symbolic 46: scene i, part ii

...Gardner’s right leg buckled and he fell awkwardly to his knees. His hand came up to his face as if he was just beginning to feel the wrongness in his skull. The drop of blood grew darker, spreading out on his cheek.

Ruiz dropped the clipboard and rushed back to Gardner. He checked the portal to Patient 178’s room and didn’t see anything in the glass, didn’t see any breaks or fractures or holes—nothing to indicate what had caused injury to the other man.

There was a white spot in Gardner’s field of vision. It was flat and had square edges and it took him a few seconds to realize the shape was Ruiz. His depth perception was gone; everything looked like it had been reduced to basic geometric shapes. As Ruiz leaned in close to his face, he could make out the other man’s features, but only as a series of triangles and circles.

His hand was wet and his face burned like a hot shard of metal had lodged itself in the corner of his eye and was dripping molten tears onto his cheek. He opened his mouth to tell Ruiz, but all that came out was a thin whine.

Ruiz stood on his toes and quickly peered into the room, ducking his head up and back quickly. He did the motion a second time before reaching for the keys attached to his wrist by a rubber strap.

Gardner tried to grab the right angle corner of Ruiz as the other orderly slapped his key into the lock of the door. Don’t open the door, he thought, the words refusing to go all the way to his lips.

The lock turned heavily and Ruiz pulled at the door, swinging it wide. It looked to Gardner like he was lifting aside a sheet of green paper. Ruiz’s flat shape stepped in front of Gardner, blocking the view of the room.

When Ruiz’s form began to shiver and lose its outline, Gardner spun away from the open room and began to crawl across the floor of the hallway. The panic button was a tiny silver dot on the wall, so much smaller than he remembered it being. He collapsed at the base of the wall and stared up at the distant button. So far, he thought, when did it get so far off the floor?

He reached for it, stretching up against the cold wall. His fingers had almost reached it when a hand touched his shoulder. He pressed his good eye to the wall, refusing to look behind him. The touch was firm, insistent, yet still gentle. He felt an exhalation of breath next to his ear. He squeezed his eye shut, his other eye only feeding lines of red fury into his skull, trying to shut out what came next.

There was a chattering sound in his head, a magnified thunder of a thousand crickets...

symbolic 45: scene from the institution

...The last door on the right belonged to the oldest resident on the wing. Thompson -- one of the psychiatric nurses -- had been at the Institute twice as long as Gardner and Patient 178, as far as she could remember, had always been in this room. Gardner checked the chart mounted next to the door.

“He’s been in all day,” Ruiz said. “Morning staff said he didn’t want to come out for breakfast. Wanted to stay indoors today, I guess.” He laughed, a small wheezing sound like air escaping from a balloon or, in Ruiz’s case, a deviated septum.

Standard policy was to keep the doors of the rooms locked when the patients opted to not come out of their rooms. Some days they wanted some privacy—there almost wasn’t any chance for solitude in the arrangement of the common room in the North wing unless you remained in your cell—and, after making sure they hadn’t managed to smuggle in an object with which they might hurt themselves, the staff was happy to comply. Still, the staff was supposed to make regular checks through the portal to ensure the safety of the patient. “When was the last time someone looked?” Gardner asked.

Ruiz checked the sheet and was silent. He shrugged finally. “Sometime early afternoon,” he said finally.

He doesn’t know, Gardner thought. He shook his head. The day and swing shifts always looked to the graveyard shift to catch up the paperwork, citing the constant interruptions of the regular hospital staff and the constant need for supervision that the patients required during their waking hours as excuses for why the finer details of their jobs were missed. Issues found during the graveyard shift—when there was more time to be careful and exacting—always become the graveyard’s problem. Never mind, he thought, that we’ve got three-quarters the staff they do.

He flipped up the hatch to Patient 178’s room and peered inside.

Ruiz checked 178 off his list and had turned back down the long hallway before it occurred to him that Gardner hadn’t said anything. He stopped and looked back at the taller man. “Hey,” he said.

Gardner flinched at the sound of Ruiz's voice and moved his head away from the tiny portal. “There’s writing on the walls,” he said. His voice sounded distant as if he was shouting from the other side of an immense cathedral. There was an emptiness about his expression as if he had just lost something and couldn’t remember what it was. A tiny dot of blood had crept from the corner of his right eye and was tracking towards the edge of his cheekbone...

symbolic 44: what familiarity breeds

The logjam was caused by family ties. Or rather, a perceived need for familial ties. Georges begat Serena who begat Jack. Serena was a plot device intended to bring elements of the story together, a means by which I could bring Jack -- an outsider -- into the story. Since the underbelly of this world is strange and different, I needed someone who wasn't part of that to be drawn into it. Jack was to be my foil, the uninitiated soul who would ask all the questions which the audience would have, and I could then lecture as necessary to instruct the audience about the world view.

