Homemade Heroes, Face Two: Captain Swell

HOMEMADE HEROES, FACE TWO: CAPTAIN SWELL
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"Jesus, Captain Swell is a junkie!"

Carter and Margie had cut away the collapsed hero's uniform to discover a leopard skin of tracks and skin popping scars that no heroin user should have lived long enough to earn.

"The Plain Blue Corsicans are trashing the hospital as we speak," Captain Swell whispered from his stretcher.

"You bastard! My kids look up to you!" Margie said.

"Hell, I look up to you!" Carter said. "And all these years, you were just some spastic drug addict."

"You don't understand," Captain Swell said, "These are my powers. Somebody had to destroy himself so that the people could be saved."

There were screams from beyond the door.

"They're here," the Captain said weakly.

"The doors are dead bolted," Carter said. "Three inches of steel."

"Don't you people read comic books?" the Captain groaned. "They'll rip through that without a second thought." He reached for his belt. Margie tore his hand away.

"Look at you," she said. "You can't even fight me off!"

"I can, with the belt."

"No, you can't. They've already beaten you senseless and you've destroyed yourself from the inside. You're a walking corpse. Except you can't walk!"

The pounding on the doors nearly made Carter wet himself.

"They're going to kill us," Captain Swell said.

"They're not going to kill us!" Margie said. "We're two nurses and a mummy. We don't pose a threat."

"We're they're favorite kinds of murders. Helpless. Save yourselves then. Take my belt, it can inject directly into your abdomen. That one's super-strength," the Captain said, pointing at the first button. "There's super speed and invulnerability "

"Shut up!" Margie said. "You're gonna risk our lives to save your sorry ass! What kind of hero is that?"

"No, look at me. I'm practically dead as it is. If my life was all they wanted, I'd have given it to them already. But after I'm gone they'll want him and they'll want you. They won't ever stop.

"I'll put on the belt" Carter said.

"Are you nuts? Your career is history if you do that!"

"We're going to die if I don't. Do you understand that?"

A human body smashed against the doors, causing them to buckle.

"He's got to take the belt," Captain Swell said, "Not because I want to live, but because they need to be --"

"What? They need to be what? He's dying! Help me, Carter."

"Too late," Carter said. He cinched the belt about his waist as the doors blew open. Margie screamed. Through the door walked four tall, lanky, psychotic men in plain blue suits.

"God's almighty billy goats!" shouted Ghjuvani Blade, the most vicious of the group. "Captain Swell is dead! Tonight's party has just begun!"

Carter thought an instant prayer and slammed all the buttons on the belt at once. He felt more incredible than he had ever thought possible.

"You're right, boys," Carter said. "It's time to have some fun. Behold: Captain Sweller!"

"Uh-oh," Ghjuvani said.

Carter stepped forward into history.

Family Portrait

FAMILY PORTRAIT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Her feet were tightly knit groups of butterflies. The right, black and orange monarchs; the left, a smaller species of pale yellow wings. My melancholy sister, Diana, was an otherwise ordinary woman from calves to face, but above her sea-green eyes, her head flared out to resemble the body of a manta ray. Her purplish head rippled as she moved and some scientists believed its wing-like form helped her to float. Mother thought it was strictly power lepidoptera.

Our mother was nobody special. Our father was ageless, having fought alongside Alexander as well as Patton before meeting mother and finally giving up on life. He doled out the secrets of life in micrograms so that I wasn't much more of a person than my mother or my classmates. He only gave me enough to know my station in the vast universe and that station wasn't impressive.

His work was unfathomable to me. I found him in the old barn once, hammering what looked to be an enormous rusting girder, claiming he was extracting from it the secrets of margarine.

When my father wasn't working he would take us to human carnivals, show us the spectacle of daily life in the city where lava flowed through ancient streets and the skies turned texture, glass-smooth to sandpaper, according to the prevailing mood. He'd question people, reducing them to tears with queries as innocent as "What are you doing?" or "Who are you?"

It wasn't the questions so much as his penetrating eyes, black as the depths of space. My mother had fallen in love with those eyes. She claimed when they met she lost herself forever in them and what we saw was just the shell of who she used to be. Her real essence, she said, was in those eyes, swimming through their abyssal expanse.

