#fridayflash: crossed wires /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, and Part 22.

Geoffrey was inside the building and on his way to his office when he first saw signs that Todd's colleagues had started their raid. He kept his eyes on the corridor wall and let his co-workers run past him. They weren't his problem anymore, and from what Todd had told him, he was confident no-one was going to get out before they were allowed to.

He unlocked his office door, made a cursory check to ensure nothing had been disturbed in his absence, and sat down behind his desk. He made a point of not looking at the chair Cinnamon had sat in.

Geoffrey unplugged the network cable from his laptop and flicked the wireless network switch to "off" before powering up. He'd have to risk logging on to figure out which pod of questioning rooms they were keeping Pepper in, but first he had to make sure his audio file proof was ready to be presented. He copied the file to his laptop. Then, since he could hear the sound of at least three people wearing body armour jogging along the corridor, he copied the contents of the microSD card Pepper had found and DeBussy's green USB key as well. He took a quick glance at what was on the USB key — he and Pepper had never had access to a computer long enough to check it out — and smiled when he saw all of the files were zero bytes long.

The office door banged open just as Geoffrey had the laptop half-lifted to plug the network cable back in. He dropped the computer onto his desk and flinched as it thudded against his desk blotter.

"You need to put your hands up and take one step away from that, sir," said the young man in the doorway. His rifle was lowered, but he looked like he was waiting for an excuse to raise it.

Geoffrey didn't reply, just did as he was told. Of course. There couldn't be a white list for an op like this. He'd have to be cleared like everyone else. He just hoped Doug wasn't anywhere near Pepper at the moment.

The young man gave a hand signal, and another man and a woman followed him into the office. The woman noticed an ID card on the desk, picked it up, and checked the photograph on it against Geoffrey's face. "That's him," she said. To Geoffrey, she sounded a little disappointed.

The young man seemed to think so too. "So, good, right?" he said.

"He's not freaked out at all," said the other man. He lifted his rifle a centimetre. "Everyone else has been freaking out."

Geoffrey decided risk speaking. "I knew you were coming."

All three members of the raid team froze and stared at him. "How?" said the woman.

"Todd told me," said Geoffrey. "Todd Brendan."

"Okay, so you know some names in our group that —"

"Manticore," said Geoffrey. "Send a message back to command. Just tell them 'manticore'."

The woman and the other man held their guns up while the young man fumbled to retrieve a cell phone from a pocket hidden under his armour. "Is that with a Y in the middle or..."

Geoffrey spelled it for him, then stood silent while they waited for the reply.

The reply came within three minutes. "We have to escort you out and make sure you get sent back to HQ to help with the investigation," said the young man. "We're supposed to take all your computer gear with us. You got a phone on you?"

"Right hip pocket," said Geoffrey. The young man retrieved it and took the laptop off the desk.

"Okay," the young man said. "You can put your hands down now. Technically you're not under arrest or anything, but, you know."

Geoffrey cleared his throat. "I'm actually here to help a friend of mine. She may have been in one of the questioning pods..."

"The one who was beaten up?" said the woman. "They were asking for medical help over the radio."

"Medical help?"

The woman shrugged. "They were going to take her to a hospital. I think."

The young man nudged Geoffrey towards the door. "Did they say which one? St. Mike's, or on University Avenue, or..."

"We have to go," said the young man. "They didn't say. You're busy right now anyhow."

To be continued...

#fridayflash: what the possum heard /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, and Part 21.

Pepper managed to get the worst kicks to land on her extremities. When the cell's door happened to open at the same time Doug kicked her in the shoulder, she took the opportunity to pretend he'd got her in the head. She faked a shuddering seizure and lay still, eyes closed, breathing shallowly. The breathing was the worst part, since at least two of her ribs were cracked.

She could hear scuffling while Doug shouted random swear words over the sounds of at least two men doing the same.

"What, the FUCK, do you two think you're doing?" The voice was easy to identify. Munroe must have been watching the A/V monitoring room on the seventh floor and come in to stop the proceedings.

"I can't stop him on my own," said Alex. The last Pepper had been able to observe him, he'd been sitting on the cell's bed-slab.

"And you," said Munroe, ignoring any response he didn't like as usual, "do you have any idea of the paperwork you're causing? A little roughed up, that we can write over. But beaten to death.... that'll take forever to explain upstairs. They'll want a fucking Crown enquiry."

Pain was radiating from so many points on and in her body that she couldn't count them all. She pictured the pain sensations as energy waves, causing interference patterns. She was back in school, doing a physics experiment with a water table and strategically-placed speakers, and the sound vibrations were travelling through the water, making predictable, yet chaotic, ripples. She was watching the wave table twitch to the beat of her own heart, and in the background she could hear men talking.

"Look what she did to my fucking fingers on the pier," said Doug's voice. "Fucking sociopath."

"Did you even glance at the dossier I gave you?" said Munroe. "Do you know how hard it is to get information like that without logging it? She's so far above you in hand-to-hand combat scores it's hard to believe you're the same species."

"Oh bullshit," said Doug. "You guys all think I was new when I started here. I had years of experience before."

"Plural indicating at least two?" said Alex.

More scuffling, as Pepper resisted gasping. Doug must have made a lunge at Alex, unsuccessful through some combination of Alex dodging and Munroe restraining.

"We can't just kill her," said Munroe. "Not in this building."

"We're supposed to kill her!" Doug shouted.

"Not here. Too much attention and too much paperwork."

"DeBussy didn't say no." Doug was sounding petulant again.

For Pepper, the room had started spinning clockwise, very gently. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut to help clear the vertigo, but she didn't dare move.

"DeBussy said it was our responsibility to keep things clean," said Munroe. Pepper recognised the tone of voice from when she'd questioned him on intel his team had given her.

"Why is this door open?" A woman's voice now, and the sound of high-heeled shoes entering just as Munroe said, "Now is a bad time." Then a screech.

"What the hell happened?" Pepper couldn't pinpoint this voice. Someone in the bureaucratic arm. Stacy. No, Veronica. No. She suppressed another gasp and half-recollected an argument about an expense report...

"Lana, this isn't your area. Just go back to your desk and let us finish this."

Lana, right. It would figure they would need someone on board from Finance to cover up this thing. Even through the pain Pepper remembered it had been way more than one disputed expense report.

"I can't," said Lana. "They've already taken that area. We have to get out of here."

"Who the hell is 'they'?" said Doug.

"They're in military uniform. Well, sort of military, sort of police... a SWAT team, maybe?"

"You came from the freaking Ministry of Defence and you don't know which uniform is which?" Munroe sounded like he was going to lose it.

"I didn't — " Lana started to say, and then shrieked.

"This way," a voice called from down the corridor. The heavy tread of many pairs of boots came towards the cell.

"Fucking dead-end floor plan," said Doug. Pepper heard metal snapping against metal. Probably he was checking his gun was loaded. "We'll just have to shoot our way out."

"You can't," said Alex. He sounded calmer than before. "When boots make that sound, it means the people wearing them have body armour and assault rifles. Geoffrey told me that," he added, with a little tint of wonder in his voice. "It's over."

The room lurched into a spin on a different axis at that point. Pepper had to exert all of her concentration towards not vomiting, and to keeping her breathing even and shallow. She desperately wanted to take a deep breath, but she knew her ribs wouldn't let her.

Air rushed over Pepper from the direction of the doorway. Everyone was talking at once, but she heard Lana shriek again and Doug say, "Oh thank God! We were tending to our colleague here, and we didn't know when backup would show up... what do you mean?!?"

Suddenly someone's body heat was very close, which made it that much harder not to throw up. A gloved hand pressed into the side of her neck, and a voice shouted, "Call for a stretcher! And tell them to hurry the hell up!"

Her eyes were closed, but she could tell from the changing of the light that the person with the gloved hands was leaning over her. She risked letting her eyelids open. It took more effort than she expected.

The new person was a blonde woman wearing fatigues. "Don't try to talk," the woman said. "We're going to get you some help. You're safe." As if to underscore the point, a man shouted — Munroe? Doug? hard to tell them apart without words — and the woman was knocked forward, probably by a random kick as whoever it was got dragged out the door.

"Sorry," said the woman, even though she'd managed not to knock into Pepper.

"7F," Pepper gasped. "Audio visual recording. For this room."

She got half a moment to wonder if she'd been intelligible enough, and then she really did pass out.

To be continued...

#fridayflash: clean /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, and Part 20.

The van was the sort of utility vehicle that was acceptable to the Rosedale neighbourhood: small, clean, white with a tasteful logo on the side, and a photograph showing sample wares. A more observant person might notice that it was odd for a vehicle owned by a carpet-cleaning service not to have a phone number or web site address written on it, but since the tag line under the logo was, "Discreet and professional!", it wasn't unreasonable to conclude this was by design, rather than oversight.

The driver directed the van up one of the side streets, hesitated in front of one of the older, smaller houses, then edged past a little, just enough to reverse into the drive. The garage door opened as the front wheels bumped over the kerb, revealing an almost-empty parking space and a weary-looking man in the prime of middle age.

