Month: December 2015

It Just Kept Spinning

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Sometimes, when something strange happens to you, it’s best to just roll with it.  Or spin with it, in this case.

In other words, I’m glad that I’ve always had the mind of an engineer.

Also, that I happened to be playing with the magnetic trick coin when it happened.

Let me set the scene.  Friday night, about seven at night.  I’m sitting at my crappy little dinner table, fiddling with the coin absent-mindedly as I’m staring at my phone, sitting on the table.

She still hasn’t texted back, of course.  Isn’t that how life always goes?  Everything was great, we were joking, laughing, tons of texts flowing back and forth.  And then, I ask her out – and suddenly nothing, silence.

Sucks, man.  I hate that feeling, especially considering how frequently it seems to be a part of my life.  Losing.  Always losing.

Just once, I thought to myself savagely as I flicked the coin across the table, I’d like a win.

I’d been spinning the coin for the last thirty minutes, convincing myself each time that, as soon as it stopped spinning on its edge, I’d get up.  Screw this girl, anyway!  I could go over to the pub next door, grab a few drinks, probably see Sean and Andy from work.  Maybe even meet a new babe over there.

Last one, I told myself for the thirtieth time, flicking the coin out across the table, watching as the fake “dollar” coin spun around in a little flashing circle of light.  After it falls, I’m getting up.

But it didn’t.

My emotions went from anger and annoyance, to feeling impressed, to a sense of confused amazement.  I lowered myself down, looking at the coin at its level, watching as it kept on spinning on the table.  What was going on?

I tried pounding a fist on the table.  The coin jumped, but kept spinning when it landed.  I fished one of the magnets off my fridge (a smiling panda, a move-in gift from my mom) and held it near the coin.  It pulled the still-spinning coin towards it, but the coin kept on twirling.

Now this, this was definitely a sign of something.  The universe definitely was trying to send some sort of message.

I just wished I knew what it was telling me.

After another minute, I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, scooped my phone up from the table.  “Whatever,” I groaned, grabbing my jacket off the back of the couch and checking the pocket for the jingle of my keys.  “I’m going to go get that beer anyway.”

Three hours later, considerably more sloshed, I stumbled back up to my apartment, opened the door – and stared.

It was still going.  Still spinning, right there in the middle of the kitchen table.  Peering closer, I noticed that it had worn a little divot in the cheap plastic surface.

If I’d been more sober, maybe I would have wondered more about what was going on, why it kept going.  But I was drunk, three sheets to a wind, and an engineer.

So, what else?  I started tinkering.

Another magnet still made the coin move, hopping out of its little depression in the plastic.  I pulled the coin first onto my hand, marveling at how warm it felt, and then deposited it onto a thick chunk of aluminum I’d stolen from one of our recent builds at work.  I’d intended to turn it in for some cash, but it would work fine as a holder for the coin.

Next, I put some wire around it, hooking it up to a spare lightbulb.  It took a couple seconds, but sure enough, the bulb flickered into life.

I grinned.  Perpetual motion! I thought drunkenly to myself.

I looked around the room.  What else could I do?  What about going the other way?  I had a crappy little weak generator now.  Could I boost the field, get more power out of it?

A few changes to the layout of the wire, and I had an induction coil, pushing more energy into the coin via its own magnetic field.  Normally, of course, this would make a spinning magnet quickly come to a stop as it absorbed its own kinetic energy.  I held my breath.

The coin didn’t stop.  Instead, it spun faster and faster, until it looked almost like a solid sphere of metal – and I realized suddenly that the aluminum block beneath the coin was starting to smoke where it sat on my counter.

Hastily, I whipped the coil off the coin.  It didn’t slow down, but at least the acceleration stopped.

Interesting.  I’d need a bigger heat sink.

It was about this time that my stomach suddenly decided to protest its beer-filled contents, and I abruptly lurched off to the bathroom.  I spent the next hour wrapped around the cool porcelain, and then dragged myself into bed.

