He had come by train, underground, and it had emptied into a station liberally and shockingly coated with advertising over every available surface, bodies darting between walls, pillars, seats and floors plastered with printed vinyl, screaming pictures of fast cars and superstars and all of the lights. A thousand insects singing in his ears. Skin itching, he had hurried upwards, towards station control, opting to leap the stairs three at a time to get away from the melee. He would not have felt more soiled if they had spread out pictures of naked women instead.

Then, at the moment he’d crossed the ticket gantries, he’d been hit in the shoulder by an irate guardian spirit.

The City Hall Interchange was always sharply dressed, pressed shirt and pressed pants and shiny shoes, yet for all the decorum there always seemed to be something off-kilter with him: The pants not fitted right, the shirt too loose and dots of perspiration beginning to betray themselves through the back. He kept his hair trendy, always in the latest style, and if you passed him by while commuting—if you could actually see him—you might have bought into his lie and thought he was a fresh graduate. But in actual association he looked like those men who would dress young and act hip but ended up looking exactly what they were: forty year olds who had smoked one cigarette too many.

Chase could not have avoided him. It would have been absolutely impossible to avoid him. So he had let himself be stopped.

“Well? What are you guys going to do about it?” A question, without pre-empt. But Chase knew exactly what he was talking about. Even someone like him—who had spent a great deal of effort to keep out of the loop without actually resorting to blocking calls and unsubscribing from feeds—knew about it, fragmentarily: in pieces of alerts and newsflashes that somehow stuck in his head. Guardian missing, unexplained, geomancic pancaking, unprecedented, possible peril, unknown. He should have paid more attention, but he didn’t.

He had shrugged in response. “Don’t know. That’s beyond my pay grade.”

“Don’t lie. You all are such a small group. You must have heard something.”

“Not me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t hang around the others much.” A girl had passed him by, then, and they had made a brief, fleeting moment of eye contact.

The City Hall Interchange made a sound that could have been mistaken for a laugh. “Yeah, we all noticed. Still cannot get over the break-up, huh?”

He had wondered, then, what the passing girl had seen, a crazy guy talking to himself and shuffling his feet in the middle of the MRT station, and he had felt a sudden stab of anger. “Shut up,” he had said, and stepped around the City Hall Interchange. “Don’t you have a job to do?”

He had hurried off into the depths of the mall, and behind him the City Hall Interchange had laughed and called out, “So you try avoid everybody, but the moment your boss calls you come running back, huh? Like a little bitch.”

“Shut up,” he had mumbled and threaded his way through the Friday lunch crowds, down subterranean mall corridors that twisted like coils of intestines, infested with storefronts like insect hives, everything blending into one anonymous eye-burning smear of places that he no longer recognised. Fast cars, superstars. All of the lights.

He had followed the signs pointing towards the Esplanade, gone up the jagged little escalator under unwashed green skylights, and that was how he found himself here, gasping for purchase at the estuarine boundary between prickly cold air-conditioning and oppressive midday heat.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Something was off, he realised. It wasn’t just stress or physical exertion or annoyance that was causing the nausea, the racing heartbeat. There was something in the air, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something that was turning him into an exhausted, jelly-like mess. Like altitude sickness of the worst kind (and he had been altitude sick once, on a trek during his college days, and it was something he never wanted to go through again).

The cavernous train station and its many appendixes had protected him from the worst of it. Out here, the roiling in his stomach became so bad that he wanted to double over and puke. The school-aged girl who had come up behind him on the escalator clicked her tongue and manoeuvred around him on striped-stocking-clad legs.

Chase looked at the sky: it was dull and leaden but nothing looked out of place. He was afraid to walk out of the protective hood of the station’s exit, afraid of what he might see. But he was already late, and his boss-who wasn’t really his boss- was waiting.

As he walked towards the Esplanade bridge the signs of wrongness grew stronger. Streaks of unnaturally dark clouds clawed their way toward the horizon, giving the sky appearance of a bad infection whose origin was somewhere behind the prickly twin domes of the Esplanade. Something in his back or neck clenched, involuntarily.

He didn’t quite break into a run, although he wanted to, opting instead for a half-jog half-powerwalk around the girth of the Esplanade, towards the bridge. It was still hot, and the sun still burned, despite the overcast outlook. Breathe in. Breathe out.

