MAUDE MOLD #39 (2023/05/12)
MAUDE MOLD
#39
by Stanley Lieber
BRAIN FOG
tags: 1967, mars3, piro, tab1, tab2
He couldn’t remember much after that. The world seemed to shift, colors inverting like someone pressing on the front of his visor, but no one seemed interested in acknowledging any changes. Red became green, green became red. Political parties switched sides, bowed to their partners. Converse had always been at war with Pepsi. The war would go on and on. Right on.
MARS3 was already winding down. Together they’d scooped out all the drugs from under the site, undermining the integrity of the whole installation. Homes were starting to collapse, foundations hollowed out from the inside in a passable simulation of normal hierarchical dysfunction. All this without anyone having discovered the serious bug in host authentication that had been present in every new installation for the past several releases.
TAB2 couldn’t think.
"Hey, that black shit’s getting into the coke."
Dad seemed unfazed by social changes, but he did disapprove of miscellaneous debris contaminating his product. He ran over and swatted away the gathering particles from atop Piro’s fresh bales, concussing vortices of the dark whatever it was outwards in a radial pattern, frittering gradually away from his wares.
"Keep your sweat on, it’s just mold."
Piro still never blinked, his big black eyes punctuating any stare down with extreme prejudice. TAB2 caught himself wondering at intervals if the pirate was truly alive, or if he was simply an aggregate model of scraped tropes incorporated without permission from user contributions.
Dog barking, somewhere in the distance. Instruction tuning, persistence of time. TAB2 could swear he heard a lawn mower, but there was no grass on Mars. Only coke.
Although... Maybe up the mountain.
"I wanted to be at CIA, MTV, or Apple," TAB2 sulked, dropping anchor into the quagmire where his many paths not taken overlapped. There was no consoling him whenever he indulged thusly in his despair at the many years that remained on his sentence. And beyond grade school there would be high school. At least.
"You did good," his father said, not really listening. "And take off that fucking mask."
Piro started up the baling machine again.
MAUDE MOLD #38 (2023/05/07)
MAUDE MOLD
#38
by Stanley Lieber
NEW KAMI
tags: 1967, ragnarok, tab1, tab2
4 April.
Before and after TAB2 visited the mountain, regardless of peccadillo, circumstance, or time period, these guys, these beings, not quite gods, had been up there. They just wouldn’t leave, and forcible measures had so far failed, not that they hadn’t been tried, so the government at length saw fit to cut a deal. These guys would stick to their mountain and the Air Force would stop trying to kill them. When no reply came the government declared victory and fucked off back to their test site, sealing off the area with impregnable red tape and instructing all personnel to avoid transgressing the boundary of the foothills.
Spiro Mold’s death had complicated the arrangement. TAB2, driven into the mountains with his apparent grief having eroded his already thin attention to the rules like so much desert topsoil in the infrequent rain, had stepped right into the middle of the dispute, unaware of his role in the continuing land withdrawal drama. The ascetics who sat immobile at the highest elevations shrugged and accepted him into their stubbornly stationary community, but only just. Maybe he could be ransomed? But that would require getting oneself up off of one’s beleaguered ass. TAB2 was happy to finally stop moving. It would be quite a few years until he came back down, even though he had only been gone a few hours.
Of course, bearing new ideas about the current disposition and eventual redistribution of test site resources.
"And just where did you think all this coke was going? Williamsburg?"
TAB1. His dad. Jerked a thumb towards the RAGNAROK, whom from all appearances had been packed full of ticker taped bales of cocaine and was ready for the journey back to Earth.
"I dunno, Palo Alto?"
TAB1 scoffed, suppressing a fatherly grin.
"Lucky guess."
MAUDE MOLD #37 (2023/05/02)
MAUDE MOLD
#37
by Stanley Lieber
ESTABLISHING THE TRANSLOCAL FOUNDER
tags: 1999, earth, plinth_mold
1 October.
Birds like flies near the top of the Chrysler building. Plinth Mold had just announced the next round of layoffs, and already they were circling, waiting to peel face-lifts off of overpriced faces. This one was going to be brutal. Even his wife had to go.