The next morning, I opened my eyes to a soft whirring sound.  I blinked, rubbing at my head and wincing at the bright sunlight shining in through my slatted blinds.  Pulling myself out of bed, I stumbled into the kitchen.

It was still there, spinning merrily away.  I hadn’t hallucinated or dreamed the whole thing.  The coin had formed a slight little depression in the aluminum, but it otherwise looked the same.  Still spinning.

I looked at it as I poured myself a cup of coffee, made some eggs (my favorite hangover cure, especially with some Sriracha on them).  I ate slowly, watching the thing spin.

And then, afterwards, I called Sean and Andy.

It took a bit of convincing, but eventually I got them both over to my crappy little apartment.  What else were they going to do on a Saturday morning?  Neither of them had girlfriends, either.

The three of us sat around, staring at the coin.  I carefully transferred it back over to the table, lifting the aluminum block.  I noticed that the coin seemed to have a bit of gyroscopic motion to it, and liked to stay in its little divot on the aluminum even when I tilted the block.

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” Sean finally pointed out.  “Conservation of energy-“

“Yeah, but it’s going!” I interrupted him.  “Maybe there’s some weird trick of the universe here, or some neutrino hit it just the right way-“

“It still wouldn’t-“

“Guys, guys,” Andy cut us both off.  “You’re looking at this wrong.”

“How’s that?” Sean asked, sounding grumpy at being told that he was wrong about anything.  Sean hated being wrong.

Andy gestured towards the coin.  “It’s going.  We see that.  But what can we do with it now?”

“We can boost it, if we need more power,” I pointed out, and explained my experiment with the induction coil last night.

Andy nodded.  “So maybe we put the thing in a water tank, rig up an induction coil, get some big-ass heat sinks-“

“Hook the tank up to a generator same idea as nuclear plants-” Sean jumped in, quickly forgetting his previous grumpiness as his engineering brain took over.  “Maybe a few banks of capacitors-“

“Hell, that sounds like free power!” I exclaimed, finishing the other two’s thoughts.  “At least, at one station.  We’ve only got one coin.”

“Yeah – about that,” Sean asked next, glancing over at me and waggling his eyebrows.

We all rushed to my laptop.  Amazon had the magic coins in stock, but it would still take a couple days for shipping.  I ordered two dozen.

My last girlfriend, before she left, told me that my brain was broken.  “Engineering – all you think about is how!” she shouted at me, as she stormed out of my apartment.  At the time, I hadn’t known what she meant.

But now, I started to see.

By that evening, my apartment looked more like an Ace Hardware, or maybe a hardware store that had just played host to a localized tornado.  Wire and chunks of metal lay scattered across the floor, and a large bank of car batteries sat balanced precariously on my living room coffee table.  We’d moved the coin to a larger piece of aluminum, enclosed on all four sides by plexiglass and balanced over a vat of water to absorb any excess heat.

We’d boosted the coin’s speed again, and figured out how to reverse the flow through the coil to drain some of the speed off if we overcharged the thing too much.  Sure enough, thanks to the coin’s magnetic nature, we soon had a charge flowing out, pumping the batteries up to their maximum charge.  Our first voltmeter blew up in a hiss of melting plastic, but we picked up a stronger one, and worked out that we had about 250 volts flowing out of the coin right now.

Each of us had our own ideas for where we should go next.  Andy was still campaigning that we hook it up to the wall outlets, try and run the whole apartment building off of it.  Sean instead felt that we should move the coin somewhere else, protect it.

And me?

I just kept thinking about that package from Amazon, on its way here.  Would the other coins behave the same way?  Was it the spinning method, the location, the nearness of my phone?  I’d done my best to keep my table, chair, and other parts of my kitchen the same, even as the piles of wire built up.

The best part?  That girl, halfway through the day, she texted me back – some insincere apology.  Something about missing my message, being busy, something like that.

