Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 (4 page)

After intentionally antagonizing us for a few short minutes by asking if we were
absolutely sure
we were ready, he swung the doors open. All my energy from before seemed to be swept away. My father grabbed my hand and lead me slowly through the scattering of couches and pillows as I stared, wide eyed, at the carvings on the ceiling that curved and bumped into each other until they finally ended over the small stage at the very end of the room.

My father picked a place to sit, but I didn’t pay too much attention to where we sat. My eyes were locked on the man sitting on stage.

He was perched on the very edge, with his legs dangling off the side. A small notebook sat next to him, open to a page right in the middle. I remember that it was marked with a red ribbon. He watched as the people trickled in, choosing places to sit.

A woman came around the room, offering people small glasses filled with pink liquid from a tray she was carrying. When she made her way to where we were sitting, my father exchanged our ticket stubs for two smaller glasses and one of the larger ones. He nodded a small thank you, and she left.

“Why does it smell funky?” Annie asked. I peered around my father to look at her and fought back a fit of giggles. Her nose was scrunched up so tight, I thought it would get sucked into her face.

“Why’s it sparkly?” I asked, staring at the white specks floating in the glass until I felt myself go cross-eyed.

He answered both of us with a decided “I don’t know,” and left it at that. A few minutes later, the Dreamer stood up. Gradually, all the voices faded away. Silence moved through the crowd like a wave.

“If you wouldn’t mind, now would be a good time to go ahead and drink.” His voice was a whisper, but it sounded as if it were coming from no more than a foot in front of me instead of halfway across the room. He was holding the notebook now. The way he balanced it in his hands, it seemed like it was part of him.

I waited until after my sister drank hers to drink mine. Once I decided that she wasn’t going to die, I pressed the plastic cup against my lips and tipped it backwards. I found out that the drink tasted as weird as it looked; sweet, but not in the good way. Sweet in the way that made you close your eyes and grasp the bridge of your nose and hope your taste buds would calm down soon.

Within a few moments, I was curled up on the cushion beneath me. My arms and legs felt heavy, and I wondered how long we would be asleep. I don’t remember what happened after I fell asleep, although my sister had. I woke up, dazed, with a few swirling images in my mind, but I couldn’t grasp any of them. Since then, I have been forever envious of those who can remember the dreams after they’ve regained consciousness. Still, I knew that something had happened.

I
knew
.

I open my eyes and stare at the same ceiling, ten years later. Cobwebs clutter the corners. The carvings now look cold and disorienting. My feet carry me over the carpet that is now slowly deteriorating. My father is not with me this time, and I know for certain that he will never be here again.

Without thinking, I make my way to the stage. The steps are warped and creaky underneath me. A thin layer of dust covers the narrow ledge. As I walk, my shoes leave small marks on the wood. I sit in the exact spot that the Dreamer had my first night here, close my eyes, and imagine what it would be like if I were one of them. I imagine what it would be like, to see pictures while you’re asleep every night. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been one of them. I think of how much more money we would have had. How we could have saved my father.

My hands grip the side of the stage, and I try not to think about what it will be like when I return home. I know that they will have taken him away by then. My father will not be lying lifeless on our couch as my sister sits beside him, unresponsive to everything around her. I will probably hear Annie sniffling in her room. My mother will be up all night, looking at pictures of us growing up and trying to grasp the fact that her husband is no longer here.

I’m not sure what I will do.

For now, though, none of that matters. For now, I am a Dreamer. It doesn’t matter that when I return home, this will have all been pretend. A fantasy. In this moment, I can make up my own reality while I’m asleep and give it away to anyone who is willing to listen. Taking a deep breath, I pick up where my father left off that night, and tell the rest of the story to the ghosts that may be listening.

“The two boys managed to make peace with the kind stranger. She took them back to her homeland, and they were able to open the first Tent. It wasn’t like what we have today.” I smile, hearing my father’s voice. The words are not my own, I know, but they’re good enough. “It was made of brightly colored fabric, and they would move it from place to place. Kings from far off places would travel to see the Dreamer. After that, other Dreamers were accepted. Rulers from all over the globe would track down anyone who showed signs of having the talent. Countries from all over opened up their own Tents, and eventually they became what we have now.

“Without the first Dreamer, we wouldn’t know what it’s like to see something entirely new. We wouldn’t know how to dream.”

###

Hannah is a former homeschooler, aspiring linguist, and future American Sign Language interpreter, who may minor in creative writing. She recently graduated from high school, and nearly cried when she turned 18 after it was pointed out to her that she may not be able to go Narnia anymore. She spends her free time attempting to find a loophole so she can see Aslan.

Red Rubber Nose

Robert Quinlivan

Having set himself on fire, the clown took a bow. The crowd went wild. Flames quickly spread up his legs, and as the membranes cracked and burst, white-hot pneumatic fluid and coolant spewed out. He posed beside the hoop of fire and smiled a toothy grin, displaying maximal entertainment value. They loved him, they really loved him. He incremented his satisfaction register.

He held the smile, waiting for the applause to die down. It didn't. The fire began to melt the clown's outer membranes. His hair was the first to go. It disappeared in a cloud of black smoke, leaving him with a charred, bald head. The paint on his face began to smear down his forehead, obscuring his vision. His chin drooped. Still the applause continued unabated. So astonished was his audience by his performance, they began to stand up from their seats and roar with amazement. He incremented his satisfaction register again, triggering a
feat_of_dexterity
subroutine.

Executing.

