Stonefish Read online

  Contents

  Stonefish

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  One: The Numpty

  Two: Stonefish House

  Three: Makarios

  Four: Mandibole

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  STONEFISH

  a novel

  Scott R. Jones

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  Stonefish © 2020 by Scott R. Jones

  This edition of Stonefish © 2020 by Word Horde

  Cover art and design by Matthew Revert

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-56-7

  A Word Horde Book

  www.wordhorde.com

  For Sean

  ONE

  THE NUMPTY

  He told me this would happen.

  He would invoke that ancient physicist and his mythical cat, say that he knew and didn’t know, simultaneously, all as a result of his involvement with the people in charge of all this. If you could call them that, if you could force yourself to believe that they had a plan, something real they could take charge of.

  I never could, even after everything he showed me up there. I resisted. I resisted him, or told myself that was what I was doing. I argued and swore and gave in to violence. But Makarios, he knew. Gregor Makarios knew, and believed, and made his choices. The great thinker, the maverick, the hermit. He plotted out something like a forward escape, and now where is he?

  He told me this would happen.

  “You’ll find yourself in a room, Den,” he said. This was towards the end of my time at Stonefish House, not long after what we did to the bear. “After you leave here. You’ll be in a room, a spare and squalid little space where a palpable despair seeps from the very walls, my young friend. Den, there’s black mould in the corners. Sunlight pooling like piss at your feet. Can you feel it, that despair? You will.”

  I do. I feel it, Gregor, as surely as I’ve felt you come into the room just now. A bastard ghost, somehow, come to gloat? My imagination. No. You’re less real than your promised despair, which I’ve felt for all the weeks I’ve been here, preparing this, I don’t know what to call it, this document. Report? Confession? A fiction, I hope. I don’t know what to call it. Evidence of my deterioration, at the very least. The room is in an abandoned shitbox complex in a part of Old Vancouver that’s still accessible. I didn’t actually get that far once I left you, after the rescue. There was little point, considering the revelations that came once I tried to get back into the world.

  Sometimes, when the paranoia is of the old-fashioned kind and I forget what a voluntary prisoner of architecture I’ve made of myself, I barricade the door like a fool. Forgetting the walls here are basically fungal rot and tissue paper. Forgetting that even were they made of reinforced bioconcrete and steel, it wouldn’t make a difference, not to them.

  And then, sometimes, I’ll remember and catch myself, take down the barricade. Because when they come round the mountain finally, we’ll all see what walls were worth.

  “And you’ll have a choice, Den. Everything they’ve done, everything they’ve grown here, it all comes down to that. A choice. It’s brutal, and simple, and in its way, very beautiful. A choice that’s generated everything in existence, this crystal in solution.”

  I can still hear the smirk in your voice at that last. Existence. But yeah, I’m looking at it, and you’re looking at it over my shoulder. My choice. Mine, so don’t try to push my arm. I sleep, when I’m able to, on a piece of industrial foam packing material in the corner. I shit in a bucket, when I’m able to get to it, out on the balcony. Piss over the railing into the empty air. I eat here, at the only thing that could be described as furniture, a fold-away noönet terminal that’s at least as old as me.

  I started writing here, too. I’m writing now; look at me go. Your gospel, Makarios, the one you refused so mightily and so well. Yeah, they got me, sir, despite all my resistance or maybe because of it. I’m not as strong as you, basically, or, if I am, then it’s strength of a different order altogether. But all the data I could pull from Stonefish House is here, spilling in a slow cascade across the screen. The vox, the text, the video. Compressed files from your archives, whatever I could pull out of the drives before I left. When it’s dark, I tilt the screen up and watch the flow from the bed in the corner. It’s almost like dreaming, and sometimes, it helps me sleep.

  I wake, though, always, to the choice.

  “It’s the First Law of the Universe, Den. You’re hungry. You want something to eat?”

