13 Blackouts
by Steven Palmer Peterson
*****
PUBLISHED BY:
Steven Palmer Peterson on Smashwords
13 Blackouts
Copyright © 2011 by Steven Palmer Peterson
Smashwords
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PRELUDE
Daylight barely made it through the shades into a murky bachelor pad. Ripped open packets of Chaser and other hangover pills lay spread around. A big Dallas Mavericks poster covered peeling paint on the wall.
Half the living room was given over to music gear: keyboard, a couple guitars, amps and mics and mixing gear, sheet music sprayed around, some handwritten. Cascades of color reflected off a glass of water and prismed through it. The color came from a massive 32 inch computer monitor on a desk littered with technology.
On the monitor a SETI@home screen-saver ran, crunching through reams of data downloaded to the computer from SETI satellite arrays around the world. The program converted the data into a colorful 3D topo-map of the chaos and white noise of radio signals from space. A webcam sat on top of the monitor—stared out at the room.
A section of the 3D graphic spiked—mini-peaks fluctuated, then became rapid binary off/on spikes. Something had been found.
A red flashing virus warning blazed on screen: COMPU-ARMOR detected a worm -
That cut out.
An error message popped up: Compu-Armor.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
The whir of a computer fan kicked on, loud—chatter of the hard drive doing something. The hard drive light flickered. Then blue screen of death.
The hard drive thrashing reached a crescendo then went silent. Computer screen flicked off.
On the monitor, a system popup: NO SIGNAL
Seconds ticked past—then a Windows boot screen came up. The webcam started watching again.
The webcam looked out at the apartment in dim, grainy video. It added a ticking time counter to the video it recorded. The light in apartment subtly changed as the computer finished its startup process. Data swarmed over its field of view—like all the programs and files were being accessed at once.
The printer churned out a test page.
The high-end computer speakers started playing miscellaneous tones and music from the computer’s files: an eclectic combination of startup sounds, warning chirps, and MP3 tracks all in the crisp audio you would expect from a musician’s computer.
The webcam kept watching—which is to say that the computer kept watching. Only now it was listening too via the wand microphone on a stand sitting next the monitor.
It listened to its own sounds playing from the speakers. The music cut out then it just listened to the sound of the heating vents and creaks and pops of the apartment.
A series of flashing overlays popped in outlining various objects around the apartment: chair, plant, guitar, guitar, guitar, big screen TV. A strange set of codes popped up next to that outline, like alien language.
Back to the chair and more codes, then a flashing box locked in, like it was a successful identification. Guitar—lots of codes, so many that the computer clearly was baffled by these strange devices.
House plant—codes, then color analysis cascaded over the plant, comparing it to a range of colors, followed by a spectrometer comparison, then a flashing box locked in. Another successful identification.
This looked like it was going to continue for a while...
AWAKENING
The bedroom windows were blacked out. Cardboard boxes served as both clothes hampers and dressers.
Nate Callender lay fully dressed for a night out on a mattress that just lay on the floor. He was wiry and worn thin by burning through life at amplitude 11. Brainy but no nerd, Nate was the guy strangers invited to their parties.
Birds chirped and a blue light flashed from the box that served as a bed stand. A cell phone lay on top. The chirping birds were its ring tone and the flickering of the screen when it rang shed a dim glow across the ceiling.
Caller ID came up—a string of numbers. Nate groaned and turned in bed. Ringing cut out and message changed—“1 MISSED”.
Nate seemed to settle back into sleep—then the phone chirped—a few more moments and another chirp. Nate sat up, rubbed hangover out of his eyes and looked around.
How the hell did I get here?
Nate stumbled into the living room feeling his pockets, picked up a jacket off the floor and fumbled through its pockets. Didn’t find what he was looking for.
“Crap.”
The webcam continued to watch. It outlined Nate in flashing overlays, then the process accelerated with more overlays highlighting each arm, each leg, fingers on the hands, something akin to face recognition. Alien symbols swarmed around the overlays categorizing. He was being mapped and analyzed.
