In Vino Veritas (Short Story)

Updated 12/15/2014

Would it surprise you to know that I am not human? Most people are not surprised when I tell them that. They just think I am insane.

I wonder what it says about me that people are never surprised to find that I am insane.

When I found out, surprise is more or less the furthest thing away from what I felt. Instead, it was closer to validation. If I were a human memoirist, then the sentence “I guess I had always known” would no doubt appear in this paragraph. But I am not human, and I guess whatever I am instead demands more self-honesty. I have not known for very long. I had, however, suspected.

My earliest memories, or what I spent many years believing were my earliest memories, were of being strange, of not truly fitting. I never had the least bit of interest in what the boys were doing. It was only very moderately more interesting than doing nothing at all, and that margin, slim as it was, is why I went along. That, and I was almost certain that if I just kept doing it, I could learn to fit.

I even wondered if all of them experienced the same disinterest. After all, they treated one another the same way they treated me–almost. The voices, as well as the gestures and the physical violence that accompanied them, were a little more emphatic, almost as though they were meant to be final, rather than to invite a response. The words those voices spoke, though, were the same.

Of course, the truth is that the words and the actions that came along with them were meant to be final, because against me, they were truly meant. I only learned this much, much later, when I saw a psychiatrist for my not fitting in.

For a while, I decided to experiment by spending time with the girls instead. This was very, very moderately less interesting than spending time with the boys, which I eventually went back to.

After this experiment, the treatment I received from the boys became quite noticeably different. The physical violence they directed at me went from leaving visible results to leaving injurious results. Once, the people I believed at the time to be my parents were worried that an injury I sustained might be life-threatening. They became quite agitated.

Though this fact was of no comfort to those two humans who raised me, I just barely noticed a difference. I have always been detached from the physical world around me, even more than from the people. It wasn't that I didn't feel anything. There are people like that. They have a condition called CIPA, and they do not feel any pain. I do. It just doesn't feel like my pain. It's a little like I spend my whole life playing a video game with a controller that vibrates when I make a mistake or when someone else attacks me. There's definitely a sensation. It's undeniably negative, and at times it's even startling. It just feels secondhand.

Eventually, the boys' behavior more or less returned to what it had been before my experiment. It felt familiar. Of course, even in my earliest memories, I recall that the behavior of other boys seemed familiar in some way. I always assumed that I had simply spent my days with those boys for some time before I managed to create a long-term memory of it.

I'm sure I did, but I'm also sure that it wasn't that simple.

In any case, the old but ill-fitting state of normalcy returned for a number of years, before it was forever altered by two incidents that were far more permanent and far more profound than a couple of months spent among the females of the human species. The first was that my brain quite suddenly began to work much faster. It had always worked faster than those of the boys and girls I had assumed to be my peers. I was far ahead of them in all of our subjects of mutual study. At night, while they slept, I studied a number of additional subjects that I'm sure they had never heard of. (That was another way in which I never fit in. I have never needed, wanted, or even understood sleep. To this day, I have no idea how it is accomplished.) Yet, as I did all this, I could not shake the feeling that the electrical impulses my neurons generated were moving through some sort of mud or sludge, that I was meant to think much faster and about so much more. The fact that I knew what neurons were at all was evidence that my brain was fine, and better than fine, by the standards of my peers. Still, it took me nearly thirteen years on earth to shake the feeling that there was something holding me back.

With a whole world in front of me, and a suddenly improved capacity to think about it, I quickly stumbled upon a second realization: that however little I fit in with other boys, I fit in less with the adults in my own home. Each of them had interests, and antipathies. Each of them had a passionate reaction to both. While it was true that there were some subjects of study which I found moderately more interesting than the others, I never experienced a visceral reaction to any of them. I can't imagine how one would accomplish that, nor why they would want to.

Some of the interests or passions my caretakers shared were the same as those of boys: television, movies and cars, for instance. However, my parents had a whole additional set of interests that were collectively referred to as “nice things.” They encompassed clothing, furniture and money, among other human inventions which have already become too tiresome to list.

