“Shift Change” – A Short Story

October 30, 2020 / JD Byrne / 5 Comments

Finally! Something about 2020 that feels normal. As he’s done in years past, author Eric Douglas has invited other writers to do some short fiction for Halloween. It’s always been fun, so I was happy to chip in another entry. You can read my prior Halloween short story here, as well as my two prior 100-word entries here and here. And, as always, head over to Eric’s place to check out stories from all the other folks.

Now, without ado – “Shift Change”

Vuzzaz sat at the end of the hall of the Amalgamated Union of Transdimensional Frighteners, Demons, and Purveyors of Dread building and watched the shift change turnover. He pretended to be engrossed in paperwork, but really he was just trying to get comfortable in his chair, watching beings. It was one of those hard plastic things designed to make you uncomfortable, but at least this one had an opening in the back so he didn’t have to sit on his tail. It swished back and forth slowly behind him.

He’d chosen this location carefully, after years of trial and error. It was far enough away that he couldn’t really overhear what anyone else was saying, but not so far away as to draw notice. Kothol demons aren’t known for keen hearing, anyway, but not every monster knew that. From here he could blend in and watch the low-slung shoulders, the puffy eyes, and other indicia of feelings even if he couldn’t hear the words.

The beings from the A shift shuffled out of the shift room, heads and tentacles down, with an air of defeat. One big red demon with four arms and a pair of swooping black horns was actually crying. Behind him, Munol, Vuzzaz’s counterpart for the A shift, put a tentacle on his shoulder in an effort at consolation. It clearly wasn’t working, leading Munol to turn and lock eye stalks with Vuzzaz.

As the A shift slid down the corridor and the B shift started to trickle in, Munol squeaked down toward Vuzzaz, his pungent slime trail dripping through the grated floor.

“Is it really that bad?” Vuzzaz asked.

Munol did the closest thing to a shrug a being with no shoulders and six flopping tentacles could. “I’ve never seen it like this. You have bad days, we all have bad days, but you don’t lose the love for the work.”

Vuzzaz looked through Munol as the rest of his shift shuffled in. “It can’t go on like this.”

“What are you going to do?” Munol’s dozen eyes all blinked at once.

Vuzzaz stood. “Go find every old timer you can find. I don’t care what they’re doing or how far up the chain they are. Tell them to come to the shift room as soon as they can.” As Munol began to ooze away, Vuzzaz grabbed a tentacle. “I mean every one.”

As Munol slithered down the hallway behind him, Vuzzaz watched as the stragglers of his shift filed into the room. Last, as always, was Bagrozoth, who looked like a pale three-foot-tall sprite or fairy, until her performance began and she tripled in size and turned coal black.

“Sorry, boss,” she said, voice squeaking.

“Get in there,” Vuzzaz said, following her in and closing the door.

The shift room was like a classroom that had seen better days. There was a lectern at the front from which Vuzzaz or his colleagues could speak to their charges. The members of the shift itself – normally an even dozen but Zongriruk was out sick today – sat in folding chairs barely big enough to hold most of them. There was room for, maybe, three or four beings to come and stand along the wall near the door.

The din of conversation among the shift quieted when Vuzzaz stepped behind the lectern. He took a deep breath, even puffing up his auxiliary swim bladder for effect. The room was very quiet for a long while.

“I understand,” Vuzzaz finally said, “that things are hard out there. But that is no excuse for not trying to do the best job we can. The Earth relies on us.”

“Then maybe the humans should cut us some slack.” It was Var’ath, a Kosmar demon who haunted dreams. “It’s a nightmare down there, even before I clock in.”

A rumble of agreement from their coworkers, including the low rumble that meant the mountain of rock named Billy, showed that they shared their opinion.

Vuzzaz held up his hands to quiet the crowd. “Tough times come and go when you’re an eternal purveyor of dread. Things will get better.”

“When?” Mizrolas stood up. She was a slender reed of a demon, pulsing blue green with three piercing yellow eyes and a mouthful of sharp, dagger-like teeth. “I was sneaking up on a girl, a teenager, someone I should scare the pants right off of. What’s she reading about on her phone? This pandemic that’s closing cities down, killing hundreds of thousands, impoverishing millions. How am I supposed to compete with that?”

