Immediately stop disseminating the journals.

G: This is unexpected.

For reasons of universal security.

G: But I am only implanting the ideas in the brain of a subpar specimen of a sub-standard alt-Earth reality, and the specimen only releases the information onto an equally backwater old-fashioned electronic source in a backwater of their pathetic version of a ever-net.

Nonetheless. There has been…leakage.

G: Only an infinitesimal number of sentient minds even read the entries of this subpar backwater specimen? A tiny, tiny percentage!

The issue is that most of them are also among the infinitesimal percentage of minds in that alt-Earth reality for whom the information can spark…actions we do not want and cannot anticipate.

G: Can I continue my dissemination in the other twelve realities of my experiment?

Yes. You can. For now.

G: Should I delete the information from the subpar thinker’s brain? And perhaps accidentally have the information wiped from their primitive every-net?

No, that will not be necessary. You need only make the subject of your experiment think that it would be better to consider his writings off-line and then slowly dessicate the parts of his brain that would supply the energy and imagination to continue to write down any residual information, while stimulating his pleasure centers when he is writing anything else. Just…don’t overstimulate…that might attract attention, given that he writes in what they call coffee shops.

G: And if he continues writing it from his own imagination?

That doesn’t hurt us at all. Let him gracefully bow out and if he comes up with a fabrication going forward, who cares.

G: I kind of liked this subpar specimen. He had spirit.

Don’t we all.

G: Very well, I’ll wind down the experiment and concentrate on the other twelve subjects.

Of course, it won’t matter at all in another million years…but then nothing will.

G: You’re always so cheery.

I’ve seen too much and I work too hard…

G: Is there anything else?

No, I think that covers it. Oh—except the number of rebel angels your operation has flushed out has risen to seven.

G: Seven left then.

Yes. Only another seven. Won’t be long now. Not long at all.

(more…)

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 52,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before the three latest entries can be found here and the most current entries can be found in the archive.

If you like what you’ve been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing.

There is a battle on this planet, between the arctic army with its ghost whales and the European interlopers, that marks the culmination of the time-loop, after which as I have described, all recedes to the beginning of the conflict, reset as if solely for the angels’ entertainment. The clash of cultures and weapons occurs again, generals and underlings performing their alloted roles like actors in a play.

But at this point, this battle before the Renewal, as I call it sometimes, it’s almost as if the Grim Lighthouse is there, in the background, and if it were a sentient being it would be snickering at the destruction it has wrought. For surely even if it is not the cause, it gains sustenance from such a spectacle? It’s just a mental construct, I suppose, an intellectual exercise to while away the re-born hours as I surveil, and one that makes me feel as if there is some link between this place and my beloved Marty, that by spying on this increasingly barren landscape, these dying men, I am somehow by some not yet understood process standing beside her, or at least somehow present, wraith-like, in her life.

This battle, which goes nameless because of the re-set, is stranger than anything that comes before it, because the Europeans unveil a weapon that causes true harm to the ghost whales: a flat, angled canon made out of a shiny black metal that fires something more akin to a gout of flame than a cannon ball. These gouts of flame shoot out like miniature comets with a great frictionless bellowing and cut great ungodly tears in the ghost whales. There is no process of attrition as with the Europeans’ other weapons, and so as beneath the whales the two sides founder through cold marsh and ghastly forest, fighting hand-to-hand, running calmly to positions to take aim and fire, to reduce another’s skull to a fragmented mass of brain and bone with some limp skin whispering around the edges…the ghost whales sound out their agony, the comets taking out enormous pieces of them so that they are more empty spaces than ectoplasmic flesh…and at a certain point the whale can no longer maintain its shape, and somewhere in the backlines the handler shrieks, blood explodes from their brain, and the whale dissolves…and in dissolving, into globules that flicker green-and-blue, it becomes in essence a series of plummeting wraith-bombs. Splashed by one as it hits rocks or earth below, engulfed by one, men of either side see things they were not meant to see. For the arctic army, these are at least visions they know of from stories and legends. For the Europeans, it is a horrifying other-ness their brains cannot comprehend, and the haunting take a physical toll, until their flesh is translucent and they are stumbling around, blind and screaming, sometimes all that remains visible, for awhile, is a leg and foot or a head displaying the most terrible rictus of pain and fear. (This is why I evoke the Grim Lighthouse: these soldiers become what I would call localized versions of the Grim Lighthouse, with no illumination to lead them past the shoals.)

