Doorways to Nowhere, Part 1

After I wrote about the destruction in Japan, a massive swarm of tornadoes struck the southeast US and killed hundreds.  Since the media is covering this tragedy in great detail, I figured we could all use an escape from reality in the form of fiction.

So here's a little story to carry you away.

* * *

The sky is the color of iron.  Lightning arcs amongst the clouds.  Hard rain forces my head down, and the cold drops sting the back of my neck.

I am lost.

The trees are black.  A fire would be good.  But it's hard to imagine the rain stopping long enough for a fire to take hold.  Fire.  I pick up a short branch next to my boot.  It crumbles in my hand, leaving a brown smear.  Blink some drops out of my eyes.  My hands shake and a ripple runs through my shoulders.

There are no leaves.  No pine needles.  No green plants of any sort.  This forest is dead.  This world is dead.  Even the mud sucks at my boots, reluctant to let any living thing pass by.  I wish for a horse, but what would it eat?

I keep moving.  I can sit down and shiver to death or I can march.  I wish I had my sword.  It's lost, probably in the castle.  I have a knife--the kind you cut food with.  Its blade is the color of the sky.

Feel like screaming, but don't.  There's no one to hear me, so it's pointless.  Anything that heard me here I wouldn't want to meet with only my little knife.

As I leave the wood, I see round, gray stones scattered across a field in front of me.  They look like millstones.  Now there's half a pillar.  I stop and touch it.  It's cold.  I don't know why it would be anything else.  There are lines on the pillar.  It is segmented.  Built from the pieces lying all around me.  I didn't know that.  I thought pillars were all one piece, but they aren't.  They're just stacks of round stones cut to the same size.  I've never built a pillar.

I've seen cities before.  They were dense and noisy and they had walls.  The city across the field has no walls.  I move closer.  Everything about the city is wrong.  The buildings are all broken, roofs fallen in, walls collapsed.  Doorways to nowhere left standing.

Enter the city.  The scale is all wrong.  The shapes hurt my head.  Stairs go up but then stop.  The steps are so high I have to jump to grab the bottom edge.  I hang for a second, then slide back down the wall.  The rain has soaked through my cloak and the shivering is worse.

When I look at the ruined city and try to picture it whole, pain erupts behind my eyes.  Walls slant and bulge.  Straight lines warp.  I shut my eyes for a moment until the feeling passes.

There are ramps everywhere.  Some go up, but most lead down into the dark soil.  Nothing makes sense.  It's as if mad titans built everything, then tore it apart in a fury.  Maybe they did.

I crouch by one of the ramps and look down.  At the bottom there are three walls and a roof.  The roof is level with the ground.

I descend to get out of the rain, but the room at the base is dim.  The ramp levels out and my right boot comes down in water.  I stagger.  Fall backward.  Squint in the near darkness and see the outline of a wide pool, like a well without its wall.  The pool is perfectly circular.  I stare into it.  The water is black, and I wonder how deep it is.  I cast a stone.  Splash.  Despite the wind and the thunder, it is terribly loud.

The ripples spread over the black water, lap the edge of the pool and die.

There are bones next to the pool.  They are not bleached white by the sun, but wet and gray and old like everything here.  One small pile is a foot, a human foot or perhaps an ape's.  I have seen bones before on old battlefields next to rusty axe heads and red-brown links of mail and forgotten dreams.

The pool stirs.  Overflows onto the floor.  Something rises from its depths. 

I run up the ramp, racing half blind through the rain.

I have to find a gate.  The man in the orange mantle shut the last gate behind me.  There will be no escape there.  I must find another.

* * *

(Part 2 will soon follow.  Thanks for reading!)

Ring of Fire

The earthquake and resulting tsunami that hit Japan 11 March were so huge that even weeks later it's hard for me to wrap my head around them.  While people in Japan are living in shelters and worrying about radiation sickness, I think it's worth reminding folks of their plight with a little science.

At magnitude 9, the quake was the fifth largest in recorded history.  Tectonic shifting pushed Honshu, the main island, 7.87 feet west (or 2.4 meters).  Eight feet doesn't sound like much until you consider that Honshu is 800 miles (1300km) long.

