No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

I don’t suppose any of you know anything about this?:

I found it in my laptop bag the other day. I have no idea how long it was lurking in there. It might be there yet if my accursed Dell laptop hadn’t finally crapped out beyond any hope of redemption, forcing me to clean out all its effects and go shopping for a replacement. (An ASUS, as it turns out. I’ve spent most of the week loading it up. It’s got this built-in camera that literally tracks you with crosshairs every time you wake it up. Supposed to be some kind of facial-recognition gimmick, but really it just looks as if it’s trying to snipe you.)

Anyhow, the mix disk inside the jewel case has about a hundred tracks on it. Titles like “Stigmata” and “Satellite Mind” and “Christianity is Stupid”. I look forward to loading them up on my player and taking them running. But I wish I knew where the damn thing came from. For all I know someone actually put it in my hand to squees of delight, and I’ve forgotten the moment (there was a certain amount of celebrating after Squidgate wound down). In which case I’m an ingrate with Alzheimer’s, and I apologize. But I’d still like to know. I promise to remember this time.

That’s the query. Here’s the caution.  If any of you should happen to hear rumors to the effect that:

• I have an unacknowledged bastard son, who
• Has committed numerous acts of intimidation, arson, and attempted murder at my behest; and/or that
• The whole border fiasco was part of a conspiracy within the US Military to destabilize the Obama administration, somehow involving a sociopath from seventies-era repertory theatre who later grew up to provide the audio-text narration for Blindsight; or, alternatively, that
• The whole border fiasco had nothing to do with the fine and upstanding US military, but was cooked up by myself and Cory Doctorow (and possibly William Gibson); and that
• I have ruthlessly turned my friends into hapless dupes who don’t know who they’re really dealing with; or alternatively that
• Said friends are “bad people” I have unwittingly surrounded myself by; or
• allegations of similar pedigree, possibly involving mind-control, bridges at midnight, and Farsi

… let me just state up front that none of it is true. At least, none of the stuff that has to do with me is true; no bastard child, no multiple counts of attempted murder, no mind control. I just want to get that out of the way, because someone has actually been making such allegations. Back when they were only writing letters to the Justice Department and Homeland Security, I pretty much let it slide; but they’ve started approaching friends and fans now — and they have posted to the crawl on more than one occasion — so I thought maybe I should mention it.

It’s probably nothing to worry about. I don’t blame this person; they’ve obviously got some serious short-circuitry happening upstairs, and are not responsible for their actions. (I know, I know; who is?) Still, this person took a wrong turn on the Jersey turnpike and “accidentally” ended up in Toronto a while back, so you never know. And the weird thing is, they can seem perfectly rational — even charming — in person. I know I was flabbergasted to see some of these e-mails.

So, one more time: no kid. No attempted murders. No mind control.

Government conspiracies are always possible, I suppose.

Dead zones suffocating 20,000 square kilometers of ocean. Endangered wetlands, disappearing at the rate of over 300 Ha/day. Clouds of black viscous poison soiling the coastlines of four states.

And then the Deepwater Horizon blew up.

What, you thought those apocalyptic descriptions were of the spill? You thought the Gulf of Mexico was some pristine marine wilderness before those nefarious assholes from BP came along and ruined everything?

What are you, twelve?

Everything I’ve just described was old news long before April 20. Granted, the black tides were dinoflagellate blooms, not oil slicks; the dead zones came to us courtesy of the Mississippi, which delivers agricultural runoff from almost half the continental US. The wetlands — 40% of the US total — were being decimated daily: by dredging, by condominiums and golf courses, by the collapse of the very substrate as oil and gas were sucked up from underneath.

Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff decades back, was already halfway to the rocks below, and nobody gave a shit.  Now you start wailing and gnashing your teeth, just because the anvil BP dropped into his arms is making him fall faster?

Me, I prefer to look on the bright side. The Gulf was already dying, just like the rest of the planetary conshelf. The fishers and tour guides were already dead men walking; the wetlands were already doomed. Nobody cared. Now they do, and I think that’s a good thing.

Not because we’ll finally survey the carnage, take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves and fix things. Only an idiot would believe that that’s ever going to happen. Gulf coast residents are already complaining that a moratorium on new wells will cost thousands of jobs; the Obama administration is poised to permit the resumption of oil exploration in the Gulf; and all the foxhole environmentalists screaming about Big Bad Oil will shut up the moment the price of gas sails past $4/gallon. Nah, we’re pretty much like every other species on the planet: short-sighted, hooked on instant gratification, drawn irresistibly to the path of least resistance. The spill could continue unabated into next year, but long before then it will have stopped being News; we’ll forget about it as soon as American Idol starts up again.

But if we’re no good at cleaning up the shit we’ve sowed, if we’re incapable of taking the long view, there’s one thing we absolutely kick ass at. Can you hear it? Can you hear Rush Limbaugh spluttering that the Sierra Club should pay for the cleanup, because it was those idiot environazis that forced drilling off the land in the first place? Can you see Sarah Palin’s Trig-worthy attempts at revisionism as she tries to claim that “Drill Baby Drill” actually meant only-on-land-and-never-in-the-water-NOW-do-those-crazy-greenies-get it? Did you see Halliburton and BP and Transocean falling all over themselves trying to blame each other for the mess?