Nate flicked through his cell phone message list while he pulled a bottle of tomato juice from the fridge, then B-vitamins from a cabinet. He frowned at an unknown number.
An icon blooped: message waiting.
Nate was about to press the voicemail button when the phone rang—caller ID said it was Miguel, so Nate pressed the answer button.
“I lost my keys,” Nate said.
“I have them, spud.” Miguel said from the other end. “And your car. Don’t you remember?”
“Not a thing.” Nate popped a couple B-Vitamins and downed them with a long chug from the tomato juice. He had practice at this.
“You were blasted. Ollie drove you home. So are you coming out?”
Nate gazed around at the tables full of sheet music. “I’ve got to work on your song.”
“Awesome! But are you coming out? Trent got another promotion.”
“Another promotion? Already?” Nate flipped through sheet music—frowned at some, nodded at others.
“It’s been almost two years.”
“No way.” Nate took a moment. “Shit. You’re right. Last time was after Jen got engaged.”
Pregnant silence from the other end of the line.
“What?” More silence. “What’d I do?”
“You told her you love her,” Miguel said.
“Aww hell.”
“Well. Do you?”
Nate looked at a tree outside the window then paced.
“Maybe I do.”
“She is not married yet, dude, and now you are totally screwing up her brain.”
Nate sat at his computer and the webcam watched back—highlighting framed Nate’s eyes, calculations streamed. Other highlighting framed Nate’s mouth as he talked and voice graphics appeared on screen to match the sound coming in through the microphone.
“I am such an ass.” Nate wiggled the mouse and the desktop came up. A message box displayed a System has recovered from a serious error notice.
“Shit.” Nate clicked the OK box. Things seemed to be back to normal. He checked email.
“Look, you just need to talk to her,” Miguel said.
The computer screen went dark—then a moment later flooded with rapidly flashing colors and patterns, like fractals, and streams of strange icons. The high end speakers kicked out a rapid-fire mashup of clicks, music-like tones, and audio clips.
“Whoa.”
“Nate?” Miguel asked from the long, electronic distance.
BLACKOUT 1
It was like an extended blink—just long enough to notice that maybe something might’ve happened there. But surely nothing important could happen in a blink.
Nate was still sitting at the computer but his phone was missing and he was positioned slightly differently, like two strips of his life had been spliced together poorly.
“What?”
He looked around. What happened? Noticed his phone was missing—wait, there it was on the floor next to the chair. Like he just dropped it. Nate looked back at the computer screen. A progress bar filled up. Its title said: FORMATTING DRIVE C.
“No, no, no, NO!” Nate jumped up—not sure what to do—then yanked the power cord out of the back. Screen went black.
“Shit.”
“Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
Nate waited a few moments, plugged it back in, then pressed the start button.
“Come on. Pleeeease...”
A black screen came up with a message: Non-system disk or disk error. Replace and strike any key when ready.
“GODDAMMIT!!”
*****
Like many Texas houses, Miguel Coronado’s place had a big Texas star on the front door. Inside was the kind of hellpit you’d expect when three unmarried men share the rent on a house. The dining room looked like a computer shop. Guts of computers were spread across the table.
Miguel, geek chic in XKCD cartoon tee-shirt, ran diagnostics on Nate’s computer while Nate plucked out a tune on guitar, something fun but with an emotional heart.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Miguel said.
“I’m trying to keep the fret-work simple.”
“Thanks dude.”
“For the lyrics try a nine-eight compound meter. This chick must be pretty hot.”
“Smoking. And funny. Abby’s way out of my league. Look, I don’t want to snake one of your songs. Especially when it’s sounding so good.”
“No way, man. This one is all yours.”
Miguel gave Nate a silent look of thanks—the kind of emotional connection that’s forged only through growing up together.
“Unless she’s too ignorant to see what a cool dude you are!”
“Definitely! Okay, let’s try to salvage some data.”
Miguel connected a hard drive to a ribbon cable. A blank, black screen came up on monitor—the darkness broken only by a blinking curser.
“Oh shit. That can’t be good,” Nate said.