There was a time when I could learn from these “nice things.” Money, for instance, has no use of its own. It is simply a symbolic stand-in that represents “nice things” in general, which can be carried easily or converted into something more specific. It also tastes somewhat more pleasant than the most of human cuisine. Clothing is only considered “nice” once it includes bland, nonfunctional decorative elements. If it is purely functional, or if its shape or coloring is unique enough to attract the eye, it is considered to be “low class.” Additionally, the more clothing discomforts the wearer and restricts his or her movements, the “nicer” it is considered. As for furniture, some of it is considered so “nice” that it is not fit to perform its standard function at all, for fear of ruining it. These facts all strike me as being somewhat banal, and in fact I'm quite sure that you are familiar with all of them. Nevertheless, these proved somewhat useful in my continuing study of anthropology.

Any details beyond these were somewhat immoderately less interesting than doing nothing at all. In fact, my caretakers' discussions of these things brought me the closest I have ever come to experiencing a visceral reaction. Indeed, I felt quite strongly that I must leave at once, and so I would always excuse myself, either to spend time with the boys, who mercifully showed as little interest in “nice things” as I did, or else to continue my studies.

As a result of this, I grew to consider myself somewhat distant from my parents. The psychiatrist I have mentioned came to the same conclusion, and to one more. He believes that my parents could not possibly have failed to notice, nor could they have succeeded in ignoring, this growing distance. In fact, they probably realized it long before I did.

It is to their credit, according to the psychiatrist, that they did not react to the change with any sort of violence or other juvenile behavior. Indeed, they continued to provide for my extracurricular education as reliably as they ever had. Eventually, about two or three years before I left their immediate care, they did cease all attempts to engage me in conversation. I found this development to be neither a relief nor a disappointment.

As it turned out, it was that parting of ways that brought the whole situation to a head. During the same period over which I became more distant from my caretakers, the boys I knew were growing very interested in ingesting a number of psychoactive substances. The psychiatrist has told me that it would have been quite natural for me to join in, and I did–exactly one time. I found the effect to be entirely unpleasant. It was uncanny how it mirrored the prevailing sensation of my youth, of something gumming up my ability to think. Though asked over and over, I always refused to repeat this experiment.

For a while, I was able to simply avoid any exposure to the stimulus, and even to people who would try to stimulate my interest in it. I took so many classes as an undergraduate that I literally had no free time to do anything else. Graduating in record time was an unintended and somewhat undesired side effect of this approach. After this, I did study for an advanced degree, but unfortunately, they actually forced me to spread that work out over a three-year period, setting the stage for the return of free time. Still, the other boys took my constant answers of “no, thank you” at face value. At least, they did for a while.

That answer stopped being good enough for my social cohort exactly twenty-one years after the official record of my birth. Apparently this day is considered to be of some import by humans. In any case, my “friends” insisted that I accede to the consumption of intoxicants. I insisted otherwise. Eventually, one of the other boys just grabbed my face, squeezed my mouth open, and jammed the open end of a bottle of foul-tasting liquid into it. I felt gravity push the fluid deeper and deeper, toward my throat. At this point I decide that, objectionable or not, a choice between temporary stupidity and permanent death wasn't much of a choice. I felt a burning sensation as I swallowed.

Apparently, this particular liquid was a far stronger intoxicant than the first one I tried. It took no more than a few minutes for this intoxicant to render me even duller than youth had. It also had the strange affect of making some heretofore-silenced corner of my brain go crazy for more to drink. Most of my brain, the smarter parts, were against this notion entirely, but unfortunately, I had become stupid enough that the smarter parts were no longer active enough to mount an effective defense.

After that, the night turned into a slow-moving blur of things I wish quite fervently to forget. But I remember.

I remember laughing for the first time. I remember being unable to walk properly, and being unduly amused by it. I remember speaking in incomprehensible gibberish, and thinking myself brilliantly clever for it.

I remember regurgitating. While there are humans who react to this act as though it has humor value, I can't say I find it to be anything other than repellant and unpleasant.