The man looked rumpled and tired, although the clothes he was wearing were so fresh the ironing creases could still be seen in his t-shirt. He stepped out of the garage and stood to the side of the drive as the van backed in. The driver stopped when the van's cab was just sticking out of the garage — as was common in older houses in the neighbourhood, the garage was small and narrow, and not much more of the van could fit inside. If the driver had backed in as far as possible, he wouldn't have been able to open the cab doors to get out.

The man waited for the driver to exit the cab, then let him into the house via the front door.

A perceptive observer may have noticed how similar the men looked. Both were about the same age, relatively fit-looking, and carried themselves with a posture which hinted at a military past. But this was in Rosedale, and therefore all those details were insignificant. Lots of things get done through connections.

Todd surveyed the four bodies lying in the kitchen and living rooms. He leaned over to check the blood spatter pattern behind one of the dead goons and let out a low whistle. "Looks like you had a helluva party, Geoff," he said. "This is going to take more than just the afternoon to clean up."

Geoffrey winced. "That's why I said both favours on the phone. I'm sorry."

Todd sighed. "I owed you. Care to tell me what happened?"

Geoffrey briefly filled him in on the events of the last day and a half, emphasising that Pepper had been framed. "I hate to leave you with this," he finished, "but I have to get to her. She let herself be bait. I have to hold up my end." He bit his lip and let his gaze settle on Cinnamon's body. "Especially now."

Todd shook his head. "If this is half as big as you say, and has even just the internal tentacles you know about, you're not going to be able to finish it alone. Fortunately," he said, taking out his phone, "I decided to drop my boss a hint as to why I had to take off for the afternoon. You know your division's been on the chopping block for months, eh? We didn't think it was anything this bad, but except for a few individuals, the results tallies have been underwhelming. We were going to absorb you, Ellie, a few dozen others, burn the rest."

Geoffrey rubbed his face with his hands. "Three days ago I would have been pretty indignant about that."

"Shit happens," said Todd, giving Geoffrey's shoulder a commiserating shake. He jerked his head in the direction of the garage as he sent a short text message from his phone. "Come on. You can carry the plastic tubs, and I'll get the, uh —"

"Jars of acid," said Geoffrey in a heavy breath.

"Yeah." Todd sighed again. "The walls and carpets probably won't be cleaned up yet when you get back, but the, um, tubs will be gone." He turned sharply on his heel and headed down the hall. "Let's get a move on. You need to get out of here and get the rest of your job done."

Iceland May 2014 /  by Katherine Hajer

I got back from Iceland a couple of weeks ago, but I'm still playing catch-up with photo-organising, food-making, timezone-adjusting, and all those other things that go with a vacation.

The short version: I'm already planning on when I'm going back.

The long version: is too big for this blog space, but hey, if you see me IRL you can always ask me about it. One thing I do want to point out, just like I did last time I visited Amsterdam, is that Reykjavík has dedicated bike lanes, separated from the main road. The first photo in the gallery shows the sidewalk/bike lane beside a four-lane highway across the road from the hotel I stayed at. This is most decidedly not right downtown — right downtown the traffic is effectively calm enough for bikes and cars to share the space, just because the cars can't move that fast through the streets.

Come on, Toronto. If a city of 200,000 people can figure out bike lanes, we can too. And if that city is at 64 degrees north latitude, it's time for us to stop using "oh, but we get winter in Toronto!" as an excuse not to put in bike lanes every place we possibly can.

Okay, onto a small sample of the 300+ photos I took during my four-day trip:

sexist crap in numbers /  by Katherine Hajer

I retweet about this sort of thing a lot on Twitter, and I read about it a lot, but I don't blog about it a lot. Tony Noland wrote an excellent post about it that I read earlier today, though, and it made me remember something I've always meant to expand upon.

A simpler version of this appeared a couple of years ago in the comments section of a newspaper article I read about women getting catcalled in the street. I'd love to link to it and give credit to the poster.... but the problem is, this is so widespread and gets reported on so much, it will be almost impossible to Google the correct article, and comments rarely get tracked by search engines. If someone knows the reference, please contact me so I can include it.

The basic math runs through some easy-to-agree-upon, back-of-the-envelope numbers, and it goes like this: say a woman lives in a city big enough to support public transit. Every weekday morning, she goes to work on the subway, and passes by, say, five hundred people. That's not a lot for a busy city, especially when you count the time she spends walking on the street from the subway stop to her office. Every evening after work, she goes home on the same subway, and passes another five hundred people. So that's 1,000 people a day who see this woman in public, not counting if she goes out for lunch, or runs an errand, or gets groceries on the weekend, or whatever. For argument's sake, let's say she works a little more or fewer hours than usual, so the 500 people who see her in the morning are completely different from the 500 who see her in the evening.

About 50% of the people who see the woman are men, and the other 50% are women. So every workday, that woman is seen by 500 men who don't know her, 250 in the morning and 250 in the evening.

Unfortunately for the woman, of the 250 men she encounters every morning during her commute, 5 of them are loudmouthed jerks. If they notice something about how she's dressed, or the shade of lipstick she's wearing, or even just if the stars are right, they are going to catcall her, or ask her to get her tits out, or whatever. You fill in the blanks. The same goes for her evening commute. So that's 10 jerks out of 1,000 people this woman is going to encounter on her commute. Jerks being jerks, they don't just call out crap once during their commute — they just continue with it whenever they think they can get away with it.

Let's be conservative and say she only catches the attentions of one of the jerks once a week. Let's say there's another two times a week she's within earshot when a jerk says something to one of the 499 other women doing the same commute our example woman is.

That works out to:

  • Out of 1,000 people, and specifically 500 men, only 1% are jerks who ask women they don't know to get their tits out (or whatever) on the subway.
  • This woman gets asked to get her tits out (or whatever) an average of 48 times a year. That doesn't count vacation weeks or total stat holidays. On the other hand, we're also leaving out all the non-commute times she encounters jerks, and she can pretty much count on something happening at least once a week.
  • Even if it's not directly happening to her, she gets to hear jerks mouthing off to other women at least once a week.

Still with me? If none of that sounds farfetched, consider:

  • Even though only 1% of the men are being jerks in this little thought experiment, that's enough for the woman to either encounter or overhear harassment on a weekly basis.
  • Since the jerks are men the woman doesn't know, that makes every man she doesn't yet know a potential jerk. Perception is reality, and lived experience is perception.
  • Chances are, no-one will call out the jerk. Not the woman getting harassed, because she doesn't want it to escalate. Not the women who are within earshot, because they don't want to be targeted. And not the men within earshot because... well, if our back-of-the-envelope numbers are right, they're the vast majority, but since the women are all acting like they're ignoring a fart, the men may well either follow suit or figure the jerk's not actually hitting his target because none of the women are reacting strongly.

I cannot overstate how annoying this crap is. It's as if the doorway to your bathroom was tiled in coarse sandpaper, and you always had to walk on it in your bare feet every time you went to use the toilet. You can't cover up the floor because otherwise the door won't close, and you can't step over it, but the sandpaper hurts. Not enough to make your feet form callouses, and not enough to cause serious injury, but it's freaking annoying.

You start to brace yourself for it. You start to tense up every time you walk on something similar like patio stone or cork tiling, even though those don't hurt. You spend all your time looking down at where you're stepping, just in case.

And this is only the overt, loudmouthed sexist crap. If you're a woman alone, it gets louder. And crappier.

So what to do about these jerks who are "not all men", but easy enough to encounter? I hate to say it, but we're going to have to call them out. And by "we", I mean everyone. And by everyone, I don't mean the bystander who yells something back, I mean several bystanders yelling something back, at the same time. One person saying, "don't say crap like that" won't get listened to. Fifteen people who don't know each other but who all chime in with the same thing might.

It might not change the jerks' minds, but it might make them shut up more often. And stopping jerkish behaviour counts for something, when perception is reality and reality is lived experiences.

#fridayflash: a break /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, and Part 19.

One of the goons gestured for Cinnamon to sit on the couch beside Geoffrey. She edged onto the seat, keeping her eyes focused on his gun.

"And you're not killing us now because..." said Geoffrey. Cinnamon noticed how calm his voice sounded. Like he was wondering why something wasn't included with an entrée on a restaurant menu. Like this wasn't life or death.  

DeBussy chuckled and settled himself into Geoffery's armchair. "I'd rather wait until we receive news the third member of your little party has been taken care of. This is a very nice neighbourhood — even with silencers people might notice the gunshots. But if we move, you have a better chance of escaping. And that, that would not suit me at all."    

"You left the work to the goons who'd been trailing us all night and already let us get away twice," said Geoffrey.

"I can't exactly walk in the front doors of your headquarters and demand to watch," said DeBussy. "Not yet, anyhow."

"How on earth did you recruit Alex?"