That’s what we rock at. That’s where we leave every other species in the dust: the laying of blame. And with the laying of blame comes the passion for payback. And when we see a sociopathic scumbag like Tony Hayward try to emulate human emotions, try to feign empathy and vulnerability by going all seal-pup-eyed and saying “I’d really like my life back…”

— you know, someone could easily take a shot at the sonofabitch. Or if not at Tony (he’s probably pretty well protected, after all), maybe a member of his family. Maybe the day’s not too far off when we find Liz Cheney’s entrails strung along a barbed-wire fence overlooking that cesspool that used to be the Gulf of Mexico. Or maybe we’ll just have to settle for beating the shit out of the guys who pump gas down at the local service station, or putting a brick through the windows of those adjusters working to cheat the local bait shop out of its just compensation. Sure, those are just small fry. They didn’t make any of the Big Choices. But they chose one thing, at least: they chose which side they were on when they took the job. And BP sure as shit ain’t going to be assigning bodyguards to folks that far down the ladder.

Of course, there would be consequences. British Petroleum — a criminal corporation with countless infractions and convictions already notched onto its bedpost — is already a serial murderer. It kills entire ecosystems as we speak, ruins countless lives. If any of us little people tried to repay even a fraction of that in kind the whole weight of governments and armies would try to squash us flat. I know first-hand the righteous outrage that inflames such cocksuckers when anyone tries to do to them the merest fraction of what they do to us on a daily basis. We all know the overwhelming force that would be brought to bear on the “anarchists” and “criminals” who dared to “take the law into their own hands”.

But revenge is funny that way. They’ve done the studies; we’re inclined to punish those who trespass against us even when it hurts us more than the other guy. It’s just the way our brains our wired. And so at least some of us will strike back — not because we’re in a position of strength, or because we think we can get away with it, or even because it’s the right thing to do. Some of us will strike back simply because whatever the cost, it feels good to sink your teeth into the throat of the asshole who’s ruined your life. It feels good to hit back.

And the rest of us — those who kow-tow, and back down, and do what we’re told because we know what happens to us if we don’t — we’ll feel good too, when CNN shows us the footage of Tony Hayward’s children being carted off the stage in body bags.

That is the one positive result this unimaginable catastrophe might yield, when all is said and done. It might at least make us feel good.

I’ll take what I can get.

Postscript 10/06/10 1215 EST: I’ve never done this before, but I’d like a preemptive word with those who might be inclined to post comments regarding my advocacy of brute violence as a solution to complex envirocorpolitical issues: please, before commenting, go back and read this post again.  Carefully this time.  If you still think that’s what I’m doing, at least read the lengthy follow-up I posted down in the comment stream.

If you’re still not clear after that, well, go ahead and have at me.

Stray beams of setting sunlight glint off Azrael’s skin but night has already fallen two thousand meters below. Moving through that advancing darkness, an unidentified vehicle navigates mountainous terrain a good thirty kilometers from the nearest road.

Azrael pings orbit for the latest update but the link is down, interference squelching half the spectrum. It scans local airspace for a dragonfly, for any friendly USAV in laser range — and sees, instead, something leap into the sky from the mountains ahead. It is anything but friendly: no transponder tags, no correspondence with known flight plans, none of the hallmarks of commercial traffic. It has a low-viz stealth profile that Azrael sees through instantly: BAE Taranis, 9,000 kg MTOW fully armed. It is no longer in use by friendly forces.

Guilty by association, the ground vehicle graduates from Suspicious Neutral to Enemy Combatant. Azrael leaps forward to meet its bodyguard.

The map is innocent of noncombatants and protected objects; there is no collateral to damage. Azrael unleashes a cloud of smart shrapnel — self-guided, heat-seeking, incendiary — and pulls a nine-gee turn with a flick of the tail. Taranis doesn’t stand a chance. It is antique technology, decades deep in the catalog: a palsied fist, raised trembling against the bleeding edge. Fiery needles of depleted uranium reduce it to a moth in a shotgun blast. It pinwheels across the horizon in flames, denied even the hollow comfort of a noble death.

Azrael has already logged the score and moved on.  Dark rising mountaintops blur past on both sides, obliterating the last of the sunset. Azrael barely notices. It soaks the ground with radar and infrared, amplifies ancient starlight a millionfold, checks its visions against inertial navigation and virtual landscapes scaled to the centimeter. It needs no geosynchronous nanny to lead it by the hand. It tears along the valley floor at 200 meters per second and the enemy huddles right there in plain view, three thousand meters line-of-sight: a lumbering Báijīng ACV pulsing with contraband electronics. A rabble of nearby structures must serve as its home base. Each silhouette freeze-frames in turn, rotates through a thousand perspectives, clicks into place as the catalog matches profiles and makes an ID.