Numerous others chimed in with nods of heads, stalks, or whatever appendage they had handy.

“I was nestled in the corner of a TV room,” said Jegexath, who for the moment had taken the form of a humanoid made entirely of chimney smoke, “just waiting for the right moment to seep out over the floor and imbue the family with dread. Do you know what they start talking about on TV?”

“Tell us!” cried out Gorkazod, like they were in their unholy church.

“Murder hornets!” Jegexath said.

Another dissonant din erupted from the room as some of the others called out the parade of horribles they had heard about, too.

“Wild fires!,” someone called out. “Australia was literally on fire!”

Another added, “so many hurricanes they’re running out of names!”

“Shortages of toilet paper! And yeast!”

They were so riled up that they didn’t even notice when Munol opened the door and walked in, along with one other old timer. Vuzzaz had hoped for more, but he’d have to work with what he had.

Vuzzaz put up his hands again, but with limited effect. “Now, now, let’s settle down.” That didn’t have much effect either. He didn’t want to go harder, but they were short on time and he had a point to make.

“KNOCK IT OFF!” Vuzzaz roared, eyes turning a shade of flaming orange while his knuckles went black as he clutched the lectern.

That quieted the crowd.

Vuzzaz took a few deep breaths to regain his composure. “Thank you. As I was saying, I know this year has been harder than most, but it’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before.” He looked to Gorkazod, a Muisto with a knack for dates and names. “When did I start trying to scare people?”

Its eyes rolled into its head for a second, then it answered, “1918.”

“That’s right. 1918.” Vuzzaz nodded, waiting to see if the date sank in. These young demons were so ignorant of history. “I first went to work while the Earth was convulsed in a terrible war, upon which a pandemic more deadly than the current one developed. Do you think I complained? No. I put my head down and did the job, because it needed to be done.”

“Due respect,” Gorkazod said, sheepishly raising a tentacle, “people were different then. They didn’t have all the horrors of the world beamed into their homes 24 hours a day.”

Silent nods greeted this, but at least they all kept quiet this time.

Vuzzaz hung his head, then turned to Munol. “Would you like to tell them when you first started?”

“1349,” it said, surveying the room. “That mean anything to anyone here?”

A silence fell over the room, punctuated only by the rolling gurgle that Xanuth did when he got nervous and couldn’t control his fluid sacs.

“The Black Death,” Vuzzaz said. “Killed half of Europe. People thought they were living in the last days, but did that keep Munol from doing his job?”

“You know it didn’t,” Munol said, folding his tentacles defiantly.

Sogthoz was just starting to explain his first years working during the era of the Mongol hordes when the door opened and Rilgaxoth walked into the room. Everyone froze – Sogthoz even stopped at mid sentence – when the boss entered. It took a moment for the shift to remember protocol before they leapt to their appropriate appendages.

Vuzzaz did his best to conceal a grin and made a mental note to buy Munol a couple of buckets of fish guts later.

“Good morning, First Supervisor,” Vuzzaz said, bowing slightly.

“Deputy,” Rilgaxoth said, with barely a notice. “Carry on.”

It took a moment for Sogthoz to get back up to speed, and Vuzzaz felt as though his hearts really weren’t in it at this point. Still, he at least made clear to Rilgaxoth why he’d been summoned here.

Before Vuzzaz had to think of where to go next, Rilgaxoth stepped next to him at the lectern, sulfur clouds billowing in his wake. “May I?”

Vuzzaz stepped to the side without a word.

“August 26, 1883,” Rilgaxoth said, barking like he was upset he had to be here. “A volcano called Krakatoa erupted, blowing most of an island off Southern Asia to hell. Killed tens of thousands. Was felt thousands of miles away. Affected the climate of the planet Earth for weeks.”

Rilgaxoth snapped his fingers and an image appeared in the aether beside him – a strange, malformed man with his hands to his face, mouth agape, under a blood red sky. “That’s what Norway – fucking Norway – looked like because of this. People thought the world was coming to an end.” He paused to let that sink in.

“And I started my work here on August 28, 1883. The Earth looked like it was on fire and I got out there and did my job. Now,” he barked again, before saying almost in a whisper, “get out there and do yours.”

