37:

af·fla·tus
1. inspiration; an impelling mental force acting from within.
2. divine communication of knowledge.

Is it wrong to trust an idealist? I hope not - but it is that hope which makes me unable to trust myself.

36: longing

ex·i·gen·cy
1. exigent state or character; urgency.
2. (usually exigencies) the need, demand, or requirement intrinsic to a circumstance, condition, etc: "the exigencies of city life."
3. a case or situation that demands prompt action or remedy; emergency: "He promised help in any exigency."

His skin was soft against her neck, with subtle hairs brushing her skin like an unseen spider's web. She fell into his embrace as it closed around her, smile never wavering, eyes glistening with the milky obliviousness of liquid innocence. She looked up past his dark beard and lonely wrinkles. Leaning back into him, she left a soft breeze pass between her lips to tickle his ear. The feeling shocked him. But then her elbow was in his gut and she was twisting away, screaming but with that smile migrated to her eye and the naive curtain dropped, and they were back in the club, and people around them were gasping.

35:

or·i·flamme
1. an inspiring standard or symbol.
2. the red or orange-red flag of the Abbey of St. Denis in France, used as a standard by the early kings of France.Today I met a man in an overcoat and trousers, but without a shirt. When I asked him why he had no shirt, he told me that it would be what I was expecting. I was hardly expecting an overcoat; it was a sunny, thirty degree day. The lack of shirt seemed superfluous. Yet he insisted. "You'll remember me, now," he told me. "That's all any of us really wants."

28: intimacy, at last!

stra·bis·mus
a disorder of vision due to a deviation from normal orientation of one or both eyes so that both cannot be directed at the same object at the same time; squint; crossed eyes.

I built a machine that reads minds. I built it from an old tin can and some odds and ends I found in my garage. My dad used to be an engineer who worked for NASA. His junk was all he left me; believe it or not, rocket scientists don't get paid well at all.

It doesn't just read minds, though, it lets you read minds. It lets you see inside somebody else's head. And better, you can see the world through their eyes. Like putting on really fancy sunglasses. And headphones. And tastebuds.

It's great. Now, whenever my wife and I fight, we just each put on my machine for a few seconds, and then we realize there's nothing to fight about. (It also prevented an affair I almost had, and it makes for great sex.) My kids finally respect me, because they have an idea the kind of shit I have to go through to keep them fed. And I understand why their silly little friends matter so much to them. It's amazing. You wouldn't believe it.

I'm keeping it a secret though. If the world got a hold of it, things would be a lot less exciting.

26: star cross'd

pec·cant
1. sinning; guilty of a moral offense.
2. violating a rule, principle, or established practice; faulty; wrong.

The rebellion failed. The conspirators were charged. There were too many to punish, so they were set free, but with a penalty: a viral infection, kept dormant, until contact was made with another like it. If any two of the leaders came within ten feet of one another, both would die. If any found themselves in the same enclosed space, they would die. The virus was not without a sense of justice; it was practical and expeditious. The idea was safe. It was poignant. It was effective.

Mariana and Josef wrote letters, at first, on plastic cards that they would each wipe down with bleach, while wearing gloves and masks. One day, so adorned, Mariana bought a bottle of her perfume, and sprayed the letter once it had been sterilized. Josef, who had rented an apartment across the street and did little other than drink and stare through his telescope into her windows, knew immediately upon opening the envelope what she had done. He wept for hours. When she heard that he had shot himself, she pushed past the police and ran up the stairs to his apartment, knowing full well that the sight of his beautiful corpse would kill her.

25: Geleira, .5

pret·er·i·tion
1. the act of passing by or over; omission; disregard.
2. (law) the passing over by a testator of an heir or otherwise entitled to a portion.
3. (Calvinist theology) the passing over by God of those not elected to salvation or eternal life.
4. (rhetoric) paraleipsis.