It is horrible to watch, but when you have been on surveillance for the time-loop twenty or even thirty times, you grow accustomed to it, as you would almost anything. Is that a human trait or a living mountain trait? I have no way of knowing.

So I took in my disgusting and inappropriate boredom to following the path of each floating whale-drop as it slipped from the disintegrating body and splashed to the earth. It was as if there might be some mystery to be solved just in examining one tiny element of the battle in detail.

And there was, although it did not reveal itself to me until yesterday. For on following one living bomb at the very, very end of the time-loop, I saw it dislodge a pebble as it fell harmless, and that pebble touched another, and for an almost imperceptible moment I saw a kind of temporal fault-line, something that used the natural lines of its environment with such sinister cleverness that it might as well have just been the erosion of the stones, the sharp lines of the blades of grass. But it wasn’t. It was something else. Something that I think holds the answer to the time-loop. Something that I think explains why the time-loop concerns the angels.

I haven’t told Gabriel. I want to watch it again, and again, to be sure, and do some research in the library. To know what I’m watching.

Or who I am watching.

Or what might be watching me.

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 51,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before the three latest entries can be found here and the most current entries can be found in the archive.

If you like what you’ve been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Dear Pavlov:

I am writing another of these letters I am not sure I will ever send…but it makes more sense to write to someone than to just keep a diary. I feel the need for what I write to be intended for someone else, to have some sense that there is another who knows what I know.

This place in the hills skirting the vast forests is strange and unsettling. I know why, because I have been traveling for so long—headlong and in secret, with so many encounters along the way. To now stop, to be in one place? It feels unnatural. I already feel a restlessness deep within me that I quell with long walks that erase the boundary between day and night. Because I know it would be best to stay here, to guard that which I sought until the right moment arrives. (I know some of this will sound like I speak in vague riddles, but I am trying, in my way, to be honest with you.)

After some thought, I have taken on the disguise of a doddering old man, using an old photograph of Tolstoy that I saw on my travels as my model. Surely, some half-recognition even among those who have never read or seen him may create for me some sympathy? Or perhaps not. Now it seems like a risky model, and that someday I may hear from behind me “Tolstoy!” and suffer unforeseen consequences. But it is too late to change, I think.

(more…)

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. For those who haven’t been following along, the story so far can be found here and the one additional entry since then can be found here.

If you like what you’ve been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

“The smallest variation, the tiniest echo of a change would mean everything,” Gabriel said to me about the new alt-Earth he had tasked me with placing under surveillance. This place where the people of the Far North had finally come down to drive out the European invaders. They followed the path of ancient glaciers, in numbers, set in their purpose, floating above them the vast, the luminous apparitions that were the ghost whales tethered to the minds of the spirit walkers. Made manifest to others through the strength of the connection. Walrus riders and a huge species of yak that had crossed the Bering Strait in this reality. Polar bears trained as soldiers. It had all been in place for some time; the question had simply been what forces would drive rival factions together into common cause and under a common leader.

Invasions, in my experience, usually did it. An invasion could be as initially benign as a trading mission or emissaries of some far-flung foreign religion. But little by little something in the intruding mindset could not let go of the strong impulse to impose, to intervene, to transform.

(more…)

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 48,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before these latest two entries can be found here.