Dad would uplift the downtrodden on the occasional whim, not out of the kindness of his heart, but just to show us that it could be done. He'd turn morphine addicts into kings with a look. The eventual effort was theirs but he was the trigger. He made them get up.

I often wondered at the point of all this and would ask him.

"That's just it," he'd get around to answering in one way or another. "There is no point." He seemed at his happiest whenever he gave me this answer.

We found his body, one Thursday afternoon at the foot of the great anvil he had made himself. As we ran to him, Mother and I watched the barn swallows swooping down to pick at his face. They fluttered away at our stampede, revealing the old, old man's mouth and nose, choked with the corpses of butterflies. We cleaned him up before alerting the authorities.

My sister's soul blossomed after that and she became a great comfort to all she touched. Although she never walked again, she was happier than she ever had been.

Aladdin's Lamp Is Passed Around The Psychiatric Ward

ALADDIN'S LAMP IS PASSED AROUND THE PSYCHIATRIC WARD
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"I just wish it was Thursday, yes," Carmen said, picking at the yellow flowers embroidered on her robe.

"This Thursday or last Thursday?" the djinn asked.

"Next Thursday."

"By next Thursday, do you mean the one coming up in four days or next week Thursday?"

"Next Thursday, yes. You know what? Any Thursday will do. I just like Thursday. The week's almost over but you don't have to worry about the weekend just yet."

#

"Are you in that Blue Man Group?" Sally asked.

"I wish! Those guys are awesome! But I'm afraid not. My skin is naturally this color."

#

"I wish I had hot and cold running mail," Norris said.

"And what exactly is that?" the djinn asked. He didn't care much for Norris. The old man had dropped the lamp twice now and he smelled like a diabolical combination of juice box remnants.

"You're the djinn, you figure it out. All I know is I want to be able to turn a faucet and get my mail at the temperature I so choose."

"As you wish."

#

The djinn parted the yellow curtains and looked down into the brown city streets. How in the world had he wound up here?

"The guy in the mirror has cooler stuff than me," Sam cried from behind him. "I want cooler stuff!"

A better question: How soon could he get out of here? These people had to sleep some time.

#

"Isn't there anyone here who wants money? Or love? How about love?"

Harold cleared his throat from the back of the TV room.

"Yes?"

Harold rose from his blue plastic stackable chair and slowly crossed the floor, watching the others while avoiding their eyes. Terror warped his face. Now at the front, he whispered:

"The first erotic dream I ever had was about Ruth Buzzi sitting on my toilet in her underwear. I was seventeen years old. Let me have that."

"You want Ruth Buzzi now, or from the Laugh-In era?"

"I don't want Ruth Buzzi at all, I wouldn't know what to say to her. I'm not very good with women. I just want the dream again."

#

Simon's eyes were wet and shone a cold grey in the flourescent light. "I want the asphalt to rise from the earth and form itself into a twenty foot tall asphalt monster named Asphalty. He has eyes made of ice and spits safety pins. Poor people lurk behind Asphalty's path of destruction to gather safety pins and sell them to new mothers. They buy bread and Jell-o with the money. Then they make Jell-o sandwiches in a rainbow of colors. Unfortunately, Asphalty is attracted by the smell of rainbow colored Jell-O sandwiches. It's the circle of life."

The Djinn clapped his hands with a boom. "Finally! Someone decisive!"

#

"You realize your daily schedule hasn't altered in the last twelve and a half years?" the djinn asked.

"Just do it. I know what Thursday feels like, yes."

"It is so."

Sunday In May, In The Water

SUNDAY IN MAY, IN THE WATER
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

After a few false starts we made it out of the car and walked through the cold rain to the beach. Thanks to the weather we had the place mostly to ourselves; there were maybe a dozen people there, including us. The walk to the water went: Rough asphalt; smooth sidewalk; dirt; wooden walkway; wooden gritty step, step, step down to the soft sand; hard cutting shells; soft sand again; then the wonderful wet packed sand gushing around our feet and finally the water ran up to greet us. It darted back and forth to introduce us to this magnificent ocean thing of which it had become a part.