It's freaky to think that the quake/tsunami combo was so powerful it changed the rotation of the earth and shortened the length of the day, even if only by a fraction.

On the human side, the numbers are just as scary.  Residents of Sendai had just 8 to 10 minutes of warning before the tsunami struck, and the water went 6.2 miles (or 10km) inland.  Think about that for a moment.  If you had 8 minutes to grab your kids and whatever you value from your home and jump in your vehicle, would you have made it 6 miles inland in time?

There are 12,000 to 13,000 people dead.  Another 12,000 to 17,000 missing.  530,000 homes destroyed.  For comparison sake, 1,836 people died in Hurricane Katrina.

It is hard to comprehend a disaster of this scale.

* Thanks to google, I drew numbers from an article in Scientific American and from a South African blogger named Wicked Mike.  And the Katrina ref is from Wikipedia.

** If you don't have complete disaster fatigue, you might consider helping through prayers or donations via the American Red Cross or Catholic Relief Services.

New novel out for Kindle

If you enjoy reading thriller novels and have a Kindle or use the Kindle app, I have a new ebook on Amazon titled HIRED GUNS. 

You can check out my Amazon author's page here or just visit the Stories page to the right.

Here's the summary:

* * *

Determined to overcome his past, paroled LA gangbanger Hector Tombs finds a steady job and a pretty girlfriend.  But a single day of bloodshed changes all that.

Elite Spetsnaz commando Alexander Turgenev fled Russia with a price on his head.  Now he leads a team of mercenaries hired out to a rogue scientist dealing in biochemical weapons.  Worse, he's fallen for the team's beautiful and deadly sniper.

When Turgenev's boss murders Hector's girlfriend and poisons eight thousand civilians, Hector and Turgenev go to war for the antidote.  From street fights in Tokyo to gun battles on the African savanna, Hector Tombs must use the skills that put him in prison to save thousands from the grave.

* * *
Thanks for reading!

Godzilla lives!

At last we have an eyewitness photograph of the vicious fence lizard! (Thanks Gudrun) Note the yellowjacket held helpless in the predator's powerful jaws.

In some cultures, a traditional test of adulthood is for a young person to plunge their bare hand into a large jar filled with multi-colored gumballs and a single hungry fence lizard lurking at the bottom. 

You see a lot of three-fingered kids in those cultures.

(Okay, I made the last part up.  The lizard usually kills and eats them.)

Voyager to the Stars

Some nights after I roll the trash can to the street, I look up at the stars and the planets.  It makes me a bit sad that I'll never travel to space.  Well, at least not until I'm dead.  Hopefully, I'll be looking down from Heaven.  I hear the view is spectacular.

My point is that humans have the urge to explore.  I worry that unless we have a spectacular breakthrough in physics that permits faster-than-light-speed travel, we are stuck here on Earth.  At best we could get a small number of people to other planets in our solar system, but I don't think we'll be able to move large groups. 

So our future exploration will probably be conducted by probes and robots.  NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977.  By 2010, it was over 10 BILLION miles (or 17 BILLION kilometers) out from our sun.  Impressive, and the engineers who built Voyager should be proud.  Now Voyager is entering the heliosheath, where solar winds from our star meet interstellar winds from space.  But will humans ever get that far?

Here on Earth we can explore the seas--they are vast and deep and may keep us busy for a while.  And we can explore virtual worlds, but this is essentially people wandering worlds created by other people.  What will happen when we run out of actual places to explore?

I think the urge to explore is built into humans.  If exploration is part of something fundamentally human, what will we become when we can no longer explore?

(Please note, the picture is from the Hubble.  And an interesting article on Voyager's latest maneuvers can be found here on space.com.)

Nature Walk follow up

In reference to an earlier post on a nature walk, an alert reader (thanks Gudrun) sent in a photo of the dreaded wasp-eating fence lizard.

Sadly, despite multiple attempts, I could not get the pic to load.  But I can tell you, it was terrifying.  Imagine chewing a mouthful of live, angry wasps.  Now picture a creature so tough it could do that.

