Rollick knelt down to check out the shards of transparent plas-crete embedded in the floor. They were mostly about 1-3 centimeters in length, half a centimeter across, and pointy to the touch. [Ouch!] Really pointy. Rollick sucked on the wound on the tip of his finger. Plas-crete, especially transparent plas-crete always sharded when it blew. The question was, what made it blow? A material that was strong enough for pressurized steam tubes in a fusion reactor wouldn’t blow for anything less than a professionally shaped C6 charge. And that narrowed down the list to a handful of people, all of whom Rollick knew, or knew of, and governments. Wonderful. It was that kind of day.
Category Archives: Fiction
Barriers
Some of my best times growing up were tooling around the countryside, or sitting under the tree by the water up at the cottage. Why is it so difficult to recreate that time? I remember one day a few years ago when I biked over to Kensington, took off my shoes, and sat in the park and wrote for an hour, just letting the crazy flow out of me.
There is something so delicious about taking your shoes off and feeling the grass tickling the bottom of your feet. Allowing yourself the unguarded moment where you feel truly safe, and where the constraints of the world don’t impinge.
I had this intuitive sense of the world, almost like I could see things happening or speaking to me, but it was submerged and overlaid with a reductionist left-brained world view and set of analysis tools.
What I didn’t realize was that this was a symptom of something far deeper.
Similar to searching for local minima in a protein folding landscape, or the fear of the unknown that stands between us and the next thing we know we need to do, I had put up barriers between what I saw as myself, and a much more fundamental part of me.
As I mentioned, I was sitting in the Faculty of Forestry’s garden when I first heard it.
“Can you hear us? Why do you tease us so?”
“Who said that?”
But I immediately looked around, unconsciously using my analytical overlay to try to determine who was saying it.
And I lost it.
A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the park, it was summer, so I was enjoying ruffling my bare feet through the grass as I sat under one of the beautiful trees.
It was as I could feel the tension flowing out of me….
“So, you feel that?”
In my now relaxed state, I was able to reply “Yeah, I do. Is it not what I think it is?”
“What you feel as tension is really the blocked flow.”
“Blocked flow?”
“The flow of the power of nature.”
“The power of nature? Can I do things like make trees walk around?”
“No, nothing quite so flamboyant, at least not at first. And even when you can, it’s always much easier to do it the other way. Besides, I like where I’m standing right now, and I have important work to do right here.”
“So, what do you mean, Power?”
“Some people talk about it as being the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but that’s really only a first approximation. When you open yourself up, you can feel what is going on around you.”
“But that’s basic knowledge, what everyone does. I’m guessing you’re talking about something different?”
“Yes. When you take off your foot coverings and connect with the earth, the energy, you might call it information, can flow up into you.”
“Energy/information? What do you mean? Does it flow out of you? What do you do with it?”
“Well, I take the information that flows up out of the ground, the information that comes to me along with little bits of the minerals that your people hold so dear, and farm it out to my leaves, where I combine it with the Sun, and process it. Most of what I give back is oxygen, but there’s a little bit of knowledge that goes along with it.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yes, it’s all part of the flow of information back and forth. It flows out of my leaves, you breathe it in in small bits, and then let it out through your hands, sometimes your face.”
“But where does putting my bare feet on the ground come into this?”
“So, you can breathe it in, but that’s really slow and cumbersome. Far better to establish a direct connection. If you could grow roots…”
“Not so far…”
“…then it would be even better. When you are more experienced, we should link, and I can give you a glimpse of all that I see.”
“Link?”
“Yes, a sharing of minds, if you will. But anyways, when you walk barefoot, it flows in, when you write or talk, it flows out. When you dance, it comes out in all directions.”
Sitting there in amazement, and somewhat stunned, I could only ask:
“So, what should I do know?”
Druid
When I first noticed it, I thought it was something else. I would go downtown, and then feel a push away from the most heavily and intensely built up areas in the downtown core. I next felt it around the engineering part of the University campus, a subtle force that I first ascribed to never feeling like I was able to prove myself to the people there.
It’s an odd feeling to feel like your unconscious body is nudging you away from a location. A vague unease, like you are not wanted there, or that you’re uncomfortable with something in some undefinable way.
It all started to come together when I realized that I was having the same reaction to a schoolyard for a school that I had never been to. I thought that it was just that the wind or sun was flowing through in a way that they wouldn’t through houses, or something about not being quite as mentally stimulating, but no, it was something deeper.
