03.23.08
Glitch
Dark. It was nearly always dark under the mountain. Nothing that lived there – and you can be sure that something lived there for if one thing is certain, it is that life can be found in some very surprising places – needed light to see by. Sight was such a poor substitute for the taste of rock, the songs of metal, the bright clear voices of gemstones, the sharp tang of water so heavy with minerals that, had there been light to see it by, it would have been as white and thick as milk.
To the little people who lived there, the kobolds, it was milk. The children drank it as their mothers and fathers worked the rich seams of ore, dug their tunnels, made their goods at forges whose fires gave heat, but no light.
Few things interrupted the eternal darkness. The little people had visitors, from time to time. Those who came by secret ways and strange, bringing riches from the world above to offer in trade for what the kobolds had to offer. They charged dear for their work, not because they craved things from the lighted realms, but because they felt that the fruits of the mountain belonged there, and it took much to persuade them to part with even the smallest emerald, the least grain of silver. The shining ones came often. The enemies of the shining host came also, and were given the same consideration. Once in a great while, a god would come to visit. They all came for the same thing, for all knew that the little people were smiths without peer, in their world or any other.
Eventually humans came, and they came not to trade, but to steal, bringing with them only light and noise and the stench of their bodies.
Like all visitors to the mountain of the little people, not all of them would return.
Texas in the late 80s was having a hard time of things economically, what with oil prices being low and the telecom revolution was still a few years away. So my folks didn’t have much even with both of them working, what with three kids (I’m the middle one, thanks for asking) to feed and a mortgage to pay. Things got worse when dad left, even with mom working two jobs. The fucking bank took the house after mom couldn’t keep up with the payments, and we ended up in a one-bedroom apartment. Y’all would call it the wrong sort of neighborhood, but it ain’t, not really. It’s just poor. Mostly Mexicans come up to find work, legal or not. It always pissed me off when some cracker sonofabitch would think I’m supposed to be all racist and shit like him just ’cause I’m white. All my friends were brown, and most of them didn’t speak much English. Still does piss me off, come to that. And I ain’t much for keeping my mouth shut, even when I should.
I didn’t know shit about faerie then – not that I’m a goddamn authority now or anything – but I guess the signs were there if I’d known what they were. From the first I can remember it was more fun taking things apart than it was playing with them. Mom would beat my ass bright red every time she caught me doing it, but I just couldn’t make myself stop. It was like this voice in my head telling me what to do, how to do it. Sure, that’s crazy, but it could have been lots worse. The voice could have been telling me to start fires and shit. Instead, I took things apart. Anything I could get my hands on, too.
When I was six, I took the whole damn stove apart, had all the pieces spread out across the kitchen floor with my little brother and sister in the doorway watching me do it with her fingers in her mouth. Funny thing of it, I could usually put them back together pretty good too. After a while I didn’t get caught so much. Sometimes they worked better after I was done, even. The oven used to burn things on one side, but after I put it back together (with my ass glowing about as red as the burners on top of the stove the whole time) it worked just fine.
Even back then, the nocker in me was trying to come out, I guess. It took a while, but it worked out eventually.
School was not the greatest thing in the world for me. Not that I couldn’t do the work – I could, easy. Too easy, maybe. I was bored to death, from the very beginning. First thing they want to teach you is how to read, and I’d been reading since I was three. Mrs. Walter didn’t give a shit if I could read already, I was supposed to sit there and be quiet. Five year old kids are not good at sit there and be quiet. Even kids who are not someday going to be nockers aren’t good at sit there and be quiet. Mrs. Walter wouldn’t let me read on my own, which you’d think would be the obvious solution. So I’d spend five minutes on the assignment and then have to wait twenty minutes while everybody else finished up.
This did not work well.
Could I draw? Nope. Read? Already said no. Color? No. Read? Do you have trouble with the English language? Sit. Down.
I could fiddle with my lunch money. That got my lunch money taken away, with her telling me, in front of the whole class, that she was going to Baskin-Robbins after school with my lunch money. I don’t know if she ever did, but I didn’t get lunch that day.
For all I knew, I had twelve more years of this to look forward to. In between daydreaming about Mrs. Walters being ground up in the gears of a drawbridge – and no I do not know how I knew what the gears of a drawbridge looked like, maybe I saw it in a book or something – I entertained fond thoughts of walking in front of a bus.
Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t really suicidal. Much. But I was hurt and angry and I wanted something to change even if I didn’t know what.
At first, the boys at the arcade gave me a lot of shit because I was a girl, but after I beat their asses a few times, I was just sort of one of them. “Who, Becca? She’s cool. She’ll kick your ass, dude.” Yeah, so I had to be better than the boys just to be accepted. So what else is new?
Then my tits started growing. It changed a few things. There were times I would swear they got bigger overnight. And they were always sore. Kinda. It was in a good way sometimes, and then I’d forget they were there and bang one on a door frame or something. Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow. And the boys I hung out with at the arcade forgot that I had a face. Whenever they were talking to me, their eyes were just fixed on the damned things. Or they’d ‘accidentally’ bump into them. Like when I was trying to land a good fatality in Mortal Kombat. That stopped after I hit a few of them back, though. A good punch even in a boy’s nipple hurts pretty good.
All those tokens cost money, too, which my mom didn’t have. And then there was mall food, clothes, a little TV and a Nintendo that I needed, all the games for that, a computer, a trick bike…. It adds up, you know? There wasn’t a whole lot of ways for a kid my age to make money, so I hooked up with the Buena Vista Kings as a runner. It didn’t pay a lot, but I didn’t have to do hardly nothing either. I’d make deliveries, run errands and shit, keep a lookout for cops or other gangers, and I’d get a hundred a week or so. They thought I was cute. I was thirteen, and looked about ten, and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was white. So the cops never even talked to me. Mom didn’t want to know about how much money I was spending.
I ended up giving her about half of what I made. She needed it more than I did. Not that it makes what I did okay, it’s not.
I got out of the ganger stuff after my little brother Michael got shot. He wasn’t in a gang or nothing, just was going to school and wanted to be a lawyer. But he just happened to be in the wrong place when the Norteños and the Crips (I dunno which ones, there’s like five gangs calling themselves Crips in San Antonio). Nobody saw shit, you know? He’s fine, the bullet went through his arm, put him in the hospital for a day or two, he’s got a cool scar to show off to girls.
Mom and I had a nice big talk – and by “had a nice big talk” I mean she beat my ass with a leather strap – and I decided that it might be better if I got out of the gang business before I lost a limb or something. She made me get a real job, too. Oh, the joys of living within the law. It pays a whole lot less, but there’s a far lower risk of my mom pulling my leg off and beating me to death with it.
At first, the humans did not fare well under the mountain. The air was often foul, there were pockets of gas that exploded when it came in contact with the fire the humans used for light, ceilings failed and fell in. Some of this was natural, the hazards that face all who dig under the mountain.
Some was not.
The little people did not care at all for intruders who came to their mountain to steal and brought nothing.
Eventually, some learned to come with more humility. To come with gifts. The miners left offerings in the tunnels. Small things, usually: a bowl of milk, a loaf of bread. Flowers. Sometimes something not so small: a child abandoned alive or sacrificed in ritual, his or her body covered in red ochre dust, for such was sacred to them.
The humans who brought no gifts died. Some died of things that could be laid to mischance. Others died because, if they didn’t see the little peoples’ bright eyes and bright grins and bright little knives glimmering at the edges of the dark, whose fault was that anyway?
Humans who brought gifts for the little people did not. Well, most of them. Some died, because they were mortal, and didn’t they always?
Since I wasn’t doing that any more, I sort of got back into school work just because there wasn’t nothing else to do. Besides, I wanted out of the barrio, you know? I wasn’t going nowhere if I didn’t do better in school. Except maybe to jail. And I’d known too many guys who come out of jail to want to go in there. It was pretty easy, when I actually went to class and did the homework and everything.
I got a reputation as a geek, but that was okay. I was a geek. Reading all the time, taking the hardest courses I could get into. I was the only person in the whole school who took electronics shop and AP English. Got A’s in both of them. Not that you’d know it from listening to me. Mister Brice, my guidance counselor, started talking about college, end of my junior year. Get real. Me? Little Becca Collins, former drug dealer/gangbanger chick, in college? No way.