I remember engaging in the human reproductive act, or at least attempting to. I'm not certain I know the entire procedure. For some reason, the boys had strapped a cellular communication device to my head. “Pork that pig!” a voice in my ear said, before making a few animal grunts and then breaking down into laughter.

Mostly I remember asking for more to drink, receiving more to drink, and then drinking it.

The last thing I can remember that happened that night was falling to the ground outside an acquaintance’s house. A crowd of people gathered around, some of them familiar, some of them strangers. But all of them, every single one, pointed and laughed. I remember the feeling of fatigue, and of darkness approaching.

Eventually, though, I remembered something else from a very different night, much longer ago than that one.

“I can't believe you grew a disguise,” a voice said, the sounds foreign but their meaning unmistakable. “I can't believe you know how to grow disguises. That's pure spytech.”

“I can't believe you did such a good job on it,” shouted another voice, using the same language.

“I do a lot of things you wouldn't believe,” a third voice responded. “Now you two close it back up. I have something to do.”

I could not see any of the speakers, but I could hear them moving around. Somehow, I could sense that there were more than three of them.  I had no sense of where they were, though. I felt crowded, but only in the same way one feels crowded on awakening from mostly asleep to half-asleep, when the sizes of things, and the distances between them, and even one's own body dimensions all become illusory.

“I think he's waking up,” a voice said. “Stick him again.”

The conversation faded , but eventually returned.

“What are you doing messing with those?” asked one of the voices.

“What do you think I'm doing?” the cocky voice retorted.

“Come on! That's dangerous. You have no idea what they'll do.”

“I know exactly what it'll do. This is for beast control, designed to slow down brain function so that it can't formulate or carry out any actions. But he's no beast, so this will make him just dense enough to pass for a child on this worthless rock.”

“Don't you need one of them for all of the rest of humans, though, so that they'll actually believe it?

“No, no, no need at all. I'm pretty sure they're dumb enough to fall for it as is. The caretakers and a few others will need some false memories, but that's it. The human capacity for delusion is quite boggling.”

“Won't the implant wear out?”

“Eventually, yes. But it's good for two generations of warbeast, which is close to four of our cycles and a little bit over twelve of theirs.”

“But it'll still wear off?”

“So what? That's after he's more than halfway out of his youth. Do you honestly imagine him getting that far without someone deciding to kill him first? I mean, I want to kill him right now, and he's unconscious. But I wasn't unconscious, not all the way.

Apparently this phenomenon is called “state dependent memory.” I don't know enough about human neuropsychology to say whether it's a real, scientifically-measurable thing, but I'm certain that I have experienced it myself.

In fact, I have pursued it many times since my first recollection of a life before my time among humanity.  With my most important questions about myself answered, a new set of questions arose. Foremost among them was to wonder what to do about it.  As much as the sensations I must experience in order to do so disgust me, I repeatedly enter a state of intoxication seeking additional memories, new information, anything more.  I repeatedly gain nothing more than my original insight.  I have now experienced that same memory countless times.  It is always identical, and I learn no more from it.  I still have not ascertained how to remove the disguise.

If you have any idea, feel free to pass it along.

Jason Wood Comes to His Senses (Short Story)

Jason Wood never did figure out how he lost his sense of smell. Every so often, his family and some of his close friends would admonish him to see a doctor about it, but Jason was a man long accustomed to dismissing all physical ailments as being an “old football injury” or merely “something I ate.” It had begun so long ago that it couldn't be blamed on the food, which left “old football injury.”

There might not have been enough clues left for the doctor to piece together anyway. The truth was that Jason remembered virtually nothing about his early childhood (old football injury), and nothing at all about smells. At best, Jason could vaguely recall that at the age of nine, there were eight things he could smell. Four of them he found pleasant enough: garlic, tasty food other than garlic (all of this smelled exactly the same to Jason, even at age nine), gasoline and his own flatulence. The four remaining smells Jason could perceive were coffee, cigarette smoke, rain showers and food he didn't like (which all smelled the same to him, and more or less like onions). Those, Jason absolutely detested.

