Climbing the rusting metal staircase outside the warehouse, stepping as quietly as possible despite the cacophony of gunfire and explosions emanating from inside, Marty checked his rifle to make sure it was properly assembled and loaded. He’d grown to distrust his senses and his memory, as everything had come to seem dreamlike and fuzzy around the edges.
    The lasting waking effect of each yawn seemed to be diminishing. Every time, he’d feel tired again several minutes later. He was able to fall asleep for brief periods but would wake up feeling even worse. The inability to escape the torment of his own body was rapidly approaching critical levels of strenuousness. His nerves felt as though they would soon flare up and burn out forever.
    One of the stairs twisted a little and gave way under his weight. He fell forward, catching himself painfully with his elbow on the next stair.
    There was a doorway at the top of the stairs. Unlike the one he’d encountered halfway along his ascent, his one was missing its door. He crept up the remaining stairs, his back pressed hard against the corrugated metal wall, and peeked cautiously around the edge of the doorway.
    At one point there had been maybe a floor or a platform or a matching stairway on the other side of the wall, but it was now just a fifty-foot drop to the first level. Inside, there seemed to be a handful of scattered people all facing away from him, and a tank of some sort. He lowered himself to his belly on the platform at the top of the stairwell, cradled his gun against his shoulder, and looked through the scope.
    Before he could even locate his target, he fell abruptly asleep.

    *

    Ben watched as one of Anna’s small missile turrets spun and centered on him. He defensively raised his right arm, despite its uselessness, and acquainted himself with the grim prospect of his own imminent mortality. He’d accepted it years ago, but now that it was within moments of taking place, he shuffled quickly once more through the stages of grief.
    Denial was silly with an array of armed missiles pointed at you, and he’d been fruitlessly trying to bargain with her for almost a day. Anger was always a given for him, as was depression, so he could skip right past those. Normally he wasn’t big on regret, but now that it really mattered he realized there were a lot of things he felt guilty about. The way he devalued his own life, for instance, whiling away the time waiting to die, lamenting his helplessness while millions of insurgents with less training than he had fought and died defending families and strangers from oppression. Instead, he’d complied with the government that had forcibly relocated his family into a guarded colony to extort a loyal military career from him. He’d slaughtered hundreds he didn’t know because they’d threatened a few that he did. But there was nothing he could do to remedy any of that now, especially as the splattered pulp he was about to become. Which brought him back to acceptance.
    There was a quiet puff as a missile rocketed toward him and unexpectedly impacted something about thirty feet above his head. A cascade of debris fell behind him, composed mostly of the tops of old storage racks that had become separated from their bottoms in the explosion. He cringed and jogged forward, but was stopped when something struck him in the back — a burning sensation more painful than anything he’d ever experienced. It moved rapidly through him, seemingly burning every cell in his body from the bottoms of his shoulder blades to his feet.
    He had barely enough time to look down at himself before everything below his rib cage and most of his left arm disappeared into a fine haze. The rapidly-deteriorating particles hung in place for a moment like a poorly-focused photograph of his body, then swirled upward and away as his unsupported upper torso fell through the cloud.
    His abbreviated spine connected with the floor, the exposed bottommost vertebra cracking a little, and he toppled backward, the back of his skull knocking lightly into the cement floor.
    For a moment, he lay completely still, watching the red mist that had once been maybe his kidney or thigh drifting lazily to the floor, a bit of it landing like a sticky dust on his face. He tried sitting after a moment, but realized after several attempts that it wasn’t going to happen. Hesitantly, he lifted his head and examined the damage he’d taken. Everything below his chest was gone, and he was likely rapidly bleeding to death. He let his head fall again and closed his eyes.
    Anna ceased fire and retracted her various armaments, and the others throughout the warehouse stopped as well. It was then that they noticed, one at a time, the remaining chunk of Ben resting atop the segment of floor that had been painted with his disintegrated organs.
    Denise rushed over to him and knelt beside him, her blue waitress outfit and eventually her socks sopping up his blood. She started to ask him what happened, but couldn’t bring herself to continue speaking after getting the first few words out.
    ”My ears are ringing,” he said, opening his eyes. His lungs were still working, which wasn’t nearly as comforting a thought when he remembered he was still bleeding profusely and short a few crucial organs.
    Denise took his remaining hand and stroked his thumb with hers. “Yeah, me too.” She sobbed a couple times and wiped away a tear with her apron, leaving a streak of blood beneath her eye.
    ”That’s not ringing,” shouted one of the NCR border guards nearby, raising his gun and adopting a defensive stance.
    The buzzing increased until it became a roar. Through all the windows and the missing portions of the building’s walls and roof poured a swarm of hundreds of thousands of insects. Within seconds, the swarm had fully engulfed what was left of Ben.
    