Even if there was any way a college would take me, there wasn’t no money for it. Besides, I’d already been talking to a Navy recruiter. He said with my grades, I could pick my specialty, and get a twenty thousand enlistment bonus. Mom had struggled to keep us fed even in a good year, so it sounded like a lot of money. All that I had to do was finish out my senior year, turn eighteen, and I was good to go. I was going to be a fighter pilot.
Note to Rebecca. Recruiters lie. They all do, whether they’re recruiting for the Kings or the Navy.
So, no. I did not get to be a fighter pilot. The Navy in its infinite wisdom felt that my skills would be better utilized in other areas. Specifically they felt that they would be better utilized in avionics maintenance and repair. It’s probably for the best, really, given how things turned out, but still. It would have been really fucking cool to be a fighter pilot. I did get the enlistment bonus, though. So I went and bought a bike, figuring if they weren’t going to let me fly, I’d find my own goddamned speed. Besides, I could get a shit-hot Honda CBR600RR (black, or course) for half of what I’d have to pay for a halfway decent car. That it’s a vibrator with a top speed of somewhere around one-sixty does not hurt even a little bit.
The first thing they did was ship me off to Great Lakes for basic training, which did not include machine guns, to my everlasting disappointment. It didn’t include guns at all. What kind of military were they trying to run here? It did involve a whole lot of getting shouted at, bad food, nowhere near enough sleep, and running outside during the dead of winter. I just about froze my ass off. They did ’suggest’ that I shave my head, which was about the only thing I did expect from Basic. It would’ve been pretty cool, if I didn’t risk frostbite of the scalp every time I went outside.
Mom and Mike and Lucy didn’t make it up for graduation, which was too bad. But I sent them pictures. I knew exactly when they got there, too, because my phone rang. Mom was terribly, terribly upset that they’d cut all my hair off, and it took about twenty minutes just to get her calmed down enough that I didn’t have to hold the phone at arm’s length so I could listen without my eardrums bleeding.
After that, I went to more school. In Orlando, this time, which was lots, lots warmer than Great Lakes. I liked it there a lot. No, I did not go to Disney World. The classes were still pretty easy, but interesting. This one guy who’d gone to college for a couple years said the math was kind of fucked up, but I didn’t figure out what he meant until way, way later.
Anyway, there I was, a petty third fresh out of tech school, and headed for my first deployment on USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75), out of Norfolk. Since the Navy was paying for it anyway, I went home for a week to see everybody. Half the neighborhood must’ve turned out. I wasn’t the only person to join the service, but I was the only girl who did. It all felt really weird, like I was some kind of hero, and I didn’t like it. Little Mike – Lucy’s first kid – was in pre-school and growing like crazy. Lucy was looking more like Mom than ever, but she’d actually gotten married, and had another kid already.
I knew it all, from pictures and from talking to Mom on the phone, but it didn’t really hit me until I went and saw it. I got out of there as fast as I could.
It would’ve been nice if Harry had been in port at Norfolk, but she (Yes, she. All boats are ’she,’ even if they’re named after men. I have no idea why.) was in the Indian Ocean between Africa and India, so I had to fly out to Rammstein, Rammstein to Diego Garcia, and from Diego out to Harry. Long, long trip. Especially by military transport. It took weeks for the bruises on my ass to heal up. But I did get to make a carrier landing, which is pretty exciting, even in a garbage truck.
I got used to shipboard life pretty quickly. Having a petty officer (third class)’s stripe didn’t mean shit. Time served was more important. When the Marines wanted to get through a corridor, you got the hell out of their way. The watertight doors all had signs saying to keep them dogged at all times, but nobody believed that. An awful lot of fucking goes on aboard ship, mostly het. Rotating shifts are not fun. Showering and sleeping with thirty-odd other women gets to be no big deal after a while. We were very, very fortunate to not be in the Army.
And I fucking loved the airplanes. The ship, too. Did you know that that big-ass ship runs on steam? Okay, so she’s got nuclear-powered boilers and turbine generators for the electric motors spinning the wheels, but at heart she’s a steamship. Too fuckin’ cool.
