I am still, from time to time, from day to day, from day to night, a writer. All my writing can be read on this website. All my writing here is available for free. All my writing is belong to all. I’m proud of that.

On a numerical bent, let’s see what the last year has accomplished:

— OUGHT-TWELVE AS SHE WAS PLAYED —

Books written: 3
of which Novels: 2
of which Short Story collections: 1
Short Stories written: 24
Novella written: 2

Grants written: ~90
Full-time jobs had: 1
Duration employed: ~3 months (temp.)
Part-time contracts had: 3
Total Income: $5,342

Debt: $0
Investments: rapidly approaching $0

Total spent on housing: $13000
Total spent on staying alive: ~$3000
Total spent on grad school applications: $1500
Total spent on interviews (clothing, transport, &c): >$2000
Total spent on frivolity: very near $0
Income minus costs: -$14000

books read: (a large number)
books begun and abandoned: (an even larger number)
books I liked: (a small number)
works of fiction I liked: (a smaller number)
books I bought: 0

zip code: 02138
months I can afford to remain in this zip code: 4
opportunities I have to remain here rent-free: 1
smiley face: :-)

— LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS —

novels: 6
novella: 17
short stories: 42
screenplays: 1
stageplays: 2

works published: 0

literary agent applications: 400+
literary agent acceptances: 0

magazine applications: ~20
magazine acceptances: 0

grad school applications: +-40
grad school acceptances: 0

job applications: over 900
jobs considered: over 9000
power level: …

job interviews (telephone): something like 50
job interviews (en corpore): something like 25
jobs offered: 0

lifetime income: ~$12000
years working: 10
average yearly wage: MATH IS NOT MY FRIEND

money invested: $2000
money returned: $23,000
amount of my student debt at time of graduation: $23,000
coincidence: both wonderful and TERRIBLE

degrees earned: 1
degree type: BA
number of guitar chords I can play: 24
these things: related

posts to the Express: 941
percentage of prose posted here: 100
hits received: 13,090
fraction of hits that come from friends of mine: large
fraction of hits which come from people I’ve never met before: large

amount I’ve earned from my writing: $0
amount I’ve spent in order to share my writing with the world: $0

my age: 25
years I have left (average from various actuarial tables): 65
amount of prose I could produce in that time: →∞

my disposition: <3

-Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, under Ilyas Kashmiri (reported dead 2011) and others

-The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), under Abu Usman

-The Haqqani network, under Jalaluddin (pere) and Sirajuddin (fils)

-Lashkar-e-Taiba, under Hafiz Muhammed Saeed

-Lashkar-e-Islam, under Mangal Bagh

-The Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigades

-Jaish-e-Mohammed, under Maulana Masood Azhar

-The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, under Abdul Haq (d. 2010)  and others

-Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistani

-Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, under Maulana Fazlullah and others

-Islamic Jihad Union

-Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, under

-Fazle-ur-Rahman Khalil

-al’Qaeda, under Usama bin Laden (d. 2011) and Ayman al’Zawahiri

-the Taliban, under Mullah Muhammed Omar and others

-Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, under Hakimullah Mehsud (possibly killed 2012)

-Hezb-e Islami, under Maulawi Khalis (d. 2004) and now Haji Din Mohammed

Several of these groups are allied with each other. Several are allied against each other. Some share leadership. Some do not even share a language. Some are focused solely on Afghanistan. Some operate in several countries. Some are international terrorist organizations which seek to target civilians in predominately non-Muslim countries. Some are paramilitary forces who engage in warfare that is hardly even asymmetric.

A list of members of the administration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) would include a number of these names. Some of the names on this list would also be found in the current Karzai administration. Several of the other Islamic groups which fought against the Soviets (Sayyaf, Dostum) are now part of the Karzai administration. Hamid Karzai himself was once a supporter of the Taliban; he would have been named the organization’s representative to the United Nations if the Taliban’s government had received UN recognition.

I see in the news today (Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/us-afghanistan-hekmatyar-idUSTRE80M0TQ20120123 ) that Karzai has engaged in indirect peace talks with members of the group controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This group was the largest and best-supplied anti-Soviet group during the 1980s. It was the particular favorite of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), through which most Pakistani and American aid was given to the mujaheddin. Hekmatyar’s stalemate against Ahmed Shah Massoud (later to be called the first commander of the ‘Northern Alliance’) was what allowed the Taliban to rise; ISI’s pragmatism caused them to switch support from Hekmatyar to the Taliban, thus allowing the easy domination of the majority of Afghanistan by that group.

