THE OUTLOOK OF MANWARING, DASH

Here's some flash fiction by me published in PALIMPSEST LITERARY JOURNAL. Read it here.

AFFLICTION INCLUDED by Steven T. Bramble

Take a look at my previous novel, AFFLICTION INCLUDED. You can buy it on Amazon here.

In the future, Stanly Borque numbers among a consolidated world population that has fallen victim to pandemic mental disease. Stanly works in a medicated haze as the head of an obscure corporate department - until a business trip overseas and a bizarre accident lands 214 billion dollars in his lap - catapulting him headfirst into a world of alarming excess. As civilization turns increasingly mad, so too does Stanly, and he slowly learns the truth about the affliction that has been tagged to him since birth.

"It's a rare and wonderful thing to chance upon a novelist this young already writing with this much precision, this much control, and having this much fun with it all. Steven T. Bramble is a writer to watch, and to be reading--not later-but NOW." - Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto and Demon Theory 

GRID CITY OVERLOAD - PREVIEW # 1

[Here's a preview of the first few pages of GRID CITY OVERLOAD / Enjoy.] 

- GERNEY -

Then I was lookin at this obviously terrorized copy of an A-F encyclopedia splayed across the flame-tiled floor behind the toilet, all broken-spined with aged grainy pages spilling from its middle like gore spilling from the belly of a gutted fish. Most of the pages were full of smudged type speckled with wet spots of urine fallout, but peeking at a sideways angle from beneath the top cover was a hint of a dual-colored map of the Americas, and just above that, bent and torn but still monstrously vivid, were the creeping whiskery legs of an arachnid fanning out over the continents.

            Nick Ibyoo’s shoes, wet and muddy from being outside in the snow, suffocated some of the loose pages while he straddled the toilet backwards, dividing up the gonine in the mutating light of the LED above the plastic tank. Nick sorta fuckin tempted me into grappling with the jet, and I agreed to embark with him for a couple reasons. First) wasn’t this what we were all here for? to erupt into euphorigenic lava flows, smiling while melting underneath the inching heat? I mean, weren’t we all supposed to be having one of those kinds of times? One of those good times? Fuck it—sure. And then second) there was the pesky realization that Ms. Yardblast, owner of Archelaos Chevrolet, had given me an ultimatum earlier in the day, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better goddamn well learn to use the DealEase platform by the end of the month lest I be kicked out into the job market on my incompetent ass.

This was not negotiable.

Then of course Nick Ibyoo had presented an appealing option at the end of the workday, much like he always did the reliable bastard, and so instead of being at home learning the software, I was in a stall at Zeal, underneath the sprawling high-def nebular formations and distant conglomerate galaxies of a ceiling screen, pulsing green and pink in time with the music.

The LED over the toilet shot chrome glow across the three lines of gonine Nick had insofar separated out. The images on the screen were of various people on the sides of freeways next to entrenched cars in what looked to be the middle of an absolutely dishearteningly bad snowstorm, uninterested traffic shooting by them, not helping. There was a short parade of similar scenarios, punctuated by hypothermic hands and noses, then finally a disturbing shot of a dead man collapsed in a snowdrift built up on the edge of a five-lane overpass, cars bulleting by, kicking up brown slush onto his corpse. The point of the ad was to buy snow tires, and I ended up having to ask Nick what he’d said because I’d been preoccupied with the commercial.

“I said she asked me to come to Aria’s place after you left.”

I nodded recognition. He was telling me a story about last weekend, something I hadn’t been present for since I got too drunk too early and had had to get driven back to my apartment by Ronstadt, who I was pretty sure had been too far on the scale of drunkenness to really be trustworthy himself.

Nick had to shout over the music. “Aria’s place is huge, by the way.”

I was starting to assume I wasn’t going to want to hear about what I’d missed out on, considering I had a thing for Aria. Though what can you really do? This is what you sign up for when you spend your whole life pretending nothing bothers you when in fact there’s hardly an instance in history that couldn’t inspire breakdown.

“This place was goddamn large, is what I mean,” he said, separating out another few lines, “and we were all hangin out in her kitchen drinking whatever this tequila stuff she owned was, some really crass little drink of fucked-upness that I’m determined to ask about so don’t let me forget. And after like thirty minutes me and Ronstadt start noticing that all the girls were disappearing somewhere. And suddenly all of em were gone.”

“How did it take you thirty minutes to notice that was happening?”

“What do you mean? We were all drunk and I was grappling like hell with the jet, which, I don’t know, I’m assuming you know a thing or two about that. It just happened. Gradually.”