I didn’t even see the text alert until two hours later, and didn’t even have enough spare brainpower to think of a reply.  I just tossed my phone aside and returned back to the spinning coin in its new chamber.

That relationship?  No future there.

But this coin, now, this had potential for a very bright future.

After the supervillains have won…

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The heels of my shoes clicked smartly against the floor as I approached the double doors of the Oval Office.  I paused for a moment outside the doors, checking my hair and running my eyes one last time over the contents of the leather file in my hands, and then stepped through.

“Sir?  I have the latest reports,” I called out to the high-backed leather chair behind the President’s desk.

The chair slowly rotated around.  I carefully avoided rolling my eyes.  The last intern to roll his eyes at the theatrics of our leader had ended up “volunteering” as a test subject for an Explosive Growth Ray, intended to boost meat production by super-sizing cows and pigs.

As it turned out, the “Explosive” part worked a lot better than the “Growth” part.  I heard that the janitors had to scrub the ceiling down for days before they got it all cleaned up.

“Ah, the latest reports, yes,” the man sitting in the chair repeated, the words sounding slightly metallic coming from behind his mask.  Through the two eye slits, dark pupils watched closely as I approached, offering the leather folder out to him.  A hand, covered by a blackened metal gauntlet, accepted the folder from me and flipped it open.

Our leader set the folder down on the desk in front of him, but those dark eyes remained locked on me.  “So, what’s the news?” he asked.

“Sir?”

He made a short, impatient gesture, uncomfortably similar to gestures I’d seen him use to order minions to execute hostages in the old archival footage tapes.  “You’ve read the whole thing, I know.  So give me a status update.”

“Well, we’re making great strides in many areas,” I began, electing to start with the good news.  “Thanks to Magneto’s work with recycling and augmenting metal, our construction boom is still providing job growth.  Analysis of Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus Pits is still ongoing, but scientists are fairly confident that we’ll have synthetic substitutes ready for phase II of FDA trials by the end of this year.  And a new joint venture between Loki and Kingpin is claiming that they’ll have portals open between all major cities by next quarter, although we know that Loki’s never been good with deadlines.”

The robed and masked man waved his gloved hand again.  “Yes, yes, I’m aware of that,” he grunted.  “What about the heroes?”

Despite my attempt to keep my face calm and blank, a brief grimace flashed across it.  “Yes.  Well.”

Those dark eyes watched me for another second, and then the man behind the desk rose up to his feet.  Instinctively, I took a step back, and I heard him snort.  “What are you worried about, girl?”

“Er.  I heard about the last intern,” I said, keeping a close eye on his gauntlets.  I knew he had a laser mounted in one of them, but I couldn’t remember which one.

“Oh, him?  Trust me, he had it coming,” the man insisted.  “I’m not planning on hurting you.  Go on, take a seat.”

Still feeling a little on edge, I let myself sink into one of the chairs in front of the desk, crossing my legs and smoothing down my skirt self-consciously.

Behind the desk, the man turned to stare out the tall windows behind him, clasping his gauntleted hands behind his back.  “They fought us,” he said, his words a little grander, a little softer, than when he’d been speaking to me.  “They insisted that our new ideas would destroy their old world, destroy everything they fought to preserve.”

“And indeed, they were right.”

The man – the king, I amended my thought, remembering his official title – shook his head slightly.  “We destroyed the trappings of their old world – the disease, the hunger, the sickness,” he said, staring out at the sunny day beyond the window.  “We used our powers for the greater good, fixing what we found broken – even when that meant remaking society itself.”

“You’ve done a lot of good for the world,” I spoke up, wanting to contribute.  “Poverty, hunger, communicable disease – we’re already seeing so much benefit all across the world-“

“Yes,” he nodded.  Behind his back, I saw one gauntlet tighten into a fist.  “And yet, they still fight back.”