And, frankly, the idea seemed rather pedantic. Sermons can, without effort, bore the audience in a second, driving them out of your narrative. The attention of your audience wanders and they start thinking about all the things they should be doing instead of being harrangued by your prose. John Galt's epic speech near the end of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is an extreme example. Is there anyone out there who has actually read all of this 90-page speech?

If Jack was an outsider and was part of family (i.e. Georges' grandson), then how would he get involved? If his grandfather has been locked away in the looney bin for nigh 30 years does Jack even remember the man? How would his grandfather know enough about Jack that he'd want to bring Jack in? Unless it was just an attempt to keep Jack from getting snatched by the bad guys. In which case, why would he bother involving the Lunar Society? Why wouldn't he just contact Jack directly?

I hate these sorts of questions. They nag me; they cause logjams in my brain. And I end up sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for some solution to come to mind. And, eventually, I end up at Orisinal playing games instead of working. If I'm just going to play games, I might as well bite the bullet, get an X-Box, and vanish.

Doesn't sound very satisfying. So I remain at my desk, staring out the window and thinking things to death. Used to be that I would just start writing, start flailing away and getting the words down. I'd worry later about plot and story and other contrivances. The trouble with that method is that I end up with lots of words that ultimately peter out because I've run into another logjam. It's a litany of logjams, my metholodgy, and it isn't a good way to work. I end up with lots of fragments and nothing ever finished.

So I'm trying to figure out something better. Well, something different. I'm not sure it is much better. And I'm not sure that I need to have everything worked out before I get started either. That may not be the way that I work.

Michael Ondaatje (the fellow who wrote The English Patient) has a book that is a collection of conversations he has with Walter Murch (Coppola's go-to film editor who also edited the film version of The English Patient). One of the things that Ondaatje and Murch discover is that they both have an abundance of material when they get down to work. Both come to projects with the task of creating a final product out of a wealth of material. They find their stories out of the unconnected threads strewn about. They cut and trim and move things until a cohesive vision takes shape.

You've got to have pieces in order to put the puzzle together. I hate puzzles. But maybe it's time to get over that.

symbolic 43: breaking the logjam

I've got a head full of logs. They've all come down from the foothills where they've been harvested and have jammed up the river right above the sawmill. I've got a full crew at the mill, ready to work. The equipment has been oiled and refurbished and sits, gleaming with carnivorous glee. The crew stands around on the dock beside the expectant mill, smoking endless cigarettes and glancing up river at the logjam at the mouth of the bay.

The lumberjacks, either oblivious to the plug in the river or uncaring about the stoppage, continue to harvest trees. Their saws and axes continue day and night to pull down trees. They have quotas to fill: this slope by the end of May, the southern slope by early summer.

Some of the logs in the river bump against each other, the hollow knock of their contact a persistent foreign sound in the wilderness. Down at the base of the jam, the logs are pressed too tightly together to move and all you can hear is the wood groaning from the incessant pressure of water and wood.

The foreman is out on the pile with a specialist who has flown in from Corporate. They've strapped spike strips to their boots and are clambering across the wet logs. The foreman is trying to explain to the man from Corporate the problem with the logjam. "Too many logs," he says, waving his arms across the expanse of water-logged wood. "This is a choke point," he explains, nodding towards the swerve of shore which juts out into the channel. "Always has been. But, as long as we've kept the logs moving, it has never been a problem. As long as we had a rhythm..."

The man from Corporate nods. He understands about rhythm, about the ebb and flow of materials through a channel. He is the troubleshooter for the company; it is his job to analyze blockages -- logs, paperwork, network traffic, lines of communication -- his expertise lies in removing obstructions.

He walks along the rim of the jam, his feet sticking and pulling in the ridged edges of the logs. The foreman follows, nervously waiting to hear the prognosis from the man from Corporate. The stranger stops, looks down at a particular log near the base of the dam, and says, "This one."

"What about it?" asks the foreman.

"Take this one out and it will all flow free," the man from Corporate says. "It won't be an easy flow -- not at first -- but give it some time and it'll find its rhythm again." He climbs down and lays his hand on the long log in question. "But this one has to go."

