"Amélioré" (French translation of "Better")

Amélioré
par Curtis C. Chen (traduit de l'anglais par Jeff R. Allen)

Pour son dix-huitième anniversaire, Jadrew Linbitter s'est absenté de son travail et, comme le veut la tradition, il a fait un poignard de son os de la jambe.

La cérémonie de remplacement était ordinaire. Les medicos ont insensibilisé la partie inférieure de son corps et Jadrew n'a senti aucune douleur quand ils ont scié sa jambe gauche, juste dessus du genou. Il a détourné son regard, vers son père, et singé son fier sourire alors que il criait à l'intérieur.

Son péroné, vidé de la chair, restait désormais dans un solution diagénétique pour remplacer les tissus durs avec un polymère durable pour le préserver. Son tibia, préparé de la même manière, sera taillé en forme de lame rituelle, gravé avec les textes sacrés, et puis métallisé.

Le écran sur le mur clignotait. Il a mit à côte son couteau électrique et a engagé le telemet. La visage de sa sœur apparut.

« Tu profites d'une journée de congé? » demanda Konri.

« Milliards, » dit Jadrew. Il a montra son tibia aigu. « Bientôt, je serai prêt à tuer quelqu'un. »

Konri rit. « Est-ce que tu te souviens ces figures cableman que tu as sculpté pour grand-père? Il vient de les faire en résine pour les exposer dans son bureau. »

Bon, pensa Jadrew. Un petit morceau en plus de ma vie minable préservé dans les siècles.

« Tout le monde ici est si fier, » dit Konri.

Jadrew sentit que il était en train de rougir. Il imagina comment la famille regarderait son nouveau membre bionique. « Je dois le finir. Papa va vouloir le voir ce soir. »

« Tu as toujours été un bon garçon. » Konri sourit. « Désormais, tu est un bon homme. »

Elle éteignit, et Jadrew a projeté son tibia vers le mur, en espérant que il se fracasse. Il a resté intact. Jadrew a poussé un soupir et repris l'os. Il se demanda si il habituera a la son de son pied métallique nu sur le sol.

Il pouvait voir tous sa vie devant lui, prédétermine, sans choix. Après deux ans, les medicos remplaceront sa jambe droite, et il entrera dans le service des conscrits. Si il survit à ça, il gagnera ses bras. Et son père sera si heureux.

Jadrew regarda son couteau électrique. Ça sera facile, de finir le charade d'obédience, avant que il étouffe sa volonté. Tout simplement, il pourra sélectionner puissance max, mettra le à sa tempe, et poussera le bouton.

Mais où peut-on trouver le sens de cette action? Il a voulu son dernier acte en ait.

Il a regardé le côte de sa lame inachevée et sourit.

Son oncle Sidrav lui a enseigné les mots, depuis des années, avant que il soit relevé comme un partie de le résistance. L'exécution de Sidav avait déshonoré la famille, mais Jadrew n'a jamais oublié les contes séditieux, raconté dans la obscurité vers l'heure de se coucher.

Il mit au travail de nouveau. Il mit une lame élégante, dentelé et il la grava avec les mots rebelles anciens:

anéantissons toutes les machines

Le père de Jadrew a trouva son corps, transpercé dans le cœur par la lame. Avant tout, il a effaça les mots blasphématoires de la lame. Puis, il s'assit sur le lit a côte son fils mort et se mit à pleurer entre ses mains métalliques.

"Customer Surface"

CUSTOMER SURFACE
By Curtis C. Chen

"Next in line!"

Scott stepped up and fumbled with his plastic bag. The woman behind the counter watched as he extricated the box and his receipt. Her name tag said "Mildred."

"Reason for return?" Mildred asked.

"Actually, I'd just like to exchange it," Scott said.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's a time-blade."

Mildred turned to look at him. "Excuse me?"

"It must have been packaged wrong," Scott said. "Or just bad quality control. Anyhow, I'd like to exchange it."

"We don't carry time-blades," Mildred said.

"I know," Scott said, wondering why he felt like he had to apologise. "That's why it's a mistake. I just need a regular ritual knife. Something low-energy."

Mildred picked up the box. "This package has been opened."

