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.
Lock n' Load
"Second Lieutenant Van Damme, come in here please"
The weedy second lieutenant slunk his way into my office and stood poorly to attention in front of my desk. Discipline in my new posting was a joke and the various clerks and assistants seemed to have all been bred from bipedal weasels, not a single guts'n-glory man amongst them it seemed.
"Second Lieutenant Van Damme, why am I here?"
There were several blinks and the start of a stutter before I cut him off.
"Second Lieutenant, I have served on the front line of more field operations and missions than I care to remember. I've butchered my way through six colonial campaigns, engaged in squad-action sabotage behind enemy lines and kicked seven shades of ET butt across this galaxy and the next. So why do I find myself in this posting?"
Van Damme removed his glasses and opened his mouth like a carp, perhaps believing that I had finished.
"I don't believe for one second that I was demoted for the friendly fire incident involving our chitinous allies from Sk'rill'pojin. If anything I was given a backroom commendation for fragging the traitorous little insects before they could turn on us. And yet I wind up here."
The second lieutenant shifted on the spot, resigned to being a mere passenger on this verbal meander.
"You're the exact sort of weedy sprog I'd expect to find here and I imagine that the mundane duties you perform mean that you have an active imagination whereas I have none whatsoever; just a terribly butch commanding presence and a gung-ho bloodthirsty frag'em-all attitude. Why do you imagine I'm here?"
Van Damme blinked behind his glasses once more and I could actually see his creative brain engage behind the eyes which began almost to sparkle with activity.
"Well Sir... everyone knows you're a man of action, not words. You're the sort of man who is sent in to negotiate with thermofrag grenades instead of compromises and you usually manage to do so with only one female survivor left in tow. Perhaps your presence here has something to do with the ultra-secret bio-weapons laboratory hidden away in the tunnels beneath the admin complex?"
Suddenly things were starting to make sense. I pushed a button on my desk, opening a communications channel to the Master-At-Arms.
"Master-At-Arms Lundgren, what's our weapons status?"
"Well stocked Sir! Exceptionally well stocked in fact. So much so that I've had to shift several ammunition and resupply lockers to tactical advantage points throughout the base along with random medpacks and body armor."
Yes indeed. Everything now made perfect sense. I pushed another button to the Deck Officer.
"Deck Officer Willis, send a lightly armed and poorly trained squad of your cockiest marines down into the secret bio weapons laboratory beneath the administrative complex. Flashlights and grenades are strictly forbidden, and if you have a squad radio with a broken antenna or battery on the fritz give them that and send them on their way. Contact me if anything goes wrong or you get a bad feeling about the endeavor."
By the end of the day I expected to be up to my neck in glorious mutant corpses bred from the failed experiments the crazy egg-heads were performing beneath the planet's core. Just the way I liked it; this wasn't a punishment from the brass, this was a reward.
Mechanique Aleatoire
I recently decided to become even more annoying to my co-workers and start introducing monetary transactions into my dealings with them.
My first exercise was to sub-contract my workload at a generous hourly rate to our new graduate. The graduate already had her own 9 to 5 duties she was being paid for but I offered £13/hour for her to take some of my extra work off my plate and maybe I'd get to leave earlier. I was also still making a decent profit and if I could have convinced the graduate to take all of my work onboard I could have started a second job.
My boss frowned and vetoed this after about 30 minutes so I bought the graduate lunch. If only she'd kept the whole transaction silent and over Instant Messenger I could have gotten away from it. Pesky kid.
The next experiment was to start using the prisoner's dilemma in a practical application, betting all the money in my pockets against all the money in one of my co-worker's pockets on a random happenstance like whether a boy or a girl would walk into the office next. When it became apparent that I had no money in any of my pockets though people stopped risking their small change just for the chance to be right.
My next planned experiment will involve using a silver dollar with one face scarred to make all my decisions. I want to become known as The Coin Man...
Diagnosis
"You have apophenia"
I have what?
"Apophenia; a reality distorsional cognitive disorder that projects patterns onto seemingly random events."
Good God! Everything makes sense now! Ever since I was a kid I'd come up with these improbable scenarios and imagine the wildest coincidences were interlinked. I thought it all stemmed from being struck by lightning. My parents knew about my uncanny ability to leap to conclusions and when I left home I always felt that there was this guiding hand of destiny steering me. Even my website is this massive collection of examples of free association. Doesn't this explain all of that?
"No, thats the apophenia talking."
Ratings
So we ended the season on a cliffhanger. It had to be the mother of all cliffhangers because we were the number 1 rated show on the air at the time and we'd deliberately delayed our last four episodes to force other shows off the air so we'd have everyone's attention.
