Gigan

Once upon a time in the land of Gigan there lived a group of human people who spent most of their lives working on a great mechanical thing that was called Gigan. This mechanical thing called Gigan was merely a machine and thus completely different and separate from the land that the human people had been living on for thousands of years. And it was even more different and separate from the human people who worked on it every day of their lives, although most of these people had trouble seeing this distinction. And of those who could see the distinction they were sadly outnumbered. The proportion of people who had this ability to see grew worse and worse with each new generation of supposedly human people who went along with the ancient tradition and toiled away on Gigan.

But one day, an interesting thought occurred to one of the workers. It was a young man, one who felt he was somehow more than a little different than the other workers, and, well, he was just plain curious about something. He wondered more and more about the purpose of Gigan. And why they were all working on it, every single day of the week -- except on the traditional Wednesdays when they rest -- and for what seemed like all the remainder of their waking lives.

He wondered why because it seemed to him that there was something funny about Gigan. Something not quite right about it. Something wrong with how it was shaped, perhaps, or how it's insides were on the outside instead of the other way around. Something about the way it looked at you whenever you weren't looking back. Something about the way it just stood there, day after day, never moving or making any sound when in fact it was a mechanical thing and so it seemed only natural that it should be moving or making some kind of sound.

He looked at Gigan again directly and this was what he saw:

A huge silent mechanical structure shaped like a man. Like a giant male human with a stern sculpted face. It had a large and diverse assortment of complicated and highly specialized internal components. All kinds of unexplained miscellaneous machinery, hydraulics, pneumatics, support structure, struts, joints, braces, motors and fluid-carrying cables. Instead of hands it had claw-like metal grinders. And it stood in the center of a clearing in a large beautiful forest. Though it had no nameplate or sign to indicate its true name the workers had always referred to it as Gigan. The same name as their land.

Eventually he stopped looking and started thinking again instead.

He thought and thought and thought some more for several hours as was his favorite pastime but eventually he decided to stop thinking -- partly because this "stop thinking" activity was also a favorite pastime too.

So he stopped thinking and decided to decide something instead.

He decided that maybe he needed more data, more input from his fellow workers on what they thought about Gigan.

So he set aside his tools and proceeded to go around asking his fellow workers what they thought about Gigan. To the young man, it was not clear that they were thinking at all because his fellow workers came back with all kinds of seemingly reasonable but possibly highly irrational explanations, each of which boiled down to the following:

"Well we work for the sake of the brain. The brain that's in the box at the top of its head. Since it's in a box it has these virtual thoughts -- the kinds of thoughts that Gigan has when it thinks in a box."

"Yeah and this box is called a brainbox."

"And the brainbox needs something to hold it up. Plus you'd have to admit that it's good to have several stable and secure places to mount mechanical motors."

"Yeah, the motors that drive the pumps."

"The pumps which push the fluids through the cables and pipes."

"The cables and pipes carry the fluids to all the parts of its structure that need the fluids."

"Those parts benefit from the fluids because the fluids lubricate the parts and redistribute waste heat."

"All of this helps it to move … if it were to do so."

When our hero heard this last bit he smiled wide and interrupted them in his sudden excitement by saying, "So clearly it has been designed to move! But it never moves!" Though when he said these things he only smiled wide on the outside because deep down he suspected that it was going nowhere.

"It might move," responded the particular fellow worker who he had interrupted the moment before. "Just because it isn't now doesn't mean it won't or ever hasn't. That is irrelevant. That has nothing to do with mechanics or what we do."

"Then what is the purpose of Gigan?" asked our hero.

"Huh?"

He groaned. "What is the overall purpose of Gigan, as a whole?" he restated his question for the purpose of clarification. "If it won't move is its purpose the virtual thoughts?"

The fellow worker he addressed got a blank expression. Someone else nearby proceeded to giggle and laugh.

"You're nuts."

"I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about."

"I think that may be a nonsensical question. Like asking what the color yellow smells like."

"I agree with Gort. To put it another way, for example, in analogy, it is like wondering about what the hypothetical opposite of a hippopotamus would be."

"Tern's right. Tern is dead on it. You're being too metaphysical. I think it is more of a spiritual issue, best left for the wise men and holy documents to decide."

The conversation continued like this for several hours until eventually, our hero -- the curious young man with questions -- became too frustrated and decided to give up. He picked up his tools again and resumed his job working on Gigan, just like everybody else.

Time passed...

Our hero showed up to work one day as usual, grabbed his tools, got into position in his officially assigned working spot. A location near the end of one of Gigan's arms. Almost immediately he made a terrible discovery:

Blood.

Where no blood should ever be at all.

There was blood on the left hand of Gigan!

Stained red spots all over and in between it's enormous grinder claws.

He raised an alarm and a crowd gathered around him to try to see what he had seen. Not all of them could get close enough to see it but of those who did they agreed that it was blood but didn't know whose blood it was. No one, in fact, knew how it got there. But they didn't seem too concerned about it either.

