07:15 It’s too early for this.

Muddling through a fuzzy mental fog, you realize that pretty much any time is too early for this.  The optimal hour for getting out of bed is somewhere between “now” and “hangover o’clock”, that ambiguous time of day when you aimlessly pad to the kitchen with a killer headache and a tongue that tastes like someone shat on it.  And look at your watch with the “OH FUCK” realization that you’ve slept through most of the day.

07:18 Winded again, but at least you only forgot your wallet, and not the key.  The “snap” of your addled synapses making the connection that you’ve locked yourself out is not a good first coherent thought for the day.

07:20 Not that you feel particularly coherent right now.  And yet, for some reason you decided to walk to work today.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Any recollection of why that was flew out the window as you context-switched to the girl in the short skirt who’s just passed you on the sidewalk.

She’s determined to get where she’s going, fast.  Women in this city always seem in a hurry.  There’s a peculiar rapid-fire clop-clop-clop-clop staccato they make with their heels, as if they’re walking faster than their legs are meant to carry them.  When you hear one coming up behind you, it’s time to get out of the way.

07:26 A beautiful young couple is bringing their two laughing small children to school.   They’re dancing around the still-empty sidewalk, joking and smiling.  Typical Parisian – how does she keep her figure?  Typical except for the smiling bit. It’s like something out of an insurance ad, the wholesome nuclear family intact and well.  Little do they know that he doesn’t work in a bank.  He’s actually an enforcer for an organized crime gang.  He’s already strangled three people this week.

07:28 This store has had the same billboard for weeks.  The lingerie model lounges, sultry and pouting, on her beach.  She’s set off by the gypsy hunched in the doorway.  Not even begging, just standing there, surveying her castle of cardboard boxes, meager belongings meticulously laid out like doilies and commemorative plates in some other old person’s home.

07:30 The street lights go out suddenly.  Washed out, greyish-blue gloom abruptly replaces the warm incandescent glow that bathed the streets, like a woman rising from bed, dolled up the night before, now frazzled-looking and tired.

07:34 You always hate walking past this bakery.  It’s shuttered, oddly, although the staff have probably been up and preparing goodies since four.  Every day, a cloud of blueberry pastry wafts up the street from the ventilator.  It’s torture when you’ve skipped breakfast.

07:37 Who buys some of this crap?  How do these stores manage to exist?  Real estate can’t be cheap here.  Maybe there’s more money laundering than you thought.

07:45 The city begins to lurch and start.  A beeping garbage truck rumbles past to the sound of its crew banging trash cans around the sidewalk.  Slipper-clad concierges rush to bring out their wheelie bins.  One of them steps, cursing, into the river of water a street cleaner has diverted into the gutter.

07:49 Every goddamn day you promise yourself you’re going to go have a civilized breakfast with a newspaper in a café along the way.  Tomorrow.  Every goddamn day.

07:53 A bus is kind of like a two-way aquarium, if you think about it.  Everybody’s looking at the goldfish on the other side of the glass.  Some of them are just a lot more tightly packed in.

A fish tank full of sardines, that’s a funny thought.

You tried meditating on your way to work once.  That didn’t work so well, kept walking into mailboxes and people fiddling with their iPhones.  How do they do it?  Thousands of quick, miniature games of chicken play out on the streets every day, who will be the first to look up from his phone and sidestep the other?  Must lead to a lot of head injuries.

You don’t meditate anymore, just come up with random jumbled thoughts like that.

07:57 Kch-kch-kch-kch kch-kch-kch kch-kch cough you hope that middle-aged lady with the dog didn’t hear you making machine gun noises at passing cars.

08:01 People in this town don’t sleep enough.  Seems like everyone’s walking around with bags under their eyes.  At least it explains why so many of them are stressed and cranky.  Fewer tourists would get their heads bitten off in sidewalk cafés if Paris had a curfew.  And subsidized ear plugs.

It could just be the morning commute, an hour in stop-and-go traffic, every day, all year, would drive anyone insane.  Doesn’t explain wanting to spend ten hours in a Southbound traffic jam every August, though.

Your friend explained his theory of maximum confrontation yesterday.  Never miss an opportunity to flip off people who cut you off at crosswalks.  Maybe he has a point.  Ey, fuck you too, buddy.  Walkin’ here. Yeah, that’s right, didn’t think so.

08:05 Does the security guy out front ever move?  Do you get a quota of security company logo blazers in that job?

08:12 Welcome to the office.  You’re late.  Should have taken the bus.

For many years, he had a memorial Risk tournament named after him.

I have no idea whether this is true or not, but what I do know is that for many of the years I attended the school, we were plagued with glacially slow antiques for workstations, which required the use of a special software to ensure nobody logged in to slow down an already-struggling game system with unnecessary programming homework. This software (a “tty grabber” — ttys being virtual sessions, needed by a user to log in, of which a running system only had so many at once to go around), appropriately called N0H0Z3RZ, was usually run right after a manual reboot to make sure any hapless user dialing in remotely was unceremoniously sent packing. Side note: this is why you should always save your work, kids. But given that these computers were one step up from doorstops in terms of performance (which is what they frequently ended up serving as), we hadn’t much choice.

But then the miraculous happened, CS got a new building (albeit one that couldn’t easily be opened after hours by a swift kick to the lock on a side door — the Computer Science Undergraduate Association eventually collected an entire case full of discarded, broken door locks) and new systems. Never mind that it was built on the premises of the old Etcheverry nuclear reactor, never mind that it looked like a green-tiled urinal, never mind that the palm trees outside looked like gigantic wood phalli spewing their leafy ejaculate majestically over the sidewalk — the place was new, and Ben the Filipino janitor-cum-artist sold nice mellow weed at reasonable prices.

Soda had a fairly strict no-games policy, enforced by a brute of a man named Francisco or Fernando or somesuch — a camp guard type who liked patrolling the labs with a sneer, kicking out those of us who wanted nothing more than to leisurely blow shit up when we should have been doing our homework. But play games we did — frequently enough in the graphics lab on the ground floor of Soda Hall.

