Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Shackism v. Sortmind, Part Three

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Michael D. SmithNovember 25, 2019

The reader of the previous two blog posts must suspect that I’ve been building to some manifestation of Shackism v. Sortmind in my current life.

So I finally acknowledge a buried concept lurking for several years: the idiotic notion that I might only have one big novel left in me, one intended to sum up and justify my entire existence in suitably solemn tones, and that I must drop dead after finishing such a perfect expression.

God, that is stupid. An artistic poverty mentality, art gasping its last breaths in a long-term care facility, pitied by all. I am here to keep growing, keep discovering, keep expressing. There is no Final Stuff to sum up.

Thank you Mike of June 1971, and Mikes that followed, for reminding me about Shackism versus Sortmind. I’m a Shackist, here to work at each little aspect that comes along. No final Sortmind synthesis is needed. No life project or bucket list, no thematic or philosophical novel is called for. If I come up with interesting ideas as I keep exploring, they’ll just occupy appropriate spaces in the story. There is so much new energy here.

Yes, I want a long, evocative, expressive novel, but I can’t rehash the ones I’ve already done. I’ve caught myself unconsciously repeating myself, such as in my 2002 notes for another big novel that I finally realized would become a thoroughly dull ripoff of my flagship novel The Soul Institute.

For a couple years I’ve been compiling new novel notes, but though I enjoyed lifting some of them for Jack Commer Seven, Balloon Ship Armageddon, these notes have mostly adhered to Big Philosophical Summing Up consciousness, and have seemed grim and unwritable. They follow a somewhat amusing pattern in my note-making of positing a couple opening chapters with interesting action, and after that all is vague and boring.

I can admit that right now I don’t have any interesting characters. I don’t have a What If. But that’s got to be okay. I seem to have grasped the cork in the mind bottle that’s prevented me from really cutting loose.

Related to all the above is coming to the end of a long period of looking backwards. I date it as starting from a November 2006 evening rereading of what I thought was my glorious HTML version of Nonprofit Ladies, then gagging at its vulgarity and its unconsciousness. The shame I felt about that book led to a great revision into Nonprofit Chronowar, the unfolding of four more Jack Commer novels, and successful revisions of Akard Drearstone, Sortmind, and The Soul Institute.

Balloon Ship Armageddon as the last Commer novel dovetails with the end of looking backwards, though eighty pages cut from BSA Draft 1 could theoretically be a basis for a Jack Commer Eight. But if that ever comes about, it will be quite new.

The other recent theme is that so far publication from commercial publishers hasn’t led to sales/success/influence, and then again, neither has self-publishing. But now I’m not even sure what counts as a success. Have I ever been truly ready to have an influence or make a real contribution? My ego no longer seems to be in the way, and I do feel I’ve put some worthwhile stuff out there. If anything, The Soul Institute is out there.

Disparate themes seem to be tying together. That is intriguing.

The Soul Institute if anyone is interested

Shackism v. Sortmind, Part Two

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Michael D. SmithNovember 24, 2019

No reader can possibly be prepared for this blog author to include a snippet from a June 26, 1971 letter to my friend Sabin Russell. I didn’t realize at the time how important this paragraph would be in my life. It comments on a philosophy paper Sabin wrote at Yale, and refers to my just-completed story “Prom”:

My thought: In a short story I try to make a little aspect of life with which I am familiar clear, like the absurdity of falling in love with a teeny-bopper. But I can’t try to explain life because I’m not familiar with all of it. So I just work at every little aspect that comes along. That is art, “little-aspect-philosophy.” Big Philosophy tries to explain the world, and fails.

So my teen self really is the child father to the man. Here’s a take on it from eleven years later, 1982’s unpublishable novel Zarreich:

He stopped in front of a small wooden shack at the side of the road. There was no other structure near this place. The shack was more of a roadside display stand, it was open on the side facing the road, and a sort of primitive counter ran across the width of the shack. All the wood was black and rotting‑‑the carpentry of the thing hadn’t been precise even when this shack was new, Jim saw‑‑the counter, the walls, the roof, all were haphazardly measured and constructed. There was no sign on the place, but Jim had the feeling that it was some sort of foreign arts and crafts booth. He searched through the eighteen‑inch‑high layer of mud that swept up against the sides of the shack and ran through the tiny interior, and saw several pieces of pottery embedded in the soft brown mud. Brown pottery with black patterns in the brown mud in the black shack. Just then Jim saw a hand with three large rings on it.

