From: seah@ee.rochester.edu (David Seah)
Subject: TacWriting 11 Exercise: Part 1
Date: 25 May 92 08:32:58 GMT

I've been doing this short writing exercises to experiment with different
idea and styles.  I call them "Tactical Writing Exercises" because I don't
start out with an outline or allow myself to edit too stringently.  Hence,
this is a first draft of a multipart short story.

This is my first posting to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo.  Feedback requested and
welcome on all and any aspects of the story.  It'll get more cyberpunk by
the next installment (if I get that far).

Note: I don't make too much of an attempt to be "politically correct" ;)
---
Part 1

        "Check out this ancient electronic stuff.  It smells weird." Two men
stood sweltering in the middle of the old suite, deep under the Group Walruse
officeplex.  One was a tall, lanky oriental, wielding a flashlight like it was
a garden hose.  He spied a bank of bulky desktop personal computers, configured
in the old upright style that was cheap to build back in his grandfather's day.
 Various electronic notekeeping devices bulged out of his oversized coat
pockets, logging both audio and visual records.  The other was caucasian,
dressed casually in a blazer fashionably chopped at the waist and shoulders to
create the impression of youthful slimness.  The room was dim except for the
slight shimmer of trendy fabrics caught in stray beams of reflected light.  It
was surprisingly dust-free for a room that had been sealed for thirty five
years to the day.
        "Fred, look at this."  The tall man beckoned absently while running his
nails down the face of a computer screen.  "This looks like real glass.  Must
be one of those lightbulb screens, not VEL."
        "No shit?"  Fred glided over, stepping carefully to avoid the cardboard
boxes strewn on the poorly lit floor.  "Wow. There ain't any dust on them,
though...this room climate controlled?"
        "The plans that my Grampa left show two more rooms off of this one.
Maybe there's aircon stuff in there.  I bet they didn't have central air in
those days.  See if you can find the door."
        Fred looked around the room for a quick appraisal.  A flash of color
caught his eye, drawing him to inspect one of the boxes.  "Melvan, check these
out!  I think these are games! Think they'll run?"  Fred picked up one of the
boxes.  The printing was still colorful even after thirty five years.
"Ool..tee...moo...aaahh Wee eye eye eye.  Shit, I can't read this old english
text stuff.  I wonder if the game's any good."
        Melvan snorted.  "Yeah, right. It's for these old pieces of crap
computers.  It probably isn't even interactive.  It'll be one of those games
you have to type to make it work. Whoa, here's a door.  Gimme a hand."
        The door opened with a hiss and puff of cool air, revealing a pitch
black room beyond.  Just ahead of them, two searing red pinpoints of light
glared at them suddenly.
        "Aiaigh!  Lasers!", screamed Fred.
        "Relax, you wuss.  It's just the old infrared detector.  I disarmed it
before we came down."  The lights flickered on one at a time, casting harsh
beams of light onto a bank of low, stocky stainless steel cabinets.  Each
had a compact control panel by a heavy locked-down handle.  Over the
freezers was a picture of a frowning chinese person, glowerly sternly out
into space with a vague aura of disapproval.  Lacquered vases and urns
filled with the black crusts of long-dead flowers and burned-up incense were
reverently placed under the portraits, which were themselves propped up
somehow against a flattened mound flanked by sculpted marble spirals.
        "What is this, some kind of chinese torture chamber?", asked Fred after
a moment of silence.
        Melvan scowled, mimicking the expressions of his ancestors, and flipped
off the audio-visual recorders before answering. "Fuck, no.  We bag the people
who piss us off and ship them to our relatives in Hong Kong.  *THIS* is kind of
like a graveyard.  The mounds and spirals are supposed to be turtles and
clouds.   The turtle is supposed to carry the soul of the dead guy to heaven."
Melvan flicked a beam of light onto the pinched face of one particularly sour
looking portrait off by itself, at the head of the stainless steel rows.
"That's my first great-great uncle Tzu-Hsin on my grandmother's side.  He ran
some kind of scientific think-tank in Thailand before he died.  He's the one
who started the trust fund that allowed us to build this facility in the first
place.  Uncle Tzu-Hsin was an New Science Buddhist...you know, the guys who
believe they can control what form they get reincarnated as.  There's this huge
book of charts and stuff that my aunt has with dates, times, and astrology
stuff in it that is supposed to predict what the odds are of being reincarnated
as what.  When you die, you're supposed to be be thrown in the queue for a new
body, I guess.  So, it's important to know when you die so you can tip the odds
in your favor.  You wouldn't want to get reborn as a gnat or any kind of edible
animal."
        "ANY animal.  You chinese fucks eat everything."
        "You're mixing us up with the Koreans",  Melvan paused. "But you're
right.  We'll eat anything that flies, swims, crawls, or slithers.  Like when I
ate your sister.  If I'd been white, I would have just turned green and puked
on the bed."
        Fred grinned.  "Fuck you.  So what did your uncle Tzu-Hsin get
reincarnated as?  Don't tell me you're him reborn.  You do look a little like
him, you know."
        Melvan looked a little uneasy.  "Actually, we don't know. You see, the
way the NS Buddhists stack the tiles in their favor is by controlling the time
and circumstance of the death.  You can do some stuff with karma and shit, but
that's supposed to be only good for 'options', like bucket seats or
air-conditioning.  When you die, you're supposed to get the first available
body.  The book is supposed to read the pattern so you know what you'll get."
