5/7/15

Digging In
By John Ogden


The star interceptor shifted and shook under my touch, danced like a puppet loosely strung.

Somewhere in the rift between the meat and the metal of my hybrid mind, a thousand digital eyes, all mine, tracked lines of code, hunted figures, wrapped critical values in light and tied them down, left them securely locked in the recesses of my consciousness. Three point five seconds. Time from initial intrusion to total control. A little slow, but the interceptor was armored better than anything else I'd seen cruising through the rim between the core colonies and the lawless frontier.

Military grade cyber armor.

No. Better. Something better than military grade. Something black market.

Meat mind impulses got the better of me and I gave the interceptor a quick flick of code that sent it spinning through the black like a top. Cheap, rogue interceptors were bad enough. Something like this– something like this particular interceptor shouldn't even be here.

Turning back inward, I caught the readings on the pilot. Terrified, but alive. Alive for the moment. Alive only as long as it amused me to keep him alive. One flick, one thought, and he'd suffocate or freeze in an instant. I was tempted. Even knowing he was plugged into the interceptor I'd taken control of made me feel dirty. Being that close to any human was enough to make me feel tainted or infected. I couldn't wait to be rid of him.

But the nature of the interceptor, its armor and everything else that made it stand out meant I had to keep him alive. Had to keep him alive, at least, if only long enough to know what he knew.

Snapping the digital equivalent of a layer of latex over my own mind, I reached into the controls of the interceptor, molded the back of the pilot's seat into a drill. The symphony of his screams as I cut into his soft and terrified mind was almost enough to make the messy extraction of his memories worthwhile.

And what I learned in the silence was sweet. So sweet.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.

7/17/14

Meat Dreams
By John Ogden


In the cold void of hypersleep, my dreams are always full of meat.
Muscles flayed of skin, surging, bleeding– the meat that pulses through my dreams is alive, spreads through the darkness like a cancer. Hungry, driven only to grow, it slithers across the cold hull of the ship, pushes through vents, forces open bulkheads, moves and moves until the whole ship is like a heart, throbbing, thrumming, echoing with the rhythm, the movement of meat.
In my dreams, I am alone. My crew, the twenty-seven men and women who keep the ship flying, who run the scans and plot the jump-courses– they are already gone. They are the seeds from which the meat has sprung. The meat of their bodies twists through corridors, rises and breathes with huge, vacuous lungs. Their mouths are open, yawning, stretched into silent screams full of spreading teeth, slick and serpentine tongues hanging, curling and uncurling. Their eyes are white, seem to see nothing and everything at once, seem to see me– even through the frosted glass of my hypersleep coffin. The dream is so real– so real. I can hear them, smell them. As if I were awake, I find myself among them, walking, crawling, sliding naked across the mucus-slick meat that bends into corridors, into vessels and veins, into throats, hungry and full of humid darkness. Everything I touch, everything I see is meat. Meat. Meat.
And then I wake, truly wake, half expecting to find the dream has come true. The hypersleep coffin buzzes and whirrs, cracks open as the ice inside breaks from the seals, and as I rise, my eyes search the flat, gray walls, the half-darkness, the long corridors of stainless steel and plastic that crisscross the ship, find nothing. The meat is gone. My crew is still asleep.
And yet the dreams– always the dreams. Always, I'm left wondering, wondering if I've ever really woken up, if the meat dreams might be something more than dreams, if this sterile ship I call my home might be merely some memory, some mad semblance of a dream breathed into existence by the moments I spend asleep.
The moments I spend asleep in the womb-like pulse of the meat.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.

6/19/14

Feeding The Beasts
By John Ogden


I place the crystal drill against the fleshy walls, close my eyes as I pull the trigger. Even before the bit begins to spin, even before the gravitic harvester starts to siphon the blood, the liquified meat into the thick, stained hose that connects my drill to the feeding vats, the walls start to scream. The mass– it knows what the cold touch of the drill brings. It knows the pain.
And it knows that there is nothing it can do to stop it.
For most of the day, I work with my eyes closed. I hum to myself, let the sound bounce around inside the helmet of my suit. On and on, the walls wail, but I do not stop. I don't dare stop. I have an assigned quota to meet, and any shortfalls will be taken out of my body, my skin. At my age, I'm considered one of the lucky ones. I'm still mostly intact. Mostly.
That is what keeps me going. The memory of the knives, the promise of losing more blood, more muscle. Sometimes I think our keepers assign our quotas hoping we will fall short so that they will have an excuse to make a meal of us. Free range human is said to taste so much better than the meat we drill from the mass, and there are few of us, very few of us, who haven't been carved up after long, hard days of grinding and pulping the fleshy walls.
When the day finally ends, when the screaming stops, I check my yield against my quota. Three point two ounces over the required means I live another day, remain whole at least until tomorrow. Exhausted, dead-eyed, I go through the motions of returning to the only thing that truly feels like it is mine– the plastic coffin where I sleep.
And as I drift away into darkness, into dreams of blood and flying gore, I try not to think about the mass, the way it screams. I try not to think about the star-faring species who enslaved humanity, the fact that they were the ones who engineered the mass we grind to feed them each day.
The fact that they grew it from seeds of human flesh.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.