Vuzzaz wasn’t sure if he actually shot out the door or just vanished, but all that was left at the lectern was a slowly dissipating cloud of sulfur. Vuzzaz stepped up and waved some of the fumes away. “Any questions?”

Xanuth, who had to double over just to fit through the door, sheepishly raised his hand.

“Yes?” Vuzzaz asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. He needed to wrap this up.

“If the humans are already so scared,” Xanuth said, “if their world is so terrifying, then why do we have to frighten them even more?”

Only then did Vuzzaz grasp how bad things were. His charges weren’t lazy or trying to get out of doing a hard job. They’d forgotten what their job was.

“What we do is so important,” he said, “regardless of what reality the humans are dealing with. The truth is, if the humans ever really sat and considered their situation, they’d never be able to leave the homes. They lead brief lives of survival and desperation on a rock hurtling through space with no purpose, no plan.”

He took a deep breath. “Our . . . competitors,” he said with a shudder, “think the way to help them deal with their situation is to give them hope, false hope, that it all really means something, that there is some ultimate reward. We know better. We know that humans can do it, they can face their fears and improve their lot. That’s why we frighten. That’s why we scare. We give their minds a place to confront darkness and vanquish evil so that in their waking lives they can get on with the business of surviving. After all, Xanuth, what’s another jammed commute or a terrorist attack or even a global pandemic once they’ve dealt with you?”

“Fair point,” Xanuth said, shaking what passed for his head.

“You’re damned right!” Vuzzaz was starting to warm up now. “Same for you and you and you,” he went around the room looking every last one of them in the eye. “You all make that world a better place, by giving them a chance to confront some fears they can conquer!”

“Yeah!” A ragged chorus responded.

“So what are we going to do?” Vuzzaz asked stepping from behind the lectern.

“Scare people!”

“And are we going to do it the best we damned well can?”

“Yes!”

He yanked open the door. “Then let’s get going!”

The shift jumped to their feet and tentacles and stumps and started pouring through the door.

Vuzzaz waited until they were all out and striding down the hall with purpose.

“Hey, all of you!”

They turned at his call.

“Let’s be scary out there, all right?”

They nodded, whooped and gave each other high regards in various numerals. Before Vuzzaz knew it, they were out the door.

Munol was standing just behind him. “Good speech. I’ll have to remember that next time.”

“Won’t work next time,” Vuzzaz said. “Sad fact is, if that world down there doesn’t start to improve, our jobs are going to suck for the foreseeable future. I think I owe you some fish heads.” Munol licked his lips. All five of them.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Weekly Read: The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

October 21, 2020October 20, 2020 / JD Byrne / Leave a comment

One of my favorite semi-recent films is David Fincher’s Zodiac, about the lengthy hunt for the Zodiac Killer (made before everybody agreed it’s Ted Cruz). While that’s an apt description of the film, it’s also pretty shallow. What the movie is really about is obsession, about the need to find answers, and what it does to people who dedicate their lives to trying to find them, yet don’t.

I thought a lot about Zodiac while reading The Feather Thief. Not because the crimes involved are in any way similar or because The Feather Thief is a gripping whodunnit. In fact, there’s no doubt whodunnit – on June 24, 2009, an American flautist-in-training (!) named Edwin Rist, studying at the Royal Conservatory in London, travelled to the nearby village of Tring and stole nearly 300 specimens of rare tropical birds from a branch of the Natural History Museum. This is hardly a spoiler, as it’s right there in the prologue. If the story is that simple, why is The Feather Thief worth reading? For several reasons.

First, Kirk Wallace Johnson does a really good job of laying out why anyone would bother to steal a bunch of birds. This starts with a history of these birds themselves, many of which were captured and cataloged by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s rival in developing the theory of natural selection. Then there’s the late-Victorian fashion fad of using rare birds (not just their feathers, either!) as status symbols and the backlash that produced one of the first animal conservation movements. Laws and treaties followed and the birds were generally relegated to becoming museum specimens at places like the Natural History Museum. They were in a small-town outpost in 2009 because they had been relocated there for safekeeping during World War II.

