Fables of Failure Read online

  Twenty-seven bolt-action rifles prepared to fire. Time slowed, but not as much as it was going to. I pulled the pallid corpse of a pixie from my pocket. It was no bigger than a grasshopper, but I could still make out the gleam of death in its bug eyes. I inserted its head into my left nostril and inhaled deeply. The pixie’s head exploded in my nose, flooding every brain cell I had with supernatural neurotransmitters.

  The high is indescribable. It’s broadly conceded that I am the best writer in my field. I’m the best at using the language as a cacaphonic symphony and a lethal weapon. So when I say that something is indescribable, one is wise to take my word for it and not write it off as a cop-out. The world doesn’t slow down, and I don’t speed up. I don’t do anything; the stimulus comes, and I respond to it as naturally as I would blink or breathe. I allow Mickey to fall safely into a trough of mucky water; I allow the bullets to miss me; I allow them to hit the flag suckers. The gunfight is a dance that I choreographed years ago, when I was in the womb. I shake the barrels of the zombies’ guns like the hands of an old friend. This is what they mean when they talk about ‘Martial Arts.’ I see a cosmos of significance in every blood spatter.

  The decapitated pixie corpse fell out of my hand. Mickey climbed out of the trough, dripping mossy water. “How did you do that?” He asked.

  “I’m a professional.” I told him. “I know what I’m doing.”

  5

  The Flag-Suckers had left their shops wide open, so we had our pick of supplies. At last I could address the real task at hand—finding an Adventurer-Hero I could write an article about. It occurred to me that I was approaching the task all wrong. The way to learn about Adventurer- Heroes was not to try to find one and ask to tag along. If I really wanted to get the job done quickly, I would need to stage some sort of event that would compel someone powerful to put one of their heroes on the case.

  An inventory of the Flag-Sucker shops made clear that I had access to a lot of weaponry, survival gear, and Royal Guard surplus. If I could raise an army, I could stage a raid and easily raze a village, or at least bring about enough carnage to get a hero on the scene. No, that wouldn’t work. I wasn’t addressing the issue in an intelligent manner. I was acting as if the nobles and the Royal Governors had the slightest interest in protecting villagers. I’d have more luck attacking the Archives and trying to get my hands on sensitive information.

  A crow was trying to remove one of the Flag-Sucker’s eyeballs. This reminded me of optometry, which then led my train of thought to the next station, which was medicine. I felt sure that the biggest repository of Provisian dark secrets had to be the Genetic Labs, a joint venture run by the monarchist blue bloods and the Provisian Pharmaceutical Corporation. An attack on this compound would surely provoke action by an Adventurer-Hero, and it would be cake to get an interview with the hero if I could set someone else up to take the fall for the raid.

  I used a stolen typewriter and forged a letter to the Vocal Villager under a rival journalist’s name.

  BREAKING NEWS!

  I just witnessed agents of the Provisian Pharmaceutical Corporation massacre a group of so-called ‘Flag-Sucker’ zombies who had mysteriously regained the ability to speak. There have been conflicting reports, but several villagers claim that the zombies were relating details of how an experimental class-specific virus had escaped from the Genetic Labs and caused their undead condition. Angry villagers have seized the supplies in the abandoned Flag-Sucker encampment north of Oily Peaks and organized a resistance movement under the leadership of a mysterious figure who wears a gas mask and camouflage.

  Please consider sending more of our reporters to investigate.

  Sir Robert Wolfram

  I called Mickey over. The kid looked miserable, slouching yet tense. Like our cart mule, I had pushed this sad little fucker well beyond his limits, and it was time to cut him loose. “Mickey,” I said, “You can consider your bond to me cancelled if you deliver this letter safely to the Vocal Villager office in Briarstone.”