    *

    By the time the gunfire inside had stopped, Marty was already at the bottom of the metal staircase and running for cover on the other side of a building nearby that resembled some kind of minimalist coffee machine. Whoever had been piloting the tank had spotted him up in the doorway as he’d been falling asleep on his rifle. He hadn’t even noticed the missile until it had exploded against something twenty feet in front of his face, startling him into spasmodically pulling the trigger.
    He’d hit the target, though, and that was all that mattered. It wasn’t a complete disintegration, but the shot guaranteed death. They could come by and identify the remains later if they needed verification. As he began puzzling over who the “they” were, a dense fog formed in his brain and the events of the last day began to disappear from his conscious mind like a hastily-awoken-from dream, each of them slipping like drops of oil from a wet stone.
    His body kept running, feet rhythmically splashing out a staccato of cascading slush as he carelessly stomped through half-frozen puddles in a straight line toward anywhere away from the place he’d come, wherever that had been. Somewhere behind him, a loud hum drowned out all sound, even his own footsteps. The sensation was transmitted from his eardrums, but discarded by his brain.
    He dropped whatever it was he’d been carrying, but lacked even the presence of mind to turn and see what it was. Something heavy and unwieldy anyway so fuck it.
    Cold air rushed in and out of his lungs, a sensation like tiny ice crystals puncturing microscopic lacerations into his bronchioles. His boots and pants were soaked and he could no longer feel his feet. There was a certain point of frigidity, it occurred to him somewhere in his head, beyond which one’s nerves became so numbed they could no longer sense an even greater drop in temperature.
    More than he wanted to find somewhere warm, even more than his body ached to sleep, he needed to find a television. There was one in his apartment, he remembered, but his apartment wasn’t anywhere nearby. Maybe it was; he was incapable of identifying his current location. This startled and unnerved him for a moment, but then he remembered he needed to find an TV, one with a feed he could control.
    Ahead was a fence with a sidewalk and a road on the other side. There were people and vehicles as well but he couldn’t really focus on them. Anything that moved when his eyes didn’t seemed beyond his ability to perceive, let alone process.
    He climbed the fence when he got to it, unaware there was a gate a little more than sixty feet to his right, and fell to the sidewalk on the other side. A voice somewhere said something to him but he forgot each word immediately after it arrived in his brain. As he rose from the pavement he grunted and shook his head in arbitrary response. There were more words and possibly other voices, but they diminished and eventually subsided as he continued running in the same direction he’d been going before jumping the fence. There had to be a TV somewhere.
    Seemingly weighing a hundred times more than usual, his head drooped and his eyelids dropped shut. He stumbled, tripping over some uneven pavement, and woke back up long enough to yawn.
    His entire field of vision was blurry, as though his eyeballs had been wrapped in a layer or two of plastic wrap and then shoved back into his head. Given the uncomfortable way they moved around in their sockets, he wondered for a moment if someone had actually done that but dismissed it as ridiculous. The thought was soon swept aside by a more pressing concern: How was he going to watch TV with his eyes this blurry?
    Panic engulfed him, followed by a feeling of abject helplessness. With no other response available from his sleep-deprived, thoroughly baffled brain, he began to sob like a child. There was a figure of some sort ahead that was probably a person, and he ran full-force toward it in hope that it actually was. After grasping at it with both his hands, clutching its clothing as tightly as he could muster with one hand while pawing wildly at it with the other, he confirmed that it was, in fact, another human when it punched him powerfully in the ribs. The sensation registered momentarily, but quickly receded.
    Without fully realizing it, he’d apparently begun shouting, his voice a high, terrified bleat. “TV?” he yelped. “Get me it! Put it on.”
    Understandably, the person trying desperately to free herself from his grasp asked him, repeatedly, “What the fuck?”
    Without really hearing her, he continued shouting, not really hearing himself either. “The show! The show, put it on, I have to.”
    As distracted as his brain was by the urgent need to locate a television, and, secondary to that, the persistent desire to sleep, he was unable to ignore the sensation and physical effect of several hundred kilovolts from the girl’s stun gun in his abdomen.

