Exotic Energies, Inc.

Exotic Energies, Inc.

by

Bobby Derie

Negg rose from behind his desk to shake my hand and welcome me. He offers the dime tour, which I cordially accept, and he leads us through the narrow cubicle-lanes of the office space, introducing people a cluster and a department at a time by their job and function. Here Logistics, and there Contracts, all the normal operations of a small business growing larger. Everyone smiles and nods, key-cards dangling from belt or lanyard. In fifteen minutes we’ve gone through most of the office workers, and Negg swipes his card at an unmarked door, leading us on toward the work area.

The factory space is large and mostly empty, vast cables looped and bunched feeding into the great machines, small piles of packing material and obsolete equipment set up in out-of-the-way corners. A group of small blue men bask in the heat of a bright green filament, obviously customers examining their wares. Negg calls them Owens or something, but hurries me along toward a pile of plastic crates. He clips a grounding strap onto one wrist and pops the locks. Inside, lying on the charcoal grey foam padding and shedding a pale blue-white light, lay a thunderbolt.

Zero point five million joules, I hear Negg explain, in a region of shaped, highly charged space. One of the company’s earliest and still best sellers. Negg reached down and picked it up out of the cradle, light as anything. The ‘bolt was nearly massless, he explained, the standing wave bouncing back and forth within the spatial pocket, the charge unable to cross the weird physics barrier that defined the region until outside forces provided a path. Light would leak through, a few lumens worth, but it still has a projected useful lifespan of thousands of years. Negg lays it back down carefully, closes the case and unclips the groundstrap. Old technology, but still potent.

Up above, Negg pointed out the chunks of frozen sunshine hanging from the metal railings on the ceiling in place of lamp. Another of the company’s early products. Exotic energies were something of a misnomer, says Negg. Energy is just a measure of something unseen, a quantum of measurement. He goes on about how those outside the industry perceive energy as some fluid or force that drives things, and of even talented engineers who talk of solar energy when they mean sunlight, and chemical energy when the talk of the potential in a glass of water. Then Negg showed me the machines. The subatomic smashers.

Great coils disappeared into the cement wall, probably the tail end of the rest of the context. A sole engineer or technician monitored the screens, the absurdly simple and rough graphics listing particles created, captured, and combined. An engineering tool, so advanced that no ergonomic programmer had ever been allowed near it to pretty up the interface, since the public would never see it. Negg introduced Lippan, one of the main energy mechanic engineers, and asked him to explain his work.

The main forces of our universe, Lippan says, are transmitted via subatomic particles—the gauge bosons of gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong forces. One method of creating artificial forces is to combine these subatomic force carriers into custom composite particles. Lippan showed his watch, an old thing with a clear carapace to expose the faint lines of the active circuit, glowing blue with Cherenkov radiation. A custom “energy” with properties mostly similar to electricity, he explained, sold to a government that wished a national monopoly on certain technologies by way of a proprietary power source.

Negg and I let Lippan get back to work, and seeing that the Owens had left, took me over toward the green filament. It is, Negg explains, one of their biggest and most complex jobs—saving only ones like the classified Project Caliburn, that required Exotic Energies to contract with a material-based firm, like their sometimes-rival sister company Exotic Matters, Ltd. The green filament was a charge holder for the proprietary “energy,” which was fairly standard, but the buyers had also desired a specific form of neural interface to allow the user to control the release of the energy from the charge container and to self-program the parameters of the “energy” volume in real-time. It was a serious challenge—the physics-spaces and thresholds for the frozen sunlight and thunderbolts were all created under laboratory conditions, and no one had ever tried to produce such effects in the field. I heard Negg chuckle as he looked forward to the challenge, and probably the many hours of billing still to come on the project.

Finally, Negg and I strolled toward the ray displays. Rayguns continued to be Exotic Energies’ bread and butter, making up the bulk of their sales—both to governments and individuals. I pick up a small, silver-finned field transmitter with a tapering flange that glowed brightly with a full charge, admiring the workmanship. Negg takes it from my unresisting hands, and with practiced ease field-strips the device, showing the basic workings. Each ray is more or less a variation on the company’s patented E/N-wave. In its most basic form, the E-ray is invisible, the composite subparticles barely interacting with the four major forces, and almost completely harmless, but with a wave-nature similar to electromagnetism. Moving E-ray charge particles give rise to a standing N-field, which gives forth to an E-field, and so on. By programming specific field modulations, Negg explains, Exotic Energies’ engineers can essentially target the E-rays to specific macrostructures—certain atomic structures, or complex molecules like DNA and RNA, for example—to apply force directly to one category of target but no other.