Hey, even chimps only eat termites.  This lizards eats wasps!
 

Nice to meet you. We've heard good things!

Did you know your smartphone might be spying on you?

A buddy of mine (thanks Dave) sent me this article by Mike Elgan in Computerworld.  The article explains how various applications for the Droid and iPhone can activate your phone's microphone and camera to gather information about you.  Where you are, what you're doing, what you're watching on TV or listening to on the radio, and onward.

Does that freak you out?

The Shopkick app Elgan describes is particularly sneaky.  Stores like Best Buy and Target have a device that makes a sound that is inaudible to humans.  But the microphone on your Droid can hear it.  So when you walk into Best Buy, your phone detects the sound and transmits a message through the app.  Then the app can identify you and your location.

Elgan writes, "Many apps actually snoop around on your phone, gathering up personal information, such as gender, age and ZIP code, and zapping it back to the company over your phone's data connection."  Since every mobile phone has a Unique Device Identification number, companies can link the data they gather to specific users.

So yeah, your phone might be spying on you.

Now don't get me started on why you should keep a piece of tape over the camera on your laptop.

(Please note:  tech guru Leo Laporte first broke this story on his podcast, found here.  And the picture is from Best Buy.  Yes, irony.)

At high speed on one inch of water

This weekend my buddy Scott and I went to watch a skimboarding competition.  While the sun was bright and the temperature in the mid-70s, conditions for skimboarding were not ideal.  Too much wind.

For those that don't skimboard, skimming is riding a short board along the beach, parallel with the shoreline.  Skimmers often turn their boards into the surf and do tricks on the waves as they roll in. 

Other than the wind, the day was perfect.  While we waited for the professionals to start, and the judges to come back from lunch, we wandered around and checked out the merch tent, and the Zap skimboards, and Yolo standup boards.  Watched some collegiate ladies beach volleyball.  Saw a group of Marines around a sweet red customized Hummer talk to young people about signing up while they gave out t-shirts for feats on the pull-up bar. 

Sports evolve.  The boards they use now are bigger and float better, and yet they are lighter than my sneakers.  I didn't see any wooden boards like mine (pictured above) in use.  And the tricks! These folks were swinging out into the hard surf, catching air, switching feet, doing flips.  It appears that skateboarding and maybe snowboarding have influenced the types of tricks now seen in skimboarding.

Unlike surfing or skateboarding, I don't think skimboarding is a big business.  I'm sure there must be a few sponsors out there, but I don't know if there are any full-time skimmers who don't have a regular job.  Sad in one way, because it's a great sport.  But good in a way that a sport that isn't driven by money remains pure.

And whether you're skimming in front of hundreds of people for prize money, or skimming by yourself on a empty beach, skimboarding is all about the beautiful synergy between the ocean and the rider.

The Virtue of the Small

A few weeks ago friends invited me along on a nature walk in a state forest.  To promote conservation efforts, members of the local Audobon Society led these walks where they could tell people about the plants and animals.

We had a group of about 15 people, including three guides.  All three guides were older gentlemen, sensibly dressed in sun hats, cargo pants and long sleeved shirts.  Binoculars and cameras hung from their necks, and they carried thick bird guides in their hands.

At first the pace was difficult for us.  Difficult as in slow.  We moved about 20 feet in 20 minutes because the guides stopped to point out plants by their Latin names, and three types of dragonflies, and even a bed of fire ants. 

My friends and I generally hike at a quicker pace because we're intent on reaching on camp site and setting up before the sun drops.  But in this case we had no particular place we had to be.  And pretty soon we began to slow down and see the virtue in the small things.

You don't have to come face to face with a bear to have an interesting hike.  The little creatures and the plants and the trees can be fascinating, too.  At one spot along the trail, when the party had stretched out over about 50 yards, we spotted a lizard on a tree trunk with something in his mouth.  A closer look and we discovered he had a yellow jacket in his jaws, and he gulped it down while we watched.