The foreman squints down from the top of the dam and, as he follows the course of the log across the bottom of the jam, he can see how it is jammed against the bank. As he stares at the log, the problem becomes obvoius to him. "Yes," he agrees, lending a hand to the man from Corporate as the stranger climbs back up to the top, "I can see it now." The foreman shakes his head. "I don't know how I missed that."

"You're too close," the stranger says, "You've been staring at them too long. You needed a different perspective. You needed to show the problem to someone else."

symbolic 42: staggering under the weight of memory

I know nothing about NLP -- Neuro-Linguistic Programming -- and, since there's a whole subtext to the BOOK OF LIES about language and how the brain processes language, I figure I should at least check NLP out. So I fight my way through a couple of websites, getting the basics down and wrestling off the strong urge to nap, and eventually realize that I want to talk about NLP even less than I want to read about it. However, there is something which slips into my brain and takes up residence.

Every piece of memory data in your brain has two attributes associated with it. First, there is all the raw information -- the empirical sensory record of that instant of time -- which is a simple data snapshot. This information is the "unobserved" data; this is the information that any recording system (with enough processor power and storage space behind it) could capture and store. It is just a series of points and values which could be reduced to a matter of binary information. The second attribute is your interpretation of that data.

Sensory data (be it visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or kinesthetic) flows into the appropriate primary area of the brain that is devoted to this type of data. Nerve fibers run from the primary area to a corresponding secondary area and, in fact, this is the only connection the primary area has with any other section of the brain. The secondary areas are interconnected, allowing information to be dumped into yet another section -- the associative regions of the brain -- and here it is that the collected information is ultimately processed. A value is placed on this block of data, and it is marked by your brain as having some context within the larger volume of your mental space.

Say, for example, that you are sitting on a park bench and an animal hops up onto the bench next to you. Your brain takes in all the information about the arrival of this mobile object: the sight, sound, smell, and possibly contact, of this creature. This raw data is distilled down in your brain to a nugget of data which is then compared against the entirety of your memory and found to match previous elements in your memory container. In fact, there's a label on this container: "squirrel." A tag is now attached to this new data that says, in effect, this memory block is another example of "squirrelness" in case you ever require more than one block of historical data to make comparisons against.

Now, I want to tell you about this experience and I say, "I saw a squirrel today." Your brain immediately matches the pieces of that sentence to the appropriate data containers in your head and constructs meaning from that series of words. But you don't know that I was sitting in Wright Park and that the bench was a worn picnic table with metal legs and a wooden top. You don't know that I was there because I was eating a Subway sandwich or that the sun was over my right shoulder or that two red cars passed in quick succession in the street beyond the park. You don't know any of these things from my sentence, but they all exist in my head because they are all indelibly linked as part of the sensory data which accompanies the construction "I saw a squirrel today."

What's running in your head right now is the associated data from the last time you saw a squirrel. Unless you've never seen a squirrel, in which case you have no idea what I am talking about.

I could also have said, "J'ai vu un écureuil aujourd'hui." That sentence builds the same picture in my mind, but may mean absolutely nothing to you. But I've just altered the association tags in my memory. I haven't touched the sensory data -- that remains the same -- but my understanding, my comprehension, of it has changed. Now, my associated links spiral off into other associations I have with the French language (including a bit from Eddie Izzard about "le singe" being "sur la branche").

The amazing thing about the brain is that it isn't just a recording device. The brain is a vast muscle which continually evaluates and re-evaluates the data it has access to. Do you suppose that if you left the brain alone long enough and let it crunch away at the data residing within that it could eventually fabricate its own system of classification and taxonomy? Language, whether it be French or English or Urdu or Chinese, is a communally built system of classification and communication. If you weren't bound by such a system, would your brain eventually invent its own language? Or would it rediscover one that it was genetically predisposed to that exists below social constructions?

And now, because my brain just took off on a series of associated links, I'm wondering what really happened at the Tower of Babel.

symbolic 41: the numbers stations

The most widely available history lesson of the Numbers Stations is the Conet Project, a four CD package released by Irdial Discs. The project contains a good overview of what the stations are in their extensive liner notes as well as the actual recordings of the transmissions which make up the four CD collection. The Stations are shortwave transmitters -- and some have actually been found -- that, on occasion, spark to life and spit out streams of numbers. And, as you can hear on the CDs, the numbers have presence: someone, somewhere, is reading these sequences of digits. To whom? And why? Well, that's the question no government will answer.