As he finishes the explanation, Negg re-assembles the weapon, pointing the raygun at me. See for yourself, I hear him say, and for a moment me world goes red.

###

Getting Older Every Day

Getting Older Every Day

by

Bobby Derie

She frowned into the mirror. Hands pinched and prodded at the small of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, the slight budding swells that would one day be breasts, the tuft of fine, pale down above her slit.

At first she thought it was her, something she’d done. He hadn’t been the same in bed, wasn’t as ready when he came home, hard like he used to be. She’d tried things to get his interest—her mother’s lipstick, a spot of blush. The pigtails, the baby talk, that had got him going again, it had been good that night.

Until she saw him eyeing the girl across the street. Ten years old if a day, chubby with baby fat in places, in her little dress. He had been staring out the window, caught up in it as she bent over, thoughtlessly flashing her little ass to the world.

She didn’t know how these things worked, no one told her, but he had shown her some things, and she’d figured a few others out on her own. He had tried to hide it, but she knew it was something about her age that excited him, made the breath catch and the cheeks flush as he stared down at her. It hurt, sometimes, but it was good. She liked to remember the good times. How he treated her after. Dinner out, little prizes, the way he did things for her, the smile on his face and in his voice. She didn’t want to lose all that, not to the little fat thing across the street.

The closet had old clothes, too small for her. Little girls clothes, only a few months or years old. Perfect. She struggled into them, tight on her body, pressing down where her breasts were coming out, covering up the ugly hairs. Maybe she should take his razor, and shave down there.

She was waiting for him when he came home, in the clothes of a younger girl, eyes painted like a whore. Her voice was high-pitched, sweet, young as she could make it.

“Hello Humbert.”

“Hello Lolita.”

###

Red Honey

Red Honey

by

Bobby Derie

County Galway, Month of the Aphid

The great scarab pushed the dying dung-ember of the sun into the western ocean, limning the dead tree. The grass swayed in the breeze, a few purple flowers among the heather, and John Magnus leaned on his axe, smoked his cigarillo and looked out over the waters at Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer as the gloaming came on. There were no animals about—not the hum of insect or the small shiver through the undergrowth of animals. The grass was unkempt, as no farmer hereabouts would let their flocks graze here, even by day, and the nearest farmhouse was abandoned with hasty, deep-dug graves, and their neighbors farther off than that. The cunning man chewed the end of his tobacco and spat it out, throwing the rest away.

“Boy,” the cunning man said, “bring the stuff.”

The lad was ten years if small for his age, or younger besides, and struggled under the bag like a veteran caddy. Together they painted their necks and arms and ankles with a greasy oil that smelled of garlic and dogberries, which is called the witchbane in England and Scotland, and put on heavy bags about their boots, thick leather gloves, and strange veiled hats. The cunning man said little to the boy through all of this, but double-checked the boy’s knots to make sure the laces were tight, and no skin showed. Once bedecked, the night was nearly on them, and the boy filled a small lantern with kerosene and lemongrass oil while the man circled the tree, running a hand over the dry, peeling bark before stopping a certain bulge where once had healed a grievous wound.

“Here’s the spot. Bring the light in, boy.”

The cunning man did not swing the axe, but held it up by the head and dug into the crumbly wood until a chunk of it fell inward. Then he lodged the iron in the hole and pulled, ripping away a great shingle of rotten wood, the size of a breastplate. By now the boy had the lantern lit and starting to smoke, and raised the lamp over his head ‘til it was level with the cunning man’s chest, and by the reddish light they looked at what horror may lie within.

At first, the boy mistook it for a mud dauber’s hive, for it was thin and dry and brown like wasp-paper, organic and curled in on itself over a web of twigs. Then he made out the shape of the skull, the teeth absent save for the two great long, sharp canines. The hive did not buzz, but seemed to hum and vibrate so that the boy felt it along with the pounding in his chest, and despite the summer’s heat he had to clamp his teeth together to keep them from chattering.