His first dead body. Part of the forearm was visible‑‑a hairy man’s arm‑‑but the rest was buried. There was hardly enough space in the shack for the body to fit, Jim thought, but somehow this guy had managed it. A foreign craftsman. The rings were gold‑framed with stones of turquoise, crimson, and pale yellow. The place smelled of pungent clay. Jim stepped back from the shack, watching, feeling the sunlight fall all over the rotted sides and light up the soft mud. Some dragonflies hovered over pools of water, their dual blue wings shining. The brightness of the sun felt good on Jim’s eyes.

Jim loved this place. He began to think that the shack was a source of power for him. He had been drawn here, he had magically been stopped in front of it, he had admired the pots, he had found his attention focused on the hand with the rings. Superstitiously, Jim now wondered if he wasn’t seeing his own death‑‑that he had traveled through some sort of time warp to visit the scene of his drowning by mud some day in the future. Because certainly Jim might one day be a pottery craftsman with a shack on the outskirts of the city. It was certainly possible, and if so, this would be how he would go out. In the flashflood. After all, to be feeling this much power coursing through him could only mean that some sort of perspective on his own death was at hand. Besides, Jim was dreaming and all sorts of things were possible in dreams: time‑travel, one’s own death, shacks like this …

Jim turned to take in the whole wide desert. Recently washed by the flood, it was rapidly drying out again in the sun. A field of cactus stretched towards a series of mountains in the west. It was morning, his perceptions were totally new; he would have started running if the street weren’t so muddy. And he thought: now how did I know that this is all a dream? How do I know that? Is it the unbelievably intense beauty? Is it this power and death feeling? Is it some quality of my own thinking?

What does this all have to do with 2019? More later.

The Zarreich Blog Post

Shackism v. Sortmind, Part One

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Michael D. SmithNovember 23, 2019

Shackism: In the moment, flexible, aware, expectant. Creative disorder. Making pottery in a little shack at the side of an empty desert highway. Hit or miss power.

Sortmind: Deep intuition, synthesizing, order, explanations, philosophy, indexing. In harmonious contact with all aspects of existence. High power levels.

Two modes of consciousness collide in Sortmind when Edward Duce, urban terrorist and founder of the Open Telepathy Foundation, invades teenage artist Oliver’s apartment.

“You blew up the library? And–and all of downtown now?”

“Hey, I don’t buy guilt trips, Ollie. It’s just not me. Besides, you’re in this too. You’re now the executive officer of a terrorist organization.”

“But … I’m primarily an artist …”

“Don’t you think I’m not primarily an artist, too? Piss on it! And your salad sucks.” He leaned back to address the circles of oil lamp light on the ceiling. “Shit on this Sortmind. I’m losing access. You ask it a question–it screws up!”

“You … must’ve Mindwiped!”

“Not me, baby. Listen, man–we outfit you with a subscription when things die down. You and me, man–we’ll be invincible. Sorta like a Zen thing. Nobody’ll know where we’re coming from. This house’ll be like a meditation garden or something. We’ll call ourselves the Knights of Nothingness. And we’re plugged into Sortmind, knowing everything, or nothing, depending on your Zen quotient.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d be any good. I mean, I really hate that sort of thing. I still have flashbacks on the CTT trip, which was pure Sortmind.”

“That’s a bullshit attitude, Oliver. Change it immediately. How can we be the Knights of Nothingness if you’re such a pill? What’s wrong with goddamn telepathy?”

“Well … like the whole idea of having everything in the universe accessible like that, everything cross-indexed, and … I don’t know. I hate searching stuff. It’s so boring. I mean, there’s no room for creativity, I guess.” Oliver reddened. His meager opinions were so inarticulate in the face of Duce’s eloquence!

“That’s shitass shit. You’re afraid of a cross-indexed universe? That’s what mankind’s been aiming for since Day One. You ever download the Sortmind program itself? Man, that thing’s like a million DNA molecules all joined up. It’s mindboggling! It’s like God! And I know a trick or two about God, ’cause I was a minister. You gotta appreciate the whole universe, and it’s damn complicated, so you better get used to it.”

