Chapter Fifteen: The Place Within

The world was spinning, round and round and back again, twisting spirals in space like a tormented gyroscope. Ace couldn’t get his eyes to focus and sounds were all blurred together, so he concentrated all effort on his hands.

He was holding a beer bottle. Suddenly, everything else made sense. Well, it was still distorted, but now the distortion made sense, not in the symbolic sense of course, but in terms of cause and effect…

“Ergh. Fugget.” Ace’s brain gave up on the logic string and and he leaned forward, slumping over the table. One elbow landed in what was left of some enchilada sauce.

“That’s the second time tonight he’s done that. Either he can’t handle booze or he can’t handle hot sauce.” John reached over and took the half empty beer bottle out of the passed out man’s hand, before it could spill all over the booth. In the seat next to him, a rather hirsute man-turned-wolf-turned-man-again accidentally stabbed himself in the face with a forkful of refried beans.

“It’s only been a month! How can I not remember how to use hands?!”

Drew poured some of the super hot sauce on her rice. “Maybe you’re just naturally clumsy.”

***

The world was a little bit out of proportion to what he was used to, but that was okay. He was out of proportion to the world itself most of the time. The door seemed to tower out of sight, even though he could clearly see the top of the door frame. From behind the wood, angry voices shouted.

“Get out! Get out now!”

“Honey, please, calm down-”

“Don’t call me honey! Call me by my name! Or can you even remember it?!”

“That’s not fair.”

“You’re right! Life ISN’T fair! You taught me that, dad! Well, maybe you should learn what it REALLY means!”

“Have you even considered-”

“You don’t even come near us any more, do you understand?! I won’t stand for it! I won’t let you build him up and then crush his heart when he runs up to you for a hug and YOU DON’T REMEMBER HIM!”

“That is NOT fair, even for an unfair world. I forgot you so I could protect you. I tried explaining this a thousand times-”

“And it’s the same bullshit each time! I WILL NOT let you drag my son into that bullshit, have him dragged into this craziness-”

“He’s already involved! Look in his eyes!”

“I don’t need to look in his eyes, I see his face all the time! I don’t forget what my son looks like!”

“THAT’S NOT IT! He’s got the spark in him, the drive, the need to understand! If you would just look in his eyes and-”

“He’s not like you! He’ll never be like you! I won’t allow it! You just see your own sickness inside him because you want to have somebody to play your stupid games with!”

“And you DON’T see it because all you care about is having a normal family! You don’t care what he can do, or what he wants! And god help him if he reminds you of me by doing a perfectly human thing like FORGETTING SOMETHING!”

“YOU FORGOT ME! YOU FORGOT ALL OF US! YOU DON’T FORGET A PERSON!”

The voices began to distort in and out, and the door bent backwards until it was a long cliff. He fell down into the canyon, but it wasn’t scary. Not scary at all.

***

“Hey, hey, wake up man. Ace.”

Ace carefully opened one eye. Some guy was way too close to his face, with liquor on his breath. Or maybe that was Ace himself. Or both.

“Ace, if a tree falls on a mime in a forest, does the mime make a sound?” The man, and some other people Ace couldn’t see because of the way his head was pointing, cracked up into hysterics.

Ace shifted and turned his head the other way. “Naw, an its iz own damn fault. He got stuckitizered in tha invisible box, an if he hadn done that he coulda got outta the way ah the tree, huh? Shoulda been a bus driver.”

The rest of the people laughed, but Ace was already unconscious again.

***

The bearded man tapped his pipe on the ground and started loading it with more tobacco. He only noticed it out of the side of his vision, as he was looking at the box the man had given him. There were lots of metal bits in odd shapes.

“What’s this one?”

The bearded man reached over and took the metal bit. It looked like two triangles, pointing in the opposite directions and overlapping. The bearded man grinned.

“This is called a hexagram, or sometimes the Star of David. Some people think it’s a sign of God and Angels… some say it’s the sign of Man and Woman.”

“What do you say it is granddad?”

“Hehehe. I say it looks like a gear. Teeth all around it, you know. But there’s something to most of it.”

“Most of what?”

“The stuff about Man and Woman, and God and Angels… sometimes parts of it work. The key is to find those parts. Everyone’s got a little bit of the truth, and you gotta think very carefully to find which bit is the important bit and which bits they made up.”

“…there’s bits of truth in everything?”

“Yessiree.”

“Even lies?”

“Especially lies.”