  There’s a gun on the terminal, a cheap but serviceable Gauss pistol. The guy who sold it to me said that its microscopic slugs exit the barrel at near the speed of sound. There’s a clean line of holes in the wall facing the flooded street, which I put there my first night here, so I know it works. The holes are a lot larger than the slugs that made them, which is alternately horrifying and comforting. I can slide a finger inside each of them. Next to the pistol is the cable that, were I to clip it to the jack in the floor, would connect this terminal to the noönet again, finally. What they used to call a hardline, Gregor. You’d be proud. Or laugh at me. Both, maybe.

  The cable, or the pistol. Upload this record of our time together to the noönet, burstcast this apocalyptic fever dream of yours to every greyed-out mind on the planet in the hope it might make a difference, introduce some of their precious novelty into the system. Would that buy us some time, I wonder. A decade, two? Time is no better than these walls, though. Another century, or a millennium, makes no difference; the choice will still be waiting.

  The cable. The other thing.

  I feel like I haven’t stopped shaking since I left you, Gregor. My hands spasm constantly, my shirts are patterned in overlapping lagoons of old sweat, I can’t get my eyes to focus properly. There’s hair on the pillow when I wake, brittle and starting to grey. I sweat and stink and shit myself, I scream and whimper in the night, laugh, a maniac, during the day. I’m laughing now.

  Piss light through stained curtains falls on my trembling arms as I reach for the future.

  ***

  It was a garbage assignment, and Wilder knew it. Even greyed out in his personal noönet chatroom as we were, I could tell he knew, and what’s more, he was happy about handing it over to me.

  “Den, thanks for coming. Been keeping well? How’s the family?”

  “Oh, you know. Shifting, gelling. We’re still getting used to the new members. Tired.”

  “I’ll bet. I can’t imagine how you kids do it, honestly. Crèche living.”

  “What choice do we have, though.”

  “Right. Right. Well, good. Glad to hear things are, well, good. Family. Home’s important.”

  “Sure, Ky. Sure. You were saying?”

  “Was I? I don’t think I had. But here it is. Okay.”

  Three years with New Heretic, two of those under Ky Wilder and I had never seen him this distracted. I could feel my palms begin to itch in response, and a dull ache bloomed softly in my left temple. The close psychic environs of a chatroom could do that, and I’d always been a bit of a sensitive.

  “Recall that noise from a few years back, Den.” Not a question, I noted, and waited for the eventual feed of images and data. This was how Wilder liked to assign stories. No foreplay, a sharp turn into the available information, all the better if there was a lot of it. I’d watched the interviews where he would explain his technique. He claimed the sudden immersion was key to eliciting a Certified Fresh take, a burst of color that made a New Heretic story stand out from the rest. Who knew if he was right. Certainly no one in noönet tech or at New Heretic ever challenged him on i
t, but then, no one really cared by that point. It was all much of a muchness by then, as I think my grandmother might have liked to say, once, though I might have dreamed that.

  The noise arrived, and my heart sank a little. Garbage assignment.

  “This was, what, eleven years ago.” Wilder’s voice slid into his customary swift drone, a high-pressure, low-volume stream of vague and uneven language, with rafts of hard data riding in on the back. “Arctic Circle, so, okay, Canada, obviously, although I guess that’s not obvious, is it. Could have been Norway, or Russia. Vladivostok, even, wouldn’t that have been a thing. But no, Canada or what used to be Canada, way up there, Echo Bay, little place, but not right there, not in the town itself, lessee, north and east from there a tic. Just a ways out. Big upset at the time, lots of talk, panels. Calls for action. You recall.”

  The thing was, I could recall, and did. I was nine at the time, and it made an impression. The archived reports swarmed my consciousness now as Wilder released them, and I could feel, briefly, faintly, the old childhood thrill.

