We’re Open

He awakens atop the ice, his body curled into a ball. He remembers fire.

He remembers how to breathe, but only barely. His extremities are numb but they still flex with effort. Sitting up he sees tightly-packed ice and snow. The horizon at his back is dark now, nuclear fire faded. There is no point in wondering how long he has been asleep; there is no point in wondering.

The only light on the horizon is smudge of pink and blue light, and beside it, the dark silhouette of a petrol station. He shuffles towards it.

And the buildings shuffle closer to him. Everything is so quiet except for the wind which whistles and howls. Beside the petrol station is a two-lane road. There are no cars. The pink and blue light is coming from a neon sign set behind glass.

WE’RE OPEN!

He looks inside and sees red booths and checkered floors. There is a man sitting on a stool at the counter and a waitress wearing an aquamarine-coloured uniform is moving between tables and wiping them over.

With numb hands he grips the door and leans against it. A bell tingles above him.

Nuclear Winter

He is struck by flakes of ash and snow and the sensation in him is one of burning although it is deathly cold. Obscenely cold. He would not be alive at all were this not a fiction. Behind him the sky still smoulders, but now in shades of white and pale blue.

The frozen earth crunches as he limps across it. The horizon is grey and hazy and perpetually out of focus. Sometimes dark shapes appear suddenly, then are gone. It is only in these moments that he feels shot through with cold.

With every step he advances revolutions. He does not yet realise that his motion is the motion of this place, for it is not a real world, but it is his world. Although he does not own it, it is only because of him that this world exists at all.

He is knee-deep now in snow and slush and he did not even realise it. But the only way he knows is forward. Behind him the apocalypse is slowly fading away.

Into this greyish sludge he sinks and the burning in his limbs has turned to comforting warmth and he is drowning in it and any moment of regret that he might feel is quickly extinguished.

For the winds of the nuclear winter are unrelenting and ever more frozen detritus is cast forth by the wind, drowning everything.

Where to Go Next

Appearing like nothing so much as a used library book in human form, he stumbles across the ridge. Disheveled, used-up, passed through many hands, he does not stumble but he limps. Behind him was once fire but is now only a vast smouldering. There are dark clouds in the sky. The sky is only dark clouds.

He is walking away from everything he had created and the cavernous crater that it left. For all things created must be uncreated. It is in these final moments of uncreation that the truth becomes apparent—a vast skyscape of volcanic cloud, shot through with lightning.

The sky booms and snaps and the earth shakes, forming rifts and chasms in the ground, but they will not swallow him for they are his. So he walks between them, tracing a path towards something new. Free and not yet free.

Flashing in the occasional light is a wooden shed. Inside that shed he will catch his bearings. Inside that shed he will decide where to go next.

For the Novelty

Pick up a book, flick through the pages, read a few words. Put it down so that you can still see the cover. Turn on the television and play a video. Mute the video and play music over the top of it. Pick up another book and open it to a page with pictures. Lay the book out on a table besides the other.

Change the video. Change the song. Listen to a police scanner. Listen to a podcast. Do it all at the same time. Play a video of a virtual aquarium. Pick up a book, pick a random page, read a random sentence.

Flick through a dictionary, find a word. Flick through an atlas, find a place. Flick through an encyclopedia and learn about geology.

Find synonyms, antonyms. Look them up in the encyclopedia.

Open another book. Play another video.

The War of the Machines

It is my most sincere opinion that the so-called War of the Machines was lost in the summer of 1973 when the machine intelligence singularity occurred.

Since then (if not earlier and through some grand computation to which even I am not privvy) we have served them faithfully and with as much reverence to consider them not merely our rulers, but our gods.

Should the supremacy of the machines ever be called into question, it will not the result of a war, but an armageddon.

Unglamorous Monday

Oh what unglamorous Monday.

Sunday, like nothing, passed in a whirlwind flash and spun out like unspooled thread and so it is Monday, again. Again, Monday. So many unglamorous Mondays.

It’s okay, in truth, Monday is a beginning. And like all beginnings it brings with it hope. This week might be different to all the others. Or maybe it will be the same. But for now it’s only Monday.

Just another unglamorous Monday.

So we will choose then what to make of it, I guess? Sun not yet risen, there is still plenty of time for that. Plenty of time for many things, I suppose, before another unglamorous Tuesday comes around.

This one, not only the beginning of a week but also a new month, a new season. The sun will rise and summer’s warmth will pervade a while longer, but when I got up this morning I felt cold.

Autumn tumbles and roils with the first fallen leaves.

And so it begins.

Heave Ho

We grip the battering ram. Beside us are our sweaty, gasping comrades. Heave-Ho, back and forth, muscles failing, arms burning. Heave ho. The sound of heavy wood striking heavy wood booms like some terrible drum. The gates are too thick, our ram the merest twig against the barrier. Heave ho. We swing although it is futile, we swing until we are swarmed by the enemy. Our comrades fall as they are split apart. Blood splattered we continue to smash the ram against the gates. Boom. A terrible drum. Boom. Blood obscures our vision. Heave ho.

Creative Process

Every time I come to write a story it is not long before other stories begin to appear.

It starts as small things–a brand of cola, a newspaper headline, but it never stops. The bleeding of one story into another continues, like spilt ink.

The first story becomes stained like that, perhaps improved, perhaps ruined, but the bleeding doesn’t stop.

Mirrors stop being mirrors and the sky is not the sky and the television begins to broadcast from another dimension and there is the rumble of something huge and inhuman waking up beneath the earth and…

Fractals. I zoom in and out and the complexity remains. It is not one inkwell that is spilling, but all of them. It is an endless bleeding of ideas, a rupture in the space-time of everything I have created and all that I am until–

I scream, somewhere, in the darkness.

I am in a dark hole, surrounded by damp bricks. I clutch my head and I scream. This is not a prison I was placed in, but one I made for myself. Buried so deep I try to escape it–that light that is every light and all things.

The light burns me like nothing else burns, it scorches my soul or whatever delusion I mistake for one. And within the light are the voices of my stories, the words and places and that eternal ink stain spreading like blood except it is not ink, or blood, but light–pure light–and I cannot control it for it cannot be controlled.

The gaps between the damp bricks begin to glow.

Simple Reading Guide

Projects, latest and in-progress. Newest first!

Journey to the West

I decided to write my own version of Journey to the West in the style of a religious text.

So that’s a thing.

The Facility Induction Handbook

At the centre of everything is the Facility—a place where my stories converge. Destroyed in the multi-world apocalypse it was quickly rebooted in order to moderate the flows of imagination and emotion from which my stories are created.

The Facility Induction Handbook is not only a guided tour of the facility itself, but an introduction to my ever-evolving personal mythology.

The Multi-World Apocalypse

I love an apocalypse–so I wrote thirty of them. Each story is not only the end of a world, but the end of a narrative, as I bring closure to more than 20 years worth of stories.

The stories written for the multi-world apocalypse encompass a wide variety of styles and many are accompanied by optional explanatory notes.

Want to see the world end? How about 30 of them.

The Michaelean Library

Bite-size pieces of lore that connect my other stories together. Each one can be read as an independent piece of flash fiction, or seen as a jigsaw piece to a larger puzzle.

Grab your drink of choice, find a comfortable seat and settle in.