“…that doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense at all. But it works. And that makes it good enough for me.”

He looked at another metal bit, a fat laughing guy. “Granddad… why does mom always yell at you?”

The bearded man took the pipe out of his mouth and looked a little grim. “Well… I have this job. It’s complicated and it’s dangerous, but I’m really good at it, and more importantly, I love to do it.”

“Mom didn’t like the job?”

“She didn’t like how it affected her, really. Your grandma, you never met, but she understood a little. See, because of my job, I forget things. A lot. You could say I have a lot of my mind, and things get lost in the shuffle. Grandma didn’t like it, but she understood why I had to do it.”

“What was grandma like?”

“Eh… it’s been a long time, but… she was beautiful. An angel on earth. I can’t remember much more than that, and long red hair. But I’ll tell you this, you can know something without remembering it. Because it’s not in your head. It’s in your heart, and in your blood.”

***

The world was vibrating, and twisting. Mostly twisting. To the left.

“Whoa, whoa! Catch him!”

The world righted itself, and Ace heard something that sounded vaguely like cursing.

“Wazzat?”

“He’s awake again. Thank god. Two people at once is one person too many.”

“Sez who, ya two timing floozy.”

“Shut up or I’ll have you fixed!”

The night air was once again filled with laughter, and Ace once again nose-dived out of it.

***

“I told you to stay away from us!”

He turned around very slowly, and saw his mother holding a gun. A pistol of some sort. But not at him, just above him.

“Get out of the way, Matt. He’s lying. He’ll forget you too. He forgets everything!”

He turned around to look at his grandfather, who shrugged. “My priorities are different from hers. I forget things. Still do. That doesn’t mean I don’t care, although your mother would disagree.”

“MATT! GET OVER HERE NOW!”

His grandfather got down on one knee and held his shoulder. “Matt, I’ve done what I’ve done, gone against your mother’s wishes, because I recognized something in you that I saw in me. I know you’re barely ten, you’re going to have to make a grown up decision now.”

He looked back when he heard the pistol cocked. His mom’s hand was starting to shake, and he was starting to wonder if she was going to shoot anyway.

“Listen, Matt. You have two options. One, you go back to your mother. Two, you let me teach you everything I know. Everything. It won’t be easy. It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. But the choice is yours.”

“Matt, don’t you DARE! You come here right now!”

His grandfather stood up again, slowly. “Is that how you’re going to respond when he gets older? When he decides that he wants to stay out late? When he has a girlfriend? Are you going to threaten to shoot him if he starts to smoke or drink? Or worse, what if he’s one of those guys who get off on chance? He starts being a daredevil, starts taunting you when-”

The report from the gun was loud. Louder than anything he’d ever heard before, so loud that the sound seemed to go on even after it stopped, some sort of aching echo in the ears and the mind. His granddad stumbled backward, holding his side.

He could hear his mother coming up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay Matt. I got him. He won’t hurt us ever again. Nonono. Never again.”

He reached up and took her hand in his while they looked at granddad. He was bleeding. Bleeding and dying. And as granddad lay dying, he stared. His tongue ran over his teeth, sticking into the gap where one of them had been knocked out, long ago. Slowly, he looked at his mother, and she looked back at him, apprehension slowly dawning as she saw his face.

“I’d rather be forgotten than HIT.”

And he brought up her hand that he was holding, the hand that knocked out his tooth, that was always raised or clenched and never open unless she wanted something, and bit through it.

He heard her scream in pain and rage, and he saw the pistol come at him-

***

And HE remembered.

HE had returned to the center of the web, only now HE wasn’t drowning or dying of thirst loss but the web was lit up by a thousand lights in a thousand directions with a thousand different colors. HE could see all the patterns, where HE had made the same mistake over and over again, but each mistake was still different and taught HIM different things. Loss. Endless loss, over and over. But HE saw that HE had not always been the one who took. More often than not HE had seen the loss, and HE had stepped in, at great peril, and said NO.

And they hated HIM for it. And why not? They had made their choices and HE had interfered. Nobody liked being told how to act and think. But in the end, they hadn’t caught up with HIM. HE was always one step too fast. They were often two steps too slow, before HIS works backtracked around and got them from behind. HE could see some of them, the cornfield that was burned by mechanical marching skeletons with tubas and trumpets and trombones that belched flame, and the ones with drums and cymbals just to round it out. And HIM marching ahead, twirling a baton and leading HIS forces. Or the dogfight above Nebraska, with some wealthy but degenerate human flying a helicopter gunship, and HE in a specially, magickally, modified cropduster.

