A Vomitorium for Terrasites

It’s A Bum’s Life

this excerpt from
A New Leaf
by Kerry Alan Snyder
is freely available under
a Creative Commons License
(Attribution/No Derivative Works).

Terras comes to with some slobber-infused cardboard for a pillow.  He jolts up bolt straight and board stiff, now wearing a rancid, patchwork, paperpulp beard.  He moans at his forlorn distortion in the glossy waxed clearcoat of the straight-8 2024 Tesla Bronto parked on the curb at his bedside. In this plane he is no longer a boy. his matted hair masks a leathery mug, a rotten puckerhole for a maw, cavernous sockets, and a left hook of a schnozz. Devendra delivers yet another convict kick to the kidneys. At what point can it really not get any worse? These Transitions are tough enough without coming across as rotten meat.

The street feels deserted.  Terras, no doubt due to his training, senses that he should remain unseen.  The hooded figures intermittently skulking past elicit no hope or expectation of conversation or compassion.  They fail to notice even the Bronto’s effervescent oily glint in the mauves and taupes of the pinched avenue.

“Feels like getting pissed on by Daun herself.  This cardboard shit smells like a dog’s last breath.”  Terras impotently smears it up his cheek with his thumbknuckle.

The Bronto’s door unclasps: a click, a snap, and the hermetic seal pops with a gush.  At Terras’ eye-level a waxed and booted foot plunges to the pitted pavement from the narrow starboard berth.  The door flies agape.  Light gushes over Terras, through and into him it seems.  The Transitor is utterly consumed. He can feel the light spewing back out of his eye sockets.  ”Ogh! Tesla… the power!”  He acquiesces, obliteration impending.  There is no conceivable concept of safety in this situation, only the leastworst response, as he knows from his Transition training.  Flaccid, blank, whiteout.

Only this time it’s nothing to do with Tesla. A Transition might have been preferable. Blinking back into consciousness with a waft of mink oil barely seasoning the cardboard stench on his upper lip — “What a crock of shit! Unh-CHOO!” The sneeze shakes a sizable chunk of brain cells loose.  Rattling like cracked marbles down through C1, now C2, into the spinal cord and down to the phantom tail he can still feel whipping behind him in frustration.  ”Hard to tell how long ago that was,” he concedes to himself.  It is impossible to tell, really.  A mechanical device, such as a timepiece, cannot come across in a Transition.  In fact very little of anything can make the journey.  The body does not make it.  Parts of the mind do.  Those self-aware tidbits, the ganglia that perceive stimuli, and the baser regions of intuition usually Transit.  The bare minima for human to continue being.  Only sometimes it’s not a human he’s being.

Sometimes he climbs silicon trees and breathes chlorine.  Sometimes he has a tail. The Impact caused many splintered versions of the truth, of reality.  But only Tesla’s Transition has made it possible to compare these truths.  While there are some extraordinary outliers, most seem derivative of a choice few.  Terras’ ostensible objective remains whether, when, and where these dominant fissures will settle their differences.  Hence the devaluation of time-telling.  The truths that have blossomed and pollenated other splinters do not seem at peace.  Their apparent gripes could predate the Impact.  Some camps at the Teslacademy hold that the truths had some hand in it, but that time is not a proper canvas upon which to paint the argument.  Their detractors, notably the Daunists, insist that the Impact was the absolute beginning, all splinters leading back to a gentle ball-peen hammer strike on the window of existence.  Many Daunists, the orthodox of the bunch, purport this window has a fatal edge which will lead to the permanent separation of the splinters, to a final crash, a chaotic sorting.

But not Terras. He’s seen too much to think things could be that orderly. He’s even had a tankard of carbon tetrachloride with the King.  Though he shan’t have had a clue what was going on without Devendra.  At least one of the truths will still share its toys.

His phantom tail stops twitching as his eyes climb the mink-oiled boots near his face. The oily sheen yields to grimy shadow as he pans skyward, rolling onto his back.  Way, way up there, past her shade-cloaked figure, hovering in the thigh-bruise-colored sky like watchtower beacons — like the Manta — her lenses glow like faceless moons, reflecting the beams bursting from the Bronto’s cabin, the ones that toppled Terras only moments ago.  Graciously the beams forego a second joust.  Squinting at the airy contusion above and the moon-eyed backlit gargoyle (gargirl?) looming overhead, Terras manages a marginally toothy grin.

“Roust!” she booms like a stretched out snare drum.

And then…