DeBussy shrugged again. Cinnamon wondered if it was an affectation or just a nervous twitch. "He is a weak and greedy man, and he hates Pepper." He raised his eyebrows. "Did you expect more?"

"Why the hell could anyone be bothered hating Pepper?" Cinnamon burst out. She instantly regretted it. Geoffrey had actually managed to connect, keep the subject talking. She might have just broken the rapport.

Another shrug. "She makes us look bad. In my case, every time she makes me look bad, it means I can't complete a job, and that means I'm losing money. I will agree with you that the people you work with are more... petty."

DeBussy rose from his chair. "As this is most definitely not a Hollywood spy film, you'll pardon me if I skip answering all your questions and try out Geoffrey's espresso machine instead." He stepped towards the kitchen.

Cinnamon checked the distances and angles, carefully wearing a bored expression on her face. Idiots, she thought. Always arrogant idiots. When DeBussy passed in front of the goon closest to the doorway, she sprang in a low dive for DeBussy's knees.

She never got to complete her tackle. The goon covering Geoffrey pivoted and shot her before she was within a metre of DeBussy.

"Fuck," Geoffrey and the goon who'd fired the shot both snarled in unison. Geoffrey was up and rushing him before the goon had a chance to react and pivot back. He forced the goon's hand to shoot in DeBussy's and the other henchman's direction, managing to wound the henchman in his gun arm.

Geoffrey slammed the goon into the wall and jerked the gun up, forcing another shot to be fired. The bullet went through the underside of the goon's chin and exited the top of his head. Finally able to grab the gun from the goon's hand, Geoffrey wheeled and shot the other goon in the head, just as he was shakily grasping at the gun with the hand attached to his uninjured arm.

Debussy had backed into the kitchen. Geoffrey stalked across the living room and found him standing by the espresso machine, fumbling to get the safety catch off his gun. DeBussy shrieked as he spotted Geoffrey in the doorway, pointing the gun at him.

"Don't," DeBussy stammered. "I can negotia—"

Geoffrey shot him neatly between the eyes. "You've got nothing to bargain with."

He stepped over DeBussy's body and picked up the kitchen phone, dialling a number from memory.

"Toronto Police," said a woman's voice.

Geoffrey asked for a phone extension. The woman simply said she'd transfer him.

A man answered the extension. "Code 34-7-51," said Geoffrey.

"Just a moment," said the man. Geoffrey heard him tapping at a computer. "At the address you're calling from?"

"Yes."

"Okay. We'll cancel all responses per procedure. Have a better one." The man hung up.

Geoffrey threw the phone on the kitchen counter and rushed to where Cinnamon was still lying on the carpet. He stretched out his hand to check her pulse, then withdrew it when he saw the extent of the damage to her head. Blood and brains were darkening the red of the Oriental carpet, and matting her bright copper hair.

He threw himself onto the couch. "Damn it, Sheila, what the hell did you think was going to happen?" He leaned back against the cushions, closed his eyes, and took several deep breaths.

Sitting upright again, he patted his pockets, swore under his breath, and then grabbed his mobile from the computer table. This time he had to look up a contact entry before dialling.

"Todd? It's Geoff. You know those two favours you owe me about the, uh, novelty coffee cups? I need to call them both in. Yeah. Now."

To be continued...

Important note: I love comments! But right now my web host has a bug with comment logins. Please feel free to leave a comment using the Guest option. You'll be able to ID yourself, mention your web site if you like, and say what you want to say!

#fridayflash: next round /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, and Part 18.

It's a truism that keeping track of time in a windowless room is difficult. Pepper discreetly groped at her armpit, trying to remember the last time she shaved. She'd only eaten two meals since she had got stuck in this mess — the pizza out in Mississauga and some tinned stuff from the underwater bunker. In the meantime there had been a lot of running around.

It couldn't have been that long, only a few hours. No-one had shown up to check on her since they'd shoved her into the room. Pepper wasn't worried, not yet, but she had to plan for if it were longer. Dehydration and lack of sleep could break a person down a lot faster than beatings. She knew that from training, and from experience. She'd watched people try to save their own urine on the same security cameras now watching her, not knowing that it was absolutely against policy to let a captured asset die from lack of water. She'd always wondered what they'd gone through before to just assume they were going to be treated that badly.

She reminded herself that right now it was ridiculous to worry about those things. It had been less than a day, and most likely they were going to have her worry through the night and then try to work her again the morning. Really she should be focused on the rescue attempt Geoffrey and Cinnamon would make.

But no matter what she did, she found herself thinking about how long they were going to keep her without giving her any water. She wasn't even thirsty.

Pepper sighed and leaned her head against the cement wall. So this is what it feels like.

She heard more footsteps outside, and expected them to go to 8B — there seemed to be a lot of activity in that room. She had barely enough time to hide her surprise when the door to her room opened. She  expected Doug, but it was Alex who slipped through and carefully closed the door behind him.

He looked around the room with the air of a real estate agent assessing how to pitch an undesirable property. "I'm sorry you had to be put in here. This isn't the nicest of rooms. I asked for 8D, but it's being used, and Munroe and Doug insist you're to be considered dangerous."

"That is part of my job description," said Pepper. Trust Alex to forget to even mumble a hello.

Alex gave a heavy sigh and sat at the end of the bed/slab. "I'm a bean counter. I don't usually dirty my hands with this stuff. Nothing against your own work," he quickly added. "I'm just much better with budgets and spreadsheets. Oh, speaking of which, who approved those modifications you made to your phone?"

"No-one. I paid for them out of my own pocket."

"But who installed them?"

"I did." Pepper decided that Alex was playing the role of the good cop.

"You shouldn't do things like that."

"It's my phone. So long as I get a model that's from the approved list, I can do what I like with it."

"No, no..." Alex was shaking his head, jowls wagging. With the heavy bags under his eyes, he looked like a cartoon bloodhound. "That may be the letter of the policy, but it's not the spirit of it. You're an asset, not a department head."

"Is that what you call what Doug did to me earlier, following the spirit of the policy? 'Cos it sure as hell didn't follow the letter of it."

Alex's face turned red. "That's your problem. You've always got the policy memorised and throw it in everyone's faces, but it never applies to you."

"This is beyond extreme for just a policy reprimand." Pepper risked leaning towards Alex. "I'm not here because of data, or because Doug botched up the USB key handover. So what is it?"

Alex stood up and crossed quickly to the door. He pounded on it in a quick sequence Pepper made a note of, and someone outside opened it for him. He started to leave, then paused and turned his head to look at Pepper.

"You forgot you were disposable," he said. "You'll be forced to remember it before the end." He walked out, slamming the metal door behind him.

Important note: I love comments! But right now my web host has a bug with comment logins. Please feel free to leave a comment using the Guest option. You'll be able to ID yourself, mention your web site if you like, and say what you want to say!

Travel alert:  when the Friday Flash report gets posted for the week, I'll be floating around the North Atlantic in an Icelandic whale-watching boat. I'll be catching up on my blog-reading when I return home early next week.

#fridayflash: glitch /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, and Part 17.

Cinnamon fingered the gun in her right hip holster. "This is an awfully nice place for a guy on your pay grade."

Geoffrey allowed a quick, sharp glance in her direction before continuing to type furiously on his laptop. "Family money. And I don't really want to chit-chat. I need to get this phone recording saved in a format that's easy to pass around at the office."

"Is that Santa Claus?" said Cinnamon, studying a photograph of a man with a long white beard standing next to a little boy with a crew cut.

"It's Robertson Davies. All the men in the family have always gone to Upper Canada College, okay? Can we focus now?"

Cinnamon raised an eyebrow. "Shit. Would never have pegged you for a private school kid. Shouldn't you be running a giant mining corporation or something?"

"If you want to go back to the office and try to get Ellie out without my help, go ahead," Geoffrey snapped. "Otherwise you're picking a really stupid time to be a class warrior." He hit the computer's Enter key with three fingers. "That should do it." His hand found the mouse, and he gave the left button a solid click.

"Vera from research, we had coffee together, right?" Doug's voice said. "And she mentioned the hotel — the location for the pick-up. And I just thought instead of waiting all night, I could just meet Ellie there, right?"

"At the pick-up." Geoffrey's voice came from the computer speakers.

"Nice sound quality," said Cinnamon. "Unambiguous."

"They'll check it for doctoring anyhow, of course," said Geoffrey. "I did send a memo about Doug screwing up when it happened. Or at least I thought he was screwing up at the time"

Cinnamon snorted. "And who's going to read the memo? Could be someone working with Doug for all we know."

"Well, call's recorded to a couple different media now." Geoffrey stood. "We should go."

"We should have just come here," said Cinnamon. "All three of us. Skip the part about handing over Ellie."

Geoffrey shook his head as he put on his coat. "We do that, they have to give up Doug and maybe a few other people, but most of those involved could just pretend to be loyal and act as moles another day. Having Ellie on the inside gives them a sense of security, lets them show their true colours."

"I'm still not sure it was the right choice," said Cinnamon.

"Ah, but choices are made in context and carry consequences," said a voice from the doorway.

