Smashcore is like noise music except it can only be properly appreciated while your car is wrapping itself around a telephone pole, and for some reason Sofia’s mom won’t even let her have the old Camry to try it.
“You hardly even drive it,” Sofia points out reasonably.
“That doesn’t mean you can wreck it,” Mom groans. “You’re not even sixteen!” she sneers. “And all it’s going to sound like is you breaking your neck!” she screeches, over and over, like a broken macaw.
Sofia tries running her bike into a wall with her headphones on but obviously that doesn’t work.
If you’re big enough to get by on one breath a year, you can hibernate for a very long time. Matociquala has.
The effort it once took to irrigate Las Vegas seems absurd, in 2050, as meltwater trickles down from Hubbard to refill the Precambrian sea. The West is a greenhouse, and things long dormant are waking: flowers, and trilobites, and beasts aching for heat.
His crypt is broken; the waves of his footsteps capsize speedboats down the Strip. Lost salmon climb balconies in ancestral terror.
Matociquala, his hour come round at last, lurches toward the desert city like a stóribjörn.
Marla’s been on the porch drinking since the sun touched the library roof, and her eyes now are puffy and mean. Too hot for February. There’s a cold front coming in.
She decides to walk through campus with her car keys in her hand. It’s after eleven, and inside gangly kids are frantically trying to fuck away the leap year. She reads windows in passing, a construction paper alphabet: Mu Alpha Lambda, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She wonders what that would spell.
There’s a rock in her other hand. She’s not sure how.
Around her stalks March, lioness in a lean season.
The Washouts are that band with two bassists. They would consider a keyboardist, well, if she was on the right wavelength? Just no guitars.
It’s a thing.
But by the time they get their interview with Mona from Velocity Weekly they’re so past that. “I can’t blame the fans for clinging to the gimmick,” says the bassist, “the ones from when we were starting out, you know.”
“And when was that?” Mona asks.
He thinks. “Saturday?”
Mona’s only here because she’s crushing hard on the drummer, but there’s this goth girl clinging to him like a wad of white library paste.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
2038 and they’re all out on the streets, sneakered and bearded. They don’t care that it’s January; it never gets cold now anyway. It’s almost time.
Weintraub is one of the wandering crowd, Vinge paperback in hand, but he’s starting to get worried. It should have happened by now. What’s their UTC offset here, anyway?
“Sir?” shouts a blogarazzo, camgun leveled at him. “Are you involved in this activity? Can you tell me what you’re all waiting for?”
“The Sing,” says Weintraub, tears tracking his face, “the Sing Sing Sing,” and stares at his wristwatch for the first sign of life.
“Wij hebben twee Fried Chicken Kippenhamburger Wrap Subs, een kom nodig Dippin’ Bacon en–beste, wilde u dessert? Een Battered Marihuanabrownie, tevreden.”
“Zou u Mayonaise Fries gerechten of een drank met dat vandaag willen proberen?” says Roderick rotely. “Dank u, zal het uit juist zijn.” He shuts off the register, taps Landry to help him and starts bagging up the trash.
“Do you ever wonder if they know real Unitedstatesian food is nothing like this?” sighs Roderick on the walk back from the dumpster, shaking down his cigarettes.
“What?” says Landry, taking the pack and knocking one out. “Yes it is.”
Triumphantly, Jarno proves that P = NP (elliptical curves, in case you’re wondering, yes, again, seriously). The university is full of cameras for about two weeks; he gets the prize check from the Clay Institute, and later he’ll probably split a Nobel.
He spends part of the money on a cabin at Shadow Mountain Lake and the rest to name a reading room at the library. A million dollars isn’t so much, actually. A little more than the value of his 401(k).
Some grad students use his work to break a Minesweeper record. Jarno fishes, and thinks about birds in flight.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008