One by one, Jason lost his ability to smell those things as well. Rain showers were the first to go, which made sense. He could barely smell those when he was nine. Cigarette smoke was next, and that didn't surprise him, either. He couldn't smell any other kind of smoke at all. Coffee and gasoline held out the longest. People told Jason that he was lucky he couldn't smell things, and he more or less believed them.

There was no discernible pattern to Jason's smelling loss. He didn't lose a steady one smell per year, and it didn't happen exponentially. He didn't wipe them all out at once when he took up drinking, either. Yet the fact remained that by the time Jason went off to college, he could not smell anything at all. Far from being surprised, Jason had been anticipating that the day when he could no longer smell coffee would come sooner or later.

Jason Wood never did figure out why, after more than ten years without one, he suddenly regained his full sense of smell while boarding an overbooked 747 two days before Christmas, but he wasn't surprised to find that he regretted it.

Odd Couple (Short Story)

I have shared my head with many stories. This is not unusual, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes that it is. I've found some who will argue that telling stories is what makes us human. Stories are, according to that theory, the defining characteristic of our species, Homo narrans. “Storytelling man,” they call us.

So it is probably not even freakish that I have been sharing my head for as long as I can remember. My stuffed animals had biographies and destinies. My earliest drawings had captions that ran onto the back of the page. Some of the captions filled most of that space, too. Once my handwriting became marginally legible, my parents realized that the writing was of a higher and more passionate quality than the drawing. I may not have been the only child ever to wish my parents would stick his pictures to the refrigerator backside-out, but I think I was the only kid I knew who actually convinced his parents to do it.

I do not ever remember restricting myself to output, either. When I was not busy creating stories, I would take in those created by others. I learned to read at the age of three, and took to it immediately and voraciously. Before that, I watched more television than is considered healthy, a habit that persisted after I learned to read and write, and which has found its way into all the cracks in my day when my eyes weren't up to reading I did not have any of my own ideas to develop. In my head was room enough for all these stories–only and always stories.

For a very long time, I did not share my head with any characters. It made me a very prolific and very mediocre writer. To date, I have only shared my head with one character. He was–or is–a daredevil. In the first draft his name was 'Crash,' if you can believe that. The story and the character both needed a working title, and I was always a fan of Bull Durham. There was a lot of Knut Hamsun's Hunger in the story. My reading had taken on a somewhat Scandinavian flavor at the time. By the time I finished a re-worked first draft, I had acquired a temporary habit of listening to an alternative radio station as I worked, and the novel grew into the title Jumper. The character's name, I guess, is Jon.

Sharing my head with a character–seeing the world in his words, thinking about what life would look like to someone outside my experience and immersed in something else entirely–invigorated my writing. My long-suffering friends, who had tolerated my stories, attempting to read them and responding (if they succeeded) with the shortest possible reviews–“cool,” “nice,” and “I like it” were the favorites–began sending me lengthy reviews to discuss things like “voice,” “tone,” and “character development.” A friend who used to work in the publishing industry helped me put together a synopsis, and a couple of agents were interested.

I awoke on the morning of December 27^th, 1999 to the earliest of the a late-morning sunrise in my window, prospects of my time-devouring hobby becoming a life-defining career in my outlook, and a loud, insistent voice.

“Sup?” the voice asked.

I immediately recognized it as a very informal version of the already-colloquial greeting “what's up?” I did not immediately recognize the voice. In fact, I just assumed I was imagining it. The TV was off, as was the radio, and the rest of the apartment was small enough that a glance at the TV and the radio was more than enough to confirm that I was alone. This explanation was seemingly confirmed when I spent a slow morning reading, a long shift as a line cook at a middling family restaurant, and then came home to correspondence from my contacts in publishing, all as usual. I heard nothing out of the ordinary.

December 28^th passed much as the previous day had, with two major differences: the earliest of the sunrise was obscured by low clouds, and the voice asked a follow-up question.