He pressed the switch on his desk, unsure if anyone was still out there, employed or not, on the other side of his big, green door.
"Maude?"
She must have already cleaned out her desk.
Suddenly awakening in his very body, he placed the papers on his desk back into his safe, locked his office, and got the coffee himself. Things would run more smoothly around here from now on. No more substandard prompt engineering filling in the adult diapers with Balls Conkrite, pecker wheat, and scurrilous pablum. Mobile suit god damn.
Only six years into the new epoch and already he’d fucked it all up.
Sports analogy.
MAUDE MOLD #36 (2023/04/28)
MAUDE MOLD
#36
by Stanley Lieber
COLLECTED KEY SECRETS
tags: 1966, mars2, mars3, spiro_mold
31 March.
From beneath the runway the surface appeared as liquid glass, shimmering translucent sheets he recalled skirting the grade school swimming pool, served forth from his ample memory of only yesterday. Spiro stared up at the exposed rafters, wondering if, as it had lately come to seem, grade school really was the whole wide world, after all.
Was he dead? Or had he just fallen through the ground?
Something about TAB2. Man, fuck that guy.
Everything here was covered in black mold, like the wet, mildewy maintenance manuals he’d found stashed in the basement of his old apartment building, or the worst utility closet ever. Spiro surfaced the runway, but it wasn’t much help. He was pretty sure he could see the mold moving in the air. What did it want? Had it always been there? No wonder so many workers went home sick, or never went home at all.
He thought about MARS3 and he was back at MARS3.
Mom was out. Probably at her new new job. He didn’t much feel like going to school, so he didn’t. New apartment, same as the first.
He thought about MARS2 and he was back at MARS2.
Children at play in the melting snow.
Covered in mold.
Why was he seeing this?
MAUDE MOLD #35 (2023/04/22)
MAUDE MOLD
#35
by Stanley Lieber
MAUDE’S NEW NEW JOB
tags: 1967, mars3, maude_mold, piro, tab2
3 January.
"What ho, pirate!"
It was back to school for TAB2, the very next day after coming back from MARS2. No time off for bad behavior. Piro was still moonlighting as a bus driver, pretending nobody knew who he was. He nodded back at the boy, blank as a main sail, and the serpent’s mouth yawned, dilating in anticipation as TAB2 climbed aboard, Piro’s smooth facade still flapping in the morning wind even after TAB2 had taken his seat.
"Yisssssssss," the door hissed.
And they were off.
School at MARS3 was more of the same. Endless scroll backed by a slightly newer software architecture running on slightly older computers, both acquired through the usual combination of lowest bidding and standards compliant corruption. Dad had already made sure the company replaced his discarded visor, so the redundancy annoyed him. The beige boxes and clicky mechanical keyboards represented friction, the bane of harvesting surplus. Which he had thought had been the whole point of the exercise. This e-waste only served to slow him down.
The serpent spit him out at the front gates. Piro closed his flaps, flipping the serpent around and kicking up sand in the faces of nearby sand dunes as he slithered off in the opposite direction. TAB2’s gloves had already logged him in, so he was trapped waiting for his assignments to download. There was no skipping class now without violating the software agreement.
New Teacher.
Spiro’s mom.
MAUDE MOLD #34 (2023/04/19)
MAUDE MOLD
#34
by Stanley Lieber
THIRTY-THREE TRANSMISSIONS
tags: 1966, Æsir, mars2, mars3, sue, tab1, tab2
Off by one.
The Æsir dropped him off back at the tail end of good old 1966, still nine years old, and Robert is your father’s nearest male relative. A serpent picked him up at the foot of the mountain.
Where was he going?
Spiro was still dead. The test site was still closed down. Or, whatever, he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was breathing hard in his respirator, pinching the bridge of his nose until it bruised. He imagined he could see the black mold orbiting, could see what Plinth must be up to. A lot of the workers were probably getting sick. Statistically speaking, somebody was getting sued.
