MAUDE MOLD #13 (2023/03/11)
MAUDE MOLD
#13
by Stanley Lieber
WHO KNOWS, WHO DECIDES, AND WHO DECIDES WHO DECIDES
tags: 1961, mancamp, mars2, maude_mold, odin, spiro_mold
2 October. Early.
Spiro let himself in and dropped his backpack on the living room floor. It had been a long walk home. He noticed the mess, of course, and at first he found himself reflexively stomping on the heavy metals and plastics, thinking there had been another impromptu invasion of cockroaches. Never fear, it was only more of Mom’s junk. Regardless, he’d still have to clean it all up. At least this would necessitate mandatory time off from the beige box, analytics be damned. He fetched the broom and pan from the utility closet and swept the pretty gore into the trash.
He decided against touching anything in the kitchen. Mom was going to be mad, but you had to draw the line somewhere, and his was drawn right in front of the pantsless man staring out the window at the transit of Phobos.
Heading down the hallway to his room he could hear her talking to someone via remote telepresence. Maybe his dad?
"I can come over there, but not every single day. When I am there you don’t want to hear anything I have to say. I feel like I’m in the way. Why are you even paying me? Anyway, I’ve heard Lockheed has poisoned the well."
He could see through the crack in her door that she was fiddling with her glove, trying to get the thing off, but, leveraging its monopoly on decision power, it wasn’t budging. He saw her set down her cigarette and take her ungloved hand and give the finger to her gloved hand. Shortly afterward her conversation seemed to terminate. Played to extinction, the glove finally released its previously consensual grip and slid onto its charger, which she promptly kicked off the dresser onto the floor.
Spiro moved quickly down the hall to his room.
He had survived his birthday, only just.
MAUDE MOLD #12 (2023/03/10)
MAUDE MOLD
#12
by Stanley Lieber
RADICAL INDIFFERENCE REDUX
tags: 1961, Æsir, mancamp, mars2, maude_mold, odin, plinth_mold
1 October.
The nascent lifeform on the kitchen floor never made it off of the linoleum. Odin stood transfixed as his actions fell into sync with the MIRV lightning uprange. He was still staring out the window over the kitchen sink when Plinth strolled in, crushing his spent cigarette on the floor, inadvertently (?) putting a stop to the áss aborning.
Odin remained frozen in time, furiously willing himself to invisibility, and, at last, in spite of the sudden feeling of powerlessness over his predicament that had so enraptured him, it seemed to work. "Azure, two clouds proper, one issuing from sinister chief and one issuing from dexter base, a cubit arm in armour in bend, issuing from the sinister, the hand grasping a branch of olive proper, and three lightning flashes gules," he muttered. Plinth didn’t seem to notice him as he stepped over the mess and strode casually into the living room.
"Where is the child?" he asked Maude, raising an eyebrow at the destroyed PC, but notably, not actually raising the subject. If pressed he would have to admit he didn’t even know what a PC was.
"Out," Maude said, pawing at the air with a gloved hand as she spoke. Scrolling, he guessed. "Did you hear Jack Northrop has left the planet?"
Plinth repaired to their shared bedroom, scene of oh so many crimes, where he opened the wall safe and retrieved a wax cylinder. He carried this out of the room in a brown paper bag, looking like nothing so much as a very rich man condescending to the liquor store himself, owing to some screw-up with the staff. He lit up another cigarette off of the cherry Maude extended with her solitary ungloved hand.
He remembered that hand, considered its uses.
Maude seemed distracted, so he left her to it.
He left the apartment.
MAUDE MOLD #11 (2023/03/09)
MAUDE MOLD
#11
by Stanley Lieber
WONDERFUL ÁSS
tags: 1961, Æsir, mars2, maude_mold, odin
1 October.
Maude felt bad. Odin was the áss. He’d knocked over Spiro’s computer, destroying the CRT, and, most likely, the CPU. Buckling-spring keyswitches lay strewn about the dining room carpet. She’d have a hard time returning the thing, now. Oh, well, there were probably more disused units back at Plinth’s office. Nobody would notice if she made off with another one.
But first she had to get rid of Odin.
Maude reviewed the uncontract. No, there was nothing here but code. Either the operation completed without error or it didn’t. Undo had not been implemented.