This lab was only used by certain upper level computer graphics-related programming classes, and not cluttered with hyperventilating undergrads frantically struggling to finish writing their “Hello World”-based operating system in some nonsensical language cooked up by a sadistic CS prof. It was equipped with special graphics-capable versions of the HP boxes, which in turn apparently were delivered with a special graphics-capable programming library by the manufacturer.

It was on these systems that I played one of the many online games that caused me to waste a disproportionate amount of time in darkened, cave-like computer rooms during college, called PEXdrive — written by HP to showcase just this library.

PEXdrive was a pretty weak game by today’s standards, consisting of up to ten or so players racing various vehicles along a course in a primitive polygon landscape. There were stunt bikes, ferraris, cop cars, a rocket car, even a (totally impossible to control) UFO.

And a tank. I’ve always had a thing for tanks.

Unfortunately, the game had loops, and jumps. Tanks don’t do loops and jumps really well — mainly because they are tanks, and tanks are not built for acrobatics. But the tank had one thing the other vehicles didn’t.

A turret. With a cannon.

And so, when everyone else took off to go chasing across the course, I would lumber across the pale mustard-colored countryside, between the pyramids and cubes and cones, directly toward the finish line. And wait there, occasionally casting envious glances at my fellow players whooping and shouting throughout the lab as they performed stunts and nudged each other off the flyover bridges.

And I’d wait

and wait

and wait until some moron showed up, screaming jubilantly toward the end of the race.

From across the room, there’d be a quietly muttered “erk”, accompanying the dawning realization that, although he’d beaten everyone else, there was a tank at the finish line, with a turret slowly rotating toward him.

Waiting.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Formula 1 racing needs tanks.

The stranger smiled amicably as he tugged at the straps holding the boat pilot’s life vest in place.

All around the small, pitching boat, the black walls of uncounted warships’ steel hulls swayed in rough seas, intermittently silhouetted against the thundering flashes of heavy guns.  In the predawn darkness, seventy-five thousand heavily laden men were gingerly making their way down rope ladders and gang planks onto a vast swarm of infantry landing craft, fast assault boats, and vehicle carriers.

The vessel was one of hundreds upon hundreds of boats circling, waiting for their cargoes of armed men.  Soon, it would throw itself against the most heavily defended coastline in history.  A seaborne swarm of angry wasps, laden with frightened, seasick men, soon to be disgorged upon a bullet-swept beach treacherous with every kind of fiendish man-destroying weaponry in a clever, determined, desperate enemy’s vast arsenal.

The stranger was wearing mechanic’s overalls and red baseball cap.  When he was fished out of the water an hour later, the Chief Petty Officer, once he’d regained a measure of coherency, could only vaguely recall the other man’s face.  “Average” was his only description, the looks of an everyman.  But he remembered the neatly pressed trousers, the cocked fedora.  And the smile that never faded as the the realization slowly broke through the Chief’s haze of fatigue and nervousness that something wasn’t quite right, that there was a stranger on the boat before the infantry…”hey what the…”

“Best get out, I don’t want you to get hurt.”  The sailor’s fumbling for his sidearm was cut short by a strong grip on his wrist.  Before he had much opportunity to struggle, the Chief found himself unceremoniously propelled over the gunwale, into the cold wave.  Struggling to free his whistle, he only briefly perceived the rolling bulk of the landing craft as it came about and cold-cocked him before powering off in the direction of the coast.

On the command bridge of a cruiser, an infuriated senior officer pushed back his helmet.  The faraway speck of an infantry attack boat was lit up briefly by a series of barrages from rocket barges launching their cargoes into the distance.   “That goddamned idiot son of a bitch.  All those men.  It’s their funeral.  At least they’ll draw some fire.”  At his distance, there was no way to tell that the boat was nearly empty.

The artillery spotters overlooked two long stretches of shoreline from a bluff extending into the water between the beaches.  From their bunker’s observation slit, they had a clear view of the many muzzle flashes spanning the horizon.  The earth shook as heavy naval artillery blanketed the coast in preparation for the coming assault.  Even through the racket, the forward controllers could hear the steady drone of an immense aerial armada fanning out above them, carrying bombs and paratroopers, or carrying gliders to attack vital points in the defenders’ rear.  Strings of tracers arced upward, finding their targets in occasional bursts of destruction, while the glow from pathfinders’ flares cast intermittent man-made daylight over parts of the defense network.

Even secure in their concrete shells, the numerous garrisons could not always escape the pounding of large-caliber shells.  The majority of the explosions raised havoc with fixtures and electrical wiring, but occasionally an armor-piercing round drilled home.  A heavy gun emplacement up the coast blew up in a gout of flame as its ready reserve magazine took a direct hit.  Mostly, the elite troops manning the defensive positions took the battering in stride.  They had seen worse on faraway fronts, and even newer recruits had been drilled in what to expect.  They waited calmly, expectantly, for the waves of attackers expected before daybreak.

They would stop them at the waterline, among the death traps and enfilading lines of fire laboriously prepared.   Uncounted slave laborers shipped from faraway camps broke their backs under the guns of their masters as jaded garrison troops looked on.  Thousands of miles of shoreline had been turned into an impervious monument to the empire’s invincibility, ensuring swift Armageddon for anyone so bold and stupid as to attack the mightiest fortress in the world.

Through the gloom and smoke, the Major raised his field glasses to his eyes and swept the water again.  He was fidgety, nervous, could not wait to get on with the business of calling down fire upon the expected onslaught.  Several months had passed since his last fight, against another enemy thousands of kilometers away, but the cold routine of slaughtering massed attackers, no matter how determined, was ingrained by battle after battle.