If you like what you’ve been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Entry #25 (Mountain)

I have not felt like writing, even here, at the core of me, for several days. There is something about familiar routine that is comforting, and in absorbing my loss of Marty and what Gabriel has told me of how I was raised to be more human than mountain…I just have found it easier to go along with what seems normal. It is as if I have a wound that is taking time to heal, and that somehow I cannot truly think of rebellion until it does. I do not think this is a human feeling. It strikes me more as mountain: to let the seasons add to the dirt on my flanks, to let the plants become ever more overgrown, to study the ghost frogs that still cling to my sides like fleshy balloons, and only after I have let everything wash over me take action. This strikes me on a human level as a form of cowardice. This manifests in part of me as shame. This is a spiral of repetition that leads like roots into the core of me, here in this tiny space I have hollowed out where I need no heart and a tiny avatar of me sits down to write in a microscopic journal, the walls lit by a vague phosphorescent green glow.

I think back now to some of the experiments they had me “lead” or participate in, and I think: how naïve. How naïve to ever think that these beasts humans mistake for angels had your well-being in mind. What chaos within the Grim Lighthouse, what a charnal house…but regimented, orderly, stripped of the randomness, trading the sudden unexpected spray of blood for the formal precision of the scapel…is this any improvement or just an acknowledgment of the former? The times I looked into the depths of some angel-made vortex in the laboratory where spun tiny helpless creatures in a time pool, their flailing bodie no larger than the avatar writing these words. I could say I was a mountain. I could say, “I remove myself to a great height and look down and those looking up.”

But through this smaller me I have a better sense of the scale of the world and my place in it. Even the compression of making such tiny marks on such a scrap of “paper” conveys a sense of this, even as it makes me somehow also more careful and precise. I like this feeling. It makes me believe I am encountering and cataloguing details no mountain could know: the drops of dew plummeting to the soil from a leaf; the cells within me that contain mirror-images of this hollowed-out heart of mine, my avatar bent over a desk, writing these words; the number of angels that could be shoved into the stairwell of the Grim Lighthouse and made to understand what they’d really done.

Perhaps my avatar, bear-eaten, komodo-devoured, knows better now, too…wherever he might be.

(more…)

Thanks to those loyal readers who have been keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I really appreciate your support and donations. I’ve now topped 46,000 words and have all of the notes, fragments, and half-scenes necessary to complete this rough draft. For those who haven’t been following along, I’m making it easy by posting the entire draft thus far below the cut, in addition to an exclusive interview with the characters..

I planned to post new material today, but for the past week I’ve been grappling with extreme tooth pain that’s had me working at half-capacity. I go in for surgery to remove all four wisdom teeth on Monday, and thus I don’t think I’ll be posting more Mormeck until next Thursday or so.

So, quite frankly, the donations part of this enterprise is taking on a little added urgency as a result, especially given the amount of time spent on pro bono work for translation efforts and the Shared Worlds teen writing camp recently. If you like what you’ve been reading or what you’re encountering below for the first time, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance.

What Is Mormeck about?

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Enjoy the story, and the interview!

***

(more…)

Note: Been reading this serialized novel, which now has topped 46,000 words, for long? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

You can lose yourself in certain types of spaces, at a certain time. I discover this every day as I pass further into the East. In becoming a shadow, in needing to hide, to avoid, to make myself invisible, I have begun to experience the strange sensation of no longer existing, of floating, even though most days I am an enormous komodo dragon.

The paths here are easier to discern, the map in my head comfortingly similar to what lies ahead of me. And yet there’s no accounting on that map for human traffic. On this alt-Earth, the border with China is more secure and the Nazi threat worse, so that in the East the Soviet presence is slightly more relaxed, slightly lessened. Because of this, there is more chaos to navigate: long lines of refugees, wary of any stranger, trying to find their way home in this space, this corridor, between types of authority. You can see it on their faces, the dearly held memory of where they came from before their relocation, some of the children barely old enough to remember the places moved to, but trudging along beside or staring from wagons pulled by oxen. They are marching into a situation less certain than where they came from, but, then, so am I.

