Shadow of the Mothaship by Cory Doctorow (mobi reader android TXT) π
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She's
wearing a catsuit and a bolero jacket, and looks sexy and kind of scary.
She's at one of the ridiculously small tables, drinking and sparkling at a man
in a silver vest and some kind of skirt that looks like the kind of thing I
laugh at until I catch myself trying one on
We make eye-contact. I smile and start to stand. I even point at my knee and
grin. Her date says something, and I see, behind the twinkle, a total lack of
recognition. She turns to him and I see myself in the mirror behind her.
My hair's longer. I'm not wearing a bathrobe. I've got some meat on my bones.
I'm not walking with a cane. Still, I'm *me*. I want to walk over to her and
give her a hug, roll up my pants and show her the gob of scar tissue around my
knee, find out where Tony the Tiger's got to.
But I don't. I don't know why, but I don't. If I had a comm, I might try calling
her, so she'd see my name and then I wouldn't have to say it to her. But I don't
have a comm.
I feel, suddenly, like a ghost.
I test this out, walk to the bar, circling Daisy's table once on the way and
again on the way back. She sees me but doesn't recognise me, both times. I
overhear snatches of her conversation, "-- competing next weekend in a
black-belt competition -- oh, man, I can't *believe* what a pain in the ass my
boss was today -- want another drink --" and it's her voice, her tones, but
somehow, it doesn't seem like *her*.
It feels melancholy and strange, being a ghost. I find myself leaving the bar,
and walking off towards Yonge Street, to the Eatons-Walmart store where Tony the
Tiger worked.
And fuck me if I don't pass him on the street out front, looking burned and
buzzed and broke, panning for pennies. He's looking down, directly addressing
people's knees as they pass him, "spare-change-spare-change-spare-change."
I stand in front of him until he looks up. He's got an ugly scar running over
his eyebrow, and he looks right through me. *Where you been, Tony?* I want to
ask it, can't. I'm a ghost. I give him a quarter. He doesn't notice.
#
I run into Stude the Dude and hatch my plan at Tilly the horse's funeral. I read
the obit in the Globe, with a pict of the two of them. They buried her at Mount
Pleasant Cemetery, with McKenzie King and Timothy Eaton and Lester Pearson.
Stude can afford it. The squib said that he was going aboard the mothaship the
day after the ceremony.
Lots of people are doing that. Now that we're members of the Confederation,
we've got passports that'll take us to *wild* places. The streets get emptier
every day. It's hard to avoid Dad's face.
Stude scares the shit out of me with his eulogy. *It's all in Process-speak*. It
is positively, fricken eerie.
"My Life-Companion goes into the ground today."
There's a long pause while he stares into the big hole and the out-sized coffin.
"My Daily Road has taken me far from the Points of Excellence, and I feel like
my life has been a Barrier to Joy for myself and for many others. But Tilly was
a Special Someone, a Lightning Rod for Happiness, and her presence graced me
with the Vision of Joy."
And so on.
I wait near the back until Stude finishes, then follow at a discreet distance as
he makes his way back to his place. It's not something I ever would have
considered doing last Hallowe'en -- the Stude I knew would've spotted a tail in
hot second. But now the world has gone to jargon-slinging harmony and I'm brazen
as I ride along behind on my bike, down Yonge to Front, and up to a new building
made of foam.
I feel like a ghost as I watch him look straight through me, and I mark the
address.
#
I spend a day kicking at everything foam.
The foam is hard, and light, and durable, and I imagine the houses of my
parent's suburb, the little Process enclave, surviving long past any of us,
surviving as museum pieces for arsenic-breathing bugouts, who crawl over the
mummified furniture and chests of clothes, snapping picts and chattering in
their thrilling contraltos. I want to scream
Here and there, pieces of the old, pre-Process, pre-foam Toronto stick out, and
I rub them as I pass them by, touchstones for luck.
#
Spring lasted about ten days. Now we're into a muggy, 32 degrees Toronto summer,
and my collar itches and sweat trickles down my neck.
I'd be wearing something lighter and cooler, except that today I'm meeting my
Dad, at Aristide. They've got a little wire-flown twin-prop number fuelled up
and waiting for me at the miniature airstrip on Toronto Island. Dad was *so*
glad when I got in touch with him. A real Milestone on his Personal Road to
Lasting Happiness. There's even one of the Process-heads from Yonge and Bloor
waiting for me. He doesn't even comment on all my fricken luggage.
#
I hit Stude's place about ten minutes after he left for his trip to the
mothaship. I had the dregs of the solvent that he'd sold me, and I used that to
dissolve a hole in his door, and reached in and popped the latch.