He did not expect the single boat approaching the shore.  The Major was taken aback by the bravery, or stupidity of whoever was piloting the craft, and did not respond to the radio operator’s repeated requests for coordinates.  Noticing the officer’s intent focus on the slab-sided vessel, the other occupants of the bunker made their way to the viewing slit.  None spoke, nor did they take note of the silence of the other defenders’ weapons to either side of the bunker.

As if by agreement, or morbid fascination, the crews manning the thousands of machine gun bunkers, rifle pits, cannon, mortars, and flame throwers bristling along the first defensive line, held their fire.  By now, all eyes were riveted on the shallow-bottomed craft, as it approached and grounded just above the waterline.  As the front gate descended, confused defenders saw a single figure leisurely making his way down the infantry ramp, seemingly oblivious to the many eyes fixed on him.

The man, no more than 200 meters from the foremost gun pits, reached into his brown jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapped out a smoke and lit it.  Taking a drag, he looked around the silent stretch beach and the dark bluff beyond it.  Between the shivering defenders and the smoking man, only the lapping of the waves punctuated the now muffled thumps of artillery impacts as long-range naval artillery shifted to inland targets.

After a few moments of this impasse, a keen observer would have seen a change come over the stranger’s face, his features tightening and his eyes becoming harder, more focused.  Behind him, it was as if the air itself became distorted.  It shimmered, as if a shock wave made of immaterial glass shards rolled in from the ocean.   The early morning temperature dropped substantially as if the air itself had turned to anger.  A subsonic roar accompanied the ethereal wall coming in from the water along the entire coast.  It was more felt than heard, ruffling the stranger’s hair and clothes as it passed him, pushing up the beach and leaving eddies of swirling sand behind it.

Soldiers in their positions felt a booming sensation wash over them.  Men with death’s heads on their collar tabs, hardened by years of war, flinched in their gun pits.  A non-commissioned officer sitting at his machine gun stared open-mouthed toward the shoreline.  Behind a sand bag wall, three privates shivered at the sense of violent terror permeating the air.  Five months before, an execution squad had shot a randomly rounded up group of villagers, condemned in retaliation for an act of sabotage.  The Lieutenant who had coolly fired the first shot now buried his head in his hands in terror.

Somewhere along the line, a trembling corporal, shivering with fear, pulled the trigger on a heavy machine gun.  His burst fell short.  A series of impacts stitched the beach before the stranger’s feet, spraying his shoes with sand.

Through his binoculars, the Major saw the man’s eyes light up.  Before he could utter a grunt of surprise, light suffused the beach.  Survivors later described an intense, cold glow lighting up the seafront.  Still holding his cigarette, with a violent roar that belied his civil appearance, he swept his hand along the defensive line.  Chaos erupted.

A streak of fire slashed across the hillside.  Bunkers crumpled like toys, thousands of tons of ferroconcrete offering no protection to their inhabitants before a burning pressure wave.  The swath of flame melted steel gun shields and barrels.

The breaking of the stillness snapped some of the defenders out of their petrified trance.  One after another, guns of all caliber began to open up on the beach.  Mortar crews frantically cranked their weapons to re-sight them on the new menace.  All along the line, officers began to scream orders at the men under their command.  The stranger was flicked his other hand nonchalantly, once, twice, toward the source of a stream of tracers lashing out in his direction.  Two resounding booms marked the end of a quadruple automatic cannon sited to shred landing craft as they navigated obstacles placed in the surf.

The gun emplacement itself was annihilated, its crew torn to ribbons by the explosions.  The man on the beach was now enveloped in a whirlwind of sand swirling lightly about his feet.  He reached out toward a rifle platoon frantically shooting and reloading; a stream of blue flame sent those men who were not instantly rent asunder running, screaming and on fire, from their trench.  The stranger strode slowly between puddles on the sand, minding his step.

To the Major, still looking on in fascinated horror, oblivious to the carnage about him, this seemed like an odd precaution. His last thought was that the intruder’s feet must already be wet from disembarking the landing boat, as a lance of fiery destruction slashed across the observation bunker, blowing gusts of burning air out the view ports before it collapsed in a sparking heap.

One after another, rifle trenches, machine gun nests, mortar pits, ammunition dumps, tanks dug into the landscape, anti-tank guns, impenetrable ferroconcrete-armored  fortifications dug deep into the hillside, all fell to the furious onslaught of the reaper moving up the beach.  Ethereal arcs of light penetrated deep into shelters, turning carefully protected munitions stockpiles into murderous infernos.  Vomiting flames from an open hatch, a halftrack ran off a ridge.  The muffled screams of its driver were drowned out by the holocaust inside as the vehicle finally rolled over and came to rest on its side.

The stranger lit another cigarette and surveyed the bedlam.  The man, seemingly towered over the battlefield that was no longer worthy 0f the name — the destruction was so one-sided and complete.  Slowly making his way inland, every few seconds he nonchalantly reached out to send blasts of ruin in the direction of anything that caught his attention.

All in a day’s work.

The first squads to disembark hit the beach running, diving behind dragon’s teeth.  They were not met by any fire.  Boat after boat disgorged its human cargo into the surf, but not a shot rang out to meet them.  Junior Lieutenants barely out of their teens charged out front, putting on a show of false bravery to rally their men.  Grim noncoms knew that such behavior would have cost the attackers uncounted officers’ lives in the face of any real opposition.  As it was, smoldering ruins and the occasional cowering enemy boy soldier were all that the troops encountered.

“Move, move, you bastards, get up there” shouted a Sergeant.  Men sprinted across the beach, laden with sopping wet, heavy kit.  The volume of covering fire decreased, as did the attackers’ frantic speed, when it became clear that the defensive lines were silent.  Here and there, a few whimpering defenders, uniforms scorched and frayed, ventured out of hiding places and into captivity.

With the arrival of dawn, the wind gradually picked up along the beach.  A scorched scrap of paper scraped along the soldier’s leg; as it flew away down the beach, he made out a glimpse of a scantily clad pin-up girl.

As the first men made their way up the bluffs, through the carnage, the beach was quiet except for the lapping of the waves.