    *

    After roughly four minutes and forty seconds, the cab pulled to the side of the road several blocks from the bridge.
    ”I can’t take you over,” said the driver in a thick Midwestern accent. “They’ll let you walk or drive across for good, but I can’t drive the cab back and forth and I ain’t movin’ to Canada.”
    Ahead, a motorcycle came toward them from the bridge and pulled over. For a moment Marty was convinced its driver had spotted him and was about to run, but it eventually started moving again. Something exploded from the left side of the road, paused, and continued along its path, and the motorcycle followed it.
    ”It’s okay,” replied Marty. “Follow that guy.”
    ”What, that motorcycle?” asked the cab driver in disbelief. He considered the idea for a moment. “It’ll be an extra five hundred.”
    ”Yeah sure fine whatever. Go. Before you lose him.”
    Lurching the cab back onto the road and speeding ahead, the driver shouted back at him, “stick the money in the tray between the seats and slide it up or I’m takin’ us back in the opposite direction. That’s eight hundred and sixty four so far.”
    Marty sighed, dropped a packet of ten hundred-dollar bills into the metal tray and slid it up to the driver, suddenly finding a new appreciation for the AutoCabs back home.
    They followed the exploding and collapsing buildings along a road that ran parallel to the freeway, then south toward the water. Eventually the path of destruction abruptly stopped.
    ”Must’ve gotten caught up or something,” said the cab driver, creeping slowly along the street, waiting for an indication of which direction to go next.
    After about a minute of waiting, Marty slid another thousand dollars up to the driver through the tray. “Tell no one about any of this. Not even your wife. I will find out if you do. Pop the trunk.”
    He retrieved the long, slim package from the back of the vehicle, and the instant he closed the trunk, the driver squealed the fastest u-turn he could force the cab to make, sped up the street, and disappeared promptly around a corner.