I sensed the man’s mood darkening, but like a true storm, I couldn’t see a way to divert the gathering energy.  “They insist that what we are doing is bad, that it doesn’t match their ‘traditional values’!” he growled.  “They now lead campaigns of fear, of ignorance and bigotry, of destruction and racism against us!”

Turning back abruptly to face me, he slammed a gauntlet down on the desk, making the entire sturdy wood piece of furniture shake.  “Heroes!” he spat, his eyes blazing behind the steel mask.  “They call themselves heroes!  They have no right to the name!”

I stared, transfixed, into the merciless eyes behind that mask.  I’d always been drawn to power and influence, and I knew that the man before me possessed both in absolutes.  I’d watched his ascension, cheered for him at the polls, listened to his old speeches.

He had brought the very opposite of his name to our country, and then to the entire world.

After a minute, the burning rage in his eyes dimmed, and he sank back down into his chair.  “The news, Sue,” he stated, folding his gauntleted fingers together beneath his chin.

I nodded, snapped out of the trance of his words.  “Yes.  We froze Wayne Enterprise’s accounts, but we’re still receiving reports of the vigilante, mainly conducting industrial sabotage.  Most of the supers have moved south, setting up strongholds in more rural areas where our military forces cannot reach them.  They’ve launched several more attacks; the full list is in the binder.”  I recalled the long list of industrial targets, fusion energy factories, synthetic medicine centers, and other areas that had suffered attacks.

The most powerful man in the free world nodded, and I heard a sigh escape his lips behind the mask.  “Heavy is the head,” I heard him mutter to himself under his breath.

When he raised his eyes to look at me again, however, any trace of weakness was once again scoured away.  “Talk with the Joint Chiefs about troop movements – we’ve got them hemmed, but now we need to close the trap,” he declared.  “Use the robotic droid systems for reconnaissance – we can’t risk more human lives.”

“The Doombots, sir?” I clarified.

He nodded.  “We thought that we’d won,” he said reflectively, leaning back in his chair.  “But we didn’t know how much higher we’d still have to climb.”

I waited a beat longer, but no other comments were forthcoming.  He didn’t dismiss me, but I knew that our conversation was at an end.

Rising up from the chair, I turned and headed out of the office, leaving President Von Doom alone once again.

Book 48 of 52: "Overwhelmed" by Brigid Schulte

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Ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything on your checklist?  Have you considered giving up on your checklist, because you’ll never finish it?  Heck, do you ever feel like your to-do list is growing faster than you can cross things off?

I know I’ve felt this way before.  So when I saw the cover of Brigid Schulte’s book, Overwhelmed, I hoped that I might find some answers inside.  How can I avoid that crushing mental exhaustion of always feeling, well, overwhelmed?
As it turns out, this book might not have been targeted for me.  Rather, the vast majority of the book focused less on just why we’re so overwhelmed, and instead looked at how one specific group – mothers – are overwhelmed.

I am many things, but I’m not a parent (unless a cat counts).  So many of the complaints, such as how I should be angry at my daycare, annoyed at all the after school activities of my child, or worried about getting my kid into the right preschool, didn’t really apply.

In the end, the message of the book is… overwhelm is basically here to stay.  You can either let go and pursue fewer activities, or suffer the overwhelm.  Those appear to be the main couple of options.  A little depressing.

Oh, wait – or you could move to Denmark, where apparently everything is perfect.  Go figure.

I liked the first third of this book, talking about all the overwhelm, but I feel like it dropped off a bit towards the end – there were no good conclusions, more a sort of open handed, empty palm gesture.  “Here’s how things are – sorry about it.”

Maybe Mrs. Schulte felt too overwhelmed to give the book a good, final ending.

Time to read: About 5 hours.