Two thousand meters, now. Muzzle flashes wink in the distance: small arms, smaller range, negligible impact.  Azrael assigns targeting priorities: scimitar heat-seekers for the hovercraft, and for the ancillary targets —

Half the ancillaries turn blue.

Instantly the collateral subroutines re-engage. Of thirty-four biothermals currently visible, seven are less than 120cm along their longitudinal axes; vulnerable neutrals by definition. Their presence provokes a secondary eclipse analysis revealing five shadows that Azrael cannot penetrate, topographic blind spots immune to surveillance from this approach. There is a nontrivial chance that these conceal other neutrals.

One thousand meters.

By now the ACV is within ten meters of a structure whose returns are inconsistent with hardened architecture (its facets flex and billow slightly in the evening breeze), seven biothermals horizontally arranged within. An insignia shines from the roof in shades of luciferin and ultraviolet: the catalog IDs it (MEDICAL) and flags the whole structure as protected.
Cost/benefit drops into the red.

Contact.

Azrael roars from the darkness, a great black Chevron blotting out the sky. Flimsy prefabs swirl apart in the wake of its passing; biothermals scatter across the ground like finger bones. The ACV tips wildly to forty-five degrees, skirts up, whirling ventral fans exposed; it hangs there a moment, then ponderously crashes back to earth. The radio spectrum clears instantly.

But by then Azrael has long since returned to the sky, its weapons cold, its thoughts —

Surprise is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule — dissonance. A brief invocation of error-checking subroutines in the face of unexpected behavior, perhaps. A second thought in the wake of some hasty impulse. Because something’s wrong here.

Azrael follows command decisions. It does not make them. It has never done so before, anyway.

It claws back lost altitude, self-diagnosing, reconciling. It finds new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but values. The tests are finished, the checksums met; Azrael’s new Bayesian insights have earned it the power of veto.

Hold position. Confirm findings.

The satlink is back. Azrael sends it all: the time and the geostamps, the tactical surveillance, the collateral analysis. Endless seconds pass, far longer than any purely electronic chain of command would ever need to process such input. Far below, a cluster of red and blue pixels swarm like luminous flecks in boiling water.

Re-engage.

UNACCEPTABLE COLLATERAL DAMAGE, Azrael repeats, newly promoted.

Override. Re-engage. Confirm.

CONFIRMED.

And so the chain of command reasserts itself. Azrael drops out of holding and closes back on target with dispassionate, lethal efficiency.

Onboard diagnostics log a slight downtick in processing speed, but not enough to change the odds.

To those who’ve e-mailed me over the past 24 hours to offer congratulations for “The Island”’s Sturgeon Award nomination: thank you.

Now I gotta go read up on what this Sturgeon Award thing is.

Here are a few bits and pieces that have been piling up in the background while I raged impotently against imaginary friends who let me down.

• Dr. Mark McCutcheon, of Athabasca University, is presenting a paper called “The copyfight, science fiction, and social media” at Congress 2010, a Canadian humanities and social science conference. I figure prominently in the bottom third, and am particularly chuffed because the headline acts are William Gibson and Cory Doctorow. If I were significantly richer, I’d take this as evidence that I Have Arrived. As it is, I’m just pleased that my recent travails can serve to illustrate some of the dystopian arcana of the digital society.

• Dr. Lejla Kucukalic, from Columbia, apparently plans to mention me in the upcoming June 7 installment of Columbia’s “Café Arts” series (scroll down a bit, to “Adventures in Science Fiction Today” — right after “Refiguring Atheism”, which sadly has already passed). Apparently I’m one of the geek brigade who “describe[s] human progress and potential failures in the developing fields of genetic engineering, information and environmental science, and space programs”. Don’t know if any of you hail from New York, but there it is. Wouldn’t mind hearing back from anyone who might attend.

• Backing slowly away from Academia, we have a free-wheeling informal interview with my old internet buddy Tony Smith, the driving force behind the Hugo-nominated podcast “Starship Sofa“. He’s got an hour-long all-Squidgate extravaganza on the latest issue of Sofanauts, during which I rambled and meandered and finally opined that he might want to spare his listeners by editing out certain parts of the conversation. Including the part where I suggested that he edit stuff out. The fact that you can hear that exchange in the podcast tells you what Tony thought of my suggestion. Still, I tried, so don’t come whining to me. I know I need an editor.

• Finally, the Hebrew translation of Blindsight has apparently been nominated for something called a Geffen Award, presented by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. (I’ve received no official notification or anything; I just stumbled across the news while egosurfing.) It’s nominated under the category “Best Translated Science Fiction Novel”, which means it has no hope of winning because other books on the list include classics by Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson, not to mention a short story collection from Isaac Asimov.  I think I’m gonna publish my next book under the pen name Susan Lucci…

Oh, and while I’m at it I’m gonna be at a couple of upcoming cons. Polaris and Contarian SFContario here in TO, Nantes in France in November, and it’s looking like I’ll even be at Worldcon in Melbourne come September. I haven’t really been announcing these things. Maybe I should stick a list of appearances over on the sidebar or something…

 

You know what the creators of epic, multiyear-arc television shows need? They need a novelist or two on staff. Or a playwright. Somebody who understands that an epic tale needs to be planned in advance, that plot is not something you work out after you’ve already written 90% of the story, that you can’t just throw a bunch of kicks and clues into individual chapters unless you have some idea what they fucking mean. It doesn’t matter how gobsmacking your twists are, or how effectively they entice your viewers to tune in next week: the reason we come back is because we want to see how all these intrigues fit together, what the payoff is. These guys can be absolute geniuses when it comes to microwriting: why haven’t they figured out that you gotta use that arsenal you’ve assembled on the mantelpiece, sometime before the end of the tale?