“But my approach has just been to … I mean, I don’t know if there really should be any sort of overarching philosophy. I know some people seem to need that, but I have this image, I guess, of how I work best.” Oliver waved at his paintings. “It’s like I’m just waiting by the side of the road, in this little shack, and things come along. I just work on things as they come, just one at a time. Like … like in a little shack, making pottery or whatever … waiting for things to come along …”

“Yeah, we’ll call your philosophy Shackism,” Duce sneered. “Well, lemme tell you, boy, it sucks! Shackism can’t ever compare to God! And your salad sucks, too! Tastes like puke! Gemme some real food, man!”

Oliver will require a long walk and another half hour to shake off his denial about his best friend’s death, and he’ll return to deliver a verdict to Mr. Duce.

More background on Sortmind the novel

Jump Grenade in Paperback

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Michael D. SmithOctober 21, 2019

Sixteen-year-old Billy Bolamme, Junior Dropout Basketball League star, joins shamanic forces with Guenevere “Uni” Ryder, fellow high school dropout, art gallery receptionist, and unwitting accomplice to thirty thousand murders. Berserk at missing his five hundredth point in a row, ridiculed by radio announcer Frank Chester over the arena P.A. system, Billy batters Chester and ties him up, leaving him to stare at two armed hand grenades on his desk. But then Billy sees that he’s left the P.A. system on, and that his threat has been conveyed to ten thousand witnesses. He proceeds to blow Chester up anyway, then destroys the entire sports arena to erase all witnesses to his crime.

In addition to its Kindle format eBook incarnation, this short and bizarre exploration of psychological Shadow is now available in two paperback sizes:

Trade: Amazon, 6” x 9”, 154 pages, $6.99
Mass market: Lulu.com, 4.25” x 6.88”, 210 pages, $5.99

Billy is huge, meaty, and psychopathic. He wears camouflage shorts with a dozen hand grenades at his belt. His father Hiram, coach of the team, is an ineffectual, dreamy art gallery owner who started the Junior Dropout Basketball League with his wife Madeline, director of the Bolamme Center for Hurt Feelings.

Jump Grenade is published by Sortmind Press.

Character images
More background
Sortmind Press

Jump Grenade – The Author Interview

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Michael D. SmithOctober 10, 2019

Q: So what’s this crap you’ve got now? Jump Grenade? And don’t give me any of those typical BS marketing blurbs.

MDS: All right, guy, let’s get into it. Basically the novel is about psychopathy, how much fun it is to win at any cost–and how surprised you are when you discover that the cost is karmic, stretching across thousands of lifetimes.

Q: Yeah, right. You’ve led everyone to believe it was about some kid basketball player.

MDS: Well, it certainly is. I had a lot of fun writing a sports story. I had to stretch a bit to do that. I wanted sports writing, visceral and sense-oriented. The casual insults and curses everyone hurls at each other evoke the mandatory ego-jockeying of the sport.

Q: Was the title intended to be stupid, or did it just come out that way?

MDS: The title is karmic. Billy has to meet a transformed version of his girlfriend at the end: a forceful and unknown Universe Ryder. Instead of a jump ball they contend with a jump grenade. His shamanic powers of winning and fame are finally throttled, but Uni’s powers of truth and responsibility are now growing.

The Draft One title was Ocean Singe Horror, the moniker Billy took right before he blew up the Baltimore arena. It’s an anagram of Orange Rhinoceros, and for more information, search for the term on my blog. I changed the title to Jump Grenade so we can figure out that the book is about basketball. Of course the cover should clue you in on that.

Q: Okay, the cover’s a decent image. You did the whole thing by yourself, didn’t you? Then again, maybe you should’ve hired a professional!

MDS: I was really leaning towards using camouflage spray paint on a basketball! Originally I thought using two basketballs would be too cute, evoking the relationship of Billy and Uni. But in experimentation, the two basketballs against the bright white background worked. It’s intensely three dimensional, with a lot of airy space, not the typical close-up of objects I’ve done for The Soul Institute, Akard Drearstone, or Sortmind. This does not look like my normal covers, which is also what I wanted.