But there was also the little girl that HE had taught Mechanomancy to, just so somebody would carry on the tradition if HE was ever killed. HE remembered when she finally snapped, made the same connections HE had been taught. She was holding the action figure HE had broken, her most prized possession, a Christmas gift from her father, that she had repaired as her first uncertain steps into unaided clockworking. It was moving around on its own and she was trying to get it to stay still so it didn’t crawl off the edge of the table and break itself, and constantly trying to wipe off her tears so it wouldn’t rust.

HE should have stayed, but a choice had to be made. Her sanity and skill, or HIS safety. HE had chosen the latter. The same choice HE made with the woman taking the trash out when HE decapitated that cocky little bastard that tried to intimidate his way out of his half of the bargain. There was no real way to excuse it.

So HE didn’t.

Always look forward. Never backward. That was the heart of Mechanomancy.

But HE found that HE couldn’t be a good Mechanomancer and a good person at the same time. HE had another choice to make. The suspicious Canadian woman and her friends with the guns and the samurai katanas and that one guy with the guitar who was definitely in a world of his own. They traded; HE gave her and her friends some large and dangerous attack machines, and she gave HIM The Book.

And now, as HE looked on the patterns that made HiS life, that hE made out of that life, He felt better. It was time to finish things.

He looked up into the blinding light, and leapt up into it. The light burned and seared and started searching for a weak point, and started drilling but that was okay-

***

-because that was just the hangover talking.

An arm flailed up and caught somebody somewhere on the body, and blocked out the light.

“GAAAH!”

“Oh hey, Ace is awake.”

“Hnugh. Not Ace.”

“What?”

“My name is not Ace. My name is Matt. Matthew Dale Riley.”

There was a long silence.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I am an awesome planner and mechanomancer both. Kind of like the guy who taught me.”

Matt pointed at the repair spider, standing idle by the television set. “I had a magick librarian write me a magick autobiography, and turned that spider into a mechano-magickal VR simulator. It showed me my whole life, first person perspective, right up to when the book was made. I remember everything.”

There was a shorter silence, an expectant one, and Matt was one of the most expectant of all. Finally, Mitch held up his bottle. “Everything, huh?”

“Yes. You were the one who shot me in the head.”

“Okay, now that we have established that, can I get frickin paid?! That was the oddest odd job ever and novelty alone does not pay the rent.”

Matt stretched his arms. “If I can remember through the liquor haze, Kimiko has most of my funds. I’m not sure where she keeps them though.”

John coughed. “Uh, yeah. About that. She’s gone.”

“What?”

“She left this note on the coffee table.” John handed the paper to Matt, who tried to make the fuzzy words appear as readable letters.

***

Builder,

I’m not going to say this to your face, because I know you’ll stop me somehow. But I have no intention of staying as your maid for any further amount of time. Whether you realized it or not, you built me with emotions and feelings and will. Those are qualities wasted on housekeeping. I don’t think you ever knew, and I certainly never told you because I didn’t want you trying to take it out.

Kimiko

***

Matt looked up. “She probably took the money with her to purchase new clothing and other stuff. Go figure.”

“Wait, doesn’t she run off of a spring? Won’t she need to come back to get wound up?”

Matt scratched his chin and closed his eyes. Scenes flashed by, plucked by random thought association; Kimiko’s first form on the slab as granddad put on the finishing touches; Kimiko smelling of kerosene before one of his Mechanomantic all-nighters, and the fire the next morning; Kimiko opening up one of the cleaning machines and carefully cleaning it much slower than she needed to.

“…no. She’s picked up enough of the techniques now to modify herself, or build a stop-gap solution.”

“…so I’m not getting paid.”

“Not in the forseeable future.”

“Fuckberries.”

***

The stars were fuzzy and indistinct. Probably the liquor. Yeah. Probably. Matt was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. So was Mitch. And John. And Cody. And Drew. And that other guy, the guy who was supposed to be smart.

“Does anybody know of a rhyme for smallpox?”

“Errr…”

“Cold up here. Shoulda worn a sweater.”

“Sweater ninjas?”

“No thank you.”

Cody elbowed Matt in the side with an arm that resembled Robin Williams’ arm in many ways. “Hey… what was all that other stuff? Like the letters, and the things that Kimiko was talking about? Parts and hearts?”

