September 8, 2014

From “A Humble Ant” by Ethan L. Baum

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Excerpt from the WHPL interview of J. Sturgis Tarboski on August 17, 1985.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about your latest book, The Othering of Deerton, out this month from Giraudoux & Strauss of New York. It’s the story of strange object infiltrating a fictional small town with unpredictable and often horrifying effects.

TARBOSKI: Horror is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? Perhaps from another perspective it’s not horrifying at all.

INTERVIEWER: How do you mean?

TARBOSKI: Imagine some of your better ant poisons. It tastes delicious, so the worker ants carry it back to the nest to share. And it poisons them all, poking holes in their exoskeletons so they die of dehydration or causing them to leak hemolymph–their blood–from their joints. To the ants, that is a catastrophe, a horror. To us, it’s cause for celebration. No more ants.

INTERVIEWER: Are you saying that’s he central thrust of The Othering of Deerton? Something trying to eliminate people in the same way that one would eliminate ants?

TARBOSKI: Not at all. The ants could be carrying food contaminated by a nuclear test back to their nest. They die in the same way but there’s no agency there–we don’t care that they die, but we weren’t trying to kill them. My point was only that in The Othering of Deerton we are the ants, and that–to me–is the real horror of the piece. We’re not used to being the ants.

INTERVIEWER: Could you talk a little bit about your influences in this latest work?

TARBOSKI: Of course. A lot of my peers are cagey about influences; I think they like to seem themselves as fonts of universal genius. Me, I think that it’s disingenuous. If nothing else, influences serve as a nice reading list for people that liked the book.

INTERVIEWER: So what’s your reading list for The Othering of Deerton?

TARBOSKI: Well, anyone can probably see the influence of the Strugatskys, whose Roadside Picnic came out from MacMillan about a year before I started writing, and which I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s to them I owe the central conceit, the effect of the utterly alien on the familiar, though they dwell much more on the aftermath while I am much more in the moment.

INTERVIEWER: They are Soviet authors?

TARBOSKI: That’s right. There’s something wonderful about Soviet science fiction. Ants working for a different queen, if you will. I count a lot of foreign influences on this latest book…lots of different queens, if you will.

INTERVIEWER: What are some others?

TARBOSKI: Well, Borges of course, but he’s in everything I write. I’m trying to learn Spanish so that I can read his works in the original Spanish and perhaps send him a letter. But I think the biggest influence on The Othering of Deerton is probably the late French filmmaker Auguste Des Jardins. I met him in 1975 in New York at a press junket, and I had the opportunity to speak with him at length about his masterpiece, Les trois Juliets. Are you familiar with it?

INTERVIEWER: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.

TARBOSKI: You’re missing out. It’s a brilliant, brilliant movie. A French woman finds that there are two other women with the same name, same family, same history, and same face living near her in Montmartre. You might have heard about how Des Jardins supposedly found triplets to play the Juliets; some people still think he did the whole thing with trick photography. In any case, like any fan I asked Des Jardins point-blank what the truth was: why were there three Juliets? Were any of the theories about the film true?

INTERVIEWER: What did he say?

TARBOSKI: He said that he didn’t know.

INTERVIEWER: How could he not know if it was his own film?

TARBOSKI: I asked the same question, and he said that it was the most liberating part of creativity. In the real world, there is cause and effect. But in fiction, in fantasy, you can have effect without cause. Your audience will always find a cause, and their cause will be better than any you could ever dream up; by making your effects compelling, you incite them to find ever more beautiful causes.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. So if I were to ask you where all the strange items in The Othering of Deerton come from, and what their purpose is, what would you say?

TARBOSKI: I don’t know, I’m just a humble ant.

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September 7, 2014

From “The Ceramic Bridge” by J. Sturgis Tarboski

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Dr. Richat, the local medical examiner who doubled as a practitioner and occasional surgeon at Deerton General Hospital (people still called it that even though it’d been Infrared Health Systems for nearly 20 years) kept a tight ship. Everything was locked and labeled, signed and sealed.

His assistants were a different matter entirely. They didn’t last long, reeled in by the high pay but quickly reeled out by the long hours and Dr. Richat’s imperious nature. Tina Hedstrom was at the night desk when Caleb and Fay arrived.