They are everywhere, seems like.  The view from the upstairs windows is intimidating, revealing a mass of shuffling figures all around the house.  I don’t dare crack the storm shutters on the ground floor; thankfully, we had all trees and obstacles cleared from the yard, so they’re not likely to break in upstairs.

I filled the bathtub, sinks, and every container I could find with tap water before the storm hit and the water cut off, plus the cistern on the roof seems to be holding.  I’m done kicking myself for never having laid up an emergency supply, turns out the survivalist crazies were actually right.  It’s mental masturbation to keep going over “what if”…I have no way of knowing whether even a disaster stash of dried noodle ramen and clean water would keep me going through whatever it is I’m facing.

The hurricane came crashing in with unholy force.  I don’t imagine that much of the neighborhood is still there.  Thankfully, whoever built this house was prescient or anal retentive enough to use lots of concrete, unlike the mass-produced mcmansions that had been driving real estate prices into crazy territory until the market crashed.  I have no doubt that the walls and heavy windows will withstand the tempest outside, and they seem to be doing a reasonable job keeping….them…out.

I can hear them, indistinctly moaning.  It’s a ghoulish, raspy sound, that permeates the rare gaps between thunder claps and sheets of rain and wind blasting the building.  I’ve no doubt that the shutters and armored door are more than sufficient to protect against their uncoordinated battering and scratching, but it’s disconcerting nonetheless.  And it has been going on for two days straight now.  I’ve trouble sleeping, even in the comfort and quiet of the cellar room, I know that two kinds of chaos are trying to break down my windows and doors upstairs.

The absence of noise is even more disconcerting when you spend all night with your ears perked, listening anxiously for any sound stemming from the worst possible eventuality.

There wasn’t much of a dawn yesterday, just the continued black maelstrom of the biggest damn storm in my memory.  The whirling madness of rain and debris occulted the sun completely.  Now that it’s pitch-black night, each flash of lightning illuminates a sea of slack faces, the image staying burned into my retinae for seconds afterward.

They all look similar, but different enough for me to tell that the ones besieging me seem to eventually give up and join the others, flowing inland in a giant grey flood, only to be replaced by more of their kind.  They must have come up the beach, and they still appear to be moving, except for the hundreds that stop to try and enter my home.

Initially I had to resist the temptation to open a window and take potshots at them, to see how they would react.  Right now, there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger.   I have plenty of ammunition for the big .45, which I’ve taken to carrying with me in a holster, just in case.  When I bought the damn thing, it seemed like a vanity — what kind of an idiot would ever walk around wearing a hand cannon on his hip?

Someone surrounded by a mass of ghouls in the middle of an insane Atlantic hurricane, apparently.

I’m tempted to raid the bar, get some sleeping help from Jack Daniels, take the edge off a bit.  But I wisely decide against it; nerves or not, liquid courage is not the best idea now, when I need a clear head.  Then again, that would presume me having some sort of option besides hunkering down and hoping the steel blinds hold, or that help arrives before I run out of food and water.

I don’t even know if they’re hostile, brain-eating monsters like in the movies, but I’m not about to find out.  If they broke in, I suppose I could take out 6 of them, but the 7th shot…maybe I’d have the wherewithal to do the smart thing rather than be torn to bits by needy, clawing hands.

The whole atmosphere is permeated with a briny, sour smell that can’t come from the hurricane-borne dead fish littering my patio.  It must be the things outside.  They obviously are not human…were they?  But what the hell is this frightening, lumbering army?  I wish I had some buddhist master’s ability to meditate my mind into a state of calm and acceptance of the pickle I’m in.

Power’s out.  Even with the generator, the TV is dead, as are the phone line and Internet.  No cell phone coverage.  I wish I hadn’t thrown out the old CB radio I’d been carrying since I was a boy, bought for $5 at an estate sale decades ago.  It’s too dark to read, and I’m hoarding my few candles and flashlight batteries for…whom am I kidding?  What for?  Still, it wouldn’t seem right to use them.  The absence of intellectual stimuli is more disconcerting than the fear itself.

I try to keep myself busy by patrolling the house, familiarizing myself with already-familiar rooms and corners, seeing if, improbably, the situation outside has changed, but I notice myself slipping into apathy and despair without some project or goal to focus on.  There is nothing I can do to change my situation, I don’t even have a situation.  It’s what I imagine solitary confinement or a sensory deprivation chamber to be like, no interaction with others, no intelligent way to pass the time, only one worst-case scenario after another to conjure up in a mind made hyperactive by dread and helplessness.

A heavy tremor shakes me out of my musings, and the banging and scraping at the front door becomes more agitated.  I rush through the corridor, and against my better judgment, venture a peek through the spyhole.  The storm’s violence is growing to unholy proportions, toward a crescendo that never seems to come.

It’s worse than anything I could have expected.

Pale, dead, flaccid faces crowd the view through the front door pinhole fisheye.

The world is ending, and I’m surrounded by zombies.

And they’re wearing three-cornered hats and eyepatches.

Zombie pirates.

It’s the arrrrhpocalypse.

But he was uneasy, and he wouldn’t seek help, not of the chemical sort, not if it involved going to the trouble and embarrassment of opening himself up to a total stranger with a clipboard, and to the perceived failure of popping a red, green, blue pill three times a day before meals, instead of just manning up, pulling up his breeches, setting his jaw, and facing the world.

There was nothing to face, really.  Just that nagging bother that something’s wrong, that something could be better.  His job, perhaps?  Objectively viewed, he did pretty well; smart, educated, knowledgeable, personable, and professionally in a position to enjoy the fruits of years of expertise.  Maybe his health?  False alarm again, all seemed well there, he was a somewhat fit, 40-something heterosexual male, arguably in the prime of life thanks to years of reasonable exercise and diet, mixed with a generally good attitude.  Friends?  Romance?  Personal interests?  Check, check, check, all there.  He’s a good guy, his friends all say so.