“It’s not over yet. But, um, did you back your stuff up?”
“I uploaded most of my new tracks to MySpace.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But those are all finished cuts. The separate tracks for synth and rhythm and guitar are all on the hard drive so if I want to re-mix–”
“–you’ll have to re-do them. Annnnnd you’ll have to re-do them.”
“Son of a bitch!!”
“You low-level formatted the drive, dude. How did that happen?”
“I have no idea.” Electronic birds chirped and Nate fished out his cellphone. “Yeah?”
From the other end came a woman’s voice. She had a bit of a Wyoming drawl.
“Nathan Callender?” She asked.
“Yep.”
“My name is Shelby Karter and I work with SETI. I tried to call you earlier. You’re running our software, right?”
“I was. Not running anything now–” Realization dawned. “Wait a second. Did your shitty screensaver destroy my computer?!”
“What? What happened?”
“I’m standing here looking at five hundred gigs of scrambled hard drive and it was running your SETI at Home thing because, like an idiot, I thought ‘here, let me do my little part to help find E.T.’ And now you’re calling me and I can’t help but think ‘oh golly, there just might be a connection.’”
“I’m sorry, sir!” Shelby said. “I don’t know. There could be a connection. Have you done anything to the computer?”
“Other than your malware wiping the hard-disk, all we’ve done is look at it.”
Shelby talked away from the phone on the other end—just a faint buzz.
“You still there?” Nate asked.
“Can I come out there? I’d like to look at your computer. We can pay for any repairs and data recovery. I might even be able to squeeze some compensation out for you.”
“Yeah, sure. I lost probably forty hours of studio time on this.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But don’t do anything to the computer until I get there.”
*****
Music and loud voices from inside a rocking roadhouse drowned out the argument in the parking lot, where Jen Davis—the kind of girl who belongs in a J.C. Penney’s commercial and would surely be a catch for any lucky guy—gesticulated and shouted at Nate.
Jen was furious and hurt and Nate felt like an utter shit.
Jen wiped at her eyes, asked him something. Nate answered. He could barely look at her.
Jen shouted at him, then heaved her beer bottle into a trash can and stomped off.
Later, inside, Nate hooked up his guitar to an amp and brooded while a small crowd milled about, drank and celebrated.
“You did the right thing.” Miguel brought Nate a beer.
“Jen was actually pretty great. Sometimes you don’t notice that until... I’m glad she’s found someone.”
Miguel patted his shoulder.
“Keep them coming.” Nate grabbed the beer.
“You got it.”
That night Nate hunched over his guitar, played stuff that was lonely, and poured his heart out. The crowd had gone silent.
He thought he made it home and to bed. That sounded right.
BLACKOUT 2
Nate was (awoken? de-spaced-out?) by a hard pounding from the door.
“Hello?!” A woman’s voice came from outside the door.
Nate looked around, confused, to figure out where the hell he was. He was sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room in his own apartment. Stereos, clock radio, iPods, multiple TVS, and computers were all on playing various things. Kung fu and karate movies dominated a couple TVs. Books and magazines were spread over the floor.
A computer monitor sat next to the TV so he could watch both at the same time. The monitor’s screen showed Nate standing in the middle of the apartment looking confused. It was wired into a video camera that pointed at Nate for some reason and was recording.
What the hell? More hard knocking on the door.
“Mister Callender?!” Shelby Karter, finally in the cowgirl-merged-with-college-girl flesh, waited as she heard the door unlock. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder.
Nate opened the door. “Hello?”
“Shelby Karter. From SETI.”
Nate waved her in, still in a daze, and closed the door behind her.
“We talked yesterday. Remember?”
“Right. Right. About the computer.” He was still discombobulated. Shelby looked around.
“Are you, um, multi-tasking?”
“Oh, sorry! I don’t know.” Nate hurried around and turned shit off. Shelby noticed that she was being recorded and waved to herself on the video monitor.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt. Some kind of music video?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you were doing?” Shelby gave him the look sober people reserve for guys who ought to be starring in a stoner comedy.
