Entries from May 2004 ↓

Just saw Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle on This Week, talking about the Iraq non-quagmire, and was not exactly surprised to find that he’s graduated to a brand new level of make-believe neocon quackery. I’m not sure if this is something he’s cooked up on his own, or if this is going to be the new Iraq-hawk line, but apparently the current mess over there is entirely Paul Bremer’s fault, because he has single-handedly managed to turn the “liberation” into an “occupation.”

Sigh. How many different excuses are these guys going to cook up before they just give up and retire to the Isle of Disgraced Ideologues? It’ll be like Gilligan’s Island, except none of the characters will be at all likeable. The cast could maybe break down this way: Douglas Feith as the professor, Richard Perle as Thurston Howell III, Dick Cheney as the Skipper, and Bush, of course, as Gilligan, bumbling around the island, screwing things up, muttering nonsequitors. I’m not sure who would play the girls. Much as I dislike Condi Rice, I would never sentence her to a lifetime of maroonment on an island with these jokers. Maybe we could dress Paul Wolfowitz up in a skirt and call him Ginger.

Ick. Maybe not.

But I digress. Bush floundered into office calling himself the CEO president, a designation he quickly dropped as the Season of Corporate Malfeasance came upon us, but I think it would be instructive to evaluate the performance of the people who have been shaping our foreign policy as they would be evaluated if they worked in the private sector. See how they like being thrown to the lions of capitalist “natural selection”, a fate to which they’ve sentenced so many of our public institutions.

Or maybe the other way around: let’s run a private sector company the way Bush runs the executive branch. Imagine this: I rush into by boss’s office and say that one of our competitors is in the process of writing some software that has the capacity to seek out and destroy our products, wherever they reside on the network, anywhere in the world. And further, that this evil company (we’ll call it Evildoers, Inc) has teamed up with a second company (Evil Ones, LLC) who have launched viruses against our corporate headquarters in the past. That the only way to deal with this threat is to nip it in the bud, to launch a preemptive, full-on frontal assault against them, crippling their infrastructure and destroying their business utterly.

When challenged to prove these wild assertions, I produce a recording of a phone conversation between two housewives in Indiana gossiping about an incident at the local Wal-Mart, where a second-generation Arab woman slipped on a Cosmo that had been left on the floor of the snack aisle and crashed into a display of Doritos, precipitating a massive chip explosion that resolved itself into a guacamole/nacho/cool ranch mushroom cloud that rose above the shelves and caused a minor stampede out of the store. When my boss asks me how this is at all relevant to my claims about Evildoers, Inc, I draw a mushroom cloud on his whiteboard and tap it ominously with a pencil, saying nothing but looking at him very significantly. When he doesn’t respond to this, I say: “This is a slam-dunk.”

Now, needless to say, my boss has more sense than anyone in the current Bush Administration, but let’s, for the moment, pretend he doesn’t. Utterly convinced by my nullity of evidence, he orders a full preemptive strike on the network of Evildoers, Inc, and then further proposes that we sink all of our capital into a hostile takeover of that company. Cooler heads don’t prevail, and we unleash ravening hordes of machine-scrambling code upon the heads of our enemies. The company (owned by a blustering moron who derives most of his income from the dissemination of Viagra spam, and staffed by a horde of pimply-faced Visual-Basic-spewing high school students) goes under instantly, and we move in and take over …

… and discover that (1) there was no plot to decimate our software with installations of their own product because (2) they don’t have a product of their own, and never did because (3) most of what they do is produce spam and underpay their employees because (4) their entire technical inventory consists of three ten-year-old Kaypro computers, equipped with 4-color CGA monitors and 10MB hard drives.

Ok. If I’m not instantly fired at this point, then I probably will be when the disgruntled programmers of Evildoers, Inc, displaced by our attack and suddenly without work, go home and, in the basement of their parents’ homes, transmogrify into angry script kiddies and write thousands of visual basic exploits to bombard our network with Denial of Service attacks, insidious hard-drive clearing worms, and disgusting Inuit blubberporn spam. And if I’m not fired then, I almost certainly will be when my boss discovers that our preemptive strike has turned the entire industry against us, and that, not only will they not help us in our attempts to stabilize and relaunch Evildoers, Inc as an Internet Greeting Card company — called Freedom, Inc — they all hate us and want us to die.