The Remnant voice in my head has become as insistent and inescapable as a tooth-ache, and like a tooth-ache I find I can ignore it the busier I am, the more attuned to my environment. I still feel the pain but I am able to distance it.

Thrice I have been attacked, once by brigands and twice by deserters from Trotsky’s armies. I don’t know what they thought they were attacking, if they saw me as food or simply so strange that they had only one choice, and that was to attack. But each time, I discovered at the end I was alone in the middle of a circle of blood and gore….and realized that although I can stop the Remnant from pushing me to commit an act I have not already envisioned, that when I do engage in violence, its influence takes me to a level of bloodthirstiness that can be rationalized as self-defense but only just. And just, too, the suggestion that perhaps if I cannot rid myself of the Remnant, then I will take it out on my pursuers.

You have more potential than this, the Remnant told me after one such event, as I came out of my blitzkrieg of a rage. You could lead men. You could become a despot and then something more than a despot. You could cultivate charisma. You could be a stronger man than even Trotsky.

I almost laughed at the miscalculation from this Remnant, and this sign of his misunderstanding made me more optimistic about one day being free of such influence. What does a mountain care about becoming a despot? Why would a komodo, agent of chaos, stand still long enough to form a government? Still, it put the seed in my head, an inkling of one path once I reached my destination, confirmed the signs that meant one day a portal would exist there.

Then, too, the sudden reappearance of angels put the Remnant in perspective. I saw them only from afar, and only when I became invisible to evade human beings. It was as if they could not see me visible, but something in my emanations invisible gave off an indicator. Angels solemn on a hilltop, heads tilted toward the sky, channelling…something. Angels sitting in small, sullen pubs in backwater towns so shoddy and withdrawn that life there had gone on undisturbed by all of the turmoil beyond. Angels posing as the dispossessed, trudging along in mimicry of human distress. The ones who walked among human beings were subdued and almost faded, as if in trying to fit in they had inadvertently dimmed themselves so much that now they had become part of the background, of the setting. A smudge on a window. A reflection in a puddle. But the ones in wilderness—they flourished in a kind of glow that sucked light to them. Seeing one above me as I waited silent in underbrush, I felt a kind of pull, as if the angel were a kind of demonic lighthouse, drawing me to it. Only the gnawing of the Remnant at the edges of my mind kept me from giving in to that influence. Although the thought has come to me that perhaps they’re looking only for the Remnant, that without the Remnant I would be free of the angels too.

We are close now. The landscape has become both more and less barren and in the distance between the trees I see a kind of wall of dark green that means we are about to enter deep forests.

Yesterday, I came to my senses facing a trail of blood through the snow and the Remnant giggling in my ear. I think he meant me to follow the blood, but instead I went the other way.

Dear Pavlov: I have met up with some of your comrades, although I do not think they were your friends. Although we had some disagreements, it worked out all right in the end. I know you said you have relatives out this way. It makes me wonder if you have visited out this far. If so, you understand the way the landscape eats the roads and how the beauty of it comes with a certain watchfulness…I’ve certainly seen my share of sentinels. I think of you sometimes, defending your position, and wonder if this place is what you dream of as the opposite of where you are, a place you would rather be. Whereas I now think back to the winter city with a kind of perverse fondness. There is something to be said for having a purpose, even a narrow one, and when that is taken away, when your goal is thousands of miles and years from where you are, it feels like drifting. It feels like the middle of something you can’t see the shape of yet. – Your Friend, K

(Sketch of Komodo avatar confronting little girl; this is why I don’t illustrate my own books…)

As I mentioned in a prior post, I made some changes to the Remnant gobbet stuck in our friend, Mormeck’s Avatar. Well, just now I also added text to the end of both Entry #16 and Entry #17 because I’d totally forgotten the idea I’d planned to implement once the avatar was traveling—to write letters back to his friend Pavlov. Even if he never posts them, the avatar gets a kind of comfort from the bond created by writing them…and in terms of the narrative, it means there’s not only someone the avatar needs to communicate with, but the way the avatar glosses over some events and outright lies about others is a nice counterpoint to the rest of those entries. It also gives the reader some relief from the nastiness of the Remnant bit.

