Monthly Archives: September 2023

(From Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, chapter 5.)

Just off campus is a chain drugstore, and I stop there on my way back to the lab, because I’m self-conscious about my jeans now. While Vunkstad’s secretary was commenting on the mud, I noticed that I’ve got a growing rip in my left knee.

I know that the iron-on denim patches must be here somewhere, so I’m chasing my own ass up and down every aisle, looking for them. I start to ask a girl who is stocking cookies, but then I look across the store and I see Gabriela. She is holding a bottle of water and staring at me with her eyes shocked and mouth open, like she has never seen something quite this horrific in her life. She immediately crosses the store and takes my elbow, leading me away with my question to the clerk unfinished.

“Zenna,” she whispers fiercely to me. “You are not reduced to this level of abject poverty.”

“I have a hole in my –”

“No. No,” she insists, talking over me.

“Just to patch –”

“No!” she insists. “No patching. This is too sad. It is the opposite of excellence.”

“But these jeans –”

“Zenna! Somebody will see. Look, everybody is staring at us.”

Gabriela’s eyes dart around us. . She’s so mortified by my appearance that she can’t waste time paying for her bottle of water, so she leans away from me just long enough to plop it onto a magazine rack, and then she steers me out the door.

“Girl,” she murmurs with her lips against my ear, “we are not gray-bearded widows who must mend our stockings by candlelight with needle and thread.”

I wriggle my shoulders, unsuccessfully trying to free myself from her grasp. “But Gabriela,” I plead, “these jeans have a worn knee. I accidentally put my toes through the hole this morning and ripped it open.”

She shakes her head at the distastefulness of it all. “I will take you clothes shopping,” she announces to me. “This should have been done at age eight.”

It’s true: nobody has ever taken me clothes shopping before. Katya and the aunts were usually wrapped in white lab coats. They used to primarily wear polyester, rayon, and other synthetics, preferably in beige. I still have hand-me-downs from Aunt Christina in my closet, and she’s been gone thirteen years. Christina favored compound cellulose lyocell clothes because they hold onto their shiny hues after an infinite number of laundry cycles. Also, she could buy them in the Fospey company store.

Gabriela opens her car’s passenger door for me and guides me in, as if she’s wary of an attempted escape. Once I’m seated, she leans through the window and says, “And we will throw these baggy shapeless denims onto a bonfire of all your other clothes.”

“We’re not burning them,” I bark back. I won’t have these perfectly good pants molecules dispersed into the atmosphere as pollutant gasses. Clothes make up 17% of the bulk waste in the global eco-system, by weight, I think I read somewhere. Or it’s possible I just made that number up.

“With apologies, Zenna, I despair for you,” Gabriela tells me as she shifts her compact into reverse and roars out of the parking lot. She glances at me and grabs a fistful of my sleeve. “Look at this shirt from a previous century. It belongs in a theatrical costume shop.”

I’m wearing a green flannel shirt with a faded plaid pattern. “What’s wrong with this shirt?” I demand.

“It’s Alex’s, for one thing,” she answers crisply.

(Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series is due on Amazon.com in February 2024.)

I’m working on the sequel to my novel Wash Away. Zenna Cherny will be back, along with Bar Bar the robot, Alex her cousin, programmer/language mangler Gabriela, mad scientist Katya, mermaid creature Kizi, and all your other favorites. I’ve got 27 chapters finished and I’m seven months behind deadline for publishing this book. Since my publisher is me, I haven’t put too much pressure on the author to get his ass in gear.

In the sequel, tentatively titled Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, Zenna gets herself inadvertently transferred into a turtle’s body. If I say it’s “Freaky Friday” stuff, I think you’ll get it, since 100% of the people I’ve summarized for have commented “Oh, sounds like some ‘Freaky Friday’ stuff.” (I haven’t seen it, not any of the versions, but it’s a trope and a cultural reference now and I’m forging ahead without shaping my imagination into any specific directions.)

If you’re inventing a story where your character gets transferred into a turtle, eventually you’ll have to confront the core question: what exactly is it that’s getting transferred?

A member of my writing group has the opinion that what is getting transferred is a soul. My strong instinct is to lean away from using the word “soul.” It’s a highly charged word for many readers, and you can’t depend on every reader understanding it the same way. It’s got inevitable religious connotations. It’s also very poorly defined, being something that might or might not exist but is entirely intangible if it does.

I settled on the word “identity” instead, and I invented a whole technology for Fospey Industries to conduct Identity Transfer Protocol into artificial bodies that have been created for that purpose. The ostensible market for this technology is first responders. An experienced firefighter can transfer herself into an “adventure body” and she can walk fearlessly into a burning house, carrying all her experience with her. (Behind the hype, Fospey executices secretly anticipate that “adventure bodies” will have two primary markets: as sex dolls and as soldiers.)

What gets transferred with identity? Memories, yeah, personality, yeah, but I’ll tell you the part that interests me. Perspective. If it’s something intangible with no mass, you want it to be a point, right? It’s a point of view and that rough conceptual vantage, so far, is allowing me to precariously balance a highly unwieldy plot.

Earlier this week I spent a couple of hours at a business amusingly named Identogo. If you don’t want to take your shoes off at the airport and you have $78 to toss into the wind, you can get your identity verified at Identogo and then you’re going to get that blessed TSA PRE CHECK printed on your boarding pass. When I was there, the fingerprint system was down and the whole operation was running way behind schedule. When it comes to identity verification in this pre-sci-fi world we actually live in, fingerprints are the gold standard.

For prosaic system access that doesn’t rise to the level of the justice system, identity is all dependent on passwords. And when you forget the password, your recourse is your email address, your phone number, your birth date, and maybe the last four of your SSN. Facial recognition might be involved. Last time I was at my massage therapist, a woman was trying to make an appointment without an email address, and the receptionist was completely stumped about how to make it happen. When I used to work at a government agency that provided the inspiration for the Confidential Business Data Center at Fospey Industries, we did a mailing where we used the last four digits of an ID number to find the right form to stick in the envelope. We ended up mailing some confidential corporate data to the wrong company, but by golly, those last four digits matched up.

Anyway, none of these identity verification methods are going to be any good any more after Fospey Indsutries rolls out the Identity Transfer Protocol and their fun new Adventure Bodies product.

Note: Three months ago I made a firm decision that I would throw away the entire manuscript for this sequel. Since then I’ve wavered a bit, but if you never see a book called Fast Asleep: Volume 2 of the Grendel Hills Fantasy Series, you’ll know this is a ghost post and I followed through on my convictions.