A crash from the kitchen. Odin’s wide-load elbows again, flapping like a lot lizard working the passenger door on a big rig. The microwave, she guessed.
There wasn’t much time to get him out of the apartment and to fold up the plastic tarpaulin from on top of the couch. Forensic hygiene was already a lost cause. Maude knew the jig was up, but fully-automated adultery had never been a sport for quitters.
Odin ripped off the spoiled condom and lobbed it into the kitchen trash. The little yellow trash can reeled from the impact of his heavy load, biting its lip in mute perseverance. It wobbled from side to side, finally tipping to the floor and surrendering its contents across the fractal remains of the microwave, pretty as you please, in precisely the kind of artistic flourish forever absent from Odin's married life.
The hair on the back of his legs stood up.
MAUDE MOLD #10 (2023/03/08)
MAUDE MOLD
#10
by Stanley Lieber
TEACHER, TEACHER
tags: 1961, mars2, piro, spiro_mold, tab2, wendy_melvoin
1 October.
Part of the contract was picking up a few undergraduate classes between milk runs. The transports puked them out, and Piro got on with teaching them to read. Or, rather, to think. No refunds.
"Mr. Bright! Mr. Bright!"
Piro pushed his milk bottle glasses back up his nose, bringing the noisy youth into sharper focus. He knew this child of old. Like all of the other students here, this specimen was the progeny of specialists stationed at the test site. In this case, his sometimes partner, TAB1.
That would make this child TAB2.
"This discussion software suuucks. I get an e-mail notification about a new reply in the thread, but the embedded link only takes me to the top of the discussion page, not to the actual post in the thread that by now has hundreds of replies. How is this supposed to work?"
Piro waited for him to finish complaining.
"Participation in the discussion represents one third of your final grade. Your initial discussion post must address at least one of the discussion board topic questions. Respond to at least three other students by either strengthening or weakening their argument. For full credit, all initial posts must be between one hundred to two hundred fifty words and include supporting references where appropriate. Please submit your initial post by Wednesday at 23:59 and all follow-up posts by Sunday at 23:59. The discussions grading rubric is used for this assignment."
"That was... totally unresponsive," TAB2 said.
Piro dinged his helmet.
"Figure it out."
Spiro, observing placidly in his sniper’s blind near the back of the classroom, decided against making a snide comment.
Just then the bell rang, and everyone turned over their desks, clambered outside to climb all over the school’s rusty old SU-27, on static display at the playground since the Bush administration. Their milk had all spilled, and papers were blowing out of the open door, likewise reminiscent of security during the Bush era. Piro kept these observations to himself.
Students egressed, Ms. Melvoin entered smoothly, nursing a hot coffee in an X-Men mug, presumably non-alcoholic.
"Those kids are going to fall off of that thing and bust their asses," she said.
Piro stared at her over his glasses.
"No SU-27 has ever killed an American."
MAUDE MOLD #9 (2023/03/07)
MAUDE MOLD
#9
by Stanley Lieber
NEW PALIMPSEST
tags: 1961, Æsir, mars2, tab1
1 October. Early.
The Æsir had founded the test site. Discovered it, he guessed. It was here before he was, put it that way. Cold at night. TAB1 scanned the desert and imagined the flat plane of frost resolving into a three thousand word SPIN cover story about Juliana Hatfield. He remembered reading this. She’d gained favor with some áss up the chain, and now every time words were committed to paper her name must needs be mentioned. All right.
Completely unlike his own assignment here. He’d backtrack across the blank desert, unknowingly carrying out the same tests and capturing the same data that had not been properly preserved so many times before. Nobody would be reading his reports, either. Whatever product this was supporting had better be good.
It was snowing.
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MAUDE MOLD #8 (2023/03/04)
MAUDE MOLD
#8
by Stanley Lieber
RADICAL INDIFFERENCE
tags: 1961, fng, mars2, maude_mold, spiro_mold
29 September.
"Get out, I’m fucking the new guy."
Maude shut the door in Spiro’s face. He heard the click of the lock, her hand slipping away from the doorknob. He waved his own hand in front of the sensor, and there at his own front door nothing happened. Frowning, he tightened the straps on his backpack and kicked rocks back to the bus stop.
It would be a while yet before the transports finished delivering students and cut back over to commercial traffic. He decided to walk the four miles to the edge of the dead zone, where he could get decent bandwidth to Earth. Not that he expected good news...