After the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, Hekmatyar fled to Iran. In 2002, as a result of American pressure, he was expelled from Teheran and most likely took up residence in Pakistan. His ties with the ISI are presumed to remain deep. Since 2008 he has become one of the most powerful leaders of armed opposition to the current Afghan state. He has several times attempted to assassinate Hamid Karzai and has claimed responsibility for the deaths of many Coalition and Afghani soldiers.

Despite this, he is considered one of the more moderate opposition leaders. He was the first opposition group willing to engage in direct peace talks with the Karzai administration. Similar overtures made to the Haqqanis (and other leaders of the Emirate of Waziristan) have been roundly rejected.

The news stories which reported this budding detente referred to Hekmatyar as ‘the leader of an insurgent faction.’ This is rather new language to refer to what was recently called an ‘insurgent group,’ and earlier a ‘terrorist cell.’ A ‘group’ is not a legitimate force, where a ‘faction’ is. A faction is part of the political process. A faction might have a legitimate position in a governing body.

This evolution of language has been essentially parabolic since the creation of the first Islamist groups in Afghanistan in the late 1970s:

For truly, one man’s ‘radical Islamist terrorist network’ is another man’s ‘political party’ – just as surely as one man’s mujaheddin is another man’s warlord… is another man’s Kabul politician.

Perhaps this shift in nomenclature is being used to allow certain groups of ‘terrorists’ to enter into democratic (or at least nonviolent) Afghani politics. Perhaps, indeed, the future of Afghanistan is as a Islamic emirate – democratically elected, internationally recognized, and tolerated by America under the monitored guarantee that it not encourage international terrorism which might affect our interests.

The pod offers me the option of getting out on the street or right inside the lobby. I choose the street. I walk around the block, once, just to stretch. There are lots of people walking. With the better part of the world accessible by cort, why live in a city unless you want to walk the pavement, be among?

It’s quite a hotel. There are people in livery doing all sorts of tasks that don’t need people to do them: hauling luggage, holding doors, changing flowers, manning the front desk. There are people who claim that wasteful archaism doesn’t speak of luxury. Some of them are lying. Some are young.

A bellhop takes me to the fifth floor. I tip him and he nods and he leaves.

It’s a lovely room, except there are no windows. A lover’s suite. There’s no lover there, and no Katie.

I wait.

I sit on the bed. I stretch out in an armchair. I read old Chicago history. I watch gangster movies on the insides of my eyelids. I must have fallen asleep, because I wake up, and Katie’s looking down at me.

“Hello lover,” she says to me.

I may be out of my depth but I’m not out of my mind. I stare at her.

She smiles at me. Coyly. And she looks like use to, back when we were young.

Then she holds up a piece of paper. On it is written, DON’T TALK. And things make sense.

A deserted beach on the Florida coast, that was private. In the jungle, on a mountain, sure. Everywhere else you have to assume someone is listening. Because someone could be. Something could be. Listening. Watching. If they want to. And whatever Katie does or gets done, it’s a safe bet there are people who want to.

Anything can be heard or seen. Anything can be recorded. There are exceptions to the rule. But I didn’t like relying on exceptions. Not when I was getting into… God knows what.

She puts her purse on the bed and opens it. She takes out a manila envelope and a ball. She unrolls the latter into a length of tiny white cable, with every six inches or so a paper-thin square the size of a coaster. She lays this out on the bed from foot to pillow. She fiddles with a dedicated interface at its end.

The little squares are speakers. They start to emit sounds. Very high-quality sounds. Heavy-breathing sounds. I’m looking right at them and I’m still hard-pressed to believe there aren’t two people having sex in the room.

It’s so strange I almost forget to get uncomfortable.

Katie turns to me and hands me the manila envelope. I open it. Inside is a piece of paper and a smaller envelope. The paper is grainy to the touch. It’s been written on. The writing’s addressed to me.

Martin:

Welcome to work! Sorry for the theatrics. I hate writing by hand, so I’ll be brief.

These are the rules. They sound worse than they are. But if you break any one of them, or even bend it, you’re done.

Don’t talk about the work we do. Not to anyone. Anyone who says they work for me is lying. Not to your therapist. Not to your lawyer. Not to your diary. Not alone in the shower. Never.

We will never talk about work. Not even a nudge or a wink. Not by cort, not in person. Not unless we’ve arranged it beforehand through accepted channels. And even then, only in person, and only in circumstances of my choosing. No exceptions.

If there’s an emergency – tough. If you’re ever in a situation so bad that you need to talk to me, it’s already too late.

You’ll do jobs for me. Each job will be different. Each job will have its own objectives, its own parameters, its own eccentricities. Some will take hours, some might take months. Try to enjoy them. I hope you do.

