The Holy Brand

by | Mar 11, 2006 | Story

Julius Bright wasn’t a designer, though he was often mistaken for one. Julius was the man who made designers, who launched and crushed careers. He had owned magazines, was the heir to an incredible fortune, a net star, an idol.

Twelve years ago, Julius Bright told me that I wouldn’t have any future as a designer. He did it in the nicest possible way. After a show he pulled me aside and told me that I had flair but no talent and that he didn’t want to say anything in front of the press because I was such a nice boy but if I continued to pursue this path eventually he would have to say something and he didn’t want me to work so hard without much to show for it.

So I quit, just because Julius told me too. I went into the business side of design, and I’ve been very happy there. When I look back on the faux bohemian that I was, I’m glad Julius pulled me aside.

Twelve years later, we met again, and this time he was the one with something to prove.

He met me outside an ugly warehouse on the edge of the city, little silver spheres swirling around his head. The Paparazzi-bots, taking pictures. It seemed like an odd place for Julius to meet me, not at all the stylish places I imagined him frequenting. He was dressed in a shining striped pink and yellow waistcoat.

“Tim! It’s been years!” he said, throwing his hands dramatically up in the air. I didn’t think he actually remembered me, I assume he played back his stored memory files. “I needed to talk to someone who could talk to the business side of things.” He said, leading me inside. “But also someone who understood design, like you do.”

I had no idea why he called me here, or what he needed from me. Sure, I loved design and could talk to businessmen, but I had a hard time believing that Julius Bright would have a hard time getting business to buy anything. His smile showed glittering teeth.

“What is one of the biggest problems the world of design faces?” He asked, leading me down a dark corridor.

I shrugged. “Consumer fatigue?”

“Oh Tim, you joker. No. The problem is with models, and the problem with models is their transience.” We came to a black curtained room with a long walkway. Julius leaped on the walkway and began to strut with long, angry steps. “A woman is only beautiful from fourteen to seventeen.” He paused and rested his silver cane against his lips. “Maybe seventeen is a bit old, but you see what I mean. Anyway, after that, she begins to rot. They’ve got such a short shelf life; it’s hard to build a career for them. They are flashes, beautiful lights that go out in an instant.” He hung his head. “There are other issues too, young girls aren’t very dependable, and the smart ones don’t really have their heart in it, they always leave to become engineers or something. Terrible losses, really.”

Julius opened his arms wide, smiling gaily. “But now we have options. Now we will have the ability to lengthen the career of a model. We can make perfect girls that will not change, girls we can control. They won’t get caught in scandals, unless you want them too, of course, and they can be relied upon. They’ll never leave to go to school, or eat too much, or die. “

I was about to ask what kind of girl would have all these features, but before I could speak, he began his monologue again.

“I know, the digital girl failed miserably years ago. The animated girl was fun and perfect, but she wasn’t real, and people like things they can touch, or pretend they could touch.”

“Now, now I can give you the flesh. We’ve grown the flesh based on the best girls in their prime. We’ve grown it and preserved it, a perfect plastic replica. You want tall? Her legs can be lengthened. You want longer hair? We can grow it in seconds.

And most importantly, we can brand them.” Julius clapped his hands, and sleek, slender, impossibly tall women, all naked, emerged from behind the black curtain and marched down the walkway, Dark hair, light hair, short, tall, milky white, coal black. Julius laughed and grabbed one on her shoulders. She lithely stepped close to him. “Here is our innocent.” He pointed to the other end of the walkway “Here is our counter culture heroine. Here is the slut. Here is the sleek lesbian, here is the exotic tropical. We can make them last, attach them to products based on image, and design for and around them. No more transience. What we have here is complete flexibility.

They are warm. Their eyes are wet. They will strut, smile and pose. They are fully programmable. We’ve been mixing them with models on the runway already, sneaking them in shows and no one has been the wiser. They aren’t girls though, make no mistake.” Julian leaned in close; conspiratorially “They are better.”

Pigment

by | Mar 10, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Stretching his thin arms, Xytherzuk slipped into his council chair, the last of nine to be seated before the chamber of balance. The high-council glared down upon the little grey being staring up with black eyes that were nervous and begged for mercy. A being in robes stood at the table and looked down to the little one standing beneath the eyes of the council.

“Eth, we have watched your experiment for seven cycles of the star system. Your efforts to weed out this humanoid evolution by pigment have failed.” The being sat slowly as the others began to whisper amongst themselves. The small being known as Eth spoke up.

“No! It is not too late high-councilmen! Let me explain! Their prejudice grows… it will eat at them and destroy them.” A loud boom shakes the sound within the room to a halt.