In the background outside the crowd around the hero a woman's voice could be heard. She was calling out a loved one's name in a worried tone, calling, pleading, begging for signs of life, over and over and over again, each time with no response. And no help from anyone in the crowd except our hero. Because our hero jumped the moment he heard her and tried to reach her. He managed to worm his way out of the crowd around and between them, and looked everywhere around to try to find her and figure out who she was and who she was calling for and find out if there was a connection between the blood discovered and the person she had lost. But he could not find her. She was gone and would never be heard from again.

Time passed...

Our hero showed up to work again one day and looked for the missing woman again but, as usual, she was still gone. So he grabbed his tools and took up his assigned working position. But he couldn't get any work done because he saw something terrible almost right away. He found more blood. Between the grinders of Gigan. He started to worry again if there was something terribly wrong about Gigan, about the people's involvement with it. He talked about it a little bit with some of the others. But nobody else was as worried about it as he was. Even though another person had been reported missing that morning. They didn't know where this missing person went. And most of the people didn't even know where the missing person came from in the first place. Some think that he never truly existed so, therefore, it would be patently impossible for him to be missing now.

Time passed...

Our hero arrived to work one morning and headed straight to his usual position. He had a particularly bad feeling that morning, about something being terribly wrong with what he was doing each day. Not necessarily there be something terribly wrong with what everybody else was doing each day because, frankly, he felt increasingly that he couldn't relate to these other people. It was as if perhaps it was not actually wrong for them to be doing what they were doing. Perhaps, for them, it was even right. And so, his little mental argument with himself went, they never thought anything was wrong whenever something terribly wrong happened because it wasn't terribly wrong for them. Just for others. And other people, in their view, it seemed, may not even exist. And since, in their view, others may not exist, it may be ---

-- The young man's thoughts were interrupted when he got a sudden shocking sight. He saw fresh blood on the grinders of Gigan. It was shiny and wet and just beginning to dry.

For a moment he just stood there and thought and thought and tried to calm his mind. He thought and thought but then eventually he reached an important decision.

He dropped his tools. Ran off into the forest.

Nobody saw him leave. Nobody talked about his absence, they just continued with their work on the machine.

At night, after all the workers were comfortably sleeping and dreaming, something stirred in the machine. A grinding and thumping sound began to emanate from Gigan. It didn't wake the workers. The left foot lifted slowly up from the ground and then moved out in front and set back down again. The huge machine moved and shifted its weight forward onto this foot, then lifted up the other one and it became clear that it was starting to walk, although very slowly and with great momentum.

Gigan walked toward the forest.

The trees bent and twisted and shredded and some were shattered and destroyed by Gigan's passing. And as it disappeared from view through the branches and leaves, it could just be made out -- by anyone who might have been out walking in their sleep -- that its giant grinder claws were slowly opening and closing, opening and closing.

To any casual observer -- for example, perhaps to anyone who might have awakened momentarily from a dream -- it would have appeared that Gigan walked with firm purpose and a definite destination in mind. At least, that is, the kind of destination that could be in the virtual mind in the box at the top of its head.

But the young man ran and ran and with firm purpose too and a definite destination in mind and so, at least for a while -- and maybe even forever -- he became free.

City by the Sea

Vileen. City by the sea. Towers and temples and tunnels by the thousands. All inhabited by people counted in the millions. It was the capital of the principle planet of the system. It had a class A starport. It had it's own space navy and it's own army. It had the most notorious bars and brothels in ten parsecs. It was the kind of place you'd be sure to find the best bounty hunters and assassins. Captain Ganymo was looking exactly for these things. He hurried through the entrance gates and proceeded on his mission.

Space Cantina Interlude

A cantina aboard a trade station, somewhere in frontier space.

"...and that is why I will never drink with a Zargollian space pirate ever again. It's just too risky."
The man at the bar was speaking to a female companion.
He wore a silver spaceship pilot's suit, a little worn around the edges, but still bearing the insignia of the Galactic Federation.
She was beautiful with long black hair, had the noticeably pointed ears of a Rigellian, and wore the outfit of a Rigel royal house to boot.
"But you had a gun," she said. "You could have shot him. Ended it right there. Before it got out of hand."
"True," he replied. "That's very true. But what I didn't mention so far is that this Zargollian had about a dozen more of his friends sitting across the room. Though I'm confident I have a decent chance against one at a time, or maybe even a few, I'm not crazy enough to think I could survive those odds. So I decided to cut bait and high-tail it out of there. Back to the ship. We lit up, cleared free of the station and were comfortably ensconced back into hyperspace before the local police vettes could so much as launch."
"That's a great story."
"Yeah. It probably sounds better looking back now than how it felt at the time. But I guess it was kinda fun. And we lived to talk about it."

Post Zero with Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to have a place online to put some of my experiments with writing fiction. There will likely be a mix of short and long pieces. Single standalone stories or scenes, as well as parts of a continuing series that get revisited with new posts whenever I generate new material for them. It's up in the air at this point. As with anything in life what's here today may be gone tomorrow. So we'll see...

Mike