But if I work for Bush, Inc, then I’ll be ok. If I work for Bush, Inc, then my boss will not only not fire me, he will praise me lavishly for my commitment to the company, my years of service, and my general upstandingness as a citizen. I work for Bush, Inc, you see, and so, by definition, I can do no wrong.

Now that’s job security. Or it will be unless the country decides to come to its senses and vote the current management off the island, eight months from now.

Here’s hoping.

And now … poetry:

Nose Smear Sonatas

Would you ever lick
  a Bolshevik?

Have you ever kissed
  a Communist?

Will you ever fear
  an Omeleteer?

The Fish! The Fish! The Fish!

Hysterical poetry groupies may line up on my left, nobel prize scouts on my right. I will endeavor to see each of you in turn, as my schedule permits.

Today my body is a teeming bag of contagion. I can feel my enemies in their multitudes racing through the avenues under my skin, darting between battalions of angry phagocytes, killing cells and regrouping in lymphy cul-de-sacs, doubling and redoubling their numbers every second. It’s just gross. If whatever I’ve got is viral, then its agents are reprogramming my cells and then multiplying inside of them until they bulge like sated ticks and explode, spilling billions of protein-sheathed strands of malevolent RNA into my bloodstream.

It’s a very unsettling feeling, being sick, and more unsettling the more you think about it. If you’re lucky, then your body holds up fairly well in its first couple of decades — brushing aside the lesser invaders with a casual immunological swipe of its hand, quickly and efficiently marshaling its full forces to fight off the really bad stuff — and all the while pumping blood through itself, keeping temperatures where they should be, balancing hormone levels and building synaptic bridges.

So when the body fails — even temporarily — to keep the wolves at bay, it feels like a betrayal. What the hell, body? you say. I was supposed to go work out tonight. I can barely make it up the stairs. And your body, busy raising your temperature to bake its foes to death and deploying masses of screaming antibodies (bouncing toward the enemy like tiny, manic ping pong balls), briefly turns its inner eye on you and says (with its inner mouth): Maybe you should try feeding me some goddam broccoli every so often, you coke-swilling twinky-inhaling reprobate.

And so, utterly chastened, you lie back on the couch, wondering if the left side of your head has actually swollen to be twice the size of the right side, or if it only feels that way, and reach for a Ho Ho. Lots of vitamins in Ho Ho’s, you’ve heard.

Yesterday, I bought one of those new DVD players with built-in Crap Detection^© technology. These things are wonderful: whenever you put in a DVD, they automatically scan its contents to determine how crappy it is, and then warn you if its crapiosity rises above a certain level.

To test it, I put in a copy of The Matrix, and it ran all the way through without a hitch. Damn that’s a good movie. So then I put in The Matrix: Reloaded, and, immediately, this popped up on the screen:

Warning: This movie is extremely crappy. Its weak facsimile of a plot serves as nothing more than a pegboard on which to pin several over-the-top action sequences and a steady stream of meandering pseudo-philosophical babble. There is a great deal of poor dialog posing as profundity, and a lot of staring. However, Trinity is still hot. Proceed with caution.

It allowed me to play the DVD, but every so often the word “Crap” superimposed itself on the action, just to remind me of what I was watching.

Next, I went out to Blockbuster’s and rented Steel Magnolias and stuck it in. This time, the player seemed a little more concerned:

Warning: This movie is crappy beyond description. It assaults the viewer with a host of irritating characters and attempts to sweeten them by making them quirky, perky, and/or sassy. It wants to be a funny inspiring tragicomedy, but what it actually winds up being is a brain-smashingly dull two-hour long public service announcement about the importance of female bonding in the face of adversity. If you insist on watching this steaming pile of shit — and we can only assume that you are doing so because you lost a bet, or are trying to impress a girlfriend — then you have our condolences.

Pretty impressive. But I was beginning to suspect that this Crap Detection technology was nothing more than a large database of cranky movie reviews tied to some DVD title recognition. I needed to test it on something recent, so I popped in a bootleg version of Troy that I got from a friend in China. The player reacted immediately. The screen turned red, and said:

You have got to be kidding me. Look, you may have two and a half hours to waste on mindless desecrations of ancient Greek literature, but I don’t. This movie is just another ridiculous testosterone-soaked action flick, men killing men for no good reason, except here they do it three thousand years ago with swords, wearing not much besides their golden-brown skin and their tiresome, bulging pretty-boy muscles. If you have homoerotic fantasies about ancient Greek warriors, I’m sure there are magazines out there that can cater to your needs. So get this piece of crap out of me and fling it back into the roiling tornado of shit from whence it came.