“Twenty bucks,” Tina said in response to Caleb’s plea. It was a week’s salary for either of them, but they scraped it together even if a quarter of it was in change. Tina unlocked the door and returned to her magazine nestled snugly between the covers of Grey’s Anatomy.

Joshua’s body lay in a drawer, but Caleb did his best to put it out of his mind. The effects lockers were a room away; in a bigger town, the stuff might have been kept in the police station. Caleb had a hunch that since the Deerton PD shared a building with the library that they thought the stuff was safer in the hospital annex.

Clutching Fay both to support and be supported, he opened the “J. Kwaterski” locker. The torn jeans and filthy t-shirt were Joshua’s beyond a shadow; Caleb was sure he’d seen them dozens of times, but in here, like cast-off lizardskin…it was horrifying.

Joshua had a few coins and a driver’s license in his wallet, but it was mostly frayed duct tape. Some tobacco-stained lotto tickets that had been kept for use as rolling papers, a braided leather belt, and…

“That’s it,” said Fay. “That has to be it.”

Caleb hefted the item at the bottom of the locker. It was heavy for its small size and wrapped in newspaper. Through a few tears, he glimpsed a cool beige surface with what vaguely resembled crackle glaze. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Fay sadly. “He said it was going to make him a ton of money.”

Caleb stretched a hand out to unwrap the object. It looked like a small coffee cup with thicker walls than he’d ever seen. Moisture glistened on the inside, and there were three perfectly circular handles evenly spaced around the outside. Caleb balanced it on its newspaper rind with one hand. “It doesn’t look that valuable to me.”

Fay’s brow furrowed. “He said it had a covering, like rubber…I guess it must have come off. I think he might have put some water in it?”

Shrugging, Caleb spat into the cup. Fay recoiled, but a moment later she shrieked as a blue light flashed from within the object with an intense ozone smell. The liquid had crystalized into something that looked like an uncut gemstone, sparkling under the harsh florescents.

“Holy shit,” Caleb cried. “Holy shit! Did you see that, Fay? Did you-”

In his excitement, Caleb brushed one of the ceramic handles with his hand. He pulled it back violently as if burned, and then clutched at his chest with a piercing shriek. The cup clattered to the floor, and Fay joined the screaming as she saw red flowers of blood blossoming all over Caleb’s torso, soaked up by his shirt.

By the time Tina rushed in from the front desk, seconds later, Caleb was on the floor in a spreading puddle of his own fluids.

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September 6, 2014

From “Tarboski’s Paincup” by Kirc Sobania Stupp

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“All it takes to turn the real into the unreal is the slightest of twists.”

That was the advice of J. Sturgis Tarboski to any young turk writers that approached him about his secrets. And secrets they were: he had an unbroken string of relatively successful science fiction stories and novels spanning the 1950s to the 1980s, the longevity of a Heinlein or an Asimov but with a far grittier sensibility. Where other writers concerned themselves with spaceships and ray guns, galactic wars and the like, Sturgis Tarboski wrote stories set in a recognizable, if often out-of-phase, mid-century America. Where other writers used a modern setting as a springboard for social criticism or utopian/dystopian dreams, Sturgis Tarboski preferred to focus on his characters.

He might have been considered closest to Vonnegut (but for the two men’s long-running enmity stemming from a fierce elevator argument over religion and politics) or a Bradbury (but for Tarboski’s fierce dislike of Bradbury’s longtime friends Forrest J. Ackerman and Gene Roddenberry). And, hagiography aside, it’s a little disingenuous to pit Sturgis Tarboski against such luminaries; a dedicated attendance at science fiction and fantasy conventions and legendary openness to fans helped mask the fact that he was successful and comfortable in the upper tiers of the genre’s minor leagues.

He’s probably best-known for his 1978 short novel The Othering of Deerton which describes the slow infiltration of a fictional small town by powerful artifacts of unknown origin and the unpredictable effects that were wreaked thereby. It shows a certain degree of influence from other authors, most prominently the Strugatsky brothers, but is unique in that it is told entirely through found artifacts–transcripts, interviews, depositions, newspaper articles, and the like.