But. I wanted to fly in a fighter jet, just once. There was a Marine lieutenant named Mendoza who drove a Harrier. I saw an opportunity there, and went for it. Or rather, for him. Not real subtle about it, either. I’d been fucking him for about two months before he mentioned flying to me. I swear, I didn’t say a word about it, it was totally his idea. I tried to sound kind of nervous about it, what if we get caught, all that sort of thing. I didn’t sound convincing to me, but I guess he wanted to show off to his girlfriend. So I let him talk me into it, and off we went.
Keep in mind that I had no idea there was any weird shit going on whatsofuckingever. None. Zero, zip, nada. The only thing I’d ever really noticed was that I had kind of a… feel, I guess, for machines, and especially for electronics. I knew when they were going to break, sometimes what to do to fix them. Once in a while, I could just yell at something, and it’d start working. But I thought everyone did that.
Turns out, they don’t. Or at least not most of them.
Anyway, it came kind of late, but that’s my Chrysalis. It started when the catapult threw us off the end of the carrier deck and up into the sky. Hell, I was wet just from strapping myself in. While it lasted, I knew everything there was to know about that airplane, every loose rivet, every blob of solder, how much wear time was left on the engine turbines, what it saw with its radar and cameras, everything. We’re lucky it wasn’t something more spectacular, or we’d probably have crashed. But Raúl felt something, definitely. I could still feel it fizzing in my bones when we got back to Truman.
The sex after that was the best I’ve ever had, before or since. I bit his shoulder so hard to keep from screaming that I drew blood. Lieutenant Raúl must’ve thought it was pretty good, too, ’cause we went up a bunch more times after that, and he gave me his second-favorite flight suit.
What, you thought he’d give me his best flight suit? He liked me, and we had a lot of fun in bed, but he wasn’t gonna divorce his wife and marry me or something.
Carefully, reverently, the old man knelt before the shrine. He laid a small bundle, swaddled in cloth, in the niche provided there and blew out the candle burning on it, symbolically giving the shrine and its contents back to the dark and to the little people who inhabited it. “Please, People of the Mountain, hear me. Give us leave to dig here, and help us return safely to the surface, to our families, our children. We thank you for your forbearance, and beg pardon for our intrusion.”
Knees creaking, back popping, the old man stood. Every month at the dark of moon (no one knew how the little people, who almost never went to the surface, knew the face of the moon, but apparently they did) he had knelt there, leaving his pleas and his people’s offerings for the People Under the Mountain. His father, and his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather had been making these sacrifices for all their lives, keeping the miners safe and leading them to the best seams of ore.
His eldest, his only son, had no interest in superstitious garbage like this. The old man rubbed his jaw where the boy (and he would always, in the old man’s mind, be a boy no matter that he had survived thirty-some winters) had hit him the last time he’d tried to teach him the ritual. “There are no people who live in the dark, old man,” the boy had said. “And even if there were, the Christ would protect me from the children of Satan. What you do is heresy, idolatry, and I have no intention of burning at the same stake you do.”
The old man feared for his people, but it seemed that the boy was right after all. Eventually his aching knees would no longer carry him into the damp cold of the mine, so no offerings were made, no thanks given to the People Under the Mountain, only to the white Christ who lived in the sky.
Nothing happened. After the boy laughed his scorn in the old man’s face, he just gave up entirely. He stayed in bed, turned his face to the wall, refused to eat.
Within days, the old man died. The small shrine stayed empty, unvisited, forgotten.
The next day, things were different. Real different. How I looked, for one thing. I’d always been white, but I tanned when I went out in the sun, brown hair, brown eyes. Now, I was pale, chalky white with patterns in red across my cheeks and nose, white hair, with gray and orange eyes, like the glow from a barbecue when the coals have had time to burn way, way down. The weird part was, it wasn’t a surprise. This was how I was supposed to look, just like the other me was how I was supposed to look, too.
Had on this amazing outfit, too. It was like this black and gray leather jumpsuit sort of thing, with straps and buckles all over the place, and a zillion little loops and pockets for tools, big stompy boots with steel toes and this kind of armor stuff all down my left arm with pointed fingertips, like claws. I grinned at myself in the mirror, and my teeth were a dull dark gray and pointed too. And I had these bat wings, not real big, the same red as the skin everywhere else but my face, growing out from under my shoulder blades. They looked good then, but ended up being seriously fucking annoying later. I liked what I saw. I liked it a lot. I looked like some kind of fetish ninja demon out of a movie with a really good makeup effects department.