Planning: An Amateur’s Guide to the Apocalypse [AGttA]

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Author’s note: I’m not yet done with my current novel (Apocalypse Before Coffee, coming soon!), but I’m already plotting out my next story.  I’m starting with a working title:

An Amateur’s Guide to the Apocalypse

The book is going to be divided up into several chapters, each one built around a different “survival tip” for the Apocalypse, the Biblical end of the world!  The main story, however, will follow a single character, a young man, as he attempts to journal his continued existence as the world comes crumbling down around him.

Ten essential steps to surviving the Apocalypse:

  1. Remain calm.  Take stock of your surroundings.
  2. Gather supplies.
  3. Search for other survivors.
  4. Keep clear and open communications.
  5. Learn as much as possible.
  6. Formulate a long-term plan.
  7. Remain positive.
  8. Adapt to setbacks.
  9. Don’t lose hope.
  10. Find what makes you happy.
The book will be split into ten smaller sections, each one based around one of these ten steps.  The rest of the story will be in the form of a journal, kept by the main character, Quinn, as he attempts to stick to his ten ‘easy steps’ – or, at least, survive!

Unfortunately for Quinn, surviving the Apocalypse isn’t quite as easy as the ten-step survival guide makes it sound…

I plan on writing many of these chapters as blog posts, so stay tuned for more information – coming soon!

Nebulous Nightmares

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“You all don’t understand!” the man cackled, rocking gently back and forth.  “You don’t know them, don’t realize just how they are.  Ohh, they hunger, but for so much more than you ever can know!”

He didn’t seem to see me, I noted, even though he sat directly across the metal table from me.  His hands were attached to a ring on the table via metal cuffs, but he ignored how the bracelets tugged at his hands when he rocked back in his chair.

“Doctor Angell,” I repeated, waiting for the man to return back to a more lucid state.  “George, it’s me, Francis.  Please, try and stay calm.”

Dr. Angell’s eyes briefly focused on me, but then they darted off again as he kept on rocking back and forth, now muttering indistinctly to himself.  He always did eventually come around, but as of late it seemed to take longer and longer.  His mind’s grip on reality, the doctors at the sanitarium said, was slowly slipping away.

I didn’t know how much longer I had before he’d lose that tenuous grip and fully slip away.

I needed to try something else to get through.  “George, please,” I begged, reaching forward and placing my hands lightly over the man’s own on the table.  “Try and focus.”

Finally, Dr. Angell seemed to come back to himself.  His rocking slowed, and his eyes finally focused on me.  “Francis?” he repeated, his voice quavering.

I nodded, trying to keep the tears out of the corners of my eyes.  “Yes, George, it’s me.  Are you okay?”

Slowly, unsteadily, Dr. Angell nodded his head.  “How long has it been?” he asked, his voice barely above a broken whisper.

“Six months,” I told him gently.  I didn’t lie.  Even as little more than a broken shell, Dr. Angell deserved the truth.

“Six months,” he repeated, shaking his head.  “Oh Francis, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.  I can feel them hungering.  They lurk, they wait, but not for much longer.  They’ll break through when I give in, and I’m so tired!”  He sagged back on the chair, dropping his eyes down to stare at his lap.  “So very tired,” he murmured to himself.

I felt sympathy welling up in my chest until I was certain that my heart would burst.  “George, do you remember what happened on that last night?” I asked gently.  “Maybe if you can remember, you can find a way to beat this thing-“

“Beat it!?” Dr. Angell shouted back at me, suddenly bursting up to his feet.  Only the metal handcuffs binding his wrists to the table kept him from rising up fully, and the whole metal table shook.  Even after six months of wasting away in this sanitarium, Doctor George Angell still possessed his broad shoulders and powerful frame.

I did my best to not show any hint of panic at the outburst.  “Talk to me, George,” I repeated.

Slowly, bit by bit, he dropped back down into the chair.  “Beat it,” he snorted to himself, as if this was some sort of joke.  “Francis, we can’t beat them.  We can’t even comprehend what they are.”

“That night, George.  Please.”