He rode back home, ignoring the regular haptic alerts from his data gloves squeezing his fingers in an apparent imitation of a grinning superior’s handshake. When he could no longer keep his eyes open his unaugmented vision blanked, and so he nearly missed his stop. Sue nudged him gently when at last it was time to disembark, and he clambered off his transport almost remembering where he was going. He made sure not to leave anything behind, and rote learning from earlier in this narrative eased his transition from the solitude and 6XL attire of the mountain lifestyle back to the similarly rat-infested, contemporary walk-up apartment he shared with his father.
Who hadn’t seemed to have missed him.
"Get your go bag. We’re headed back to MARS2."
TAB2 rolled his eyes.
photo by momus, used without permission.
MAUDE MOLD #33 (2023/04/14)
MAUDE MOLD
#33
by Stanley Lieber
WHY WE CALL THEM BROTHERS
tags: 4099, Æsir, ants, mars2, piro, ragnarok, tab1, tab2
1 October.
Gather round children for the tale of why we call them brothers. Many young folk employed at the ranges today are not aware, but ants were not always the dominant life form here at the test site. Before the expansion, before we emerged mandible-over-mandible out of the service namespace, lo, even before the Æsir interjected their moronic evangelism into our creation myths, human beings bestrode these same sands, dispensing their behavior surplus, neither aware nor consenting to its collection by hostile forces.
It was on one such day, oh, I’d say around three thousand years ago, make it late 1957, when TAB1 breached the big hangar on the south end of the runway, calling, as it were, to inquire after his partner Piro’s disposition. But Piro was not in attendance on that morning, gone these several hours pursuing a thread unrelated to our present narrative, instantiating some diverse resource fork, somewhere up the chain. Concurrently, not in parallel. Stipulate that TAB1 encountered an empty hangar. Empty as he understood it up to that point.
There she was.
RAGNAROK, children. The end of days.
Well, she was as beautiful as anything he’d seen. That certainly got his attention. She was long, she was sleek. Glistening pink. The microscopic, fractal triangles comprising her smooth skin reflected wideband, non-ionizing radiation at oblique angles, at least where it didn’t outright ingest it, leaving naught but a barrier of absolute room temperature air to coat her exquisite periphery, like the laminar flow of an air hockey table, or the active wing of a classified aircraft.
I tell you, not even an ant would have adhered to her surface.
TAB1 was smitten beyond words, and I’m not just saying that, I assure you.
Now Piro, born of the RAGNAROK, was a loyal and jealous son. He did not approve of unannounced visitors in the hangar, much less aboard his ship. Even if they were regular passengers. Seriously, he didn’t like it one little bit. He looked in on TAB1 and his mother engaged in... the act.
The RAGNAROK’s doors ajar, forward probes extended. TAB1’s khaki pants around his ankles, United States flag at full mast in the bed of his waist-mounted pickup truck fanny pack. Body parts appearing and disappearing according to some regular, structured pattern reminiscent of human music.
Based upon the immediate descent into silence all involved seemed to agree it was a bad look.
TAB1 had expected for Piro to somewhat pedantically point out the several violations of the flag code currently in evidence, but instead the lonely pirate simply turned on his heels and walked out of the chamber, pretending somewhat implausibly that he’d never seen what his mother and his best friend had been up to, there, inside her body, inside his hangar that was isolated from the rest of the base by a modest-sized marsworks of local dust and soot. If he’d felt some kind of way about it he never let on.
He never mentioned it to anyone.
Later on that same day TAB2 was born.
MAUDE MOLD #32 (2023/04/13)
MAUDE MOLD
#32
by Stanley Lieber
IN LIVING COLOR
tags: 1996, mars2, shit_mold, tab2
14 February. Dusk.
He recognized the place. Formerly known as Tight Impressions, the barber shop where Dad and Piro had got their hair done. Man, a lot had changed.
"Yeah, let me get an espresso and a cinnamon toast." He wasn’t too hungry. Hands on her hips, the waitress rolled her eyes until her hair started moving. Oblivious to the implications, TAB2 reclined in his booth, waiting casually to see what he pulled from the local fanbase. Disappointingly, nobody seemed to recognize him.
"What’s with the hot pants?"
Shit Mold, age six.
"Thirty years I was up the mountain. Apparently, you keep growing even when you’re sitting still."