Gabriel Byrne and Willem Dafoe were already up for Emmy's for their performances, Jordanna Brewster had become the new Sarah Michelle Geller and was gracing countless men's magazine covers as well as the fashion glossies. Leland Orser had finally broken his typecasting. Our writing team had spent the past three seasons weaving this web of intrigue and suspense, building up to the cliffhanger that would be talked about for the rest of the summer, they'd even gone to implausible lengths to keep the Shadow's true identity secret.
In the season finale Texan Ranger Burke shoots Adelle as she attempts to escape to tell Senator Acta what the DNA test has revealed about his son Paul who at that moment is on the brink of leaping from the burning White House balcony whilst grappling with the Shadow, one hand on the trigger, one hand ready to unmask the true identity of the Shadow to clear himself of murdering Burke's daughter. Acta is on the Senate floor carrying the deadly Phoenix virus, making the decisive speach that will either send the world into another war or save humanity from extinction and Agent X is dragging himself half dead from the burning wreckage of his Humvee for an ultimate showdown with the Shadow's boss who may or may not be Senator Acta. The music reaches a crescendo and...
Fade out.
And then we found out we'd been cancelled because too many people were BitTorrenting our show and the ad sell couldn't cover the cost of producing another season and the DVD boxed sets were just sitting on the shelves because the pirates had been selling them on the streets.
Empirical
To further our research and hopefully extend the purview of our research grants Sophie and I began our attempts to scientifically prove or disprove certain movie clichés.
The obvious ones about people surviving suicidal plunges to their doom from atop waterfalls to escape their nemesis we left well alone; nobody could survive those. Instead we tried the Fake Defector Shoot Your Friend set-up on some college students under controlled circumstances. Two students handed a gun to a third and told him he had to shoot a fourth or they would kill him.
The third student deliberated for a whole and broke into tears before firming up his resolve and turning the gun on the first two rather than take an innocent life by force. The gun was empty of course, as it always is when this decision is made. Had he fired the gun at the fourth student it would also have been empty. The only time the gun is loaded is when a miracle trick-shot is called for that allows three and four to escape unharmed without killing one and two.
I turned to Sophie in the two-way mirrored booth we'd been observing from. The glass had partially steamed up from the tense situation beyond and she looked up from her clipboard, catching my eye. She held my gaze for a few moments and neither of us spoke. Her lips were slightly apart and I moved gradually closer. I could sense her breathing quicken and felt my own heart flutter. Her eyes seemed to twinkle as they partially closed.
"Everything I know about romance I learned from Han Solo" I said gently
"I know..." she replied.
We couldn't have stopped by that point even if we'd wanted to; we'd reached Dawson's Event Horizon, whereby a kiss between the two main characters becomes inevitable. And even though we would spend a Moonlighting Shark Jumping night together, I already knew that she'd tell me in the morning she'd accepted a research role on another continent with her Previously Unexposed Estranged Husband.
Kitchen Surgery Nightmares
I followed the instructions; I swear I did, to the letter.
I used the ocular replacement pod, making sure it was placed the correct way up and directly over the iris, I didn't blink, I didn't tremble and yet still somehow the scalpel removed my iris and botched the replacement. I was too scared to try it on the other eye as I swabbed at the vitreous humour that dribbled down my cheek.
Any sensible person would have stopped there, but I hadn't even tried the cheek-bone chisel yet and how many times have you heard someone say "s/he's got cheekbones to die for". It’s the strange skeleton chic to have sunken cheekbones and the vacuum attachment was working fine for the first few seconds before it caved in my mouth and left that gash through my face. Unfortunately I had used it on the same side of the face my home iris transplant kit had messed up so the vitreous humour was now dribbling straight into my mouth.
I should have given up and sought medical attention after that, but the kit had thoughtfully provided "bio-regeneration strips: just apply for five minutes and flesh magically regenerates to replace damaged tissue" but after only three minutes of holding the strip over the hole in my cheek my fingers had permanently bonded to my face. It was at that point I had to admit defeat and reach for the pruning shears.
If only I'd taken into consideration that my depth perception was completely shot to hell and I was using my left hand...
Corporate Takeover
I'm up in the nosebleeds, among the skells and the repo-punks, the jack-outs and the cyber-pros. People this far away from the arena floor aren't interested in watching the match live, they're here for the buzz, the noise, the atmosphere. I have to admit it is intoxicating, but I have badder fish to fry. I turn my attention to the vid-screens showing Super Nashwan taking on the Turbo Hammers far below me in all their spectacular bone-crunching glory.
My eyes shift out of focus as I access my hyper-cortex modem, scanning the crowd for open ports or breakthroughs I can easily de-ice. I need a distraction. This match is the last of the season between two giants; Nashwan have been leaders for almost the entire season, with the Turbo Hammers challenging them both on and off the arena floor ever since their star centre-forward Midia defected to Nashwan.