There it was, the militantly-efficient bridge over the bay. And there—emerging behind the glass and metal shards that formed the facade of the Esplanade—was what he had been dreading to see.

It was nothing like he had expected. He wasn’t even sure what he had been expecting, but it was nothing like this.

Across the water, across the bay, the sky folded into itself like an inverted whirlpool, as if someone had taken the surface of a tropical depression and flipped it upside-down. Pulled the plug from the surface of the sky. Underneath the gaping maw sat the trophy-boat of the Marina Bay Sands, the iconic hotel building’s appearance of being a ship on stilts made more disconcerting by the roaring tempest overhead.

Sylvia was already there at the halfway point across the bridge, looking exactly as he’d expected her to be: ramrod straight, hands on hips, staring dead across the bay like she was facing off the elements. He shuffled up to her. “Sorry I’m—”

“Late.” Eyes never wavering from the vertex.

He took a deep breath, hands naturally finding a space in his pockets. The vertex, ignoring their presence, continued to rage without a sound. It would have been less unnerving, he thought, if it had been roaring like the wrath of a thunder god; seeing all that fury proceed in total soundlessness was like watching a war movie with the sound turned off. He shivered.

Silence stretched between them, long and sinewy and palpable. A major bollocking was in the works, he knew. He’d seen Sylvia ream into others for far less than dropping off the radar for two entire months. He was going to get it. He was going to get it so bad.

She said nothing. Still looking straight ahead as if he wasn’t even there.

“What is that?” he finally asked, unable to delay the inevitable any further.

Sylvia just shoved something in his direction, focus dead-set on the monstrosity across the bay. He looked. Cheap plastic folding binoculars, the kind you could buy from sporting events.

Peering through the dull scratched lenses, his world tunnelled down to a distorted telephoto circle, Chase swung the viewfinder back and forth what he assumed was the horizon until he located the anomaly. Up close, it didn’t look like anything much at all. He had expected to see that the surface was crackling with hellfire or made of teeming roaches or something like that. But nothing. It just looked like clouds – typhoon-scale, building-destroying clouds, but clouds nonetheless.

“Down,” came Sylvia’s voice, intruding into the narrow claustrophobic world. “Look at the building.”

He swung the viewfinder downwards, through frighteningly huge swathes of grey, feeling like he was drowning in sky, unanchored in a world with no top and bottom, no up and down. Just as he thought he’d managed to lose the entire building, as if he were somehow looking into a world where it didn’t exist, the slash of a dark grey blade flashed across his vision. He swung back, bringing the top of the building into sight. Bushels of ferns, carefully cultivated, clustered together against the roiling sky, and he couldn’t see what Sylvia really wanted him to look at, until—

He nearly dropped the binocs in shock. “What the—”

Sylvia didn’t reply. He took a moment – one breath, two breaths – to compose himself, before raising the binocs to his eyes again.

Perched on the roof of the fancy glass-walled restaurant or whatever it was they had up there was a monstrously huge gargoyle of some sort, or at least it looked like a gargoyle of some sort, with a batlike complexion and a pair of leathery wings sprouting from its back, which was all he could see. The creature— thing— he didn’t know what to call it—towered over everything in his tiny circle of view; it had to be at least four or five meters in height, taller than two elephants standing on top of each other.

It turned around. It had a face like an Indonesian dancer’s mask, bulging angry eyes and tusk-like fangs. Chase put the binocs down and swore, very quietly. As Sylvia retrieved them from him, he asked, “Is that the Marina Bay Sands—?”

“No. She’s gone. Completely gone.”

“Then what—?” Words failed. A parasite, an opportunistic predator come in to feed on the chaos, the universe inventing something to counter the imbalance— what?

“It shouldn’t have been built in the first place,” Sylvia suddenly said. “Look at what they’ve done.”

Chase knew that his boss was a traditionalist, the type of conservationist that he’d once heard Joe deride as “shophouse-huggers” when Sylvia was out of earshot, but the anger coming from her was unexpected. Her nostrils flared and her fists tightened, and Chase found himself feeling suddenly afraid. “What were they thinking? Creating a nexus for this kind of greed and hope and despair right in the middle of everything? Look at what it’s done.”

“Macau and other places have casinos,” he pointed out. “Las Vegas.”

She turned on him, and he physically took a step backwards. “Have you ever been to any of these places? Do you know what the groundskeepers have to get up to, just to keep things in check?”