    *

    Anna burst through a wall into an extremely large metal building — some kind of abandoned storage facility — and stopped, idling silently in the middle of the largely empty concrete floor.
    Ben and Denise, tightly following the trail of dust but not closely enough to actually be inhaling any of it, arrived shortly thereafter.
    ”Take this,” said Ben, handing Denise one of his two pistols as he got off the motorcycle.
    ”This.” Denise took the gun, her expression the epitome of apprehension. “Against that.”
    He looked thoughtfully at his own gun for a moment. “Yeah, pretty ridiculous isn’t it?”
    They crept cautiously toward the building, slowly circling around to find an entrance other than the one Anna had made for herself.
    Within minutes a handful of border patrols from both the United States and the New Canadian Republic had begun arriving, alarmed by the trail of explosions creeping through the city. Among them was the NCR border guard they’d dealt with at the Ambassador Bridge.
    Shouting as soon as he disembarked from one of the armored vehicles, inappropriately camouflaged for their urban surroundings, the highest-ranking of the New Liberty Army troops confronted his NCR analogs. “What in fuck are you canuck pricks trying to accomplish here?”
    ”We came out for a late evening picnic,” shouted one of the Canadians in response, matching intensity. “What the hell do you think we’re doing out here?”
    ”Blowing up half the goddamned city from the looks of it.”
    ”We sure as hell aren’t responsible. We thought maybe you guys might have something to do with it.”
    ”Now why the fuck would we attack one of our own cities?”
    ”Ah, right, ’cause that‘s never happened before.”
    ”What’re you implying?”
    ”Actually,” said Ben, stepping out from between the building and a stack of rusted shipping containers, intervening before anyone started drawing weapons, “this is technically our fault.” Denise stayed behind.
    ”Oh now who the hell is this assho–” barked the NLA soldier, cutting himself off abruptly when he recognized the various insignias on Ben’s uniform. “Sorry, Sergeant. What’s the situation, sir?”
    ”One of our tanks malfunctioned,” he replied, making his way between the two groups of soldiers. Unable to tell the complete truth due to the confidentiality of his tests with Anna, he quickly fabricated a cover explanation. “Running around on autopilot, randomly destroying everything in its path. I followed it here after it turned its guns on me.”
    ”This your fault, then?” whispered the NCR guard from the bridge, standing a couple feet away.
    Nodding, Ben made note this time of the surname stitched onto the guard’s front pocket: Foley. “Not a planned assault or anything, though. Promise.”
    ”Glad I didn’t let you across earlier,” mumbled Foley, loud enough for Ben to hear but not the NLA troops.
    ”She runs out of ammo eventually,” whispered Ben.
    ”How far you been following it, sir?” asked the obnoxious NLA soldier, PFC Brightman.
    ”Uh, Cincinnati,” Ben lied.
    ”Ohio?” asked one of the other NLA soldiers, too far away for Ben to get a good look at his name.
    ”No, Cincinnati, Alaska, moron,” replied Ben. “You can all keep asking me useless questions or we could actually maybe do something productive.”
    Brightman nodded. “I’ll lead a team ’round back to secure the tank’s entrance point, make sure it don’t leave again.”
    ”Which would be a great idea if the tank couldn’t just create any exit it wanted, or if it had any intention of not running you over. We’re not dealing with any kind of rational enemy, here, that you can force to take its own self-preservation into consideration.”
    In actuality, Anna’s priorities seemed to follow a loose approximation of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but considering her behavior since the previous morning, he felt he could confidently operate under the assumption that those constraints were no longer functional. Even if they were, nobody in the group seemed to be wielding any weapons that would’ve been in any way effective against her, so she’d have easily seen the hollowness of any threats made against her. Conventional military strategy was about as useful in this situation as a nest of angry hornets in an operating room.
    ”So what do we do?” asked Brightman, restrainedly irritated. “Just rush in through the front door and have the fuckin’ thing cut us all down?”
    ”If it was going to kill us, it would’ve charged out here and crushed us all as soon as we started talking.” So why didn’t she? he realized. “Doesn’t really even matter how we enter the building, since it can acquire dozens of simultaneous targets. Anyone have a fiber optic scope or something?”
    Nobody replied. A few shrugged.
    ”How about C4?”
    Within seconds, someone had shoved a small brick into his hand, followed by a radio frequency trigger for the detonator. Though the sun was beginning to disappear over the horizon and the streetlights had yet to turn on, he was able to make out the safety markings on its label.
    ”What’s your plan?” asked Foley, following Ben to the side of the building.
    ”It’d be pointless to describe it to you, because it’s not going to work.” Also rendering description pointless was the fact that Anna could clearly perceive every word of their conversation. Which was why as he spoke, he held the C4 under his arm, fished out a pen and a small notepad from one of his pockets, and began writing. “If I can somehow flip her, it might buy me enough time to, I dunno, try to find some kind of emergency access panel or something.”