That's one tough lizard.  A yellow jacket bit me on the hand once and it swelled up like a catcher's mitt.

But my point is that these guides reminded us of the beauty of nature all around us, from the largest tree to the smallest lizard.  And that's worth remembering as we all hurtle through life, yapping on our cell phones as we race from one appointment to another.

So take a moment this weekend and watch a bee work.  Or listen to a bird sing.  Or smell a flower as you pass by.  It's worth it.

(please note this bird pic is from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/)

Robot counterattack

An alert reader sent me a link to this CNET news story.  Five weeks after the tsunami, the Japanese are now using a combination of remote-controlled heavy machinery and robots to work on the Fukushima reactor.

This includes doing overhead imagery of the plant with a small aeriel vehicle, the T-Hawk.  And using the Talon robot to check things out on the ground.  The Talon is a tread-based robot that weighs about 100 pounds and has been used from the Ground Zero wreckage after 9/11 to the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.  According to PW Singer's book WIRED FOR WAR, by 2008 there were nearly 2,000 Talons in field service.  

I wonder if engineers needed a month to shield these robots to handle the high radiation levels -- that would explain their delayed deployment.  Or maybe the radiation has reduced enough now to send in unshielded robots?

Either way, it's good to see robots getting in there to help and saving humans from having to undertake suicide missions in high-rad zones.

And on a personal note, yesterday Asimo walked into Starbucks and punched me. 

Send in the robots!

(Please note this pic is from:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Honda_ASIMO.jpg)

So as I've watched the tragic aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, especially in dealing with the nuclear plants, I've wondered, "Where are the robots?"

They have nuclear reactors that are too dangerous for humans to enter or even approach.  Isn't this the ideal situation for a robot? After reading PW Singer's book WIRED FOR WAR about how advanced US robots are, I figured the Japanese would have some giant Gundams to go in there and clean up the radioactive mess.  Instead, it appears they don't have anything better than Asimo, pictured above.  And I don't think Asimo is up for the task.

A scientist friend (thanks Cory) informed me that without special hardening, the high radiation would fry a robot's electronics, effectively killing it.  I guess we don't have any radiation-resistant robots, but I bet we are scrambling to build some.  At least I hope so.   

Second short story

My second short story went up on Kindle ebooks today.  Here's a brief description:

"Wintertime in Florida.  During a fierce storm, a guest in a deserted beach motel faces something far more deadly than a night alone.  Will he live to see the morning?"

It's a fun story and I hope you enjoy it.

Here's the link, or you can always check my Story Page.

A radioactive pencil bit me

Sometimes people ask, "How did you get started in writing?"

I could talk about reading F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton or Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens and feeling so inspired I sat down with a quill and a scroll and poured forth a novel.

But the truth?

Comic books.

In third grade I read J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT.  It was wonderful.  And a challenge for my limited reading skills.  But it was BIG.  Wizards, dwarves, goblins, hobbits.  And not just any wizard, but Gandalf wielding Glamdring.  And not just any monsters, but Smaug, the great dragon.  Heck, even the battle wasn't a battle between two armies.  Oh no.  Tolkien had a battle with FIVE armies! Awesome.

I was eight years old and I knew I couldn't write a book like that.

But comics? Comics were friendly.  They were short in pages, but epic in storytelling.  Marvel, DC, Charlton Comics, Classic Comics and all the rest were accessible.  I knew how to draw, and color, and I could write simple dialogue like, "Hulk smash!"

So I got a spiral notebook, turned it sideways (landscape view), and wrote a story.  I made up a plot, drew the pictures, and filled in the dialogue.  In my story, the Fantastic Four teamed up with Spiderman to stop the Hulk's latest rampage.  By the end of the story, everyone became friends.  Hulk and Thing even shook hands.

The main difference between my spiral notebook and a regular comic, other than the art and the writing, was that all my characters were cats.  Human bodies, with cat heads, and cat tails.  Spidercat, Kitty Hulk, etc.  Okay, that's kinda weird, but the point is that when I wrote/drew the last page, I had told a story.

And there I went.