The bizarre “painbridge” is perhaps the most noteworthy artifact in Tarboski’s story. Appearing like an unnaturally heavy ceramic mug with three radial handles, it has the curious and horrifying effect of violently killing whoever touches it with bare skin while causing an exact duplicate of that person to appear somewhere in a 5-mile radius exactly 19 minutes later. The struggle over the “painbridge” and its use dominates the latter part of the book, which ends with the item lost in a collection of actual novelty coffee mugs owned by a local eccentric. “Painbridges” of later fiction, including the Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits revival episodes, featuring a “death cup” and a “duplicup” respectively, can be traced directly to Tarboski.

Upon his death at age 80 in 2013, Tarboski–who had never married and outlived most of his close relations–asked that the contents of his estate be auctioned off to “fellow writers and fans.” Accordingly, his executors arranged an auction to correspond with the interval between the 2014 Nerdicon and 2014 SciCon conventions. The first item up for bid? A ceramic cup with three handles inside a plexiglass box.

There were no takers.

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August 21, 2014

From “The Taste of Space” by Cate Pestas

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“Coming up on one of the densest concentrations now.”

Corris nodded and adjusted his trajectory. The Altair was an inexpensive solar-skimmer, sipping ions from the radiant energy of the surrounding stellar clouds, but that meant it took a lot of handholding to pilot. Almost instinct rather than science, as they used to say in the McCrea family.

“You gonna tell us that story again, of how your great-aunt almost navigated her way out of a black hole on instinct alone?” said Derrick, gently poking fun of Corris’s consterned, concentrated expression.

“Only that I’m not sure how grandpappy knew the story if she didn’t escape,” Corris said without breaking his concentration. “That one always stumped him.”

They were upon the concentration now, off the shoulder of the constellation Aquila. Corris made a final adjustment before he gave the order to deploy the collectors. “Now!”

Skating through clouds of interstellar dust on the solar winds, the Aquila deployed its collector sails, the most expensive part of the ship, designed specifically to wring precious resources from the voids of interstellar space.

“Derrick! Get me a purity report as soon as you can,” Corris cried.

A few moments later, Derrick did so: “Ethyl formate!” he cried. “99 percent purity!”

Corris nodded. “Excellent.” The ship’s holds were rapidly filling with crystalized esters–alcohols synthesized by the stars themselves. They were in high demand for commercial flavorings for everything from raspberry candies to artificial rum, but the choicest pick of the skim would always go to the McCrea still–a mom-and-pop alcohol outfit as respected as it was illegal on every planet in the constellation.

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July 29, 2014

From “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Scam” by Madelyn Aisha Goeke

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“So you gave her your personal passwords, your credit card number, and your Social Security number even though you’d only just met?” said Officer Carruthers incredulously.

“You don’t understand!” wailed the quivering lump of pale manflesh in the precinct office. “She had dyed hair…she was so vibrant and quirky, I just…I just felt a connection!”

“Even so, Mr. Daniels, surely you must have had some idea that things weren’t on the level,” added Chief Strong, trying and failing to sound sympathetic rather than annoyed.

“She said she wanted to grind for loot for me in Dungeons of Krull,” blubbered Daniels, “and she wanted to register so we could play together!”

“Gentlemen I believe I may be of some assistance here.” At the sound of that familiar voice, both Carruthers and Strong recoiled. “Not again.”

“Yes, gentlemen, it is I: Sherwood Greg. Collector, scholar, dungeon master, level 25 elven sorceress, head of the Council of Twelve, and overall coordinator for Nerdicon.” The rotund form of Sherman Gregward, as he was known to the state, waddled into the office. If nothing else, he made Daniels look svelte by comparison.

“What is it, Gregward?” snapped Chief Strong. “Can’t you see that we’re in the middle of something? How’d you get in here, anyway?”

“I heard the cry of a kindred spirit in need, echoing throughout the blogisphere,” said Sherwood Greg grandly. “And it just so happens that your man at the front desk is a fan of Glowworm, and now has a complimentary ticket to the cast and crew panel at this year’s Nerdicon.”

