Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Animal Fiction
"If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare."
Well why is it always monkeys, eh? Why should the monkeys get all the glory? And Shakespeare, why Shakespeare? I think it would be much better to have penguins typing out the works of Raymond Chandler;
"Wak, wak!" said the broad as she waddled into my office. I put down the bourbon and slid the glass away from me, what did this skirt want out of me? Her husband had run off with the head cashier and all the profits from their Mom and Pop fishery and she wanted me to track them down, my only clue, a valet stub from the Hotel Grand. Opening a drawer I took the cold hard steel of my snub revolver and tucked it under my wing, then I called Jerry and told him I'd need a cunning hotel disguise, maybe a bellhop or a dinner waiter jacket...
Or what about puppies rewriting the works of Tom Clancy?
"Wuff! Wuff!" The warning came too late as a hail of bullets tore through the wall beside me. I ducked down and covered my big floppy ears with my paws. Ambush! The Columbian Andrex cartel had been waiting for us. The woosh of an RPG-7 round streaked past overhead and director Fluppy-wumpkin's Toyota imploded showering bodywork and shrapnel around us; he'd never go walkies again. I pushed a door open with my snout and trotted away from the carnage wondering if I'd ever get another chance to sniff my wife's bottom...
Or finally how about some Dan Brown written by sloths?
Hmm, actually with the lazy plotting and undeveloped characters maybe that one isn't a stretch of the imagination.
Full Stop
"No happy endings" she said and looked up at me.
Is that a question or a statement? She was holding a copy of my last book, a collection of posts from the website Acerbia.com that had been reedited or retuned completely to fit the offline format. Some had been padded out to fill up more than a few pages. She had the show copy I kept around when I was looking to impress, it had been well thumbed and read from in parks. Whenever I did a signing I always used that copy for the reading beforehand.
"They're all really bleak and bitter;" she added "don't you believe in happy endings?"
In my experience there's only one real ending and that's death. Everything else is peaks and troughs of happiness and misery. After you ride off into the sunset you're left with nothing but a horse and some saddlebags, maybe the woman, maybe the money, but you're got a cold night ahead of you. If you want romance then Mark's books are on the next shelf down.
"Yes but there are phases in life and there can be happy endings to those phases."
Name one.
"Well maybe you... maybe you split up a bad relationship. Or maybe you get a new job?"
That’s a bad ending to a bad situation and a new beginning you've just mentioned. Give me an example of a happy conclusion.
She stood there, thumbing through the pages without looking down at them. Her hands subconsciously tugged at the stitching of the binding and her lip curling up deep in thought. I expected her tongue to poke out of the side of her mouth like a Peanuts character concentrating while using scissors or crayons. Finally she closed the book and approached me.
Kissing me firmly on the lips she drew back slightly and said "this conversation is over."
We're still living happily ever after.
The Robot
The robot approached and for the first time I was not afraid. For the first time I felt in control. Ever since I had seen the shooting star and gone to investigate the burning wreckage I had known that the charade could not continue any longer. The robot was not in control as it pretended to be. There were others like me.
It was dented and scorched, as it usually was when it returned from its excursions and I saw that the metal carapace had been penetrated in one area and flickering wires sparked beneath. The robot faced me and the screen listed the necessary repairs. I stood before it in my tattered clothing and put down the molten metal repair gun and the panel-beating mallet and took a step back.
The robot paused and the screen flickered for a moment. Then it moved forwards, picking up the gun and mallet with its claws and held them out to me. The screen enlarged the first repair instruction.
I took another step back but did not turn to run. If I ran the robot would chase me down again and clamp one claw around my neck, holding me up as it burned more gouges into my legs; it only needed me to be able to stand and move short distances. I did not take the proffered tools.
Eventually the screen blinked off and the robot put down the tools. I imagined I could hear a faint whirring sound emanate from the shell as it calculated all the possibilities and decided upon a course of action. Eventually the screen flickered back to life with two choices; I/O.
Indenture or Oblivion. Which did I choose?
I stared defiantly into the robot's faceplate and pressed my finger hard into the O on the screen. Had it not already burned out my tongue I would also have told it to go to hell. With my choice finally made and communicated to the robot I felt at peace at last. After months of abuse and existing solely on the scraps it provided me with, sleeping when it left to fight and patching it up when it returned, the shooting star had shown me the truth.
The crash site had been a mess, a black crater in the desolate landscape and yet the occupant, dead on impact, was wearing a uniform, was well fed and healthy and was human. The robot was fighting humans, those that had survived must have banded together and I was repairing the robot after each engagement.
