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

The memories are inconsistent, jumbles of pictures and sounds but nothing concrete. A fall. A cut. Bleeding. Healing. I recognize these wet, fallen leaves, but not this naked skin or the blood on my hands.

“I have the schedule. We’re going to review batches one through eight from Sample Block E.” The lab coat, animated by some pale ghoul wearing glasses, spoke with authority. “We purged blocks A and B earlier this week. Only one batch had a slight improvement over earlier iterations. Strains were isolated and taken for further study.”

I hear water. Somewhere off to my left, the trickle of a stream. I try to move towards it, but my muscles ache from the gnashing cold. My bones feel like iron being dissolved by acid. The branches from these fallen trees jab my bare feet, poking and stabbing and torturing with every step. I can see my breath.

“I was disappointed with the results from number one. Do you concur?” One lab coat shuffled awkwardly next to another, hazy outlines of men washed out by glaring overheard lights. “Number two shows a lot of potential, but it’ll never work with those defects. We’ll extract the sequences and move on.”

The sun is dropping in perfect time with the temperature. As the shadows grow longer, my aches burrow deeper. I’m not sure I can outlast this day, not without finding some kind of haven. The water soothes my cracked throat. My teeth chatter.

“Ah, three-ee. Three-bee showed great improvement, but we had to remove it due to a psychological abnormality.” One lab coat marked something on a clipboard, pen skittering across the paper like a spider across a web. “I think this one is the first passable example we’ve seen. Except…”

The sun is gone. I don’t know if I’ll see it come up again. I can see a light in the distance, up high, casting a yellow glow over the clearing. My legs feel too sore to run, but I move towards the light. Towards the light. The warm, seductive beams of light.

“No, no. This won’t do. The project parameters specifically set the tolerances of variation. If we accept this batch, we’d be undoing years of meticulous splicing.” Lab coat one turned and whispered something to lab coat two. “No. I said no! Flush the chamber.”

The light is affixed to a wall of stone. Several more throw flat light in all directions. The wall is smooth and cold, but I can feel a hum coming from the other side. The leaves and sticks have been cleared here. Familiar.

“I don’t care if you think the progress is too slow. Natural evolution takes hundreds, thousands of years. We can speed it up, but these changes are subtle, gradual.” Several other lab coats had gathered, all of them moving away from Block E, ghosts moving from one life to the next. “We’re scheduled to review Blocks C and D tomorrow. There’s still hope our engineering will have the desired effect.”

I pass several large, round openings, most dripping water into shallow pools. Tracks, deep grooves in the mud, move off in every direction. I can finally see a door, brown and thick and metal. I run my hands along the concrete for guidance and support. I move slowly. I see a sign.

“Good, good. Three-cee appears to be within limits. Inform the director. We’re ready to move to live trials.”

The metal is cold, etched. Words. A language. Words I know: united, lab, genetics, states. My fingers are numb. I try to remember, but the memories are inconsistent, a jumble. I slump against the wall. I rub my hands across my chest, trying to keep warm. I find something. Raised skin, painful lumps. A three. A bee. I close my eyes.

“Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.” -Barbara Ehrenreich

Review: Troegs Sunshine Pils

June 27, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

He wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep his fair skin out of direct light. Long sleeves covered his existing, blistering burns, and he sweat like a mobster taking a polygraph. His thick white clothes were his only armor against the rays that bombarded plant, stone, and man.

His garden was wilted. The plants struggled to grow with what little water they were provided, and lost most of it to the heat of the day. The shade of his wooden shed gave them some respite, but the sun moved quickly and consistently. He lost a whole row of beets to a wildfire a few weeks earlier. He sat and watched as their above ground leaves burst into flames, spontaneously combusting under the midday sun. All that was left were blackened husks. The fruit below the earth dry and hard, unfit for human consumption.

But still he farmed, or farmed as best he could. The animals had perished long ago, and the few cacti and longrasses that could survive the summers make for bland, unsatisfying meals. He dug his rows at night, when the temperature dropped to a tolerable one hundred and three degrees. This was the only time the ground was breakable; he’d ruined 3 good shovel trying to crack the crust of baked clay that covered his land during the daylight hours.

An eye dropper was his watering can. Each drop he placed was precious, so he made sure each plant got only what it needed to not die. The arid soil gulped each drop greedily, and he prayed that it would seep low enough to nourish the parched roots. The plants survived through his meticulous care, but they did not thrive.

One night while digging a row for the tomatillo seeds he had found in his basement, his shovel struck something hard. The reverberations rushed to his shoulders, causing him to drop the shovel and grab his right arm in pain. As he slumped to the ground, he could see the edge of what he had struck. Something big. Something metal.