That was another thing. You might’ve heard someone say, ’swear to make a sailor blush?’ Shit, I managed to make a goddamned master chief blush. I couldn’t stop myself. Every third word was a curse. I damned near bit my tongue off trying to keep from doing it all the time, but it didn’t help. Almost lost a full grade for insubordination.
I tried, I really did. Since I changed, I knew more about that goddamned bucket of shit than CHENG did. I didn’t know why, or how it happened, but there I was. I could feel her all around me, all the airplanes, the bunker oil sloshing around in her tanks, the decay of her nuclear fuel, everything. I swear to God she was dreaming. Slow, dark, simple dreams, with brilliant flashes and sparkles like fireworks, impossibly far away. Now, I don’t claim to understand it, but I was there, and no shit, she dreamed.
But I wasn’t going to get to stay aboard her. She was the Navy’s, not mine, and they didn’t feel I fit in any more. We went around about it some, and they ‘offered’ to give me a medical discharge, rather than an other than honorable. The doctors decided it was some kind of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome. No, I did not tell them about how I looked, since nobody else seemed to be able to see me. Surely somebody would’ve mentioned it if they noticed the wings.
I’d get to keep some benefits, and I’d keep my grade (Aircraft Electronics Technician’s Mate, Second Class, if you must know), and I wouldn’t have to pay my reenlistment bonus back.
They were generous. Really generous. But I wanted to kill the whole goddamned review board when they told me what they’d decided. We’d actually gotten back to Norfolk by that point, so there I was, in the middle of a Navy town, and I wasn’t a sailor any more.
So I went and I stayed drunk for a solid week. It was the only reasonable thing to do. And in much better taste than having a rendering of her tattooed across my back, which was my other thought.
(Lieutenant Mendoza, bless his pointy little head, found another cute little E-rating to keep his dick wet for him. I didn’t care, by that point, and still don’t.)
Keep in mind that I didn’t know dick about what I was, what Faeries were, or any shit like that. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know there was anybody else like me out there. So it was something of a shock when this guy who looked like my twin brother found me on a barstool in Buffalo. New York. I have no idea how I got there, so don’t bother asking.
The first thing I did, when he got me back to his hotel room, was throw up. He told me in considerable detail what a stupid fucking bitch I was, and how much goddamned trouble he’d gone through to find me, and put me in the shower for a while. At least a day or two, until I sobered up enough to be worth talking to.
He said he was something called a nocker, and I was one, too. They didn’t have too many people in active service, but there were relatives of theirs that kept an eye out for people like me, and let them know when we were getting out. There was some kind of communications fuckup, and the guy who was supposed to have met me in Norfolk got there too late.
Yeah. So anyway, I had a choice, now. I could go with him and get an apprenticeship with the Bes Din, which he was an agent of, and learn more about what we were and what we were supposed to be doing, or I could go off by myself and get killed in a couple of months. Nice choices, there. It wasn’t like I was going to get any better offers, so I went along with it. Had to sign a long-ass contract, too.
But it was okay. They run a company, Global Technologies Consolidated, outside of Atlanta. It’s not publicly traded, but it’s all legal, incorporated in Bermuda. I was a ‘Research Associate Trainee.’ Almost everyone’s a nocker or nocker kin, with a few other kinds of people. Damned few straight-up normal humans. For good reason, you understand.
Employee orientation was a crash course on Fae history, recent and otherwise, some basics on etiquette and politics. And then they got us into the good shit. Gematria, Alchemy, Monad theory, Beginning and Advanced Contracts Seminars, Introduction to Mining… It almost made up for not being on board Harry any more. I got another reputation there, for being fucking nuts this time. Getting one for being a geek, there, would’ve been like getting a reputation for being able to swim, if you were a sperm cell.
We were a big hit at DragonCon, too.
So there I was, I’d finally found out exactly where I belonged, and they kicked my ass out. I’d made myself a big-ass sword, which amused the hell out of me, at least at first. See, the thing with my wings was, they didn’t fucking work. Oh, sure, I could move them, and feel with them, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn’t fly. When I was on board ship, it was fucking awful. I couldn’t exactly cut holes for ‘em in my uniform, so they were all cramped up inside there. Not that they were in the same world, but anyway. It’s seriously fucking unpleasant. Frankly, a good set of cramps is a better time.