Except for the unsettling sense that something just was not as it should be.

Then there was the anger — the sudden busts of aggression toward would-be attackers, the desire to unleash adrenaline-fueled rage on an imagined evil-doer who would not show himself, the poltroon  And the heroism, the endlessly played-out scenarios of rescuing damsels in distress, or saving the life of foreign dignitaries from fiendish terrorists that never came.  Thankfully, too, since every time the man was faced with the need to spring into action, he usually ended up blankly confounded, imagining what he ought to have done, for days following.  What the French call l’espirit de l’escalier, “what you should have said”.  And still, he wasn’t slow-witted, just, well, maybe a little bit.  Walter Mitty, eat your heart out, you’re a good man nonetheless.

So, what’s wrong?  Nobody knows, nobody will probably ever know.  The man has dreams of escaping to a far-off land, of abandoning his stable-but-dull career for a lemonade stand on some tropical beach, of turning his personal habits around and becoming a testosterone-dripping he-man for his lady friend, of founding a company and developing it into a mighty conglomerate, or of being recognized for some sort of act of international heroism as is his due.  He somehow knows, though, that these will all remain just that, dreams and fantasies.  Maybe, in his gut, it’s this very knowledge, fervently deny it though he does, that causes his discontent-in-the-midst-of-seeming-plentitude.  Perhaps, it’s what prevents him from being content and happy in his otherwise pretty nifty surroundings, and yet, at some level, it keeps him going, looking for that palm-covered beach, that ticket on a spaceship, or the gilt boardroom that will never come.  Or will they?

Dream on, dissatisfied man.

He is more than angry, he is livid.  Angry at his job, at the train, at the jerk next to him who won’t turn down his crappy girlie-pop that he recognizes, angry at the fact that he recognizes this, angry at the trash on the floor, angry at the lady whose kid keeps bawling, angry at the kid.  He knows he’s being irrational, that his anger is destructive.  Henry wishes it weren’t so, not that he weren’t angry, but that there would be a good reason for his fury.  That pisses Henry off even more.

Henry woke up at the wrong time this morning.  In addition to sleeping just not enough, in that confused space between total exhaustion and full ability to function, he was rousted out of his slumber by a combination of jackhammers, honking cars, stomping neighbors, barking dog, and the need to pee.  He knows he shouldn’t go drinking on a week night, and he’s sworn time and time again to abstain in the future.  He also should go to bed earlier.  But he just can’t let go of either winning that stupid online argument with that stupid stupid jerk, and there’s just one more episode of whatever show he’s currently addicted to, just one more, maybe he can still get seven hours of sleep.

Of course he can’t.  He tosses and turns, knowing that he’ll be barely conscious tomorrow, that the fatigue will be painful for the eight hours he’s expected to produce something or other at the job he doesn’t particularly like.  And yet, maybe if he just turns off his alarm clock, accepts being a bit late, he’ll still get enough sleep to have a good day.  Except for the jackhammer, the car horn, the neighbor with her high heels, the dog, and his bladder.  He didn’t bargain with those.

And so Henry got up this morning, determined to have a good day, trying to force himself into a state of borderline enthusiasm while showering away the grogginess.  To no avail.  And so, all day, small things have been nagging at him, chewing away at his tolerance for adversity, testing his patience, until Henry just decided that today would be a day of anger.

Stress, the risk of hypertension or even a heart attack, incomprehension and hostility from coworkers and others around him, failure to plan and carry out even basic tasks, all these serve to drive Henry into ever deeper fits of resentment at the world.  He is aware that, to his fellow humans, he is an utter pill, a neurotic whiner on par with a Holden Caulfield, albeit without that character’s literary merits.  To hell with Holden Caulfield, Henry never liked that book anyway.  Why would something that…irritating…garner universal praise?  It just pushes his button even more.

Henry doesn’t know what he want.  Maybe he should have a drink, or go running, or meditate, but this is not the kind of nothingness-induced rage that lends itself to self-medication, nor is it the red-curtained choler that drives some to excel at sports, with the theme from Rocky playing in the background, or to create something of marvel.  Rather, the closest thing on Henry’s mind is putting his fist through a window or destroying some thing.  And he knows that this would make him even madder.

Nobody had better mess with me, he scowls to himself as he stomps homeward.  I’ll show them.  Yeah, you, looking at me, you son of a bitch.  You can’t imagine how wound up I am.  And he is.  But nobody dares.

Tomorrow, Henry will be content again, a productive, agreeable, funny, relaxed man, the kind of guy who irritates his co-workers with his smiling, sunshine-ridden “good morning!”  Thrown into the room of sullen office drones in a way that hovers in the air with an enthusiastic exclamation point.  For at least one of them, it will be the trigger that turns a bad night’s sleep into a genuinely awful, infuriating day, full of small defeats and perceived injustices.  But not for Henry.  Tomorrow will be a good day.  He is angry today.

She paused for a moment after exiting the cab, looking around to take her bearings, to get a feel for the neighborhood.  At left, a slightly modernistic parking structures, its high prices a holdover from better, more economically insane times, when shiny SUVs driven by open-collared venture capitalist-types holding a cappucino in one hand while talking on bluetooth earbuds terrified commute traffic.  Natasha Sheherazade Roubichev, who for some inexplicable reason went by the innocuous name “Janie”, had never particularly understood those little earpieces.  Like bicycle clips, cell phone belt holsters or pocket protectors, they seemed like a wonderful idea when considered purely logically.  And like those other things, they made their owners look utterly stupid. That, or frighteningly insane, as they walked down the street, spontaneously gesticulating and shouting at the invisible magic demons, when all they were really doing was complaining to their plumbing contractor how, goddammit, the repairmen had tracked crap all over the recently cleaned carpets again.