Midia is on good form tonight, she's already broken two jaws, an arm and scored twice against her former team-mates, keeping Nashwan barely ahead of the Hammers, but I need a more physical distraction and I find it in the almost-empty RAM of a spectator with open ports into his brain. I purge the useless spong, lobotomising him instantly before downloading the ghost image of a famous 21st century terrorist and subliminally triggering a command that sends him stalking off towards the private boxes.
After that it becomes a race to hack into either of the gorillas that are protecting the Eurocorp executive in his private box overlooking the arena. I throw ice pick after ice pick at their defence walls with each attack fire walled off or subroutined away from their cores. If I can't get in before my little hacked ghost shows up trying to murder his way in then I may miss my opportunity altogether.
Down on the metal deck of the arena the steel ball has been thrown with enough force to paralyse one of the substitutes and the med-bots are dragging his body off the pitch, vaporising the blood spill as they go. The crowd is jeering and screaming, whipped up into a frenzy and Midia takes a free throw just as my hack attacks break through and I appropriate the mind of a Eurocorp personal bodyguard.
Through the eyes of this body man I grunt at my colleague, indicating the approaching spong with murder in his eyes. My colleague goes for his pistol and cuts the spong off at the knees, burning both legs clean through at the shins then moves closer to vaporise his head. Meanwhile I lumber the hijacked body through the scanning fields of the doorway and approach my "boss", doing my best to control it without giving away that I am an illegal occupant.
A tackle on the arena floor between the goalie and a midfielder leaves the path open for Selene, the Nashwan left winger who slams another goal home with seconds to spare, kicking the crumpled goalie with one steel boot as she charges triumphantly past him. Nashwan have secured the title for another year and I'm on the brink of closing my lumbering brute's hands around the Eurocorp exec when the second bodyguard slips into the seat beside my host body up in the nosebleeds and crushes my larynx, leaving me and the gorilla vegetables both.
The Illimitable Superior Spirit
To justify the enormous research grant we'd been given Sophie and I had to come up with something spectacular. When you purport that you can disprove the theory of relativity people sit up and take notice, but eventually after the XBox parties and shopping trips they start to request progress reports. We'd run out of excuses and needed something that, at least on paper, showed that we weren't just spending the money on frivolous, yet tasty and entertaining pursuits.
Unfortunately Sophie and I had never had to work together before, we were just a beautiful couple capable of impressing the sponsors, and when it came time to work together she thought I was drippy and geeky and I thought she was insipid and dull. How had we managed to throw such great parties?
We went off to our seperate workshops, each with the basic premise as set forth by Einstein regarding relativity;
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
When we met up again to exchange notes (and mail) there was some light chat and prevarication before we finally revealed what we'd each worked on; she'd created an easy-chair from an old Aga stove that actually wasn't that uncomfortable to sit on, and I'd found a way to superheat pretty young girls through general conversation. Needless to say Sophie got a bit hotheaded about the whole thing.
Handy Man
I took one last bite of my egg and bacon sandwich before putting it down on the greaseproof paper. I came to the end of the thirteenth chapter of Breakfast with Ducks and tucked the book into my back pocket. Normally I wouldn't mistreat a book so it could be passed on to the next reader in good nick but I was feeling vindictive towards the author for the simplistic approach he was taking towards communicating over toast and eggs with waterfowl.
Time to get it over with, there was no sense stalling any further, I'd already messed about enough to justify my earnings.
From deep in the guts of the escalator, beneath the marble tiled floors of the brand new shopping mall I sifted through my toolbox and brought out the extruder.
All handymen worth their salt have got one, usually tucked away under the recognizable tools like the hammers and wrenches. The extruder is like the secret formula to Coca-Cola or the handshakes used by the Freemasons, it's the secret that must never be revealed.
"Can't get the parts" or "Needs a new washer" or "looks like the sprocket assembly has confounded the greeble axel across the unreality leafsprings" are all just ways of saying "Its going to take five days to fix at an extortionate rate before I actually get the extruder out and fix the problem."
Most things these days can be put down to the one cause of most malfunctions; gremlins.
PC crashing? Gremlins. Dyson not sucking hard enough? Gremlins. Escalator eating small children in front of their mothers? Gremlins.
So I got out my extractor and waved it around in the crawlspace beneath the escalator. Sure enough, six gremlins were sucked into the aperture and immediately discombobulated out of existence. The escalator started to groan and move again at the lethargic pace such machines always do and I could happily write up an invoice for stupid money. There is pleasure in stealing the souls of machines.
Automacide
"He's shot the Turk! He's shot the Turk! Come quickly!"
The diminutive man-servant tugged at my sleeve, causing me to spill my brandy and splutter on my cigar. I looked down at the man with a tiresome glare. I had had enough of the Turk myself.
"Yes? And?"