The next night, he ignored his rows and began to dig up the newly found object. It could be anything from what he could see of it; an old car, a chest, a washing machine, or even part of some left over military ordnance. He worked unrelentingly to unearth whatever it was; this find was the first thing to break his routine in a number of years.

It took a week of nightly digging, taking a few hours each night to drop water on his existing plants, to dig a hole big enough to get a true sense of the thing. It was rectangular and heavy, roughly the height of a man, with the outline of what appeared to be two hinged doors, caked with dirt. He dared not open it. He feared its power.

The thing became an object of worship and wonder; a monolith that he admired as much as he feared. The world had been destroyed by the evils of men and machines, and it was entirely possible this massive metal block was a weapon that would put a quick end to him and his little patch of struggling life. But something inside of him burned to know its secrets, burned like the sun in the middle of the day, burned like the nuclear clouds that drifted across the planet.

The fire inside overwhelmed him one evening. He found himself standing in front of his god, shovel stuck in the crack between the doors, ready to pry them open and meet his maker. He stood at the ready for hours. Finally, with a breath of despair, he put his weight against the shovel. The doors swung open easily. He was hit by something he hadn’t felt since he was a just a boy.

Cold.

Smoke accompanied the drop in temperature, and he stood for a minute shocked at the relief he felt. Large bricks of smoking, translucent material sat in the bottom of the opening behind the doors, radiating a refreshing coolness. In the bright moonlight he strained to see what else was inside. It was a cavernous thing, this cold metal box, but the only thing that sat on a shelf in the middle were 6 brown bottles, all near freezing and almost painful to the touch.

He knew bottles from his childhood. He removed one and carefully used the shovel to remove its cap. A small hiss let him know its seal had stayed intact. He pressed it to his lips.

The rest he poured onto his plants.

9 out of 10.

It is incredibly difficult to take a picture of direct sunlight.

Flash Fiction Challenge #1 – beatbox32

April 16, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

My entry for the flash fiction contest over at http://beatbox32.wordpress.com!

Daedalus 2112

Did we learn nothing from Icarus? Was his death for naught? Have we become so bold in our invention that we think ourselves more capable than nature?

The sky is for the birds.

The economic collapse of the olden days made tourism an archaism. As gas supplies dwindled, flights became scarce. Even those with the money to afford flights couldn’t book them. People only moved to find food. The days of adventure were replaced with the days of survival.

The global airline industry inevitably collapsed. The infrastructure fell to ruin; once bustling airports became open-air graveyards for rusting metal behemoths. Several resourceful tycoons attempted to keep a small, elite fleet in serviceable order, but soon found the cost too prohibitive and the attention from marauders too dangerous.

My son was born in a converted hanger. He is smart and strong, and has quickly learned what it takes to survive in the wasteland. His eyesight is sharp, and he is often looking upward.

He has seen the magazines – Skymall, Plane and Pilot, Aviation Weekly – and asks many questions. His life is in the ruins of something he can never truly know, which both fascinates and frustrates his growing mind.

I have shown him the vast instrument panels, the food service trays, the massive piles of discarded seats, removed to make homes in abandoned fuselages. The more he sees, the more his obsession grows. I wish I could contain it, but he is surrounded by the artifacts of our days in the air. It would be like trying to keep a fish from getting wet.

I know that he will never fly. I learned of the downfall of aviation through my father, who learned from his. Man still has the knowledge of lift, thrust, and drag, but lacks the raw materials to rebuild working airplanes. Some have been cannibalized into homes or bunkers, others are completely beyond repair.

To keep him grounded and focused on survival, I have told this to him. His youthful fancy denies my logic, which is to be expected of a boy so young. I tell him that there is nothing wrong with studying, but to not be as brazen as to assume he will one day join the geese that pass over our airstrip. To fly now is dangerous, and his attention needs to be on protecting himself and his mother.

He has never seemed happy being stuck on the ground.

———————————————

I woke to find my wife shaking me, her eyes filled with worry. “He is gone!” she screams, unable to do more than point at an empty cot where my son should be.

He came home late, talking of some lights he’d seen high above the trees on the south side of the airstrip. He has lived through five or six marauder attacks and knew better than to explore alone. He asked if we could find the place tomorrow, and I had denied him.

I knew his imagination had overwhelmed his reason. I knew he thought they were real planes, and he had to go see them. Admittedly, I did not know what the lights were. Mystery rarely leads to anything safe.

I loaded my rifle and rushed towards the lights which were clearly visible, even from some distance. Several other people had come out to look, some preparing to lock down their homes in case of attack. I focused on the rhythmic pattern of the lights. They moved in a circle, as if some great storm had captured several streetlights in its fury.