No, he had not. He had studiously managed to avoid being in another big city aside from the one he’d been born in, in fact. He’d never seen the point.

Sylvia’s attention returned to the building across the bay, and he let a breath out, slowly, feeling incredibly small. “So that thing,” he finally ventured, “killed the Marina Bay Sands?” Stupid question, but he had to ask it.

“No. It was there before. A place like that attracts feeders. No idea what it is, we can’t classify them all. But there have been deaths in the building, some of them have made the news. That chef, if you remember. Small numbers, but the Marina Bay Sands would have balanced them to keep it in check. Now that it’s gone, that thing is out of control.”

He realised he’d never met the Marina Bay Sands before, but from what he had heard, it took the form of a small child, a girl. Sylvia had apparently been quite fond of it, despite decrying the entire development from day one. Funny how that worked.

“So it’s going to kill more people? That thing?” he asked. Helplessness: an unpleasantly familiar feeling. Of being hugely, horribly outclassed, and not even having the words to describe that lack of ability.

“No-one’s died yet,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning this is more complicated than it looks.”

“So…” He tried to talk himself through it. “This wasn’t an accident. Somebody deliberately destroyed the Marina Bay Sands, to let that thing grow unchecked. But it’s definitely under someone’s control, because it hasn’t gone on a feeding spree yet…” He stopped there, right at the point where logic dropped off a cliff-edge and vanished into an abyss of ‘why’. Why? Why would anyone do that?

He turned around. Behind them, the Esplanade Bridge had been armoured, along its vertebral column, with a row of concrete blocks anchoring plates of two-metre-tall metal fencing. Across the city steel girder exoskeletons had grown over along selected roads, crusted at intervals with thousand-watt lights. In two days’ time the entire ossified route and the capillaries surrounding it would be closed to traffic, the cartilage hardening and bones fusing, conjoining roads that previously laid criss-cross across the city center into one single-flow, unbroken system. A neonatal presence, unfolding into existence: the ephemeral Marina Bay Street Circuit would be amongst them.

Fast cars. Superstars. All of the lights.

“You don’t think—” He gestured at the cladding behind them. Of course she did. The timing, the location, would have been far too coincidental otherwise. But – “Who would do that? Who would be crazy enough?”

Sylvia hesitated a moment before answering, not long enough to be deliberate, not short enough to avoid awkwardness. “We don’t know yet.”

“But you have an idea?”

Another one-beat, two-beat. Then: “This is where you come in.”

“Me? What am I supposed to do?”

“You know car people,” Sylvia said.

A statement, not a question. The sinking sensation in his stomach became a full-on freefall that dragged the rest of his innards along with it. “But, uh— I’ve not contacted any of them since—since a couple of months ago. Look, I don’t really know any of them. They were her friends, I just came along.”

“Doesn’t matter, we have a contact. You may not know them, but they’ll know of you.” She held out a small square of paper, barely larger than a taxi receipt. He had not seen where it had come from, and he hesitated to take it. “Call this number. Get in contact and tell them you need services for the race days. A tracker. Monitoring.”

“Monitoring?”

“This is our backup plan. If we can’t fix whatever’s going on by the weekend, we need firefighters.”

He shook his head in an imitation of a small child that hadn’t learned how to talk. “I’m not the right person to do this. I never get involved with the Formula One races. I leave the country. I hate all this spectacle. I literally cannot be exposed to too much commercialization. I’m allergic.” And it was true. He had two plane tickets and a booking to a quiet village resort in the South Philippines for the weekend, which he still couldn’t bring himself to decide if he should cancel or not.

“Allergic, yet you’re still here. You can’t be that sensitive to it.”

“You really should be asking somebody el—”

“Let me get this clear,” Sylvia said. “I’m not asking you to do this. I’m telling.”

What choice did he have? She was a force unto herself. He took the piece of paper and looked at it. Handwritten on its creased surface was a mobile phone number, and underneath it just one sloppily-written word, in all-caps: BUTTON.

Chase turned the paper over. The other side was blank. “It’s not the F1 driver,” Sylvia said. “We asked someone who knew car people for a reference and this is what he gave.”

“I didn’t know there was an F1 driver called Button.” Was it meant to be common knowledge?  He kept turning the paper over and over, as if some meaning would magically spring forth from its banal surfaces. “I don’t understand this at all. You want to get a ride that can monitor the entire racetrack and intervene if something goes wrong, right? I’m not sure they have anything like that.”

