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    Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears
    Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears
    Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears

    By James Comins

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    About this ebook

    A free collection of contemporary and sf/fantasy short stories from author James Comins. In "The Soft Operative," a corporate saboteur kidnaps a genetically modified employee. In "Four Seasons of a Man," a Vietnam war vet's life is seen in four vignettes. In "Matt and Maggie," a punk couple live through a suicide attempt. Twenty stories and poems and poem-story-things.

    1. The Soft Operative
    A corporate saboteur kidnaps a genetically modified employee.
    2. The Silent Pasture
    Beauty and the beast sit in the garden of Eden.
    3. Maxwell's Demon
    Flash fiction for a New Scientist writing contest.
    4. Red Sox Yankees
    A city erupts in a riot.
    5. The Old Open Door
    A poem based on "St. James Infirmary."
    6. The Woman on the Other Side
    A story about Alzheimer's.
    7. Four Seasons of a Man: Spring
    8. Four Seasons of a Man: Summer
    9. Four Seasons of a Man: Autumn
    10. Four Seasons of a Man: Winter
    Vignettes of a Vietnam War veteran's life.
    11. A Guide to the Apocalypse, by Henrietta Stevensen, Age 46
    A satiric look at Internet conspiracy theorists and zombie-obsessed loons.
    12. Who's Afraid of the Big Beowulf?
    A prose poem mashup of Little Red Riding Hood and Beowulf.
    13. Moonwalk
    Three kids lost in the guts of the Space Elevator.
    14. The Sky Fell
    . . . and what happened after.
    15. Places
    Gesture drawings in words. Not quite a poem, not quite stories. Prosody.
    16. The Coffin Worms
    A poem of the horrible things that happen after you die.
    17. The Death of Piers Plowman, or, The Barley-Child
    A metaphor from The Angelus of Millet.
    18.The Singsonger
    No idea. I think it's funny, anyway.
    19. The Rise of Arch-Lord Evil
    The origin story of the big evil badguy from every video game and fantasy story.
    20. Matt and Maggie
    Two punk kids deal with a suicide attempt.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Comins
    Release dateFeb 17, 2012
    ISBN9781466162938
    Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears
    Author

    James Comins

    James Comins is the author of Fool School and Fool Askew, formerly available from Wayward Ink, "Notes Found Inside the Body of the Convict Clarence Skaggs," published in CrimeSpree Magazine #48, and other stories. He currently lives in New Orleans.

    Read more from James Comins

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      Book preview

      Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears - James Comins

      Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears

      Stories by James Comins

      Smashwords Edition

      Published by James Comins on Smashwords

      Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain

      and the Mountain Disappears

      Copyright 2012 James Comins

      Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

      Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

      This book is a collection of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead, places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

      If you enjoyed this book, please visit the author's Smashwords page at

      http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jamescomins

      Table of Contents

      The Soft Operative

      The Silent Pasture

      Maxwell's Demon

      Red Sox Yankees

      The Old Open Door

      The Woman on the Other Side

      Four Seasons of a Man: Spring

      Four Seasons of a Man: Summer

      Four Seasons of a Man: Autumn

      Four Seasons of a Man: Winter

      A Guide to the Apocalypse, by Henrietta Stevensen, Age 46

      Who's Afraid of the Big Beowulf?

      Moonwalk

      The Sky Fell

      Places

      The Coffin Worms

      The Death of Piers Plowman, or, The Barley-Child

      The Singsonger

      The Rise of Arch-Lord Evil

      Matt and Maggie

      About the Author

      The Soft Operative

      The burnt cinnamon smoke of the flares crept up to the rusting high-carbon ledge. Twinkling red LED eyes reflected off the aluminum towers and poles far below, clouded by the chemical burn of layered smog between the distant ground floor and the security platform. The grated catwalks were cantilevered over the deep, valleying gulfs of metal that formed the outlying harbors and aerospace ports of the conglomerate.

      It wasn't a factory--the word rang with thoughts of tiny, archaic leather conveyor belts and oblong spinning cogs and the cold, authentic authority of preprogrammed robots that Colombian automobile manufacturers still used to produce the little gas-powered scootermobiles that delivered illicit Vioxx and DDT to developing nations. The word for Martial Industrial wasn't plant either: a plant was a fabrication site for brightly colored chemicals and girders and wires thicker than the thighs in a Dutch whorehouse.

      The Martial Industries conglomerate, a rumpled patchwork sheet of corrugated aluminum draped over a concourse larger than Texas, was a core. A department store for the military-industrial complex, the core stretched for miles in any direction, including straight up and straight down. Many of its power stations were geothermal, huge turbines creaking away so far underground and in such perfect unison that a rumbling heart-murmur emanated through the steel beams and rebar up to the transit gondolas suspended a thousand feet above the roof, making the gondola cars hum and sing as they skittered through the moldy skies. At the same time, since the increasingly swampy atmosphere didn’t block out the sun yet, elevated sheets of photovoltaics and orbital-beam microwave plants hung above, the light refracting off each little brown cloud in the soggy sky.