Cinnamon and Geoffrey wheeled around, Cinnamon reaching for her hip holster again. Anton DeBussy pointed his gun at Cinnamon first. "Ah no," he said. "You cannot draw faster than I can pull the trigger. That only works in Westerns. Do please divest yourself of your weapons."

"I'm surprised to see you holding a gun yourself," said Geoffrey. "Don't you have people for that?"

DeBussy shrugged the shoulder opposite his gun arm. "I've had some redundancies lately. My staff neglected to take care of... what do you call her, Pepper? Ellie? at the hotel as they were instructed. Apparently they thought she really was the cleaning lady." He gave a lopsided shrug again. "I'm sorry I didn't wait until five PM today to close the deal as we agreed, but sometimes one has to do things oneself, when the correct time arises. Clear!"

Two men in black turtlenecks appeared, pointing guns at Cinnamon and Geoffrey. DeBussy lowered his own gun and set the safety on.

"You two should both sit down," he said to Cinnamon and Geoffrey. "You're going to be waiting a while."

Important note: I love comments! But right now my web host has a bug with comment logins. Please feel free to leave a comment using the Guest option. You'll be able to ID yourself, mention your web site if you like, and say what you want to say!

so i did something daft /  by Katherine Hajer

Lately I've been thinking a lot about web sites. I've been thinking about how I want to brush up my HTML and CSS skills. I've been thinking about how even though I liked the template of my Blogger blog a lot, I'd been using the same design for six years, and maybe it was time for a change.

There's also this web site I stumbled upon when I was trying to find HTML5 resources: One Page Love. It's an excellent resource, and great because you get to see a lot of very different, but definitely successful, web sites. And they mentioned Squarespace a lot — a web template site I'd checked out before. Four days ago, I signed up for another free trial, and talked myself into making the move tonight.

There will be the usual awkwardness of physically moving a blog: all of the internal links lead back to the old Blogger site, and short of editing every entry that has links in it (and there are lots), there isn't really anything I can do about it. Oh well, the old blog isn't actually going anywhere, so all the content will be there. I've disabled comments on the old blog to encourage people to use this new one.

The general plan is to stick with this template until I have a need for an actual home page, and then switch things up a bit. I'm sure there will be a lot of kinks to be worked out, but if you could give me any feedback, I'd be very grateful.

#fridayflash: 8C /  by Katherine Hajer

If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, and Part 16.

Pepper sat on the cement platform substituting for a bed with her back against the wall. She kept her hands clasped lightly around her knees, ankles crossed, head tilted slightly up and rolled, just a little, towards the door.

It was a good position for the circumstances. The circumstances were that Alex, Doug, and three men she didn't recognise had just broken about every regulation the "company" had for interrogating and searching a prisoner. Pepper wanted to look casual and relaxed for the security cameras she wasn't supposed to know were in the ceiling corners of the room. Since in reality she was in a certain amount of pain, a true relaxed posture wasn't going to work.

Okay, she reflected, they hadn't actually used torture. They'd just been inconsiderate jerks about the cavity search. She rolled her head slightly away from the door. Deliberately inconsiderate jerks.

And Doug, bloody Doug with his questions.

"Where's the microSD card, Ellie?"

"What microSD card?"

"The one you said you had!"

"I said no such thing."

"You said you'd hidden it at Queen's Quay."

"You had a gun pointing at my face and I wanted to get away. I moved the interaction to somewhere I had the advantage."

Doug, breaking all the rules by showing how angry he was, while Alex just looked on with his usual hangdog expression. The interrogation had gone on forever, and she was pretty sure she'd never confirmed she knew about the memory card. It certainly wasn't on her. They'd torn apart her phone, her clothes, and nearly torn apart her looking for it, but what they didn't know is that Geoffrey had walked out the door with it just about when they were taking her to room 8C.

Pepper had always liked 8C for work, not that she'd used it much. Usually she would just hand off and then leave. It was at the end of the corridor, a little bigger than the other cells, and far more difficult to get out of. Even if the prisoner did manager to overpower any visitors, they were caught on camera doing so and it was easy to block off the end of the corridor.

She rubbed one hand over her knee. On the cameras it would just look like she had an itch, but she wanted to check the material used in the clothing they'd given her. It was some synthetic stuff with no discernible weave or knit. Flimsy. She'd have to give it a good twist before trying to strangle someone with it, and that would waste time she didn't have.

Someone was walking down the corridor. Pepper forced herself not to tense, but listened carefully, body posture slack. The footsteps stopped some distance away, and she heard a door click open. Probably 8B. The sounds faded.

If she had gleaned the situation correctly from the questioning, Alex and company were holding her because Doug, or someone working with Doug, had convinced them that she had stolen the data and put it on the microSD card. That she didn't possess a microSD card should have knocked a large hole in that theory, but she was still locked up, so they hadn't let go of the idea yet.

Either that or they were trying to figure out what else they could pin her with.

Pepper shifted position. Cinnamon and Geoffrey needed to come through before Doug got any more frustrated.

To be continued...

#fridayflash: out of the frying pan /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, and Part 15.

 "So how does a field agent score an office?" said Cinnamon, flopping into one of the visitor's chairs opposite Geoffrey's desk.

"I haven't actually been a field agent for a long time," said Geoffrey. He tossed the whiteboard markers he'd taken from the supply room onto his desk. "They just wheel me out when they need a middle-aged soft-looking type to pose as a businessman or some other sort of mark." He glanced at Pepper. "You should sit down, Ellie."

Pepper shook her head. She undid the clasp on her locket and handed it to Geoffrey, who put it around his own neck.

"All right," said Geoffrey, picking up one of the markers with one hand as he tucked the locket under his shirt with the other. "Debrief. I have to say, the engagement hand-off between myself and Sheila was textbook..." His voice cracked.

Someone knocked on the office door. Geoffrey nodded at Cinnamon, who got up slowly and went to open it.

"Geoffrey." A short man pushed his way past Cinnamon into the office. His suit looked like he'd slept in it.

"Alex." Geoffrey waved the whiteboard marker. "I was just going through a debrief on the DeBussy op."

"Good, good," said Alex. "I was just going to borrow Ellie from you."

"We'll be done in an hour," said Geoffrey.

"I'll have her back to you by lunchtime." Alex took Pepper under the arm and steered her out of the office. To Cinnamon's surprise, Pepper just let him do it.

Geoffrey put his finger to his lips and shook his head at Cinnamon. Then he took her arm the same way Alex had taken Pepper's and pushed her out of the office.

"What are you..."

"Sh." Geoffrey pointed back along the corridor. Cinnamon let him take her to the elevators, through the underground food court, and along the PATH walkway to St. Andrews subway station. She only spoke again when Geoffrey produced two subway tokens and dropped the first one into the turnstile.

"We are not just going to leave her there. I'm not. You go do whatever skull-and-dagger crap you think you need to do, but..."

"We're coming back for her," Geoffrey said quietly. Cinnamon rolled her eyes and passed through the turnstile, then waited for Geoffrey to feed it the second token and enter the station.

"We're going to pretend to be going back to your apartment," Geoffrey said into Cinnamon's ear as they descended the stairs to the waiting area. "Then we're going to go to my house. They're not going to believe Ellie, they're not going to believe you either, and while I might be able to shake them a little bit because I'm one of them, they're not going to believe me without some physical evidence to back me up."

The train arrived, nearly empty now that morning rush hour was over. Cinnamon slouched onto the first available set of empty seats, Geoffrey perching beside her.

"There isn't any physical evidence," said Cinnamon as the doors chimed closed. "We know Ellie found that card in DeBussy's hotel room because we know she wouldn't make that shit up, but all Doug and Co. have to do is claim she had it on her all along, that she's the one who stole it, and..."

"We have a little physical evidence," said Geoffrey. "And if we can get to my place in time, we'll have a little more." He stared at the cement walls of the subway tunnel rushing by the windows. "I just hope they haven't thought of it already. Right now it's down to how long Ellie can stretch things out."

#fridayflash: simcoe street /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, and Part 14.

"So where are we?" said Cinnamon. Geoffrey had led them north through the bunker's second entrance tunnel, through a series of progressively older-looking underground passages, to a small room with red brick walls and a cobblestone floor.  The room was illuminated by a single incandescent bulb stuck in a rusty wire work lamp, showing the room was empty, but featured a newer-looking steel door opposite the rot-softened older one they'd just passed through.

Cinnamon noticed the orange electrical cord attached to the lamp ran into a hole drilled into one of the brick walls. The whole thing looked like it was meant to be temporary and then had been forgotten about.

The ceiling shuddered and rumbled as something large and heavy passed overhead. Cinnamon sprang back into the corridor, reaching for one of her guns. Pepper just clenched her fists and looked at Geoffrey.

"That was probably a dump truck," said Geoffrey. "Up until the mid-sixties, this was a debriefing room, and sometimes an isolation cell. We're underneath Simcoe Street, very near to where it intersects with King."

"What corner?" said Cinnamon.