"You must come quickly, please sir, please"
A perfectly good evening of dinner and socialising with Madame Blavatsky as hostess here at the Martense Mansion with nearly a hundred of Paris' high society in attendance had been marred only by my encounter with the Turk. Even the odious man from the Republic of Texas with his portly rotund belly and wide grin who had spent the entire evening railing against the impending annexation of his beloved Republic had been a mild annoyance by comparison.
The atmosphere and music had been so loud I hadn't even heard the shots but as the man-servant dragged me through to the games room I beheld the Texan, standing with his gun drawn, barrel smoking, over a large wooden cabinet adorned with a patterned wooden chess board. Built into the cabinet top was a mechanical effigy. Young Silas Mitchell stood to one side, in shock. Before I could even ask, the Texan addressed me.
"Damn thing beat me again, third time this night."
Without further thought he fired another two shots directly into the automated chess machine, otherwise known as the Turk. There was the splintering sound of wood, chess pieces flew from the tabletop like shrapnel and the crunching metallic sound of gears grinding issued from the compartment beneath the cabinet followed by an inhuman shriek of pain.
Both Silas Mitchell and the man-servant broke through one of the top panels of the cabinet, knocking aside the articulated armature that served to move the pieces across the tabletop and dragged a bleeding and unconscious man from inside the cabinet.
"Well I'll be damned" said the Texan, "it’s not automated at all; he was pulling the strings from inside all along"
I kneeled down beside the broken body of Dr John Mitchell before standing up and arresting the Texan for attempted murder.
Tales From the Riverbank
Deep in a burrow on the west bank of the river Fimyo in the heart of the Verdant forest a gathering of woodland creatures was underway. On a red gingham sheet covered in plates of triangle cut sandwiches, cocktail sausages, plates of crisps and pots of warm tea the various representatives nibbled and sipped at their picnic, discussing a variety of topics until Ahriman, the wizened old badger called the meeting to order.
"Gentlemen" he waffled politely "and lady" he added, tipping his head to Phaedra the vole, "we are gathered here today to address a very serious development indeed"
"Petard's over-eating?" interjected Bellaphon the otter, prodding his rotund companion. "Look at him, he's not a weasel anymore, he's an obeseal!"
Petard grunted and reached for another treacle crispy treat with one stumpy short arm, wriggling like a beached whale.
"No, something of much more serious import. Gentlemen, we have a mole amongst us."
Before anyone could blink, Rasmussen the stoat had leapt across the cavern and slit Berkeley the mole's throat clean across with a pearl handled straight razor. There was a wet splat as Berkeley's thorax split and disgorged crimson blood all over the picnic. The assembled animals watched in utter horror.
Rasmussen looked from face to face, waiting. "What?"
Ahriman took a deep breath and began again "we have a spy amongst us, who may or may not have been a mole."
Rasmussen sheepishly sheathed his razor.
"We found a weapons cache nearby which we believe was used by whoever might be embezzling from us. Ingredients were mixed with nitro-glycerine to create a sweet, edible explosive; half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle. If we can figure out where the money goes we might have a solid lead."
All animals present scrutinised their immediate neighbour. Ahriman looked at Rasmussen, Rasmussen looked at Phaedra, Phaedra looked at Hela, Hela looked at Epheseus, Epheseus looked at Bellaphon, Bellaphon watched as Petard reached for his final treacle crispy treat, his mind suddenly realising what was to come next. Mausolos the river rat had long ago made his escape.
Retribution
"Wait, stop, I can get it for you."
I struggled against the constricting ropes, gouging thick burns into my skin as I twisted my arms this way and that. There was only enough give in the ropes to make it painful to move, not enough to slip a hand free.
She stalked back and forth in front of me like a hungry tigress, as if trying to decide what the best way to devour me would be.
"I know you can flim-flam man. You promised me my heart's desire."
"This time its not a scam though, you're too clever for me. Look where I am; out of options, at your mercy. I can still give you your heart's desire."
She stopped short, her stilleto heels clicking to a halt on the concrete surface of the deserted lock-up. She approached me, her face giving way to an expression of tenderness. Tied to the chair as I was, I was incapable of stopping her from straddling me, pressing her body up against mine, her hair falling gently onto my cheeks as she looked down into my eyes.
"I know you can, and that's just what you're going to."
I had always been warned about scorning a wowan, but until her a mark had always been a mark. This one was certifiable though and I should have seen the signs from a mile away. As soon as sweet talked myself free I'd have to make a quick exit. So close to her now I remembered what the seduction had been like, how her body had fit against mine in the darkness of the hotel room and how I had had to swallow the guilt as I cleared out her trust fund.
Slipping away from me she took a few steps back before taking another swig of vodka from the bottle she'd already half downed. "Here's to my heart's desire, flim-flam man!" she toasted, before dousing me with the remaining contents. "Burn baby, burn" she added and lit a match.