“Then call them and find out.” She had already turned away from him, conversation clearly over on her part.

He looked at her. Frowned. “You don’t like car people.” Also a statement, not a question.

“Whether I like them or not is irrelevant.”

“But you think this is a bad idea.”

Sylvia turned and hit him with a foundation-destroying look, and whatever he might have said next shrivelled up and fled him entirely.

“Hui Ling,” she said, without warning, and the name triggered some sort of avalanche in the pit of his stomach. “What kind of ride did she have?”

The question threw him. He had not seen it coming, trampling gleefully into territory he had managed to finally avoid getting mired in. “Um. It was a… It was an Audi.” He had a clear memory of the four locking rings, rendered in ink, marking the small of her back. He could barely remember the familiar itself. He’d never particularly asked to see it. “It was white. And it had two doors… I think.”

“Could it do this job?”

“I don’t know.” Why was she talking about this? He didn’t want to get Hui Ling involved, at all. He flapped the square of paper, lamely. “I’ll call them, and see what they can do.”

“Good.” Sylvia reached into the messenger bag she had slung over one shoulder. A few crumpling noises later she was holding out a small paper bag.

Inside: an indeterminate quantity of used spark plugs, smelling of hydrocarbon and rusted metal. “It’s for the consultation fee,” she explained.

“I know that,” he said. And internally: I’m not an idiot. Good thing mind-reading wasn’t one of Sylvia’s sensitivities.

“Can I get an update on this by tomorrow? Find out their capabilities and what they’re asking for it.” She looked at him, eyebrow raised, and he knew she expected an affirmative answer out of him.

Here’s what he could have done: he could have said no. He could have said, fuck you, you’re not my boss, you’re not paying me, this isn’t my job, we don’t even have club memberships. He could have thrust the paper bag and its dirty old spark plugs back at her and said I don’t want to have anything to do with another rider or groundskeeper or any other sort of sensitive anymore, so stop calling me because I won’t answer. He could have walked away.

Instead, what he did was nod. And say, “I’ll try my best.”

He left Sylvia, standing on the bridge like a sentinel, while he returned back into a ground heavily infected with parasitic shops and into the arms of a city he was sure was laughing at him.

An expansion of this universe, a vast extension of this piece of microfiction I found from early 2011. Written as an assignment for my creative writing class with Writing The City. Title of the piece inspired by this wonderful BBC introduction to the 2011 Singapore GP qualifying rounds broadcast.

Now that you’re gone you’re safe in my head again

And I can hold you, a pure and pretty idea, untainted by fear.

I can let you die in my arms, an apology on your lips

Whispering about the things that should have been done

While I cradle your head and curse circumstance.

In this fantasy world we were secret agents

Watching each other, across a bed of coals

Gratefully blaming the world for keeping us apart.

The fatal gunshot you walked into, I could have stopped

But I couldn’t have saved you from yourself anyway.

I watch your eyes drift shut, dark lashes like gates

Knowing I will never hear the low, soft rumble of your voice again

Or the brush of your cold fingers along the back of my neck.

Regret nests in my chest, a cool lump, like glass

That I will keep close and dear to me, forever.

It’s so romantic, you know, to part like this

Rainwater, tarmac-warm, soaking through my knees

Collecting in the stillness around your lips

Years later, in the narrative leap, I will remember you now

Perfect and brittle in unshakeable sleep.

But here, at the end of it all, your weight resting against mine

I wrap my arms around and let the blood seep through

Your body is empty but my heart is full.

My lips linger, unwilling to leave your brow

Where I can only whisper to myself: “Everything will be alright.”

(There’s a part I and II, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to write them. This is the closest I can get.)

“I need a smoke,” he groaned.

She didn’t look up from the papers she was reading. “That’s a vestigial response,” she said. “Ignore it. Eventually your soul will forget the body’s nicotine dependency.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving chaotic tufts in their wake. “That’s what I kept telling myself, but it’s only getting worse.” He flopped on the couch and looked pitiably up at her. “I think I’m going to die.”

She held back a sarcastic remark about his lack of self-awareness, and instead asked, “How many did you use to get through a day?”

“A pack and a half.”

“For goodness’ sake!” She let the papers drop to the table, finally paying him some real attention. “It’s a good thing you were poisoned, it spared you a slow painful death by cancer.”

His only response was a sad, imploring look.