A smaller grey being leans forward. “They are inspired by the colors you have given them. This virus of yours has caused them to see their world with shades and hues. Yet it has also caused them to expand!”

Eth whimpered and in his squeaky voice tried to make due with his case, “They have racism, high-council. And they have prejudice against colors that do not match. Given time this will cause more war and more hatred.”

“We are done with waiting, Eth. Already our scouts are identified by their grey skin. Could your virus not have given us a better sensory projection than a mottled grey? And of the skies… you made the skies look as such and they have ventured forth to go beyond it. This, we cannot allow. We are cutting the experiment.”

In truth, Eth never really wanted to argue much with the council. He knew his experiment was doomed to failure from the beginning and yet somehow hoped everything would work out. As he was escorted back to his chamber he thought of the reactions of pigment to the human race and how it had blossomed into more than he could have imagined.

Imagination, it seemed to Eth, was something missing from more than just the humans. He sat within his chamber cell and waited for the guards to leave. Underneath his pillow he slipped a hand to retrieve his hidden vice. A small booklet colored with an amber hue rested in his three-fingered hand. He pulled it open to reveal a slew of what was known to the humans as photographs.

Sitting back against the wall, his small body heaved with a long, drawn-out sigh. They would remove the color from the world, but the virus remained within him. Plucking a photo from the group he looked at the vision of his grey form coated in paint and behind him a smearing of color across a brick wall in a dilapidated city block. Eth sighed and smiled. The colors were his to enjoy.

The Post-Emotional Age

by | Mar 9, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Terina fumbled in her pocket for her pill box, a present from her mother. If you had to live with such an unfortunate disease, Mama had told her bluntly, you might as well have something nice and unobtrusive to hide the necessary medication. Terina had needed a pill then, too, letting her six-year-old bangs hide the shame in her eyes. Thirty years later, she no longer had the benefit of the curtain of hair, but the enameled pill box was a good focus for her gaze. Terina popped out one of the small blue spheres and tucked it under her tongue, letting her body dissolve the medicine as she tried to pay attention to the feed in front of her.

Bodies. Dead bodies, everywhere, laid out across a bloody plain that nearly made Terina sick when she had to look at it. She swallowed bile and willed the pill to dissolve faster, sneaking a glance at her fellow commanding officers, all arrayed around the readout in stolid contemplation.

“Looks like the blast points were precise,” one of the men observed, pointing out charred circles on the readout with his stylus. “They maximized human casualties rather than structural damage.”

“That makes sense,” a blue-eyed woman replied. “That’s one of the few plants that isn’t automated. Without its workers, production will be halved at best. They did their research.” She shook her head in detached admiration. “Intelligent terrorists.”

“Lieutenant Carreas?” the colonel asked, turning to Terina for her opinion. She jumped a little before she got a hold of herself.

“We’ll have to write to the families,” she said softly, then immediately regretted it when six pairs of incredulous eyes turned towards her. Terina shrank back and crunched the pill between her teeth; anything to get it to dissolve faster and restore her composure.

“Let’s focus on the situation at hand, Carreas,” the colonel suggested, and his disapproval was clear. Terina swallowed the pill. She could finally feel the medication beginning to take effect, detaching her from the weakness of outdated emotional reaction.

“Yes, sir.” Straightening, Terina examined the readouts again, this time more easily able to ignore the mangled bodies at the crime scene. “This looks like Redox residue,” she said at last, circling a blackened piece of ground with her own stylus in order to enlarge it. “It must have been the Xiang rebels. No other group has access to that kind of technology.” The rest of the lieutenants nodded and murmured their agreement. Terina knew that all of them thought her more than a little flighty due to her condition, but they still showed a grudging respect for her skills as an analyst and tactician, provided she remembered to take her medication.

“Good work, Carreas.” The colonel nodded sharply and turned his gaze to the blue-eyed woman. “Lieutenant Holmes, you will lead the dispatch team. Flush out the rebels; if they’re Xiang, they should still be in the area. Make sure they’re caught promptly. We can’t afford any more production delays.” The woman saluted smartly and turned to go, with the rest of the commanding officers following a step afterwards, as soon as the colonel gave the signal of dismissal. Terina hung behind.

As the rest of the lieutenants filed out of the briefing room, Terina traced the images on the screen with her finger, swallowing a lump in her throat. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think about the families. She wasn’t supposed to feel any of this. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all.

Turning quickly, Terina hurried to catch up with the rest of the group before she was missed. The slight blur of her vision was something she had learned to accept. Once the medication took full effect, it would be gone.