Tower of Karma

My friends and I play board games.  Most of them involve a map, cardboard or plastic units, and dice.  The dice rolling is always the exciting part.  It captures all the elements of chance, whether you're herding sheep in Settlers of Catan, or sending a fleet of X-wings to blow up the Death Star in Star Wars: Risk.

Lately we've been playing Seth's new purchase, Shogun (the 2006 version), a game where each player represents a powerful samurai clan and tries to conquer medieval Japan through a combination of economics and combat.  It's not only a fun game that makes you think, it also uses an interesting cardboard tower with a clear plastic well at the bottom.  When two armies battle, you dump the appropriate number of troops from each army into the Cube Tower.  (Painted wooden cubes represent the troops.)  The cubes filter through the tower and whatever comes out in the well at the bottom determines the winner.

The interesting thing is how this changes players' perception of luck.

When you sling a handful of dice, you know the outcome is random, yet you feel responsible.  I can't count the number of times I've watched friends lean back from the table and say, "I'm rolling horrible tonight."

My pal Chris pointed out he doesn't have that problem with the Cube Tower.  It's like a cardboard computer.  You drop your troops in the top, and whatever falls out is the result.  No arguing.  No sense of failure.   It feels like fate.

Now I could argue that with dice you get a truly random result, whereas with the Cube Tower you can count the number of cubes you have in the tower (which I think Susan did), and even keep track of enemy cubes to figure the exact odds.  But my point is that the Tower FEELS like luck.  Luck without the burden of responsibility.

And psychologically, that's interesting to me.

(By the way, while Chris harvested rice, and Susan counted cubes, and Seth and I depopulated eastern Japan with constant warfare, Torger quietly built temples and castles and won the game.)

Tesseracts

I was thinking about tesseracts, and the idea that something that is small on the outside can be very big on the inside.  My memory may be faulty on this, but I recall an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where they found a small starship and brought it inside the Enterprise for study.  When they climbed inside, the ship was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Sadly, a visit to the Star Trek database found no such episode, but I did spot a clever reference to Coxeter's book on polytopes.  Which I only knew about from a reference about hypercubes on this math site.

But the point remains that some things are bigger on the inside than the outside.  For instance, a book.  Physically, a book may be a small thing you can hold in one hand, but inside there may be entire worlds and cultures and dozens of interesting characters and a massive sweep of history.

Or a computer.  Its hard drive may hold every album/cd/song you've ever bought.  And all your pictures.  And whatever you've written or composed.  USB/thumb drives/memory sticks take this to the extreme. 

This does not, however, make these things any less valuable.  Like Yoda said, "Size matters not."

(please note the image is from wikipedia.)

Kindle application for computers

Okay, I thought you needed a Kindle device to read ebooks for the Kindle.  I was wrong.  They make an application you can download so you can read your Kindle books and shop for more on your home computer or laptop.  Which is cool, because a lot of people I know don't own an ereader.  

Here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

First short story on Kindle

I put my first short story up for the Kindle this weekend, and it should be published by tomorrow.  It's a crime story/thriller.  Here's the description:

When his best friend calls for help, Al Fisher drops everything.  But how far does loyalty go? From a mansion on a Florida golf course to a seedy motel, Al falls into a world of blackmail and murder, loyalty and betrayal.  And as the bodies pile up, Al fights to make sure the last corpse isn't his.

If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, please check it out.

First attempt at self publishing

I've spent a week learning about self publishing, and reached the point where I am ready to try a short story as a test.  So I formatted one of my favorites, "Coercion," and put it on Amazon Kindle's Direct Publishing store for .99.

Now I need to put a sample on this site, and a link to the Kindle store so folks can find the story and download it.  There's a lot to learn in this self pubbing, and I don't believe the authors that say it gives them more time to write than working with a traditional print publisher.

But it does give you more control, and more freedom.  And that's pretty cool.

False Start

I'm learning how to format my stories for e-readers.  And I realized I need a blog or website where people can find links to my work.  So after a few months of letting this blog languish, I'm back to make it useful.

Please remain patient.  Building things takes time.