The officers exchanged looks of intense annoyance. “Well, we’ve got a fairly straightforward case of identity theft here, Gregward,” said Officer Carruthers. “So I don’t know what help you can be.”

“On the contrary, our mutual friend Mr. Daniels–AKA Armageddetron82–has fallen victim to a recent trend that I like to call the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl Scam.’ Namely, a savvy con artist aping the two-dimensional wish-fulfillment female characters so prevalent in entertainment for the purposes of cutting-edge fraud and social engineering.”

“I think we had figured that part out,” said Chief Strong. “What can you do that we can’t?”

“I can offer myself up as bait, of course,” said Sherwood Greg. “For I assure you that seeing the con artist who has been ravaging the local nerdgeek and geeknerd community brought to justice is foremost on my mind, and I am a far more tempting target than either of you could ever hope to be.”

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July 26, 2014

From “The Life Angel’s Truth” by Phil “Stonewall” Pixa

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The man was elderly, dressed in a suit. Steely grey eyes that danced with intelligence were deeply sunken into a powerful brow, with a rough shock of grey hair above and a neatly trimmed beard below.

“Augustus Zeitengel, I presume,” said Graham. “You look exactly as I thought you would.”

“That is no accident, Thomas Ellford Graham.” Zeitengel’s voice was deep and resonant, the voice of a man who had swayed multitudes and was well aware of the fact. “What you see is solely for your benefit, that you might understand what it being said. Zeitengel’s ideas have always been more important than what is behind them.”

“So are you Augustus Zeitengel, or not?” Graham paused. “Does he even exist?”

Zeitengel–or whatever it was–smirked but said nothing.

“I just want to know the truth,” Graham said. “About you, about the Temporal Anarchists who have been riddling the City’s timeline with holes, about everything.”

The old man laughed a dry laugh, the merry rustling of tree leaves and burial shrouds. “Truth? It was never about truth. It was about certainty.”

“Certainty?”

“Yes, certainty. The City today is a whirl of moral greys and conditional statements. Nothing is certain except uncertainty, and that is not what humans crave. They yearn for certain knowledge that they can be confident in, a heuristic through which all they meet and experience may be put.”

“Like the Sepulcher?” Graham said. He hadn’t been to a service in so long, even when he and it had existed at the same time…

“At one time your fellow denizens of the City would have found the certainty they craved through that miserable edifice, yes,” Zeitengel sneered. “But as their faith was eroded, they were left grasping for certainty that their worldview would no longer allow them to derive from the Sepulcher and its tired, hoary religion.”

“So that’s where your Temporal Anarchists came in,” sighed Graham. “Offering the certainty that nobody else would. Telling them the lie they wanted to hear.”

“Why, Mr. Graham, what makes you think it was a lie?” Zeitengel laughed his embalmed, deathful laugh again. “If the City had wanted a comforting lie there were myriads to be found. But why do you think none of the lies ever caught on, from the Supreme Temple of the Second City to the Obliteration of the Self to the Death-Worshipers? No. The Temporal Anarchists offer only the truth.”

“But not the truth that your…supplicants…or whatever are after,” cried Graham. “They won’t be reunited with their loved ones, or gain eternal life.”

“Who is to say that they are not? When our great work is done, when the vorhang, the blind, succeed in replacing the order of this universe with chaos, the distinction between living and dead, loved ones and strangers, or other and self will be meaningless.” Zeitengel spread his arms wide in an all-encompassing gesture.

“That can’t work. It would destroy everything.”

“Doesn’t the fish think that life in the air can’t work? Doesn’t the man with no microscope think that nothing smaller than what he can see can exist? Simply because you cannot conceive it, you declare it to be impossible. In fact, it is inevitable.”

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July 19, 2014

From “Of the MAIA” by Bernard S. Roberts

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The first generation of the SCNF Mobile Artificial Intelligence Armor, or MAIA, had a sophisticated neural link system that housed a compact but scalable artificial intelligence. It was designed to learn from its user, adapting its preferences, controls, and other functions for maximum combat efficiency. In turn, the system fed the user information from an internal database of tactics, strategies, schematics, and tolerances.