I slowed my pace as I reached the tree line. I could see smaller lights, dotting the forest floor. I could hear talking and laughing. It sounded like dozens, if not hundreds of people. I cocked the bolt on my rifle as quietly as possible.

With my back to a tree, I started to make out what was being said. These people were speaking a language I was unfamiliar with. Dozens of colorful lights played and flashed on various large machines. An odd kind of music boomed from a small caravan. If these people were enemies, they came in odd fashion.

Lying prone, I used the scope of my rifle to get a better look. I panned the crowd; their faces were different, skin tones lighter, hair sunshine yellow. They seemed to be celebrating something. My crosshair finally came to rest on a huge metal machine in the middle of the clearing. At the top of it, sixteen lights spun in a circle, suspended by thin lengths of wire.

Then I saw him. My son was on this machine, climbing the extreme height towards roof of the contraption. The other people had not seen him. I could do little else but watch and pray.

As I sat enthralled, the sun broke over the horizon, flooding the area in a diffused half-light. I could make out what was at the end of the wires; tiny little plastic airplanes. My son had his eyes fixated on them; he could not see, or did not want to admit, that they were not real.

Through my scope, I watched as he jumped from the top of the tower, arms stretched out to his sides. I never saw him hit the ground. All I remember is his face.

Eyes closed, smile wide, the rays of the early sun behind him like two angelic wings.

Der WriMo

November 1, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

In an attempt to save precious words, this post will contain fewer of them than normal.

Today marked the start of my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It’s been a goal of mine to finish something of substantial length, and this event will be my motivation and excuse to write until I lose conciousness.

The ultimate goal is to write 50,000 words (or more!) by November 30th.

I wrote 2801 words today (so far).

I’ve got a complete plot outline, character bios, and more notes than I know what to do with. I’m far more prepared for this than I usually am for anything else in my life.

My story is science fiction. The plot synopsis, short and sweet, is: “In a near-future world where the universal language translator is a reality, a group of displaced linguists attempt to discover a sinister truth about the device that the world has come to rely on.”

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Or mine. Yea, the latter. I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.

P.S. I know my synopsis ends with a preposition. Go read something else if that is the sort of language up with which you cannot put.

Pre-Op

September 26, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

He wanted the screws back. They had been inside of his body so long, that he felt they were his. They had absorbed some of who he was, and in turn, contained a part of him that he was not ready to let go.

Casually, he asked his doctor if he could have them back afterwards; a sick trophy to match his scars. The doctors eyed him queerly, and said no. This would not do; he didn’t just want them, he needed them. But the doctor could not know that.

He rubbed his arm, slowly outlining the head of one of the screws that was near the surface of his skin. His muscles and nerves flared and shuddered at this unwelcome contact. He couldn’t let them go. He wouldn’t let them go.

He asked the doctor again if he could please have the screws. Again, the doctor looked at him oddly, this time asking, “why?”

“I just want them, as a reminder.”

The doctor didn’t understand. He claimed it would be too much work to decontaminate them, and it would be best if they were destroyed. He couldn’t bear to think about them being destroyed. If they were, they would destroy a little piece of him that he’d never get back.

The doctor returned and said they were ready. He panicked, knowing this might be the last time he would have his screws. Before he could say anything else, the anesthesiologist had done his job. Four seconds later, the world was a black plain where dreams come to play.

He was angry when someone woke him. He had dreamt of a world in the future, with surreal landscapes and unreal architecture. His mind did not return immediately, and the fog of surgery crept over him like a hangover from really cheap wine. He reached for the screws; nothing. Alarmed, he tried to sit up, but the drugs outweighed his will. He slipped back into his dream.

He felt like he was overheating. Clumsily, he kicked off the blanket someone had pulled over him. His mind was much more lucid and fresh now. He overheard people talking.

A familiar man’s voice, “Looks like it was a success.”

An unfamiliar woman, “Do we report this to command?”

Familiar man again, “Probably, but we need to break this to the patient carefully.”

His screws. Where were they? He scrambled out of the bed, but collapsed heavily under the still present influence of the tranquilizers. A nurse ran to his side and lifted him so he could sit on the bed.

“My screws! My screws!”

The nurse looked at him, perplexed. The doctor came in carrying a small container with an orange lid. Inside rattled 3 small silver pieces of metal. He snatched them out of the doctor’s hand and held them close, like they were a small animal that needed his protection.

“What was that all about?”

“His mind did not take the original trauma well. He was convinced that the prosthetic arm enhancement was his real arm, and it was being held together by those three screws. He’ll need a major psyche evaluation to help him cope with his new ‘body’.”

“So those screws he’s holding weren’t actually in his arm?”

“No, I found them in the old medical archives. Can you believe they used to put people back together with regular old screws?”