I didn't make a mess, just methodically opened crates and boxes until I found
what I was looking for. Then I hauled it in batches to the elevator, loaded it,
and took it back to my coffin in a cab.
I had to rent another coffin to store it all.
#
The Process-head stays at the airport. Praise the bugouts. If he'd been aboard,
it would've queered the whole deal.
I press my nose against the oval window next to the hatch, checking my comm from
time to time, squinting at the GPS readout. My stomach is a knot, and my knee
aches. I feel great.
The transition to Process-land is sharp from this perspective, real buildings
giving way to foam white on a razor-edged line. I count off streets as we fly
low, the autopilot getting ready to touch down at Aristide, only 70 kay away.
And there's my Chestnut Ave.
God*damn* the wind's fierce in a plane when you pop the emergency hatch. It
spirals away like a maple key as the plane starts soothing me over its PA.
I've got a safety strap around my waist and hooked onto the front row of seats,
and the knots had better be secure. I use my sore leg to kick the keg of solvent
off the deck.
I grab my strap with both hands and lie on my belly at the hatch's edge and
count three hippopotami, and then the charge on Stude's kegger goes bang, and
the plane kicks up, and now it's not the plane coming over the PA, but the Roman
tyrant's voice, shouting, but not loud enough to be understood over the wind.
The superfine mist of solvent settles like an acid bath over my Chestnut Ave,
over the perfect smile, and starts to eat the shit out of it.
I watch until the plane moves me out of range, then keep watching from my comm,
renting super-expensive sat time on Dad's account.
The roofs go first, along with the road surfaces, then the floors below, and
then structural integrity is a thing of past and they fall to pieces like
gingerbread, furniture tumbling rolypoly away, everything edged with rough
fractal fringe.
#
Dad's greyfaced and clueless when I land. All he knows is that something made
the plane very sick. He's worried and wants to hug me.
I totter down the stairway that a guy in a jumpsuit rolled up, ears still
ringing from the wind and my big boom. I'm almost down the step when a little
Process-troll scurries up and says something in his ear.
I know what it is, because he's never looked so pissed at me in all my life.
I'm a fricken *genius*.
--
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Imprint
wearing a catsuit and a bolero jacket, and looks sexy and kind of scary.
She's at one of the ridiculously small tables, drinking and sparkling at a man
in a silver vest and some kind of skirt that looks like the kind of thing I
laugh at until I catch myself trying one on
We make eye-contact. I smile and start to stand. I even point at my knee and
grin. Her date says something, and I see, behind the twinkle, a total lack of
recognition. She turns to him and I see myself in the mirror behind her.
My hair's longer. I'm not wearing a bathrobe. I've got some meat on my bones.
I'm not walking with a cane. Still, I'm *me*. I want to walk over to her and
give her a hug, roll up my pants and show her the gob of scar tissue around my
knee, find out where Tony the Tiger's got to.
But I don't. I don't know why, but I don't. If I had a comm, I might try calling
her, so she'd see my name and then I wouldn't have to say it to her. But I don't
have a comm.
I feel, suddenly, like a ghost.
I test this out, walk to the bar, circling Daisy's table once on the way and
again on the way back. She sees me but doesn't recognise me, both times. I
overhear snatches of her conversation, "-- competing next weekend in a
black-belt competition -- oh, man, I can't *believe* what a pain in the ass my
boss was today -- want another drink --" and it's her voice, her tones, but
somehow, it doesn't seem like *her*.
It feels melancholy and strange, being a ghost. I find myself leaving the bar,
and walking off towards Yonge Street, to the Eatons-Walmart store where Tony the
Tiger worked.
And fuck me if I don't pass him on the street out front, looking burned and
buzzed and broke, panning for pennies. He's looking down, directly addressing
people's knees as they pass him, "spare-change-spare-change-spare-change."
I stand in front of him until he looks up. He's got an ugly scar running over
his eyebrow, and he looks right through me. *Where you been, Tony?* I want to
ask it, can't. I'm a ghost. I give him a quarter. He doesn't notice.
#
I run into Stude the Dude and hatch my plan at Tilly the horse's funeral. I read
the obit in the Globe, with a pict of the two of them. They buried her at Mount
Pleasant Cemetery, with McKenzie King and Timothy Eaton and Lester Pearson.
Stude can afford it. The squib said that he was going aboard the mothaship the
day after the ceremony.
Lots of people are doing that. Now that we're members of the Confederation,
we've got passports that'll take us to *wild* places. The streets get emptier
every day. It's hard to avoid Dad's face.