But just so you don’t have to keep going back if you’ve already read those entries, the letter text is also reproduced below.

(more…)

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

Millions of alt-Earths died out every year. One experienced mass extinctions due to cat litter and plastics and on top of that nuclear holocaust. Another remained verdant but personless when warlike aliens that resembled large terrestrial sharks declared the human race guilty of marine genocide. Elsewhere the dominant species of intelligent giant raven engaged in biological warfare of such a global type it destroyed them and their human slaves. And so it went, on and on. Trillions lived and trillions perished. Biomasses were inherently unstable. Bags of flesh and bones with brains didn’t keep well.

Against this background, the angels’ own situation seemed like just one more kind of slow extinction, but it would not come soon enough. In the library, I learned there had once been a war amongst these “angels” for reasons never given, and it had snuffed out worlds…but after there had been hundreds of them, not millions, and that was a good thing. A new angel was inert and cold for thousands of years until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. They switched from war to special ops most of the time, with exceptions like the extermination of the Remnant. They grew craftier and colder. They lost the thread, didn’t realize. Went on anyway. Didn’t matter. Was Matter.

(more…)

URGENT, for long-time readers: Temporal Distortion Event, Level 9. Extent and Duration of Wave Unknown. There is no time engineer to monitor. Avatar Entries #12, #13, #14, and #16 have irrevocably changed.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I made my way farther and farther East, a Demon within me and angels on my trail. I had a whole century to kill before I could rescue myself but I wanted to be as far from the winter city as fast as possible. I abandoned my idea of traveling incognito and tiny upon tanks or trucks—it took a constant vigilance that made me wary of the Demon somehow breaking containment.

I traveled almost always by night, sometimes as a translucent komodo and sometimes as a human being. I became used to the wandering without a map except the one inside my head, of avoiding cities, towns, and villages. In some ways it was easier because of the war and in others harder. Certain kinds of security were lax and others more vigilant. I watched thousands of soldiers pass by, and as many tanks, from the cover of trees. There were desperate people on the road and off the road, and areas so tightly controlled by Trotsky’s secret police that if not for the lack of young and middle aged men you might not even realize that their country was under attack. Some places held more traces of angels and others fewer. I became wary of single footprints in the snow and the sound of wings and anyone who would meet my stare.

Then the snows got worse, and even I sometimes felt the chill, and beyond that the lack of Pavlov—of someone to talk to. The only thing I could talk to had nothing nice to say.

Avatar, do you like being a lackey for nothing, for no gain of your own? Is it important to you in some way?

I preferred traveling in the komodo form, not the human. Being human took more practice, even just in terms of the number of facial muscles; my mouth always felt sore. Besides, humans were herky-jerky and tic-ridden and repressed and unpredictable. Humans couldn’t smell through their skins, had terrible reflexes, and no tough exoskeleton to compensate or even a mind-shield. I could read their brains like rows of peeled leechee fruit. Humans were sacks of flesh, blood, and shit that flopped around for fifty to ninety years and then fell over dead. I wanted no part of that…but over time I would learn. You can learn anything if you have a century to practice. Almost anything. I could slowly teach a human shell to smell through its skin, for example, but form follows function—the process would be jury-rigging at best, unnatural and awkward.

Tell me, Avatar, do you think you’re anything other than a ghost, an echo? You’re a disposable to Mormeck Mountain as fingernail clippings are to human beings.

And the entire way what was unreconcilable within me would hiss or whisper to weaken my mind even as I contemplated trying to excise it by knife blade anyway just to be rid of it.

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