Vapor, Cont. 1

"Say! Doc!" Shaun yelled right into my ear. I reached around and pushed his head back, scowling.

"What?"

"Some locals at 10 o'clock. Looks like they'd heading for the hills."

And so they were, though they'd never get there in time. I could see a plume of dust rising behind them as they kicked over the bumpy terrain in homebrew buggies, angling toward what was left of the old highway into Longmont.

"I wonder what they're in such a damn hurry for," I yelled back at him. "No way they're gonna beat the rain. What in the heck do you think they're even doing out here?"

The kid called out some sort of reply, but it was all chopped up by the fans. I wasn't really listening anyway. Those buggies had me intrigued. I hadn't seen the locals sporting tech like that before.

I started to bring the skimmer around toward the fleeing locals, thought of the hybrid bears we were carrying and started to pull out, then went ahead, against my better judgment.

In a few moments we were swooping in right over them. I could see six or seven buggies, rather pathetic things made out of old aluminum and carbon-composite car frames, but sporting enormous rubber tires, which really surprised me, and an invisible source of power. I eased back on the throttle and circled around the locals as they drew up into a sort of defensive circle and stopped. They all rushed out into the middle of the circle and started waving their arms around threateningly.

"What do you think they're about?" I shouted at Shaun. "They can't think we're gonna hurt them?"

"I don't think they're threatening us, Doc," he yelled back. "I think they're trying to get our attention."

I looked again, and this time the waving arms didn't seem so menacing, just urgent. In fact, the locals seemed to be lifting something up to show us, something rather long and wrapped in white cloth: a body.

Working Title: Vapor

We were coming in low and fast over the plains north of Hotspot. It was early May, and stormclouds were gathering over the still-white peaks of the Front Range. I had the throttle wide open, the fans making a tooth-rattling moan as I tried to will the skimmer back to U Town before the storm hit. Shaun was in the backseat fiddling with his Syst8, seemingly oblivious to the gathering storm, and below us, a small herd of buffalo was scattering in fear. I felt a twinge of guilt at disrupting the herd--normally I flew the skimmer high and slow enough to avoid that sort of thing--but we needed to beat the storm, and the upper atmosphere was a seething mass of chaotic air being pushed ahead of the front.

"Those fetuses OK, Shaun?" I yelled, shouting to be heard over the fans. He glanced up from his little terminal and craned his neck around to check the monitors on the foamsteel cases in the skimmer's little cargo bay.
"So far so good, Doc," he called up. "Temp is still 5C, and they're all still suspended."
I nodded, but I could feel the knot of worry in my gut tighten. These blackbear fetuses were in a state of temporary suspended animation, but unlike a grown bear, they couldn't hibernate indefinitely. A couple of days at most and then they'd start to die or suffer permanent damage. I'd stupidly let Howard, up in the Black Hills, talk me into stopping over on the way back from New Omaha so I could see some of the wolf specimens he'd been working with, and now we had precious little time to get these fetuses into the incubators at U Town. Clear forecast or no, I was kicking myself for not being more cautious. Spring in the mountains meant a storm could blow up at nearly any time, and there was no way we could take the skimmer into the teeth of a May squall. If we had to wait the storm out, chances are we'd lose more than a few of these fetuses before we could get back, making the whole trip a waste of time and money.

An Addendum

I'm making my committment, right here, right now, to myself, my nonexistent readership, and to the cybernetic Genius of the Internet that I will try to come up with one post every day, NO MATTER WHAT. Well, maybe not on Saturdays cause that's my day off from everything, yo. And I'll be gone most of this weekend. But on all other days...

Where Do We Go Now? (Sweet Child O' Mine...)

So as anyone who may have looked at this blog any time over the last, oh, three or four months has probably realized, it's been a little dead in the water. Partially that is because I was super busy getting married, finding a new apartment, and doing all these exciting things that I suppose I could've blogged about but I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe because I was really busy actually doing these things as opposed to commenting on them, or maybe it's because I'm a little uncomfortable writing about myself. Not that I don't want to write about myself, it's just that I seem to have a hard time going about it straightforwardly.

Which is the real reason this blog has been languishing, especially for the last month. I haven't felt since I started, I suppose, that I've really known what I wanted to say. Sure, I have opinions about lots of different things, but my interests are so mercurial that I've had a hard time focusing my efforts and attention on making this a "something" blog, like a photo blog or a sci-fi blog or a political blog or even just a personal blog. And trying to be an everything blog was too nebulous. It's like reading the paper: so many important events stacked one atop the other that by the end of it you don't have any coherent sense that you've actually done or discovered anything important. And that's how I felt blogging about whatever crossed my table: it was interesting, but I didn't get the sense that I was doing or saying or even bringing to anyone's attention anything of worth. And it was too easy to abandon it.

But at the same time I have the persistent, nagging feeling that I have something to say and I'm simply not saying it. What can it be? Do I want to tell a story? I don't know. Writing is enjoyable, but I haven't had the patience (or maybe just haven't pushed myself) to actually sit down and work out a plot, characters, you know--all the things you need to actually write a story. I want to, but it keeps getting put on the back burner until, you know, one day I have cancer or I'm 90 or I fall into a raging river or something and I've never done it. Never written anything I can be proud of, and I realize as I'm dying that I always could've done it, I just never tried. I don't want that.

So how does that dovetail with the blog? A couple different ways, I suppose. The first is that I want to start serializing some fiction on here. My own private Charles Dickens, I suppose, and if anyone I know or don't know happens to come on here and read something and comment on it, so much the better. Might even get me writing to know someone was reading something I was working on. The other thing is that one thing I do a lot of is reading. Well, I watch movies, too. So I'm involving myself in a lot of narratives, and I'd like to think out loud, so to speak, about what I'm reading and watching. My own little review site, too, I guess you could say. Not that there aren't enough movie and book reviews floating around online already; I don't expect to make any kind of splash, socially speaking. But I think it would help me immensely just to organize my thoughts about things and get stuff out, start writing something just for the pleasure of it.

And if anyone I told about my blog actually comes by to check it after its long dormancy, well, that would be cool, too.