Q: Yeah, but now I find that Jump Grenade’s based on another one of your old stories from childhood. C’mon, don’t you have anything new?

MDS: Jump Grenade is new consciousness. It has current energy that speaks to me, though it’s also connected with the past. Yeah, in 2008 I came across an old ninth grade story, “The Saga of Billy Bam, Basketball Star,” and it was so farcical that the idea of expanding it with modern themes instantly intrigued me. I didn’t care if it wound up as another story, a novella, or a full novel, I was just going to let it come out at its own rate even as I readied myself for other new writing.

After finishing the rough draft I let it sit while I worked on other novels. Then in 2014 I made an EPUB of the first draft so I could read it on my phone, and I found myself laughing out loud at it at D/FW Airport. I figured I owed it to the universe to get the novel in passable shape. The second and third drafts didn’t disappoint me; I still find myself laughing at my own novel. Maybe I shouldn’t, but the ludicrousness of this thing keeps hitting me.

I have a lot of old novels I’d never consider rewriting or publishing. They were just experiments. No energy resonates from those, and I seem to be done looking backwards to refurbish old works. The Core now understands there are no more old novels to fix up, that it’s time to embark on new paths. That isn’t balking me, although plot, characters, and structure for a completely new novel are still unknown.

Q: So here’s the standard stupidass question: where’d the idea for the stupidass book come from? Continue reading →

Jump Grenade is Published

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Michael D. SmithOctober 3, 2019

Billy Bolamme, psychopathic Junior Dropout Basketball League star, joins shamanic forces with Guenevere “Universe” Ryder, fellow high school dropout, art gallery receptionist, and unwitting accomplice to thirty thousand murders. Berserk at missing his five hundredth point in a row, Billy kills a taunting radio announcer with hand grenades, then blows up an entire sports arena to erase all witnesses to his crime. From here on out his fame and luck can only grow.

Is this really any sort of sports fiction? Black humor? Absurdist farce? I think the book points to the Other World and karma. Human beings do anything to reinforce their ego and their winnings, but the hurt they cause must eventually be accounted for. Over the eons.

Sortmind Press has published the Kindle eBook, with paperback to follow shortly.

Characters

Billy Bolamme, sixteen year-old wunderkind of the Junior Dropout Basketball League, a shamanic force of death and destruction who changes his name to Ocean Singe Horror on an LSD trip during a basketball game

Guenevere “Universe” Ryder, art gallery receptionist, Billy’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and unwitting accomplice in thirty thousand murders

Hiram Pebley Bolamme, Billy’s father, coach and owner of the Bolammes basketball team, an ineffectual, dreamy art gallery owner as well as a wealthy do-gooder who started the Junior Dropout Basketball League with his wife Madeline

Dan Ryder, Bolammes regular announcer, Universe’s father, and the man who must finally summon the courage to confront Billy

Frank Chester, former Bolammes player and now Bolammes co-announcer

Madeline Bolamme, Billy’s mother and the director of the Bolamme Center for Hurt Feelings

Mongar Frederick, detective with the Plattville Homicide Bureau

Emala Ryder, Universe’s mother and dean of the Billy State University School of Library Science

Jonathan Mueller, surviving witness of the Baltimore disaster who dies after giving testimony about Billy’s involvement

More background

Cover by Michael D. Smith

Some Secondary Sortmind Characters

Posted on August 12, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 12, 2019

Barbie Malroux, Canterra Art Institute cheerleader and architecture student

Witness his miserable entanglement with that girl in math. He groaned to consider his downfall here. The girl was everything he always said he despised. First of all, her name was Barbie. God, what a sickening name. Secondly, she really didn’t belong at the Art Institute. She wasn’t any sort of artist, but her parents evidently wanted her at CAI. He’d seen some of her rigid, childish drawings tacked to the walls of the commons, and was ashamed of himself for even knowing that kind of girl. Apparently she claimed to have pretensions of being an architect, but after seeing those drawings Sam knew she’d never make it. There was zero creativity there.