Pablo Vargas was alone in the lab, but for the analyst Piter, who was discreetly punching keys at a desk nearby. His small, skeletal presence was easy to overlook. Vargas, meanwhile, filled the room. Something about the intensity of his eyes, darting between his datapad and the glass wall partitioning the lab and the greenhouse, made the space seem that much smaller.

Beyond the wall, a host of specimens from across the equatorial and temperate regions of Geleira grew in individual environments, the temperature and air pressure of each kept steady. The walls of the facility isolated the greenhouse from the outside climate, allowing the plants to interact only with the light from Florescente through a circular atrium. This was the control group. They were important only as a basis for comparison. It was the plants outside that held Vargas' interest.

24: Cobalt, 2

la·i·ty
1. the body of religious worshipers, as distinguished from the clergy.
2. the people outside of a particular profession, as distinguished from those belonging to it: "the medical ignorance of the laity."

It wasn't a prison cell. But the cushions were too plush, the drapes too livid, the dark wood of the alien oak too real. They were assuring him.

"Tell us what happened," the Heirophant had asked, in delicate, practiced English.

Outside the window, the once satellite Geleira - now deserving of its Portugese name - was slipping into a coma from which it would not return. Cleft from its mother planet, it was following a new course toward the outer reaches of the Florescente System. The forests had frozen, in ice and in time, and would be left as statues testifying to a paradise whose warmth of life had fled. The moon faced the necessarily opposite fate of its parent.

Strange how life can only survive in such a narrow space, he thought. Pushed outside that slim belt of habitable conditions - one burns, the other freezes.

"Tell us what happened," he heard again, remotely.

They had given him traditional pen and paper to write, synthesized specially for his use. He had realized it later - when he saw them carrying their digital pads, their styluses, using their voice activated commands. Ritual, perhaps? To make him more comfortable? It had only seemed natural that his story must come from his hand onto parchment, as blood stains linen. Anything less would be neither fitting nor appropriate. Perhaps they had anticipated that feeling. Perhaps his was not the first confession they had taken.

There was no jury to try him, no court that would take him; not one of this world, at any rate. No judge looked down upon him other than what remained of his Earth-born morality, that last vestige of his childhood there. Earth itself had forgotten his plight before they'd even known of it. The secession had made certain of that. The Clergy, meanwhile, were after something of practical value. When this was over, they would leave him free to go wherever his one-man ship could take him.

Yet the words would not come. The paper remained clean as an infant's conscience. He stared out through the diamond windowpane at one of the worlds he had killed, and wondered: from whom am I hiding?

23: Cobalt, 1

pro·so·po·poe·ia
1. personification, as of inanimate things.
2. a figure of speech in which an imaginary, absent, or deceased person is represented as speaking or acting.

"I heard it Hafi, I heard it!" Khaled twisted in his seat to find the disturbance, his seatbelt grinding against his shoulder, but it was in vain; the noise had been everywhere, and the buildings themselves were shaking. The traffic down the Fifthway was jerking along uncertainly in the aftermath of what had sounded like the world rupturing along its axis. Khaled could think of no other way to describe it, no experience he could draw on for reference. Not an earthquake. Nothing so tame.

There was the weird feeling of lightness, like the ground beneath their sedan had broken off from the rest of the planet and was drifting away. Briefly, Khaled wondered if that was what had happened. Then he dismissed it as an anxious delusion. Impossible.

Would Earth...?

No. Impossible.

A flawless sapphire cincture kissed the golden desert ridges in the distance, where the Fifthway snaked around the coast, away to the Spanish cities in the North. The Rappais lapped at the desert's jagged feet in jealous protest. West of and around the great highway, Piskadh stood on a great outcrop that forced apart the waters and the shore like an ancient accord, while the irreproachable sky smiled in the glass reflections of the city towers. This was the tripartite assembly of blue, yellow, and grey that populated the planet. Green things had never evolved here; life had come to Cobalt on spaceships.