She sighed and got up. “Come on. I know somebody who could help.”

**

She took him to the ghost city that lodged under the railway bridge and stretched all the way to Borough Market, unknown to the human droves that wove amongst them. The man they were looking for sat cheerfully playing cards, dressed jauntily in attire from the early previous century. “Ah, Noor,” he said as he caught sight of them. “What can I do you for?”

“I’m not asking a favor today, Damien. He,” she said, indicating her companion with a tilt of the head, “needs a smoke.”

“Aaah.” Damien gestured. “Right this way, boy.” They followed.

The man’s room, crammed somewhere in between damp brick, was top-to-bottom with knickknacks and paraphenalia. He drew out a bottle filled with dark, nebulous smoke. Gently uncorking it, he withdrew a thin strand of smoke, which shaped itself into a cigarette in his graceful fingers.

“How do you do that?” he asked. Damien simply winked and held out the cigarette.

He reached for it, but just then Damien teasingly withdrew it out of reach. “Ah, there’s a price.” His smile was like a cat’s, warm but dangerous. “A kiss.”

He looked at Noor, flabbergasted. “What kind of price is that?”

“It’s a memory he’s offering you. You must pay him in kind.” When still he hesitated she asked, “Do you want the smoke or not?”

He conceded that he did.

The other man’s lips felt cool and dry against his. It didn’t feel like he was kissing a dead person – dead was relative anyway – but it was nothing like any of the kisses he had ever received. Nothing like Marcus, his lips rough and soft and warm and moist at the same time, tongue darting playfully in between like a fish, a schoolboy. Firm hands roughly pushing at the waistband of his trousers.

Marcus welled up in him like a plume of magma, shared Italian dinners and smoky wine, crinkles at the edge of blue eyes, tousled hair turning lighter, almost reddish in the morning light. And his anger, explosive; the fear he used to feel when a mug might go flying and smash itself into ceramic ruin against the kitchen tiles; the loneliness he had felt standing at the platform at King’s Cross with one ticket punched and one not. Then there was Marcus, red-eyed, hiding in the back of the cemetery between two trees because he had been too afraid of being seen, of being alternatively comforted and shunned, fingers wound so tight the flower stems ended up broken.

Damien drew back, snapping him back into his current version of reality. “Easy, my friend. You’ve got some issues to work through there.”

“Did- did you feel all that?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t meant to get carried away, but he did.

“Don’t be. Thank you for reminding me why I don’t miss being alive.” He reached around and picked up the jar of smoke again. “For that, you get extra.”

Damien shaped the smoke into an entire pack this time, Marlboro Lights. Marcus had introduced those to him; before that he had been a menthols sort of guy. He reached out to take them, then hesitated, looking at Noor, who had become bored, resting against a wall with her hands in her pockets. She shrugged. “It’s your afterlife you’re ruining.”

“Thank you,” he said in a hushed voice to Damien, as he squirreled the smokes into a jacket pocket.

“No, thank you,” Damien said, and he thought he saw the other spirit wink at him. “You’re welcome to return and feed your habit anytime.”

(I have a few more snippets written about Adrian and his (after)life, which I think I will try posting at some point.)

“They are not,” the captain replied, not even looking up from the starchart he was annotating.

“I beg to differ!” The first mate stormed towards his captain’s table, and dropped half a dozen printouts onto it with a clatter. “Have a look: ‘MUCH PLEASED TO HEAR NEWS REVERT PLEASE’.” He pointed, triumphantly, to the offending word. “What does this mean? I do not think there is supposed to be a word there, it does not make any sense.” He grabbed another plate. “Here, an inexplicable interjection of the word ‘input’, and it is in the plural form. I had not known that input was a countable object. Very surprising indeed. Look at this, ‘synergy’. I’ve have never heard of such a word. Might it be a mis-spelling of ‘energy’, perhaps?”

“Escapees”, Bells said.

“It is a mis-spelling of ‘escapees’?”

“No, I mean that the words themselves are escapees. I do collect them, if you haven’t noticed. I keep them in a spare pocket, here,” he said and patted his coat. Then his face crumpled into a frown. “It is not a happy place, though, as I fear that ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ has become rather a bully as of late. I can only assume that those words escaped to flee the persecution they faced.”

Howie, rendered speechless, merely stared at him.