Thirdly, Barbie was a cheerleader. If there was anything that Sam had railed against in his four years at CAI, it was the existence of the football program and the mindless cheerleaders, with their airline stewardess smiles and their boundless chirping energy. They were allowed to wear their purple and white uniforms to class. One day he’d been outraged to see Barbie’s pom-poms stashed under her chair.

The problem was that Barbie, with her long red hair and her small-breasted, slender, five-foot, two-inch body, with her freckled nose and sparkling blue eyes, sat next to him in three of his classes and was the cutest female he could imagine. Conversations were now required at the beginning and end of each class. Barbie looked up at him with those bright eyes and smiled at everything he had to say, including his wisecracks about cheerleaders, now subtly toned down so as not to offend while still allowing him to express his disapproval of everything she was.

Randall Perrine, Oliver’s father and co-founder of Citizens Against Telepathy

Randy Perrine was short, angular, and tense, with overly large ears jutting from crewcut russet hair going gray. He hunched over papers on the desk, jabbing them with a bony finger, apparently unaware that his rigid jaw was half an inch from ramming into the desk microphone.

Perrine jerked up from his reading, deep-set gray eyes putting the entire room under surveillance, and he struck Sam as being a paranoid monkey in a business suit, ready to spring up and dance a simian jig on the Council dais, waving an AK-47 and screeching gibberish curses. Sam fought to keep from laughing out loud at this image. He could definitely save it for a short story. “Paranoid Field Marshal Monkey with an AK-47” already started plotting in his mind.

Edward Duce, founder of the Open Telepathy Foundation

Duce leaned to the microphone. “Greetings, Madame Mayor and honored members of the Canterra City Council. I formed the Open Telepathy Foundation last October for the express purpose of combating the regimented insanity of Citizens Against Telepathy here in Canterra. As a minister, I can assert that the Sortmind app is our last best chance of establishing true communion among the peoples of this world. The Trantor Group has inadvertently opened up human consciousness through this app. As such, Sortmind belongs to the people. It should be free, and unlimited. We understand that Mindwipe and Bleedthrough are minor problems to be solved. In this we stand with complete solidarity with Mr. Trantor and his company.”

“You pretend to be this peace-loving, happy-ass organization, but all your demonstrations turn into riots,” Toland shot back. “Your buddy Plill here has been arrested a dozen times for inciting violence!”

“Charges are always dropped, because they can’t prove a thing!” Plill sneered.

“And it’s only because Perrine’s brownshirts wade in with clubs,” Duce added.

“There are no brownshirts! You repeatedly use that irrational term!” Randy Perrine shouted from the right table.

“Why, then, any term you like! Fascists who disrupt our spiritual rallies!” Continue reading →

The Main Sortmind Characters

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 5, 2019

Oliver Perrine, Canterra Art Institute student, painter

Peter Trantor regarded the lanky youngster looming out of the dim elevator with Suzanne at his side. “Well! Oliver! Glad you could make it! I’m Peter Trantor. Welcome to the command seat of the Trantor Group.” He waved at the expanse of windows showing the lighted towers of Canterra in the darkening sky.

Oliver Perrine stared back in consternation. Peter took in the disheveled strawberry blond hair and the suspicious deep-set eyes.

Go easy on him, Peter, Suzanne transmitted. He almost made a pass at me just now. Think he thought there’d be nobody in the building tonight. But he’s a good kid.

“Oh, right … hi there,” Oliver said, finally sticking out his hand to accept Peter’s shake. “I guess I’m here for the tour?”

“Right,” Peter said, pulling up subtext to Suzanne’s comments to the effect that she wished she were seventeen herself, and that she might even have responded to Oliver’s awkward approach. But his Vice President for Sales couldn’t know he knew this; Peter had reserved UnderDocument Mode to himself.

Sam Emersonn, Canterra Art Institute student, Mitchell Emerson’s son, Oliver’s best friend, writer

Sam’s February Paintbrush article, “In Defense of the OTF,” was considered rabid even on a high school campus which was probably ninety percent OTF supporters in the first place. Here was the son of one of the founders of CAT publicly suggesting that all CAT leaders might be better off “executed by the people” than left to their destructive, culture-destroying ways. He’d been forced to write an apology a couple weeks later, but nobody could tell if he meant it or not.