But Khaled and his children had forgotten that beauty long ago, in the instant that it all came apart. An eerie, impatient calm drowned the Eagle Eye Gorge in the seconds between the celestial convulsion and the arrival of the cloud above the Western horizon.

"Allah help us," Hafa uttered into the silence. In the backseat, little Nada began to cry. Afeef, her thirteen-year-old brother, urgently tried to shush her. The eldest, Murshid, simply stared through the tinted window at the second sky - an unbroken line of dust, segregating the two quarreling blues beyond the city.

Khaled had a silly thought.

21: Leroy kills himself again

per·si·flage
1. light, bantering talk or writing.
2. a frivolous or flippant style of treating a subject.

The second time Leroy Thavish killed himself, he did so by accident. Traffic accident, to be exact. One cool morning in October, he put on a pair of very large headphones, told his iPod to play Third Eye Blind, and turned the music up to full. He sighed and threw a longing look at the seagulls cawing above a nearby MacDonald's. Then he took twelve steps out onto the 401 and was obliterated by a red Rav4.

After the story of his complete recovery had fluttered around in low-credibility tabloids for a few months, he was successfully charged with reckless endangerment, as well as six counts of manslaughter. The driver of the Rav4 and her twenty-three year old son in the passenger's seat had been similarly splattered when an even bigger SUV behind them on the freeway plowed into them, followed by an 18-wheeler which rolled over the new roadblock like a child on a deflating air mattress.

Miraculously, the driver of the trailer, Murray Givenchi, walked away from the accident without a scratch. Two years later, he was also charged with manslaughter when he fired six rounds into Leroy's chest. The charges were lifted when Leroy walked out of the hospital room two days later, and Murray was committed to a mental institution.

Leroy remembered that morning, because it was the first time he had been chased away angrily by a homeless person after attempting to give him change. He discovered too late that there was actually coffee in that mug. The hobo turned out to be a very disgruntled Murray, and he happened to be carrying his revolver in his tattered jacket for just such an occasion.

Historians interested in his predicament, writing for Weekly World News, would record this as the seventh time that Leroy Thavish, in fact, killed himself, as the shooting was ultimately the consequence of his own actions two years previous.

20: the art of begging

or·i·son
a prayer.

Please don't do it. If there's anything I can give you, anything that will make this better, just let me know, I'll accept it, I'll do it, I promise. Please, just don't. Don't...

Well that's real productive, guy. Why don't you just go hang the rest of the fuckers while you're at it? They all deserve it, don't they? Mr Right Hand of God? Hmm?

Okay, look - what's your name? - Okay, you don't have to tell me, that's fine. But just calm down. Think about what you're doing. We can all make some sense of this if you just give us a few seconds.

Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you know who I am? Fuck you. You can't do shit. I know people, man, and they are going to have your head on a fucking platter, if you don't drop the routine right fucking now.

You'll rot in hell for this.

Alright, do it. Just get it over with. Make it quick.

There has to be something I have that you want. I have money. Connections! I can get you out of the country. No? Okay, okay, well, I can do some fantastic things with my... okay!

You know Jesus loves you, right? There's still time. Give yourself up.

I have kids. Do you have kids? You did? ...What happened to them?... Oh. I'm... I'm sorry to hear that. Listen... I know it's gotta seem very cliche, and all, me telling you to think of the children. But you understand. No, you're right, my kids are probably nothing like yours were. They're probably complete spoiled brats next to yours. No, I'm not - I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that -

Whatever we did to you... we're... I'm... sorry.

19:

quix·ot·ic
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) resembling or befitting Don Quixote.
2. extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable.
3. impulsive and often rashly unpredictable.

New job today. Cleaning the ducts above habitat three. I get to wear a space-suit, it's pretty thermal. They tell me the last guy got caught too close to a microbreach and the pressure pushed his entire body through a hole the size of my fist. I know I'm not that dumb. Jessie's still worried, though, and she's passed it on to the kids, the silly woman. They're all huffing and hollering and threatening to leave as I walk out the door. But what the hell. It's good pay. The sooner I make the credits, the sooner I get off this damn rock. If they wanna come with me that's their decision.