  “The Numpty,” he continued. “Was what they called it. What everyone not actually there studying the thing called it. So, there it is, unchanged since ’61. The Numpty hasn’t said boo since, nor shifted size, shape, or semblance. Can’t see it, still, no one can, not until they’re in it, and then, recall, there’s nothing to see once there. Some nominal interest still, in the circles you’d expect to find that interest.” A neon wash of conspiracy sites and hackneyed sensationalist reports, as if sensation counted for anything anymore.

  “Nothing to see, hear, feel,” I interrupted, maybe with a trace of awe in my voice. “Do they still send the drones through?”

  “Drones, lessee. Yeah. Once a week, multiple exit and entry points. Same as ever on the inside. Rocks and lichen. That small cairn everyone got excited about for a week. Recall, not large, that space. Half a kilometre in diameter if it’s an inch. Oh, here’s a lucky thing. A fox ran into it from the northwest three years back, while they had a drone in there to capture it.”

  Cue the video, play it back with that breathless immediacy video has in the noönet. A smudge of umber and white slides across the grey and green of the stone, sniffs at something, half-leaps, paws at something else. Looks up, around. Cute predators make me nervous, and this one, strolling through the Numpty like it’s nothing, like it’s not even there, well. The itch in my palms got worse.

  “It can see. Obviously.”

  “Yeah. See, smell, shit. Look, there it goes.”

  There it went. The drone camera zoomed in. A cute little fox squeezing out a cute little fox turd in the northwest corner of the Numpty. There it was, steaming away. Zoom-zoom again, and there’s a sliver of bone protruding from the compact mess, and grey tips of mouse hair, too, like the turd is trying to revert to its previous form. A beetle of some kind crawls up from underneath it, antennae sampling the deposit.

  “Like that?”

  “No? Fuck, Ky. Why would I like that?”

  “Everyone liked that one, Den. Come on. Actual wildlife up there? And the cute kind? Nat Geo got v. excited. The meme-shoals glowed for weeks.”

  “I have deep filters for those. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Missing out, son. Missing out. See, people liked that shitting fox because it humanized the Numpty. Pulled the fangs out of the thing. A person walks across that line and wanders in a void, unsure of something as simple as where to place a foot, but this bastard trots in and makes a deposit? Priceless.”

  “It’s still there, though.”

  “What, the fox? Or the turd.”

  “The Numpty.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, no, you’re right. Anyway.”

  We watched the animal do its business on repeat for a while. Some wag had added a soundtrack: Swift, from her pathetic surrealist phase. I tried to suppress a shudder at the juxtaposition and failed. The spectacle of pop eating itself is never pretty. Wilder giggled at my discomfort, a sound which, in the noönet, tends to carry unstable echoes.

  “This is puerile. Can we move on?”

  Wilder grunted. The scene shifted back to barren tundra.

  “So. What are the haps. Has something changed?”

  “What are the haps, indeed,” Wilder sighed. “There are no haps. At least, not up there. Like I said, the Numpty hasn’t said boo since.” A half dozen sparse infographics and photos drifted into view. Traffic cam footage of an intersection in some industrial park, Katagana on the signage. Japan. Dusk. No, dawn; no one on the streets. A lone figure enters the intersection, stumbles, falls to their knees. They reach out their hands, grope the air. Mouth like a cave. No audio, but I can hear the howl anyway.

  “It had a little brother, though,” Wilder breathed.

  They give up on their hands in the air, drop them to the pavement. I know that doesn’t help, not really. They’re oriented to their own body, sure, but any sensation from beyond the border of their own skin is gone. In that space, gravity is all you’re left with, and even that fundamental force isn’t much. Their hands flat to the road, but they’d never know it. The anguish on their face is real as they scramble around for purchase.

  “How long?” I asked. “Had?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s gone. Li’l Numpty here lasted ninety-three minutes from the moment of discovery here. And it was little, Den, not even as wide as the intersection. Little bubble of nuffin.” Wilder spun the video ahead a minute, two. There was a sudden flare of light and a dark shape blotted the screen for a moment. “Shit! Missed it. Hold on, this is gold.” Darkness, light, street again. Whoever they were, they were still in the road. In the oncoming headlights, the whites of their eyes glowed with fear, and thick whips of saliva arced from their lips as they shook their head. The truck swerved slightly as the driver crossed into the perceptual void.