In the earliest days of the conflict against the Vyaeh and their conscripted races and mercenaries, MAIA-equipped troops were hugely successful in boarding actions and other ship-to-ship combat. Their ability to fight in low or zero gravity gave the SCNF a decided edge once the opening ambushes and encounters of the war were over with, and they were decidedly superior to the Vyaeh Enhanced Marines or Tuy’baq Armored Skirmishers that formed the marine compliments aboard enemy ships of frigate size or larger.

Eventually, though, a key programming flaw became apparent: the flow of information between a MAIA operator and the suit’s integrated AI core was essentially unregulated thanks to the SCNF’s haste in designing and testing the neural link. As such, the AI rapidly took on the neural patterns of the operator and vice versa, leading to repeated incidents of operators going on a rampage when threatened with disconnection from their suits. SNCF Command was willing to overlook such incidents as long as the MAIA units were necessary to the conflict, but circumstances soon changed.

First, the Vyaeh were successful in reverse-engineering the technology, which resulted in the appearance of Executor and Adjudicator Armor among their starborne troops. A permanent fusion of genetically modified Jul-Thun or Ryteg subjects with advanced armor, the Executor and Adjudicators were far more complex and expensive but easily superior to the MAIA troops. Second, the SCNF introduced the MAIA-II, an improved unit that corrected most of the teething problems of the original.

When the SCNF attempted to demobilize and deactivate MAIA troops, though, there was open rebellion among their ranks. Hundreds were killed and an unknown number of MAIA units went rogue. The AI and organic portions thereof, freed from restraints and interference, essentially became a single being. As a result, the organic portion–the pilot–eventually atrophied and died. Sealed inside their combat armor, their corpses became mummified while the gestalt which the AI core had become continued to direct the MAIA armor.

They exist to this day, inspiring horror with their imposing visage of deteriorating metal and mummified organics, often working as pilots and mercenaries for those with no scruples. The current generation of MAIA units, the MAIA-IV, are occasionally deployed against their older brothers where and when they are found. The SCNF maintains an SOS (“shoot on sight”) policy toward all MAIA-I units to this day.

Inspired by this image.

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July 14, 2014

From “The Seed of Disaster” by Eddie T. O. Stasser

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Let me tell you a little story, and then maybe you’ll understand why we do things the way we do.

A tourist–a kid whose parents were tourists–found something that they thought was neat on the beach. A little seed with three lobes, radial symmetry. The parents didn’t think anything of it, let the kid bring the seed home in a bucket of seashells and sand. Customs didn’t even inspect them.

Week later, parents notice a little three-petaled flower growing in the kid’s bag. It smells awful, so they throw it out. Two weeks later, those smelly flowers are all over the dump and none of the garbagemen can breathe. Three weeks later, and weird-colored vines are showing up all over the town full of more flowers.

People start talking about things with three legs stomping around in the parts of town where no one can breathe after about a month. Not long after that, they get hungry and start dragging people in. Nobody gets a good look at them, because they breathe and sweat the same poisonous fumes that the flowers do. It’s not long before the whole place is a ghost town.

You might think that would be the end of it, but it’s not. The stuff just kept spreading, and soon there were flowers with three lobes, fish with three lobes, nasty predators with three lobes, and all of them were making things more poisonous by the day. They tried to blast them out, but that only spread the seeds further. Because they didn’t go through quarantine, the family that took a vacation on X-23 wound up unleashing a cyanide-based ecosystem at home, and the entire planet had to be abandoned.

That’s why we have quarantine, and that’s why it lasts as long as it does. Not to bug you or inconvenience you; to keep your planet from being colonized and destroyed by something you were dumb enough to bring home with you.

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July 11, 2014

From “The Callistan Infiltrator” by Clynick Rogers

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Major Natasha Lebedeva, section chief of intelligence for the Imperial Central Securitate, collected her notes. A ten-year veteran of the ICS, she specialized in psychological warfare and black ops, with well over 100 successful operations to her name. She was sure that, with his impending retirement, Colonel Richat would soon nominate her as his successor in the position of ICS Undersecretary for Extraordinary Affairs.