TAB2, age thirty-eight. Still wearing the same sad clothes from second grade, his arms and legs poking out all over the place in spite of his younger self’s attempts at tight rolling. The overall effect was more Duncan in CLASS ACT (1992) than Kid in HOUSE PARTY (1990). In spite of this it was more like a blown out paper bag than a proper outfit. Somehow, he’d outgrown himself.
Shit cocked his head at an angle, ready to pounce. Then he stopped and sank back down into the booth. He was unsure of how to proceed. Exercising his decision power, he reached down and ripped the legs off his pants, followed by the sleeves of his shirt. Smiling, now, he vomited a friendly little rainbow onto the table.
"This will have to do until I can scam some proper baby clothes," he said, and climbed happily out of TAB2’s booth, off to notify his friends, all of whom had been standing monitoring from a line of bar stools along the soda counter. They dropped their devices flat on the reflective Formica and cheered when Shit validated TAB2’s too-hype, flavor milk gear. Smart tards were dispatched to collect the discarded electronics.
Now, members of the technical staff appeared, clearing the dining room floor of chairs and tables as the establishment’s anachronistic infrared probes, otherwise invisible to onlookers, reflected in the tiny pink lenses of their visors. Soon it would be time for a short interstitial, followed by a series of commercial messages, capped off by a closing musical performance slash rousing dance recital. Aspirants poured into the dining room from an heretofore unnoticed side entrance, freshly divested of a generous cover charge.
Paying customers could do what they wanted to do.
SIMILAR HERE
MAUDE MOLD #31 (2023/04/11)
MAUDE MOLD
#31
by Stanley Lieber
THOT COFFEE
tags: 1996, mars2, tab2
14 February.
The Disk And Executive MONitor woke him. His respirator crowned the pink sand, a replica mountain in miniature, monument to a monumental labor with no one left in charge. Somewhere beneath all this lay our protagonist, cursing the lack of signal strength in his adept’s blind. TAB2 had secluded himself on the mountain for thirty years, and now he couldn’t get back on the network.
Tiny quartz crystals twinkled up at him from the surrounding sands. He scooped a handful into his pocket, dust still falling out of his eyebrows and partially obscuring his already compromised vision. Assuming this wasn’t just frost, he might be able to trade some of it for useful and sundry from whatever remnants of civilization still troubled the Martian desert in this ássforesaken year of 1996. Then again, depending on how bad things had gotten while he was laid up, maybe the locals would even buy frost from a stranger.
He stumbled into town before sunset, not too late for an espresso from Thot Coffee.
MAUDE MOLD #30 (2023/04/11)
MAUDE MOLD
#30
by Stanley Lieber
SIMILAR HERE
tags: 1966, mars2, tab2
31 December.
It really was taking a long time to climb up this hill.
A dialogue box appeared.
SIMILAR HERE
TAB2 clicked. He couldn’t really see what he was doing, and maybe he even missed, but there he was still on the steep side of the mountain, data gloves stabbing wildly into the... whatever it was... and he’d be damned if more of the same didn’t seem like too good an opportunity to pass up.
Things began to happen.
First of all, he was knee-deep in gray mud. Contra dust. The windswept side of the mountain seemed to be meeting him halfway, perhaps even moving in the opposite direction as himself. In any case, suspiciously giving and friendly. He rejected this out of hand, the residue of long training representing a substantial investment by his country. Something he’d internalized through early grade school and on into the present. There was no even-handedness when he was even-handing, so shut the fuck up.
The hill was sliding down on him.
Okay.
He clicked, and clicked.
MAUDE MOLD #29 (2023/04/06)
MAUDE MOLD
#29
by Stanley Lieber
RETROCAUSALITY
tags: 1966, lorraine_ipsum, mars2, tab2
3 December.
Was it taking a long time to walk up this hill, or what?
"You can’t wear that thing up here."
Lorraine Ipsum. Miko.
"What, this? Consider it gone." TAB2 stripped off his visor and tossed it over his shoulder, wondering at the proliferating echoes as it clattered down the trail behind him. Somehow this all seemed familiar. It must have penetrated his prior awareness, however briefly, some number of years ago. But it couldn’t possibly have been that loud.
"No, the respirator," she said, motioning to his apparatus.
"But, I’ll die."