"None of them," said Geoffrey. "We're on the south side, but we're underneath the actual street."

"And this is part of headquarters? It looks ancient."

"For around here it is. Rumour has it the Upper Canada Rebellion was partly planned in this very room." Geoffrey shrugged. "We — by 'we' I mean the company  — used to have a safe in here for documents, a table, a chair for the person asking the questions. This room got sealed up after the end of the Korean War — change in questioning policy. Couldn't use scary rooms anymore. Go figure."

"So they cleared out the furniture and..." said Cinnamon. "Just sealed it up?"

Geoffrey shook his head. "Someone must have screwed up with the paperwork. It got sealed up all right, but the furniture and the safe wasn't removed. When constructions workers building the Roy Thomson Hall accidentally found it in the late 70s, there were still two cups on the table."

"Was there anything in the safe?" said Pepper.

Geoffrey grinned without humour. "Not that anyone's been willing to admit to me." He pointed at the steel door. "We go through that, which leads to a tunnel that eventually goes under Wellington Street — the construction workers found a portion of that too, but they thought they sealed it up. Come on."

The walk was about fifteen minutes, although Cinnamon thought that between clambering over old rubble and jumping over small water pipe leaks, they couldn't have gone more than a couple of blocks. If she hadn't completely lost her bearings, they should have looped back south and to the west a little. That would put them underneath the underground shopping mall at Metro Hall — right at headquarters.

The tunnel turned to the right, and then ended abruptly at another steel door. To Cinnamon's surprise, Geoffrey simply grasped the door handle and turned it.

She checked Pepper's reaction, but Pepper had been silent and stone-faced since they'd left the underwater bunker. Cinnamon couldn't blame her. It was no fun being bait — you had to pretend to be more helpless than you really were.

The door was unlocked. Geoffrey quickly checked whatever was inside and closed the door again. "This is it," he said. "We go through this, we step into the admin office's stationery room. Anyone need sticky notes or highlighters while we're in here?"

"Ballpoint pens?" said Pepper.

"Sorry, Ellie, no weapons. They'd spot that."

"Just a well-sharpened pencil..." Pepper stopped talking when she saw the look on Geoffrey's face.

"Now as far as weapons go," said Geoffrey, turning to Cinnamon, "are you ready?"

Cinnamon shrugged. "Sure. It's a pain having all these guns holstered, but I'm okay. I'm just glad I do a lot of weight training. These things are heavy. And it's going to take me forever to get scanned and signed in by security."

"Don't worry about that. All right, here we go." Geoffrey turned the door knob again and pushed something behind it. Cinnamon heard the sound of metal scraping on cement for several seconds, and then Geoffrey's arm reappeared through the doorway, waving at them to follow him.

Cinnamon slipped through the doorway after Pepper. They now stood in a narrow room lit by fluorescent tubing, with metal utility shelves lining the entirety of every wall except the one opposite them. It had a frosted glass door in it that Cinnamon recognised as being the same design as all the rest of the interior doors in headquarters.

Pepper helped Geoffrey push the shelving unit back to in front of the door they'd just come through. Geoffrey checked the door behind it was closed completely.

"Ah! Here they are," he said, and grabbed a fistful of whiteboard markers from a small tub on the shelf they'd just moved. He strode up to the frosted glass door and opened it. "After you, ladies."

Pepper and Cinnamon walked into a bustling office area. A woman wearing a slightly better Chanel-style suit than the rest of the women in the area looked up from her laptop. "Field division out of stationery, Geoffrey?"

"The field division never has any stationery, Martha, you know that," said Geoffrey. "I need to do a debrief and task analysis with these two, and I had nothing at all to write with." He beamed a smile at Martha.

Cinnamon fought to hide her surprise as she noticed Martha blushing. "Oh you," she said. "You're just lucky we don't have to sign that stuff out."

Geoffrey thanked Martha with exaggerated gallantry, then led Cinnamon and Pepper to the elevator bays. A man in a maintenance engineer's uniform got on the elevator with them, but exited only one floor down.

"So in case anyone's wondering," said Geoffrey, "we really are going to my office for  a few minutes. At least long enough to make it look like a real meeting."

"Mostly I'm just wondering exactly how badly our security sucks," said Cinnamon.

To be continued...

guest post from icy sedgwick: visuals in fiction /  by Katherine Hajer


It can be easy when writing to sometimes fall into the trap of reducing visuals to personal appearance, or a vague nod in the direction of setting. Literary fiction conditions us to primarily consider feelings or moods, and genre fiction devolves into a collection of stereotypes. Some writers use visuals purely to repeatedly tell us how attractive a character is, and other visuals end up standing in for an archetype – witness the number of beefy barbarians or aristocratic vampires. But can visuals play a bigger role, particularly in world building, and help transport a reader into the setting that you’ve imagined, rather than into their own interpretation?
I’m a big fan of set design within films, and I think there is real potential to use set design within novellas too – you’re not just ‘writing’ the setting, you’re ‘designing’ the setting. It involves a little more conscious thought and planning about how rooms or settings will look, and what impact those visuals will have on the reader. Consider the way JK Rowling depicted Dolores Umbridge’s office in Hogwarts – her cutesy obsession with pink and kittens was possibly more monstrous even than her behaviour, but it was a deft touch that helped to make Umbridge even more detestable.
Obviously you don’t want to get carried away with the visuals. If you start describing every single stick of furniture in the room, a reader isn’t going to know what’s pertinent to the story, and they’re also going to switch off from the story after being bombarded with description. Anton Chekov came up with the idea, now known as Chekov’s Gun, that if you hang a gun on a wall in act one, you’d better use it by act three, or audiences (readers in this case) will wonder why it’s there. You want to paint a broad enough picture that readers can ‘see’ the setting, but include enough details to foreshadow future events and give away details about characterisation that’ll save you from having to artificially describe them yourself. A room with peeling wallpaper and damp patches on the ceiling lets us know the inhabitant is slovenly and disinterested in his environment without us having to ever say as much.
The visuals of The Necromancer’s Apprentice are a bit of a mixed bag. The Underground City, where we first meet Jyx, was based very heavily on Mary King Close and the Blair Street vaults of Edinburgh. Picture dank spaces, devoid of natural light, where the air is clogged by the soot from gas lamps and the tall, narrow tenement buildings stretch up into darkness. It’s a Victorian slum, inspired in part by Gustav Doré’s nineteenth-century engravings of Whitechapel, where the alleys are called ‘closes’ because they’re so crammed together. By contrast, the part of the City Above that we get to see as Jyx travels to the Academy is based on Venice, all quiet canals and buildings with white shutters and delicate balconies, where Jyx can see the sky. It seemed a good way to set the two spaces up in contrast with each other, demonstrating the affluence and clean air of one, and the poverty of the other.
Yet that’s not all the visuals are for. True, they make good scene-setting, and people can quickly ‘see’ what sort of locations these are, and they can compare these imaginary locations with ones that they know in order to form connections or draw conclusions. You can also hide clues in the set design that like-minded people will pick up on, giving them a satisfactory ‘a-ha!’ moment when they recognise something in your design. When Jyx reaches the House of the Long Dead where he’ll be working for the necromancer general, he finds a lot of the art painted on the walls features figures drawn flat, in profile, which was my way of referencing Egyptian art. The Wolfkin are descended from Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, and he later discovers a statue of a man with the head of an ibis in my nod to Thoth, the god of knowledge. On their own, they just add to the set-dressing and help to build an atmosphere, but anyone who shares these interests will spot the references, and it should hopefully enhance their enjoyment of the story.
What about you? What kind of visuals do you like in your stories?
Bio

Icy Sedgwick was born in the North East of England, and lives and works in Newcastle. She has been writing with a view to doing so professionally for over ten years, and has had several stories included in anthologies, including Short Stack and Bloody Parchment: The Root Cellar & Other Stories.
She spends her non-writing time working on a PhD in Film Studies, considering the use of set design in contemporary horror. Icy had her first book, a pulp Western named The Guns of Retribution, published in 2011, and her horror fantasy, The Necromancer’s Apprentice, was released in March 2014.
Links
Website: http://www.icysedgwick.com
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Necromancers-Apprentice-Icy-Sedgwick/dp/0615964893/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/icypop
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/miss.icy.sedgwick
Google +: http://plus.google.com/+IcySedgwick/about

#fridayflash: concentration /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, and Part 13.

 Cinnamon ripped a fresh sheet of paper from the pad and set it on the cutting board she'd repurposed as a clipboard. At the top of the page, she wrote "DOUG" in giant letters. Underneath she jotted down a list:
  • recruited and graduated same year as me
  • always bombed every exercise and group activity
  • acts like he knows what's going on — not just a messenger boy
  • acts like he's in charge, not just of the goons for this job
  • I KICKED HIS BUTT IN JUDO AND I HAD THE FLU THAT DAY!!!!
  • rumour was he'd flunked his field procedures exams AND intelligence analysis
  • HOW DID THIS GUY GRADUATE????
The pencil broke as she carved the last question mark into the paper. She swore, slapped the paper on the mess hall table with the others, and grabbed the pencil sharpener.