Saturn Swallows Its Children Whole

by | Mar 8, 2006 | Story

On Saturn’s ring plasma knives were illegal and as such, costly. Tangerine remembered Big Slab used to wear one around his neck, but she had never seen him use it. But this was Earth, and Earth was said to be civilized, unlike those settlements on Saturn’s rings. Which meant that when these girls from Tangerine’s school brought out knives and threatened to cut her, they were plasma, not steel.

“Here’s how it lays out, Ringer,”said the tall girl, clearly the leader. Her holographic nails illuminated the delicate controls on her knife handle. “We don’t like you, and we don’t need your kind at this school. So we’re gonna do you a favor, and give you a reason to go on back to your smelly little rings.”

Tangerine’s mother had insisted on the move. She didn’t think Big Slab and the other members of The Titans were proper role-models for a young girl. Tangerine had tried to explain to her that you couldn’t be safer than the protégé of the leader of the toughest gang in the ‘rings, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it.

“Saturn swallows its children whole,” she would say, shaking her head. And that would be the end of it. “Saturn swallows its children whole.”

So instead of the warm tutelage of Big Slab, Sally Gone, Dingo and all the rest, Tangerine was in the parking lot of a convenience store of civilized Earth with five girls discussing how many pieces they were going to slice her up.

“Don’t you worry too much about it, Ringer. Tell you what, if you don’t struggle, we may even leave you that pretty face of yours.” The tall girl kept adjusting the magnetic field of her knife, making the blade longer or shorter or wider or thinner. Playing with it.

Tangerine remembered Big Slab talking about those who treat weapons as toys. She remembered what he said about how to deal with those people. For the first time since leaving Saturn’s rings, Tangerine smiled.

“I really like your nails,” Tangerine said. “All that light. They must make finding your boyfriend’s tiny penis really easy.”

The tall girl came in quickly. Tangerine dodged the strike with ease, and caught the girls wrist. In one fluid motion, she turned off the knife, and depressed one of the control dials so hard it snapped. Tangerine pushed the girl away, closed her eyes and placed her arms in front of her face.

The tall girl charged again, raising her knife high above her head, her hologramed thumb switching it back on. But fell to her knees immediately when her knife exploded in her hand, the ignited plasma expanding outward without the magnetic field Tangerine had broken. The rest of the girl-gang temporarily blinded, Tangerine wasted no time hauling the tall girl up by her hair.

“I’m a daughter of Saturn,” Tangerine whispered in the tall girl’s ear. “I think you know what that means, now.” Tangerine let go of the tall girl’s hair, and watched as she crumpled on the asphalt.

Tangerine adjusted her school uniform, and calmly walked out of the parking lot, back into civilized Earth

A Room of One’s Own

by | Mar 7, 2006 | Story

“It’s a transition period,” Meryl says, but everyone knows that once you’re in, it’s nearly impossible to get out. It’s a matter of logistics, really. We’re a three-person, which means that each of us gets about five waking hours per day. Take travel time into account, and we each have four hours to work, assuming that we never eat. That’s barely enough to pay maintenance, let alone save up for a new place.

Meryl was forty-seven when she moved into the body. Kate and I think it was some sort of cancer, because she’s always cluttering up the rules list with health-nut commandments like “don’t eat artificial sweetener” and “don’t sit near the smoking section.” Kate was hit by a bus when she was twenty four, and my body died of a good old-fashioned heart attack at the ripe age of seventy three.

We’ve been sharing the body for three years, which has been more than enough time to get on each other’s nerves. Kate’s always dressing us in terrible fad fashions, and once when Meryl stepped in she found a silver hoop in our navel. Meryl writes ad copy for an herbal health supplement line, and I swear, she’s going to give us carpal tunnel with all of that typing.

When one person’s in the body, the rest of us sit around in the lobby, which really isn’t a lobby at all. We can’t see out, since only the person in control can use the senses. Sometimes we tell jokes, or talk about our lives before the body. Usually, though, we gossip about whoever’s in the cockpit. It’s just girl talk, though. No bad blood.

The only time we’re all in the lobby together is the weekly meeting, Tuesday night after we’ve left the body to sleep. It lasts about an hour, before we get tired as well, and we use that time to talk about group expenses and time management. This week, we resolved to eat more tofu (Meryl’s still upset about our failed attempt at vegetarianism), get our hair highlighted (but nothing too extreme, we warned Kate) and buy lottery tickets. It’s up to almost $400 million this week, which would be enough to buy us each a supermodel. A girl’s gotta have some space to herself, and it doesn’t hurt anyone if that space was in a swimsuit magazine.