Sam was practically a professional, regularly getting his articles into the Paintbrush the past two years. Oliver’s crappy paintings were listless shit compared to that. Sam would be an important writer someday.

Peter Trantor, CEO, the Trantor Group

Anna Winstead. Could she possibly find him attractive? Hadn’t Margaret said he was good-looking? Something about his mouth and chin being “finely sculpted”? She’d told him that their first time in bed. Said he moved fluidly, “like a cat on a crowded mantelpiece.” Maybe Margaret thought she was a poet. But she’d done wonders for Peter’s ego. Up to the point where she took up with that Tad asshole. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t spoken to her in a year. God, she’d been everything.

Maybe if he worked out more. He wasn’t a beefcake. How could you be a beefcake at a hundred twenty pounds? Peter ate and ate and never gained an ounce. Did women really want beefcake? Could Peter possibly reprogram himself into beefcake? What would that take? Hell, this Winstead woman had been laughing at him. Laughing at him for being a cat on a crowded mantelpiece. She had a boyfriend and she was laughing at him and suing him even now.

Should he try to access all her JIS info again, see if he could make sense of it? He could feel tens of thousands of questions lining up in his spent mind. But what if he really was close to Mindwipe? What if Anna Winstead was the query that pushed him over the edge? Continue reading →

The Sortmind Chronology

Posted on August 2, 2019 by Michael D. SmithAugust 2, 2019

At the risk of polluting this blog with an imperfect and overly long document, I’m adding something that’s not meant to be read, but just perused in order to show the lengths an author has to go to nail down chronology. The Chronology file is one of three main files for Sortmind, the others being Characters and Facts. Those two files are equally long.

It’s possible that not every date in the Chronology document is as precise as it could be. I may have inadvertently left in dates corresponding to early drafts or cut chapters. Nevertheless, I wanted the file to be as accurate as possible to avoid plot conflicts.

Although year dates are mentioned nowhere in Sortmind, I used the year 2017 to establish the events of the novel, since I wanted to refer to precise days of the week. There’s no use having an eventful school day on a Saturday, for instance. The chronology contains dates back to 1945 for references to characters’ pasts, but below I’ve omitted everything except “2016” and “2017,” which comprise three-quarters of the Chronology file.

The novel opens on April 13, “2017.”

2016

Monday 2/15: First PortaLawyers go on sale.

Late May: Oliver’s paintings gain attention at CAI Art Show.

June: Sam gets construction job for the summer.

July: Over the summer, Pat and Porter go beyond beer and dope and discover the joys of hard liquor and whatever drugs they can find at the Art Institute.

Friday 8/5: Sortmind app released by TTG.

Monday 8/22: CAI school year begins. Godwin Shaw transfers in from another city.

Monday 8/22: Saviors of Earth by Curtis Tillotson published. He had published a few books before, but Saviors of Earth becomes a bestseller by October.

Wednesday 8/31: Sam breaks with his parents and moves into his own apartment in the run-down area just south of CAI. Sam pays for it all out of construction job income, although his parents, alarmed that he says he’s dropping out of school, offer to pay for his education through college, so it isn’t a total break after all.

Monday 9/5: Sam buys a used 1996 car.

Tuesday 9/6: CAT formed.

Tuesday 9/13: date TTG instituted subscription fees. Also called the Restructure. Setup fee, annual subscription, and exorbitant searching fees.

Wednesday 9/21: Roseparker made VP for Software Development.

Sunday 9/25: Suzanne is activated.

Continue reading →

A New Portrait of Jonathan James Commer

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Michael D. SmithJuly 12, 2020

Jonathan James Commer copyright 2019 by Michael D. Smith

This baleful mood was captured in ink, acrylic, and gouache on canvas-covered board, 2019

Jonathan James is Jack Commer’s insolent, troubled son, the author of the bestselling Alpha Centaurian novel, A Fragmented Encyclopedia of Recent Self. He was also briefly Emperor of the Alpha Centaurians, later leader of a rebellion against the SolGrid surveillance system, and eventually a Wounded robot dedicated to the destruction of the entire Milky Way.

From The SolGrid Rebellion, Book Six of the Jack Commer, Supreme Commander series:

Tall, skinny JJC gave the impression of being frail until you noticed those powerful biceps and forearms. He sat with the women to either side, Jackie on his left and Suzette to his right.