“Still, being drunk is hardly an excuse for failing to notice that whole people were turning up missing. How many girls were there? Six, seven?”

“Look, are you gonna shut up and listen to this story or not?”

“No, seriously, how many? Because I can’t honestly comprehend how you and Ronstadt could not notice six or seven girls just up and—”

“Gerney. Jesus.”

“—just up and disappearing without, and I’m not Jesus—”

“Will you just shut your mouth and listen to the fuckin story?” This came out as a snarl. Anxiety zoomed into view, speech uncontrollable, the ceiling screen switching to a shot of four escalators crammed with people gushing upward, unending heads, welding sparks falling down on them (or up on them, from where I was standing), and it was only then I noticed my fingers were twitching so I stopped talking.

Going back to producing lines on the top of the toilet tank, he said, “So me and Ronstadt look at each other and we’re both like, ‘Where’d the girls go?’ So we start walkin around Aria’s apartment, y’know, searchin em out. And we come to this door that’s locked, it was down a hallway that branched off the TV room, and we can hear em in there doing something, so I start bangin on the door shouting, ‘Goddammit, ladies, this is Nick Ibyoo, the fleet manager I might remind you, of Archelaos Chevrolet, which is an establishment that happened to win some quite prestigious business awards from the Grid Chamber of Commerce only last year, and I demand you allow us entrance!’ But so after a few—oh, hold on a sec.”

He interrupted himself to take his phone from his pocket. Apparently he’d felt it buzz. He was tapping a message onto the screen, his spindly fingers reminding me of the torn picture of arachnid legs on the floor that now had a gritty wet footprint on it from his shoes. There was never any break in the music at Zeal, all songs running into one another and piling up in freeway-accident fashion, but I imagined I could identify the infinitesimal gap of half-silence that occurred when a switch was imminent, the flow of all audial currents taking sharp ballistic dives into a compressed pool before charging back up, only stronger this time. In the song now playing were injected soundbites of a speech made by Randy Mobyle, given only four days ago.

The ceiling screen caught aflame with a dense collection of comets. Once they dissipated there was a looming foreshortened globe, quickly rushing closer, bigger, becoming gargantuan with oscillating details of what looked to be a hostile multichromatic atmosphere slowly turning in its orbit, a projection appearing on the planet’s surface caused by a silver flying device hovering near its outer reaches. It was a close-up of a delicious burger, overstuffed with crisp lettuce and veggies. A price was listed, and in the final moments of the pan around the sandwich there was a small but brilliant sliver of sun rising over the peak of the planet that blinded me with realistic rays.

Randy Mobyle’s voice, aggrandized by slowly uplifting digital percussion and showers of sustained notes, declared, “It’s not the—not the—not the—not the time for inaction!” before the flow of the song picked up once again in full. A wave of goosebumps ran from the top of my neck to my lower back. It was true: it didn’t seem like the time for inaction at all.

The LED above the toilet transitioned to a live shot of us, Nick and I, in the stall. There must have been a camera installed into the screen because the view was mirror-like, showing us what the wall was seeing only backwards. The lines on the tank were clearly visible in the picture. I called to Nick over the music.

“What?”

I pointed to the LED, giving him a concerned look with my eyebrows.

“You got a problem?” He looked at himself in the LED while he said this.

“Should we get out of here? The gonine’s exposed.”

“Not an issue,” he stated, waving me off and returning to the message he was typing. He’d already deleted one attempt, rethinking his wording and tone, I guessed.

The planet that had appeared on the ceiling was now receding back into the void of high-def space from where it had come at the same rate it had approached. When it became just a speck in the distance there was a jarring, immediate rendering of an explosion, the whole ceiling sliced through with an icy fulmination that made me wince, even causing Nick to react though he wasn’t looking. Some of the faraway stars rearranged themselves to read BURGER KING in the company’s branded font.

“God that ceiling screen is badass,” Nick mentioned, still wrapped up with his phone and not having seen any of what happened.

The rising percussion returned again. “It’s not a question, we will—we will—we will—we will act!”

“Okay, sorry.” Nick returned the phone to his pocket. “Millie keeps asking how long we’re gonna be in here. I told her as long as it damn well takes.”

At the bottom of the LED was a display of the time, saying 9:15 pm.

“So anyway, me and Ronstadt are bangin on the door, givin em hell to make em open up for us, and—” He put down his ID, reaching into his pocket for the phone again. “Dammit! One more second, all right?” He began tapping out another message.