To the right, an empty sidewalk was abutted by a run down coffee shop.  An elderly black homeless woman talked to herself, while a thirty-something white guy with a three-day stubble stared listlessly at his Macbook.  Ordinarily, Janie would have pegged him for a marketing wonk or sales account manager who’d snuck out of the office to “work” remotely.  In these times, the pale light cast by the laptop’s screen onto his face through gloom of a cloudy afternoon was more likely the reflection from some social networking site or similar time-waster for the shell-shocked recently unemployed.

Ahead, a short set of stairs rose into a vaguely scummy 5-story building, probably put up in the ’50s or ’60s, which inevitably attracted mid-sized shipping companies, travel firms or other nameless third-tier outfits with a need for cubicle space.  Space to house the legions of middle-aged secretaries that haunted the city’s subway at rush hour, clad in tennis shoes to be exchanged for sensible pumps at the office, clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a bright blue oversize fake leather purse in the other.  Who answered phones, organized the company christmas dinner, spread office rumors around the water cooler, put pictures of their nonexistent cats on their cubicle walls, and retired at quitting time to evenings of pajamas, Sex and the City, and ice cream.  The kind of person, in short, who stereotypically infested the sort of company that Janie desperately hoped she was not about to set foot in.

Dressed stylishly but not excessively so, unsure of the expectations of the 20-something crowd of with-it t-shirt-clad, soul-patched hipsters she expected to encounter having the run of the place, she brushed down her skirt and approached the double glass doors at the end of the dusky hallway, infused with a brew of dim daylight spilling through the frosted windows topping the other office doors, and indefinable office sounds.  Telephones, keyboards, muffled voices all speaking of human daily activity hidden in the offices of innumerable lawyers, therapists, accountants, headhunters, detectives, consultants, scattered throughout innumerable office buildings in innumerable cities, creating the strangely calm atmosphere of work through which Janie walked through the doors.

OrionWerks Ltd. was one of the flood of publishing operations devoted to comic books that had sprung up during the nineties, in response to an Internet-driven combination of talented, doodling high school kids bored stupid by their biology teacher and able to spread their drawings to other, equally bored kids, and a seeming epidemic of short attention spans leading to the decline of anyone actually wanting to pick up a “book” and parse “text”.  All pretensions to luddite elegance aside, it always seemed like such a vastly more practical way to convey concepts when compared to sitting in front a computer screen, droolingly taking in mascara’ed emo types whining about political concepts they barely understood.

To be continued?

The robot vehicle guys weren’t the only ones stealing the thunder lately.  Those windbag jerks over at Weapons Platform Research never stopped bragging about their damn Predator drones.  Listening to them, one couldn’t help getting the impression that those remote-controlled flying marital aids could do just about anything, including making coffee for breakfast.  Everyone knew the platform boys cheated at cards just to get the Air Force meatheads to sneak them into the drone operations center so they could play with their toys in the field.  It was harmless fun at first, with the Xbox-raised joystick jockeys frequently buzzing goat herds on the other side of the world, scaring the crap out of the locals.

The yokels in the area had never been particularly happy about having infidels chase their livestock around the place with their horrid winged nuisances and would drive out in their jeeps to shake their fists at the drones, screaming Pashtu obscenities at the little bastards. Things got a bit out of hand when one of the drone controllers got a bit over-excited during a particularly obnoxious bit of aerobatics and accidentally spilled his Coke on the launch console, dropping a couple of laser-guided bombs on a Land Cruiser belonging to some Waziri chieftain.   After this screwup, it was going to be difficult to keep the carnage under wraps, so Bolander, the navigation systems team lead, called a cousin at Central Intelligence and claimed they’d just completed a successful live weapons test on a known group of Al Qaeda operatives.  The Pakistani army didn’t dare go into that neighborhood for a while afterwards, so nobody ever asked what terrorists would have been doing with the 50-odd now-disassembled sheep littering the smoking crater.

After the robot vehicle teams were asked to leave following a badly wired circuit that sent an F500 pickup, nicknamed “Fluffy”, through the cafeteria during lunchtime at 50mph, the infantry mobility team had a bit more peace and quiet to figure out some ways of giving soldiers laden with several hundred pounds of weapons, armor, electronics, supplies, pornographic magazines, beer and anything else a grunt needs in the field, the kind of movement advantage that would let them chase down hopped-up fanatics with AK-47s in narrow side streets.

Everyone’s nerves were on edge, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the project was on a tight deadline and an even tighter budget.  Inter-office SRM (Stress-Relief Mission) competitions, usually involving substantial amounts of liquor, the roof terrace, and large electronic appliances liberated from other groups did a bit to improve morale.  Bannock, who inevitably instigated the shenanigans, figured that using taxpayer money to buy more equipment from American manufacturers was a better way to stimulate the economy than giving it to bankers, who’d just use it to buy cocaine anyway.  This all lasted until late one Tuesday night, Mrs. Holley, the assistant director’s personal secretary, failed to note the deep gouges in the pavement outside lab building C and parked her Mini Cooper in the wrong place on her way to “take dictation”, as the team euphemistically named her rumpus sessions in the conference room.  Nobody ever claimed responsibility for having gravity-tested the storage tape array that Mrs. Holley found taking up the driver’s seat of what remained of her car later that evening.

Things looked glum, until Simonds, the junior micromotor engineer, found the leftovers of the custodial staff’s chocolate brownie supply.  That cheered things up a bit.  It cheered things up even more when Mohdi, the IIT exchange student from UCLA, inexplicably, quietly, started singing Bollywood show tunes in an oddly high voice.  That drew some giggles, then more, until the entire crew was impossibly stoned, having neglected to realize that Drew, the Grateful-Dead-t-shirt-clad loser who operated the trash pickup golf cart and insisted every time on clipping the rear fender of whoever happened to be parked in spot 27, had been driving particularly erratically that day, and that after their brownie party, the maintenance guys had been uncharacteristically mellow.  Everyone just figured that Johnson, the apprentice electrician, had a perfectly good reason to spend 45 minutes staring at the socket he’d been installing that didn’t necessarily involve a copious amount of pot baked into the brownie he’d just eaten.