So, if you’re here because you followed a link from the back of Ceriph, hello and welcome. This blog is not… entirely dead. I just haven’t had the time to write much since I moved into a new job (with the local media) a couple of months back.

I should probably fix that.

Anyway, do feel free to hang around and riffle through the few stories that I do have in here. Some of them are better than the others, but for me the important thing is that I keep writing and sharing my stories, no matter how good/bad they are. Which is why I’m making it a new resolution of mine to continue writing–even the tiniest little stories–despite how busy I’ve come to be since my new job started.

STAY TUNED

He looked. It was a number on a scrap of paper. “That’s it? You’re not going to help me?”

The witch patiently rubbed her papery fingers together. “Taxis are my eyes and ears. They prowl the streets everywhere, all the time, even in the night when the buses are asleep and the trains rest in their lairs. And they’re cheap, too: they don’t require much in return. Just the occasional sacrifice, the passenger who boards and is never seen again. I handle that, you don’t have to do anything. Much easier than cats.” She gestured at the piece of paper. “You want to find the girl? They’re your best bet.”

“It’s a micro black hole,” her uncle had said. “It’s not very stable, and takes effort to keep it in place.” He tapped on something that looked like the unhappy union of a fire extinguisher and a pressure gauge. “This is the injector. It feeds the black hole matter so that it doesn’t evaporate away into nothing.”

“Black holes evaporate? You make them sound like puddles of rainwater.”

“They are surprisingly fragile when you get to know them better.”

So she’d asked him the question any normal person would have: why do you keep a black hole on your desk, even a miniature one?

“It’s a memorial. The Hawking radiation, see.” When she’d given him a blank look he’d just shrugged and said, “It’s a physics thing.”

She went home and looked up “Hawking radiation” on the Internet. On the fourth page of Google results she found notes for a lecture he’d presented to his first-year Astrophysics class. According to her uncle’s notes, black holes were not entirely radio-black as their name suggested, and actually emitted particles from time to time, losing mass in the process. He explained how it happened:

“Sometimes little miracles of nature happen, in the spontaneous generation of a particle-antiparticle pair. These particle pairs, irrevocably linked, are usually left to their twinned destinies.

But sometimes, at the event horizon of a black hole, disaster happens. One of the pair is pulled in and is lost, leaving its partner without a counterpart to annihilate with. The remaining particle, bereft, is left to wander the galaxy forever, doomed to its singular existence. And the black hole, having apparently emitted the lonely particle, must lose mass to preserve the laws of thermodynamics.

My wife, who is an English major, calls it the Shakespearean tragedy of particle physics. I can’t say I disagree.”

She remembered the way he looked at her aunt’s funeral, somehow smaller and sadder and greyer as he stood alone, away from the crowd.  She remembered the way he spoke about his dead wife, the lively artsy girl to his quiet physics nerd, the extrovert to his introvert, the chaotic warmth to his aloof logic. She remembered what he said about opposites attracting. And that was when she realized that what he had said was wrong. It really wasn’t a physics thing at all.

Then one day she rocked the boat, her phone tucked between shoulder and ear as she folded the laundry. “I want to try the new seaweed shaker fries from McDonalds.”

He paused. “We don’t have that here.”

“That’s sad. It’s really good. And it comes free with every Extra Value Meal when you upsize it.” She tossed aside a shirt whose color had faded to unwearability. “Maybe I’ll have the seaweed shaker fries and you can have the regular ones.”

He pursed his lips, not that she could see it. “But that’s not the point of why we’re doing this.”

“What does it matter? It’s not like we’re even eating the same meal. You’re having an early lunch and I’m having late supper.” She sent him a picture of the shaker fries later, showing him what he was missing out on.

A couple of weeks later she said, “I don’t really feel like having fast food today.”

“But we’re supposed to do this. That was our deal.”

“I’m sick of fast food. And Tony says I’ve been putting on weight. It’s all the junk food I’ve been shoveling down.”

“Who’s Tony?” he asked.

“We’re going to try a new Japanese restaurant that just opened recently,” she said, and hung up.

He stared at the dead and silent phone. “Fuck globalization,” he said.

In my original review of T:L, the movie, I hated the fact that sentience originating from a entirely closed, man-made system apparently held the key to life, the universe and everything. Emergent cyber-lifeforms are a cool concept that I totally dig, but that plot point just didn’t make sense.

