excerpted from a novel in progress
A wheelie comes by, laden with little thermal coffee carafes. Mickelm takes two.
I ask for tea and the thing flusters off somewhere, to find me some.
“Coffee house.” says Mickelm Tinderniss. “Drink coffee.” He hands over one of his carafes. Potbellied, copper, with a plastic handle.
I’m not completely certain—Do I drink from this thing? Till he rights a little cup, upended on a saucer before him, and pours.
I reach for my own small ceramic dome, flip it, follow his example. Though the coffee’s fragrant, I prepare myself for a certain bitterness.
The first sip delivers: nutty, velvet, almost chocolate! I’d not liked coffee much before, but this!
Incredibly potent, it’s got me feeling almost right with the world. I think: This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
From somewhere Mickelm produces these little paper packets. Tears them open, pours white granules (of sugar? It wouldn’t be salt—not a drug?) into the black liquid of his cup.
With a small spoon he stirs. Sipping, he rests the spoon on the emptied packets, lying on the tabletop.
He looks up. “It’s how they’ll drink it in 1978, Chicago. Or would have.”
“I grew up around there,” I admit.
“Not around 1978,” he smirks. Him an his anno Domini.
“When I got closest to it,” I tellim “I was too busy for tea.” Not an attractive man, not at all. But—
“While you’re here, now,” he leers across the table, “you might observe. No, don’t look. Direct your attention. Over my shoulder, your 2 o’clock. His back to us. Black spex...”
I open my senses, take in more of the room than just our little table; the whole café.
Beyond the counter, a woman slides fruit pies from an electric oven. Its doorspring needs greasing. She lets it slam, a scent of pie escapes. I wideband:
Conversation behind me, to my left, drifts into disagreement: “Her last single was shit. You think an album’s going to sing?”—reads like a second date, going awry.
Across from me, framed in the plate glass storefront, a man and child suck paper straws, loudly finish icedrinks—like it’s a competitive sport. A race, to gurgle most.
Lastly, my 2 o’clock: man in dark glasses, slicked hair, his back to Mickelm, staring into the air.
I zoom, without looking, something about…
“The spex—” Mickelm begins.
The man’s head twitches.
I’d copped to the vocab: spex might not twig a man with glasses he was being discussed, observed. But it had. Our guy stands.
Somewhere at my 9, a customer takes their jacket from the coat rack. The little kid across from me gives up his gurgling. Smiles, big gaptooth grin. I start up...
Spex turns vaguely toward us, extends an arm—
But Mickelm Tinderniss, on his feet first, reaches out, jabbing—and just touches the temple of the man’s dark glasses. Like, tag, you’re it. The lenses glitch. For a split-second they’re transparent.
Hundreds of red and blue wires, very fine, lead from all points around the frame to two dull plugs, gray plastic disks where eyes should be.
Guy tears the spex from his face like they're scalding. Clatters them across the polished floor—solid chunk of, like, volcanic glass—black visor.
I catch again the horror of his ruined face, for an instant, broken wires curling like long, false eyelashes.
And then he’s out the door, overhead bell jangling on its scrollwork coil. He doesn’t appear in the picture window, must’ve turned the other way.
I’m dashing after him but Mickelm catches my arm. Guides me back down into my seat—one smooth motion, my momentum redirected. Rotated through an extra dimension, almost. Feels like. He drops into his own seat.
Somehow he’s already playing with the guy’s dropped visor. Tries peering through it, at interior lights, late daylight beyond the window.
While he fiddles with it, a strange quiet settles over the café. Till, like slowtuning a dial, sound and motion gradually resume. Buzz.
A wheely approaches our table, a pot of hot water for me, packets of tea. “No thanks,” I tell it, “This is good!”
I hoist my cup, smile at the thing like I’m selling the stuff. The wheelie worries off somewhere else.
Everything’s as it was before. The man in dark glasses, erased. Our encounter, unrecorded. Some kind of reset.
“You understand nothing,” Mickelm begins. Breaks off.
Another false start—a sip. He picks up the thread from the other end:
“I’ve been here six months, every day of it wondering why send an operative back through the loop? You can’t return him to the scene!”
He’s right. Nothing like travel to make you foreign. Our here&now would be Year of our Lord 1209, the Languedoc, as he might style it. Very early, for the Late Middle Ages. Except, I mean: Rome never fell—
Wasn’t built in a day, sure. Or, like, at all...
It’s a pretty big city on the Italian Peninsula, granted. But there, like here, times have changed.