The children went in without hesitation. The cold wet wasn't reason for trepidation, it was fun and excitement, the first they'd had all day. I went in starts and sputters, cringing with the chill but driven relentlessly by the need to relieve my bladder. With each small wave my chest tightened and my heart sped. More and more bare skin was goosebumped until for a few moments my world went dizzy and I pretended my body had a taste of what shock must feel like. Relieved and able to think again, I moved further into the rain-dimpled sea. Up to my chin.

I looked east. To the west was civilization, hotels, human beings, a green-roofed concession area and a tall erector set of a tower with a dish on top to give it a purpose. But to the east . . . To the east was the ocean, vast and green and the broken grey sky. There wasn't room for anything else. To the east was forever, the awesome splendor of nature. I had returned to the Earth's womb for just a few moments. A dozen feet from my bobbing head, two pelicans swept across the surface of the water, their wingtips nearly slicing its rippling skin.

My son called to me. I was too far out. I let myself be gently pushed back home by wide bluish waves. They cast nets of foam at the beach which brought some sand in before dissolving. My time was done here, but I waited, for my children had thrown their worries into the sea and had surrendered their lives to joy. They, like the patient ocean, had eternity.

Running Downhill, Naked

RUNNING DOWNHILL, NAKED
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Running downhill,
naked.
Screaming.
With blood all
over me.
"Who the heck
is this maniac?"

"Give him a cookie!"
"Immediately!"
"A nice one
with raisins."
"They're Nature's
candy!"

They pelt me
with nice cookies.
And now I am naked
and screaming
with blood and
cookies all over me
and still running downhill.

It's a big hill.

SIGNS

SIGNS
By Matthew Sanborn Smith

A stop sign on a lonely country road set Jeff off. It was red and it was "STOP." It was negative in every way it could be and there were, what, millions(?) all over the country just like it.

"This is what's wrong with the country!" he screamed out of the window of his Nissan. A flock of birds scattered into the sky.

Back home, Jeff blew the dust off the sheet metal machines at his father's old factory and got to work on the scraps that littered the place. Fourteen hours later he curled up on a floor dusted with insect droppings and exoskeletons and slept hard with his arms wrapped around a bright green, round "GO" sign.

Stop signs saved lives, Jeff knew that. He certainly wasn't gong to remove them. But wherever there wasn't a stop sign, why not post a go sign? He hired a couple of guys and they'd make signs during the day and plant them around town at four in the morning, when the local cops changed shifts and were less likely to drive by. People liked the signs and they caught on. Jeff had plans far beyond "GO."

His vision of positive reinforcement next took on the venerable "YIELD" sign. Powder blue "PUSH ON!" signs sprung up everywhere. But why stop with street signs? They planted "PLEASE PLAY WITH DOG" signs wherever there weren't "BEWARE OF DOG" signs. "SLOW CHILDREN" signs were replaced with "CHILDREN WHO ARE REALLY TRYING HARD" signs (there was some misunderstanding there).

Copycat sign makers tried their own hands at the game. Some started slowly, merely buying other people's signs and cutting off the "NO" in them. "PARKING" signs were rampant and people actually paid money for the "SMOKING" signs. "LOITERING" signs were popular with young people. Lonely shut-ins ordered "SOLICITING" signs by mail, phone, and internet. Kids wrought delightful havoc with their misplaced "SPITTING" and "FOUL LANGUAGE" signs. Popular "PANTS, SHOES, SERVICE" signs quickly overtook their negative cousins.

Amid the chaos, a change came over the people as they discovered freedoms that were always available but about which no one ever thought. Millions reveled in all the places they could go as unauthorized personnel. They proceeded without caution down their two way streets, through live ends as quickly as the speed allowance signs directed. They dumped and trespassed and thru traffic beeped its horns with glee as it raced past the new "FAST" signs that were not near construction sites. There were so many outlets! And so much fishing!

Jeff was made the Secretary of Transportation. The whole country just lightened up and felt better about itself. It didn't go unnoticed either. Other countries started asking us out and inviting us to parties and soon we were popular again.

But we wouldn't put out.

We weren't a floozy.