But now John Magnus had put aside the axe and took out a great thick-bladed silver knife with a black handle, and tore it to the right of the breast bone, causing a great crack in the chest cavity—and then the cunning man reached in with both hands and pulled the two sides apart. The outside of the thing was ashen, grey and brown, but inside it was damp and dark and vibrantly red. Pale things crawled and flew and danced in the air, swarming around John Magnus’ hands and over him. The boy nearly dropped the lantern as they came pouring out of the corpse’s mouth, lazing through the air. One landed on his outstretched hand, and the boy was glad it was gloved. He studied the strange thing—like a honeybee, but its fur was alternating stripes of white and black, and the pale thin stinger was a needle of glass that dug ineffectually at the heavy leather.

John Magnus came out with a great chunk of something in his hands, and the frenzy of the swarm increased, so that the boy could feel the pounding subaural hum in his temples now. The cunning man showed the prize to the boy—a vast chunk of scarlet honeycomb, each little brown cell red with blood. The cunning man had described what it would look like to the boy—at St. Alban’s was an apiary where a corpse had been sliced up and fitted in shelves, to ease the insect thing’s works—but this was the first that he had seen it, and he wondered a little at the dried meat that hung off it, and the thin curves of bone that were once a man’s ribs.

The red honeycomb disappeared into a satchel, and Magnus turned back to the work, hacking into the corpse to harvest more. The pale bees swarmed silently, but the smoke confused them, and no unprotected skin presented itself. In half an hour the thing was done, and then the cunning man motioned the boy in close with a flick of his knife. Pointing with the dull blade, he outlined the still-wet heart of the corpse, slick with stolen blood—the thin, half-dried veins that the bees had colonized and drunk from, to their doom, and the poor dry litter of pupae which had once been the bee’s young, drained of vital fluids and left to rot and dry. With care, the cunning man pressed the dull knife into the pliant flesh of the heart, bringing forth a spurt of bright red arterial blood that dripped into the mess below. The pale bees swarmed at the wound, but Magnus forced the organ open to reveal the nymph—no larger than the boy’s thumb, the body pale and translucent, almost never formed, but with horrible black spots for its eyes.

The silver blade slashed through the queen bee, crushing her and the heart against the bone of the spine. Then the humming ceased, and the boy saw that all the bees lay on the ground and still, and no more did the heart look like a living thing, but only a piece of meat—as a bull’s heart might look on the counter in a butcher’s shop. John Magnus wiped the blade on his trousers and sang a little song to the Bee King, who lived in the lower reaches of the Nile in the olden days and harvested the first of the red honey, and the great uses he made of it. The boy brought the lantern forward and upended it, pouring the smoking oil on the corpse, and it was not long before the whole of the dead chunk of wood was a merry bonfire. John Magnus looked on the blaze and took the veiled hat off his head, and the boy could not read the emotions in the cunning man’s gaze and the set of his face.

They turned their faces from the burning tree and the islands and the sea, and walked back into the night.

###

Balancing the Book

Balancing the Book

by

Bobby Derie

Jim stood out in the hall, holding the box with his laptop and few personal possessions from his desk, and waited for his turn to be fired. Inside, Old Man Detwiller was talking to someone. They made a pair: Detwiller carried his years well, hair silver-white, clean and immaculate, in a bespoke suit with real gold ornaments at cuff, wrist, and collar; his opposite weathered and shrunken with age, his suit hanging off him like the half-molted skin of a reptile, a single blue gem stuck in his left ear. Jim couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could parse it. Money talk of some sort, of course, but it didn’t sound good.

“How much are we over?” Detwiller asked.

“Five million, if the Greeks don’t get us.” the lizard answered.

“Can we change the spread?”

“There’s twenty-five million quid in already, Harry.” Jim had never heard anyone call the Old Man by his first name. “You change the spread, at the very least it’s a pull-out, and then the punters’ll be dicey, and that’ll kill it. No, we can’t change the spread.”

“Then you had better find the five million, Martin.”

“Might could, if I had a bit of help.”

“Right. James! Get in here.”