“Eh… red herrings. For her and me both. She needed me to go on a wild goose chase, probably gambling that I’d finally give her a human-looking shell so she could help somehow. Turns out, though, that I left random clues that went nowhere and a few different leads back to the main goal.”

“Which was?”

“Get rid of Kimiko. I didn’t build her. My grandfather did when he was teaching me Mechanomancy. Because he had to support me normally and take time to show me the magickal ropes, he needed some help. He taught me a lot just putting her together, so it was easy for me to fix her when she got damaged.”

“She thinks you built her though.”

“Hmmm… I think that granddad knew I was attracted to this one girl at school, so he modeled most of her first shell after that girl. And he made her as human as possible… I didn’t realize he made her an Automaton until much later, though it was implicit in her construction.”

“So he built her with loyalty towards you?”

“Not that I was able to see. It took a good portion out of him to build her, so I would handle most of the chores and the delegation. That could have been it.”

Doubting Thomas, the eternal know-it-all, raised one hand up to the sky. “So… why did you want to get rid of her?”

“She kept me moving. Kept me running from threats I probably could have fought and won against, but who were still dangerous. She would set the lab on fire after I was done working and couldn’t remember the previous month or day. Or organize stuff over the phone so killer pit bulls would end up getting released near my place. Stuff like that.”

“Wait, I thought she couldn’t talk until you put in that one thing?”

“So did I. I’ve been adding, removing, repairing and modifying that girl for so long that very few elements are original hardware.”

Drew sat up and turned to look at Matt. “Wait, wait, then how could she be the same person she was before?”

“She wasn’t. But I wasn’t the same guy who worked on her before, either. You’re not the same person who asked that question. But the pattern remembers. Parts and wholes… they have a tendency to repeat themselves.”

Doubting Thomas raised a hand again. “So who was your grandfather, who taught you? I’ve been trying to figure that out for a long time now.”

“His name? Hmmmm… King. Jonas King.”

“Hmmm. I remember reading about a clockworker named King. Linus King. Same guy?”

“Could be. What’s in a name?”

“Letters.”

“I’ll drink to that!” John’s liver had apparently been boosted beyond human levels by his magick; he had to bring along some schnapps or something just to keep up with everyone else’s sobering up.

“So he was your grandfather? Probably on your mother’s side?”

“Yeah. Mom didn’t like him much.”

Cody snickered. “What, dad comes home one day and forgets that it’s his daughter’s birthday, forgets he ever had a daughter? No, I don’t see why she’d be unhappy at all!”

“I think that actually happened, but I’m not sure. Whenever they got together, they’d yell. And when I asked her, she wouldn’t tell me. For somebody so angry at her father for being forgetful, she sure was keen to forget her childhood ever happened. She was crazy, of course.”

“Inherited?”

“It’s very possible. Granddad told me Mechanomancy has to be passed down through family lines because people take machinery for granted now. They don’t even think about it until it breaks, or unless their neighbors have a newer, shinier model. Having a predisposition to not perceiving time and matter normally probably helps. But I mean crazy crazy. Worse than any of us here.”

“What? Worse than a guy who stabs himself? This is an outrage! I demand satisfaction! You and me, with trombones at ten paces!”

“Quiet you. Last time granddad came… well…” Matt thought about the fight. In trying to sever his mother’s fingers, he had severed any connection he had with his mother. She lashed out. He hadn’t even tried to move. He could remember the actions he had taken, but still not the reasoning; even the magick of the machine he made and the Book it used was not enough to restore that. But he could make a guess — a life spent with very little memory of the past lead to lots of guessing.

“You could say we didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye.”

John dropped the bottle he was holding and it clinked on the roof. “She gouged out your EYE?”

“Not exactly. She shot Granddad. Unprovoked, I think. I bit her. She pistol whipped me and hit me right in the outside corner of the eye socket. The doctors said it was ruptured or something. That part of the memory is hazy because they had me on some drugs.”

“What happened to your mom after that?”

“Oh, she ran like a bat out of hell when Granddad’s cavalry arrived. He had some backup he built after the war, he said. They were built to watch his back. They took him and me both to the hospital. We told the staff what happened, the staff called the cops, the cops went to my house and mom ran. I don’t know if they ever found her. Maybe she killed herself. Maybe she’s still out there. Maybe she totally forgot me and she’s convinced that she has another life somewhere else that she’s always had. Ironic. Or maybe Granddad built something to find her and gut her. She certainly never bothered us again.”

“Well… that sucks.”