The subject of unicycles arose after a meandering discussion about PC power supplies, tulips, astronomy, the true power behind the government, and finally, the problem at hand, which was a portable, lightweight, universal infantry vehicle.  In one of his more lucid “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” moments that evening, Roberts, the mechanical engineer, tried to follow a logical chain of thought that kept popping up in his marijuana-choked mind…small size, rugged, simple, cheap, fluorescent….   Actually, the color hadn’t figured in the original army specs, but that wasn’t going to stop Johnson from including a degree of psychedelic coolness in the design, into which he launched himself with a determined frenzy once he’d decided that his protractor wasn’t actually trying to crawl away — all of which seemed nearly as funny to the rest of the team as the fact that Roberts had trouble staying on his chair while drafting.

The idea was readily accepted by the three colonels on the project evaluation board.  This was considered a career dead end, and each of them wanted to get the hell back to his respective regimental HQ ASAP to prepare for some serious ass-kissing before the next round of promotions rolled about.   Nobody would fault their decision — after all, these were some of the nation’s greatest scientific minds, stoned or not, solving the toughest challenges of the common defense, and if the goddamm French could mount an artillery piece on a Vespa, we could certainly put an infantryman on a unicycle.

The Mark 27 Portable Veterinary Inseminator (actually a strangely squat-looking unicycle given the name of an abandoned low-visibility project as a smokescreen against nosy reporters) went through the design and production stage in record time, due to Mohdi’s ability to get one of his numerous cousins to commit to a rush order job in his sweat shop outside Chennai.  The first hundred units shipped Stateside in boxes labeled “Bananas — ripen before re-shipping” and went to the testing platoons for evaluation.

The test results of the world’s first personal combat unicycle resulted in no major failings, with several of the volunteers who had been ordered to participate in the project surviving the field trials with remarkably few serious fractured bones.  Minor design flaws were observed, such as the propensity of the device to flip over from recoil when firing heavy weapons from the shoulder while riding, or the possibility that enemy soldiers would simply poke long sticks between the spokes of the wheels.  However, it was estimated overall that in a combat deployment, enemy casualties might, given optimal conditions, actually exceed friendly injuries. Psychologically, the new weapon was proven to be a masterpiece, with simulated enemy troops literally reduced to combat ineffectiveness, from laughing at the vaguely embarrassed GIs frantically flailing their arms in an effort to remain upright.

A special 8-foot-high scout model was considered, but rejected as being impractical after repeated falls from inattentive snipers banging their heads into low street lamps and shop signs while looking in another direction.  An airborne model also existed at one point in the form of a few prototypes, designed to be strapped under a paratrooper to allow a rolling start when landing in a “hot” zone.  The development group, alas, underestimated the force with which the average parachutist hits the ground, their only exposure to such suicidal stunts as jumping out of a perfectly good airplane coming from childhoods spent watching action movies and playing war games instead of actually doing their homework.  The resulting injuries, remarkably, left the army footing the bill for fewer than 20 gender reassignment surgeries for those parachutists who had managed to avoid getting their clumsy undercarriages caught in trees, swamps, chimneys and other obstacles and actually landed upright.  And landed hard.  Too hard.  Thankfully, the army’s shiny new sex non-discrimination policy prevented the resulting paperwork from being too complicated.

During the invasion of Iraq, a testing platoon was issued with early versions of the combat unicycle — while the unit generally performed well on flat surfaces, the insurgents quickly developed the technique of lying in ambush by the roadside and jumping up and waving their arms to startle the riders.  The resulting confusion would inevitably send badly balanced and overloaded infantrymen careening into each other, to the endless amusement of the local children watching the closest they’d thus far ever come to a clown circus.

The unicycle project was finally dropped after a little-known incident when the testing platoon accidentallyentered a patch of quicksand, to tragic yet strangely hilarious consequences, with 45 troopers simultaneously faceplanting in the soft ground.  The design team is currently on indefinite administrative leave; their respective academic institutions have been asked to restrict themselves to providing research input on sanitary installations and camouflaged candy wrappers.

“The fuck you want, Gummo?”

“I told you, don’t call me that, jackass.  My boots are hosed.  Yeah, lookit, the sole’s all coming off.  So I…”

“Uhngh, dude, I’m trying to sleep.  Why do I give a shit?”

“..need a new set of boots.  C’mon man, just tell me what I gotta do to get another pair?”

“Ah geez, I don’t know, ask Sarge.  Now fuck off and let me sleep.”

“Hey, Sarge, you got a minute?”

“Yeah, I s’pose.  What is it, Hufflepoke?”

“My boots are shot, Sarge.  Can I get another pair?”

“Let me have a look…shit, Hufflepoke, can you please stop trashing your gear every chance you get?  Fill out this form, I’ll take it to the Ell-Tee.  Actually, put in for five pairs, I think stores is runnin’ low.”

“Sir!  Sergeant Knobrocker requesting a moment of the Lieutenant’s time, sir!”

“Just a moment, Sergeant.  All right, come in.  At ease.  What do you want?”

“Lieutenant Wartpuncher, I got these requisition forms, some of my guys need new boots.”

“Great, just what I needed, more paperwork.  Let’s see…what do you guys keep doing with all those boots, anyway?  We should just go ahead and request a full replacement batch, I think the Captain’s getting tired of all these piece orders.”

“Captain Gooseheart, sir, here’s the report you requested on Bravo Platoon.”

“Right, Lieutenant, let’s see…latrine maintenance trend positive, I like the progress they’re making on their personal cleanliness medals, and..hmm…full replacement batch for your boots?  That’s going to look terrible in our monthly statistics.  Dismissed.”

“Captain Gooseheart, what the hell is the meaning of this spike in personal equipment requisitions?  I’m waiting for your explanation.”

“Well, Colonel Pieflinger, I don’t know what to tell you, it must be the weather, it’s pretty hard on our gear.”