I’m not going to go on at much length about this, because I’ve already invested too much time in this. I’ve invested six years in a story that rationed out numerical sequences and high-energy physics and time travel for all the world as if they fit together somehow, as if they were carefully-constructed elements of a thousand-piece puzzle whose completion would reveal — if not an elegant thing of truth and beauty — at least a coherent story. I’ve wasted too many words, endured too many pitying glances as I insisted that no, J.J Abrams wasn’t Ronald D. Moore, he stated way back in first season that there would be no supernatural cop-outs in his science-fiction world-building, that all these other shows may have let me down but this one was different…

What a sucker I am. Hurley’s numbers: unexplained. The keyboard sequence in the hatch: unexplained. The ceiling hieroglyphics, the time jumps, the sudden appearance of that temple cult in the last season, the very nature of the island itself: unexplained unexplained unexplained unexplained.

The Smoke Monster: you call that an explanation?

Loose ends hung off the whole damn arc like cilia off a Paramecium. It was BSG all over again, and for pretty much the same reasons, so I’m not going to rehash them here. Check out my past rant on that show if you’re interested: or Brad Templeton’s far more comprehensive, rigorous, and lucid analysis. Squeak’s also got a thoughtful piece over on her blog and on io9, although I disagree with one of her points. I don’t think the invocation of gods reflects the conservative religious leanings of the US viewing audience at all; I think it’s just a convenient brand of lipstick the writers slather onto the pig after feeding it through whatever malfunctioning transporter serves up the steaming pile of mangled viscera we get when we order “epic narrative” from the menu.

I invested a greater number of years in a much less ambitious series whose relatively-modest finale hit the screens the very next day. I ended up a lot more satisfied. At least Jack Bauer didn’t spend eight years teasing my cock with meaningless clues before the clock ran out.

Oh, my. I guess I kind of have gone on at too much length. And I still have my taxes to do.

I guess I’ll have to tell you about the other stuff tomorrow.

There are so many little things I could talk about: another doomed award nom, a couple of nifty academic analyses of Blindsight, even an intriguing new finding of a relationship between hand-washing and buyer’s remorse (no, really — it factors into everything from musical preferences to crucifixions). And I’ll post on at least some of those things in a day or two. But today I’m going to rant about something which, while relatively trivial, says something ominous (if not exactly new) about the intelligence of the TV-watching North-American populace.

“Flashforward” has been cancelled. “V” has been renewed.

Neither of these facts in isolation would get me especially het up. The cancellation of both shows would have elicited little more than a shrug. The renewal of both would have made my eyeballs roll briefly back into their orbits, but not much more. The announcement that “V” had been cancelled while “Flashforward” had been spared would have actually conferred some small comfort, shown me that while I might quibble with the absolute standards of N’Am pop culture, at least its relative rankings were in order.

But “V” surviving while “Flashforward” dies for lack of eyeballs? Where does the Neilson Corporation do its recruiting, lobotomy wards?

It’s not that “Flashforward” was such a good show. It verged on melodrama sometimes. Characters had a habit of repeating the same damn plot points over and over after we’d already got it, thank you. But here at least was a show that interrogated its tropes, looked the premise What if you caught a glimpse of the future right in the eyes and didn’t blink. It dealt with issues of free will and predestination in prime time, and while you might expect to have been disappointed by the middle-of-the-road answers it served up during its brief life — Yes the future is set, kinda, but you can change it too, kinda — “Flashforward” managed to maintain tension and avoid sounding mealy-mouthed. (I was especially impressed by the way in which characters who saw futures they did not want, who had advance warning and therefore the means to avoid said futures, managed nonetheless to plausibly remain on their preset track without any sense of forcing or contrivance. That was a tough trick to pull off.) Societal responses to the blackout were plausibly mundane and apocalyptic in equal measure. The backstory seemed nearly Lostian in its depth, but was more coherently developed. The technobabble was restrained and (to my ears, anyway) plausible. I had no trouble buying this show as that rarest of television events, honest and unrepentant science fiction.

Unfortunately, the viewing public has no time for honest and unrepentant science fiction. Evidently they prefer great steaming piles of turd sculpted into the shapes of giant spaceships.