I took out my own phone. When it came alive the camera initiated, prompting: AUGMTD REALITY MODE? I pointed it at the toilet, a red autocursor honing in on a single line of gonine, outlining it perfectly, bringing up various statistics. The molecular structure of the substance was like a wheel with a flailing serpent attached, and I hovered my finger over it, causing the whole image to rotate, taking in its genius. The scan alerted me to extensive cutting. Mannitol, baking soda, and a small amount of meth. This was gonna be one of those nights where we’d go hopping on the back of every fifteen minute interval with carnal ferocity, tearing it apart, only to be laid out on the floor at the end, needing another dose.

I clicked away from AR mode and sent a message of my own, this one to Aria Forum, who was out in the main part of Zeal with Ronstadt and Millie and Quentin and Veronika Sine and whoever else was there. I asked if I could buy her a drink, like a tequila or an absinthe or basically anything with a motor in it, but I got no response and quickly tried to forget I’d messaged her at all. I managed to get a few seconds into looking for a tutorial on DealEase before Nick finished up his business, continuing his story without warning or transition.

“So we keep bangin on the door, and I swear to God you wouldn’t have believed what was goin on in there. I barely believe it.”

I gave him the so fucking tell me already then face.

“They were having an orgy. The girls. Can you believe that? And, yeah, your earlier estimate was right, there were like six or seven of em.”

“Who?”

“Millie, Aria, these two girls we met up with at Q/V—you weren’t there for that, though—Veronika, some others who I think Aria invited. I don’t know their names.”

“What did you and Ronstadt do?”

He tapped the side of his head in response, forming the sixth and final line on the toilet tank, his motions mimicked by the LED in front of him with frightening exactness, and who knew what bunker-dwelling employee might watch the recording later or even be watching at that precise moment? I didn’t pursue a concrete answer, feeling something inside me drop. There were contradictory impulses of wanting to extricate myself from Zeal, the stall, the whole situation, while also wanting to dive even deeper into the night and its details. The important thing, I knew, was to ignore whatever feeling I was experiencing entirely, remove it from the front of my head, place it in the back, let it rest there until it could come out during a moment of less stimulation, likely during work hours, when I could understand the full extent of its effect. For now, just ignore it.

Finishing the careful architecture of the final line and pocketing his ID, Nick said, “But I’ll tell you what the craziest thing is.”

I waited, taking a bill from my wallet, handing it to Nick.

“The craziest thing is I tried to mention it to Millie and Aria when I got here, and they just gave me blank stares. They don’t remember a single thing from what I can tell. Unless they’re faking it. Mutually agreed to strike it from the record or something. Bizarre, right?”

I agreed, knowing I wasn’t showing the proper interest given the magnitude of the information, but remaining calm was all I could do not to lash out and send Nick’s face into the edge of the toilet seat. Instead I was quite pleasant.

“How can we believe in—believe in—believe in—believe in anything anymore?” and then the ceiling screen showed a fast-forwarded elapse of a year in the universe, everything expanding slightly and seeming disproportionately intimidating.

Nick put the back of a hard hand into my chest. “This is a match night. We match each other, agreed?”

I said, “Just don’t go too nuts. I have stuff to do tomorrow.” I was thinking rather hopefully I might try to get started on DealEase.

“On the contrary, I’d advise you to do as much as you can because I’m planning on drinking a shitload tonight. Massive insufflation is just about the only thing standing between you and a splitting hangover tomorrow morning. Trust me.”

There were three lines for each of us: this was the beginning. Nick went first, then when he handed the bill to me I made sure to watch my reflection in the LED, the video me, bent over at an awkward angle, face round and obtrusive within the screen’s parameters, the gonine disappearing up the bottom of the bill in one efficient movement.

“Not great stuff,” he said with shallow disappointment.

“I checked it out on AR,” I let him know. “It’s cut.”

“Wonderful.” He divebombed his second line, erasing it off the toilet tank.

The bill was handed to me again and I asked him, “Listen, do you think you could teach me DealEase? Like not the whole program or anything, but maybe just the basics? Maybe just enough to show Tamara I’m making some progress?”

“Where the hell do you… [sniff] …think we are? We’re not at Archelaos right now, and that means I don’t talk about Archelaos. Now hurry up and finish this shit before those bastards out there lay siege to this stall.”

People had been pounding on the stall door ever since we’d gotten in there, which had been a long time ago. I finished my second line, handed off the bill. I watched the reflection of Nick snorting in the LED, and when he traversed the distance of the line his eyes became shifty, looking sideways in my direction, and without warning he quickly vacuumed up my final stripe of gonine.