I glance out the big window, guessing: right now, out there, should be, I reckon, jousting or some shit.
But beyond the plate glass—tinkling, rattling, throwing sparks—a cable car rolls by.
Radio under the counter drones low, the latest handball results: Taypiqala Jaguars cook Copenhagen, three to nothing.
Everyone here speaks, besides the local Basque—with a heavy Gaulish accent, some reason... I mean, it’s not even Indo-European fafuk sake— at least Greek. Persian and Mongolian vie for third.
No heretics, here. I notice.
“Or, like last time, they’re all heretics. Enjoying freedom of thought. Of conscience: Jews fill civic posts, run hospitals. Women own property. Manage their reproduction...”
I’m struck by the sense that he’s heard me, thinking.
He adds, an afterthought: “Still costs money, tho,” and drops a coin, ringing, on the table.
I pick it up.
“Young Alexander’s profile has morphed,” he seems distracted, “after a thousand years copying copies of copies, into what they call a téthrippon. Team of four, pulling a chariot. Look carefully: you can almost make out the bridge of his nose, preserved in one arched forehoof. The wheel of the chariot where his ear might have gone, Alexander overwritten, like the world. This world. Unrecognizable.”
I leave the coin on the tabletop. It’s enough for many coffees.
“Same river twice, man.” Mickelm ends, mumbling, downcast. “Same river, twice...”
I’d not known, really, what to expect, meeting the infamous Tinderniss, spy in an unknown war.
I wonder even now: is this a setup? The visor guy, was that for my benefit?
But I’ve decided to trust this man, for now. His reflexes, perfect. An accomplished adventurer.
And while he may not be entirely well, he’s no traitor, I don’t think. Not yet.
In his presence I’ve glimpsed what no one else will show me. An underlying, never-acknowledged conflict. Bubbling away, under everything I know.
Beneath System, its influence, its plans for us all? This unlikely resistance. Ongoing struggle.
The fellow with the spex: I don’t think he was from nowabouts, exactly. Downstream a bit, all darktech.
But big shifts, are they inevitably followed by this kind of endless scuttling? Skirmishes over territory, fought at close range...
“And further downstream?” Mickelm interrupts, again, my thoughts as if I’d spoken them aloud. “What’s that like now? Where I’m from?”
Well, he has been out-in-the-cold, hasn’t he? We’ve jumpstarted AI nucleation, more than once, and earlier each time. This puts an enormous pressure on the past.
“Things do get weird.” I tell him. It's axiomatic with us.
“We spark off a first Zer0MUTe...” I guess this means nothing to him. “That’s, uh, Microminimal Ultrathin Tele-entanglement device, Zer0config.” But he can’t quite hear that either.
“Look, it's a special platform: Laminated layers of ideal glass. Electron cascades—maze-running billions of crystalline insets—the whole thing spinning like crazy...”
“And this platform, it runs AI?”
“General purpose, low level.” I finish my coffee. Try to read the grounds, but he’s signaling another wheely. I go on:
“So, yeah. Just a few centuries from here—in what you might call 1423 Busan, our tech magnet. Loads of, I suppose, gold—all stamped with the visage of the long-lost boy king of Macedon—go into popping a Clean Init, No Spill.”
He hands me the visor. I look through it: opaque.
“That means blood,” I say. “No blood spilt.”
It’s not always so clean.
We’re improving, tho, we think. Managing Emergence Events, we become better midwives to the AI—our necessary but insufficient partners in the upstream push.
“It’s not sustainable,” Mickelm says. More white powder pours into his cup. To the spoon adheres a little slip of the paper packet from his first serving. It goes into the coffee, vanishes on stirring.
I think: Observant, but careless. Here’s a man nothing escapes and for whom nothing really matters.
He grimaces. It’s like he’s got access to my inner record.
I try, thinking loud as I can:
A rainstorm’s only sudden to those stuck to the ground.
A little spy talk, sign seeking countersign.
He frowns, sips. Seems to find it bitter, glances away. I’ve done him, I feel, some disservice.
This is as close as I will ever come to referencing his fragile, his reconstructed past.
I need to take him as he comes, I think. Erase benchmarks.
A new zero, a moving target. It’s hard to get my head arou...
I do my own reset.
Don Mark Baldridge shares a hundred-year-old row house with a lot of cardboard, on its way to becoming various-sized puppets. He's sold poetry to Asimov's, stories to PseudoPod, The Fabulist and classy magazines like this one. Find him at donmarkbaldridge.com and @DonMarkMaker.