Maude resumed the living room, wearing little more than the smirk Spiro would always associate with her face. Her cigarette dangled even as her satin robe clotted around her ankles, joining our program already in progress. FNG was staring, discombobulated, or else he might have thought to ask who had been at the door. As it was he almost remembered why he was here.
Maude straddled him, still smirking. It almost seemed as if her face was stuck that way.
"Give me that cigarette," FNG said, swiping it out of her mouth and clamping his own rough lips around its machine-printed silhouette.
Maude shrugged in the nude, with FNG’s hands all over her.
Oh, yes.
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MAUDE MOLD #7 (2023/03/03)
MAUDE MOLD
#7
by Stanley Lieber
REIDENTIFICATION
tags: 1961, mars2, jerrymander_mold, tab1
10 August.
"The voices say I’m crazy, but fuck those guys."
Jerrymander, perpetually shifting shapes in the dirt. This time he’d brought along tools. A stiff-bristled brush and a cigar large enough to deform his speech, which ended up being irrelevant to his purposes, anyway. So far this morning he’d excavated a man-sized plot off the north end of the runway. Oblivious to the optics, he squatted in his usual peculiar posture, twerking gently in time with his near-continuous verbalizations. Finally he stood up, dusting the residual carcass of Mars from his prize.
Presented it for comment. THE JOURNAL OF AUTODIDACTIC STUDIES, SELF-PUBLISHED. September, 1977 issue. Nobody said a word.
"Completes the set!" he finally shouted into the rising wind. This had apparently been a long time coming. Years ago he had mailed his last copy of the issue to someone who’d expressed vague interest online, and now he’d finally recovered an intact example. Here, of all places.
As usual, TAB1 was minding his elder. The man was typically confused. He glanced at the novelty publication but was unable to muster much interest in light of the day’s slate of higher-priority activities. There was too much he had to keep track of, and owing to this latest distraction he was already certain he was forgetting something important. No room in local storage to form novel affinities.
Jerrymander flicked his cigar towards the runway, where it skittered tentatively across the tarmac like an experimental aircraft ready to drop its overclocked propulsion and collapse into a heap of foul-smelling tobacco ash. Rolled up the key back-issue and shoved it into his back pocket. Then he walked over to the edge of the runway and retrieved the still-smoldering cigar butt, plugged it back into his mouth, and secured a firm seal on the shaft as if he’d never spit it out.
"What do you want from me?" he said, blowing a chemtrail of perfectly round smoke rings into TAB1’s face.
He knew TAB1 was obliged to follow him anywhere.
MAUDE MOLD #6 (2023/03/02)
MAUDE MOLD
#6
by Stanley Lieber
INTO THE WHITE WORLD
tags: 1961, mars2, spiro_mold, sue
10 August.
These colors don’t run. The familiar red, white, and blue flag of the Russian Federation over the slogan, a bumper sticker some smartass had stuck to the side of the school bus. Spiro waved his hand over the sensor and climbed aboard.
Kids were packed in like too many comics in a short box. There were no empty seats. Instinctively, Spiro turned to the bus driver, but this was an optionally manned vehicle. He sat down in the arbitrary driver’s seat.
After a prolonged period of setbacks both fiscal and technical, the new school buses had progressed from nighttime to daytime operations, migrating out of the black at least partially into the white world. Students still needed to be moved from their apartments in the mancamp to their classrooms over in the next county, and someone up the chain had hit upon the idea of putting them (the school buses, not the students) to honest work. One thing had led to another, and after an extended litigation in which it looked like the primary contractor’s preference for Ghost Gray might carry the day, the transports were all painted School Bus Yellow and deployed to the south end of the range.
It seemed to be going well.
Spiro had not been apprised of any of this. But he also didn’t know that the school buses were only one variant out of seventeen separate models derived from the same airframe during the past five years. All of which were referred to as "Sue," in honor of the Soviet-era Sukhoi SU-27, an aircraft that had first flown in 1977, and was somehow still generating new model variants even after time had rolled over and then righted itself back to 1961. This might also have explained the Russian flag, come to think of it.
Sue was Spiro’s school bus.
"You’re sitting on my outfit," Sue said, and Spiro obligingly migrated down the aisle in a vain effort to locate a vacant seat that did not in fact seem to exist.