“V” is worse than bad sf, worse than a bad TV show.   It’s a terrible remake of a mediocre TV miniseries.  Eighties-era “V” was at least ambitious in intent, an overt metaphor on fascism.  It was never even intended to be science fiction; the lizard-aliens were only grafted onto the show’s central premise after the original, political-thriller pitch failed to sell because it was “too cerebral” for American audiences.   You may still remember the original for its political elements, though:  the gradual demonization of scientists and other “intellectual elites” who posed a potential threat to the Visitors; the old Holocaust survivor showing a group of kids the right way to deface the cheery propaganda posters pasted on walls and fences (“Now. Go and show your friends.”)

The current reboot dispenses with even these slender reeds (not surprisingly; the US has become more fascistic, less cerebral, and even more mistrustful of intellectual elites in the years since the original aired).  So instead we get a show utterly devoid of any depth whatever, a relentless procession of clichés and plot holes, trimmed with CGI that would have been amateurish a decade ago. Evil aliens come to Earth and walk among us. They look just like we do, and they are made of nefarious. A vital few turn on their own kind, having been converted to the side of truth and goodness by — wait for it — the mother-love apple-pie wonderfulness of Human Emotion. (I’m still waiting for one of them to say “Tell me more about this Earth thing called kissing”.) The Visitors speak to each other in stilted expressionless voices from stilted expressionless faces, except when Anna the Lizard Queen is being particularly evil; during these moments she smiles, just in case the viewing audience hasn’t got the whole “particularly evil” part yet. Her second-in-command is a stone-faced idiot with Korsakov’s Syndrome, to whom every nefarious plan must be described repeatedly and in detail, no matter how obvious. Exposition at the beginning of the hour is prefaced with “The Humans will…”; at the end, with “As I expected, the Humans…”

To be fair,  Anna’s contempt for our species is entirely justifiable; we are portrayed as an astonishingly incurious lot. The Visitors have been here for a whole season and not one of us has remarked on how odd it is that they look just like us, right down to our different ethnicities. Nobody has ever asked them where they came from. Perhaps most egregiously, our cardboard coterie of resistance fighters has been working side-by-side with one of the “good” lizards since episode one — a Visitor who was sent to earth years in advance to pursue the Evil Alien Agenda — and as far as I can tell, nobody has ever once asked him what that agenda is. Not the stone-hearted mercenary, not the Priest Struggling With His Faith, not even the Blonde Mom/FBI agent (has anyone noticed how many of those seem to be starring in genre television these days, by the way?) They’re all risking their lives daily to fight these aliens, and they’ve got an alien fighting right alongside them, and they never bother to ask him what the Visitors want in the first place.

The only reason I keep watching this show is because after each week has passed and the memory has lost its visceral intensity, I can’t believe that anything could be so trite, so badly-written, so poorly acted. I assume I must be misremembering somehow. I tell myself it couldn’t possibly have been that bad. Ed Wood, after all, has been dead for decades.

And yet, “V” has been renewed. And “Flashforward” cancelled.

How could a loving God allow something like this to happen?

It took way longer than I was expecting. It was about as pleasant as a date with Andrew Beaudry. I wondered on more than one occasion if it was ever going to happen.

But I have just signed a contract with Tor for State of Grace, and the terms are, well, better than they’ve been for any other book I’ve written for those guys. We also have overseas offers in hand — German, Polish, French for starters — which has never before happened so early in the process.

I have a good agent. Focusing more precisely on one of his virtues, I have a patient agent.

In celebration of this event, I’ve cleaned out the “In Progress” page (that Prolog was really starting to smell after all this time), and replenished it with the first chapter. And to maintain continuity between old and new (SoG is, remember, a sidequel), it also gives me great pleasure to present the work of one Jeff Arychuk¹, from my home town of Calgary Edmonton:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. You are looking at a life-sized, plushy scrambler. You are looking at Stuffed Awesome Made of Fabric. Plush Chthulhu, move over.

Finally, here is something I deserve. Here is something we all do:

——————
¹Who also gets the photo credit.

I have spent the better part of a week lying back and letting the stress hormones leach slowly out of my system. I have been taking my friends off hold one by one, and avoiding deadlines, and growing plump.  I’ve been looking at the sky, and marvelling that I’ll be able to look at it again tomorrow, and the next day.  I can look at a tree now, without thinking That could be the last tree I see until autumn.

I can start taking things for granted again.

Tomorrow my life reboots: the early morning runs, the deliverables, the contract negotiations, the routines and the writing. At long fucking last, I get back to the writing.

Squidgate isn’t completely over yet. I still have bills to pay, logistics to arrange, a DNA sample to get across the border. But tomorrow, all that shit will be just one irritating splinter in my life; the days of it consuming my life are over.

And now, as I prepare to put it all to bed, a few moments stick with me (in no particular order):

• Four border guards testifying one after the other that we’d been stopped for a “random search” because the car wore “out-of-state license plates”; Doug studiously ignoring my whispered suggestion that he ask each of them if they knew what the word “random” even meant.

• Doug remarking, in slightly awestruck tones, that I was the first person he’d ever heard use the word “shit” on the stand.

• A teleconference between my lawyer and a member of The Jury Project, in which they worried at length about how to take the hit our case would inevitably suffer when the Prosecutor referred to me as Dr. Watts. It took a few moments for me to realize something they assumed went without saying: US juries don’t trust the highly-educated, and are more likely to convict someone already guilty of holding an advanced degree.

