A New Kind of Monster, issue #8
The side-projects issue
This is the newsletter for the New Kind of Monster project - an ambitious and twisted project whose goal is to invent an entirely new kind of monster. In this issue, we have the third installment of the serialized sci-fi story Compartment, a story about a child who has lived her entire life inside an enormous and mysterious machine. And an update on current projects, including the sequel to Second Death.
If you’re a new subscriber, welcome to the newsletter! Please ingest a Cosmic Fudge flavored breakfast snack and enjoy the search for a new kind of monster…
Side Projects vs. Main Project - Update on the battle for my attention
Side Project: Rockin’ the Dad Bod
When: Summer, 2023. I had some free time.
What I should have been doing: Working on The Humanity Game - sequel to Second Death.
What I was actually doing: Drinking a beer and listening to the song Comfort Eagle by Cake. (No, wait - this version is better)
And then: I decided to start a quick side project. Just a day or two, I thought. It’ll be fast. I wanted to write a story that evoked the same vibe I got when listening to Comfort Eagle.
Eighteen months later: I suffered through a year-and-half of writer’s block and managed to perfect procrastination to the point where I could doom-scroll on three devices simultaneously.
But finally, as Fodo said: It’s done.
And now you can benefit from my suffering by reading (for free!) Rockin’ the Dad Bod.
Main Project: The Humanity Game
In If You’re Armed and at the Glenmont Metro, Please Shoot Me, we learned about the terrible consequences of overdosing on the powerful cognition-enhancing drug, Mentanovox.
My Daughter Wants to Eat a Woman who Shares her Birthday introduces us to Helen Kaizen. Helen is a brilliant physicist who just happens, through no fault of her own, to be the entity destined to end humanity.
We catch a glimpse of Helen’s demented experiments in My Patient Spent Eight Million Years Under a Bench at the Glenmont Metro (although, you gotta hand it to Helen - she did produce some publishable results!)
Second Death takes us straight to Hell (hey! You get quadruple hazard pay if you’re posted there) where we come face-to-face with the consequences of Helen’s research.
What is Helen after? What will happen to our military outpost on the far side of the River Styxx? Why was Helen born 90 minutes after her mother’s own birth?
All will be answered in The Humanity Game. The story will be released as a series for free reads and a full-length novel. (You’ll have to pay for the book!) Follow me here, or wherever else I have an account, for updates…
Compartment - part 3
Part 1 and part 2 appeared in previous issues.
Part 3
Father always had a dim view of Arin’s proposed unplanned inspections and nonconforming maintenance actions.
“Father, can I short-circuit the secondary feeds with the heat wrap again?”
“That was an accident. Something that shouldn’t have happened and will definitely… Not! Happen! Again!”
“Father, what if I vent the outgassed coolant into the hot side of the thermal controls?”
“Stop! For the sake of city and its servants, child, back away from the manifold!
And so on. Father never let her do anything fun or interesting. And Mister 5-8 Jenco never failed to agree with father, even when he did not hear Arin ask father the original question. Mother’s answer to Arin’s “can I” questions was usually “ask your father.” Although, sometimes mother would sob, wordlessly, when Arin asked permission for some strange experiment or stunt. Misses Jenco didn’t communicate at all, so there was no point in ever asking her for permission.
Her plan to follow the air was something she needed to do privately. Nobody else needed to know about it. In fact, the four people needed to not know about it, for their knowledge of Arin’s plan would certainly lead to an abrupt end to the scheme. She would have to be as invisible and silent as the air she intended to follow.
Her opportunity to follow the air came six shifts later. Father and mister 5-8 Jenco were consumed with a complex bit of maintenance in the maneuver mesh. Mother was curled in her hammock, crying, since halfway through the previous shift. Misses Jenco was in her usual seat at the Maintable, staring vacantly at the logbook shelves.
Arin approached the project as if it were a legitimate, planned maintenance process. The first step in any activity in the Compartment is to ready the tools and materials needed for the task. To consider the problems that might occur and ready any additional tools and materials that will be needed if things don’t go as planned.