She glanced over the other notes as she jammed the pencil into the sharpener and gave it a few twirls. The top row was for notes on people: DeBussy, herself, Geoffrey and Pepper. She'd also included Munroe and some other people in research she thought could be involved. The second row was a timeline of all the major events which had happened, started with the job being assigned. The third row was for items: the decoy USB key and the real data on the microSD card Pepper had found, the files themselves, and an inventory of the weapons they'd filched from Doug and his goons before canoeing out into the lake.

Cinnamon tapped the spare pencil shavings into a wastepaper basket she'd found and made herself re-read every note in detail. She shook her head. "I can't see it," she said under her breath.

"Can't read your own handwriting?" said a voice from the doorway to the dormitory. Cinnamon clutched at the gun in her shoulder holster, then relaxed when she saw it was Geoffrey.

"Just trying to figure this out," Cinnamon said, gesturing at the papers.

"But you've been checking both entrances and the cameras too, right?" said Geoffrey, walking up to the table.

"Every fifteen minutes," said Cinnamon. "Nothing to report."

"Good," said Geoffrey. He picked up the notes on the data files. "This isn't accurate, you know." He tapped one of the entries in the list. "The data's sensitive, and it shouldn't be found off its isolated network, but that doesn't mean it would fetch much of a market price."

"It's Level 9," said Cinnamon. "It's not supposed to leave the building. You can't even transmit it on a dedicated line."

Geoffrey nodded as he replaced the paper on the table. "Yes, but that's just because it's from NATO, and anything we get from NATO always gets classified as Level 9. But you saw the file names. It's not like it's launch codes or submarine routes, or even a duty roster. Even journalists wouldn't give a shit about that stuff." He stepped back from the table. "No. NATO bureaucracy needs it, but it's useless outside of that particular environment. Wouldn't help you break in. Can't even be used with other accessible data to find out something interesting."

Cinnamon bit her lip. "I just wanted to do something useful while I was on watch. Maybe once I catch some sleep I'll be able to come up with something..."

"This is useful," said Geoffrey. He chuckled and pointed to the note on Doug. "Did you really get him against the mat while you had the flu?"

"It was worse than that," said Cinnamon. "I kicked him in the head. He was unconscious for thirty-seven seconds."

"I wonder if he knows that as well as you do," said Pepper, entering the mess hall. "What is all that?"

"Sheila's been breaking things down," said Geoffrey. "I think she's found something."

"What?"

Geoffrey gave Pepper a look. "You're not going to like it."

Pepper leaned over the table and scanned the pages. "This is just recording what we know. Not a bad thing," she added quickly, glancing at Cinnamon. "Mercenary finds a mole willing to sell some data, arranges a buy, but a job for slightly different reasons thwarts him. Or it will once we can come in from the cold."

"But consider," said Geoffrey, picking up the note on DeBussy and holding it behind his back. "Now what's the story?"

"If you take him out of it, then..." Cinnamon's eyes widened, then narrowed. "But he is in it. Take him out and it distorts everything. It looks like it's all about Ellie."

"One way to find out," said Pepper. She locked eyes with Geoffrey. "You're going to have to bring me in."

"Yes," said Geoffrey. He shot a look at Cinnamon. "Get some sleep. The two of us will figure out how to stage this."

Cinnamon nodded and headed for the dormitory with a frown. She wasn't quite sure how she'd just been shut out of her own analysis.

She reached the bunk area and startled. Only one bunk was made up to sleep in.

That's against regulations! she thought. Then again, maybe Pepper and Geoffrey didn't care under the circumstances.

Pepper's voice floated into the dormitory from the mess hall. "This is Sarajevo all over again," she said.

"That's what worries me," said Geoffrey, and then he added something Cinnamon couldn't hear.

#fridayflash: stock-taking /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, and Part 12.

 "That sky's looking awfully pale," said Cinnamon. She was the only one facing east as Pepper and Geoffrey paddled the canoe to Lake Ontario's western shore.

"Can't do anything about it," said Geoffrey. He pointed at a spot slightly north of the canoe's course. "We need to head a little more that way. Damn condo developments have obliterated all the landmarks, not to mention half the shoreline shape."

"We could risk a quick geo check," said Pepper.

"It's okay," said Geoffrey. "I can see the Humber College campus from here, and that's all I really need to go by. At least they haven't moved that yet."

Any natural beach had been removed or covered with football-sized chunks of cement, which served the double purpose of both using up construction leftovers and making the shore too awkward to swim or dive from. Geoffrey instructed Pepper to navigate to a lonely dock that looked like it should have ripped up and carted off decades ago.

"We can tuck the canoe under this," he said, as Pepper helped Cinnamon disembark. "Just put the paddles inside and then push down and towards the dock, like so..." The canoe squeezed under the short end of the dock and disappeared underneath.

Cinnamon and Pepper followed Geoffrey off the dock and onto the adjoining parkland. Geoffrey walked into a close-cropped lawn surrounded by bicycle paths, checking the grass as he made a show of turning out his pockets, as if he'd just dropped his keys. Some joggers were making their way along the path from about a quarter-kilometre away.

"Here," said Geoffrey, stomping on what looked like a lawn sprinkler. The edge of a rusty utility tunnel cover popped up. Cinnamon and Pepper pretended to be helping him look for the imaginary keys as the joggers went past them.

All three of them did a visibility check. When they nodded to each other in agreement that they weren't being watched, Geoffrey prised up the tunnel cover and Pepper and Cinnamon slipped in. Geoffrey followed them, hitting a button on the tunnel wall that triggered the cover to fall back into place.

Geoffrey tapped both the women on the shoulder, and they leaned towards him. "This way," he whispered. Holding hands and walking in total darkness, they formed an awkward human chain as they made their way down the tunnel, Geoffrey in front with his free hand reaching before him. The tunnel was dry at least.

At the last they came to a door. Pepper listened to Geoffrey adjusting something in the dark. It reminded her of a job she'd been on once which had involved some safe-cracking. The sucking sound of water-tight seals giving way announced that Geoffrey had remembered how to unlock the door.

"It's like the door on a ship," he said quietly. "You'll have to step over."

Pepper waved her arm in front of her until she found Geoffrey's waiting hand, then let him guide her through the doorway. Cinnamon did the same, and they stood in the dark while Geoffrey sealed the door behind him.

"The good thing about that hatch is it's not just water-tight, but pretty soundproof," said Geoffrey in a more normal tone of voice. "Hang on..." Pepper and Cinnamon listened to him running his hands over the walls. There was the sharp sound of an industrial switch being thrown, and they stood blinking in the blue-white light of a series of fluorescent tubes.

The lighting showed that the tunnel they now stood in ran down a series of ramps, back out into the lake. Cinnamon wondered if the faint, intermittent sound she heard was a fluorescent tube on the blink or dripping lake water.

It was a long walk to the bunker itself. Geoffrey apologetically explained that there used to be some golf carts in the tunnel once it reached maximum depth and ran level, but they had been removed when the bunker was mothballed.

"It still gets a maintenance check on the last day of every month, so we don't have to worry too much about it being dangerous," he said. "But it's a bloody long walk. Sorry about that."

The bunker proper was sealed off from the end of the tunnel by a double set of sealed hatches. Geoffrey explained they were intended as an airlock in case the tunnel was breached but not the bunker.

Inside Geoffrey had to turn on another circuit's worth of fluorescent lights.

Cinnamon stared up at the interlocking triangles forming the inside of the domed main room. "This reminds me of something," she said.

"Ontario Place, the IMAX theatre," said Geoffrey. "The bunker's a series of Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes."

"Funny these don't get more notice from passing boats," said Pepper.

"Oh, we're well under the lake bed now," said Geoffrey. "Nothing to see but a couple of cameras, and even for 1980s tech they're pretty well camouflaged."

He led them to the sleeping quarters — several rows of military-style cots. "Bedding's in there," he said, pointing to some lockers. "I guess we ought to keep a watch. I can go first."

"I'll do it," said Cinnamon. "I didn't do any of the paddling, and I bet I woke up last out of the three of us."

Geoffrey hesitated, then nodded.

Cinnamon left Pepper and Geoffrey to sort out the cots and returned to the working/living space. She checked the camera feed, but it was still too dark to see anything outside, and she didn't want to risk the floodlights. She checked one of the steel desks near the camera station and found a pad of ruled paper and a fistful of pencils. Some more searching yielded a pencil sharpener.

Cinnamon thought for a moment, then headed for the mess area. She picked up a plastic cutting board. One side was scarred with knife-cuts, but the other side was unused and smooth. She brought it back to the camera area, tore a sheet of paper off the pad, put it against the smooth side of the cutting board, and began to write.

six years /  by Katherine Hajer

Yesterday The Eyrea celebrated its sixth anniversary! I feel like I should be baking a cake or something. It would have been more traditional to celebrate the fifth anniversary when it happened last year, but I was preoccupied with other things. Typical.