One arm extended and the claw snapped back to reveal the laser I had suffered so often, only this time I prayed it would be set to kill instead of simply to burn. The robot faltered. Maybe it didn't understand my defiance. Maybe it knew that it needed me to help it continue the fight; maybe I was the only one who could repair it?
It was only then that I realized that it couldn't possibly kill me. It would keep me alive in whatever way it could so that I would continue to repair it. With a beam of heat and intense light the laser started its elaborate burn pattern.
Smart Cookie
Abigail sat hunched over the napkin, scribbling with a black felt pen. Occasionally she'd look up at me as I talked and nod or frown or blink in that way that said I am listening, I'm just doing other things as well; she wasn't making this easy for me.
"I guess what I'm trying to say Bee is that... well, I think we work well together. I know all the cool cats and you're the smartest girl in the class. Since you got contacts and started wearing nicer clothes you're also like... well, one of the prettiest too."
She glanced up.
"No, the prettiest. Easily."
Her scrawls were indecipherable from where I sat but that wasn't uncommon, I rarely understood what she was up to when she jotted down her thoughts and equations. It was like trying to get it on with John Nash if John Nash had been a nineteen year old girl, which I'm pretty sure he never was. Abigail's pen caught and tore through one layer of the napkin. She lifted the tip, scraped the pulped paper and ink on an unused corner and continued. As did I.
"See, what I'm trying to say is that, we made all these changes and I know that it was because I asked you to, and now I can't help thinking..."
This part was a lie, it had to be a lie. I never thought, not in the way that Abigail thought. She quoted forgotten Pythagorean dictums and frequently conjured up her own mathematical symbols when she'd used up the entire Greek alphabet in one equation. She had a patent in for the square equivalent of pi, currently under review by the maths department at MIT. She might be the smartest cookie ever, but she was no good at understanding the human nature to lie.
"I can't help thinking that we're just not that good together anymore. Not the way we used to be."
She once needed me. I elevated her in social status and she elevated me by getting me good grades, explaining the simplest principles, correcting my mistakes, but always leaving me feeling small and worthless. That was the trade-off. And in return I did a whole geek-turned-prom-queen popularity thing I saw in a movie once. But now what?
Abigail's napkin had filled up fast and she seemed to be slowing down. She kept taking occasional sips from her Coke and frowning at the napkin. Was she coming to an end or had she realised that we were?
"Are you breaking up with me?"
"I guess that, well Bee... I mean... yeah."
She slid the napkin across the table towards me.
"This is the chemical formula for love."
In an instant I knew she was right. Even without being able to understand any of the higher euclidean algorithms or the portions where she had written in Magrathean the equation sang to me. It sang of all forms of love, brotherly love, infinite empathy, lust, desire, a deeper understanding of the planet and our place within the ecosystem, it burned past my eyes and grasped my heart like a vice.
We would be rich with this formula. We could add it to breakfast cereals and the world would start its day with boundless love. We could embed it in movies and people would love the movies. We could read it out at the United Nations and have them read it to their people and eventually everyone in the world would know love and there would be an end to war!
"And this is for making me care about you."
With that she knocked her glass of Coke over the napkin, soaking it through and destroying the equation, breaking my heart in two.
Smooth Criminal
I used to be a cyber cop, a guardian of the online superhighway. I caught cyber crooks by tracerouting them, blocking their hacks with black ice and spiking them, causing their systems to fail and crash. I was the pioneer of the heuristic firewall that could repair itself as it was being attacked. Never got the patent on that.
I hung up my keyboard and mouse a few years back with only one rogue who ever got away from me. The guy lived, breathed and ate through the Internet. He had interfaces that the games and theory boys at Langley would have killed for and on one occasion they tried to have me trace the guy so that they could. He was the ghost in the machine, he was my nemesis in every way. I retired without taking him down.
The ringing phone woke me up one morning and when I answered it I heard the screach of a 28.8bps modem trying to establish a connection. Nobody does old-school like that anymore so I immediately dropped the handset onto the Cermetek 212A acoustic coupler I have beside the bed, a stayover from my old crime-fighting days. Old habits die hard. The hard-lined 386 SX at the side of my bed came to life and in yellow and black an image formed.
A Mandelbrot; somebody was sending me a message, but what?
I sat pondering this as I waited for the lights to change at the corner of Lexington and Concord on my way to the store. They didn't. It took me a while to realise that they weren't changing when the guy in the car behind me got out and checked the pedestrian button hadn't been wedged in place. Another message? Was somebody trying to tell me something?
