Inhuman
Winners of the Fourth Absolute-XPress
FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE
by
Pete “Patch” Alberti, Jason Barney, James Beamon, Christopher Chartrand, Greg College, David L. Craddock, Stef Donev, Larry Kerr, Andrew Magrath, John Martin, Ty Miller, Dan Murphy, Tony Noland, Jay Raven, C. D. Reimer, David Strachan, Matthew Stroescu, Chrystalla Thoma
SMASHWORDS EDITION
(e-Book ISBN: 978-1-77053-011-9)
(f-20100728)
This book is available in print
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An Imprint of Hades Publications Inc.
P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada
Inhuman
Copyright © 2010 by Pete “Patch” Alberti, Jason Barney, James Beamon, Christopher Chartrand, Greg College, David L. Craddock, Stef Donev, Larry Kerr, Andrew Magrath, John Martin, Ty Miller, Dan Murphy, Tony Noland, Jay Raven, C. D. Reimer, David Strachan, Matthew Stroescu, Chrystalla Thoma
Cover Illustration: Malcolm McClinton
Editing: Margaret Curelas
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Absolute XPress and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledge the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing programs.
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INTRODUCTION by Jerome Stueart
THE HUMAN ASPECT by David Strachan.
A MATHEMATICIAN’S GALATEA by Andrew Magrath
RED KING by Ty Miller.
SILENT OBSERVERS by C.D. Reimer
RESPECT YOUR ELDERS by Larry C. Kerr
LEVI’S HELL by Christopher Chartrand
WELCOME TO PLANET EARTH by Stef Donev
HUNTER’S MOON by Jason Barney
JESSE’S CHOICE by Chrystalla Thoma
MUDDBLATT by Pete “Patch”Alberti.
A FEW SMALL OBSERVATIONS by Danil Murphy
IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN by Matthew Stroescu
DUET by Andrew Magrath
JOY by Chrystalla Thoma
FREE BEER TOMORROW by John Michael Martin
MALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Jay Raven
THE KISS by Greg College
EXAMINATION OF INTERNAL PROCESSING by James Beamon
I LIVED by David Craddock
NEARER COMES THE MOON by Tony Noland
The Inhuman are Different Than You And Me
Let’s face it. Humans have a lot of baggage.
We are made up of our cultures, our time periods, our education, our genders, our regions, our pasts, our relationships, our desires, and heavens, yes, our families. We are complex. Often we act as both good and bad people within minutes of each other. We have complicated relationships with other people. Our acts of heroism and bravery are set against our acts of cowardice and self-preservation. We contradict ourselves. Our “wisdom”—if we have any—can change with our mood, our circumstance, even our audience. It is difficult to find how we are alike in all the minutiae of our differences. It is hard to find our humanity in the maelstrom of our context—unless, perhaps, this is our humanity.
It’s hard to know, though, what makes us human—and alike. We want to know what binds us together on this planet as humans—especially when we regard each other, so often, as “the Other” over some miniscule difference.
Shylock, Shakespeare’s voice of the Other, uses a list of qualifications to establish that he is, in fact, not so different than everyone else.
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
It is a transformative moment in “The Merchant of Venice” because the characters have been assuming Shylock is different—even inhuman. But those are pretty definitive characteristics of humanity. It’s hard not to give Shylock some credit for making a good case.
Certainly, science fiction and fantasy have borrowed that speech from Shylock time and again to show us that aliens, computers, animals, viruses, holograms are just like us and should be granted sentience.
However, while sentience may be easy to grant on the basis of a list of similar traits, we still have a special love for the inhuman—for their differences.
There’s something soothing and simplistic about them. Pure, innocent, extremely reflective. They think about us, they despise or worship us, and at their best, they highlight some facet of ourselves for us. Like a backwards prism, they take the chaos of our context and produce a straight beam of light.
At least, that’s the way they seem to work in fiction.
Fictionally, the inhumans come in handy. We can say something profound as a writer through an inhuman—and get listened to—much better than if one of our humans say the same thing. A reader will favor the outsider. They won’t know how to contextualize—aka dismiss—something profound the inhuman says. We don’t know if it matters where that alien was born—what continent of their planet, what time period, their family, economic status, etc.