Jim slipped into Old Man Detwiller’s office like a schoolboy sent to the head office. He stood half a head taller than the shrunken old man, and broader at the shoulders than Detwiller, but both of them had age and authority on him. The lizard barely glanced in Jim’s direction.

“James here has a penchant for gambling, which has gotten him into a bit of financial difficulty.” Detwiller explained. “We were willing to overlook it until it began to affect his work.”

“Is that so then?” the lizard said, turning now to get a better look at Jim. The old man appraised him like an untried racehorse. “How’s that, then? What’d he do?”

“He operated a betting pool among the younger members of the firm, on whether a certain weekly index would rise or fall. Unfortunately, he lost too much at the racetrack last week, when a falling index unexpectedly rallied. He had to come to me for an advance on his pay to cover it.”

The lizard snorted. “Amateur mistake. Good lesson to be learned, if it doesn’t happen twice.” The lizard appeared to consider, and it dawned on Jim that he might not be fired. “Alright, I’ll take him. We’ve got a week left. We can maybe do four million in a week, between the two of us, if he works fast. I still think we should have some insurance, though.”

“I don’t want to over-leverage ourselves. I’ll authorize half a million cash for losses—anything beyond that, and it’s your commission and your paycheck.”

“Right you are, Harry.” The lizard bobbed his head and moved to leave, motioning Jim to follow. They descended through a spiraling back stairwell, until the modern façade gave way to brick and mortar covered with gritty white paint, wires and pipes bolted along the walls to a small wooden door marked by a sign: DERIVATIVES. The lizard waved a card at it, and some internal mechanism cachunked; the door opened to reveal a small, tidy two-room office that might have been originally been a janitorial storage unit. The lizard seated himself behind a desk older than Jim was, and waved a hand at a red velvet chair that looked like a refugee from a Chinese whore house.

“James, was it?”

“Jim, sir.”

“Marty. Call me Marty. Welcome to Derivatives, Jim. We operate a little different from how you expect, and we’ve got a hard deadline or its our asses and Harry’ll be driving the lawnmower. So: tell me what you know about derivatives.”

Jim set his crap down at his feet and cleared his throat.

“Basically, a contract to buy a certain commodity at a certain time at a certain price. If you’re lucky, you buy a lot of something at below market value, then can turn it around and make a good return. If you’re not lucky, you’ve agreed to buy something for more than it’s currently worth, and make a loss. The name comes because the value of the contract is derived from that of the commodity.”

“Good enough. The thing to remember is that a derivative is a kind of bet, see? And you know bets, or so Harry said upstairs. The thing about gambling is, if you want to guarantee making money on a bet, you have to run the game. So what we do down here is make books.”

Marty reached down and picked up a ledger from somewhere Jim couldn’t see, and laid it out before him: neat piles of numbers ran down both sides of the page, in blue and green ink.

“Now, this is an old-school book. Nowadays I’ve got me spreadsheets, but it’s the same thing. This book was for gold, then offered people to buy in, here.” A crooked nail-bitten finger indicated the column in blue ink. “And we had people that wanted to short gold, here.” The finger crawled across the page to the column in green ink. Jim’s forehead crinkled.

“So we were betting for the price of gold to rise and fall at the same time?”

“No son. The punters are doing the betting. What we’re doing is taking the vigorish—a commission on the monies at stake. No matter which way the price goes, we get our cut. But d’you notice something about this book? Study it hard for a moment.”

Jim ran his eyes over the columns of figures, then compared the totals.

“You’ve got as many customers wanting to buy gold as want to short sale gold.”

“Almost son. The profit and loss would be the same. See, let’s say that the price of gold is £400 an ounce.” The lizard dragged out a piece of scratch paper with a crude drawing of a penis on it and wrote ‘£400.’

“Now, for the short sellers we borrow the gold and sell it for them at that price, and the derivatives agree to buy it at that price. Then, when the term comes up, we buy for the short sellers and the derivatives, take our cut, and pass along the money. However much the derivatives make, the short sellers lose, and vicey-versa. It doesn’t matter to us if the price of gold goes up or down. We’ll buy and sell what we’re committed to, and use the punter’s money to do it.”