The real kicker came when the elevator in my building stopped dead halfway up the shaft. From behind the wall panel came the grating mechanical cackling of a digitised voice. Shrill laughter followed by the ASCII coding of an e-mail address in binary. My mind mentally decoded the sequence and I climbed out through the access hatch.
There is only one way to thwart a pure-blooded hacker when you're an old-school cybercop; I emailed him two images of bullets.
Duty
He reaches out through the cloak of darkness that entwines them both and runs his rough, calloused fingers over the smooth curve of her hip. She always sleeps on her side and for the longest time he was convinced that she was shunning him in bed by always turning her back to him. It occurred to him one sleepless night that she was instinctively curling up into his protective embrace. When you sleep you let your guard down and your true face shows through.
He cannot sleep again. Night terrors haunt him and each time he reaches the brink of peaceful slumber he is jerked awake again. The doctor calls it a myoclonic twitch. The shrink calls it post-traumatic stress disorder. She calls it his nervous tick. He knows it is his penance, his burden to bear. Nobody would remain unscarred if they had seen and done the things that he had done in the sweltering nightmare jungles of Asia where man becomes beast and life hangs on a machete edge.
He hums a Sinatra tune to himself softly, without wanting to disturb her, and shifts his weight slightly to ease an ache in his hip the field surgeons had promised him wouldn't last long some twelve years prior. He falters on the verse and reverts back to the chorus, his troubled mind stumbling over lyrics and his humming becomes the tuneless droning of preoccupation. How many have there been?
There were the three in the hut the grenade launcher had started off and he'd finished up close and personal with his K-bar. The colonel in Indonesia and his aide and a smattering of unconfirmeds during the maneuver and evasion phase of that operation. The girl in the hotel in Rangoon where his hands shook and he took the cheap vodka with him afterwards leaving her body dangling by the sheets from the ceiling fan. Double agent? Did he really trust the intel on that one? Somewhere an analyst was sleeping peacefully unaware that his information still left doubts.
How many conventional operations had he been involved in as part of the green machine, cutting his way from village to village with three squad mates, their only link to civilization a temperamental radio connection that depended on wind and altitude, signal strength and enemy proximity. How many?
He is startled to notice that the hand he had been carefully stroking along her hip is now shaking perceptibly, his trembling fingers dancing against her moon-white skin. His sins would never leave him, they prevent him from the blissful oubliette of sleep where he could at least fight back in his dreams and now project a tangible presence into his waking life. He feels the surge in his chest, the surge of remorse, of guilt and regret. Despite years of training and conditioning, countless moral justifications that what he was doing was right in the name of freedom and democracy when he closes his eyes he can still see the ghosts of the dead and they will never leave him.
"Shush baby" she says before rolling over to stroke his brow until his eyes close and his mind empties and he finally sleeps.
Left a bit...
You know, I would find it easier to play Wipeout Pure on the Tube if the Tube would respond to the directional buttons I push and when I push turbo I goddamned want turbo! No stopping at King's Cross!
Hmmm... maybe portable PlayStation gaming is not such a good thing if it leads to me wanting to crush pedestrians with Lumines blocks to the encouraging bebopping of a happy scorpion. Or garotte them à la Metal Gear Acid before hiding under a cardboard box IN PLAIN SIGHT.
X, O, left, R, triangle
Test
My guilt was proven by scientific process. You can't argue with scientific process. A proton is a proton and there's no getting around one unless you're an electron. That I was guilty, I didn't realise myself until after the experiement had been conducted, and since the methodology had been clearly documented and subject to close scrutiny by some of the keenest scientific minds on campus once again I could not argue.
Myself and a control subject were put into seperate rooms and I was made to watch the closed-circuit television footage on the screen provided. True enough the blurry figure shrouded in static did indeed look just like me. I could not find fault with their identification.
I was then led into an ajoining room where I was asked to recreate the scene I had seen on the screen. I raised the gun they handed me and fired it at the student provided, killing him outright. Behind bulletproof glass several of the professors noted down a variety of observations on clipboards. I was then led out of the room and into an interview room furnished with a table and two chairs.
A psychologist asked me how I felt about what I had just done and referenced back to the original crime. Did I now feel remorse after reliving the event? Was there anything I would have done differently? Was their experiment accurate or had they left out any details only the perpetrator could have known of? I did not know how to answer most of the questions, but as it had now been demonstrated both that I looked like the man responsible and that I was indeed capable of doing such a thing I answered them as best I could.