"We’re all dying," she said. He realized she meant presently.
"Yeah, but I need a few extra decades to read all these comic books." He mimed a command sequence purely from memory, suspiciously expert with the possibly-still-classified device. Suddenly, her near vision was filled with a crude, three-dimensional representation of his back issue collection. Like long boxes, receding. He guessed. His visor was gone.
Anyway, what was she doing up here?
"Seriously. You have to take that thing off. I can’t understand a word you’re saying."
TAB2 shook his head.
"Nope," he said again, settling his stance and crossing his arms. When this had no visible effect he simply pushed his way through the torii gate and continued on his way. Easy enough.
"Black mold," he added, over his shoulder.
Lorraine covered her mouth with her hands. Colloquially. Out of habit, that is, rather than any sense of capitulation to TAB2’s overabundance of caution. Belatedly aware of the optics, she pulled them away again and scrambled up the trail after him, her face flush with the effort, her robes flapping in the darkening, dusty wind.
It had been a while since they’d had a visitor.
MAUDE MOLD #28 (2023/04/04)
MAUDE MOLD
#28
by Stanley Lieber
EXCLUSION
tags: 1966, a_person, mars2, mímisbrunnr, mímir, tab2
3 November.
TAB2’s respirator had fogged over his visor. He leaned over Mímir’s well, A. Person staring back up at him from the de-indexed depths. He could still smell it, dark wafts of outgassing black mold from the open burn pits. Well, that had put a tin lid on the whole valley, hadn’t it? He had to get out of there.
"You’re not really alive, are you?" TAB2 eyed his own reflection, still not entirely certain whom he was addressing.
"How am I supposed to answer that?" A. Person replied. The water rippled, irritably, for the entire basis of this interrogation seemed an error condition, an impossible contradiction in terms. His annoyance echoed around the rim of the well, obsessively recapitulating the same historicist preamble to his aesthetically defunct rhetorical situation. Why couldn’t his doppelgänger understand?
Enough of this.
TAB2 pulled on his jacket and continued uprange. North, to the mountains, where he was likewise unwelcome. The families who were staying there had really stayed, and wanted nothing at all to do with leftover refugees from the test site, no matter whom or what their parents might once have been. Piro had given up on exterminating them once he, too, had become convinced that no one back on Earth was keeping track. They, and their goats, were simply staying put, a prim shawl drawn tight around the flesh-colored ridges that straddled the site.
They guarded the mountain.
MAUDE MOLD #27 (2023/04/01)
MAUDE MOLD
#27
by Stanley Lieber
NEW NEW YORK
tags: 1981, earth, maude_mold, piro, plinth_mold, ragnarok, tab2
12 September.
Of course they should have been protecting the mountain. But A only equals A when you control the trademark. TAB2 had nothing to say for himself, which worked out fine since Maude Mold was doing most of the talking.
"How could you not have known anything about this? Weren’t these your guys? When I saw those towers come down, right after I stopped crying, I said to myself, Maude, we’re going to be majorly inconvenienced here. No sooner had I mounted that flag in the bed of my pickup truck than word came down from Plinth the whole winter line had been placed on hold. Hel, now the whole line is on hold. Capitalism is canceled. Not even your brother is allowed to fly. How are we going to move these shipping containers out of the city?"
Piro and his mother had just landed on the roof.
"Speak up, and don’t talk back to me!" Maude shouted, way too close to TAB2’s face to be shouting.
He rocked back on his heels, not about to offer an excuse. His smile was uneasy, and his face glitched uncommercially from an excess of management as his mind raced behind his visor. No, not now. He needed this job. A lot was riding on his burgeoning partnership with Piro. He’d finally be seeing residuals from their ill-considered gains.
Maude fixed him with a hard stare, twitching out a false start every few seconds, as if to telegraph she were about to leap across the desk and strangle him by his leather necktie. He could guess what she must be thinking. Ever since Spiro had died, some fifteen years ago, he couldn’t do a damn thing right as far as she was concerned. Soon as Spiro had gone Maude suddenly remembered she was a parent, and it was as if TAB2 was being made to pay for all her prior twelve years of sleepover mistakes. It was not as if he’d killed the boy or anything. He never even understood why they didn’t get along.