Wow. The reviews haven’t been great, but I thought that was a little harsh. I kind of like Brad Pitt, so I hit play anyway. Nothing happened. I hit play again, and the word NO appeared on the screen, in big red letters. So I kept hitting it until the screen said FINE and the movie started. But I couldn’t watch for long. The DVD player kept emitting farting noises whenever Brad Pitt said anything, and it replaced the soaring martial battle music with looney tunes jingles, and, worst of all, it removed the heads from all the women — including Helen of Troy — and replaced them with George W Bush’s. I gave up.

Next, I tried Flash Gordon, surely one of the worst movies of all time. I was kind of looking forward to seeing what the player had to say about this one. But it didn’t say anything at all. The screen remained blank. Presently, I heard some gnashing, gnawing, buzzsaw sounds coming from inside the DVD player, and it began to shudder and whine. The sound got louder and louder. I stepped back, thinking I’d tripped some extreme-crap-induced self-destruct mode, when the tray slid open, and hundreds of tiny pieces of DVD spilled down onto carpet. It had eaten Flash Gordon. Apparently some movies are so bad that they have to destroyed, for the good of the country. I scooped up the remains and poured them into the case, hoping the guys at Blockbuster wouldn’t notice.

There was one more feature I wanted to try. It’s called Crap Detection Smart Play^© — instead of warning you about a movie’s crapiness, the player just cuts all of the worst parts out, showing only the non-crappy stuff. I turned it on and put in Titanic. “Smart Play Active”, it said, and zoomed me forward past the credits. I watched selected cuts from the the first twenty minutes or so, basically Leonardo getting on the ship, and then the action hiccoughed and we were down in the hold, and Kate Winslet was naked. That lasted for a couple of minutes, and the player hiccoughed again, and the ship was sinking. I watched it go down for half and hour, and then the movie cut off just as we were about to zoom forward in time to that old woman and her ridiculous framing story. Two and a half hours of crappy movie reduced to forty minutes of pure quality. Not bad at all.

They have Crap Detection TVs, too, but I don’t think I’ll get one, at least not for another week or two. The American Idol finale is right around the corner, and I cannot miss it: I heard Clay Aiken might make an appearance, and that Paula Abdul is just so damn adorable.

Hey, we all need a little crap in our lives.

Yesterday an Israeli tank and helicopter gunship fired on a group of protestors in the Rafah refugee camp. There were about a thousand people in the crowd, marching on a sealed-off housing project called Tel Sultan to protest the occupying government’s recent rash of house demolitions. Ten people died, three children among them. Dozens were wounded. The army professed deep dismay, and said that all those tank rounds had been a terrible mistake, warning shots gone awry, as had, presumably, the supporting missiles fired from the gunship. An investigation is, of course, underway.

The United States decided to grow a minor, vestigial backbone, and abstained from the UN vote to censure Israel for these latest murders. Not vote against it, mind you, because the resolution failed to mention anything about the need for those wily, defenseless Palestinians to stop provoking the armored might of the American-sponsored Israeli military. Abstention as a moral stand. How sad.

It seems to me that the entire dialog about the Palestinian crisis is being conducted through the rabbithole, in some strange and highly stylized Alice-in-Wonderlandic dimension, where the basic facts about the situation no longer apply. But the facts are there, though necessarily buried under years of bloody history and a mass of caveats. There’s no doubt that the Palestinian suicide bombers who have killed so many Israeli civilians, women and children included, are as morally culpable for their atrocities as the Israeli army is for theirs; or that the corrupt reign of Yasser Arafat during the years of relative peace in the region was an unmitigated disaster, and a real tragedy for the Palestinian people; or that the Arab dictatorships who profess to be friends of the Palestinians use their cause as a rallying cry to both stoke their peoples’ anger and keep it directed outward, at Israel and the United States, rather than inward, at their own governments, where it belongs. All that’s true.