When you finish a job, you report that you’ve finished it. Then you’ll wait for another. If you keep waiting and it never comes, that’s how I want it. Never, ever hurry me. Most likely it’s nothing you did. Either way, it’s just business.

Every job will set up the manner of communication for the next assignment. If I contact you in any other way, ignore the communication. The only exception is if I hand you instructions myself. Just as I am doing now.

I am a paranoid girl. Which is why I am old, rich, and free, all at the same time.

Details about your first job are in the other envelope. Put it in your pocket and take it home with you. Read it at home where nobody can see you. Memorize it. They shower with it – it will melt in your hands.

Which is what you’ll do with this letter as soon as I leave.

Best of luck, Martin. I really hope it works out. But either way, I’m glad to have you back in my life.

I look up at Katie. She holds my eyes in hers with a heavy grip. Then she nods, and turns back to the controller on her speakers.

After a few more moments of moans and grunts, the disembodied performance comes to a conclusion, and then ends.

A minute of heavy breathing later and she rolls up the speakers, slips them into her purse, kisses my cheek, and takes her leave.

There was a strong implication that they meant ‘influence’ in the way a playground supervisor might ‘influence’ unruly children. That aside, they raised a question. I thought I’d try to answer it.

Based upon some quick calculations, the Egyptian military currently operates:

AIR FORCE: 888 fighter planes (inc. 240 F-16s); 169 attack helicopters (inc. 57 Apaches); 102 UAVs

ROCKET FORCES: 120 theater-range ballistic missile launchers (SCUD variants); 108 battlefield-range missile launchers; ~200,000 RPGs; ~4000 shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles (inc. 1800 Stingers); 1601 multiple rocket launchers (mostly Katyusha equivalents); 120 mobile SAM units (inc. 100 M1097 Avengers); hundreds of automatic grenade launchers (inc. the Mk 19)

NAVY: 23 guided missile frigates (inc. 4 Perry class); 4 submarines; 2 corvettes; 1 destroyer

ARMOR: 3980 tanks (inc. 1130 M1-A1 Abrams); 965 tracked howitzers (inc. 621 Paladins, 144 M110s); 750 towed howitzers; ~1400 pieces field artillery; 342 tank destroyers (all TOW capable); 780 mounted mortars; 3885 infantry support vehicles; 5230 armored personnel carriers; >600 minelayers; ~3000 AA guns;

ARMY: ~6000 mortars; ~8000 recoiless anti-tank rifles; and enough small arms to comfortably outfit their 858,000-man standing army

Whereas, on the civilian side, we have:

THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE: Twitter.

…I think that answers their question.

It has never been much of a problem. A temporary inconvenience at best. When my laptop died I got it replaced under warranty. When my e-reader died I bought a new one. When an external died I either had to replace it (to keep up my two-deep redundancy). At worst (as happened in October) one hard drive crash came so fast on the heels of another that I had to redownload all of my music and movies. And then buy another drive.

Expensive at best, time-consuming and expensive at worst. But I have never lost any data.

Until now.

In September I had three external hard drives – a terabyte for music and movies and backup, and a 500gb just for redundant backup.

In October the terabyte drive (Illegal Flower Tribute) died. I began putting movies and music onto the 500gb drive (Areopagitica), and bought another 500gb drive (Eikonoklastes) for more backup.

The new drive, Eikonoklastes, gave me some trouble right out of the box. Bad sectors, noticeably slow data moving, things like that. In retrospect I should have immediately returned it. I know that now.

On Thursday my computer stopped working. The culprit was a faulty power cable. For two days I was without power. On Saturday a new cable came and, marginally poorer, I booted her back up.

As soon as I did so, my good drive, Areopagitica, started making Sad Hard Drive Noises. Calm as I could I grabbed Eikonoklastes, mounted it, and began copying as much data as I could from the dying hard drive to the new.

About halfway through the copy process, Eikokoklastes stopped responding. Diagnoistics are a bust. I have been unable to mount it, reformat it, change the partition table, anything.  It is a brick.

I tried to remount Areopagitica and see what I could move onto my main hard drive. It has stopped responding. It will not spin up. As far as I can tell, it, too, is a brick.

Both my backup drives died simultaneously.

Fuck. Shit. Balls.

I did lose all my music. Fortunately I’m getting pretty good at re-torrenting it. I keep an up-to-date $tree output just for that purpose. At my truncated 100kbps internet connection, I should have refreshed most of it within ten days. More, if I have to occasionally pause the downloads in order to actually use the internets.