Saturday Night, Wasted At Bill's

SATURDAY NIGHT, WASTED AT BILL'S
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"What's the secretest society you can imagine?" Bill asked, unwrapping a super bubble. "I mean, how secret can it get?"

"Welp," Popper said, "I s'pose nobody would know who they were. I mean, there wouldn't even be any conspiracy theories about them because no one would know they even exist." He pushed off on the cable spool coffee table that Bill had bolted to the floor and squirmed deeper into the pea green couch. He was pretty satisfied with himself. Bill nodded.

"Okay, not bad. But that's just a pretty secret society. I'm talking the secretest. How secret?"

"I don't know, dude, just tell me, will ya? I'm ready to grab some nachos at Fine's and Dandy's."

Bill sighed. "Look, think about it. The secretest society would be one so secret that not even the people in it would know they were members."

"Whoa." Popper got a far away look in his eyes. "Dude, are you trying to tell me something? Are we in this society?"

"What I'm trying to tell you is that this goes beyond conspiracy. This shit goes so deep that everyone is involved in it and no one knows they are." Bowser walked over to Bill, licked his hand and fell onto her back waiting for Bill's scratch. So much of her fur was embedded in the carpet, it seemed like the carpet was made of it.

Popper ran his hand through his hair. "But if everyone is in it, is that still a secret society? I mean it sounds like it's just . . . Society."

"Not if we don't know about it."

"So who's pulling the strings?"

"We all are!"

"Whoa." Popper looked around the place slowly, paying close attention to corners and shadows. He grabbed the first cigarette within reach, didn't care that it was tobacco, and lit up. "I don't know about you, man, but I'm gettin' kinda scared."

"Hold it together, Popper! This is our chance to make something of ourselves!"

"How?"

"I don't know yet, but if we're the only ones who know, that puts us ahead of everyone else doesn't it?"

"Hey, yeah! We could be like the kings of the town or something!"

"Forget that, how about kings of the world?"

"Well, I don't know about that. I don't like to fly. King of the world probably has to do a lot of flying."

"Dude, we're the kings! We can have everything flown to us!"

Popper was slowly overcome with revelation. "Yeah. Yeah! Kings of the world!"

"Now you're talking!"

"Wait, wait, wait. Wait a minute." Popper said.

"What?"

"Dude, if we know we're in the secret society then we can't be in it."

Bill stared at him for a long time, then said, "Shit! You're right! Man, we had the whole world right in our hands for a minute. Shit like this is why we can't get ahead!" He desperately wanted to throw a beer can at Popper's head for thinking of this because it would have worked otherwise, but all he had nearby were empties.

"We just gotta find a society that's even secreter," Popper said.

Bill's eyes went white all the way around. "Man, you nailed it! I knew there was a reason I told you about this! We're gonna find a society so secret it . . . it . . ."

"It doesn't even exist!"

"Yes! Yes! Forget your damn nachos, grab us a couple more beers. We've got a lot of work to do!"

The World's Worst Choose Your Own Adventure

THE WORLD’S WORST CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

You wake up. You’re pretty tired.

Get up or
Roll over and go back to sleep

Finally He Gets To The Review

Happy Labor Day, laborers and non-laborers alike. This is one of the few Labor Days that I don't have to work. Wayyyyyy back in my post of 11/27/05 I raved about the AlphaSmart 3000, a product I hadn't even used but was going to get for Christmas and I promised a review of the product. This is what I wrote at the time:

The Alphasmart 3000 IR is a keyboard with a memory and a little screen. According to the website, it runs for hundreds (!) of hours on 3 AA batteries (!) and stores about 100 single spaced pages of text. You can use it anywhere and then upload your work to your PC. It auto-saves every keystroke and turns on and off in a couple of seconds.

Well, after about nine months of actually using the thing, I have to tell you, it is indeed awesome. It's very light and therefore portable and it's built to last. I've been using the same batteries since Christmas and according to the power indicator, I may have used about three percent of the juice so far. To be honest, since I've been posting a story a day, I've been getting much more use out of it. I take it to work and often hammer out most of a first draft on my lunch break. Once home, I upload the file to my PC and finish it off.

