Contributor Philip Rhoades has shared with us the beginning of a soon-to-be released short story. 'MultiPhil' looks at life in the not-to-distant future where we are always wondering what the 'other-us's' are doing.
Lana’s left hand comforted her damaged ribs and her right shoulder used the very expensive and tasteful kitchen shelving to help keep her upright. A wet, sticky stream ran down from about her right bicep, saturating the crook of her arm and the lower black sleeve - making it glisten. The blood continued down over her thumb and forefinger and getting into all the little mechanisms of the TEC-9 machine pistol. Little wisps of steam from the heated blood mixed with smoke from the still hot silencer. The drops of blood kept up a regular rate of one per second forming a stellar scene on the grey-streaked white tiles - a large Red Giant orbited by assorted Red Planets and Red Moons.
“How could you not?!” complained Sterling Archer. He gave a final exhausted twist - the clown mask rotated more than the head that it covered did but there was still a nauseating crunching sound and the person that the head belonged to stopped struggling. One less scary clown on the planet. “I mean the Larson C Ice Shelf has been threatening to break off for years!”
“Using cartoon characters as plot twists in a Science Fiction story is weak and shrieks of desperation”.
“But it’s funny right? I mean who doesn’t love ‘Archer’? Look, I am allowed one or two really good lines in a book and you know it has worked before. My mock anger about the two women’s responses was tinged with a little impatience but I could see their half-smiles - they knew it would it work - and the rest of the book was good. I am so funny sometimes - I crack myself up . . I smile my irresistible, boyish smile . .
It is interesting that I am empathising with a fictional, smart, beautiful, tall, African American, female, spy cartoon character but it is more interesting that I am doing it as a second-level, dream-within-a-dream, successful, male SF author who is amusing two of his female author colleagues with his cleverness and charm - with a hint of sexual attraction. I guess there is not much need for consulting Freud in this case, I do really have sore ribs and I daydream about being a successful SF writer. I know there are occasional flashes of something interesting in my writing - what is lacking is sufficient discipline for developing the writing talent or just a plain obsession about writing. As far as I can see, all the greats in the arts and sciences were driven to do what what they did and didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter - although serious parental pressure didn’t hurt either.
My ribs still hurt - I just had a Panadol. After being up for 30 hours, it would have been nice to sleep for 15 but the combination of a pain in my chest and and not being in my own bed meant that six hours was all I got . . I wonder about the dream-within-a-dream thing - it has not been unusual for me over the years. However, what if this “real world” is not the innnermost Russian Doll layer? - someone suggested this world really is just a simulation run by a higher being for his primary school homework . . The number of Physicists who think this is the case (well, not the primary school student thing exactly) seems to be increasing. I was lucky I got any sleep actually - I could have stayed up for a further 9 hours and then tried to sleep on public transport ie spending the night at City Extra in Circular Quay working on my laptop and catching up with emails etc before getting the early train to Bathurst and then on to Cowra by bus. It was lucky that Stuart finally returned my call - when he had not made it to the Meetup on ChatBots, I had thought he had been called away at short notice or something.
After the Panadol, the pain is easing up a bit but I might as well stay awake now and try, yet again, to get into a “normal” sleep cycle. I wonder how the other Phils in the “Multiverse” are going. How many of them had the same fall on Pitt St last night while multi-tasking with carrying bags, opening an umbrella and trying to negotiate a slippery kerb at the same time? I am sure I had the same fall on that corner in the rain some years ago when I was still living in Sydney - but I was heading North then and not South - going back to Central Station. How many of the Phils also had two falls on the same corner? How many had two falls walking in opposite directions? Stuart had this idea about somehow getting in contact with the other Stuart's to combine brain power to get some serious problem-solving going but it is not clear how to manipulate the Quantum-level substrate to allow this to happen. On sleepless nights in Cowra I have occasionally tried to make contact with any of the other Phils - no-one has talked back so far unfortunately . . maybe the Quantum connection will work through Google Docs? - I keep writing . .