Arin slipped past misses Jenco and stealthily ran across the pose gear catwalk. She quietly opened the drivers locker and plucked a twist driver, a full set of bits, and two extenders from the drawer. She gently closed the locker, looking up at the maneuver mesh stack to check that father and mister 5-8 Jenco were still occupied with their maintenance task. She put the equipment in her belt-box, and slipped over the edge of the catwalk. She gently lowered herself to the lower walkway, climbed over the railing and used the conduit run as a ladder to climb down to the feeds floor. She crawled across the feeds floor and reached under the bonding table to grab a medium gauge wire tool. She clipped two meters of medvolt wire from a patch spool, coiled it neatly and put it in her belt-box with the other tools.
With the plan’s first bit of subterfuge complete, she leaned over the bonding table guard and looked up at the mesh stack. Father and Mister 5-8 Jenco were barely visible through the jungle of conduit, pipes, walk plates, and the moving machinery of the mesh. The mesh gang coupler was still disconnected, which meant their work would continue for at least another two or three-thousand turns.
Arin slid under the bonding table guard and let gravity pull her body over and between the hydro-fluid expansion tanks. Now out of sight of the maneuver mesh and the two people who would be extremely critical of what she was about to do, she moved more freely, crawling and, where the space allowed it, walking to the stern of the Compartment.
The stern port outvent was installed above a bank of redundancy switches and directly in front of the fourth leg trochanter actuator. The massive actuator converted the rotary motion from a pose drive shaft into the jerky two-dimensional movement of the trochanter shaft itself. The person-sized assembly of heavy metal parts completed its complex rotary and translational movement every eight seconds. The exact motion and period depended on the inputs from the maneuver mesh. But since the mesh was on maintenance cycle, the linkage’s cyclic twisting and thrashing motion would remain steady and predictable.
Arin stared at the moving actuator, memorizing and internalizing the timing of its jerky, multi-axis movement. When she felt she had synched her mind to its cycle, she stepped forward, pressed herself against the outvent cover and let the actuator swing behind her. The air it pushed aside blew over her scalp, but the part itself didn’t touch her. “three, four, five, …” she counted the beats until the rear arm of the part would slice through space, a hand’s width from the outvent. She stepped backwards just in time, into the space recently vacated by the forward arm of the actuator. The rear arm spun in front of her, missing her nose by a millimeter or two. “six … seven … eight,” she leapt to the vent again as the forward arm swung into the spot she was standing and the rear arm rotated out of the way, promising to slice back downwards again in eight more beats.
Arin laughed, and jumped backwards and forwards again and again, dancing with the deadly trochanter actuator. She would have to continue this dance, without mistake or misstep, as she removed the outvent cover and bypassed the volume flow sensor inside.
Jump forward – use the twist drive to loosen an outvent cover screw … three … four … five – jump backwards to avoid death from the rear arm, wait for the rear arm to clear … six ... seven … eight … jump forward to avoid death from the front arm, and continue the work on the cover.
She deftly unscrewed the outvent cover five beats at a time, without dropping any of the screws or the cover itself. The next part would be trickier.
Immediately inside the outvent duct was a volume sensor that monitored air flow. If she entered the duct without first tricking the sensor, the partial blockage caused by her body would trigger an airflow warning. The unack light would flash on the Maintable, and her scheme would be discovered.
Still dancing with the deadly trochanter actuator, Arin unscrewed the head end of the flow sensor and added a length of her coil of medvolt wire to the terminal block. She connected the other end of the wire to the terminal on the sensor bus, and gently placed the flow sensor on the deck in front of the now uncovered outvent.
She jumped back to the safe zone in front of the actuator a split second too late. The massive metal part banged against her knuckle. She laughed – touching the moving parts was utterly forbidden by father. Then she looked upwards, through the maze of machinery, towards the roof of the compartment. Did her plan work? Or was her attempt to fool the sensor flawed in some way? If the unack light on the Maintable was flashing, how long would it take for Mother to sound an ack-clear? Would misses Jenco do anything if she saw the flashing light?
No sense worrying about something I can’t do anything about, she reasoned. She counted off the beats of the actuator and jumped into the outvent duct.