The Stations operate without any apparent licenses or support structure. They can be there one day, bleeding regularly into the airwaves, and then gone the next, silent for years before starting up again. The British Government, when finally cornered about the existence of one of the stations emanating from the island, relented and said that yes, they knew about it, but the rest pertained to national security.

The transmissions are most likely some type of one-time pad encryption. One-time pads, if used correctly, are still the most low-tech and unbreakable cipher code system there is. Most cipher systems over the years have been broken because of human error or because the opposition has gotten their hands on a copy of the codebook or key word which enables them to get a handle on the permutation of the cipher. But one-time pads, by their definition, are used once and discarded. And, if you don't have the same combination of letters and numbers, you will never know what the translated text truly is.

The only person who will know is the listener who has their own copy of the one-time pad and who can reverse the substitution. So who's listening? That's the beauty of the shortwave transmission. It could be anyone with a radio tuned to the proper frequency.

They've been running since World War II. People have been talking behind all of our backs for over fifty years. Wonder what they are saying? Georges Maratres and the Lunar Society wondered. Most of them are dead now and Georges has been in a tiny room for several decades, putting his brain back together. And the stations are still talking.

76798 66932 73833 28472 69327 66587
76798 66932 85786 86982 32877 37676
end

symbolic 40: the lunar society

Liz Kimbrel is a member of the reformed Lunar Society, though they don't call themselves by that name. The actual Lunar Society was formed in secret during the Cold War. You see, it plays out like this:

Georges Maratres was a member of the French Resistance during WWII and, due to some specialized background, was deemed useful to an American organization which was following the troops as they took back Europe. This organization -- we'll call it ACE for now -- was tasked with determining just how much occult influence there was in the Nazi regime and whether or not it was something creepy and actually effective or if it was just a brutal and misinformed hobby of the guys in charge. With the end of WWII and the dissolution of any Nazi-based occult organization, ACE returned to the US and brought with them a number of the useful tools which they acquired during the retaking of Europe, both material and personnel.

Georges got a job with the US government and did basic signal intelligence work for them as he settled down and started his new life in the States. Probably a decade or so went by before he started to tumble to something which gave him pause. Something which he had worked on in the Resistance was the interception and deciphering of Allied transmissions. Some of these weren't part of Enigma and were never cracked, deemed either too inconsequential or inconsistent to be worth time and effort or they were exceptionally careful and utilized one-time pads as they should. Either way, Georges has stumbled upon the Numbers Stations which are broadcasting on shortwave bands in the States and recognizes them as the same transmissions which they couldn't break during the war.

He tells his supervisor about his concerns and, a few weeks later, is told to ignore them. The Numbers Stations are part of the jurisdiction of the CIA and other national security agencies and are nothing which he needs to concern himself with. Georges, no stranger to the bureaucratic brush-off and the informal warning which is imbedded in such a "don't worry your pretty little head about it" mandate from management, nods and keeps his suspicions to himself. He starts to listen in private, spending hour after hour in his attic room scanning the shortwave bands where he discovers that there is more than one Number Station.

After a few years of quietly keeping notes and his ears open, Georges discovers that he isn't the only one who is wondering just what in the hell these strange transmissions are. Other members of the private sector are also listening and, unlike George, don't have the same security clearance concerns which he does. They're talking to one another. The core group call themselves the Lunar Society and refer to each other with code names taken from names of lunar geography.

It is a few years before Georges is able to gain their confidence enough to meet some of the members of the Lunar Society. And, once they learn who he actually works for, they begin to consider the possibility of a more active agenda: using Georges and his access to governmental data to figure out what the Stations really are.

This is, of course, where things go wrong. Someone on the other end doesn't want to be found and, as these amateur sleuths start turning up where they shouldn't, the people who know react. The members of the Lunar Society are systematically hunted down and killed.

Georges has no idea that they've been removed. Not yet, at least. He's been trying to get his head together these last thirty years. Trying to dodge the radical treatments, the frontal lobotomy, and the pharmaceutical recovery options. Georges has been locked in a nuthouse for three decades, and he doesn't know that he was the link that got the Lunar Society killed.

Nor does Daniel Caretti. His father was "Tycho" of the original society. He was young enough that he didn't really remember his father's death, but he does know that his mother has always believed there was a larger conspiracy afoot. She pined and died eventually and Daniel came into possession of his father's belongings which included a sealed trunk. Inside the trunk were all of his father's notes about the Lunar Society.

When Georges gets out of the insane asylum and tries to contact his old friends, it is Daniel who recognizes the call sign.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.

THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.

SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.

LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.

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