Aliens can be just aliens—giving us an honest, good outsider perspective. They have little agenda for giving it, little to gain. And a reader will grant them a special dispensation, a greater hearing, for honesty—a grace, if you will, for their innocence and lack of guile.
So, you can say things with an Inhuman you can’t say from a human perspective.
Science Fiction and Fantasy writers didn’t discover this cool technique though. The concept of “the Other” is a long, beautiful tradition in literature dating back to Beowulf, the Bible, A Thousand and One Nights, the Odyssey, the oldest of literatures.
It is one of those ancient literary devices that reveal whole cultures.
If a culture recognizes that they have an “Other,”—someone who is not like them—chances are, they are revealing who they are by contrast. Let’s say the Other is that Barbarian race over there which doesn’t wash, speaks in monosyllables, interbreeds, promotes war. It’s obvious who the “Us” is—us clean, intelligent, peaceful, moral people, of course!
But we’ve become a global culture now. We don’t want to pick apart where Canadians are different than the Chinese, or where men and women differ. When we deal with only human cultures, there’s now a tendency to concentrate on the minutiae—habits, manners, fashion, morals. Science fiction and Fantasy allow us to push “the Other” far from us—thereby finding a way to talk about all our cultures as a single entity—the Human. By making the Other inhuman, we get to figure out the basics of being human, and so find out what makes us alike.
Science Fiction and Fantasy have taught us well that the inhuman character can say a lot about humanity just by being themselves. Vulcans showed us what might happen if we suppressed all emotions—the good, the bad, the impassioned. The Cylons taught us the importance, and the arrogance, of looking for a Creator. The Morlocks, the importance of intelligence and patience; the Eloi the dangers of being cared for. Dwarves and Elves and Hobbits all have specific traits—they aren’t just tall or squat or hairy; they are not human and think differently. HAL could be so efficient, so powerful, so careful, and so kindly malevolent. Even WOPR, the NORAD computer in the 1983 movie, “War Games,” concludes “that nuclear war is a strange game. The best move is not to play,” thereby reducing our arms race into a silly child’s game.
General Petraeus can’t tell us war is silly. We need WOPR to do that. In science fiction, we need the Inhuman badly—in the end, it’s the only one who will be listened to.
So, while I’m all for complicating our aliens, granting them Shylock—humanity status, I think we need their representative nature—their ability to speak for their species, and in contrast to, and objectively about, ours. We desire their simplicity, their lack of complexity—so that when they want to talk about humanity, we can’t dismiss them through the Babel of context. We have no prejudices already built in. The inhuman come to us pure. Clean. Clean and reflective.
So when they speak, we listen to them.
Jerome Stueart
by David Strachan
The attack was sudden. Many of Tchaktuli’s physical Aspects died in the moments it took for her to notice the invader. The Worker Aspects, heavily laden with silken egg sacks, did not stand a chance. She looked through the multi-faceted eyes of a surviving Aspect as the giant silver invader landed in a cloud of dust and crushed the Aspect to the ground. A giant limb held the injured Worker down and she was unable to pierce the creature’s carapace with her pincers and claws.
Warrior Aspects arrived and swarmed the hulking creature but were cut down by long silver stingers that spit a deadly barrage that shredded carapace and chitin with equal ease. In seconds the invader had destroyed all but the dying and pinned Aspect.
Anger surged through Tchaktuli and pushed away the pain. Who was this invader? Who dared enter her realm?
Tchaktuli projected out from the Aspect and surged towards the invader to battle it psychically. She recoiled in confusion as she encountered three unlinked minds within. There was an alien feel to them and, puzzled, she fled back to the Aspect.
A panel in the side of the invader opened and three small bipedal creatures stepped out squinting in the harsh light, two with smaller silver stingers. Tchaktuli was surprised to see the deadly stingers were not attached when one was handed to the creature that did not have one.
They spoke in an alien tongue and gestured towards the captured Aspect. They were unaware of her presence and Tchaktuli took advantage and attacked the nearest mind. The sense of self she encountered was stronger than she expected, more like another Queen but limited to a single physical body. Emotions flooded through the link as it sensed her intrusion. Surprise shifted to anger and to a weak mental defence which Tchaktuli easily brushed aside. Emotions Tchaktuli did not recognise flooded through the link as the creature tried again to expel her.