He sighed, but the light in his eyes faded slightly as his memory gazed back.  “I was at the observatory, on the main telescope,” he recounted.  “The previous night, one of my assistants reported spotting a change in one of the red stars we were monitoring.  I tuned in to that sector of the sky, hoping to make the observations that would validate my theory on gas giant eruptions.”

I nodded, not interrupting.  Before his sudden commitment to the sanitarium, Dr. Angell had been one of the best known and most respected astronomers.  His work on documenting the slow burnout of the stars around us had been featured many times in the tabloids.

“I tuned into the sector of the sky with the red star,” Dr. Angell repeated, his voice quavering slightly.  “And there it was, glowing so balefully, red and diseased.  The nebula behind it made it easy to spot, an orb that hung in front of a great gas backdrop.”

“And then… then they came for it.”

At these last words, Dr. Angell gasped, and I could sense that he was on the brink of losing all control.  “They?  They who?” I repeated, trying to keep him in the realm of lucidity.

He shook his head violently, his long, scraggly hair whipping back and forth.  “The nebulas,” he whispered, maddened red eyes staring back at me.  “Oh, Francis, they’re alive!  They hide in the backdrop, slow as glaciers, but so hungry, waiting to devour it all!”

“Focus, George!  Don’t lose it now!”

“And then- the eye!” the doctor screamed, throwing his head back.  I could see his every muscle standing out, taut and stretched to its very limit.  “Oh, that red eye!  It turned on me- Francis, it saw me!  From a billion miles away, it saw me, sensed me, hungered for me!  It reached out – oh, it reached for me-“

The doctor collapsed, his words choking into gibbering babble.  “I felt it,” he gasped out.  “So hungry.  Forever hungry.  It will consume it all, mindless- it won’t be enough-“

I waited, even tried again, but Dr. Angell didn’t speak again for the rest of the visiting hour.  No amount of prodding or cajoling from me could bring him back from his half-paralyzed muttering.

Finally, after the orderlies had taken him away to his room, I stood outside, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my overcoat to protect against the chill.  The sun had dropped below the horizon, now, and stars lit up the sky.

“He is getting worse at a faster rate, now,” the head nurse told me after Dr. Angell had been escorted off to his room.  “He used to come and go from wakefulness, but now he’s almost always catatonic.  He likely won’t last much longer.”

I nodded, told them to do whatever they could.  I tried to keep a note of hope in my voice, although I knew as well as the head nurse that there was nothing they could do.  Dr. Angell stood no chance.

Now, outside, I stared up at the stars.  Even without the powerful telescope of the observatory, I could see their different colors, could make out the glow of the Milky Way in a band across the sky.  My eyes scrolled across the black dome above me, automatically noting the familiar landmarks of Polaris, Mars, the Seven Sisters, Orion’s belt, and others.

Suddenly, I paused, frowning.  There, just between Orion and Gemini, a reddish blotch glowed faintly against the darkness.  There was a nebula there, I knew, but it was usually too faint to see with the naked eye.

Staring up into the sky, for just an instant, my mind’s eye filled with a long finger, stretching out across millions of miles, stabbing out with unthinking hatred towards that puny mind that dared to touch it.  I saw a huge creature, a gaseous body stretching across a galaxy, a mind so ancient and cold as to be frozen over.  I imagined that I felt hatred, cold and reptilian, seeking to consume all light and warmth, an ocean swallowing the light of a candle.

“It will consume it all,” George had babbled, before he collapsed into senselessness.

As I walked home, most of my mind focused on composing my report to the Royal Guild of Astronomers on the unfortunate fate of the man who was once one of their most prominent members.  It would be a difficult report for me to deliver, but as Dr. Angell’s protege, I knew the duty was mine and mine alone.

Still, a tiny little part of me wondered about his last, mad rantings.  Surely, they were nothing but madness.

But I resolved to spend some time on the main telescope, turning it towards that reddish nebula that now glowed faintly but unmistakably in the night sky.