That first post is strange to read now, because it's talking about a very different cyberspace. At the time, I just wanted to get out of Facebook. Joining Facebook remains one of my biggest social media regrets, not because anything overly embarrassing happened, but just because it was a colossal waste of time. I didn't connect with any old friends, and most of the people I did connect with were, quite frankly, annoying. Since I haven't heard from them at all since, I can say that.

It's funny how desperate that first post was to prove there was life outside of Facebook (like the part reassuring readers we could still play Scrabulous).

Nowadays I just don't care. My network connections are much better now, both in the number of people and in their quality. People are much more interesting and pleasant when you're learning about them outside of 80s sitcom quizzes and Farmville. I'm more comfortable blogging now — the early counts of 18 posts per year have grown to 1-2 posts per week. Best of all, communities like Friday Flash are easier to find and connect up with outside of the big blue cage.

I like the blog format. I like how it lends itself well to short essays and flash fiction, the two forms I'm most comfortable composing in. I like the spirit of community it fosters. I like that I get to pick my own damn colour scheme.

Thank you to everyone who has dropped by and read something, and especially to those who leave comments. I hope you enjoyed the read.

More to come...

#fridayflash: undercurrents /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, and Part 11.

Toronto Harbour is remarkably quiet after midnight, given that over two million people live around it. Air activity at Billy Bishop Airport must stop by eleven PM, and the last ferry run between the islands and the mainland is at midnight. After that, one might see a water taxi bringing a late-night reveller from a pub on the Islands to the mainland, or the motorboat of an Island resident giving a visitor a lift to the quay.

But that's all in the summer, which made the sight of a canoe all the more unusual. It was barely spring, and not only was the canoe travelling from the mainland to the Islands, the opposite direction from the norm, but its occupants seemed to be both expert canoeists and wholly unprepared for their late-night voyage.

The person paddling in the bow was clearly a man, wearing a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The light pollution from the harbourfront made his shirt and greying hair a pale gold.

The person paddling in the stern was of indeterminate sex, dressed in a black billowing coat, hair pulled back tight in a pony tail.

The paddlers gave three quick strokes on opposite sides of the canoe, switched sides by flipping the paddles in the air in front of them, and then three quick strokes again. From the side it looked not so much that they were paddling as much as digging their way through the water. The canoe sliced through the harbour, swiftly delivering them to the strait between Centre Island and Hanlan's Point.

A third figure was sitting very still in the centre of the canoe. Again the sex was impossible to determine from a distance. They were wearing a dark-coloured hooded sweatshirt. A few strands of bright red, chin-length hair escaped from the black baseball cap on their head.

Their face was hidden in the shadow from the cap's peak, and they seemed very busy with something lying on the bottom of the canoe.

The paddlers stopped fifteen metres from the point, and let the canoe glide amongst the sailboats and motorboats tied up in the marina. Back on the mainland shore, shadows raised themselves from the ground and groaned, then swore. By the time the shadows pulled themselves upright and resolved into men, the canoeists and their single passenger had disappeared into the twisting channel between the islands.

Geoffrey switched from the racing-style paddling they had used to cross the harbour to the leisurely C-curl he knew Pepper would expect from him. He pulled the canoe through the water while Pepper steered from the stern.

Somewhere to the west there were the sounds of a party going full tilt, but here everything was quiet, the only sound coming from their paddles reaching into the water.

The channel meandered a lot, but Pepper seemed to know where she was going. When they finally came clear of the Islands. Geoffrey was surprised at how far east they'd come. They passed the rusting hulks of abandoned freighters and the Leslie Street Spit, its skinny fingers grasping at the lake but never quite holding it.

Pepper called out to paddle racing-style again, and they headed southwest until the lights from the city of Hamilton seemed slightly closer than the few streetlights visible on the Islands. The waves were much choppier outside of the harbour, and Pepper altered the orientation of the canoe to minimise how much the water would push them around.

"It should be safe to talk here," said Pepper. "Just remember how much sound carries over water like this."

Geoffrey handed his paddle to Cinnamon and carefully shifted around so he was facing towards the stern.

Pepper looked up at the sky. "Crap," she said. "If that's where Orion is, then it must be... what, three in the morning? No wonder I'm tired."

Geoffrey cupped a hand over his wristwatch and quickly flicked the backlight on. "Three-fourteen," he said. "We have to either find a safe house to sleep in or turn the tables on this lot quickly."

"Both sounds good to me," said Cinnamon. "Want to go the rest of the way to Hamilton?"

"It's farther than it looks," said Pepper. "The lake's forty kilometres across at this point. The sun will be up before we get there, and we'll be spotted."

"We have to go somewhere. There's nothing here."

Pepper chuckled. "According to the local UFO groups, we're floating right over top of a flying saucer base."

Cinnamon snorted. "You think the little green men are after the data?"

"It's not a flying saucer base," said Geoffrey.

"I was just joking around," said Pepper.

"I'm not," said Geoffrey. "It's not a flying saucer base. It's one of ours. During the Cold War someone had the bright idea that if Toronto got nuked an underwater bunker could come in handy. I think the physicists said it would be useless for a nuclear winter, but they didn't control the budget or the project scope. It hasn't been used since late 1980s, but it's still there, and it's still in good shape."

"And we know this because..." said Pepper.

"My first desk job with the agency was mothballing it," said Geoffrey. "The security stuff — files, protocols, code books — that's all been removed. But there's non-perishable food, beds, power... the brass figured that even if we weren't going to get nuked, there could be an epidemic or an insurrection or something that would make a bunker at the bottom of the lake handy."

"Zombie apocalypse, alien invasion..." said Cinnamon.

"We don't have to swim to it or anything, do we?" said Pepper. "The water's awfully cold."

Geoffrey took his paddle back from Cinnamon. "Due west," he said. "We want to get to Port Credit."

To be continued...

#fridayflash: all downhill /  by Katherine Hajer


If you want to read the rest of the series, here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, and Part 10.

 "Dumbass."

Doug quirked a crooked smile and adjusted his gun stance. "You're the one who's going to get shot, Ellie."

Pepper rolled her eyes. "Yeah, in front of at least six CCTV cameras, not counting the red-light camera at the intersection. You're going to have your close-up on every news outlet in the country, and half the US too."

Doug started to look for the cameras, then caught himself. "Just give me the data, Ellie."

"If it means you're not going to shoot me, or Sheila or Geoffrey — just to be clear — then sure. We can go pick it up."

"Pick it up?"

Pepper made a tutting sound. "You lost me outright for over an hour, Doug. Did you think I just rode the subway the whole time?"

Doug cocked his head at Cinnamon, who was looking down her nose at him. "She picked you up."

"Uh huh. And you followed the car the whole time, right? Got a tracker on it?"

"She's stalling," said the goon with his gun trained on Geoffrey's head.

"What the hell am I stalling for?" said Pepper. "What, I'm going to keep up this standoff until morning comes and the office drones show up and make this little meeting impossible to continue? I don't think so. Doug, your help is even stupider than you are."

"Where did you hide it?" Doug said. "The data."

"Queen's Quay Terminal," said Pepper.

"Bullshit," said Doug. "There's no way —"

Cinnamon sighed loudly. "Gardiner to Lakeshore, Lakeshore to Queen's Quay Boulevard, then Queen's Quay back to Lakeshore to go north on University Avenue. University to College, then south on Bay Street. Total detour time no more than fifteen minutes in light traffic, which we had." She glanced at Pepper. "We should have gone around back via Elizabeth Street like you said."

"Shit happens," said Pepper.

"So where is it then?" said Doug. His voice cracked.

"It's a microSD card," said Pepper. "You think I can just give you directions? I'll have to go there and get it."

The goon standing behind Cinnamon swung and arm around her neck and put his gun to her temple.

"Watch it, asshole!" said Cinnamon, grabbing at his forearm. "You're choking me!"

"We'll keep your friends here, with, ah, my friends, and then we'll come back once we get the data," said Doug.

"Not acceptable," said Pepper. "I leave, and while I'm getting you the data your goons kill them. No way. Either we all go, or you leave now empty-handed."

"We can't just march down Bay Street holding guns to your backs," said Doug.

"The rest of Canada would think it's an awesome metaphor for the national banking district," said Cinnamon. "Hey!" She fought to keep her balance as her guard almost pulled her down. "What, you got relatives who are stock brokers or something?"

"Let her go," said Doug. "All right," he said to Pepper, gesturing with his gun, "we'll do it."

"How do we know you won't just shoot us after you have the data?" said Geoffrey.

"We'll..." Doug stopped, flummoxed.

"You could trade your guns for the data card," said Geoffrey.

"These things weren't cheap," said Doug. "We... no, wait, if we do that, you can shoot us and get the data back."

"Trade two out of three," said Pepper. "That way you still get to have a gun, so attacking isn't risk-free for us, and you have leverage to get away."

"But then we won't have guns," said the thug holding on to Cinnamon.

