And here we go with more:

     6

  I had that short dream again. The one where I'm
dangling over an incredibly huge whirlpool of black water. It's half
a mile below me and is all I can see on every horizon. Overhead is
a dirty ceiling of machinery and pipes that spill myrrh on me,
splashing off

splashing against (I don't really think of it as splashing 'off',)

my bare skin. I'm falling and my fear of it is growing

so bad I can't breathe. The maelstrom slowly comes up to meet me
and I can only let it. We never actually touch though; it always gets
too intense by that point and I wake up.

Better than dreaming about reading in front of a crowd, naked. :)

  Morning is when I am most willing to surrender myself to
my subconscious and stop trying to interrupt my stream of sensory
input. It feels like thinking about any one thing for longer than it
takes for it to pass me by is sacrilegious.

Heh. Interesting way of thinking.

Trying to get up, work,

and in any way change my surroundings feels deeply hateful to me.

I'd use something other than 'hateful' there. It just doesn't sound like the
best word to use.

  YOU'VE GOT NEWS!

  Click. Not anymore I don't.

Heh

  "What up, Zig?"

  "You look different."

Heh. That's no longer remarkable when it comes to Screw. :)

  "So did you kill him or not?"

  I sighed and looked uncomfortable. "He *might* still be
alive..."

  "What does that mean?"

That Screw didn't get a chance to examine the body. If you don't have a
corpse, assume they are still lurking around.

  I told him the whole warped story. It only took five
minutes, so he was still puffing smoke when I was done. I sat up
on the couch and stretched without much pain. My hip had scabbed
over and the bandage on my neck was numb. This numbness was
irritating.

  Getting up and walking into the kitchen, I found hot coffee
and drank right out of the pot. It burned my mouth but also woke
me up

Burning does tend to revive one. :)

  "We're gonna need heavier guns. New cyc's.

cycs.

Fake papers,

so we can get on the train to Lanz Island. And anything else you
can think of. I want Alethea back here tonight."

Zig: I want to be able to shit gold. But we don't always get what we want.
Know what I'm saying?

  "Well, he never showed up after we iced White. We
wandered around down there for at least two hours afterward
looking for a way out, and he could have killed us anytime during.

I'd drop 'during'. End it at anytime

  "I don't know. Chris thinks he's looking for some kind of
immortality solution. All the work with merusion and psionics
probably point

points

 to something like that since he has never shown any

real interest in anybody who hasn't been involved. I don't
remember a lot from when he and I had worked together in the
past; those parts of my memory seem to be the darkest.

Prolly for the best.

We know

that the Yuma machine is probably at the center of it. Other than
that, and why he needs other psionics users in addition to himself
is

himself, is

'Aeronaut' written on the side in strange letters."

Ah. that thing again.

  "I mean, he experimented on and killed all those people
years ago just to find a way out into space? That doesn't make
sense. Guys like him with special powers have better things to do
with their time.

Not if  that's his goal.

He could be running the city right now. He could
make everyone it his

in it

slaves and build himself a giant palace." He

laughed. "Shit, that's what I'd probably do."

Nah. People would rebel at that.

  "I think that's about all we can do. Unless

do, unless (I think)

 >

  At half past eight that night, Karen and Diago had both
returned and the four of us went out to eat. The whole east side of
the Plaza had been barricaded off so we drove north. It was
decided by a vote that it ought to be Diago's treat

With the vote 3 to 1, I'm sure

  "So how come you don't die?"

Screw: Never seemed to quite get the hang of it.

where it began. Karen looked back and forth between both of us
without understanding. Diago just waited silently. He of course
was the one person who had personally known Screw before I
came into the picture, so even if Zig hadn't asked, Diago would
have. It didn't matter, I would have to lay it all out anyway. There
were more details than I could ever fit into a book back there, but I
only planned on stating what was really necessary. Zig was right,
some of it needed to be said before any of us dug ourselves deeper
in this little hole. Our enemies, Rufius and the Mandate were

Mandate, were

  "When I was twenty-two I graduated from College with
degrees in Anthropology and Campaign Diplomacy. It was winter
and I had no time for anything else than

anything other than (sounds better to me)

 > enjoy every day of it.

  "We were set with the task of running barn security around
the Island. The job wasn't that important but made a good stepping
stone for what I really wanted to get into, campaign management.
Maybe work for a Director someday and get a few of my own
ideas made into law. It was a indistinct

an indistinct

fear anything, love anything. Everything I saw in the world was
merely a reflection of what I saw in those occasional glimpses of
my soul, like those fractions of a second where your eyes actually
cross the sun. The rawest experience of existence itself was
contained there, and of course nothing else in existence could ever
be a worthy trade. Maybe I was fantastic at being a soldier and
standing up for others, and truly it made me feel like a good and
worthy citizen of the city. I had gained some well-deserved pride.
But it wasn't what I had ever really wanted deep down, and now I
realized that had lost most or all of that holy vision. It absolutely
crushed me."

Hmm. Quite the speech there.

  "In only two weeks?" Karen was sitting forward in her seat
paying attention, while Zig and Diago looked uncomfortable.

  "Shit," I said, "maybe it was only two hours, or two
seconds, I don't know. But it was a voice that I hadn't paid
attention to for so long that I had forgotten was

forgotten it was

 >

  "Torn wide open and battered down, I spent the rest of my
vacation time in a sliding self hatred that eventually became
nothing more than malaise. I loathed my new insight, my new
population of formal military instincts. All attempts at reaching out
to other people completely ceased. I even slept in alleys just to
help myself feel worse about what had happened.