I did lose all my movies. Fortunately I’m getting pretty good at redowloading that too. I remember most of what I had – I only really keep my favorites around. And about three days before the Day of Digi-Sadness I gave a bunch of stuff to a friend, which I fully intend to steal back. Yee haw.

I did lose all my microcode. Fortunately I don’t really use non-Linux (and hence, non-free) computer programs any more. If I want I can always redownload them.

That is the pattern here. All the things I “have” on my computer, are just things that I’ve pulled from the cloud. They aren’t about to disappear. If anything it’s getting easier to torrent things, easier every day. The only reasons to download these things at all are

a) convenience. If you have them locally, you can play them exactly when you want to. This is especially useful for someone like myself who likes being able to change the music like a squirrel in a DJ booth. But honestly, if I had a faster internet connection (>1mbps), this wouldn’t be a big deal; at those rates I could download an album in less time than it would take to find a CD, open it up, and put it in a CD player. And that while still relying on the pay-avoiding torrentz.

b) fear. the idea that having all these things locally is good because one day it might be hard to get them. cough sopa cough. on the other hand, this has certainly not been the pattern of the last two decades. filesharing has become easier by the day. and this attitude, this must-protect attitude, only serves to make the torrent networks more robust. yet it is worth indulging, I think, in a bit of fear – since to replace just my core collection of music and movies and manuscripts, ignoring the fact that I like to add & prune at will, would cost me (rough calculations) about $30,000.

c) acquisitiveness. I still cannot shake the idea that the things I am downloading, though I can easily get them for free, have monetary value associated. As such, downloading them feels like an accomplishment, owning them projects the comforting illusion of value. This is no doubt a silly feeling. But it is hard to shake, for a person – yes, I’ll say it – for a person of my generation.

d) personalization. by adding or subtracting or reorganizing the data which I downloaded – which all falls under the category of Altering The Metadata – I can get my music/movies/&c the way *I* like them – something which, once I’ve redownloaded all this stuff, I shall have to do again.

e) transience. some things, once easy to download, have now gone by the wayside. And, even worse – some things I cannot well remember to download.

It is this latter which is now causing me the greatest difficulty. I lost a collection of movies and images downloaded online. They were culled – from YouTube and whatnot – not out of any specific intention to download, but only as I came across things of interest. Since most things I download in this way have no set titles to speak of, I provided my own metadata for each file. As a result, tracking them down again would be nearly impossible. It would be searching for a needle in a needle-stack.

I did not lose items which I made. But I lost the collection, and the collection was a thing I made. Now I will never be able to reassemble it. Not the least of which because, having been assembling it for the last fifteen years, I am no longer the men (and boys) which I once was. I could not reassemble it, for the original assembler has himself passed into memory.

I have just backed up all my data onto a friend’s external. I am hoping that the insurance company will be getting me a new laptop in the very near future. If they do, I will be making sure to buy a USB 3.0-compatible machine, and I will then pick up at least two portable hard drives that are compatible therewith. If I do not have a new computer owed me, I will buy two 2.0-compatible drives, with the knowledge that, once Gainful Employ visits me once again, I shall be able to dispose of these antiquated drives – hide them somewhere, far away, a time-capsule of a computer, another layer of redundancy.

Digital information is not immortal. It is just more easily replicated between corporeal vessels. Those vessels, I know only too well, are decidedly mortal. A hard drive may be less like a manuscript than like a medieval library – but even those, from time to time, would burn. Only a robust series of libraries could preserve the data of Christendom, of the Middle Kingdom, of the dar al’Islam. In that same way…

…I really need to buy some new hard drives.

Friday

530p:
SF/F, Prior Art, and Patents — 1hr 15min — Paine (2)
The Heinlein Juveniles — 1hr 15min — Quincy (2)

630:
Viking Fighting Moves: Fiction vs Fact — 30min — Grand Ballroom AB (1W)

700:
“Reclaiming the Blade” and Q&A — 2hr 30min — Harbor Ballroom III (3E)

830:
Paneling 101: A Primer — 1hr 15min — Revere (2)

1000:
Asimov vs. Heinlein: Which Future? — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W)

SATURDAY:

1000a:
Judging a Book By Its Cover — 1hr 15min — Revere (2)
World Building 101 — 1hr 15min — Otis (2)

1130a:
Character Building — 1hr 15min — Alcott (3W)
Fantasy Before Fantasy, SF Before SF — 1hr 15min — Griffin (3E)
Poly 101: An Introduction — 1hr 15min — Lewis (3E)
Language & Linguistics in SF/F — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W)