    He showed Foley the note he’d been writing — fake plan – she can hear us, play along — and flipped the page, writing some more. Even if Anna may have been capable of somehow picking up the sounds of the pen scratching against the paper, which was unlikely given that he was grinding his boot into the gravel to interfere with her audio sensors, there was no way for her to tell what.
    ”You think that small a brick of C4′s gonna flip that thing?”
    ”No. But we can’t go inside, so this is our only option.” The next note he showed Foley read, close expl. will disrupt sensors. He wrote something more on the pad, underlined it several times, and showed Foley again. Temporarily.
    Foley gestured, indicating he wanted to write something. “How you gonna get it under it?” His note read, how long?
    ”No idea.” Pointing to the pad and shrugging, Ben indicated that his response answered both questions.
    ”Shit,” said Foley. It wasn’t necessary for him to make any indication he was replying to both written and verbal conversations.
    Something stirred for a moment within the building and everyone tensed. A few drew their sidearms.
    ”So’s she a pretty special girl, then?” Foley asked, whispering.
    ”Huh?” He glanced at Denise, then back at Foley.
    ”You keep calling it ‘she’. What the fuck?”
    ”Oh. It’s like what sailors call their ships I guess. My, uh, my dad was in the Navy when I was a kid. Anyway, better apprise everyone of the plan.” Gesturing significantly with the items to emphasize their importance, he handed Foley the pen and paper, then jogged toward the building’s nearest entrance.
    Surprisingly, the electricity was still functional in the building, though nearly all the lights were either burned out or broken. Given her myriad sensors it was silly to try to sneak in on her, and without night vision goggles of some sort, illumination would be more beneficial to him than to her.
    Discerning her location via glances through the office window, he then searched for somewhere to take cover within the warehouse. A pile of metal debris about twenty feet from the door was the best he could find.
    Using a small credit-card-sized mirror from his pocket, he looked around the corner to assess Anna’s line of potential fire, waited a moment, then dove out the doorway and rolled behind the heap of junk.
    Anna refrained from even attempting to fire at him while he was exposed. After a moment, she spoke, using one of the external speakers hidden somewhere within her various hull folds. “Why Ben, are those plastic explosives I smell? You know I much prefer flowers. There’s rosemary — that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there is pansies — that’s for thoughts.”
    Unable to remember the next line, he instead replied, still shouting over the wall of junk he was using as a shield, the first line that came to mind. “Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.”
    She made a loud disappointed sighing noise. “That’s two acts ago, Ben.”
    ”Sorry; your metal brain is obviously superior to my meat one.” Arming the detonator, Ben nervously caressed the triggering device with his other hand. “Anna, I really don’t want to have to do this. We can still talk about it. I’d prefer to.”
    ”Words, words, words. I pray you, pass with your best violence; I am afeared you make a wanton of me.” She sprayed a few shots in his general direction.
    ”Goddammit, would you stop with the fucking Hamlet already?” he muttered after her burst of gunfire, peeking extremely briefly over the random metal detritus that separated him from Anna. After estimating the throw’s trajectory, he wound up and launched the C4 across the warehouse at her.
    As the explosive sailed through the air, Anna repeated at increasing volume, “except my life, except my life, except my life, except my life, except my–”
    At the sound of impact, Ben thumbed the detonator and threw himself into an overturned metal crate nearby to shield himself from any unlikely shrapnel or debris. Some empty cardboard boxes rained down from somewhere, likely blown off the tops of nearby shelves by the shock wave.
    Spinning around frantically, clanging clumsily into her surroundings, Anna panicked over her sudden lack of sensation. She knocked a shelf of something onto herself, remaining unaware of its presence even after it scattered across and tumbled from her hull as she shook.
    The handful of soldiers waiting outside poured in through the door, firing uselessly on the bewildered tank. Denise cautiously followed, immediately taking cover near the office doorway and hooking her wrist around to fire sporadically through the adjacent wall.
    Lacking enough momentum to exit through the wall, Anna instead simply dented it outward, still unaware she’d even impacted with anything, and reversed direction, tumbling into a stairway and climbing back out again. Incoherent shouting blurted from her loudspeakers.
    Having no idea what the next part of his plan would entail, Ben rolled out of the metal crate and jogged toward her. As the others took up various positions throughout this side of the building, firing several ineffective rounds before moving into a better position, he waited for a safe moment to approach.
    During a lull in gunfire he charged at Anna, hoping to find some hidden vulnerability that might allow him access to her interior. He stopped abruptly after a few steps, the soles of his boots skidding in a crunchy stutter across the concrete floor, when Anna suddenly regained her composure and turned to face him.