“Look, don’t worry about it. My computer?” He pointed her to a table where it sat, case opened.
“Right, well you know we’re really sorry if our software messed anything up. It’s never done this sort of thing before.” She checked out the case, wiggled cables.
“But you knew it was messing up my computer.”
“Yeah—sort of–”
“Your software was monitoring me?”
“No. No. We don’t do that.”
“Then how’d you know? You called me.”
“We got a flagged signal sequence and, yeah, when that happens your computer phones home and tells us about it, then I give it a look and follow up. But it doesn’t tell us anything about you.”
“A flagged signal sequence? This is SETI stuff right—listening to the top forty countdown from, like, Pandora or whatever, right?”
“Not quite like that. But, yes, E-M signals coming out of space.”
“My computer found E.T.?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s probably some Russian signal bounced off the ionosphere or a neutron star with a weird wobble.”
“So a Russian, as opposed to Klingon, top forty station fried my computer?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. But whatever went wrong here, fried us too.”
“What?”
“Maybe a minute after I got your flagged sequence, my entire system crashes. A virus came back up the SETI at Home channel, blew right past our anti-virus wall, and scrambled all our stored data. It’s the hardest crash I ever saw.”
“You’re saying it came from my computer?”
“What kind of websites have you been visiting lately?”
“You know, normal stuff,” then he got the hint, “–not THAT kind.”
Shelby shot him a look. Uh-huh. Right. She started packing up Nate’s computer.
“I’m not a computer tech, so I need to take this back with me.”
“You don’t know computers? Then why’d they send you?”
“I know computers. I’m a radio astronomer doing a post-doc out of the University of New Mexico. I’m just not an expert in computers.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to ... actually that sounds pretty cool. Radio astronomy. You’re like a celestial deejay.”
Shelby laughed. Oh yes, he could be dangerously charming...
“Oh. Um, thanks. I didn’t mean to either ... well, I know how pissed off it can make you when your hard drive blows up. All that work just whoosh. Your music, right?”
“Yeah, that’s all I really care about. Some of them were still just experiments. But you never know.”
Shelby looked around at the strangely ordered chaos of the room.
“What happened here? Is this like... normal?”
“I have no clue. I had a rough night and maybe a little too much–” Nate made the drinky-drinky sign. Shelby laughed.
“I imagine that’s part of the job description.”
“One must keep up appearances. For my five fans, of course.”
Shelby helped pick up some of the books and papers.
“So you become studious when you get plastered? You should donate your brain to science.”
“I don’t remember any of this or what the hell I was thinking.”
Shelby picked up the video camera, still recording. “Here you go! Need some help remembering?”
“Why was I recording myself?”
“Maybe something naughty...” She waggled the camera.
“You’re gonna be sorely disappointed.”
Shelby rewound, then pressed play. Video came up on screen showing Nate in extreme close-up as he CLUMSILY set the camera on a shelf where it had a good angle on the middle of the room. The TV and various radios played in the background.
Nate stutter-stumbled back a few steps, like he hadn’t yet learned how to work his limbs. He fell over with a clump and simply crawled to the middle of the room.
“You are soooo wasted,” Shelby said.
“Holy shit. This is so embarrassing. The really strange bit is that I feel fine now. A bit of a headache but no hangover.”
“Huh.”
The video showed Nate turning around then opening his mouth and making various odd croaking sounds. He mouthed out other sounds—vowels and consonants.
“What the heck?”
In the video Nate stood, seemed to gain better balance. At the same time the sounds he made grew coherent and parroted a radio announcer so that he repeated what he heard just moments after the announcer said something:
“–Giants downed the Cubs in extra innings. Looks like another long season in Chicago.” The repeated cadence was almost perfect.
“You don’t remember any of this?” Shelby asked.
“Not a thing.”
In the video Nate continued parroting things he heard, switching between the radio announcer and music and what was said on TV. And he started doing Tai Chi—moved his arms around, crouched, stood, crouched again, then walked.
“It’s like I’m trying to figure out how to walk and talk,” Nate said. This kind of shit should not be happening to him.