But wouldn’t it be nifty, perhaps, if these lifeforms were actually born out of the massive amounts of data being generated from one of the biggest experiments to figure out the way the universe works today, the same data that is being uploaded to The Grid at CERN, the same people who invented the Internet in the 1980s?

That was how this fic was born.

Tron: LHC

It had been fast. One warning sound and a brief glimpse of red, before everything turned to light and the world changed. He hadn’t even had time to think.

***

Those were the filters, the strange woman said as their impossible vehicle hurtled down some future post-apocalyptic landscape he’d never seen before. She was dressed in something straight out of the Matrix and seemed strangely calm for someone who had just pulled him from the gaping mechanical jaws of death.

What about those men, he asked her. Those ninja, warrior-type dudes.

Russian programs, she said. Much easier to deal with than the ones sent by the Consortium.

Russians? he asked, not understanding her.

Programs sent by hackers, she said. We get them every now and then. Their users found a way onto the Grid.

I have no idea what you just said, he told her.

She shook her head, smiled, and held out a hand by way of a response. I’m Quorra, she said.

I don’t get it, he said. Who’s the Consortium?

She laughed. All in good time, Sam Flynn.

***

I don’t understand it myself, his father said. But clearly whatever happened during the accident, during the ionization process, somehow managed to transfer our consciousness to the Grid.

And you’ve been here all these years? he asked. His father did not look a day older than when he had died. Or, as he had put it, been transfigured.

His father nodded. It’s been quite a ride, he said.

He looked out across the mesas of information and the programs that worked it, and said, You don’t say.

***

The ISOs were born from the data sent from the experiments, Quorra had explained, an emergent phenomena from the complexity of the system his father had devised. They were warriors, completely separate and totally autonomous, different from  the user-created programs, the filters and the data crunchers.

We protect the data from attack, she had said.

The Consortium were fundies, a group of fringe nuts absolutely convinced that the work done at CERN would bring about the end of the world. A group of fringe nuts who had the skill of some expert programmers.

The battlefield was something out of nightmare. The worms sent by the Consortium were killing machines, larger than men, larger than the programs they were crushing. They were drawn to the datastreams. They fed on them, crunching them up and chewing them beyond recognition, beyond analysis. And they were also strong, and deadly.

But the ISOs were stronger, and deadlier, and they worked in teams that took down the worms faster than they could penetrate the Grid. He and his father watched as Quorra’s lightcycle sailed a semiconductor gap as she stood astride it, her disc in hand and at the ready. The cycle skimmed past a worm’s massive head and she drove the disc into it, shattering it into a constellation of incoherent bits.

You’ll learn to do that someday, his father said.

He shook his head. We had noticed significant slowdowns in the data processing cycles, he said, but we had no idea it was because of this. He gestured across the scene of carnage before them. No idea.

***

The whiteboard in his father’s study was densely covered with data and equations, a series of marching ants he immediately tried to untangle, on instinct. Have you been working on this all the while? he asked. How did you know all this?

Then he stopped, taken aback by some of the unexpected terms he saw. What’s this? he asked. This is new. You’re making a lot of assumptions here.

His father smiled, and said, they’re not assumptions.

And realization dawned somewhere between looking at the board and looking at his father’s Cheshire cat expression. You did it, he said, You found evidence of the Higgs. But as he looked at the equations with that thought in his head more things started to become clear. No, it’s more than that, he said. You’ve found more. This– this is an entirely new theory. You’re reinventing physics as we know it. How–?

How indeed.

He was surprised by his father’s bemused expression. But you worked on this, he said, trying to figure it out. Didn’t you?

His father shook his head.

Then who–?

He followed his father’s gaze. Leaning cheerfully over the counter, Quorra gave them both a little wave.

You did all this, he said.

It was a collaborative effort. The ISOs, we have a way of understanding the raw data we get from the beam that the other programs don’t have. We were born from the data, after all. And we see everything before it hits the filters.

He tried to keep the awe from his voice as he said, But all this discovery. The world needs to know about it. Don’t you have a way of sending messages out?

She shook her head. We don’t.

***

Who’s that, he asked Quorra, pointing to the man in the distance, standing on a hill, talking to some of the other ISOs.

You don’t know?

That’s why I’m asking.

But you wrote him.

I what? Then it dawned on him. The Synchrotron Data Management Program?

Tron. Yes. Then her nose wrinkled. Is that really what you called him? He’s not a manager. He’s a fighter, like us.