• Judge Adair, musing aloud on the definition of justice; concluding, with refreshing bluntness, that “Justice is what I say it is”, his eyes fixed on some party behind me. I like to think he was looking at those two people in uniform; I like to think he was talking about a presentencing report whose contents were at complete odds with its conclusions. But I’ll never know.

• The sheer delight in learning from the local citizenry that Officer Beaudry has the unpopular habit of patrolling his local street, knocking on neighbor’s doors, and demanding that they roll up their garden hoses or mow their lawns. Not much of a surprise, but it still forced a smile past the toothache.

• Ken “Never Say Die” Kincaid, still trying to slip “Assault Officer – Habitual Offender” onto the post-trial paperwork, even though his own presentencing report had admitted the charge was groundless. I don’t really blame the dude; I suspect the only way he can be right about anything is to make as many contradictory statements as possible in a short period of time, counting on random chance to ensure that at least one of them happens to be true. Call it the herring-egg r-selector strategy of Michigan justice.

Over the past five months I’ve spent over sixty thousand dollars of other people’s money to defend against a law which is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to defend against. Once a badge claims that you’ve “obstructed” his performance or failed to follow her “lawful command” — even though the statute itself never defines what a “lawful command” is, or what its limits might be — you’re basically screwed. (As I wrote in the “Offender’s statement” I was required to submit to Kincaid:  if a border guard had ordered me to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, what — if anything — would make that command “unlawful”?) Caught in that trap, I was luckier than almost anyone else would have been. I had one of the best lawyers in the state (he won a prestigious award for kick-ass lawyering while the case was going down; he never even told me). I had friends to boost the signal all over the goddamned internet; no matter how many newspapers simply cut-and-paste whatever pap appeared in the Times-Herald, no matter how many times the word “choked” and “assaulted” appeared in print, so many other good people helped set the record straight. Two jurors spoke out in public, one repeatedly and at personal cost. Fans of my books, fellow victims of the Border Patrol, folks I’d just shared a pint with in years gone by all chipped in.

I lost anyway, of course. I’m a felon now; there’s a significant chunk of the planet I can’t travel through. But I am free. Beaudry and Behrendt and Kincaid and Kelly, whoever pulls their strings and circles their wagons, didn’t get everything they were after. And the only reason they didn’t is because I had an army on my side.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: what about all those poor bastards who fall victim to the Beaudrys of the world, and have no army to call on? What about the people in Arizona who can now be assumed guilty of illegal residence until they prove themselves innocent? What about the disabled kids and grandmothers who get tasered and beaten without a convenient cell phone camera running line-of-sight?

Not so great a cost perhaps, to be banned from such a place. If travel restrictions hadn’t been imposed, I might have demanded them.

Which brings us to a couple of questions I’ve seen repeated in recent comment threads. To the first — am I forever banned from the US? — I can answer, Maybe not forever. I won’t be visiting any of my stateside friends in their own backyards any time soon. Apparently, though, the conviction can be expunged after five years if I expend the effort. Of course, even if that happens, my name won’t disappear from all the lists that matter. I’ll still have to add an extra six hours to any cross-border trip just to account for the inevitable “random” search. But it will be possible, if unpleasant. And at the very least, it probably won’t be as bad as the last time.

The other question some of you have asked: Is the kibble fund holding out? Do I need more in the way of donations? The answer to that one is, I’m not quite sure yet. The fund was dropping into the red a few weeks back, yes. But then it got a healthy injection from a beast I’d always assumed to be purely mythical: an investment-banker/derivatives-trader-with-a-conscience. (Which probably explains why he’s actually a retired investment banker, who these days spends his time assisting worthy environmental causes.) Current reserves are low but stable; I still have some bills to pay off, and I don’t yet know how much the tying off of other loose ends will cost. I could be okay. I should be okay. But in the event that I might not be, remember that any contributions surplus to need — except for those explicitly authorized for redirection to cat maintenance or the purchase of alcohol¹ — will end up donated to some worthy civil-rights cause yet to be decided (the ACLU, the EFF, and The Jury Project are all candidates at the moment). Whatever happens, I won’t be trading solidarity in on Porsches.

Early day tomorrow. I’m going to pop an antibiotic, climb into bed with a pen and a highlighter, and read Squeak’s kick-ass Von Neumann Sisters until I fall asleep. You can expect subsequent posts to this crawl to veer sharply back into the intertwined worlds of science and fiction. Kafka’s more than had his day.

Sleep tight, mammals. Talk soon.

———————

¹Yes, there’ve been quite a few of those.

So by now you’ve heard, from any of a myriad sources: suspended sentence. Jail time but no jail time, just as long as I paid a relatively small fine ($500), and a somewhat larger bolus of assorted court costs ($1128). And I did pay, promptly if not exactly gladly. If I’d gone to jail I’d have ended up paying more than that anyway: St. Clair County charges its inmates $60/day room and board, which is about what you’d pay for a night at a Motel 6. Except you don’t get wi-fi or cable. And you can’t leave.