"Yes," Scott said. "That's how I found out it was a time-blade instead of an athame."

"I'll need to check the lot numbers," Mildred said, and opened the box.

Scott folded his arms and tapped one foot, hoping he looked impatient instead of nervous. Mildred pulled out the knife and turned it over.

"Sir," she said, "this blade has been inscribed."

Scott leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. "Yes, I realised it was a time-blade when the raven-claw tip in my engraving pen turned to dust halfway through the inscription. You should be glad I'm not suing your store for selling faulty merchandise."

Mildred said, "I'm sorry, sir, we cannot accept damaged, altered, or hexed merchandise for return or exchange. It's store policy."

"Well, I want to talk to your supervisor," Scott said.

Without taking her eyes off him, Mildred extended one arm and tugged on a rope which hung from the ceiling. Somewhere above them, a bell gonged.

The air behind Mildred shimmered, and a stocky man materialised. His name tag read "Barry."

"What's going on?" Barry said.

Mildred said, "This gentleman wants to exchange some merchandise." She held up the knife.

Barry squinted at it. "Is that an inscription?"

"Yes," Mildred said, and repeated Scott's story. She got all the details right.

When she finished, Barry looked at Scott and said, "Sorry, sir, but like she said, it's company policy. Nothing I can do."

Scott nodded. "Then I want to speak to your supervisor."

"I'm the store manager," Barry said. "You'd have to write to Corporate."

"Fine. Give me the address," Scott said.

Mildred stepped out of the way while Barry used her terminal and scribbled the information on a notepad. He tore off the parchment and handed it to Scott.

"Thank you," Scott said, his hands shaking as he gathered up everything he had placed on the counter. He turned and walked away quickly.

Five minutes later, Scott parked his car at the kebab joint down the street and walked in. He found the booth where Dana was still nursing her giant soft drink and slid the sheet of parchment across the table.

Dana pulled a scroll from her handbag and laid it flat on the table next to the parchment.

"Perfect match," she said, smiling.

Audio: "Customer Surface"

Why, yes, I did watch a lot of Monty Python's Flying Circus when I was in high school. What of it? (Also Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, Are You Being Served, and whatever other Britcoms the local PBS station was broadcasting late at night.)

Ironically, I was never really into Doctor Who, and still am not. I tried out Torchwood for a while, but it was just too silly.

Instead, I say, give me Life On Mars and Spaced and The IT Crowd and A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Now that's comedy.

Music: Guitar and Keyboard stems from "Ikea" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

It's Harry Potter Meets Veronica Mars!

No, not really.

But this--and by "this" I mean today's story, "Customer Surface"--is what happens when you run a Hogwarts Game one year and later watch most of Veronica Mars in less than three months. Random stuff gets wedged in your subconscious, like spinach between your teeth, and the only way to get it out is by... flossing? writing? Sorry, I don't know where that analogy was going.

Anyway. By the time you read this, I'll have only six days left to complete my 100-page Script Frenzy screenplay. You can follow the previous link to see my current progress, and if I'm still behind on page count, please feel free to taunt me via blog comment or email. And don't let anybody tell you three pages a day is easy. They are lying liars who lie.

512 By Mail

If you're reading 512 Words or Fewer via RSS feed, you've probably noticed that I recently switched to syndicating short (truncated) versions of each post. This is because there's a 500-item/512KB restriction on the size of the XML file for the feed, and I want to preserve as many audio posts as possible for new subscribers to the podcast.

To balance this slight inconvenience, I've also set up not one, but two ways for you to get 512 Words or Fewer by email!

• Look for the 512 By Mail box in the sidebar to the right.
• Choose your delivery option (Full or Digest).
• Enter your email address in the appropriate box.
• Hit the corresponding Sub button.

Follow the instructions to verify your email address, et voilà! You'll get new stories delivered to your inbox every Friday.

What's the Diff?

Full Sub (via Google Groups) will send you the complete text of every post as an individual email. So, on a typical Friday, you'll get three separate messages from 512. For example:







Digest Sub (via FeedBurner) will excerpt all the posts from a single day and send you just one message every Friday, as shown:



Because I'm releasing all 512 content under Creative Commons, you should always feel free to forward these emails to your friends. Sharing is good!