“Humph.  This puts us into divisional budgeting category D.  If the General gets in a bad mood over this, I’m having your ass, Captain, understood?”

“…and that, General Pugshave, sirs, is why I propose launching a full equipment readiness upgrade initiative for the 17th.  My staff have gone over this in detail, and we believe a near-total re-outfitting from the ground up is the only way to ensure compliance with regulation 247-B-59 Foxtrot 669.3.  General?”

“Colonel Pieflinger, bringing your regiment into compliance with 669.3 means we can’t just ignore the other units.  Oh well, I suppose you’ve made your case.  You’ve got until tomorrow to put together a presentation for the Secretary for me justifying a full divisional reequipment project.  Thank you, this meeting is adjourned.”

“General, you’re asking me to go to the President with this…this meshugge of a budget?  Do you understand what you’re proposing?  Do you?”

“Secretary Hasenpfeffer, I…”

“…you’re asking me to overturn decades of military budgeting policy for the purpose of transforming a single division of the United States Army into some sort of best-of-show special case?  Well forget it, I say!  This country’s military can’t afford primadonnas!  And then you tell me that without this, we will completely lose the fighting capacity of a key part of one of my best corps?”

“Well, Mr. Secretary, we don’t…I mean, you have to see that…”

“…Bupkis I have to see!  This means we’ll have to nearly double our projected force upgrade project budget.  And gevalt, you do realize that we outsourced our logistics to that Canadian outfit?  Do you?  They’re based in Edmonton, and you’re going to tell me you expect them to deliver five full army corps’ worth of equipment in mid-January?  Those putzes are probably all getting drunk at the hockey rink!  Get out!  Out of my office!  Oy veh, I don’t want to know how President Mufflebodkin is going to react to this…oy veh..”

“FIVE ARMY CORPS?  ALL THEIR EQUIPMENT?!? CONGRESS IS GOING TO EAT ME ALIVE!  GET OUT OF MY OFFICE YOU IDIOT!”

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, Madame Speaker, is why I respectfully ask you to approve the distinguished gentleman from Oklahama’s Defense by Unifying Military Buying Activity Special Services amendment to the mid-season interim armed forces budget.  We anticipate that the increased needs for funds can be compensated by over 20% through a reduction in subsidies for American hand-cranked washing machine manufacturers, seeing as how there is only one such plant in the United States, which neither employs any workers nor has produced a single unit since 1978, and to 80% by shifting logistics activity to our competitively priced Central American partners…”

“Welcome, Ambassador Putamadre, I hope you are well?  What can I do…”

“Mr. President, my government is very concerned about this increased American military transport activity in our neighboring country’s principal port.  You must realize that this sort of thing is a threat to our national sovereignty and commercial interests in the region….”

“Mira, Alfonso, los yanquis vendrán para este rincón para alla.  Es una oportunidád de golper estos gringos imperialistas de CIA…mira los camiónes, dispara!  Dispara!  AHORA, puta mierda!”

“Señor Presidente Mufflebodkin, no tengo, I, ah, assure you, er….”

“Ambassador Putamadre, I consider this baseless, unprovoked attack on a strategic resupply convoy at Culo Verde an act of aggression against the United States military.  The fact that the ambush occurred near your border with our allies, and bears all the hallmarks of the FNORK guerillas that YOU support, bears no explanation!”

“….”

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, Madame Speaker, is why I ask for your vote in responding to this cowardly act of aggression against a vital unit of the United States military in the midst of our most vulnerable period in years, while completely reorganizing our armed forces, by issuing an immediate authorization for the use of armed force..”

“Hey Sarge, what’s up?  Something cookin’?”

“That’s right guys, we’re shipping out to Central America, gonna go kick some ass, looks like.  Get your gear ready, fall-in at 0430.”

“Goddammit, Gummo, what’s your problem?  Get outta my bag!”

“Shit, Roy, I need some glue to fix this thing.  Ain’t that typical army?  Going to war, and I still ain’t got a decent pair of boots…

Alamut Corp. is so heavily compartmentalized and diversely structured that the legions of executives, lawyers, managers, accountants, project leaders, engineers, secretaries and janitors in the employ of its various subsidiaries-registered-over-shell-companies-through-holding-firms-via-proxy-participation-in-majority-stakes throughout dozens of countries on six continents are usually not even aware of the existence of some broader institution.

Via its presence in over 120 different market segments, Alamut enjoys horizontal and vertical synergies between subordinate establishments.  Within the syndicate, different companies belonging directly or indirectly to Alamut or its many divisions may compete viciously against each other in the same market space without ever having a clue that they are part of the same whole.  Its stakes in so many interwoven enterprises mean that Alamut enjoys, essentially, a vast set of hedges against itself.  It has survived wars, revolutions, depressions, natural disasters, cultural shifts, management trends and any other conceivable eventuality in human civilization’s recent evolution.

At times, without some grand master plan, Alamut’s tendrils have infiltrated churches, governments, schools.  Always discrete, the attainment and brokering of influence have never suffered from the overt drive for power or domination that gave meteoric rise to and brought down companies, churches and empires.  No employee of Alamut’s daughter companies is capable of seeing enough of the big picture behind the conglomerate to aspire to domination — promising, ambitious individuals rise through the ranks, are transferred, brought down, ensuring that the company exhibits an almost evolutionary, self-healing nature.

Alamut is truly too big to fail.  It is also, ironically, too big to succeed, at least by modern business’ beat-the-market-at-all-costs definition of success.  The roots of the group’s success lie in a combination of complete lack of aspiration — not by design, but by evolution.  Alamut Corporation is unassailable precisely because it does what it needs to keep pace with affairs, to plan for any possible event and to survive.  The fact that none of its employees have anything approaching an overview of its goals, strategies, scope or actions means that the entire corporation functions more as an organism than an organization.  It is neither good nor evil, but rather completely amoral and impersonal — an economic behavioral scientist’s dream.

And I believe they are hiring.  Don’t call them, though.   They’ll be in touch.