  6

  I looked at the militant villagers through the goggles of my gas mask. For the millionth time, I marveled at myself. I am a puppet master. To talk about writing or journalism is to do wordcraft injustice. I practice bibliomancy. I had written a pack of lies under someone else’s name and sent it to the office of some leftist rag. And now, a rebel army had materialized before me, ready to help me combat a rapacious medical establishment that I had conjured out of thin air. They looked the part, too. A casual observer could have taken them for Levellers or Panarchists. They covered their faces with bandannas and wore makeshift armor made from old boiled leather and blacksmith gear. A part of me wondered if I had missed my calling. If I could strike a lie like flint and ignite the haze of peasant ignorance into such a blaze of fury, maybe I should have been the revolutionary messiah that the poor had been waiting for since the days of old Previsia. But there’s no sense looking back.

  “Tonight we will strike.” I said, my words beautifully deformed through the gas mask. “We will put an end to those who use science and sorcery to oppress the people.”

  “Who are you?” Someone asked. “Why do you risk everything to fight for us?”

  “My name is Commander Choke.” I said, proud of myself for inventing such a sinister-sounding name right off the top of my head. “My motives are not important. Stopping the royalist centrifuges is what is important.” I put my hands behind my back and started to pace, feigning the mannerisms of an experienced military leader. “The first group will use rockets to damage the fortifications. The second group will invade on foot and steal the evidence we need to shut down the enemy’s operations. The third group will provide cover for the second group. You!” I said, grabbing hold of a young woman’s shoulder. “Come with me. I have a special job for you.”

  I led her to a dark hut. “Stay there.” I instructed, parking her in the doorway. I went deeper into the shadows and began to remove my costume.

  “What are you doing?” She asked.

  “My work here is done.” I said, “The minds of the people have been liberated. Don’t you see? Anyone can be Commander Choke.” I waited for a sufficiently dramatic moment. “I know that you will do the right thing.”

  I climbed out the window and disappeared into the night.

  7

  It’s an old trick—rev up a mob and hit the dirt when things start to get rough. Hucksters, demagogues, and fascists have been perfecting the technique since Previsian times, when folks still lived in caves and there were no mutants or crossbreeds. I surveyed my handiwork. I had reduced the town from picturesque poverty to downright decimation. Most of the farm animals were no more; heep lay bleeding and gutted on nests of shattered eggs. The ground was littered with shingles from collapsed cottages and inns. A cartload of dung had tipped and spilled its cargo on a milkmaid, who was dead.

  I craned my neck to survey the wreckage, and heard the subtle creak of my bark as my head swiveled. I felt no great satisfaction in this ruin, but I also didn’t feel any guilt or sorrow. If I felt anything at all, it was awe. Leon the Lionhearted was resting now, but he did not disappoint. I sat and watched as he dispatched the entire uprising. All the stolen ordinance was a minor annoyance to him. I watched a grenade bounce off the muscles of his chest. He swatted it away like a gnat and it burst in a trench, killing and maiming three insurgents.

  He had backup, but they didn’t even fight. His men-at-arms wore ridiculous patriotic armor and helmets bedecked in the red, yellow and green stripes and pentagrams of our glorious flag. Mostly they just scooped up the insurgents who weren’t dead and tossed them into paddy wagons that looked like toys, colorful mobile dungeons with monster truck wheels and vermillion glass windshields. But they were not even squires to this warrior; just a clean-up crew. And as I watched, I came to understand the appeal of the Adventurer-Hero phenomenon. I knew at first glance that such strength wasn’t natural, but a peasant child wouldn’t know that. The ‘Heroes’ were
not just super-powered enforcers—they were hope made flesh, a living legend to give hope to the dopes. Leon Lionhearted, Peyton Painbringer, and all the rest were there to be a dream for the naïve an aspiration for the asses. Look kids—look what you could be. You’ll definitely be a superhero when you grow up. You definitely won’t work till you die shoveling heep manure and rooting out hives of filch parasites.

  Lord Leon the Lionhearted sat exhausted on a small stone wall, a towel draped around his neck. He had long since gone gray, but he was shirtless and enormously muscled. He wore a champion belt with his signature triple ‘L’ logo. Flashbulbs popped around him, since tabloid scavengers and hack vultures had come to try to steal my story. I shooed the photographers away like a fleet of fireflies.

  “Thanks.”

  “Tough adventure?” I asked.