I didn’t mind sitting on the park bench by the field, but something about the organization or perhaps the institutional nature of the structure screamed NO! at me.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in the forestry gardens inside the university that I put it together. It was one of the places I was most comfortable on campus (modulo parks that followed ancient creeks), but it still spoke to me as something entirely too managed.
And that’s when one of them first spoke to me.
Crime Scene
Rollick appraised the scene. It was like your standard murder scene, except that all the techs were immaculately dressed in classic suits and wearing white gloves. Rollick bowed to the lead crime scene tech, and asked him what he had so far.
“Rollick-san, you can see here that the apparent cause of death is this gunshot wound in his neck. However, you can see that there is very little blood on the carpet here, suggesting that he was already dead when he was shot.”
“So, what do you think happened?”
“Well, we’ll have to wait for the pathology report, but in the meantime, we’re combing the room for clues. I would recommend you take a look at the display case over there. You might find it interesting.”
“Arigato gozaimasu.”
Rollick bowed and headed over to the display case.
Body
Rollick always experienced a strange thrill the first time encountering a corpse.
It was the feeling that something monumental had just happened here, a great transformation. What before was a living and breathing human being was now just a pile of rapidly decomposing spare parts. The only thing that rivaled it was the sheer joy of creating life, but that was all too fleeting, and took too long to grow to really have the same impact. It made him want to finally get that tattoo on the back of his neck of an old-style UPC of 70 kilos of lean beef.
Scent
It’s the scent that reaches deep into your medulla oblongata and makes your heart skip a beat. The scent that would launch your trireme, if you could somehow haul it down Yonge Street. The scent that was emerging from the crime scene.
Rollick smelled her as he was walking into the crime scene.
“What are *you* doing here?”
“I could ask the same of you. What’s a retired corp investigator doing on the diplomatic beat? Shouldn’t you be doing a Bloc consult?”
“They said that there was a parsnip sculpted into a rose at the scene.”
“Oh, that. It looked like it came out of that trophy case, there. It was sitting on its side. The ambassador was known to collect Bloc artifacts.”
“So, you don’t think the White Rose was involved?”
“He’s never gone this far afield before. We think it’s a copycat or a red herring. Besides, what would the French Ambassador to Japan be up to that would interest the Eastern Bloc?”
“Right. So, why are *you* here.”
“You wouldn’t believe that I heard you were coming and rushed breathlessly to meet you?”
“Not unless I had something you wanted.”
“I was actually in Shinjuku on vacation, and I was the closest thing the Committee had to a criminal psychology expert nearby, so they sent me. It goes without saying that this is above top secret. They didn’t want any flights being recorded.”
“But we should be able to hide that from most organizations. You think Them is involved?
“We can’t know for sure.”
“Fair enough. Let me take a look.”
“You’ll be impressed. It was very professionally done, with an interesting twist.”
Rollick bent down to look at the body on the floor.
Pastus…
…or perhaps pastino. No one really knows where the genus name for Parsnips came from. “Pastus” meaning “food”, or “pastino” meaning “to prepare the ground for planting of the vine”. I had a feeling that meanings like these would have a greater bearing on this case than anyone expected.
We had had many dealings with the White Rose before. We’d never met him, of course, nor even ever seen him. Only the few scattered conversations, shunted through proxies around the world, voice scrambled and descrambled dozens of times, sent through an unhackable optical link in Rio, all the standard things a true professional would do.
And up to this point, the White Rose had seemed content to deal with internal Eastern Bloc matters. Some grievance some nation or city-state had with the former Russia, some internal squabble in one of the London or New York expat communities. But now, this was was different. What would the French Ambassador to Japan be up to that would interest the Eastern Bloc? Or worse, what if it had nothing to do with that? They said there was evidence of a struggle, which was odd. The White Rose was known to kill from a distance, or at least silently. If the ambassador put up that much of a fight, then they must be either very, very good to notice the White Rose, or something else was going on…
Atmospheric
Rollick could hardly see his client’s face through the smoke. The smoke that covered the city like a permanent miasma.
“I need you to find someone for me.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know who they are.” “What I can tell you is that they left a parsnip cut like a rose by the body of the ambassador.”
“The White Rose.”
“Exactly. No one has been able to find him, or even know who he is, but we think he has just tipped his hand by starting to play politics.”
“So, what *do* you have for me to go on?”