If you have any problems or questions, please email 512words+orfewer@gmail.com and let me know.

"Sam Spayed"

SAM SPAYED
By Curtis C. Chen

The building manager unlocked the apartment and said, "You know they got a talking cat, right?"

Jake took his hand off the doorknob and stepped back.

Andy said, "Don't tell me you're afwaid of puddy tats, Jake."

The older detective scowled. "I hate talking animals."

Andy shook his head and stepped forward.

The first pet "translators" were just prerecorded audio chips triggered by sound. Then a couple of Stanford graduate students had refined the technology, using voice stress analysis and text-to-speech software. Now anyone could walk into any pet store in the country and get a patented "translation collar" to give his or her pet its own unique voice.

Andy pushed the door open and called, "NYPD!" Nobody responded.

Enough daylight was coming in through the kitchen window for him to see potted plants everywhere, half-folded newspapers on the dining table, and one mostly empty teacup on the carpet by the futon. There was a distinctly non-plant-like silhouette in the kitchen window. Andy walked over and saw a sleek orange cat, half-crouched on the windowsill and staring back at him with big yellow eyes.

"Hey there," Andy said. "I don't suppose you know where your owner is?"

The cat blinked its eyes slowly and started swishing its tail. It let out a short meow, and a second later, the hexagonal tag on its collar blinked green and said, "I can has cheeseburger?"

Andy groaned. Apparently their missing person had sprung for one of the novelty language upgrades.

He saw two empty bowls on the kitchen floor, picked up one of them, and filled it from the tap. The pressurized water hit the side of the bowl and spattered all over Andy's chest before he could shut it off.

The cat yowled, "You're doing it wrong!"

Andy put the bowl down. He saw Jake standing in the living room, grinning.

"What?" Andy said.

"I'm searching the bedroom," Jake said. "You have fun with your furry friend there."

"Fuck you," Andy replied.

The cat descended onto the counter and sniffed at the water bowl. "Do not want!"

"Yeah, yeah," Andy muttered.

"It has a flavor!" the cat said.

Andy looked at the bowl on the counter. He turned on the faucet and watched the water spray into the sink. The stream seemed more diffuse than it should have been.

Andy searched his pockets and found his Mickey detectors. The precinct had issued everyone drug testing kits after a sudden wave of knockout rapes in downtown. He opened the plastic canister, pulled out a strip, and held it under the tap water. The stiff paper turned red instantly.

"Son of a bitch," Andy said.

He turned off the water and unscrewed the aerator at the end of the spout. When he pulled it away, a small, shiny disk fell out of the faucet. The surface of the disk felt slimy and left a residue on his thumb.

Andy smiled and petted the cat with his other hand. "Good kitty."

"Also," the cat said, "your mechanic is a pony."

Audio: "Sam Spayed"

If there is a moral to this story, I suppose it would be: Humans are easily fooled.

We are hard-wired to fill in the blanks. Flash a sequence of still images at twenty-four frames a second, and we think we see motion. Show us strange phenomena that can't be easily explained, and we turn to conspiracy theories, religions, or both.

It's good and bad that we're predisposed to understand things in terms of story. Good, because narrative is a solid framework for all kinds of information dispersal; bad, because sometimes what you want to hear isn't what you need to hear, or even what's available. Reality can be a real buzzkill.

Music: Bass and Electric Guitar stems from "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

IM IN UR STORY, etc.

Yes, I'm afraid it has come to this: punny titles and gratuitous references to overexposed Internet memes. But hey, at least I'm not taping bacon to my cat.

Here's another link, just in case you're wondering where I got that punchline. And yes, I have made some Lolz featuring our own cats.

Simpsons fans may recall a similar translator idea in "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" But the idea of a "universal translator" dates back to at least 1967, when Star Trek used it, and probably appeared before then in other fiction.

Would the ability to communicate with other beings help or hurt first contact and the establishment of peaceful inter-species relations? I have to agree with Douglas Adams here—it would most likely be irrelevant. Many people who speak the same language are still right bastards to each other.

Being able to talk to someone doesn't mean you're automatically going to like them. Or believe them, for that matter. As cops and doctors know, everybody lies. Even machines.