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It could have been worse, I could have slipped into the path of an oncoming bus. Another common wonder is: what percentage of the Phils survived the childhood and adolescent dumb risk-taking? - so many times I have gotten away with it - at 65, I am really amazed I am still here at all - although I am pissed off about other stuff like health problems etc - but that is another story. What helped a little this time, and is interesting in the Multiverse context, is that in this, the latest non-fatal drama, there was the role of Psyllium Husk (PH). Now this is about as far from the cool, sexually successful Sterling Archer as it gets - serious and time consuming attention to my bowel movements. I am not alone in this of course - when I was younger I used to be quite amused about the amount of discussion and effort that older people participated in regarding the importance of maintaining gut regularity etc. In this particular case, PH probably helped prevent more serious damage to my external anatomy during my fall - at the expense of my ribs unfortunately.
For years I had been swallowing Metamucil, a commercial product made from PH, however in one of my futile gestures to stick it to Big Pharma, I had started to buy the raw PH in bulk - but I continued to use the Metamucil containers as convenient and appropriate containers in the kitchen and in my travel bag. However, just recently I decided I didn’t like the shape of the narrow, tall container in my soft, cooler bag that had become my odds-and-ends travel bag so I started using a flatter, nicer, softer plastic container - also with a screw-on lid. This was from a set of kitchen containers that, predictably (I should have known better), got very little use. Now the thing that would have disadvantaged some of the Phils is not making this change. In my haste to prevent myself getting too wet with the sudden change from a light shower to stronger rain, I slipped, and, as I went down, fortunately I had my soft travel bag on my left shoulder and my Cowra Markets shoulder bag with laptop and tech gear on my right shoulder - with both hands holding the straps on my shoulders so the bags didn’t slip off and then trying to manage the umbrella as well. When I stepped with my right foot my left shoulder went forward a little and to prevent the face-mash on the footpath, I moved my left arm more directly in front of me with my left hand still holding bag’s strap on my shoulder. This is more detail than is necessary probably - but other Phils might like to know. The end result is that the new PH container acted like an air-bag in a car - it must have taken the bulk of the force of the body-smack on the ground - it simply exploded into many pieces! Of course PH went everywhere in the bag but I didn’t know that at the time - being more concerned about what the nice young woman who came to help me thought of me ie that I was yet another geriatric who has bitten the dust. Some of the other Phils would have had the old container and not having had the air-bag effect would have ended up with a bloody face - that would have delayed the trip to their Stuart's place but might have precipitated a nice or at least an interesting relationship with the kind young woman?
The Meetup hosts had the usual unhealthy fare for food and drink so I got a sandwich and more unhealthy stuff when I got off the train and walked to Stuart's place. I sat on the lounge, ate, and chatted with Stuart occasionally as he played with some updated Virtual Reality software. By then the ribs were becoming noticeably sore and I wondered if I might have cracked some. I asked Stuart whether he had any new and / or interesting things to talk about - it turns out he is going to fund some work on gravity waves as a means of inter-world quantum communication. He explains how it is supposed to work but my chest pain is distracting me and I would probably need to see some drawings anyway for his explanations to make any sense at all anyway. This conversation became more interesting and I felt a little guilty about distracting him from his work but then his mobile rang and his smart and beautiful Chinese girlfriend asks him why he is not doing the work with me that he had said he was going to be doing - insinuating that this had just been an excuse for him not being able to see her last night - defensively he turned his iPhone towards me to prove to her I had actually turned up. I waved to her happily but felt a tinge of jealousy re not being smart enough, rich enough or attractive enough to attract smart and beautiful women . .
As usual, I got the train departures wrong, so instead of picking up the 7am train from Central at Parramatta, it will be the 4pm one. That means a late night arrival in Cowra - I hope I can go straight to bed and actually sleep . .
The Panadol has worked well, my ribs are still sore to the touch but are not distracting me from writing now. I have about eight hours before I need to get to the train station - I had a large coffee milk to swallow the Panadol so I am buzzing but that will wear off soon and it will be a challenge to stay awake all day. Maybe I should try and think of ways I can make contact with the other Phils again - particularly the ones that ended up taller, better looking, smarter, more successful in Science and The Arts and have made better progress with working out how to get some serious Life Extension going. Surely one of them should have made a lot better progress than I have so far - why haven’t I heard from him?
By  Philip Rhoades | Embed |
Philip grew up in Sydney, Australia, did some BioMedical Research, was distracted by Politics and Changing the World. Philip Rhoades, EO Cryonics Association of Australasia http://cryonics.org.au Executive Director Neural Archives Foundation Http://neuralarchivesfoundation.org Member LifeBoat Foundation https://lifeboat.com Writer / Editor Domain Science Fiction http://domain-sf.com | |
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