Heh. Interesting way of doing it

  "At some point, following that path through the forest of
dead notions, it dawned on me that I was feeling the tinges of my
own curiosity surfacing. That kind of feeling is almost impossible
to nail down, but over and over again, out of the corner of my eye,
I would catch myself wanting to know more about these household
items that belonged to the city when it wasn't ours. Things our city
would never see fit to produce now, yet had been fashioned in the
human mind's own image centuries before the city had an
ambition. This alone had made them curious and real to me. I
marveled at things so mundane as the broken stone feet of the
statue of a lady. I still felt no soul, but this was more than a clue to
where it might someday be found.

Hmm. Interesting that it was the past that made him feel that way.

  "This was Rufius. The name meant nothing at the time he
first spoke it. But he quite amiably reached out to shake my hand
and said that he was pleased we had finally met. He said that he
knew why I had come down here; he hadn't known that it would
be me specifically, but had known I was on my way. He had also
been a soldier at one point and was searching for similar answers
about himself. His story was strange to say the least, and I actually
stood there for a minute and listened while the pretty woman in
ropes dangled behind me

Heh. Almost surreal

  "Well, Rufius asked me to join him, to help him manipulate
this woman into restoring her trust onto the city, whatever that
meant. He said that he would even suffice for just the souls of him
and me if nothing else could really be done. But he wasn't about to
walk away from the secret of the world with nothing. I told him he
was crazy and that he had better let the woman go immediately.
But he was undeterred; there was a gleam in his eye that said he
was sure of himself beyond those limits his mind had ever passed
before.

Meaning he was pretty much insane. :P

The speech began innocently enough. He talked to me

about how I was different from everyone else I knew but him. He
said I had the potential to become something great for the citizens;
that if I accepted this new duty and helped him cure this girl that
I'd help change everything that was wrong with the city for the
better. This coming from a skinny teenager with a long knife in his
belt.

Hmm. Hadn't realized Ruffy was that way. Might want to describe his visual
aspect back then earlier in the speech.

  "Yet it had already stuck me that his account was exactly
the kind of thing I had daydreamed of hearing from someone,
someday. I had no doubts about the quality of its fantasy, but it still
confused the hell out me for more than a few hours, these two
waiting for me in that great empty room deep under the city,
playing some little game. I said I wanted him to cut the woman
down so that I could hear how she told the story, but he said that
was against the rules. He alone could understand her words and
that if any one else heard her speak it would be impossible for
them to influence her in any way.

That's convienent

  "That's nonsense. You're not dead right now."

  I nodded. "You're right. I'm not." This was not shaping up
to settle well, just as it never had with anyone who I had trusted
enough to tell. "But I have been dead before. It's no kind of
immortality. I just tend to reincarnate nearby for some reason.
After Rufius stabbed me in the neck, I woke up naked in a
dumpster about a half mile outside the History building.

Hmm. So Rufius didn't give him the power. Interesting.

  "No, my body also changes to fit my surroundings. I looked
ten years older and pretty different. The finger prints, retinal
patterns, all that had changed too. I fit so perfectly into my new life
that I lost interest in asking why my memories were cloudy at best.
Like before, my only memories of a childhood were images of a
dark, rainy city. Everyone has those; nothing to work with. Since I
barely aged at all, I lived as 'Ganes Christiansen, the engineer' for
years until I was killed in a motorcycle accident. I woke up a few
days later and started it all over again. It's easy to get used to
anything when you can't remember the last time it happened."

True. But somewhere the cycle broke and he remembered.

  "Its strange,

It's

 Rufius and I go way back. He has always been

there; when I was a lowly bus driver and he was a Director. Or
when I was a gang boy, and he ran the Special Forces. He's always
there living better than I am, with a higher job and that incredible
talent of his. He never once told me why he came to hate me so
much. But he does, so we meet every ten or fifteen years and one
of us always rides home in a body bag."

Hmm. Interesting. So Screw has won from time to time.

  "How many times has he killed you?"

  "Oh, a little less than thirty."

  "And vice versa?"

  "Once."

Heh. Okay. My bad.

  "It was more his fault than mine. I tricked him into
following me through a three story house that my friends blew up
with a bathtub full of napalm and myrrh. He doesn't deal well with
myrrh for some reason. But that was the last time I even stood a
chance. There have been a few times over the last century when he
just crushed me with his power from a quarter of a mile away. Let
me tell you, it makes you learn to seize the moment."

Yep

  "Then why don't you just find him first, and kill him in his
sleep?"

Mostly because he didn't remember, I'd wager.

  "And this didn't seem at all unnatural to you?"

  "Hey, the chance forget

chance to forget

  "What?! Twenty-five thousand bucks? That's insane!"

  "He also mentioned something about a couple of tickets to
next year's smoketoberfest."

  "Where's the phone?"

Heh

  Zig took another look at me, ran back inside, and shut the
door behind him. I laughed. At least he had his priorities straight. I
turned back to Karen who was now the only one left with me on
the patio.

  At least she wasn't giving me the glare that Alethea gave
the last time I talked about my past. Karen was definitely another
person altogether. I waited for her to break the silence but she
didn't. This must have been the most uncomfortable forty-five
minutes of her life. I didn't know what to say at all.
So for the moment we sat in the cool air and wondered
what all this ought to change.

And we'll find out next time out. Good work that fills in a lot of the
blanks  about the past of Screw and brings some things together. Look
forward to reading more.

D.B. Sommer

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