He stood straight, arched his back, and ran toward the cheering audience. The crowd, already plainly stunned by the entertainment value of the clown's movements, leapt to their feet and ran into the aisles. Some even
gallivanted joyfully out of the circus tent. His programming didn't have any explicit instructions on how to handle such audience behavior, so he engaged his Heuristic Engines to determine a suitable
feat_of_dexterity
. He jumped, locked his legs, and landed, pivoting his weight around the column of ball bearings in his waist and propelling his body forward. The abdominal pistons contracted, positioning him to spring on his hands and continue the flip.

But when his hands struck the ground of the platform, his body collapsed. The script halted, terminating with a
script_execution_error
. The burning clown collapsed in a heap of exposed components and melted plastic. His red rubber nose detached from the membranous material that
rendered his face and rolled beneath a seat in the front row, directly beneath a young boy. The ecstatic lad leapt up onto the seat and shouted with joy while the adults around him flailed their arms, happily.

Something is…wrong.

Such was the reluctant conclusion of the
Heuristic Engine. Evidently an error had occurred in one of the primary locomotive and sensory modules during the
feat_of_dexterity
. But where had the failure originated?

He executed a debugger routine and puzzled over the stack trace, piping its output back into the Heuristic Engine. Was it possible that his balance sensors had been incorrectly calibrated, causing the Heuristic Engine to miscalculate the trajectory?
Possible
, the Heuristic Engine mused,
but rather unlikely.
A failure of one of the gestalt sensory systems, it believed, was more likely at fault.
Did you check that first before coming to blame me?

The clown was beginning to tire of his heuristic system's defensive attitude; he was simply trying to understand why the
feat_of_dexterity
had failed. No one was trying to assign blame. The situation was growing dire, with more systems reporting failures every second, and he simply wanted to resolve it as quickly as possible so as to abide by the Directives.

As he silently argued with the stubborn Heuristic Engine, a group of technicians rushed out onto the stage to survey the crumpled, burnt body of the clown. He wanted to shout
Error detected, debugging in process! No need for assistance!
but he found that his auditory systems were inoperable. As if things couldn't get worse.

The clown quickly enabled emergency power and began repairing the damaged systems. The increase in throughput was enough to lift his body from its crumpled state into a standing pose. He stood and flung his arms open for the amusement of the audience, flinging molten globs of artificial skin into the bleachers.

Ta da!

The technicians backed away. The audience roared with appreciation and rushed out of the tent to tell their friends and neighbors of their delightful experience at the circus. Even the technicians were elated. They shouted with amusement, calling more technicians and security guards to their side. He incremented his satisfaction register and executed a laugh, which came out as a garbled
GAHK-GAHK-GAHK
through the damaged auditory system. It was the best that he could do, for the time being. It would save face.

The internal systems seemed to be under control, but that poorly executed laugh violated the Second Directive, according to which the clown was to maintain professional composure at all times during a performance, and to recover from any malfunctions in a manner most conducive to the all-important First Directive: that the clown remain, at all times, entertaining.

While the Heuristic Engine ran an expensive subroutine to calculate the proper response, the clown performed a rendition of the Charleston while laughing uproariously.

Then a target was chosen.

The visual system focused on the dismembered ball nose under the boy's seat in the front row of the audience. The Heuristic Engine inserted a high priority command into the front of his operation queue:
You must recover the red rubber nose! But you must do so in a maximally entertaining manner so as to avoid violation of First Directive. Now go! Do some top notch clowning!

He had his orders. He began moving toward the ball nose. The boy, who stood on the back of the chair, inches above the nose, froze.
GAHK-GAHK-GAHK
, the clown laughed, as he pulled the red ball out of a pool of white fluid that had leaked out of his face.

The clown applied an epoxy through one of his emergency dispensers beneath his fingernails to the bare metallic skeleton where his nose used to be attached, and pressed the red ball in place. Satisfied that it was properly secured, he executed a short
feat_of_dexterity
, performing a forward-flip and landing next to the boy.

Through one smoldering rear ocular sensor, he spied the technicians and the security guards cheering behind him. The boy seemed unamused, frozen.

He decremented his satisfaction counter. Then he decremented it again.

The maneuver had failed. He had succeeded in meeting the demands of the Second Directive by recovering his facial component, but had in the process violated the First Directive. The child was unamused.

Unamused!
Unacceptable
, hissed the Heuristic Engine. He pointed out that it was the Heuristic Engine, after all, which had commanded him to recover the nose.
Sure, blame me for your failings. You're the one in charge, clown. I just give you the answers. If you ask the wrong questions, that's your problem
.

Perhaps it was right. The clown's systems were not functioning properly, and it would not be prudent to dismiss the possibility that it was his own central module which had originated the error.

He asked the Heuristic Engine to execute a scan of the central module's activity over the last hour.
Sure, why not
, it snarked. While the process ran in the background, the clown began emergency procedures to correct the First Directive violation. An
empathic_gesture
was advised, according to his programming.

Executing
.

The clown engaged his rotors and reached down to the boy. He scooped the child into his arms, cradling the little body. The child immediately began shouting with unrestrained joy.

But something was still wrong. The rear ocular sensors indicated the security guards were approaching, followed closely by the technicians. The clown tried to warn them not to approach–
I am engaged in an empathic_gesture
with an audience member!
–but the damaged auditory system rendered it as an incomprehensible series of metallic squawks.

As the security guards approached, his systems indicated an input language pattern. How fortuitous! Perhaps something of his warning system's message had been comprehended after all.

"Put down the boy or we will open fire."

The words hung there in memory, awaiting decipherment by the language synthesis system. Still the burning clown held the little boy, gripped tightly in his bare skeletal hands. Just as the translated data was mapped by the central module to inference blocks and response scripts, the Heuristic Engine finally returned with the scan of the central module's activity.

Severe error occurred in central module at approximately 5381725587843 (16 Jul 2140 16:46:27). Advise immediate halt to current operations!