“Sup,” it said again as I awoke. Then, an hour later, while eating some toast and reading a somewhat absurd novel about soda advertisements, it asked “What's up, man?”

On December 29^th, I heard the voice three times–“sup,” as I awoke, “what's up man,” later in the morning, and “what are you doing?” on the way to work. I felt the last was a valid philosophical question, given the circumstances.

I had the 30^th off. True to the pattern, I heard the voice four times. I woke up to “sup.” I had my breakfast with a side of “what's up man?” That day, I was asked “what are you doing?” twice: once while reading and once while writing.

Soon, the voice grew less philosophical and more direct. “Why don't we go out and do something?” it asked. “Why don't you forget about submitting this book for rejection and take some real risk?” It also found a novel two-word review for my hobby-slash-purpose in life: “you're boring.” Then directness gave way to insistence, admonishing me to “get off my ass” and “live once in my life,” and calling me things like “virgin,” “pansy,” and “basement dweller.” Once, the voice sang that song “Take This Job and Shove It” repeatedly during my shift at the restaurant, starting with the old Johnny Paycheck tune and then moving to the punk rock version from the 80s and then the rap with Marky Mark guesting. The accent wasn't right for the country song and the artist formerly known as Crash wasn't much of a rapper, but it got the point across.

I had figured out who the voice was long ago, of course. I just didn't know how to shut it up. Ignoring it was impossible. It was too close to me. I couldn't even keep my mind on the TV. Trying to get any writing done was utterly hopeless. One time I threatened to burn its book, and it responded by saying “lighting fires in the house could be interesting. I say go for it!” I could only assume that anything the voice would do was a bad idea. Knowing that character was enough for me. I didn't want or need the risk to life and limb that actually being him would entail.

Finally, I decided to go skydiving. I figured if old folks do it for their anniversaries, it can't be as dangerous as it sounds. “Alright,” the voice agreed. “That's more like it. Still not my kind of fun, but at least it's actually fun. It's a start, anyway.” It was certainly expensive.

It worked, though. When the day finally came, the voice had enough respect (and sense) to let me listen to the instructor explain how to wear the pack and use the parachute. I have since read that some skydiving instructors will actually push first-time students out of the plane if they get nervous, but of course I had someone much closer to home to do that job for me.

And then, in freefall, I felt nothing. I heard nothing. I thought nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

What wouldn't I give, over and over, to feel that again? Absolutely nothing.

Since then, I haven't cut my writing back to absolutely nothing, but I haven't written much. Just this and telephone messages. As you can see, this took me thirteen years, and even that was like pulling teeth.

I'd much rather be out doing something.

The Last Year (Short Story)

The timeline first malfunctioned on June 6^th, at 7:21 AM GMT*. Technically, the year was 2117, although that designation quickly became irrelevant. It was, for all intents and purposes, The Last Year.

There's no way the original malfunction would have been observable, given its location. Even if it had occurred in a technically observable location, it would most likely not have observed. In fact, it occurred in the Andromeda galaxy, within the supermassive black hole's immediate sphere of influence. On June 6^th, at 7:21 AM, a neutron simply appeared from nowhere. That is not an altogether unheard of event, but under normal circumstances, matter appears with its antimatter counterpart, and both are destroyed in short order. This neutron appeared unaccompanied, and remained.

It remained, anyway, for long enough to be pulled into the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second later, two protons and two electrons appeared, again unaccompanied. They might, perhaps, have coalesced into a hydrogen atom, had they not also been consumed by the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second after this, three protons, three electrons, and one neutron appeared, only to suffer the same fate as the anomalous matter that had preceded it. This pattern continued unchecked, and radiated outward.

Approximately twenty-six hours, fifty-four minutes, and thirty-two seconds later, the disappearances began. A single hydrogen atom in the process of being sucked into the supermassive black hole simply disappeared. One second later, three subatomic particles in an otherwise stable oxygen atom suffered the same fate. This new pattern followed the same trend as the appearances.