The lizard scratched out a few more numbers and showed them to Jim:

£390                                        £400                                        £410

+£10/-£10                                0/0                                           -£10/+£10

“See? The short sellers are on the left, and the derivatives are on the right. Both are buying originally at £400, and selling at the market price. If gold goes down, the shorters make money and the derivatives lose; if gold goes up, the derivatives make money and the shorters lose—but they all lose the same amount of money. So we don’t have to cover anyone, we just need to make the books balanced and they’ll cover themselves. Either way, we get our vigorish—the commission for the transactions.”

The lizard leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “Well, that’s the simple form of it, anyway. Something like this, our firm buys the gold, and then we’re buying and selling it from ourselves at market prices on behalf of the customer…the punters never see the gold, see, they just look at the prices and the money that comes into their account, and we take care of all the details. They never see any of that, most of ‘em aren’t even interested.”

“So that conversation you were having with Mr. Detwiller…” Jim said, and the Lizard dropped his eyes down to the desk and glowered.

“Aye. I made a book—barrel of oil prices—but everybody thinks the price is going up. We’ve got fifteen million quid that wants to buy, and only ten million quid worth of short-sellers. We need to balance the book, or the firm is on the line to pay out if things go the wrong way.”

Jim sat quiet for a few minutes. The lizard looked down again at the book. “I used to know a few angels that trusted my judgment, but none of ‘em will put up the whole five million, not without a hedge. Insurance or summat.”

“You don’t need insurance…” Jim said slowly “…you need to find someone else that’s doing short sales on oil and buy the contracts off them.”

The lizard pricked up his bushy eyebrows.

“Look, it’s like the bookies down at the track. If they can’t get enough marks to bet on either side of a dog, they’ll buy bets off of the other bookies. We don’t need to go fishing in a dry lake for someone who thinks oil prices are going to drop—we need to find someone with a bunch of short-sale contracts who thinks oil is going to go up. We buy up the difference and then your book is balanced.” Jim finished.

The lizard cracked a smile, revealing very small, even teeth.

“Oh son. You’ll go far in this business. Let’s make some calls.”

###

The Wrong Porn

The Wrong Porn

by

Bobby Derie

Dramatis Personae

Sam (a customer)

Queen (the shop clerk)

Jess (another customer)

Scene

[The curtain rises on a sex shop.]

[Queen is at the counter, bored. Jess is browsing the wares.]

[Enter Sam, with package.]

QUEEN.

It’ll never fit, darling. Your eyes are bigger than your bottom.

JESS.

I…it’s not for me.

QUEEN.

It never is, is it?

SAM.

Excuse me, but I was in here yesterday to pick up something from my box and…well, it’s not what I wanted.

QUEEN.

Pornography is the art of raising hopes and dashing expectations. We risk disappointment every time. What’s the problem?

SAM.

Well I had ordered…something else, and I got this instead. I don’t want this, I want what I ordered.

QUEEN.

How do you know you don’t want it? Have you tried it?

SAM.

No, I haven’t tried it! Look, there’s a girl missing a leg on the cover, a clown, and a midget!

QUEEN.

We don’t judge darling, we just sell.

JESS.

Midgets? As in, persons of smaller than average size?

SAM.

Little people, yes.

JESS.

Like dwarves?

SAM.

Exactly so. Look, I’m in the middle of something here.

JESS.

Can I take a look at that while you two are talking?

SAM.

Alright, fine. Here. Where were we?

QUEEN.

You hadn’t tried it. So you don’t know if you like it.

JESS.

This isn’t even labeled in English, it’s Russian or Elvish or something.

SAM.

I know just looking at it that I don’t like it!

QUEEN.

If you haven’t tried it then you can’t possibly know you’ll like it or not. We never quite know what we like until we try something new. I can rent you a booth in the back to try it out.

JESS.

It has donkeys in it.

SAM.

Look, I don’t want to try it. I don’t want this. I want what I ordered.

JESS.

I think its part of a series.

QUEEN.

What did you order?

[Sam mumbles under her breath.]

QUEEN.

I’m sorry darling, I didn’t catch that. Can you speak up?

[Sam leans over and whispers in Queen’s ear]

[Exit Jess.]

QUEEN.

Oh my. The one with the…?

[Queen makes a gesture toward her chest. Sam nods.]