“You goddamn thief!” He came back up sniffing hard and laughing, but I wasn’t joking around. I’d been threatened with termination at work, and my need to grapple the jet was quite a fucking sight bigger than Nick’s. He walked out of the stall, pushing past some of the bathroom-goers who’d been waiting for us to exit. In the periphery I saw a great stone carving of a humanoid figure on the ceiling screen following me out of the stall, probably notification that security had their eye on the situation.

“What’s your problem,” I seethed into his ear, watching him inhale water into his nose.

He hardly seemed to notice I was there, and when he finished at the automated sink he attempted to walk out of the bathroom without saying a word before I latched onto his shoulders with both hands and hurled him into the hand dryer near the door—there was a pronounced metallic squeak I could hear even over the music, which had switched again. I confronted him at close range, meaning sincerely to menace him. “I paid for half that shit, meaning I should probably be kicking your ass right about now.”

He laughed, the gonine visibly affecting him already, looking up toward the hovering figure. “Go ahead. Beat the everliving shit outta me. I fucking dare you. But do you even realize how fast your life would disintegrate? There’re ceiling screens in just about every bathroom in Grid. You’d be hauled off in”—he snapped—“milliseconds! You’d lose your job, I’d sue you for every last red cent, and you’d have a handful of months in prison to think about how satisfying it was to exact retribution over a single line of gonine. Wake up! You’re irrevocably plugged into the system right now, buddy. So just cut the bullshit.” He never once stopped smiling, his teeth uneven and not at all a pretty sight. I was shoved backwards and he walked out the door.

Adrenaline and gonine were galloping through my system, stripping whatever rust had formed on the insides of my veins because I was suddenly very limber and powerful, my hands forming fists and loosening at a healthy rate. I went to the sink as well, feeling a wet trail of analgesia snake its way down into the deep regions of my throat, the flame-tile glowing hotter. Once my heart rate returned to normal I left the bathroom and wound my way through the crowd, every surface a screen, a continuation of the astral images on the ceiling in the bathroom. Bodies became dark obstacles. From a top-down perspective I was sure we looked like a recording of densely-packed bacterium moving at random. Standing upright against the lurid red tint of the universe were the M16 space pillars, a triplet of provoked cobras, and once I moved within striking distance I was handed a glass of absinthe by Ronstadt, who had bought the first round and was proud of it. He leaned in and mentioned something about an inept bartender who couldn’t pour what he’d asked if her life depended on it, so sorry if my drink had the taste of concentrated ass. I accepted the apology. Sitting at a table were Aria and Veronika, subdued and bored, sipping similar glasses. Millie was speaking to Nick on the opposite side of the table, and before I looked away I saw her dart her tongue into his ear, his head retracting away. Quentin showed up with a couple friends from work. The whole tint of the universe framing us changed away from red, and now we stood in a diluted leafy-green radiance. Ronstadt was in the mood to talk, but first he motioned with his head to the girls, probably implying something about Nick’s orgy story. I nodded, trying to make it clear no words were necessary. He asked, “You see Mobyle’s speech today?”

“No, I was at work.”

“Me too, but our supervisor wanted to watch so we got a thirty minute break.”

“Was it good?”

“That guy flips me out with how much sense he makes. Some initiative about info organization. Information structuring. I don’t know. He mentioned the goddamn building, anyway.”

“The building?”

“The building site I’m working at. InfoZebra’s movin in there. It’s a scraper. You didn’t know that?”

“InfoZebra’s building a scraper in Grid?”

“Yeah, at like the almost exact center. Downtown.”

“Holy shit.”

“We’ve been workin underground for three or four weeks now. Thing’s comin along.”

“I had no idea.”

“So how’d you feel last Friday? When I dropped you off you were practically drooling in your own lap.” His teeth spread out green in the radiance.

“You can probably imagine,” I said.

“Missed a hell of a night, though. Too bad.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Well keep a stiff upper lip, guy. It’s lookin twacked again tonight.”

But he didn’t understand how to use that word, unless he was commenting on the number of people in Zeal, which actually was fairly twacked in not the strictest sense of the word, the doormen exercising no control over numbers, or maybe it was a comment on my own personal twacked-outness, entering into the familiar opening scenes of bad grappling, DealEase and Tamara Yardblast and Archelaos Chevrolet all fenestrated into a ragged sheet by the machine gun fire of adulterated gonine, collapsing into a specter of rising dust, ready to reassemble at a moment’s notice. A million separate layers, once stratified and thinly stacked, rushed together to form a solid chemical groove. I seemed to see Aria Forum and Nick Ibyoo on the grooves parallel to me, hair rippling behind them, our velocities unstable. At the last moment their grooves converged, mine shooting drastically upward toward a spot of chattering flaming light.