That these kinds of birds were basically illegal to possess, or at the very least sell on the open market, led to them becoming particularly valuable to a particular community – that of expert fly tiers. These are not folks that tie flies in order to use them fishing, but rather out of artistic drive and the desire for historical accuracy. Rist was not only a member of this community, but a leading light of it, even as a teenager. He was, broadly speaking, in the right place at the right time to know the value of these birds and have access to them.

The second thing that makes The Feather Thief compelling is Johnson’s role in this tale. He was once responsible for trying to rebuild parts of Iraq after the war, then transitioned into helping Iraqis who had worked with the United States seek asylum in the US. Although he wants to know why Rist did it (which is pretty obvious), he’s more interested in trying to right the wrong and locate the birds that hadn’t been recovered via the usual process of Rist’s criminal prosecution (he got no time, thanks to a shaky autism diagnosis by – no shit – Sasha Baron-Cohen’s cousin). This began with a stray comment from a buddy while fly fishing and, well, the rest is history.

This is where the Zodiac connection really comes in. Almost everyone in The Feather Thief is driven by an obsession that border on all-consuming. Wallace spent years in the Asian jungles in pursuit of specimens (while Darwin jumped in front of him with the whole evolution thing). Rist took to fly tying the way an addict-in-waiting takes to heroin. The ecosystem in which he swam online was obsessed with these birds as a means to creating the perfect fly. And, finally, Johnson himself nearly let his life get away from him as he tried to track down all of Rist’s birds.

None of these obsessions really end well, which returns us to Zodiac. There is no happy ending here, except maybe for Rist – yes, he’s a convicted felon, but he got his degree from the Conservatory and is making a living as a professional flautist. Johnson doesn’t find a trove of stolen birds. He can’t make the museum, and science itself, whole. Instead, he has to walk away before it consumes him, unsatisfied that he wasn’t able to make a difference.

The Feather Thief isn’t the knottiest whodunnit. The bad buy here isn’t really that inscrutable (whatever he convinced a court about his motivations). It’s more about the impact of a crime and the need to try and set it right. Along with the realization that, a lot of the time, that’s a hopeless crusade.

On Changing the World

October 14, 2020October 13, 2020 / JD Byrne / 1 Comment

There are generally two kinds of speculative fiction in terms of where those stories take place. One kind takes place in a world that is wholly divorced from our own. In fantasy that means the typical kind of second world story (like, say, The Water Road), but it applies to a lot of science fiction, too. Even if a sci-fi story is told in our reality, if it does so hundreds of years in the future it’s hardly “our world” it’s taking place in.

The second type, of course, takes place in what is basically our current world and universe – at the very least, it looks like what we think our world looks like (before The Year of the Plague, at any rate). Think urban fantasy or any of the numerous examples of near-future sci-fi that dot our pop culture landscape. There’s a particular issue with this, however, something that pops up more often in fantasy and something I first thought about because of a bunch of law professors.

The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog collective of most libertarian law profs and scholars. A few of them are also sci-fi/fantasy geeks, and so talk about that occasionally in and among lengthy posts on the Fourth Amendment and what have you. Several years ago, one blogger talked about having read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy.

For those not familiar with the books (or the excellent SyFy series that was based on them), the elevator pitch is “Harry Potter, but at college.” With that in mind, the blogger highlights an important difference:

Like the Harry Potter series, Grossman’s world features a hidden society of magicians who wield enormous power yet are unknown to normal humans, whose history they have little effect on. In the Potter series, however, there is a very powerful wizard government that prevents wizards from revealing their powers to Muggles and trying to dominate the world. The magical authorities in Grossman’s world are a lot weaker. It therefore strains credulity to believe that powerful sorcerers have been around for centuries, yet have never revealed themselves to normal humans, seized political power, or had any impact on history.

In other words, the world of The Magicians is different from ours not just in the general sense that “magic exists,” but that people have been trained to use it for generations and are living among us and . . . so what? What major historical catastrophe was averted? What major political movement played out a different way? The answer is nothing, and it’s a bit disappointing.