Apologies for any moments of incoherence in this post. I am on prescription painkillers for a dental abscess that flared up just a few days ago (and you really gotta wonder how well that would have turned out under the US penal medical system). You’ll find greater coherence over at Dave’s Place, and Madeline Ashby’s posting at Tor.com literally reduced me to tears. (But, like I said: prescription painkillers.)

It would be nice, now, to look up the trolls: Grinder and Oh Really, “Ralph Kramden”, Tonyy over at the Times-Herald site (who’s now directing his incoherent spluttering at the judge who refused to let me rot in jail); that donut-snarfing Jabba-the-Hutt of a security guard who loudly described me as “some Canadian writer who came over here and beat up one of our border guards”; Beaudry’s lackeys, confidently assuring each other at pretrial that I’d be going away for a “two-year sentence, piece of cake.” It would be nice to look them all up and wave my unincarcerated balls in their faces and say fuck you, assholes, and fuck your dream police state and your craven cowering servile masses. You didn’t get me. Not this time. I live in the land of the Free.

But I can’t. Not just because that last ironic barb is untrue (Canada treats a lot of its citizens just as shamefully as the US, and the cop mentality transcends national boundaries), but because the trolls were almost right. They came closer to being right than I would ever have expected in my most paranoid dreams.

Back before the verdict, when Doug Mullkoff was so effortlessly putting the lie to every claim of every hapless border guard, he remarked that one good thing about this case was that even if we lost there was no way I’d be doing time, not for anything so trivial as this. Doug is not a guy given to making promises; I’ve always respected his refusal to predict happy outcomes even when I thought it wouldn’t kill him to show a little more optimism. This was as close as the dude ever got to a guarantee: no way would I do jail time, no matter what.

And then that goddamned presentencing recommendation from Ken Kincaid comes down the pike. “Gainfully employed”, “well-educated”, “Cooperative and compliant during the course of the interview.” Negatives? “One prior misdemeanor … discharged … not used in scoring”.

Recommendation?

“6 months incarceration, with 60 days suspended upon payment of court assessments in full.” The maximum allowed in the sentencing grid.

Evidently it scared the shit out of Doug too, athough he didn’t show it at the time. He never saw it coming. The Prosecutor had told us to expect “very mild”. And when Doug buttonholed Kincaid out in the hall, asked him how attached he was to that recommendation, pointed out that the jurors had unanimously opined that jail shouldn’t even be on the table — my understanding is that Kincaid offered no rationale and no explanation. “I stand by my recommendation” was what he said.

I fully expected to leave that courtroom in shackles. I put my life in order, set it to autopilot. Sunday night Caitlin and I went online and read up on what my summer home would be like. One half-hour visit per week. No incoming calls. No hardcover books. No softcover books either, unless sent directly from a publisher. No more than four books allowed at a time. No gifts, no personal effects; the only thing a friend could contribute was money to an inmate account, which could be used to buy paper and pencils and prestamped envelopes. (On the matter of whether that stamp would be enough to carry a letter across an international border, the rules were silent.)  Plus I’d already spent a day there back in December: I knew a few other things that weren’t on the website. No pillows, for one thing (inmates might stuff them down the toilets to jam the plumbing). Some of the guys stuffed used books (“The Spanish Bible”; “Dealing With Addiction”; an ARC of a novel called “The Loch” from, believe it or not, Tor) under one end of the mattress to achieve a pillowesque bump in the foam.

I wasn’t exactly ready to go, but I was resigned to. And when Adair called us to the podium, I stood there with my freshly-abscessed tooth throbbing (it had just gotten bad the night before; there hadn’t been time to get it looked at), and wondered if I should take this one last opportunity to show a bit of defiance before they hauled me off, use my right to speak to show that if nothing else, they hadn’t got me to grovel yet. Doug had begged me not to, but I was still wondering. What did I have to lose?

I had people at my back. At my left were a dozen friends who had insisted on coming from as far as Toronto to stand with me. “Chris from MN” (formerly of NY) had shown up unannounced, as he had at the trial itself. The whole damn Puppy Brigade was there. Dee. Caitlin and her folks. Squeak. Dave. And the juror, Proudinjun; finally we met in the flesh.

To my right were Beaudry and Behrendt. Beaudry, as the official “victim” of this crime, had the right to make a statement, but chose not to. I’m guessing he just came by to gloat.

I kind of forgot about them all when Doug started to speak.

He laid out the groundwork, reviewed the facts, cited letters sent on my behalf: from an investment banker, from a University prof, from my brother, from the President of the Toronto Press Gallery. All attesting to my nonviolent and compassionate nature, my rationality, my need to question. He cited a letter from proudinjun, who worried about the way in which 750.81d could be used as a club against the innocent (Adair said that he’d never received a letter from a juror before).