… (2023/03/01)
MAUDE MOLD #5 (2023/03/01)
MAUDE MOLD
#5
by Stanley Lieber
STELLAR CARTOGRAPHY
tags: 1961, mars2, fng, jerrymander_mold, tab1
9 August. Late.
FNG’s first day at the test site had proven somewhat anticlimactic. The very first thing TAB1 had told him was not to get too comfortable because the project would likely be winding down soon. This had elicited a snort from Jerrymander Mold. Or, maybe that was just the cocaine.
The transports had seemed fine. None had completed an actual test milestone, as of yet, but he could see from the fact they were riding around all over the range inside of them that the test program must be well and truly underway. Surely he hadn’t been brought all the way out here only to be shipped right back home?
No.
TAB1 was in his ear every morning with a fresh itinerary. This, this, and that. FNG didn’t understand the insistence on voice communications. Nothing was ever written down. How did they keep it all straight?
The visor was already gouging a deep canyon into the bridge of his nose. To dilapidate a metaphor. He always wanted to take it off but he found he kept having to slip it back on in order to accept a call from one of his coworkers. Finally he just kept it on.
There had been little discussion of what he was and was not allowed to talk about with his neighbors in the mancamp. FNG was appalled at the lack of protocol, in general, but who was there to complain to, on Mars? He was the fucking new guy. People here just seemed to stumble around wherever they liked. Usually, it seemed to him, chaperoned solely by their vices, which were numerous and exotic far beyond Jerrymander’s quaint Earth practices.
FNG had managed to get a pretty good look at this place from the air.
He decided to venture downrange.
MAUDE MOLD #4 (2023/02/28)
MAUDE MOLD
#4
by Stanley Lieber
ACTUATION
tags: 1961, mars2, spiro_mold, qualia
9 August.
Spiro led the dog on its leash, which he’d read was a mistake. But otherwise they’d never have made it out of the front yard, so he accepted that he contained multitudes. Qualia paid no attention to his commands, and had hardly touched her food. He didn’t know what to do with her, but he couldn’t let her shit in the apartment, and his mom didn’t want it in the yard, either.
Activity uprange. Spiro reversed direction.
One drawback of living in the mancamp was proximity to all the strange goings-on that he wasn’t supposed to know about, which at times included literal high-powered explosions. Spiro was for some reason technically authorized to access all areas, but he wasn’t supposed to venture uprange unannounced, and he knew for a fact they didn’t want dog shit on the runway. He led the dog away from the access road and out onto the unformatted desert. The morning sun had finally dispersed all the gray. Everything was once again back to normal. Wall to wall pink, all along the way.
Qualia shit in the soft sand.
"Good girl," Spiro said.
She wasn’t doing it for him.
… (2023/02/28)
MAUDE MOLD #3 (2023/02/25)
MAUDE MOLD
#3
by Stanley Lieber
LOW RED MOON
tags: 1961, mars2, fng, jerrymander_mold, spiro_mold, tab1
9 August.
So, in the middle of his blowjob he looks up and expects to see, like, a bunch of dead grey rock and shit, right?
Hunt-uh. This was not what he expected, right?
He near to smashed every switch on his control board when he finally saw it. There, down in a rather large crater on the dark side of the moon, was the biggest resort hotel he had ever seen. Actually, it looked to him like there was a whole little town down there, right? So he drew his craft in closer from the night sky, to get a closer look at whatever the fuck was going on.
He barely pulled away in time to miss being disintegrated by the deflector shield. Coming by on another, more liberally distanced pass, his sensors informed him that there was what appeared to be a giant plexi-plastic bubble over the city. A sort of glass ceiling, if you will.
So, what does he do? Why, he blasts a hole in it, of course.
Down on the ground, a little boy had let his dog out to see a man about a horse. He was standing there, in his backyard, looking up at the night sky, when he sees this guy’s craft come crashing through the bubble.
Well, the craft’s blasters apparently hadn’t been enough to handle the bubble’s natural bio-genic feedback, and so he was sent hurdling to the surface. The craft touched down in the boy’s neighbor’s (who weren’t home at the time) backyard. The child raced over, but his dog hadn't finished pissing, see? All over his Asics.
The boy and his dog found the charred remains of this guy and his mistress, right? So he runs home, and his folks (first thing) get a hold of the press.