6/28/12

{EAV:24b9a8f3bda8ff3c}
Stillborn Futures
By John Ogden


I press my face into the scope to look, but don't open my eyes.

At least, not at first.

I know what I will see. I know what the QPR lenses will show me. Maybes. Ifs. Could-have-beens.

Should-have-beens.

Almost reluctantly, I open my eyes. The lights of an indice at the center of ten coordinate points is the first thing to resolve as the blurriness falls from my sight.

Then I see her. Her.

Sigrid.

Breath catches in my throat a little. I see her eyes, aquamarine, the fronds of blond bangs, the wide, generous smile. I see the memories, flickers of touches and words and fights and compliments that have led to this moment, the moment of a younger me reaching for her, kissing her just lightly on the forehead. Shaky arms extend, and then I, he, gently takes the baby from her, rocks it, coos to it.

I turn my eyes away, spin one of the coordinate dials to eradicate the images, rub at my face with shaking hands.

A child. A child to pass my heritage on to. A child to tell about my father, my family.

Our family.

There is more. I know it. Another careful calibration of the dials shows a younger me making love to another woman, a woman who fell into my arms in another universe, another fragmented fractured path of a possible reality. I know her features immediately, know her face. Tracy. At another indice, she too is straining in the throes of childbirth, squeezing, hands white knuckled against sheets as she brings forth new life, life we share together, teach together, learn from together.

I throw the dial again, throw it to a series of coordinates I know as a possible future with a woman named Teresa. Seductive, motherly hips, handsome features, sharp hair, a poet's soul. A handful of degrees in one direction, and she too is giving birth, bringing our child into the world.

Another throw of the dial, another life lost in possiblity. Names track one by one from my list.

Glenda, Rebecca, Sabrina, Allie, Yvette.

Lives that could have been. Lives that might have been.

And in every one of them, a child.

Every one of them except the one I have chosen.

A few carefully calibrated twists of the dial from the moment of the life I am living now bring me to the future of the path I walk. Gray hair, in this future. Louise. Hand in hand, we walk, memories flickering over the simple, calm pleasures of a life as devoid of bumps as it is of purpose. In this path, there are no children. There is no job. There is nothing but simple pleasure, a life as passing as a breeze, touching so many, and yet only so lightly that my name is forgotten as easily as is the legacy of my family. Six months after my body is lowered into the darkness of the earth, I am nothing. It is as if I had never been born, as if my father, my grandfather, his father and perhaps men standing even further back had never been born.

Here, now, I turn away from the QPR lenses, wipe the tears from my eyes, mourn futures that might have had quieter, less painful deaths.

If only I had resisted the urge to see them.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.

1/5/12

Retro-Futurism Love Song
By John Ogden


Those endless, yawning vistas;
Cosmos, eternity in a touch.
Bright colors, so beautiful
The happy march
Of progress
Pushing farther, deeper,
Into a horizon
Full of stars.

Will we ever see that glimmer
Of stellar light again?
Cast off the dystopia
And take our place
Among the sky
So full of stars?

Chained to this forsaken stone,
Prometheus in silicon chrome
I wait, silent.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.

10/20/11

Pastoral #2210
By John Ogden


The simple beauty of a pastoral life,
rising with the first rays of day
to a cruise through rolling hills
still running some archaic, previous version of grass.
How simple, how beautiful, the way unmodified life
sprouts from the unenriched earth here,
the way the air still hangs heavy with the earthy scents
of cedar, hay, ancient petrochem,
and oh! How oft--
see the bucks as they thrash rutting racks
against the dawn-golden glow
of guard-fields that line the mag-ways.
See the way that light keeps death at bay,
keeps stags with does,
autosedans with autosedans
life with gentle life.


- - -
John Ogden was conceived of a government form and a passing mailbox. He lives somewhere out in the woods of a rural land more akin to the fantasy realms of literature than real life, and his favorite dirt bikes will always be the broken ones.