“Come in, Major.” Richat was seated at his desk, flanked by his usual personal escort of two ISC military police–since the base attack the previous August he had rarely been without them. “I had to discuss this with you personally, as our most experienced operative. We’ve received intelligence that a Callistan has infiltrated the highest levels of our organization.”

“What sort of intelligence?” Natasha was taken aback by the news. She knew all about Callistans, genetically engineered masters of infiltration and subterfuge who sold their services to the highest bidder. Able to change aspects of their appearance at will–though not to the ridiculous extent of popular rumors–they were also rumored to be masters of impersonation to the extent that the line between impersonator and impersonated was often blurred. Natasha had written her master’s thesis on the case of a Callistan unmasked and executed in the Imperial General Staff decades ago, and was the foremost expert on them within in the ICS.

“We’ve recently installed a photophore scanner with a resolution of 1.2 PPB. The absolute latest in military-grade scanning technology, able to detect Callistans no matter how perfect their disguise or how long their mimicry has gone on,” said Richat. “It uses the normal surveillance inputs throughout the ICS compound.”

“That’s wonderful news, sir,” said Natasha. “We sure could have used one of those at Theg Prime. They never did find General Raven’s body.”

“That they did not, Major. And all they ever found of his troops were a few bone fragments.”

“I know, sir. I worked recovery on that project,” said Natasha with a shudder. Even for one as combat-hardened as she, the memories were distinctly traumatic. “Is that why you’ve brought me in? To consult?”

“After a fashion,” said Richat coolly, as was his aspect and manner in all things. “As I said, we’ve discovered a Callistan infiltrator and would like to solicit your input. Who do you think it is?”

Natasha hesitated, combing her brain for anyone who acted strangely or had a suspiciously sketchy past. “Captain Reid? He was a photographer before the war, after all.”

“No, Major. It’s you.”

“W-what? I-”

“A disguise so perfect, you fooled even yourself.” Colonel Richat gestured at his bodyguards, who relieved the Major of her sidearm and clapped her in irons. “Take her away.”

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June 5, 2014

From “Ilion’s Network” by Wiktor Neilson

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The cell phone call was routed to the interactive dash of the car Ilion had just hijacked. Well, “hijacked” is perhaps not the best term: rather than smashing a window and hotwiring, Ilion had used an unsecured wireless network to pinch the car’s authentication key to command it to unlock and start. It was an electric, so all that was needed was to find another unsecured, or easily breakable, car before the other ran out of charge.

“Ilion? Can you hear me?” It was Cherril’s voice.

“I can year you, Cherril,” said Ilion, “I’m a little busy right now.”

“Please, Ilion…please stop this,” Cherril said. “Stealing cars, crashing servers…do you have any idea what you’re doing to people who had nothing to do with anything? How many innocent people could get hurt?”

“They’re part of a corrupt system,” Ilion replied. “I was in IT long enough to know that a compromised system can’t be fixed without some damage. I’m striking back with the tools that I have available.”

“But…do you have any idea how long it’s been? Ho much has changed? You’re lashing out at a system that isn’t the same one that killed them, at people who weren’t here and may not even have been born when it happened!”

“Are you going to tell me the system’s gotten better since then?” Ilion’s car weaved and dodged through traffic, causing horns, fender-benders, and a collision that did not look survivable in its wake. “Time is meaningless. If you leave it alone, a system doesn’t heal, it festers.”

“Illion, please…stop what you’re going and come to us. We can help! It doesn’t have to be you against the world.”

“The world is just data points and networks, Cherril, pathways to get me where I need to go and help me do what must be done. If you know anyone that you don’t want to be hurt, tell them to stay off the streets and pull out their landline.” The connection clicked dead.

“It didn’t work,” Cherril sighed. “I’m sorry.” She turned to look at officers of the cyberterrorism task force assembled around her. The cell phone connection had been their best hope of getting though to Ilion, whose attacks had been disrupting the city every six to eight months with a geometrically increasing rate of complexity and deadliness.

“Do you think…?” an officer began.

“No,” Cherril said firmly. “It’s pretty clear that Ilion has no idea. I guess, wrapped up in revenge and increasingly linked in…the transition from being an independent being to a malignant fragment of self-replicating code was so subtle that it was never noticed.

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