    *

So I received a rejection letter from Tor[1], and since it was one of the shittiest in what seems to have been an almost nonstop string of rejections in nearly every element of my life over the last seven months, I took it kind of hard at first.

It’s not that I was naive enough not to expect it and it’s not that I can’t take rejection, but in the context in which it came, well… this was one of a dwindling few things I had left to really hope for. While everything else crumbled I retained the hope that maybe when I got word back on my manuscript it would be the thing to turn it all around. And I was wrong. I figured if nothing else, the statistical likelihood of all this general crappiness has been like flipping a quarter a hundred times and having it come up tails every single time.[2]

Anyway, I was depressed. Even more so than usual. But then I ended up coming up with an entire young adult book series, the first installment of which I hope to have written relatively soon. I won’t get into details, but it’s going to be “Twilight for boys”, basically. Only, y’know, well-written and -thought, with an actual plot.[3] I’ll keep you posted.

It’s weird though because it seems like the shittier my life gets, the more my brain generates these great ideas for books and things. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Thanks to some guidance and inspiration from friends[4], I’ve decided to take the John Scalzi approach and release my book online in serialized installments as I make an editing pass through it. (Keep in mind that I still consider it a rough draft, so please leave suggestions (as some of you have already been doing — thanks!). It’s definitely helpful and I’ll be making another editing pass again when I’m done.) I may self-publish on Lulu when I’m done with the next edit but I’m not sure. The publishing market is really weird right now.

A part of me is hoping (though not naively enough that there’s any genuine expectation) that the right person might end up reading the book as I’m serializing it on the site and offer me a book deal. Mostly, though, I just want a lot of people to read it regardless of who they are. But there’s one thing that’s going to have to happen, here, in order to accomplish that: You are going to have to tell your friends.

Look, I’m not doing this for the money.[5] If I were, I wouldn’t even consider putting this up online. I mean, it’d be nice if I could make enough money from it that I could do it exclusively since I have so many ideas that I’m not sure I could really get them all out if they had to constantly compete for time with other activities, especially ones that can take up massive portions of a person’s daily life.

But I write — hell, even this website, which I’ve been maintaining with relative frequency since I started it back in 2002 — because I want to inspire people. I want you to like my ideas and roll them around in your heads and maybe even go on to write or draw or sing or sculpt things of your own, even if only tangentially inspired or related. I want to have an impact on people. And while I really appreciate all the readers I already have, I need more.

If you like my ideas and want me to be able to get even more of them out — all the ones I have in my head — you’re going to have to help me out a little. I figure it’s at least worth the few breaths required to prod your friends into checking out the book.[6] So please, if you like it, spread the word to everyone you know who you think might like it. Blog about it, link to it, Twitter about it, scratch the URL into a bathroom door — whatever you want to do. Just get the word out. (And I’m still working on those marketing opportunities I mentioned before.)

Thanks in advance, and I really do hope you’re enjoying (or will enjoy) reading Machination.

By the way:

(There are some interface issues on the site in Safari — it doesn’t like some of the Javascript for some reason so I’m going to have to figure out why, but I’ve been too busy to work on it. It’s been working flawlessly for me in Firefox. Also, you can read it on an iPhone but you can’t interact with the menus and the menu bar doesn’t stay at the bottom like it does in every other browser. Let me know if you have any major issues. There’ll be an FAQ page up soon.)

Footnotes:

[1] One of very few publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts. The other of the relatively bigger names in scifi publishing with a similar policy is Baen.

[2] I’m starting to lose my faith in cliches like “it can’t rain all the time” and “it’s always darkest before the dawn”.

[3] And not about vampires. It’s really awesome though — promise. For those counting, this means I’m working on at least three books simultaneously (excluding Machination, which I’m just editing). The other two are also awesome, but in different ways. And then there’s this weird experimental project I’m working on that’s sort of House of Leaves meets American Psycho meets Infinite Jest with multi-level footnotes that eventually loop around to reference the original text, but that’s kind of a back-burner thing right now.

[4] One of whom reminded me that many publishing houses are firing massive amounts of staff and are therefore very probably unwilling to take chances on unknown authors right now. So diverting this into a typical EtJ politics rant, you may have that fuckoid Bush and his “hey, banks, do whatever you want!” policies to thank in part for my novel not getting released. Hooray!

[5] Though you’re welcome to donate if you’re so inclined — I’ll set up a PayPal button for it. No suggested amount and no obligation, just whatever you think you want to give. And I’ll remember you, and if the book does end up getting published formally at some point I’ll do something special for you.

[6] I mean, if you’re trapped in a sinking submarine or you have to blow out a candle before it lights the fuse on the TNT in the elaborate trap you’ve been placed in by some kind of spy villain, please use those breaths more wisely.