        "So?  What did the Great Book of Animals have to say?"
        Melvan looked away.  "The book isn't clear...it's written in this kind
of old chinese poetry that sounds good to the ear but is sorta vague.  My third
uncle on my father's wife's side thinks that respectable great-great uncle
Tzu-Hsin is going to be some kind of dragon.  Except it doesn't go right out
and SAY dragon.  The character for that is _lung_, but the poem doesn't say
that.  It talks about a many-limbed creature with a flowing body of crystal.
It sounds like a dragon to me, except..."
        "Except what?"
        "Except that you're not supposed to be reborn as a dragon. The passage
that talks about the dragon isn't actually in the 'look up your future' part of
the book.  The numbers worked out to point at the back, where there are some
bizarre poems that talk about the Gods and stuff...some chinese scribe just
tacked that part on so it would fit with whatever the official religion was in
China a few thousand years ago...it's not part of NS Buddism."
        Fred glanced sidelong at Melvan with a cynical glint in his eye.
"Maybe your aunt messed up the calculation or whatever it is you do."
        "The calculation wasn't done by my aunt.  Tzu-Hsin did the calculation
_himself_ very specifically.  What gets me is that it makes no sense in the
context of NS Buddhism.
        "I haven't heard of any glass dragons running around Metro. Guess he
fucked up."
        Melvan turned around slowly to face his friend to look straight into
his blue eyes.  "That's what we're going to find out.  You see, for this glass
dragon to be reborn, Uncle Tzu-Hsin had to die _today_."
        The neat rows of stainless steel freezers stood at attention, arrayed
before capsule #1 occupied by Tzu-Hsin. Melvan signalled Fred to follow him up
to the control panel. It was dust-free.  A small display slowly counted down
the seconds elapsed, calibrated to some unknown date in the lunar calendar.
Fred stirred uneasily, acutely aware of the stares of long-dead chinese people
on his back.  "Er, Melvan...what are you supposed to do?"
        Melvan shifted position slightly, his joints cracking in the frigid
air.  "Nothing, I hope.  I'm just supposed to make sure the the computer times
it right.  I'm the backup man and family recorder.  Shit...I have to turn these
back on." He fumbled at the A-V equipment briefly, powering on the holographic
recording mechanism.  "Yeah.  When this number reaches 0, I will have two
seconds to decide whether to override the computer and stop life-support
manually."
        "He's actually ALIVE in there?  And all these other guys too?  That's
fucking creepy.  No wonder you wanted me to come along."
        "No, they're not really alive.  I don't understand the science part,
but he's not dead.  It's just his head and torso.  The head for the brains
part, and the torso because the soul is supposed to be located somewhere around
the stomach.  It would be too expensive to freeze the whole body.  And the rest
was cremated thirty-five years ago anyway."
        The two men fell silent, watching the seconds tick by on the
display.  The count reached zero, and Melvan nervously chewed his lip for 500
milliseconds before the computer kicked in.  A soft bell gonged somewhere
behind the display, and a small electroluminiscent display switched from
green to red.  A raspy hissing sound emanated from the freezer. Fred looked
anxiously at Melvan's tense face.  After two seconds, the hissing stopped
and the EL display switched back to green.
        "Is it over?", whispered Fred.
        "Yeah.  The cycle is complete, and now I have access to a two million
credit trust fund.  Tzu-Hsin made allowances for the relative...me...to
perform this duty WELL."
        "Geez, I wish I was Chinese."
        "No you don't.  C'mon, let's get out of here.  Bring that game you
found...maybe we can find an old PC at school and see what it's like."
        "What about those other guys?"
        "They have their own relatives to deal with it.  Don't worry.  It's all
been planned out.  It's not OUR problem."
        Fred scooped up the old game and a few other interesting artifacts, and
the two friends sealed the door behind them. Walking back to the stairs, Fred
was struck by one last thought.
        "Melvan, why did the light turn green again?"
        Melvan grinned.  "One thing you can say about we Chinese...we know how
to cover our butts.  A bunch of my relatives from Shanghai back in the 1940s
were Chinese Nationalist generals and judges.  When it looked like the commies
would kick them out, the generals had already made plans to loot treasure from
the mainland and retreat to Taiwan.  Hell...the reward was greater if they lost
than if they had won."
        "So what does that have to do with the green light?"
        "Long Tzu-Hsin wasn't some crusty old chinese guy who lived in a rice
paddy.  He headed a highly-respected scientific organization.  While he was a
firm believer in NS Buddhism, he also believed that cryogenics had its place
too.  The red light meant that life support terminated.  The second green light
meant that the cryogenic system resumed, so if the reincarnation doesn't work,
at least there's the chance that his brain can be revived sometime in the
future."
        "Heh...that's pretty clever.  Say, is 'Long' the same as 'Lung' or
whatever the dragon word is?"
        "That's _Lung_...don't try pronouncing this stuff in public,
Fred...you'll just embarass yourself."
        "I don't give two shits.  Is it the same or not?"
        "I dunno.  Probably not.  I'll call my dad when we get home. These
words sound alike to you fair-skinned western people, but let me assure you
that they are not."
        "So why can't you speak chinese?"
        "Shut up!  That's different!"

(to be continued...?)
--
Dave Seah ^..^   |  University of Rochester, Dept. of Electrical Engineering  |
graduate grad!   |  Apple II Art & Graphics Forum Consultant, America Online  |

//// Internet: seah@ee.rochester.edu, AFCDaveS@aol.com //// AOL: AFC DaveS ////