But here’s the ur-truth, the one that started it all: the Palestinians are an occupied and displaced people, driven out of their homeland by a British decree, a 1948 United Nations resolution, and several subsequent, ruinous wars; and then hounded into smaller and smaller enclaves by the concerted efforts of the Israeli government. Today, the offspring’s offspring of the original refugees are growing up in squalid camps in surrounding countries, or are crammed into shrinking parcels of their own land, without friends, hope, or recourse. Their plight is worse than desperate.

This is what it’s all about, really. When our leaders, and the punderati, express amazement that the Palestinians are so reluctant to accept a peace agreement that would effectively “give” them a chunk of their own real-estate, carved into minor Bantustans by a warren of Israeli settlements and their attendant military retinues; when we casually poopoo the notion that refugees expelled from their homes over fifty years ago should be allowed to return to them — it’s as if 1948, and the steady succession of UN resolutions ordering Israel to get the hell out of occupied Palestinian territory, never happened.

Instead, this is what Bush is throwing his support behind: a largely amoral and savagely belligerent former general who designed the settlement strategy that has been steadily chipping away at what little the Palestinians have left for the past thirty years; a policy of systematic repression and denial of basic human rights, lately posing as a fight against “terrorism”; and a concerted effort to eradicate the hopes of millions of displaced human beings. Sadly, Kerry’s no better. He’s enthusiastically supported Bush’s support of Sharon and all his outrages. In fact, the only time our leaders complain at all about this, it’s in the context of not pissing off the Arabs any more than we already have. In this view, the lives of Palestinians are, explicitly and remorselessly, pawns in a high-stakes geopolitical game, with all the rights and privileges that apply to pawns thereto.

The radical fringe of the Palestinian resistance (a fringe that seems, at times, distressingly large) still calls for a destruction of the state of Israel in its entirety. That’s ridiculous, of course, and irrational, and counter-productive, and immoral. Level-headed, moderate Palestinians simply want peace, and a land of their own, separate from and independent of Israeli and its military. That dream is dying, and has been for many decades, throwing itself about in increasingly frenzied death-throes, like a bad actor.

The Palestinian people have endured years of mistreatment at the hands of pretty much everyone: Israel, Britain, Jordan, Egypt, the United States … even their own Palestinian Authority. But they march, anyway, and struggle and suffer and die for the basic human rights that their oppressors — and their oppressors supporters — take for granted.

Update: In reading over this just now, I note with dismay that it is precisely the kind of frenzied, emotional screed that has done so little to help the Palestinian cause over the years, and so much to hurt it. Thankfully, there are cooler minds out there, on both sides of the conflict, working on actual solutions. Here, for instance.

I think I’ll leave this up here, though. None of what I’ve written is untrue; though it is, perhaps, unhelpful.

Mitt Romney, the governmer of the Massachusetts, apparently horrified that his state has become the first in the nation to sanction and perform gay marriages, is now strictly enforcing a moldy old 1913 law that proscribes marriages for out-of-state couples whose home states would not have allowed them to get married. This effectively bans non-Massachusetts non-heterosexuals from taking their vows in Massachusetts.

The law was originally intended to discourage interracial marriage. I think that says it all.

Scribblers take note! Karim has just released a cool new hyperfiction site that makes it easy — and, dare I say, fun — to create collaborative online stories. It’s called StoryStream, and it’s open to everyone.

Getting started is easy: you just register, then go in and write a scene. Conceptually, a scene is a fragment of a story, but beyond that it’s whatever you want it to be: besides text, it can contain images, Flash animations, and — eventually — music. You create a story by stringing together a bunch of scenes to make a narrative; you create variations on a story by forking those scenes into one or more substreams. This allows the action to diverge based on the whim of the author, or of any readers who decide they would like to take it in an entirely different direction. Everyone can contribute to everything. It’s free love, baby.

But it’s more than that. StoryStream has a built-in ratings system that not only allows readers to tell the various authors what they think of their stuff, but also makes it possible for the software to call out the most popular streams, and the most popular paths through those streams. Which means that StoryStream, once it gets a critical mass of users, essentially runs itself: a dynamic, self-organizing library/trove that relies on its patrons to tell each other what’s good.

There are already hyperfiction sites out there, certainly; but, since they’re open to anyone and everyone, their stories quickly disintegrate into mangled multifarious jumbles of varying quality. StoryStream solves this problem, in true Internet fashion, not by limiting participation, but by judging it — or, rather, by allowing the community to judge it. The jumble will always be there if you’re interested, but the software sorts wheat from chaff so that casual readers who just want to enjoy a good yarn can call up the “best” path through a popular stream and read it, start to finish. It’s a strict meritocracy, and everyone can participate.