1230:
The Martial Arts of A Game of Thrones — 30min — Harbor Ballroom III (3E)

100:
Don’t Quit Your Day Job — 1hr 15min — Adams (3W)

230:
The Cutting Truth of Medieval Swords — 1hr — Harbor Ballroom III (3E)

400:
Art as Business — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W) – LEFTONS A-GO-GO

700:
Plot and Structure — 1hr 15min — Carlton (3E)

830:
Self-Publishing Snares — 1hr 15min — Hancock (2)

1000:
Mud and Blood: The Grittier Side of Fantasy — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W)
SUNDAY

1130a:
Myth and Folklore in Fantasy — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W)
Why You Should/Should Not Self-Publish — 1hr 15min — Alcott (3W)

100:
Arisia Lightning Talks — 2hr 45min — Burroughs (3E)

400:
Writing As Business — 1hr 15min — Paine (2)

530:
Creating and Maintaining Your Public Persona — 1hr 15min — Revere (2)

830:
The eBook Ecosystem — 1hr 15min — Hancock (2)

1000:
Consistent Magic Systems in Fantasy — 1hr 15min — Burroughs (3E)
Ethics of Science Fiction — 1hr 15min — Douglas (3W)
MONDAY

1000a:
Boston in SF/F — 1hr 15min — Quincy (2)

1130a:
Setting as Character — 1hr 15min — Burroughs (3E)

100:
The Future of Old Age — 1hr 15min — Revere (2)

I think of it as a screenplay. Whatever, however: here is the story.

We open in a bar. It is dirty and dismal. The people are sullen, their clothing torn, their eyes hollow. In the back of the bar are five people, mixed men ad women. They are muttering into their beer. They are clearly having a Last Drink. They drink it down, and get up to go.

One of these people is our protagonist. I picture her as an embittered young woman, fighting to let through a tiny ray of hope.

They go outside. They are in the ruins of a city. Buildings are boarded up. Some are ruins. Basically it looks like Stalingrad in the winter of ’45. The only things that are clean and bright are few and far between – and clearly not of this world.

The four friends scatter. They each go to a different hidey-hole, remove a weapon, conceal it. They move to set locations. They wait.

After a fashion, an alien comes down the street. These creatures are large, strong, intelligent, and emphatically not human. They are not bipedal. The less like any earthly life they are the better. Their dominance of the population is quickly established. Some tired old beggar gets in one’s way, and it kills him without breaking stride.

These five people, these rebels, each grimace at the sight. There is another man on the street just loitering. He seems unaffected.

The alien is walking through the city. He reaches a bend in the road. “Now!” shouts one of the rebels. They draw their weapons and open fire.

The alien is strong. He resists their assault. He makes it to one rebel and cuts her down. He runs to another who is forced to retreat. Five against one and the five are losing. They are shouting, screaming, desperate, the embodiment of desperate struggle. They are humanity. And they are losing.

Then the other guy from the street gets up to the alien, attacks it, beats it to the ground… and starts to fuck it.

There he is. Broad daylight. Nightmarish creature from beyond the stars. He bests the creature when nobody else could. He defeats one of mankind’s horrible overlords. He saves the lives of these freedom-fighters. And he does it WITH HIS DICK.

He finishes his, um, act. The creature is clearly no longer alive. He then runs. The rebels follow. And following his lead they manage to get to safety, away from reprisals from the alien species.

They hunker down with this fellow. He doesn’t say much. He is, in fact, quite clearly balls-on-his-forehead completely fucking crazy. Insane. Not necessarily charmingly so. But crazy. Crazy. Fucking LOONY TUNES.

All they know about him is that his name is Johnny. And what he does, successfully, compulsively… is rape aliens.

It becomes established that the aliens have taken over the earth. They invaded. The humans fought back. A large amount of the world was destroyed as a result. The aliens didn’t care. Whatever they want out of the world, destruction is not an obstacle. Now they go about and do whatever it is they do.

They seem willing to let humans go about their business. As long as they don’t do anything that might lead to rebellion. Such as use any electronic devices. Or get up to anything in groups. Or get anywhere remotely in an alien’s way. Then the aliens will kill them without a thought.

There are only a few hundred of them in the whole world. Rebellion against them has been unsuccessful and is now scattered and disorganized. In fact, this Johnny is about the first person who seems to actually be good at fighting them. In this he is pretty much unique. Also, indeed, in his methodology.

After much discussion, and being seriously weirded out letmetellyou, the rebels decide to follow him. Maybe he can be of use to them. Not like they were doing a real bang-up job before.