QUEEN.

Well, we’re not really supposed to, but if you’re really not pleased with it I can do a return. Do you have the receipt?

SAM.

Yes. Thank you. Here you are.

QUEEN.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t the correct receipt.

SAM.

What? But it’s the receipt I got yesterday when I picked this up.

QUEEN.

I know, I can read the date on it, but look, the name doesn’t match.

SAM.

This is the name of what I’d actually ordered.

QUEEN.

So you did pick it up yesterday?

SAM.

No! I picked this up instead. I thought it was it. The clerk must have rung it up wrong.

QUEEN.

Well, that happens. You should really check these things before you leave. Look, I can’t refund your money without a receipt, but I can run an exchange.

SAM.

Thank you. Really. It should still be in my box.

[Sam checks the box. Enter Jess, flustered.]

JESS.

Do you have any more of this?

QUEEN.

I’ll check in the back, dear.

[Exit Queen.]

SAM.

My box is empty!

JESS.

Well, you’ve come to the right place then. Dildos are on the west wall, and there are booths in the back if the need is immediate.

SAM.

Arsefuck. This is impossible. I just want to fucking get off. It shouldn’t be this hard.

JESS.

You must be looking for something very special.

SAM.

It’s…well, it’s nothing too kinky, you know. But I like what I like, and it can be hard to find stuff. I didn’t want to order it over the internet or anything, have it delivered to the house, pay with a credit card with my name on it to one of those sites. And I got so excited waiting for it to come in…I’ve spent the last couple of weeks rubbing my legs together at the thought of it.

JESS.

Go on.

SAM.

Ew, no. Are you a pervert or something?

JESS.

Something like, yes. Although it’s not like you can really judge me now, is it? I mean, we’re both here for the same reason. It’s not even like you wandered in thinking this was a lingerie shop or something. There were no honest mistakes here. When you get right down to it, we’re after the same thing.

SAM.

No. I know what I want. I’m not…browsing and touching things just to look at them. I’ve seen you in here, before. I only come here for the one thing, and I even managed to screw that up. I think this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had at a porn store.

JESS.

I know, right? How many times have you walked in and out of here, people milling about, and nobody’s looking anyone else in the eye? Everyone giving each other the space to do their thing in private. I’ve seen a lot of people like you, who aren’t here to browse, who feel guilty if they sit and linger instead of getting their sex goods in a business-like fashion. In and out. I don’t hold with that. I think there’s pleasure to be had in every step of the experience, and like anything sensual, is worth taking your time over. And I don’t like to be judged.

SAM.

I don’t…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.

JESS.

Don’t worry about it. I think I’m going to buy this thing if the clerk ever gets back.

QUEEN.

Hello then my darlings, good news and bad news. There’s no more of that series in the back, but I found the item you were looking for earlier in the mail pile.

SAM.

Oh wonderful.

JESS.

Damn.

QUEEN.

Now, if you’ll just give me the one you got yesterday, I’ll change it out.

SAM.

Right, I gave it to…hey now, where is it?

JESS.

Oh. Yes, I must have left in the booth.

SAM.

You dirty…you didn’t. You were only gone a minute!

QUEEN.

Oh dear. Did you take it out of the packaging?

JESS.

Yes?

QUEEN.

We might have a problem then. I cannot accept a return if the product has already been opened. It’s the owner’s property.

SAM.

Oh come on! He’s the one that did it!

JESS.

Look, I feel bad about this. Let me pay you for it, and then you can buy your thing.

SAM.

Alright.

JESS.

Except I don’t have any cash on me, just my card. [To Queen] So can I pay you for it, and you give her the refund for it?

QUEEN.

I suppose. I’ll need to scan the first item again though.

SAM.

I’ll get it.

[Exit SAM.]

[Jeff hands card to Queen.]

[Enter Sam, hands package to Queen.]

[Queen counts out money on the counter, hands packages to both Jess and Sam.]

QUEEN.

There you are darlings. I hope to see you both again.

[Exeunt Jess and Sam.]

QUEEN.

Two more satisfied customers

[Enter Jess.]

JESS.

Er, I don’t quite know how to say this but…you’ve given me the wrong porn.

[CURTAIN.]

###