Here comes one of the most important parts though: For some reason, cutting and pasting doesn't work very well either when I'm posting here or in my nearly identical MySpace blog. It raises my blood pressure and takes forever to edit a post into shape. But if I copy my post from my PC back to the AlphaSmart, it's able to enter the text into the blog not as a cut and paste, but as if it's typing really fast. I can't tell you how much my lifespan has been extended because of this machine (I really can't because I don't know, but I bet I'm getting at least a couple extra days tacked onto the end), not only because my stress levels over blogging have evaporated, but because of the time I'm saving by not having to overhaul each post.

Now that you know how wonderful it is, I have to tell you can't have one. Sort of. See, I was telling a customer at the job about its wonders yesterday and told him to check the website. Being the person that I am, I checked the website (alphasmart.com) when I got home to see what he would see and discovered that AlphaSmart no longer sells the 3000. Of course, it's too late to tell him otherwise, but I'm telling you. The base model is now the Neo, which is swell and has more bells and whistles as well as more memory, but costs $110 dollars more. I'm not saying it's not worth it. If all you're doing is writing it's still cheaper than a laptop. But if money is really tight you may want to check ebay for an old 3000.

You can still buy accessories for a 3000 from the AlphaSmart website. I must warn you though, not to invest in their GetUtility software. I shelled out an extra $30 for it because they suggested it was the only way to download text from your PC to the 3000. This is not true. The AlphaSmart Manager software does the job just as well. Save your money.

The Conquest of the Pumpkins

THE CONQUEST OF THE PUMPKINS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

For fifty-thousand years, pumpkins had been lying in wait, ready to burst into action at any time. Up till now, there simply hadn't been a need. Many of you will ask, "What about all that pumpkin eating we've been doing? The pumpkin pie and the Jack O'Lanterns and such?" But you'd be looking at it from a human point of view. Pumpkins prefer this treatment. It beats rotting on the vine.

Now, however, the time had come. The world was ripe for conquest. Through an organically achieved electro-chemical pulse through the soil below, Pierre, self-proclaimed Pharaoh of the Pumpkin Clans (he wasn't really up on his history), gave the signal:

"NOW!"

After a series of remarkably strenuous exertions, they found they couldn't move.

"Dammit!" Pierre tried to yell, before he realized he couldn't even do that. "We should have exercised! Even a little!"

Pierre's patch was harvested, like so many of their recent ancestors and sold from the lawn of a local church whose members swore up and down that they weren't for Halloween, but for the Harvest Festival which only coincidentally happened to fall on the last day of October, since it was a Saturday.

Aggie's Song

AGGIE'S SONG
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

"Tell me you've got hard evidence on who murdered him, DEL," Aggie said. When she spoke to me, she spoke with an underlying melody of binary, driving her words into the soul of this machine. We sat on the edge of a pink divan in windowless apartment. She kept the place cold for my comfort.

"I can't tell you what you want to hear, Aggie," I said. "I can only tell you the truth." Her sad face turned hard, but even angry she evoked a kind of pity.

Humans, I'm told, found her unnerving. She'd removed her eyelids with two slow slices of a razor. One of the fits of misguided paranoia that had consumed her since the finalization of RAN. I, myself, found her look slightly alluring. More robotic than human.

Med-green spouts peeked out from beneath the skin that still surrounded her eyes, overcompensating for a lack of lids and lashes. Heavily misted with a solution of her own oil, mucous and saline, Aggie's now over-large eyes looked perpetually teary (which may have suited her perpetual grief).

"RAN killed himself," I said.

"No," she said, chastising me for giving her the wrong answer. She had her own theories. RAN's employer planned to send him to Mars to manage a farming franchise. There were men who didn't think a robot should have such a lucrative job and men didn't equate the destruction of a bot with murder. Neither did most robots. Aggie did. She'd drawn the police bot working on the case, SYSIL, to her cause. But he had disappeared before the police investigation was concluded which only added to Aggie's paranoia. If RAN's killers were ever caught, they'd be fined for property damage and that would be the extent of it. She wanted to catch them first and administer her own justice.

"You've been gone for days," she said. "Too long to come back with an answer like that. You didn't see what RAN looked like!"