The goal of the group is to make use of this fellow – who seems indifferent to being followed in this way – in their fight against the aliens. The goal of our protagonist, both out of self-preservation and sheer human curiosity, is to find out who this guy is and what has made him into whatever-the-fuck he is.

They follow him. They watch him stalk his targets. They watch him prepare his weapons. They watch him, single-handedly, trap and disable an alien. Then they watch him bend the thing over a barrel and pound its extraterrestrial ass.

The rebels begin to employ his tactics. They bring down an alien, then another. They do not really work with Johnny. More like in tandem with him. He is a force of nature. He is hell-bent on his goal. Which is taking aliens and fucking them. To death!

Our protagonist finds out a few things about this Johnny. He has some awful traumatic experience during the alien invasion. She things it was something like a bunch of humans raped his wife and daughter because they thought the world was going to end. Johnny had to watch. This completely screwed him up, to the point where all he does is vent his horror onto the aliens.

I would intend to see his character portrayed as half farce, half truly horrific tragedy. Think Niko Bellic meets The Toxic Avenger… meets Wilt Chamberlain on a Viagra IV.

The rebels follow him. They have adventures. Some close calls. Some epic triumphs. Some serious nonhuman deathfuckings. They follow Johnny like a berserker. People see him in action. He gets known.

They go into a new town. They hear people talking about this guy. His name’s Johnny and he’s the only one who can defeat the aliens. He’s Johnny Rape. And he is humanity’s only hope.

More and more people begin to rise up. They take down aliens here and there. Many die trying, but at least they try. They organize. They get better. The rebel group helps them. Organizes them. Brings them together. And every time they see Johnny work his rapin’ magic, the people of the world become like French yeomen suddenly come upon Joan of Arc.

Finally the aliens are fighting for their lives. They are no match for these careful new tactics. They retreat en masse to a single location. The rebels find a way in to their citadel, Johnny at the lead, and there is a big climactic epic battle. Many die. Many of the rebels die. And at the end Johnny skullfucks the alien leader into a jell-o. He has the orgasm which saves the human race.

He comes out of the citadel. The aliens are dead. Humanity is freed. And he has freed it. A great cheer rends the sky for this hero of humanity. Then people realize just who they’re cheering, and the breath dies in their throats. And they just stare at him. Their savior. With alien brain goo still on his junk.

Johnny just stares back, crazy as ever. Then, I think, he walks off into the sunset. The Cincinnatus of Humanity. And possibly the craziest motherfucker in the history of fucking all.

JOHNNY RAPE

HUMANITY DOESN’T CONSENT

Right. Now let us never speak of this again.

What gives?

Earlier today the Kingdom announced that if Iran’s petrochemical exports were sanctioned – or, y’know, exploded – it would increase oil production to cover 100% of the shortfall. Even so, the price of oil is trading very high: Brent crude (al’Ghawar standard) is spotting at 108 1/3. Iran produces about 4.1 million barrels of oil a day. They use about 1.6 million domestically. The remainder is export: 2.5mbbl. That’s $275,000,000 a day at current prices.

If the Saudis are going to cover an Iranian shortfall, we will need to pay them about 275 million dollars a day. That’s a lot of petrodollars. Especially in the middle of the biggest liquidity crisis in eighty years. Really, we just can’t afford it. But while we don’t have cash, we do have lots of surplus Vietnam-era military hardware. We didn’t have the money, so they offered to sell us their oil for trade.

The difference between the paid value and the flyaway value of the RSAF’s new F-15s is pretty damn near the cost of a day’s closure of the Straights of Hormuz. These 84 fighters aren’t a military asset. They’re a promissory note against a three-month military blockade. Riyadh is offering to finance Washington in a war against Teheran.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: there can still be war in a global economy. Even between trade partners. In some ways it’s even easier, because more trade means more alternative sources of goods. The only real difference is that now you can spot the war before it comes. If only you know what to look for.

Sources:

WARPLANES: Al’Jazeera:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/12/20111229171349492933.html

OIL COVERAGE: Bloomberg Business:

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9RTJQ500.htm

F-15: National Museum of the US Air Force:

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=621

PRICES: Bloomberg live ticker:

http://www.bloomberg.com/energy/

Then Alan spent a few solid hours just watching the blikenlights: checking his eMail, backing up his thesis, playing Minecraft, reading old XKCD. By the time the sun’s chariot was on Route 128 and heading home, Alan had managed to wrap his head around what was going on that day.

When the sun had set the mid-street nerds all unplugged and went over to Killian. There they were joined with hundreds, maybe thousands of other people. Most were MIT. Some were just from the area. Some weren’t from anywhere near the area. They’d gone looking for MIT, they’d gone looking for anything, they’d just ended up there for one reason or another. For one of a thousand different reasons. The worst was over: now everyone had their story to tell.