"You can get more," said Doug. He flicked his gun towards the south. "Let's go. Don't do anything to make us use them while we all have them."

"Just make sure you keep up," said Pepper.

They trudged the five blocks to the lake, silent except for when Pepper turned west to walk the final block to the terminal and one of the thugs thought she was trying to escape.

"Watch what the hell you're doing," Doug shouted.

"Do you think," Pepper said in normal tone of voice, "that it's a good idea to shoot a gun when the only building that's not a condo tower around here is a hotel? The question isn't whether or not there'll be witnesses, but how many dozen. It's this way."

They walked up to a grey-painted wooden hut with a small dock behind it. "This way," said Pepper, leading them behind the hut and onto a strip of solid ground only a few metres wide.

Pepper stopped sooner than Doug was expecting, and he walked into her. She grabbed his gun hand with both of hers and twisted it. There was a cracking sound, and Doug screamed as the gun fell from his hands.

Cinnamon stomped on her guard's foot, then elbowed him in the stomach before he could react. She karate-chopped him in the neck and took his gun out of his hands, using it to knock him across the head. He fell unconscious to the pavement.

Geoffrey threw his guard against the side of the shed, forcing his gun hand into an odd, intricate position. Finger bones snapped, and Geoffrey gained control of the gun, which he used to knock out his opponent.

"Dumbass," said Pepper, giving Doug one last kick in the head.

"I haven't had to do that in ages," said Geoffrey.

"I haven't had to do that for six weeks," said Cinnamon. "So now what?"

"I don't know about either of you, but I need some time off the grid," said Pepper. "Let's get out on the lake." She flicked the padlock on the door of the grey hut. "You still remember how to paddle a canoe, Geoffrey?"

writing blog hop -- jump right in /  by Katherine Hajer

Jon Jefferson invited me to join a writing blog hop he was taking part in. He writes Speculative fiction with forays into Noir and Bizarro. His stories have appeared in the 2013 Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology, and the Foil and Phazer Divide and Conquer Anthology. His work can also be found on Amazon and Smashwords. Flash fiction stories can be found at his site 10th Day Publishing (http://10thdaypublishing.com) or his anthologies, short stories, and Novellas can be found at his Amazon Author page (http://www.amazon.com/Jon-Jefferson/e/B00DQDBBBK/).

The idea of the blog hop is to answer the four questions (below) and then list three biographies of other writers, who will continue the blog hop. I decided to put a bit of a twist on it — if you want to hop onto the blog hop, just leave a comment saying so and link to your own blog post.
  1. What am I working on?
    This year: I'm finishing the first draft of last year's NaNoWriMo, editing Tilly with the Others into something less serial-like and more book-like, and starting novel #3, which so far is in note-taking stage. It will move to outlining stage over the summer.

    There's something else too, but more on that when there is more to tell.

  2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
    I tend to have slightly unconventional protagonists. Tilly is about a recently-widowed senior citizen who has been communing with space aliens her whole life, and the current NaNoWriMo project is an extension of some flash fiction I wrote featuring ninja witch knitters. But hey, my grandmother was a lifelong knitter, and she'd pointed a gun in someone's face with a total intent to use it (she was working as a guard at a prison for Quislings at the time, but still). People are more exciting than we collectively seem to think.

  3. Why do I write what I do?Because that's what comes out. I'm always perplexed that other people are more deliberate about this stuff.

  4. How does your writing process work?
    Lately I've started doing light outlines — nothing too detailed, and nothing I follow too slavishly. This is helping. The structure I'm using is a modified version of the scene tracker in The Plot Whisperer. I actually prefer editing to writing, but that's probably because most of the writing I do for the day job is really editing, in the form of project change requests.

    For flash fiction, I have something like two dozen gazillion notes to myself on my phone. If I get stuck for a topic on a given week, I read through the notes. Sometimes I even remember what they were supposed to be about, but it doesn't really matter if I don't.
And here's my brief bio (and when I say brief, I mean brief!):
Katherine Hajer is a regular contributor to Friday Flash, a flash fiction community, and posts to the-eyrea.blogspot.com. Her short story "The Expected Ghost" was published in Descant in issue 152: Ghosts and the Uncanny.

help your writing with video games part 3: minecraft in survival mode /  by Katherine Hajer

If you don't already know the basics of how Minecraft works, you might want to at least scan Part 1 of this series. If you're just interested in using video games to easily create 3D sketches of settings, you may want to read Part 2.

Survival mode is where setting influences character behaviour, and character behaviour influences plot. Every survival mode game story starts with "how I survived the first night." In the case of the game I've been playing, I was materialised on a beach with some more-solid dirt hills nearby. It was around noon. Recall that Minecraft days are only ten minutes long.

It used to be right under that cactus

I started making a dugout with my bare hands. By nightfall, I'd made one just barely big enough to hide me from the monsters. I had no light, no way to make tools — nothing to do but listen to the monsters groan and bark outside. I had to sit through ten minutes of game time doing nothing.

At one point I got bored and made my dugout a little bigger. I heard something outside and saw two grey-glowing eyes peeking into the air hole I'd left open.

I closed the air hole with a spare block of sand and learned to keep quiet at night. Understand: even though I was just staring at my little Android phone screen, it was genuinely scary! Okay, I am a wimp, but beyond that the sound design and the darkness really do make for a scary experience.

So you learn what it feels like to be hunted.

After a few nights, I'd punched enough trees down (no tools yet) to make a log cabin. I built it at the top of a mountain, thinking this would be safer:

Without that torch, it would be pitch dark, even in daytime.
This was probably the stupidest dwelling I had. At night I had to close up the air hole, because not only did the monsters find me, but they circled the thing all night. I had to wait almost all morning before they wandered off and I could tear down log cabin.

The next place was another log cabin:
At least it had a pretty view.
This was where I finally able to build a crafting table, make a proper door for the dwelling (no more air holes!), make some torches (no more cowering in the dark all night!). I even threw some sand in a furnace (I made a furnace!) and made a small window facing the lake.

For the first time, I could watch the sun come up, signalling that the world was safe enough to venture outside of my little cabin. And that's when I learned to worship the sun.

I stayed several days in this cabin, but decided to give it up when spiders perched themselves on the roof and attacked me as I came out (the spiders are as big as you are in this game). So I dug into a nearby cliff with my new tools and made a three-story cliff house:
A home that needs stairs!
So, great, right? Nope. Monsters could (and did) walk right up to the front door and do things like detonate the walls. Or else they'd shoot arrows at me if I stood on the balcony at night, unable to sleep because monsters were near.

So I moved to the end of the cliff and made a higher house with more defences:
Now known as The Death Trap.
I made this place to be safer, and wound up making it more dangerous. It was build under a rocky overhang, and it got very, very dark at night in and around the house, no matter how many times I tried to eliminate the dark corners with torches.

A skeleton manifested on my balcony (which was lit with torches) and let itself into the living area. Skeletons and other monsters aren't supposed to be able to open doors, but this one did — I heard it. Then there was the time I was trying to expand the space a little and left one corner with insufficient light — and a zombie materialised. Plus, the doorway in was facing the wrong way: it faced east, so it was always dark first at sunset.

I had learned to value sunsets.

My current dwelling has a door that faces west, so the sun shines on it until the very last moment. It's built inside of a naturally-formed rocky tower, and its floor starts 15m above ground level. The stairway up to the living space is surrounded by a courtyard with a high wall. If I make it to the courtyard, I'm almost as safe as I am in my living space.
Virtually monster-proof.
This is the dwelling where "civilisation" has really kicked in. There are large, floor-to-ceiling windows facing each of the points on the compass:
I even used resources to make a painting!
It's bright and airy, even at night, and I built a rooftop garden so I can grow plants — even trees — and not have to worry about encountering monsters:
Most gardening happens at night — 25m up with cliff-drops all around.
The monsters have become way less terrifying and more of a nuisance. Recently I've been adding to the fortifications so they can't interrupt my sleep anymore (you can't sleep if monsters are nearby). In the "back yard" I've build a covered mine that goes down to the bedrock. I've found gold and other precious minerals. I now have a clock so I can, say, dig a tunnel underground without worrying about sun position all the time when I need to go home.

Even though I've found and smelted a decent amount of iron, I still mostly work with stone tools, because I've learned to appreciate scarcity. The cultural choice on this world is to stay low-tech unless absolutely necessary — the opposite of the real-life society I live in.

The playing field worlds are randomly generated. If I'd wound up with a different sort of geography, I'd probably value different things. One of my creative mode worlds has lots of water and little land, for example, so I chose to build all the buildings on the water, rather than on the land (think of Lake Town in The Hobbit). I don't think it's possible to play Minecraft without becoming at least a bit of a sun worshipper, though.

So: geography and other environmental factors build character values, which in turn determine character choices. Character choices drive the human-shaped parts of the environment, and alter the environment to suit the character. The character's relationship with their environment changes as the environment becomes more or less safe.

There's got to be at least a few stories in there.