On July 1^st of 2117, humanity discovered a method for opening a gateway to another timeline. For most of the next three months, this would be regarded as the defining scientific discovery of the year.

On September 4^th of 2117, at 10:26 PM GMT, the appearances reached earth. One proton and one electron in an Ozone molecule disappeared, resulting in unobserved chaos at an atomic scale.

The next day, at about noon, the appearances claimed their first casualty, when a small particle of Boron which appeared in the upper troposphere had its fall to earth interrupted several times. It managed to accrete a massive hailstone around it before finally falling to earth and striking a woman in the head. Her death was noticed; its ultimate cause was not.

Shortly after that, science confirmed the phenomenon of appearances when a small mass of subatomic particles, in a state indescribable beyond “seething” and “searing,” appeared in a classroom in a university in Bolivia. It interrupted a biology lecture.

By the beginning of the next day, the disappearances reached Earth. The appearances, meanwhile, had become alarming.

Scientists, the people who truly understood how the universe worked – or was supposed to work – realized the magnitude of what was happening, understood that if it was not stopped, it would be the end of man, and in a hurry. These people turned to the gateway, believing it would save them. Their first idea was to simply feed matter into it, attempting to counteract, offset, or interrupt the phenomenon.

Up until this time, nothing but electrons had been sent through the gateway, carrying data. Engineers and scientists on both sides had been very careful to balance the data sent and received, so as not to create any unintended consequences. Now, the time for caution had seemingly passed. The scientists first tried to push a small puff if helium gas through the gateway.

They were fortunately not to be killed by the attempt. The gas was instantly destroyed, releasing a massive amount of energy which, luckily, only widened the gateway rather than killing everyone present.

Realizing they could not simply funnel matter through the gateway, the team now looked to exchange matter. This plan did not carry with it any hope of sparing the unaffected timeline, but it might allow the people living there to escape. To test this theory, engineers in the affected timeline would attempt to pass one kilogram of nickel through the gateway, and receive one kilogram of cobalt from the other side.

The results of this experiment were as follows: the walls of the laboratory on the unaffected side became splattered with one kilogram of molten cobalt; the walls of the laboratory on the affected side became splattered with slightly less than one kilogram of molten nickel (the remainder of which disappeared at some time during the course of the experiment); the walls of both laboratories became splattered with the remains of dead scientists and engineers. Subsequent to this experiment, a new team of scientists in the unaffected timeline set to work closing the gateway to the affected timeline.

On the affected side, even the scientific community was upon the point of panic. Everyone else was well beyond that point; life had become essentially unlivable. Everywhere, the roads were clogged with frightened people hoping to escape the inescapable. Slow-moving at first, the traffic everywhere became stopped when random pieces of the road surface, the cars, or the drivers disappeared, causing fatal accidents involving dozens of cars. The hail of falling objects was unending.  Everywhere the eye could see lay the leavings of a decaying landscape: broken things, broken animals, broken people.

Desperate physicists now turned to a pair of farfetched, last-gasp solutions. Some hoped they could find a point of origin for the instability, and perhaps create a black hole that would consume its source. They succeeded in creating a small black hole in low earth orbit without destroying the Earth, but failed to find an appropriate place to deploy a larger one. Despite the futility, these people did remarkable work.

The remaining physicists went for broke, and attempted to discover a means of time travel. The idea was that if they could access the phenomenon in its earliest stages of escalation, they could counteract it, or at least have longer to prepare for it. These scientists came very close to proving the complete impossibility of time travel. The undoubtedly would have completed their work if they had been given more than five days to do it.

They did not even get six. On September 10^th, a ball of heterogeneous matter approximately the size of the moon appeared less than two hundred thousand kilometers from Earth and was immediately affected by Earth's gravity well. It passed wide of an actual collision, and its momentum was just reversing to make a second pass when a chunk of planet Earth approximately half the size of Africa disappeared.

This was the last event observed by humanity.

*This is an extreme oversimplification. Time does not malfunction, because time does not function. It is above function, beyond function. Time is the one thing immutable. In the end, of course, that was precisely the problem.