Suddenly she was upon him, unsnapping his leather pants. Her hand plunged in, trawling his UNIQLO underwear for guilty treasure. Too soon?
Abruptly, she stopped.
"I don’t care anymore," she said, surveilling TAB2’s poorly secured thoughts. "Get out. You’re fired."
The worst was coming true but still he had friends. TAB2 made a beeline for the elevator to the roof. To Piro. Auspiciously, he passed Plinth arriving at the office, coming the other way down the corridor just as he egressed the scene of his final dissolution.
"Where are you going?" asked Plinth. "It’s 2:30 in the afternoon. I need those drawings by the end of business today."
"You fired me," TAB2 said.
"I didn’t fire you," Plinth said, and took a sip of his coffee. "There’s a war on."
Looked at his watch, debate concluded. If a human lifespan was 20,000 years, Plinth was a very old man indeed.
TAB2 smiled.
Employment!
MAUDE MOLD #26 (2023/03/30)
MAUDE MOLD
#26
by Stanley Lieber
MARS3
tags: 1966, mars2, spiro_mold, tab2
31 March.
"You’re not supposed to be here."
TAB2 from a distance, the eight year old holding a shoebox full of Mold Industries action figures tucked under his arm. Picked up a rock. Chucked it the twenty yards.
Spiro went down.
Partway up the runway he’d felt a hand on his shoulder, or maybe it was a finger running down his spine. Turned around and there was TAB2, just off the south end, shouting something, probably vulgar, but too far away to be heard clearly. Spiro stood straining his ears until the unseen projectile skinned off the side of his face, sending him spiraling into the pavement, nose down, Paris Air Show ’89. Where he stayed.
TAB2 caught up with him.
"Say, are you all right?"
"When a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is no."
Spiro spat, laying flat on his back as the pesky youngster skylined himself against the dusky firmament, twin moons surfacing the waning daylight to frame TAB2’s visored visage like a pair of Kenner TIE fighters mustering for a critically important, late-day strafing run. The spit landed back on his face.
"Your face is fucked."
Indeed, Spiro’s cheek had split in two, strange colors pouring out of him. His skin was puking rainbows. He rolled over onto his stomach, face down, purposely draining his life’s blood onto the slowly cooling tarmac. But death seemed to be ghosting him, and TAB2 couldn’t help but feel responsible.
"Tell you what," TAB2 began. "I’ll just give this back to you."
He dug into his shoebox and produced a wax cylinder, tossed it into Spiro’s lap. It looked familiar.
"My apartment’s only a couple hundred miles from here. If we get started now we can be home by, oh, I’d say the first of October."
Spiro looked around.
"I’m calling Sue."
Cells collapsing, he melted into the runway.
MAUDE MOLD #25 (2023/03/28)
MAUDE MOLD
#25
by Stanley Lieber
VEILED ENTRY
tags: 1966, mancamp, mars2, odin, spiro_mold
31 March.
Mom never changed, and this place hadn’t either. Spiro stood mock vigil in the kitchen next to Odin, finally allowing himself to see the place as it was, as it had always been. Debris from the night the microwave exploded were still scattered across the kitchen floor, laying at cross-purposes to the rust stains on the yellow linoleum. Odin was still there, too, his white hair puffed up absurdly at attention all over the mottled smörgåsbord of his devastated body. Spiro inched past him into the dining room, careful to avoid spoiling the scene of the crime. At least this war was over.
He had considered this place background, something to offset the cleverness of his t-shirt, a place to throw his locked trapper keeper, but in its absence the whole context of his reactionary lifestyle had changed. He hadn’t intended it, for his essential self to become so tightly coupled with the disposition of a shitty apartment in a mancamp operated by a contractor to the U.S. government, but, oh well, identity was a scam, anyway.
Dad’s safe was empty.
His own room remained wickedly wrecked, just as he’d left it. This wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but still it disappointed him, as it diverged stubbornly from some (he realized) cherished sense of the place as he would liked to have remembered it.