“You better see a doctor.”
*****
Shelby and Doctor Ghiya watched through a window as Nate lay on the patient table for an MRI. Doctor Ghiya was younger than Nate. Nate wasn’t certain if he should consider that reassuring, or troubling. fMRI scans played over the monitors.
“Whoa. Lots of activity,” Doctor Ghiya said.
Nate slid into the scanner.
“Just relax, Nate. It’s perfectly safe,” Doctor Ghiya reassured.
BLACKOUT 3
Nate blinked at the sunlight as a car alarm blared nearby. Where the fuck am I? He looked around—some city street. Cars parked along the roadside. Sun too bright. Where the hell was the hospital?
“Hey! HEY! What are you doing?!” An angry man yelled at him.
Nate looked around to find the source of the commotion—and spotted Angry Man—big enough to make the anger scary. Angry Man was running toward him. What was this all about?
Then Nate noticed that he was standing next to the car with the alarm blaring. The car’s passenger window had been busted in. A cinderblock lay in the back seat in a tumble of glass next to an open notebook computer carrying case.
Finally, Nate noticed that HE was holding a notebook computer. The pieces weren’t hard to put together after that.
“That’s my car and my computer, asshole!!” Angry Man shouted.
“Oh shit.” Nate started running. Angry Man gave chase.
The alley looked good. Nate sped down it. Angry Man huffed behind him.
“I’m gonna tear you up shithead!”
Nate realized he was still carrying the computer, looked for a place to drop it but couldn’t slow down without getting caught.
“Shit, shit, shit–” Nate saw a pile of full garbage bags. He slung the computer, gently, into the piled bags, then cranked up the speed.
Angry Man decided to cut his losses and grabbed the computer.
“Dickhead! If I see you again ... DICKHEAD!!”
Nate wove through some alleys behind warehouses, huffed hard, then stopped and leaned against a wall. Sucked in air.
What the hell is wrong with me? Probably something really, fucking serious.
His phone rang and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He fished the phone out, still huffing.
“Nate?” Shelby said from the other end of the line.
“Yeah.”
“Where the hell are you?! You ran out in the middle of the–”
BLACKOUT 4
Nate sat at a bank of computers in a shiny, college library, deer caught in headlights look in his eyes.
Books and printouts were stacked around the computers. The computers had web browsers with multiple tabs open—astronomy articles, star maps, star classifications. He noticed a pad of paper filled with complex calculations—pages filled with polar coordinate conversions.
“What the hell?” Nate rubbed his eyes, temples, pinched the bridge of his nose, then hit the men’s room—where he plugged quarters into a vending machine and punched the button for a packet of aspirin. Ripped open packet, downed the pills and drank straight from the faucet.
Back at his desk, a librarian took the books and put them on a cart. She looked annoyed by this, and even more annoyed by Nate.
“Wait, wait! I’m, uh, not done with those,” Nate said.
“Your phone rang again while you were in the bathroom.” The librarian sure seemed happy to see him return. “If you’re trying to avoid someone you ought to just turn it off.”
“What? Sorry. Um, have you been here all day?”
“Since four.”
“Have I been here all day?”
She looked puzzled, but Nate seemed increasingly desperate.
“Maybe since five.”
“And I’ve been working here?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. I don’t remember any of it.” Nate pulled his cell from a jacket hanging over a seat back and walked out. The librarian watched, stunned.
Nate called Shelby then fidgeted and paced in the parking lot waiting for her to show up. Shelby barely let the car stop before she jumped out:
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know! I’m either blacking out and sleepwalking or suddenly forgetting everything I’ve done.”
“You ran out right in the middle of the MRI. The doctor saw something serious in your scan, Nate.”
“A tumor?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But I could tell he was holding back something big.”
They headed into the library and Nate waved at the astrophysics books. He handed Shelby the pad with all the writing on it. Shelby’s eyes popped as she looked over the math.
“Where did you find this?”
“I wrote it. That’s my hand-writing.”
Shelby looked at the computers, brought up various star maps.