      I looked down over the edge of the platform. To understand the depth of vision I was seeing, crouched over the guardrail of the security monitoring station, think about perspective. Normally, parallel lines appear to converge in the distance, although they never quite touch until they reach the horizon. From where I was huddled, looking down, all the aluminum seams stretching out below me faded to blue-gray long before they vanished in the smog. Grubby rivets clung to thin, flush aluminum panels, stretching down to checkerboard oblivion. I turned away. There was more than enough metal and clouds here to occupy me without diving into vertigo at the same time.

      Rappelling down metal siding is quick and painful--no way to slow yourself except by ramming your feet through a window and ducking inside, orangutan-style. The security AI was offline for an emergency patch job. It was a hack-and-slash response to a very delicate and subtle subterfuge I uploaded with one of Sarah's old security clearances. The antiquity of the clearance code was obvious and the bug was caught before it got close enough to smell the digital smog, but the sabotage virus clearly outlined a potential security breach that a real employee with a real clearance code might be able to take advantage of. No one in a position to do so actually would, of course--no one with the credentials to get a desk job at the core would possibly consider jeopardizing that status. There was just too much money and too few corporate jobs. But no corporation was going to tell its stockholders that it didn't try to stick all its fingers in the leaky dike just because there wasn't any water on the other side.

      An AI servo was strung together to patch the hole. It took their processors about three microseconds to write the code, but uploading to the entire intranet of a building the size of Texas takes up to three minutes, just enough time to stage a meat invasion. Security nowadays focuses on quantum software malfunctions, overloads, and q-jump sabotage, a way of using fishbowl computers to remotely alter data--sort of like tossing a solar flare through a memory bank. No one ever expects a computer attack in person, so with a few precautions you and your meat can just walk into the core and dick around with hardware.

      In a massive bank of legacy computer parts like the ones they use to store old information at the core, a computer part must, must, must be easily accessible if god forbid it should break. There are simply too many pieces in a corporate information retrieval system, and eventually a random power short makes the solder overheat and the plastic burn.

      Nowadays, any hunk of silicon with information in it is always backed up by at least one redundant hunk of silicon. They both say the same thing. If the first hunk of silicon goes up in smoke, you flip a little plastic toggle, pull the silicon out, and throw it away. Eventually another hunk of silicon exactly like it will take its place and copy the data. Easy.

      When sabotaging information-retrieval systems, synchronicity is the mother of invention. As long as every checksum matches up with everything else, no one bothers to review it. Even autism-AI code relays won't see the error. All you have to do is swap out all the hardware cabinets in a redundant array, swap in new ones, hit the on button, and wait for everything to purr into motion. It doesn't really matter what information the new drives have on them, because the chance that anyone will actually need the information is microscopic. The practical upshot is, you can steal a block of data from the core with impunity.

      I skittered along cheap, mottled carpeting down an interior corridor. High-traffic carpet muffles your footsteps, and the air conditioning mutes the long, tenuous echoes. The hallway had the dank, dim fluorescence of a place human beings could go if they wanted to but never did. No respectable bureaucrat would have an office out this far away from the center of the core, and soft operatives had their own clearly-marked stations. This was safe no-man's-land, the back alleys built by the janitors, for the janitors. Boxes of flickering blue striplights were set into the ceiling, nestled in between the Swiss cheese tiles. Spindly metal sprinklers added a festive flair. No one had bothered to pay for closed-circuit cameras out this far, so I was safe until some no-account employee showed up in person.

      It was as comfortable and welcoming as those segmented pipe-ramps you stumble onto when you disembark a commercial airline flight. Further and further down the irregularly sloping and angling passage, I crossed small patches of darkness where all the fluorescent lights had flickered out. I butted through the odd set of double fire doors with the little windows and long metal push-strips for doorknobs, the ones designed so wheelchair people can get through . . .

      I was looking for a professional-looking unmarked door, the sort that would lead to a tech center or engineering storeroom. There's always some useless junk in the backwashes of an office environment, and there's always that one room where all the storage space for all the computers is kept. I burst through another set of fire doors, started down the hall, and then realized what I'd gotten myself into.

      I know there're legacy silicon computers in the core. I've seen them. They're plentiful and expansive. But this corridor was not a security corridor for a legacy silicon computer array, although it had sure looked like one. It looked just like an array corridor. But it wasn't.

      This was a soft operative cel.

      The smell of putrefying tissue clung to my nose the moment I passed through the double doors. Airlocks. That's what they were. And the Formica ceiling tiles were vapor diffusers. Beneath my feet the carpet squelched with sick-smelling moisture, then ended with one of those brass carpet-trim strips. From here on out the floor was slick, damp corrugated steel, the sort that has diamond-shaped bumps so that you can keep your footing. Organic smells wafted out of the irregularly-structured doorways. The soft gray doorframes were curved, arching up to form a smooth loop, crusted with skin and pulsing with unseen, half-atrophied human capillaries. Just my luck to end up in the one spot in the core with no hard drives whatsoever. Unable to restrain my curiosity in the light of good sense, personal hygiene or time constraints, I peered in.

      Eyes looked up at me. Lots of them. All different shapes and sizes. Some were elongated, some were pinpoints, most were

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