The old test site had been shut down, surplused, liquidated. The mancamp was empty. The transports run off. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
Spiro tipped over Odin on his way out, making sure the disabled elder god went all the way down, face mashing into the floor. Forensics be damned.
Made his way uprange.
Into the wider world.
MAUDE MOLD #24 (2023/03/26)
MAUDE MOLD
#24
by Stanley Lieber
CONVERTING THE DEMON WITH NINE HEADS
tags: 1966, kintsugi, mars3, piro, sadbeard
27 February.
"Corporations are people, but how can you tell if they’re white?"
This again.
Kintsugi finished his filet-o-fish and moved on to the other side of the porch. Sadbeard could be so... sad, sometimes. Kintsugi really felt sorry for him. The pirate was laser focused on property rights as the locus of political power at the rapidly expanding replacement test site. And, maybe he was right. Just look at the boss’ own holdings. The de facto alignment of policy with profits. The slack dispersal of dividends amongst certain of his men. Redline laws. But, did Sadbeard even consider Japanese to be white? And, what did this arbitrary construction of race matter to him, anyway? Events of the next few moments hinged upon his answer.
Kintsugi waited, but Sadbeard had stopped talking. He found himself fondling his receipt. Already he’d nearly worn a hole in the crumpled yellow paper, the thermal dot matrix lettering rubbing off on his fingers even as he read and reread the manifest: Sadbeard, Kintsugi. Sadbeard, Kintsugi. Sadbeard’s name always appearing first on the list, in spite of Kintsugi’s superior rating in virtually every category tracked by the company’s metrics. They’d been alive barely a year and already some things never changed.
A serpent appeared. Sadbeard and Kintsugi boarded, by now resorting to the time-honored cold war cold shoulder. Purely textbook, Kintsugi just wouldn’t talk to him unless he had to. Sat down on the other end of the transport. Hopefully Sadbeard would take the hint.
"Do you think we should kill the boss?" Sadbeard said, ignoring the seconds old verbal détente.
Soft creak of faux leather from somewhere up the line of high-backed rows, probably near the driver’s seat.
Piro inspected the scene via rearview mirror.
He put the serpent in gear.
MAUDE MOLD #23 (2023/03/25)
MAUDE MOLD
#23
by Stanley Lieber
TUMMY RUBBISH
tags: 1966, mars3, maude_mold, tab2
5 January.
The Bifröst flag flapped on the front of Maude’s new apartment building as she loaded old hard drives onto the little wooden shelf Plinth had mounted on her bedroom wall. Sometimes memories were good.
She secured the shelf with her thumbprint and locked her room. Spiro would still be at school, but he was far from the only little shit running around here. Some of them didn’t even bother with their classes. They probably got in here when she was gone. Wait ’til she caught one...
"For it is the lot of some men to be assigned duties about which they may not speak. Such work is not for every man. But those who accept the burdens implicit in this silent labor realize a camaraderie and sense of value known to few. These memories cannot be stolen. They will last always, untarnished, ever better."
TAB2’s stomach hurt. He removed his visor and tried to wipe the words away, but the unwanted message remained flashing in his near vision. God, Dad. Nearly two years past his installation date, he still wasn’t used to this thing. Not really. They were always fixing things in front of his eyes. And then there were the waves and currents of pixel floaters, miscegenating disparate objects and connecting the square dots in a confusing moire that—he’d rather be left alone. Some conclusions he still wanted to stave off.
He was here.
"Hey, Maude," he said, as the older woman squinted down at him and exhaled purple smoke directly into his face.
"Stay out of my room," she said, and slammed the screen door behind her.
MAUDE MOLD #22 (2023/03/24)
MAUDE MOLD
#22
by Stanley Lieber
LOCAL GHOSTS
tags: 1965, mars2, spiro_mold, sue
1 October.
The transition was winding down. Families were expected to have vacated the mancamp by close of business on 31 December, tits and all. Get your shit and hit the door. Auld acquaintances were about to be forgot.
Transit betwixt MARS2 and MARS3 was reliable and cheap. Spiro had taken to making the trip on his days off from school. The new facility was still taking its first tentative steps on shaky newborn legs, so Spiro was able to ship himself back and forth several times a week and no one much missed him in class. It was a long trip, but at least the serpents had cable.