17: another way

rec·on·dite
1. dealing with very profound, difficult, or abstruse subject matter: "a recondite treatise."
2. beyond ordinary knowledge or understanding; esoteric: "recondite principles."
3. little known; obscure: "a recondite fact."

"Not only are they born without love, but they lack even the capacity. There is no word in their language to describe it, no neuron package in their brains to understand it, no hormone responses associated with it. They don't miss it at all, because they've never known what it is. Intimacy is as foreign a concept to them as infinity is to us. When they touch one another to procreate, they feel no depth to the act. There is physical pleasure - evolution did not deprive them of that - but no devotion, no passion, no jealousy, no desire for emotional union. Sex is just something practical. There isn't any of the significance that human poets have spent generations trying to capture.

"Many of them have read about love in their scientific journals, as a biochemical response, acquired through natural selection, to stimulate monogamy. They see it as a mechanism to protect offspring, shared by humans and many lower forms of intelligence. Imagine the dynamic of a lion's pride, with one male and many hunting females, and see how alien it is to your understanding. You may study it, but you will never experience it. This is something like how they see us.

"Needless to say, they are far more rational creatures. Their passions are harder to stir and their emotions are subsidiary to their logic. Their wars are fewer and their advances quick and decisive. They argue, yes, and their regard for life is naturally less extravagant - they see little value in others beyond their own interest, and what's more, they shamelessly admit to it. When they fight it is without hesitation and it is bloody as hell. But it is also quick and pointed, and it is never undertaken in the name of God or a dead princess.

"Is it a better way to exist? How does one measure the success of a species, by their progress or their happiness? In one they excel, but in the other they have a seeming deficiency so inherent as to go without notice. We caricature them as lifeless automatons, as creatures so helplessly inept and unaware of it that they could not possibly find contentedness. But this is so false as to be pretentious. In fact, it is not a deficiency at all - they are happy. They have desires and pleasures, satisfactions of both the superficial and the soul. How can we say they lack anything? To them, love is an aberration, a waylaid evolutionary trajectory that causes as much pain as it does pleasure. They believe they are better off. We tell them they're not, try to describe all they are missing out on, but what are our words to the actual experience? How can we argue in terms they can understand?"

She shook her head. "It is what we are that matters, James. They see life one way, we see it another. We live in different languages. Neither better nor worse, simply different. We have meaning in love, they have meaning without it; but we both have it somehow, and that is what's important. Neither of us is missing something, but to one another, we are and always will be alien."

15: wargames

sanc·ti·mo·ny
1. pretended, affected, or hypocritical religious devotion, righteousness, etc.
2. (obsolete) sanctity; sacredness.

Marty tried not to frown, but one attacked him anyway. The Hellcats had taken northern Macedonia early in the evening. The Vipers' positions east of Kosovo had all but been obliterated by aerial shelling, leaving them with 35% casualties, over a hundred civilians dead (in other words, a dramatic loss in points standing), massive equipment destruction, and depleted morale. Meanwhile the White Army, from the reports, was gearing up to come from the South. Overnight, the odds in favor of the Vipers keeping former Serbia for the month had shifted from 3:1 for to 18:1 against. Marty was going to lose a lot of money.

The Vipers' Del Amio had been a good friend of his in a forgotten time, before he'd headed east and joined the Games. Marty wouldn't enjoy seeing his head blown in by an artillery round, but it was projected to be a big media attraction by the end of the month. Commodore, on the other hand, had a sickly lemon-slice smile slapped to his big face, rows of sticky yellow teeth protruding from his jaw like gravestones. "Too bad, blippo," he gloated at Marty. Commodore had put forty thousand credits on Jimmy Tuledo and the underdog Hellcats, and it looked like he was about to become a rich man. What a bad day, Marty thought.

14: Sphere, 2

lo·cum te·nens
a temporary substitute, esp. for a doctor or member of the clergy.