Stude scares the shit out of me with his eulogy. *It's all in Process-speak*. It
is positively, fricken eerie.
"My Life-Companion goes into the ground today."
There's a long pause while he stares into the big hole and the out-sized coffin.
"My Daily Road has taken me far from the Points of Excellence, and I feel like
my life has been a Barrier to Joy for myself and for many others. But Tilly was
a Special Someone, a Lightning Rod for Happiness, and her presence graced me
with the Vision of Joy."
And so on.
I wait near the back until Stude finishes, then follow at a discreet distance as
he makes his way back to his place. It's not something I ever would have
considered doing last Hallowe'en -- the Stude I knew would've spotted a tail in
hot second. But now the world has gone to jargon-slinging harmony and I'm brazen
as I ride along behind on my bike, down Yonge to Front, and up to a new building
made of foam.
I feel like a ghost as I watch him look straight through me, and I mark the
address.
#
I spend a day kicking at everything foam.
The foam is hard, and light, and durable, and I imagine the houses of my
parent's suburb, the little Process enclave, surviving long past any of us,
surviving as museum pieces for arsenic-breathing bugouts, who crawl over the
mummified furniture and chests of clothes, snapping picts and chattering in
their thrilling contraltos. I want to scream
Here and there, pieces of the old, pre-Process, pre-foam Toronto stick out, and
I rub them as I pass them by, touchstones for luck.
#
Spring lasted about ten days. Now we're into a muggy, 32 degrees Toronto summer,
and my collar itches and sweat trickles down my neck.
I'd be wearing something lighter and cooler, except that today I'm meeting my
Dad, at Aristide. They've got a little wire-flown twin-prop number fuelled up
and waiting for me at the miniature airstrip on Toronto Island. Dad was *so*
glad when I got in touch with him. A real Milestone on his Personal Road to
Lasting Happiness. There's even one of the Process-heads from Yonge and Bloor
waiting for me. He doesn't even comment on all my fricken luggage.
#
I hit Stude's place about ten minutes after he left for his trip to the
mothaship. I had the dregs of the solvent that he'd sold me, and I used that to
dissolve a hole in his door, and reached in and popped the latch.
I didn't make a mess, just methodically opened crates and boxes until I found
what I was looking for. Then I hauled it in batches to the elevator, loaded it,
and took it back to my coffin in a cab.
I had to rent another coffin to store it all.
#
The Process-head stays at the airport. Praise the bugouts. If he'd been aboard,
it would've queered the whole deal.
I press my nose against the oval window next to the hatch, checking my comm from
time to time, squinting at the GPS readout. My stomach is a knot, and my knee
aches. I feel great.
The transition to Process-land is sharp from this perspective, real buildings
giving way to foam white on a razor-edged line. I count off streets as we fly
low, the autopilot getting ready to touch down at Aristide, only 70 kay away.
And there's my Chestnut Ave.
God*damn* the wind's fierce in a plane when you pop the emergency hatch. It
spirals away like a maple key as the plane starts soothing me over its PA.
I've got a safety strap around my waist and hooked onto the front row of seats,
and the knots had better be secure. I use my sore leg to kick the keg of solvent
off the deck.
I grab my strap with both hands and lie on my belly at the hatch's edge and
count three hippopotami, and then the charge on Stude's kegger goes bang, and
the plane kicks up, and now it's not the plane coming over the PA, but the Roman
tyrant's voice, shouting, but not loud enough to be understood over the wind.
The superfine mist of solvent settles like an acid bath over my Chestnut Ave,
over the perfect smile, and starts to eat the shit out of it.
I watch until the plane moves me out of range, then keep watching from my comm,
renting super-expensive sat time on Dad's account.
The roofs go first, along with the road surfaces, then the floors below, and
then structural integrity is a thing of past and they fall to pieces like
gingerbread, furniture tumbling rolypoly away, everything edged with rough
fractal fringe.
#
Dad's greyfaced and clueless when I land. All he knows is that something made
the plane very sick. He's worried and wants to hug me.
I totter down the stairway that a guy in a jumpsuit rolled up, ears still
ringing from the wind and my big boom. I'm almost down the step when a little
Process-troll scurries up and says something in his ear.
I know what it is, because he's never looked so pissed at me in all my life.
I'm a fricken *genius*.
--
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<dc:description>A science-fiction short story by Cory Doctorow about a
scientologyesque cult that is annointed the leaders of human ascension into
beatitude by inscrutable aliens, from the short story collection "A Place So
Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls Eight Windows press in
September, 2003 (ISBN: 1568582862)</dc:description> <dc:creator><Agent>
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Publication Date: 06-24-2010
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