  “It gets tougher every time.” Leon mopped at his face with his towel. I took a swig from a bottle and offered it to him. He took it gratefully, apparently not looking at the label. Elven Vodka gets you rapidly inebriated if you don’t have experience with it. I had a hunch that he didn’t drink much. I waited until it kicked in.

  “I’m no hero.” I said. “I could never do what you do. But I gotta ask. What was all the fuss about? What was in that laboratory that’s so bad no one can know about it?”

  “That’s what everyone thinks.” Leon said vacantly. “Everyone thinks we’ve got some kind of monster in there that lives in a vat and eats orphans. That type of shit went out of style way before my time. It’s not something bad they’re hiding anymore. It’s something good.” I lit a cigarette. “You said you could never do what I do.” He continued. “But that’s not true. They’ve developed a process, see? They put you in a chamber and turn on the juice. They can turn anyone into a God. But they don’t do it unless they think that God’s gonna think like they do, you see?”

  “Do you like your job?”

  “I like the halo that surrounds my job. I like the way people greet me and act around me, the way they behave as if I matter. I like the vacations and orgies with Goddesses and that kind of thing. I just don’t like being a fraud.”

  “Shit.” I said. “How am I supposed to write an article about you now? You’re not such a bad guy.”

  “Write about this Commander Choke idiot.” Lord Leon suggested. “That son-of-a-bitch has some screws loose.”

  “SNAKE IN THE GRASS”

  (The following is the last article ever published by Forrest G. Cromwell.)

  1

  I was sitting there on a Telesaurus egg the size of a small car, smoking a joint. Time travel is decadent and depraved. The only thing worse than modern Provisia is Provisia thousands of years ago. Previsia, as it is called by the paleontologists who study it for a living.

  Radiodactyls were flying overhead. I was inconsolably bored, because prehistoric beasts are not as much fun to harass as humans. I was suffering from prank withdrawal, so I used my wrist watch to change the channel on a Radiodactyl to a bluegrass station. Radiodactyls use radio waves to navigate, so the creature crashed into a giant redwood in a hail of circuits and conduits. I got a moment of grim satisfaction out of this, but I was soon bored again.

  2

  I slid off the rock, noticing an insect that appeared to have a very high opinion of itself. I unzipped my pants and urinated on it to teach it who was boss. I’m not a friend to bugs. You wouldn’t believe the trouble they give me, and how they love to burrow in my bark. All this thought of harmful parasites caused my thoughts to drift to how much I hated the Recreation Bureau. The Bureau was made up of know-nothing nobles who sat on the board and collected a fat salary by implementing idiotic ideas.

  Five years back, they had dreamed up the concept of ‘time zones,’ reservations built for certain time periods in the present. Of course, the time zones were really just amusement parks that had been built to resemble the time period they were supposed to simulate. Tourism to these reservations was deemed ‘Time Travel’ even though anything you did in a different time zone wouldn’t have the slightest effect on the rest of the present, for obvious reasons.

  If anyone ever invents real time travel, the royals will quickly have that person murdered. The ruling class hates it when you fuck with the timeline. They’d prefer not to live in a present where they have to work for a living like everyone else.

  Needless to say, the public loves time tourism, because it is unfathomably stupid. I reached into my pocket. My editor had written my assignment down for me on a little card because I was out of my face on Think Ink when I was supposed to be getting briefed.

  Assignment

  1) Go to Previsia.

  2) Locate the Garden of Paradise.

  3) Gather material for a story on Aaron and Eva.

  It was then that the full horror of the new assignment resurfaced from the narcotic haze. In the early days of the time zones, the Recreation Bureau had been short on funds because Time Tourism was still untested, and they would not be able to pay themselves exorbitant salaries if they used their allocated funding appropriately. To address this concern, they formed an alliance with the Church of Provisian Saints to finance their first project, which happened to be Previsia. As a result of this, I was literally standing in an external manifestation of some zealoty evangelical creation myth. “Fuck!” I said.