As I said, ultra-cool. But don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

I’m reading Dune again, and find myself completely blown away by its prodigious awesomeness. The action has, so far, focused pretty tightly on the major characters, but I’m already feeling the massive, epic scope of the world that Herbert has created here. He has that admirable ability to say big things by talking about small things; his prose is a kind of reverse fractal wherein we glimpse the patterns of the universe in small descriptions, quiet conversations, private heartbreak. When you’re building a world, the details are as important as the broad strokes; you can tell that Herbert spent a long time sweating the details in Dune, and nowhere more than in the names he gives his people.

A good name makes a character stick in your head, but a great name manages to contain that character, draws an onomastic portrait with the expressive, Spartan brushstrokes of Japanese landscape art. The people in Dune have names like Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, Thufir Howat; names that roll nicely off the tongue, and manage to be alien, cool and pleasant at the same time. Clay Sails often laments the unfortunate propensity of hack fantasy writers to use apostrophe-laden surnames in their efforts to sound exotic and different. A’Quali’DingDang the Drow, for example, or Laara’d'd’d'd’garaeeeeen the Half-Troll: names that are all flash and no bang, icing and no cake. When I hear Gurney Haleck, I think of a spry, seasoned man of action with a sly streak and a silver tongue; Duncan Idaho puts me in mind of a straightforward, honorable adventurer type, placid and passionate by turns. A’QualiDingDang, on the other hand, is just hard to say.

Naming things is an incredibly important task. Adam, the Christian Ur-Namer, got to name everything. That’s a huge responsibility, and I’m glad he took it seriously. If Adam had been a hack fantasy writer, then we’d be calling trees T’rreequ’ars, badgers would be Baxdjer’toxas, and and the Sun would be Lord Xol. And that would just be silly.

Back in the heady days of the turn of the century, in the thick of the 2000 presidential campaign, I remember looking at the person that the Republicans had produced to lead their ticket and breathing a sigh of relief. He was so obviously out of his depth, so clearly unsuited to be president of anything, much less the entire country, that I assumed Al Gore pretty much had it made. Michael Moore said it best while he was out on the stump, campaigning with Ralph Nader: “This lectern,” he said, pointing to the lectern, “has a better chance of getting elected than George W Bush.”

Alas, he was wrong. We were all horribly wrong. We underestimated the resolve of the Republican party faithful, the ruthlessness of the political operatives that Bush surrounded himself with, the willingness of voters to look the other way, the country’s deep partisan divide. One thing we didn’t underestimate, however, was Bush’s intelligence. That would be very hard to do. The man just isn’t very smart.

But not dumb either, I don’t think. I’ve reluctantly come to believe in his politically savvy: in his ability to effectively leverage a strident anti-intellectualism in his effort to capture the hearts and … hearts of the country. He used his doltish rep to good advantage in the campaign, emerging from debates that he clearly lost as a sort of winner because he managed to occasionally put together a complete sentence, and didn’t at any point collapse in tears onstage. “I may occasionally mangle a syll - a - ble or two,” he said during one of them, cracking that fratboy grin we’ve come to know so well. He’s gone on to mangle a lot more than syllables, of course. Our country’s environmental and labor policies, our relations with other countries, our economy, our standing in the world are in tatters, just three years after the apocalypse of his election. It takes more than blatant stupidity to accomplish such wanton destruction in so short a time. It takes targeted stupidity.

The whole Bush method reminds me of a stand-up routine I heard a long time ago. “Yeah, I’m kind of stupid,” said the comedian. “Always have been. But it’s really not that bad. Gets me out of a lot of jams. Whenever I really screw something up, and some guy looks and me as says ‘What are you, stupid?’, I just shrug and say, ‘Yeah.’” This is why the press corps doesn’t seem to talk much about Bush’s aphasic, content-free extemporaneous speeches, why they always give him a pass after his disastrous (and rare) press conferences, why they don’t highlight his studied, lazy disregard for good, non-ideological, fact-based policy. “Yeah, we know,” they say. “What’s new?”