Sphere, 1

In an instant, she felt her fear shatter under the pressure. It exploded like a frag grenade - the shrapnel remained, embedded, but incoherent, suddenly meaningless. A vague sort of senselessness washed over her. It wasn't that she had overcome the water. It was that for a moment, it had been suspended. Rationality was supplanted by fuck it, whatever.

Kailey sucked in air, then remembered belatedly that her lungs would last longer deflated, and exhaled again. She did this a few times, looking like she was hyperventilating, before she felt a playful tug at her ankle and succumbed to her whatever.

She pulled herself down, urging against her body's demand to float up. The water around her seemed to grow only chillier and thicker as she swam. She clammed her eyes tight and tried desperately not to think about it. Seconds passed, counted in arm movements. Time seemed to stretch out away from her, actions slowed, lungs beginning to burn for air. As she dove deeper she felt the telltale gut-hollowing-out sensation. Gravity was weakening. Closer! I can make it!

Abruptly, Kailey decided that it was too far. Mark had said it was only a few meters, but she had traveled at least four; she must have come at too shallow an angle. I can't do this. I'll try again, she told herself, knowing she wouldn't. She held on to calm, remembering, My air will save me. Stopping her arms at her sides, she waited for the power of buoyancy to thrust her back to the surface like a cork.

It didn't.

The sinker line!

Her eyes shot open. The fragments of fear dislodged, reassembling as panic. She felt it now, seeping in through all her orifices, inside her, replacing her, as if she wasn't even physically there. It would swallow her, crush her to nothing in its compacting stomach. She screamed bubbles, lashing out arms and legs, trying to vainly to fight the omnipresent foe. Water reached into her mouth, choking her.

Then something caught her leg. Suddenly she was dragged down, down, shutting her eyes to block it out. She felt the water thin only briefly, as gravity reduced to nothing and the pressure eased off. Then she broke into blinding light.

13: without purpose

de·hort
(archaic) to try to dissuade.

You'll notice that timescales here are considerably shorter. When there's nothing to do, you talk in days instead of weeks, months instead of years. What you would have had the patience to wait a decade for, you demand and expect to see in ten days. It's not so much the boredom as it is the lack of interruptions, the freedom from the banal necessities of life. Instead of cleaning your kitchen and going to bed after a long day of work, you go out every night, because you don't have to get up the next day. You meet girls, you date them - and you date them the next day, because your schedule is already clear. If you want to spend a weekend at the cottage, you don't plan it in advance, you just go. There's no waiting. There must always be something to do. But in paradise, all there is to do is live.

It's exponential in nature. Like extinction. You watch time shrink, slowly at first, then faster, until it tips - and suddenly, there's no conception of time anymore. You're drifting in a timeless waste, where nothing ever happens because it all happens at once. Suddenly there's nothing left to do, because it's all been done and you no longer have any desire to do it again. You find that without those banal necessities to highlight your free moments, everything becomes a banal necessity. Having sex, reading books, enjoying a meal, are all things you have no interest in but you suffer through out of pure inertia. It's as if we need to be bored by something. If we don't have work to be bored by, we become bored by living.

You slip into oblivion. Once the time is completely gone, there's no getting it back. Nothingness propagates itself. Soon you find yourself without any desires whatsoever, not for women, nor for joy or companionship. Motivation is a specter that haunts your memories, like a long dead grandparent, whose presence you can remember as a faceless sensation, a core of emotions and values and events. As a beautiful girl whose existence you remember but whose smile you've forgotten. You exist, suddenly, in a vacuum. You want the world back but can no longer remember how to attain it. The concept of getting out and doing seems so foreign as to be completely indecipherable.

And that's where the story ends. At the bottom of a spiral, of a potential well, after it tapers to one dimension. Traveling in a line, compelled by impetus, already moving so fast and so straight that any acceleration, backward or forward, seems inconsequential. You watch the world fly by in seconds, instead of years, and are amazed when, at the end of it, while you wonder where the time has gone, you still have nothing to show for the effort you never made.