Anyway, I ended up looking like the world’s baddest motherfucking moogle, straight out of the Final Fantasy games, so I figured, why the hell shouldn’t I have a big-ass sword? Because big-ass swords are really fucking heavy, for one thing. Another is that I don’t know how to use a big-ass sword. So I gave it to the armory and built myself a goblin bow. I’m not much better with those, but they at least have the benefit of working a nice long way away from the bad guys. It’s not really a crossbow at all, having more in common with a railgun than a spring-driven weapon. The bolts are all metal already so that works. It doesn’t actually throw them any farther or harder than a spring does, but dude, I’ve got a motherfuckin’ railgun! It looks a lot like Kaneda’s laser from Akira, actually. Not surprising, considering how much anime has warped my tiny little mind. One of these days I’m going to build his bike. Not that it’s going to get me cute Japanese girls, revolutionary anarchists (were they anarchists? I could not figure out the politics in that movie) or otherwise, but I can dream, right? Yeah. Anyway.
That, along with my thesis on machine dreams and virtual dreamworlds was my apprenticeship project. My advisor told me I shouldn’t do it, but I figured, what the hell? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Nobody believes they exist, but the Aethernauts took me when the Toymakers wouldn’t. Though even they think I’m batshit. When Aethernauts think you’re crazy? Maybe you should look into that.
I signed another fucking contract, got my guild license, and they said, basically, “You’re a fucking journeyman now. Get your narrow white ass out there and fucking journey.”
“How come it’s not ‘journeywoman?’”
“Shut the hell up and get out already, Glitch.” Ah, discourse among the goblin-kind.
So I’m fucking journeying already. The Bes Din hooked me up with a computer store that needed a repair/build technician up in Denver, and for some reason they actually hired me. It for damn sure wasn’t my stellar interviewing skills. I went back to San Antonio for a week to visit the family. It’s nice to see them, though we don’t talk about certain things, like why the baby is afraid of me. Apparently some children, if they’re young enough, can see into the Dreaming, and mine isn’t the most soothing face ever. If you want that cheerful helpful shit, find yourself a boggan. If you want shit to get done, you call one of us.
So, Denver. It snows up there. I may have to buy a truck for the winters. It’ll work out. I can learn how to snowboard or some shit.
It’s not always dark out on I-10 in west Texas. Even at night there’s light from billboards, from all the little towns and truck stops along the freeway, from headlights, from the sky. You can see a lot more stars out there too, with not so much sodium-orange light pollution blotting out the dimmer stars. Out west of Ozona, look up on a clear night and you can see why the Romans called it the Via Lactea, the Milky Way. The stars really do look like milk spilled on black glass. It is a truly breathtaking sight, if you stop to pay attention.
The nocker known as Glitch has no intention of stopping to pay attention, or of stopping at all unless there’s a truck stop canopy in between her and the sky. Not that she’s agoraphobic, but her kind is given to a subterranean life, and having nothing at all between them and the sky makes them uncomfortable. But there’s a sense of danger (and a very real danger) in driving at night that just isn’t there during the day. A knocker has a bit of an advantage, being able to see far better in the dark than a human, but mule deer on the road are a problem for everybody, mortal or otherwise.
But out underneath the Milky Way, just for right now, there’s only Glitch and her bike and a hundred empty miles of Texas freeway. The suspension was tuned perfectly, transmitting every joint in the pavement directly to her spinal cord through her pelvis. Top gear and thirteen thousand RPM and wind rushing through her tightly-furled wings and Oh. My. God. she thought, if there was only a way to do this without the leather in between me and the bike I would never ever ever get off this thing except to piss. I would eat every meal while it’s idling between my legs.
Do we all feel this way about machines?
Do I care?
Nah.
Eventually even West Texas freeway runs out, but that was eventually. This was now, and there was the girl on her stomach over the gas tank of her bike and the closest thing to pure speed possible on this fallen imperfect Earth, mile markers blurring past every thirty seconds, each little more than a flash of green at the edge of the dark.