The bastard thought he understood women so well. Maybe that came from frying his brains on being AC Emperor, with trillions of Alpha Centaurian females running amok in his mind, worshipping him. In any case the ladies sure flocked to him. A lot of people had underestimated JJC, Pat thought sourly. Including himself.

Pat set his wine down and tried to ignore Trotter slurping at a bowl of water. “Okay, guys, look, anyone can see there’s something up here.”

Forks momentarily halted. JJC looked up with a smile. “Something–up here?”

“C’mon, anyone can see something’s going on here. You call this dinner, you say it’s the last time we can get together, and–so what’s the deal?”

JJC grinned. “Why don’t you just dip into your little SolGrid and find out?”

“C’mon, you know damn well that’s not how it works.” Any idiot knew that if the others weren’t participating in the Grid, Pat wouldn’t find any information unless he happened upon some other person privy to whatever JJC’s knew. “So you call this dinner–”

“I didn’t call any dinner. I invited my friends here because I wanted their company. I’m not some hotshot corporate president who calls dinners.”

Pat blinked at the insult. Okay, so he’d called a few dinners here himself as SolGrid president. But the others weren’t SolGrid, just Pat and Sanders. Jackie had her own projects to attend to and had never shown any interest in the company, and Suzette had her own complicated life running between her husband back on Mars and her new lover Jonathan James. Jonathan James and his damn telepathic dog!

“Okay, okay,” Pat said, “I just wanted to say I know your little secret and it’s damn stupid if you ask me and I can’t believe it of any of you.”

The others were silent. Pat had a moment of satisfaction seeing JJC blink, but Jonathan James took a sip of his golden wine and recovered. He turned to the numerous other tables in the restaurant and assessed the noise level. Pat followed his gaze to the windows, to the icy mountains beyond the small buildings of New Houston’s main street. Above it all loomed all the giant yellow sphere of Saturn undergoing reconstruction by the Martians.

JJC turned back. “I’m surprised, Patio. I really didn’t think SolGrid could pick that up if we were Dark.”

“Grr … uff!” Trotter put in with a hint of warning.

Pat winced. He kept forgetting that the dog understood every word they said. He was also thoroughly tired of JJC’s irritating nicknaming habit. How things had changed between them since the first dinner Pat last December! He and Sanders had been deep into creating SolGrid when Jack Commer’s son showed up asking for an interview. Hirte had maintained that JJC might have some insight into the software, but Pat had protested that everyone knew that the twenty-eight-year-old had burned his brains out screwing with the fascist Alpha Centaurian Grid last year. But since JJC was his old friend Jack’s son, Pat reluctantly agreed they could take some time out and invite the kid to dinner.

Two things surprised Pat at that first dinner. First, instead of applying for a job, JJC pleaded with Pat to scrap all plans for SolGrid, but seeing that Pat wasn’t budging from his fresh United System contract to build just such an application, Jonathan James then began a campaign to introduce safeguards to guard against any Alpha Centaurian-style brainwashing. Pat wound up promising a dozen add-ons which he always found excuses never to implement. There was just no time with the threat of the Wounded.

The second revelation was even more astounding. It was painfully obvious that both Jackie and Hirte’s girlfriend Suzette were smitten with the young man. Jackie was almost seventy-six but rejuvenated to mid-thirties, and she was drooling. Pat’s own girlfriend, drooling for this brain-damaged fool! And Suzette Borman, forty-two but never rejuvenated, looking so hard and used up by life that she scared Pat, was giggling and swatting JJC’s thigh and hanging onto his shoulder. Lee Borman’s wife, who’d been having an affair with Sanders Hirte for God knew how long.

Pat had recoiled in disgust at JJC’s charisma. It was an unruly and much more powerful version of his father’s leadership charm, and over the next few months Pat had gotten more than enough of it shoved down his throat. But before long JJC was somehow part of the SolGrid group, even though he was passionately devoted to dismantling it.

“Look, it’s been obvious something’s been up for a while. This opposition to SolGrid you have. And now somehow you’ve brainwashed everyone else into it.”

JJC narrowed his eyes. “Let’s not use that term if you don’t mind, Mr. Patster.”