12:

bluff 2
1. rough and blunt but not unkind in manner; gruff.
2. having a broad, steep front.

Poker is his only metaphor for life. The first and most important rule, he reminds us constantly, is that a poor player plays his own hand, a good player plays his opponent's hand, and an excellent player plays what his opponent thinks is in his hand.

11: Sphere, 1

daunt
1. to overcome with fear; intimidate: "to daunt one's adversaries."
2. to lessen the courage of; dishearten: "Don't be daunted by the amount of work still to be done."

Kailey fluttered her arms in the water, head shaking nervously. "Mark, I don't want to. It's too deep."

Mark smiled at her from atop a couple of wooden planks lashed to some tires. He was a stiff, muscled character just shorter than her and just blonder. His hair clung to his face like seaweed, while beads of water winked at her from his chest and shoulders. She looked away, paddling a few feet from the raft, and tried to find some excuse for embarrassing herself in front of fresh meat. Suddenly her breasts felt small and she wished she had makeup.

But he was gentle about it. "It's only a few meters, Kail," he coaxed. "No need to be scared."

You bastard, she thought. If you want to get laid, don't make this worse than it is. It made her feel a little better to imagine she could turn him down.

Kailey had hated deep water for as long as she could remember. It was intrusive. It felt like it was climbing into her through her pores, filling every vein and artery with its chill. Beneath her, the Sphere was a thick, inky unknown, glimmering with starlight that seemed brighter and closer here than on any other orbital. As if the universe had given its full attention to a talent show act who'd made it through the audition on caffeine and her teacher's warm encouragement.

Mark dove off the platform with a flourish. He glided beneath the surface to Kailey's side, where he broke the still water just as irreverently a second time, his face alight with brazen, impudent youth. "Don't be scared," he repeated. She felt his warm breath on her neck, all too enticing. The cold water provided emphasis.

Maybe it isn't that far, she hoped.

"Just hold your breath and dive straight down," Mark cooed. "It'll be hard for the first little bit while your air buoys you up, but once you get past the halfway mark the pressure will ease up and it'll be a cakewalk from there."

Kailey's lips pressed into a thin line. "Yeah, and if I run out of breath after the sinker line, I won't float back up either," she retorted. "I'm already panicked stupid, and I haven't even dipped under yet. If I freak out down there - "

"I'll be right beside you."

Her sentence caught in her throat. You cruel, cruel boy...

"Just try it," he urged. "I'll see you down there with the others." He pinched her stomach, sending an uncomfortably good feeling through her body, and disappeared into the darkness. But for the small waves spreading from her arms, the air and water around Kailey fell still and vacant. The pinpoints in the sky waited to see what she would do.

Sphere, 2

9:

burning bridges
an expression synonymous to the "Point of no return", typically used when a relationship becomes irreparable.

Dear God,

If there is a reason for all this, politely let me know at the soonest opportunity. I understand what that will cost me, but brain implosion is a small price to pay.

Thank you for your time.

8: Leroy kills himself

en·nui
a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: "The endless lecture produced an unbearable ennui."

The first time Leroy Thavish killed himself, he hung from a tree by the lake for nine hours before someone found him. He had picked a special spot, where he'd met his love decades earlier, and where he'd scattered her ashes decades later.

Leroy had made the decision on a Friday. He'd always known he would get to it eventually; it was just a matter of getting off his ass. On Sunday, he woke up at 11, groaned at the clock, showered, fed his three cats, and set off for the lake with a length of rope. The waves were beautiful. The knot was immaculate.

On Monday afternoon, Dr. Matthews shook his head at an X-ray and said, "I don't understand it. It was a clean break. Your spine was severed the moment you fell. And now it just... isn't."

Leroy, sitting on the hospital bed, rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced at the doctor. "Being immortal sucks," he said. "Don't try it."