“Not really. He made me an eye to replace the one I lost. And if you have to live with a crazy person, it’s better to live with the one whose crazy helps you.”

“I will drink to that also! For that matter, I will drink to anyone here whose name starts with… a letter.”

***

Matt did not want to wake up. The hangover was expected, but it was a nuisance even if it felt like somebody was holding an angle grinder to his forehead. The real reason he wanted to stay asleep was the dream. Drew was dancing about in a dress. Long, black, and not terribly showy or immodest, and she was really a she. Not just a cross-dresser. A woman. And John was also with her, doing some bizarre German Beer Drinking Dance in Lederhosen. Mitch, Cody, and Matt himself joined them, and soon they were all doing a line dance, high stepping and kicking, and there was a blue glow in Matt’s eye socket that left trails.

Those trails gradually drifted up and resolved themselves into a big fish. The fish opened its mouth and belched for about eight seconds, then began demanding that Matt give up all his shirts and use them to wallpaper the fish’s summer condo. There could be no subconscious symbolism to the dream at all, unless he was telling himself to never, ever, ever drink again.

It was great.

When sleep finally let him go, he got up and started drinking a lot of water to try to correct the dehydration element of the hangover. A quick shower, during which he once again thought about the great zombie battle a few years back, and some jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and he was ready for the day. Not so much ready to see four people drunk in his apartment’s main room, but none of them had thrown up, so that was okay.

Cody was sprawled back on the sofa. Without beer-vision, his face was easier to resolve. Still very animalistic, with a mighty beard, a beard suitable for a hippy from the 60s who was snorting steroids through one nostril and Rogaine through the other. At least, if those two things would work if inhaled. Matt was not sure if they would.

Mitch and Drew on the floor, Drew still dressed as a girl. John and Doubting Thomas were nowhere to be found. Matt looked his hands, then at his friends, and the fish on the wall. He knew what he had to do.

And that was great too.

***

“Okay pal. Hand over your wallet and nobody gets hurt.”

The man was short and stringy, and he seemed to be compensating for it by holding a big fat knife. Matt looked at the knife, then at the mugger, then at the knife again. Using one hand, he reached into his coat pocket and held out a wallet. As the man took it, Matt’s hands crossed over and grabbed the arm holding the knife. Matt twisted and used all his knowledge of leverage and inertia to put as much stress on that arm as possible. It snapped loudly and the man screamed. It was a girly scream. Even the sound of the knife bouncing on the sidewalk sounded effeminate and more or less cowardly.

Holding the mugger by his broken arm, Matt reached around until he found the man’s own wallet, not as fat as some of the others, the real muggers with guns that he ended up killing and leaving in dumpsters. But there were still a few twenty dollar bills in there.

“Hey! What are you doing?! That’s mine!”

Matt looked at the mugger and grinned in the most unpleasant manner possible.

“I know. Ironic, huh?”

When Matt let the man go, he ran down the street, cradling his broken arm. That brought the total to something around three hundred and fifty dollars, and it made the streets safer too. Of course, what didn’t go to Mitch was going to have to towards more parts. Especially at that adult oriented shop; the vibroblade worked damn good, but if it was damaged or lost, or he had to dismantle and abandon it, a spare would be very handy.

And then there’d be the awkward phone calls to some of his former allies to try to reforge connections. It would be easier face to face, but that would take a long drive or four. Oh well. Matt smiled to himself and hummed as he walked down the street. He didn’t know the name of the tune, it was just something he’d heard from somewhere.

If John had heard the tune, he could have pegged it as “Dance Like An Idiot” by Lemon Demon.

***

Every lie starts with truth. And every truth has a lie in its ancestry.

What does a Man Woman Child want to feel? What do they choose to think? What are they told to believe? When what is truth and what is lies cannot be agreed on, there is conflict. The universe can accommodate contradiction — there is sufficient room. The mind can hold contradiction with ease — it is stronger than most thinking creatures comprehend.

Ego. Ego was not large enough, not strong enough, to tolerate contrary ideals. A Man Woman Child sees another Man Woman Child who has another truth. If there is not one truth, then there is doubt and confusion and uncertainty and fear… for those who must rely on the truth of others. Who to follow? Who to believe? How to tell true from false, right from wrong, good from evil?

Of all falsehoods, the One Truth is the most false. And the truest lie ever spoken or written? He She It They can handle the truth. And if He She It They You can’t, then there is but one recourse.

Throw the truth away.

And make Your own.