And they told it. One after another. One over another. They couldn’t stop. None of them could. They just talked. And Alan just wandered around and listened. He couldn’t not.

He heard stories of bravery and of cowardice, of genius and stupidity, of kindness and cruelty, of desperation and of determination. He heard stories from graduates and geriatrics. He heard about kids who made breakthroughs in scientific theory and professors who saved lives with hammer and saw. He heard about things people had done alone, and what people had accomplished acting in groups, together.

An adjunct professor of nuclear engineering had lead the team which got the reactor up and running. At one point a faulty connection had put them in danger of meltdown. He had managed to avoid, not only a terrible accident, but also the necessity of a reactor shutdown. His strategy was sufficiently innovative that he was already in contact with the DoE concerning its general adoption. They said they’d give it strong consideration – and told the army not to let him anywhere near so much as a AA battery.

A lab tech had overheard a bunch of people talking about power generators. He was the one who had the idea to form up a bunch of different teams and compete against each other. Three lab PIs had taken a week to come up with what the criteria of judgment would be. By that point they already had more than eighty wind turbines up and running. Some had been made, by genius or necessity, in the most curious shapes. A few of these were sufficiently innovative as to warrant further study by scientists. His management of the scientists had earned him an honorary MBA.

A compsci grad student had managed to set up a local area connection of over two thousand computers before it went down. From studying the subnet’s crash he was able to draw conclusions that allowed him to bring up the entire MIT subnet, and keep it up. He had already been flown to an undisclosed location, though the gossip was he’d had a major impact in bringing the internet back up. They were speaking of him in reverent tones. They were talking about how glad they were that He had been at MIT.

A kid from the creative writing program had set up a site on the MIT subnet through which people could upload their stories, their tales of what-they’d-been-through, what-they’d-seen, what-they’d-done. Now that the internet was back up it was being hotlinked on the main FEMA splash-page. It had gotten a few hundred million hits in a day; servers were being seconded to its service as fast as they could come back online. The kid had had a Google Analytics ad on the top of the page for about six hours before they made him take it down. Over those six hours he’d made enough money that he looked like he’d just walked into a wall.

A professor had fallen off the Mass Ave while trying to rig a wind-sail. One of his grad students had jumped in after him and saved him.

A group of Longy students had biked up to Lexington and talked a riding center out of a team of horses. They’d pretended to be doctors. They were good pretenders. They’d ridden the horses back to Cambridge, made a cart out of bicycles and two-by-fours and improvised some yokes out of duct tape. They’d spent the next two weeks riding all over Boston, moving from aid station to aid station, busking. They called themselves the Horse Theives. They didn’t have the internet to check if the name had been taken before. They’d built a fan base of tens of thousands. They knew they’d get a record deal as soon as there was someone to deal with. And a way to record.

Harvard Divinity students divided the city by region, drew lots among themselves, and went off to preach on the streets. As a result there were some very strange conversion clusters in the 617. Including Catholics in Newton, Jews in Southie, and atheists pretty much everywhere else.

A single woman had trained more than a thousand Harvard students into EMTs. She had designed the curriculum to suit the situation: training started at dawn, certification happened at dusk, then the newborn med-techs went out on the street to work. She’d trained hundreds a day, there on Harvard Yard. She herself was a freshman. She was studying studio art. She didn’t mention that.

Several acting troupes materialized as if life from the primordial soup, such taht Davis Square had a different play every night. Most of them were exceptionally risque, and so it was for the best that their candle-powered lighting kept all but the first few rows from actually seeing the stage.

The art history department at BC took over the MFA, the Gardner, and the the Peabody Essex. Scarf-wearing hipsters holding golf clubs were all that stood between the treasures of the world and creative appropriation. Thanks to their efforts not a thing was stolen. Although most of the Chihuily sculptures were smashed. For aesthetic reasons.

Ten days into the blackout the Yale football team showed up. They’d walked to Boston from New Haven with their gear in duffel bags over their shoulders. They’d had a game to play. They came to play it. They dropped their gear on the football field, slept under the stars, and in the morning the Harvard team found them doing wind sprints in the mist from off the river. They shook hands, they flipped a coin, they beat Harvard by a margin expressable only using scientific notation. They walked to the river and bathed under the sun. Then they put their gear back in their duffels and started back for New Haven.