  Worse still, I had to find my way to meet the first man and woman, who holy-roly-polies believed coexisted with the ancient technological dinosaurs, that had been built by the Gods before the Gods were proficient in working with organic material. I screamed an ocean of invective against the universe as I hacked my way through the dense foliage with my machete. As a severely disfigured Outlaw-Journalist who doesn’t so much abuse drugs as indecently assault them, there are many places that I don’t feel welcome. Every place, really. But this was different. There was something depraved and hopelessly desolate about walking around in an alternate world, a reserve that had been built only to comfort the minds of the most literal and fanatical religionists--a giant creationist theme park. It was death to be here. As if to prove my point, the foliage ended abruptly and I nearly walked right off a cliff.

  I worked my way back, trying to think of a viable plan to find the Garden of Paradise, which was bound to be hidden somewhere in this wall-to-wall terrarium of idiocy. For the first time in my long, strange life I wished that I had paid more attention in religion class at the orphanage. I got to know The Book of End-Game pretty well in my early days as an Outlaw-Journalist, since it was often a good strategy to quote passages from it at the opening or perhaps the closing of a story, depending on the nature of the apocalyptic degradation I was writing about. But the creation myths were almost wholly alien to me. I knew that the first man and the first woman were supposedly named Aaron and Eva. They had mucked around awhile in the Garden of Paradise, naming dinosaurs and being contented, until they had angered the Gods through some transgression. I couldn’t remember what they had done. It was possible that this was some sort of holy omission, and I wasn’t supposed to know. More likely I just forgot, since I don’t truck with that sort of heepshit anyway.

  I stood still for a moment. An idea was swimming in my mind-stream, and I had to grab it like a trout and grill the little fucker before he got away. If Aaron and Eva had named the dinosaurs, it was probable that they cared about them. If I could kill enough of them in a graphic enough fashion, perhaps I could get them to show up and lead me to the Garden of Paradise that way.

  And so I did. I launched a frenzy of digital dinosaur destruction. In point of fact, I was doing the things a favor. Provisia is a land of jingoists, freaks, and liars—ugliness and heepshit are always piled high. But I had never seen anything like these beasts before. They were meant to reconcile half-baked geological revisionism with the creation myths found in the Book of Emergence. According to the Church of Provisian Saints, nothing evolved, and everything was intelligently designed by Gramiphonius with the help of other Gods. But even Gods c
an’t be expected to build perfect organic lifeforms from scratch. So the prehistoric dinosaurs as conceived by the Fundies are mostly hardware; walking, weaponized discount electronic shops. They were an animated parody of the lethal-looking shells of long dead beasts and vehicles from days gone by.

  So I granted them mercy. I used a sharp stick I found to pry boulders loose and drop them on the heads of Adaptor-Raptors. They stumbled mindlessly for a few minutes before collapsing. Techno-Biological dinosaurs are really no smarter than chickens, so it takes a while for them to realize that their brains had been smashed. I squirrelled up the migration patterns of Radiodactyls, using conservative commentary hour, boy-band pop rock, and a local college radio station. I cracked open Telesaurus eggs by heaving stones at them. The yoke yielded partially-developed, squishy machine parts. I snuck up quietly behind Cabledons and tore out their battery packs. The dying purr they made was like catchy electronica.

  After about two and a half hours of this, I was thoroughly exhausted. I was considering using the pager the Previsian tour guide had given me to signal for extraction, and fuck the story to hell for the sake of the Gods. It was time to cut my losses.

  And that’s when I saw her.

  3

  If you abuse drugs long enough, you come to realize that many of the key pillars of human experience are illusions. Truth, for instance. Our entire understanding of truth is based on perceptions that can be screwed hither, blither, and Sally by baking the right kind of weeds into brownies and eating them. Love is another good example. Love is a lie, a biochemical state that has been fined-tuned by evolution and fucked with by the immortal Gods. When I first laid eyes on Eva, I felt that I was in love, but I knew better. Every fiber of my being wanted desperately to renounce my doomed lifestyle and devote the rest of my existence to the worship and protection of this gorgeous fiery-locked nymph in her improvised clothing made from circuit panels. But it didn’t matter what the fibers of my being wanted—the big picture, the shirt of my being, still knew the score.