Spiro reclined on his cushioned seat, his bald head acquiescing to the mandatory imprint of a pink doily draped over top, representing the serpent’s last line of defense against human colonization. It hadn’t saved the rest of the seat. He decided to inspect the CATV once again for injection attacks before finally releasing himself entirely from liability. He flipped on the switch. For all his efforts he was unable to guarantee what might come out of the screen.
Presently there appeared an external view of the serpent (a visible descendant of last year’s school buses, but nobody who hadn’t been there would have recognized the fact), frame rate in sync with moments of unsupported transport when it broke contact with the ground and appeared to float, glowing genially above the cooling Martian sand. Such a display inspired the feeling of being stared at, and Spiro quickly switched it off.
"Welcome, Spiro," said Sue.
Spiro recognized her voice.
MAUDE MOLD #21 (2023/03/23)
MAUDE MOLD
#21
by Stanley Lieber
GORGON DEFAULTS
tags: 1964, mars2, jerrymander_mold, santa_claus, tab2, trolls, ymir
25 December. Morning.
The children who didn’t believe in Santa Claus hadn’t minded at all when he got shot down. Trolls popping up everywhere; the Ymir giant suddenly coalescing out of thin ice; all of these things were of secondary importance to stabilizing the flow of behavioral surplus from farm, to table, to manager, who were themselves only following orders from higher up the chain. Simply put, the gods were out of ideas and needed to huff the secondhand exhaust of humans in order to to make themselves feel sane again. For their part the children were happy to oblige, interacting with the scenario in real time, calibrating the automatic urban legends until Santa had made himself all too obnoxious to the powers that be. And then the missiles had gone up.
"We’ve gotta get these guys back in their bubbles."
Jerrymander was still fiddling with his desktop settings. The ground flickered pink and then gray, pink and then gray, suggesting an impending aesthetic revelation that nevertheless continued to eluded Jerrymander’s conscious perception. TAB1 punched him in the arm to get his attention, inducing the (very) old man to rock in his Brooks Brothers shoes, the fist-shaped indentation slowly filling in as Jerrymander found himself inexplicably resisting the urge to complain.
The Gorgon defaults would have to do, for now.
They crossed the battlefield, trudging over mismatched limbs and disconnected appendages, gathering up whatever seemed to be in good enough condition to recard and sell as new. The layers of wack on wack crime baffled them—most of these idiots had killed each other, quite independent of the lightning from god—but this, too, was part of the job. The gods and trolls provided permanent OPFOR, serving as a foil for the observations of the children. They were not themselves the product, but merely its abandoned carcass.
MAUDE MOLD #20 (2023/03/22)
MAUDE MOLD
#20
by Stanley Lieber
GORGON CHRISTMAS
tags: 1964, mars2, santa_claus, tab2, trolls
24 December. Late.
"Yes, a lack of working capital is holding me back."
"No, I’m not clicking that."
"Thanks."
"Bye."
Last Christmas, TAB2 had clicked. It had been a bit of a disaster, ultimately leading to his manager putting him on steps, and he’d never even claimed the working capital. This year, if he had anything to say about it, he wasn’t getting red teamed by H.R ever again. All of his contraband was safely squirreled away in the wall behind his manager’s desk, not even making animal noises or trying to chew through the drywall. He had gotten it done. No more tears.
The trolls lived under the hills which they cranked up in order to peer at the outside world. Dotting the Christmas desert were circular, sprinkled perforations marring the otherwise unblemished complexion of the winter frost, like Oreoes pitched into a glass of milk, or the hindquarter of the original prototype model of the Millennium Falcon. It looked good enough to eat (or play with), if the trolls had been into that sort of thing. As it was they hated Disney, and so they bided their time, staying hungry, which according to local slang must have been a good thing, but mostly just complained amongst themselves about products they intended to buy.
Across the surface of Mars hills clicked back into place as Santa’s sleigh swept the horizon. Chatter online indicated his craft had been spotted gleaming the frozen, shimmering atmosphere twenty minutes prior. All around the world children scrolled feverishly, scouring their Gorgon feeds for war or rumors of war.
I mean, why else would he possibly be here?