A mixed Harvard/MIT group had dressed up like pirates, broken onto the USS Constitution and raised sail. They were last seen leaving Boston Harbor and heading for the open ocean. Earlier that day there’s been a tweet: “Internet’s up. But so’s the wind.” They hadn’t been heard from since, nor were they expected to be.

An enterprising young Robin Hood had gotten together some Merry Men , likewise some ski masks, and had broken in to a tony liquor store downtown. They’d robbed-from-the-rich about a hundred thousand dollars worth of vintage Champagne. The cops had come and chased them off. When they came back for another pass they found that the store had been emptied out by casual passers-by. Concluding that The People deserved a drink about then, they decided to go from store to store and deliver its contents to the masses. They’d break into a packie, drink the best, box the rest, and put the boxes on the sidewalk. The police had better things to do than deny people tipple. Also they didn’t want to mess with what had grown into about a hundred large drunken alco-libertarians. For a few weeks Boston was an open-air night club for any who wanted it. Now there was hardly a drop of liquor to be had from Alewife to Braintree. Boston hadn’t been so dry since the Pilgrims.

One of the rhinoceri in front of the Harvard anthropology museum disappeared. It was melted down and cast into one thousand perfect scale replicas of the original, which were then stacked in a pyramid on the empty pedestal. MIT students were presumed involved on the circumstantial evidence that only they could possibly be so god damned meta.

A boy wearing a yellow bandana and holding an empty 40 of malt liquor had a circle of admirers around him, most twice his age, some very conspicuously leaning on automatic weapons. It seemed he’d been the one to figure out a way to clear the streets of crashes and stalled cars. He’d overheard some army guys bemoaning the clogged streets, so he’d five-fingered paper and pencil from a stationary shop and made some sketches freehand. He’d shown them to the soldiers. They’d talked it over and agreed. They’d pinched two heavy snowplows from a Public Works shed, plugged a Mig welder in at the nuke plant and welded them to the front of the tank. Then they’d driven up and down Memorial Drive plowing cars off the road and into the river. When it proved a fit solution to the problem they’d passed it on by radio. They were finding out that the idea had made it via short-wave all across the country, into Canada, down to Mexico. Somehow in that long game of telephone everybody knew that this kid, this fourteen-year-old Richard Leibowitz, had been the origin of the idea. What they were just now finding out was that he had also been the one driving the tank.

Alan came upon a knot of girls wearing red coats. He looked from face to face but none was the girl he had seen. He recognized one of them, a second-year envirosci named Nadi who wore her sexual orientation on her sleeve.******** They were standing around laughing like comrades-in-arms. They had managed to find beer. They weren’t the only ones.

Alan walked up to her. He tried to think of some introduction besides oh-hey-I’m-your-TA. But then she saw him and smiled that big broad smile, that smile that everybody seemed to be wearing. And she gave him a big hug. And she introduced him to her friends.

“You didn’t see the Red Coats?” she asked him, seeing the look on his face.

“Red coats?” Alan asked weakly.

“Yeah! Oh, boy, did you miss out. These Radcliffe girls started it. Don’t know how big it got – we’ll find out, I guess – lots of us, jesus – but man, jesus, what a great fucking idea. There was this clothing store in Harvard Square – hipster place, fucking manatee on the sign or something – and right before Lights Off they’d just gotten this ridiculously huge shipment of red coats.” She gestured to herself. Of the other five girls, three were wearing the same exact jacket. It didn’t fit any of them terribly well. “Anyway. Yeah. So when the cops opened all the clothing shops – that was like, what, day three? – these Radder chicks all got dibs on these red coats and said they were the Red Coats. Like the British. You know? Kind of a joke. Sort of. Anyway. They got a bunch of condoms and morning-afters from all the drug stores and started handing them out at the Squares. Got more girls to join in. Went all around. Just walked the streets. Did counseling, showed people how to use condoms and stuff. Lot of people thought it was the end of the world and had been fucking everything. God, it was wild. Some crazy shit. Oh, jesus though, I’m fucking glad we did it. Fucking amazing.”

“Fucking amazing,” said one of the other Red Coats.

“I want to keep doing it,” said a girl in an inside-out red Harvard hoodie.

“So fucking cool,” Nadi said. “So. Fucking. Cool. You didn’t see us?”

“No,” said Alan.

“Didn’t see one of the safe sex demos at Kendall? Fucking too bad, man, your fucking loss. Those things were wild.”

“You were wild,” said Inside-Out Hoodie.

“I was not! I was. Yes, I totally was. You didn’t see it?”

Alan shook his head.

“Jesus. Well, yeah. Fucking awesome.” She took a gulp from her beer. “What about you, Mr. TA? What did you do?”