Next day. The headline reads:
ALIENS CRASH LAND ON EARTH.
Now. Where’s my cocaine?
FNG looked around. TAB1 was still staring straight up, sans visor, peering through the pink clouds at some distant, though persistently incoming pink object. No one had brought any cocaine.
"No one brought any cocaine," he said.
"I spoke but rhetorically," Jerrymander sighed. He leaned down and snorted the ground, his two nostrils presently caked with sand.
About a mile downrange Spiro had set out with his dog.
MAUDE MOLD #2 (2023/02/24)
MAUDE MOLD
#2
by Stanley Lieber
ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
tags: 1961, mars2, maude_mold, spiro_mold
9 August.
"Fuck, Mom!"
Spiro Mold, age seven.
"Jesus Christ!" he added. His scream vibrated in the strings of the family’s upright piano, untouched by slender hands these past few weeks.
"There is no Jesus Christ," scolded Maude Mold. "Figure it out."
Spiro was seated at the kitchen table, upon which had been mounted various bits of sinister looking hardware, which probably weighed more than he did. A CRT, a beige rectangular box, and a heavy, mechanical keyboard, all in metal casing. The woman had called it a computer. Spiro was incredulous. The power requirements alone would have dwarfed that of his RF gear. Its shielding seemed dubious. What was he supposed to do with this thing?
"You’re gonna need to know all about this kind of stuff if you want to get a job someday," Maude continued.
Ah.
"But I don’t want to get a job someday," Spiro stated the obvious. "You’re always gone. You’re never happy. You have no idea who I am."
She allowed as much.
"Furthermore, you don’t make enough money to convince yourself all of this is worthwhile. You haven’t joined the search for a new asset class, nor have you innovated a new commodity at virtually zero cost. You’re surviving, not living. No matter what the stats say. Lacking any sense of ambition, your actions are a net drag on the economy. I don’t suppose this device has fixed any of that."
Again, she couldn’t argue.
"But you’re going to keep doing this anyway," he said. "Going to work, coming home. Going to work, coming home. Hypocritically micromanaging my future at the expense of straightening out your own life."
"Yes," she said.
Spiro turned on the machine.
MAUDE MOLD #1 (2023/02/23)
MAUDE MOLD
#1
by Stanley Lieber
SMART TARDS
tags: 1961, fng, jerrymander_mold, mars2, tab1
9 August.
Gray over gray. No way to differentiate sky from skidmarks, save for the sporadic roar of transports kickflipping the gap. One had just landed.
Jerrymander Mold crouched in the dust.
TAB1 was standing. Squatting had never agreed with him, what with his factory second back. Here, the dry air had seemed to ease the regular pace of his chronic incapacitation, but still he was taking no chances.
TAB1 stood.
The transports were drunk, disgorging new users into the sand, careless with coarse dribbles of ornamental vomit. The new accounts stumbled around, likewise confused. It would take time for all present to customize their settings, some of them never quite satisfying themselves that the task had been accomplished. Tweaking even as they powered down.
Jerrymander drew a fresh white rectangle into the gray sand. He arrowed down and the text advanced at his pleasure. He looked up, then killed the window.
FNG was with TAB1, sampling statistical data from user exhaust. He was still getting his sea legs, here in the desert. He kept trying to access the admin panel, and TAB1 kept slapping his hand away. Use your local tools, he said.
The sun rose, and the gray desktop background slowly resolved into pink. An unauthorized modification.
"A demonstration of instrumentarian power," TAB1 began. he gestured with one glove, then the other. Made jazz hands. The puddle of users began to curdle, then writhe, then spontaneously it self-organized into a flash mob of fierce individualists, each partisan eager to impart a sudden, strongly held opinion about something neither TAB1 or FNG had ever heard of. TAB1 mimed washing his hands of the whole affair, and the body of smart tards resumed aimlessly milling around in the dust, frequently bumping into each other and verbalizing sub-lingual grunts and guffaws.
The sun was getting hot. TAB1 wiped his visor with his data gloves, and then took them off.
"Plinth says it’s time to go."
Jerrymander had stood up, now, presently casting a series of oddly shaped shadows betwixt the precincts of TAB1 and FNG, disenfranchising a fair amount of sand. He looked around.
"Where did all the school buses go?"
… (2023/02/22)
… (2023/02/19)
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