  “Do you hate it when, I dunno, when it seems, like, scripted, almost? Den?” Wilder reversed the video and we watched it again. And again.

  “I mean, shit. Look at that. Clean off. Bumper catches the guy just right, right under the jaw. Couple inches to the left and he’d be alive today.” Reverse. Again.

  “Instead, pop! That’s what they used to call a line drive. Smacks that stop sign like fate. Look! You can see the thing vibrate with the impact.”

  “Can we not. Ky.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I forget my sensitivity training sometimes.”

  Wilder never forgot anything, in my experience. He liked to plan these things ahead; reversing the video to the moment just before the impact was proof enough of that. The look of bright, uncomprehending anguish on the face of the Japanese person shone like a great but awful idea. I knew what that look meant, had read a decent chunk of the research coming out on the Numpty back in the early years of its presence up there in what used to be Canada: they were trapped in their own skull, and it was loud in there. Loud and grey and sharp. My palms were on fire, and the ache in my temples was no longer dull. This was garbage, I knew, and there was more garbage to come.

  “If it’s no longer there, why are we talking about it?”

  “Right? I mean, who cares about the Numpty anymore? It’s not like it affects anyone, not really. Well, okay, that guy. That’s a given. Truck driver has the serious PTSD, too. And the neurologics people are excited again, obviously. This is their bwick, after all. I guess that’s kind of my point: The Numpty is a human problem. That fox. It’s our brains that go blank in there, our senses that die. So, it’s medical, psychological, another noönet side effect, whatever, but it’s ours...”

  “Your point?”

  “Didn’t you use to write for Phraxos?”

  “I did.” Garbage. “For, like, a season.” I could hear the truck backing up, hydraulics lifting the dumpster. A weird, sly smile slid around the lower half of Wilder’s face, never quite coming to rest on his lips.

  “You ever meet the man himself?”

  “Makarios, you mean.” Because of course he meant Makarios. The man himself. Wh
o else would get referenced in that way. “Once. At a fundraiser. For half a minute.”

  “You’d know him to see him.”

  “Fuck, Ky. Everyone on the planet would know him to see him.”

  “Sure, but tell me, would he know you?”

  “No.” Would that matter to Wilder, though? Also, no. The smile had retreated now and his forehead rippled. Fresh information poured into our field, mostly textual, and a single video of an ancient TED talk: Gregor Makarios as a young man, face like a granite rockslide even then. I could see the beginnings of the fever in his eyes, then realized I was only imagining it, letting hindsight fold it in. Wilder started to drone again.

  “You know he’s been missing for a while now. Years, years. After Tusk absorbed Phraxos, Makarios went sideways, railed against multiple targets, the terminal disease of hominid society, he called it. Our disconnect from reality, you know, that old chestnut, full on conspiracy mindjob we’ve seen a thousand times, no news there but check it...” An interview slithered into range, the bits Wilder thought relevant to his point glowing yellow and popping from the page. “He saw the Numpty coming.”

  I looked. Read. “Nope. That’s just his style. That’s poetry.”

  “I’m sorry, but we’re in the street, the beast roaring down upon us doesn’t jump out at you, Den? C’mon. Heads up, we’ll leave the body politic at speed, ring the stop sign like a bell, that doesn’t resonate at all?”

  “Coincidence. It’s not predictive of the little Numpty. It’s just words.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  I sighed. “That’s not gonna be the tagline, though, is it.”

  “Nope.” The smile was back and firmly resident. “Look, Den. I like you for this because, and allow me a moment here, I like you for this because I think you’ll get Makarios. Did you know that Den Secord pieces trigger a three percent uptick in emotional response to New Heretic in noönet subscribers? Did I ever tell you that?”