As I said, the issue has stuck with me. When I read Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell I really loved the way that magic worked in that book – it was about knowledge, it was about books, not bloodlines and destinies and all that. The relationship between Strange and Norrell reminded me of the apprentice system that trained new lawyers before law schools rose to prominence in the 20th Century. My mind whirred and I came up with an idea for a world, like ours, where magicians organized into firms and did contract work for clients, just like lawyers do, complete with oversight by the state (my main character was going to be the equivalent of a State Bar investigator). “Okay, cool,” I thought, “but how is this world different from ours? After all, if magicians have been operating like this for decades, things should be different, yes?” I’ve foundered on the shoals of that question for years.

This issue raised its head again recently while I was reading N.K. Jemisin’s new novel, The City We Became.

If you’ve read her short story collection you’ll recognize the basic idea from the story “The City Born Great,” which effectively serves as the prologue for this book. Essentially, for reasons that aren’t really all that clear, at some point certain cities are “born” into actual, living entities. Some of these births go well – London, Hong Kong, and Sao Paolo are all living breathing cities at this point – while others don’t make it, or don’t make it for very long – think Atlantis and Pompeii, and New Orleans is having troubles, too. In the book it’s New York City’s turn and its difficult birth in the prologue leads to the avatars of the city (one per borough and an additional one overall) fighting to keep it living.

The book overall is pretty good. Jemisin can lay words on the page like just about nobody else going right now and the individual scenes and chapters are great as set pieces. The broader plot doesn’t quite work, however, and the book winds up feeling like less than the sum of its parts (props here to the audiobook production which, aside from one minor quibble – longer pauses between scenes please! –is brilliant both in production and performance). One reason that’s true is that we’re not given any idea why any of this matters. I mean, there’s a villain to vanquish (in the next book, apparently – grumble, grumble) and a city to save, but as to what makes London and Hong Kong and Sao Paolo different from what New York was prior to its birth we never learn.

On the one hand, this doesn’t necessarily mean the main story suffers. After all, it’s likely that The City We Became didn’t address this issue because it wasn’t really applicable to the story Jemisin set out to tell. Still, one of the great pleasures of speculative fiction is digging into a fully developed world that’s not ours and glossing over such things can leave the experience a little hollow. In other words, if you’re writing modern-world fantasy, or near future sci-fi, it’s worth thinking about what’s going on in the world beyond the discrete story you’re telling. Maybe it’s not that important, but it introduces some interesting possibilities for how to deepen the world you’re building and provide some extra details for readers who are interested in sinking their mental teeth into that kind of thing.

Thoughts On Buttered Cats

October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 / JD Byrne / 1 Comment

One of my favorite bands is Sanguine Hum, which marries intricate song writing and arrangements with an absurdist streak derived from the original Canterbury scene (not for nothing was an earlier version of the band called Antique Seeking Nuns). A few years ago they released a pair of concept albums – Now We Have Light and Now We Have Power – inspired by what’s called the “buttered cat paradox.” Did I mention the absurdist streak?

The buttered cat paradox is best explained in this short video, where butter is substituted with jam, but the principle is the same:

The further step upon which the Sanguine Hum albums are based is the idea that if the cat will hover off the ground, rotating, that the rotational force could be capture as a form of generating power. As one song from the first album goes:

The simplest way to describe
What is lighting up the night’s sky
Is rotatory fur!
It spins through the air.
We buttered their backs
Now we have light!
Now we have power!

This is, of course, basically a joke (remember the absurdum!), but the whole idea never sat right with me. If the cat wants to land on its feet and it’s falling feet first, why on Earth would it suddenly stop and start spinning? Sadly, my education left me without a good means of figuring this out. The closest I got to science in college was a survey-level Biology class, with nary a Physics class in sight. If you need someone to explain the histiocity of Holocaust denial or expound on legal philosophy, I’m your man. How things move in the universe, not so much.

I did some poking around and someone confirmed that I was right to think this doesn’t make any sense! The long and short of it involves the much larger mass of the cat as compared to the buttered/jammed toast:

So there it is – a completely hypothetical, terminally absurd thought experiment is debunked. I do take some satisfaction in this, even as I try to always keep in mind the MST3K motto to “repeat to yourself it’s just a[n album], you should really just relax.”

Let’s do just that, then, shall we?

Now We Have Light by Sanguine Hum