I’m not sure my bosses would have approved of Ass-Kicking Warrior Program.

She laughed at that. And then said, I cannot wait until you start helping your father with his work on improving the Grid.

But I’m not, he said. He blinked. What is this? What has he been saying.

She just stared at him.

***

He hated yelling at people, but dealing with his father just brought it out in him, like he was ten years old again and just couldn’t get him to see reason.

What else would you do here, his father said, sounding confused.

I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. But what I know is that you don’t get to decide that for me. Don’t go making plans about my future without even telling me about it. I’m not a child anymore.

***

Because it had never been about the science, or solving the mysteries of the universe. it had always been about being a particle physicist. It had been about giving up guitar lessons for math enrichment classes, it had been about forcing himself through every quantum mechanics class in college so that he had something for the CERN studentship application. It had been about turning down the offer from SLAC and hauling ass all the way to Switzerland and learning to speak two different foreign languages just so he could carry on his father’s legacy.

I’m sick of it, he said. I’m done.

***

Where will you go? she asked him, as he packed a carry bag with a few items he was sure he would not need.

Don’t know yet, he said, zipping it up.

Well, she said, shrugging, you’ve got to do whatever you feel is right.

Well. It’s user’s privilege, I suppose. I wish I could give you that. I wish you could have that kind of freedom.

She tilted her head. What makes you think I don’t?

And that line stayed with him. Stayed with him as he traveled the data mesas and semiconductor fields, as he thought about his life and everything that had passed before, as he wondered how much of it was really relevant in this world he had not come to expect.

He watched, from a distance, at the glimmers of light swarming over another worm infestation. It was a fight that the world would never see.

That’s not right, he said to himself.

***

You’re back, Quorra had said, and hugged him, but his father had merely smiled and nodded, as if he’d always known that Sam would come back. It didn’t matter.

I can’t believe that we have all this computing firepower at our disposal, and no way of communicating with the outside world, he said.

Probably should get working on that then, his father said.

He grinned. Probably should.

***

“I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea that he’s gone,” Kath said, nursing the flavorless coffee that the memorial caterers had provided. “It doesn’t seem real.”

The professor shrugged in his coat. “It isn’t the first time it’s happened.” He looked up at the winter sky, overcast as it had been for a week. “It’ll be hard for the first few months, but it’ll get better over time.”

“You knew his father, didn’t you?”

“We were friends,” he said. “He was a brilliant man.” His face was inscrutable.

“It’s a bit strange, don’t you think, that Sam had almost the same sort of accident that took his father? It’s almost creepy.”

“It’s a big coincidence, I agree.”

“It’s almost as if they were following the exact same path.”

The professor was silent for a while. Finally he said, with a slight shake of the head, “No. I believe that in time to come, we will see that he left his own legacy.”

FIN

“Who is it?” asked the voice over her earpiece.

“It’s that guy, the Ninth Doctor. No, wait, not the ninth– the guy who came after him. The tenth one, he was really popular. What was his name? Benedict something. Or was it Christopher? Christopher Bandersnatch?”

“You’re thinking of Benedict Cumberbatch. Wrong classic British actor. David Tennant was the tenth Doctor. Unless you were in fact referring to Christopher Eccleston?”

“No, it’s David Tennant, you’re right. I forgot.”

Another voice cut over the intercom–this one younger, more incredulous. The Junior Inspector. “You’ve got Gandalf in there with you?”

“No, not him. This is the younger version. By about thirty years.” She paused in her procedure, completely put off by the intruder’s fish-eyed stare from between the trees of her vanished childhood playground. “He keeps staring at me. It doesn’t feel like part of the background.”

The Chief Inspector was back at the helm. “Is he doing anything else?”

“No, he’s just staring. Like a creepy creeper from Creepville.”

“The triple-S pulls elements from the subconscious. You watched the show as a child, didn’t you?”

“Sure. But I know what gets pulled out of my subconscious, and this isn’t it.” Which beggared the question: what was this?

“I’m not part of your subconscious,” the apparition said, as if to answer her question. “But you wrote an essay on your blog when you were thirteen. I pulled it from the universal cache. I thought you might appreciate a form you were familiar with.”

“Who are you?”

“My name,” he said, ” is Charlie. I picked it out myself.” He smiled then, a stretched parody of emotion. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Chief,” she slowly said to her earpiece, “I think I’ve found the bug in the system you were looking for.”