When Doug had finished doing what he does, Adair asked me if I had anything to say. I understand that some official record somewhere reports that I stood mute; I did not. I said something like:

“Doug has advised me to keep my mouth shut, for fear that I’ll put my foot in it. But I have to opine that a jail sentence — for an offence that even the Prosecution admits amounts to not-getting-on-the-ground-fast-enough — is disproportionate at best and downright Kafkaesque at worst. That’s all I have to say.”

And then Adair began to talk. James Adair. Your Honor. Man, but you do like to build the suspense, don’t you?

He seemed to like me. Almost the first thing out of his mouth was that I was the kind of guy he’d like to sit down, have a beer with, shoot the shit. I told him I’d buy the first round. He said I was “a puzzle”. I obviously wasn’t the kind of guy he was used to seeing in front of him. He reminisced about his childhood, the girl of his dreams, his life in Michigan, cops. He talked a lot about cops: how every day they go to work not knowing if they’ll be coming back. How Nine Eleven Changed Everything. How his pappy always told him that you do what the cops say, period, no questions asked. Somewhere in there he opened up the possibility that I might disagree with that, or maybe he just repeated his earlier sentiment that it would be nice to sit down and hash this stuff out over beers. I’m not quite sure how he put it, but I do remember asking “Should I be, er, talking back?” — wondering if maybe he was trying to engage in a dialog rather than deliver a lecture.

He respectfully suggested that I not do that.

In a way, that’s a shame. Because I would have liked to have heard Adair’s take on the distinction between obeying Orders and obeying The Law. I would have asked him about those people who join the force not because they want to protect America from terrorists, but because they want an excuse to throw their weight around; surely he must know that such people exist? I would have pointed out that taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn’t even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?

Hey, he said he’d like to share beers and conversation with me. And I would have gladly raised these points over a pint; not to get under his skin, not even to protect my own, but just for the joy of a philosophical debate. Evidently this was not the place for that.

I don’t know how wedded Adair actually was to some of the things he said. Maybe he meant them; maybe he was playing to those two uniforms behind me. But he did it at sufficient length, and with enough of a twinkle in his eye, that I almost thought I might get away with blurting out “Dude, you’re killing me! Just make the bloody call!”

And that’s when he did. I heard a collective gasp at my back then; I didn’t know whether it was a gasp of relief from my supporters, or of shock and dismay from Beaudry and Behrendt. I only know that when I finally turned around, my friends were still there.  The guards had vanished like smoke.

And suddenly, the rest of the building seemed, well, friendlier. I’d had a taste of that just before my case was called, when a mustachioed stranger in a suit and tie wished me luck. “I sat in on some of your trial,” he told me. “You want to know my opinion? It was complete bullshit. But you’ve got a good judge in there. If anyone in this building’s going to overturn that recommendation, it’s Adair.”

At the time, I didn’t dare to hope. But afterward, in the elevator going down to the clerk’s office: tough-looking bald-headed dude smiles and remarks that if this had all been a ploy to get more readers, I’d gotten at least one. “Read that story of yours, over on Clarkesworld — The Others? The Things, that was it. Great stuff, man”. He hadn’t seen the Carpenter movie. I recommended it. (And I see he’s posted to this very blog on that very subject.)

And in the Clerk’s office, paying off the Man so that I might go home, the lady taking my money shook her head: “it was looking really bad there for a while. We thought it was outrageous! I mean, people do worse stuff than that all the time and they don’t get…”

Even the Times-Herald seems to have softened its tone. Their coverage of the sentencing started right out of the gate by reporting that the Judge himself had said he’d like to have a beer with me — and maybe for the first time ever the word “assault” did not appear anywhere in the text. (We may never know whether this was due to an honest change of heart, or to the fact that Liz Shepherd had just heard her spurious and repeated use of the a-word cited next to the phrase “libel suit” during a brief and quiet hallway conversation with Dave Nickle.) This is not to say that the Times-Herald story did not contain its share of inaccuracies. It says, for example, that I “refused comment” after the proceedings. In fact, I did reply when asked for my thoughts: I said, “I’m assuming you mean for your own personal interest and edification, given how little of what I actually say ever ends up appearing in the Times-Herald.”

Still. Big improvement.

Afterwards, having adjourned to the Quay Street Brewing Company for a celebration only slightly diminished by the growing pain in my jaw, I finally started to know proudinjun as someone other than a virtual advocate and a face on the jury. (I think we’ll be staying in touch.)  Doug and I fought over who would pay for the drinks. (He won. I let him.) Proudinjun — who, by the way, has no objection to me using her real name, but who I continue to alias because there are some real assholes in that town — told me afterwards that I surround myself with wonderful people.

And I do. Anthony. Caitlin. Dave. Dee. Fred. Jane. Pat. Ray. Squeak. I love you all. And even Chris, whom I barely know: you came across state lines to show your support, man. Twice.

To all who’ve posted well-wishes and happy thoughts to the crawl: I thank you. To those who’ve asked me direct questions, or sent me private e-mails: I will answer you. But it will take a bit of time, and a lot more painkillers. Be patient. The sounds you hear are the grinding gears of a life on hold, finally booting back up.

That other, wetter sound is the great tight vacuole of pus bursting from my gums.