They were unable to establish motive and at this a number of the professors came into the room and debated it on moral, philosophical and quantum levels. During the debate Professor Haldane and Professor McCrae came to blows and were removed from the room. Eventually Professor Wallace pointed out that they had all just watched me kill a student so they no longer needed to establish motive, I was obviously guilty.
As I was led from the laboratory in handcuffs I couldn't help noticing that the control subject looked just like me, but much, much happier about himself.
Delectable
The first time I tasted Ambrosia I didn't think much of it, but then to be fair it had just been scooped out of a tub of Deus Ex Sandwichfilla onto some plain white bread and cut into triangles. The quivering clear jelly smelled divine though and I knew I would taste it again. Little did I realise that this would be the beginning of an addiction.
Pretty soon I was smearing the amber nectar over everything; cereal, snacks, sandwiches, dinners, even attempting to make an Ambrosia curry that went spectacularly wrong. Even that disaster did not disuade me from eating up every last drop. I was hooked and constantly hankering for my next fix.
Money ran out, my possession were all sold off at rock-bottom prices, all for another sweet, sweet taste of that food of the Gods and finally, when I was down to living out of a suitcase and a cardboard box I struck on the perfect plan, the one way to have an everlasting supply. Driven mad by my cravings I decided that I simply had to go and kill myself in Greece.
Rowr
Slowly, pushing through the ferns and flourishing cycads, Tyrannosaurus Dave stalks his prey. Circling overhead a flock of Archaeopteryx swoop and dive, catching baby Ichthyosaurs from the nearby stream with razor-sharp rows of teeth. Tyrannosaurus Dave ignores all else but his target.
Breathing silently through flared nostrils atop his long snout Tyrannosaurus Dave senses the temperature, the taste, the fear, the presence of his prey and advances precariously on arched feet with only his toes touching the ground. His focus is pure, his intent murderous.
Tyrannosaurus Dave brushes between two conifer trees and enters the clearing. His senses are alert but he is goaded onwards by the rumbling emptiness of his belly. He must eat and this makes him careless. As he begins to devour the helpless Chinese take-away Sweet and Souropodicus that has been left out for him he falls prey to Girlfriendicaurus Raptorus and has to cough up the cash for dinner.
Spaced
At the north west corner of City Road and Old Street in London EC1 there is a fenced off empty space with nothing in it. You can't park in it, you can't do anything in it. It is wasted space.
In Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 there is a small white square in the bottom right corner of the Folder List that does nothing. This is also wasted space.
Whereas the Conservative party appears to simply be a waste of space.
My Love Affair With Guns
It started with a rifle, an air rifle firing little metal pellets. My mother told me she'd been a champion, one of the few girls to shoot air rifle and it seemed the most incongruous thing in my head to associate my mother, the origin of my life with a tool of destruction. In my young mind I didn't differentiate between target shooting and deadly shooting, guns killed people in the movies.
My next was a Browning 9mm. The instructor had a moustache that looked like it was pencilled on. He named the parts of the pistol off for me like it was a nursery rhyme and loaded the clip in a sing-song voice, enunciating the various rules such as a gun is always loaded and never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy. He reminded me of every Monty Python sketch that was ever made involving British army officers. Later he let me fire off some .45s from his antique revolver.
Then came the concealed carry Glock 26 and the devastating MP5K. The Glock was a pop-gun, barely fitting into my hand, my fingers wrapping around the grip almost twice. The 5K was a machinepistol by definition and would burp out long streams of fire dangerously close to my steadying left hand on the foregrip. The awesome firepower of the 5K was in stark contrast to the proximity and accuracy required from the pistol.
Further accuracy was on order with my first rifle, another H&K, this time the G3SG1. Bipod legs extended and set to single shot only I lay on a blanket and watched swirls of dust curl from the barrel tip after each shot. Adjusting the scope one click left, one click up and firing again before taking apples down to the end of the range and splitting them just as I'd seen in a Tracey Chapman video on MTV.
My latest affair was with a Glock 20, firing 10mm for the first time. The casings seemed no bigger than usual but somehow the power being delivered through my arms was all the more intoxicating. After 50 rounds and a dozen dead paper terrorists I cadged a cigarette and sat smoking it with shaking fingers, high on the adrenaline rush. My final cut-out had a piercing shot outside of the concentric circles, smashing through the outline's throat, silencing him forevermore, the 9's and X's didn't matter after that shot.