Jacob Weisberg has written a wonderful column for Slate analyzing Bush’s dumbness strategy:

Having chosen stupidity as rebellion, he stuck with it out of conformity. The promise-keeper, reformed-alkie path he chose not only drastically curtailed personal choices he no longer wanted, it also supplied an all-encompassing order, offered guidance on policy, and prevented the need for much actual information. Bush’s old answer to hard questions was, “I don’t know and, who cares.” His new answer was, “Wait a second while I check with Jesus.” … This Oedipally induced ignorance expresses itself most dangerously in Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. Dubya polished off his old man’s greatest enemy, Saddam, but only by lampooning 41’s accomplishment of coalition-building in the first Gulf War. Bush led the country to war on false pretenses and neglected to plan the occupation that would inevitably follow. A more knowledgeable and engaged president might have questioned the quality of the evidence about Iraq’s supposed weapons programs. One who preferred to be intelligent might have asked about the possibility of an unfriendly reception. Instead, Bush rolled the dice. His budget-busting tax cuts exemplify a similar phenomenon, driven by an alternate set of ideologues. As the president says, we misunderestimate him. He was not born stupid. He chose stupidity. Bush may look like a well-meaning dolt. On consideration, he’s something far more dangerous: a dedicated fool.

One of the big buzzwords of the Bush presidency, and of his campaign for a second term, has been “steadfastness.” No wishy-washiness here, no agonized debate, sifting of facts, contemplation of possible repercussions. Just a strident forging forward, an admirable “resolve”. The secret to this kind of resolve, of course, is an unwillingness to contemplate alternatives, a surrender to blind ideology. It’s hard to deny the political soundness of this approach; it got Bush where he is today. The problem is, it got the country where it is today, too.

The incursion alarms blare along the corridors of the Maze, and, just beneath them, I hear the breathy hiss of our sanctum’s blast door sliding open.

He’s back. The monster is back.

Blinky stirs beside me, and then his eyes saucer open and he’s up and rushing the door, skimming his pleats across the floor. He glows crimson, a hard angry color, and his voice, when it comes, comes hard and breathless. “Breach!” he screams, to no one in particular. “Fucking breach motherfucker! Breach! Breach!“

I sigh, and look over at Pinky and Clyde. They’re just coming awake, their eyes still thick with sleep. Pinky’s coat looks a little dingy, as usual; it’s an occupational hazard of being pink. Incursion pursuit is hard, dirty work.

By the time I look back, Blinky is already out the door. He makes a hard right and disappears down the corridor, screaming incoherently. Of all the ghosts I’ve worked with, none have enjoyed their work as much as Blinky. The sameness of it, the pain, the futility — none of it gets to him. He loves the chase, pure and simple.

I float out after him, and pause, listening. I can hear the wokka wokka wokka of the monster’s progress through the Maze, but it seems to come from everywhere at once. I guess, and turn left. The walls stream by, blue and featureless, glowing with a mild phosphorescence. I’ve been traveling these narrow corridors, skimming just over the surface of this jetblack floor, for nearly thirty years now. I know them by heart, by sight, by smell.

The corridor turns left and I follow it, silently counting the pod seeds as I pass over them. So far, all there. The monster hasn’t been down this way yet, apparently, but it won’t be long. He’s grown ruthlessly efficient over the years, able to ingest the contents of an entire Maze — two hundred and forty of our unborn children — in less than two minutes. Not if I have something to say about it, rings a voice in the back of my mind, but it’s an old, tired voice, a voice worn down to a shallow nub of its former enthusiasm by years of hard experience.

A right, then another left, and now I’m in the West Long Corridor, one of two that stretch North/South across almost the entire length maze. He’s been here. Most of the pods are gone, and I see glowing spots of ectoplasmic gore where he’s been sloppy in his consumption, where the vital fluids of our children came squirting out of his great maw as he ground them into pulp. The old rage kindles in my breast, and I pick up my pace. I am a incursion specialist; I contributed none of my seed to these eggs, and never will. But, nevertheless, these are my children.

I come to an intersection, look left, and see him, barreling towards me.

He’s huge, an eyeless, featureless yellow orb that fills the entire height and width of the corridor. His mouth opens and closes rhythmically as he skims down the corridor, swallowing pods. Each disappears into him with a sickening crunch, and I feel the anger and the hatred geyser up out of their places within me, fill me utterly. He is an insatiable yellow sociopath, says the voice, no longer whispering: shouting, now, raving. He must be stopped. He must be killed. I bank left and barrel towards him, moving as fast as I can. Maybe, just maybe, we can end this now.