"I did," I said, recalling the mess at the scrapyard. Every inch of metal that was once RAN had been twisted inside out, every bit of plastic looked like it had been instantly frozen while boiling, bubbles caught in mid-pop. The mech was a hideous mockery of the beautiful thing he once was.

"Then they've gotten to you too, haven't they?" she said. "They killed RAN, they killed SYSIL, and now they've turned you against me."

"No," I said, looking down at my segmented legs. "No, they haven't gotten to me." I almost lamented the loss of my poor, unblinking Aglaope. But she'd been this way since I'd met her, hadn't she?

I was an AI psychologist, programmed by the Alsing school and Aggie hired me in the hope that some memory of RAN's final moments could be retrieved. Unfortunately there wasn't enough of his brain left to explore. But in my experience, an AI's psychology can also be found by noting the wear and tear on its body, the enhancements purchased and the stress indicators of its various components. I can see an entity's habitual behaviors laid out before me under ideal conditions. The condition of RAN's body was far from ideal. There were older injuries, though. There were repair records. There were Aggie's deluded memories, the least reliable evidence, but I couldn't escape them. I didn't want to escape them. I could sit for hours and feel my electronic organs dance to her enhanced voice. It hurt that she didn't want to believe me now.

Aggie climbed onto me, straddling my lap. "They're out there, Del," she said to me, taking my face in her hands in another one of her unnerving mood swings. "They're out there and they're after me too. They're after both of us because of what we know. You know in your heart RAN didn't kill himself."

I felt sucked into those eyes. It was true, RAN didn't kill himself. No, what was I thinking? I proved to myself that he had. He was in love with her. Love was all I could call it. The state that he was in at the time of death couldn't be called anything else. RAN couldn't live without Aggie. The prospect of leaving her for an off-world assignment was more than he could bear. But that couldn't be right. Why was he murdered for that?

"You're right," I said. "He was killed. There's more to it though, I know there is. Let me go back over the data, Aggie. I can find the killers, I know I can." I lifted her off of my body, taxing my processors more than my artificial muscles. "I have to go."

"Don't leave me!" she cried and the full force of her subliminal song flooded my consciousness. I pulled her to me and held her a little too tightly. She gasped and I felt her song and her concentration break as she struggled to catch her breath. I threw her to the floor and bolted for the Gate.

"Wait." It was all she could do to choke out the words.

"I'll be back," I said. "I promise. I'll find them. We have to go on the offensive." I was through the Gate and miles away in a pulse. Out of her apartment, out of her reach. My senses were coming back to me only slowly. I jogged through empty city streets (the last place anyone would look) and let the air flow through my chest vents, cooling my overheated brain.

How many bots had Aggie brought to their doom? I could only count two but I hadn't known her that long. Was she doing it on purpose? Or were we just being drawn into her needy aura of self-destruction?

I began to run. I had to keep running until that nagging little piece of RAM in my brain stopped telling me to keep my promise. Until it stopped telling me to return to her.

Our Hero

OUR HERO
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They called Gard Fehfer mad when he tried to tile his bathroom with slices of American cheese. They called him mad when he sewed a parrot onto an iguana and built twenty-foot robot that ate puppies and ran on table linens. Well, okay. These things could be construed as eccentric, taken out of context like that. But if you knew the whole story, you'd see why his actions made sense.

It was all in preparation for the invasion. Not a military invasion, but an invasion of fashion. The Designers' Guild, never the most unified body in the first place had broken into multiple factions and a civil war now raged throughout the land. Jelly Jam, the youngest, hottest thing going, said everyone else was just marmalade and vowed that his new line would rock the planet to its very foundations.

Gard Fehfer had gotten wind of Jelly Jam's evil machinations through his network of double agents (they were actually triple agents but neither Gard nor Jelly knew this because the agents were just that good). Gard knew that he was the only thing standing between the world and high top loafers, cross your heart hats, and fountain skirts. The last piece of Gard's defense was to recite the biography of a non-existent Canadian chef in a dark room where no one could hear.

Those fools. They'd never understand that he was their savior. They all laughed at him. They called him mad for writing about himself in the third person, past tense.