But he’s fast. Too fast. He takes a hard turn and disappears down the south corridor, and, as he moves, I see that Blinky is close on his heels. “Corner!” he screams. “We’ve got him. Head him off!” I hang a left and then another, U-turning back the way I came, making for the furthest extremity of the Maze’s Southwest quadrant. If Blinky actually manages to hound him into that corner, then he’ll find my coming at him from the other direction. Trapped. Nowhere to go. Dead.

But a nagging sense of foreboding has begun to gnaw at me. There’s something wrong, here. I can’t say what, but a thin mist of disquiet has settled over the bloodlust, and suddenly this plan seems like a mistake. A very bad mistake.

I take the last left just as he appears around the corner, Blinky close behind. We have him now. He is in a narrow corridor, caught between us, with no avenue of escape. Blinky lets out a strangled scream of triumph, and I feel the joy rising within me as well. We’ve have him. We really have him.

But then I notice a large orb, floating in the corner, pulsing brightly in the uncertain light of the corridor. It seems familiar, somehow, and then more than familiar: terrifying. I can’t say why, but the sight of that orb — that Energizer, says the inner voice, suddenly robbed of its righteous anger, suddenly small and tremulous — calls up an atavistic fear in the deepest reaches of my heart.

The yellow beast dashes toward the orb and swallows it. A wave of cold runs down my body, and I feel myself changing. Something is happening to Blinky, too. He’s turned completely blue: not my shade of blue, not the pleasant cyan that used to turn all the girls’ heads back in school, but a dark, unpleasant blue, a blue that speaks of fear, and weakness, and death. I look down at myself. I am the same color.

I stop, and spin around, and run. I can neither explain nor condone this sudden cowardice, but that makes it no less real. Even the sudden scream behind me, the high, strangled voice that sounds only vaguely like Blinky’s, does not slow my pace. I flee down the corridors, taking turns at random, wanting nothing more than to get away.

But the beast is right behind me. I can hear its hard, toothless gums slamming together, smell its hot, fetid breath on my skirts, sense its hissing progress. It all comes back to me as I flee: the energizers planted in the maze by whatever agency sent this yellow horror, their ruinous effect on us, our inexplicable inability to remember their existence after our death; and then the death itself. The pain. Oh great Ghost, the pain.

Ahead of me, a warp door: if I can get through it, across to the other side of the Maze, make a few quick turns, then perhaps I can hold it off until this terrible fear, this abominable weakness, wears off.

I am nearly there. I can feel the cool, stale air of the teleportation void, smell the faint ozone stench of recent use. The first dim embers of hope kindle within me. I will make make it through, I will escape; and, later on, when I have found my courage again, I will come after this round, vile creature like nothing it has ever …

Its jaw clamps into my backside, then. I feel the pain as a sudden numbness, followed by unspeakable, unbearable agony. A scream rips free of me like a sentient creature, like a small part of me trying to escape. The monster chews his way through my body, and I feel it disintegrate, collapse into itself, and perish.

I am no longer.

And yet … I am. I feel myself rise above the scene, floating free; the color has drained out of the world, and everything — the walls, the beast, the remains of my corporeal body — is flat and colorless. Whatever I have become moves rapidly through the maze, away from the scene of my murder, on invisible, spectral winds. I am caught up in the motion, powerless to do anything but watch, and wait.

The winds bear me back to the center of the Maze, and drop me at my post. I lie there, helpless, until a new body begins to knit itself together around me. It is like being born again, a pain different from that of death, but no less intense. In a matter of moments, I am whole.

I look around, and find Blinky, newly encased in a fresh red shell, rising and hurrying toward the door. “Let’s go!” he screams. “He’s on his way to the Northwest Quadrant. Pinky and Clyde have him cornered. Move, motherfucker!”

I gather my wits about me as best I can and follow him out, exultant again. The beast is cornered; we have him now. It’s only a matter of time.

But there is a faint trill of disquiet in my mind as I hurry through the Maze, and I wonder at it: a feeling that there is something in that quadrant that will thwart our efforts. That the chase is not over; that it will go on for a very, very long time.

That it will go on forever.