Not A Blog™

Remix time! I know this comes right on the heels of my post about copyright, but I’m not trying to prove any sort of point relating to that. Rather, this is an entirely different project which I’ve been working on for some time and only just finished yesterday. I’ve had numerous false starts and, all things considered, it turned out to be harder than I expected.

The original idea was this: I thought it would be a lot of fun to take a short story and rewrite it in the style of different authors. There was a number of problems with this, the biggest one being the difficulty in finding a short enough story that everyone is familiar enough with to warrant rewriting. The joke rather depends on how familiar the reader is with the original story—and how familiar they were with the styles of the authors I chose to write in. I like to think the story could work even without either of these two elements, but a level of humor would be lost. Because of this, I had a lot of difficulty in deciding on a story and authors.

Finally, I ended up settling on, not a story, but a poem. I chose my favorite poem, Jabberwocky. I don’t like poetry, generally speaking, so it makes sense that my favorite poem is one that makes fun of how one should write poems. I also figured it would be well known enough that people would have at least a passing familiarity with it. If you haven’t read it, head over to Wikipedia and catch up; it’s not very long.

The poem, however, was going to turn into a short story. This I knew was basically a necessity. I’m not sure one could rewrite a poem in the style of another poet. It’s probably possible, but I don’t know nearly enough about poetry to attempt this. It’s easier to make the poem a story. (Of course, it helps that Jabberwocky is rather nonsensical to begin with, so I can make it into any kind of story that suits.) I didn’t follow any particular rule when I did this; a few lines are changed for grammatical reasons, and I switched around a few references in the middle. But for the most part, the prose follows the poem, line by line.

The author I chose to lampoon is the venerable William Gibson. I like Gibson’s work, and I like Gibson’s prose, but I also fully understand the criticism that it’s purpley-tinged. Or bright purple, in some cases. Regardless, he most certainly has a distinctive style, and the more distinctive, the better for style parody. I think I hit most of the big ones: rambling description, snappy action with sentence fragments, and dialogue that only kinda makes sense.

So that’s what this is. It’s my style tribute-parody of William Gibson, telling the story of Jabberwocky in short story format. It’s kind of goofy but hopefully entertaining.

‘Twas brillig. The traffic thickening to a rush-hour crescendo, and if I got stuck in those slithey toves, I’d have to answer to some greater authority. Monolithic clouds gyre and gimble on the horizon, and as I cut through the wabe, I was suddenly struck by how the mere shadow of a storm so effectively disabled the precision sundial in the center.

I jay-walked across triple one-way lanes, into a parking garage of slab concrete, and dropped from the second level over a chain link fence. I landed in the alley behind the Drome, only a fashionable three and a half minutes late.

It wasn’t even happy hour and all mimsy were the borogoves. I pushed through a knot of shiny leather over neon tees, mirrored glasses despite the dim interior, and cheap plastic phones pressed to ears, sealing deals of dubious legality. I just missed a mome rath, staggering, who tripped toward the door and too fast for words, there’s outgrabe all over the sidewalk.

I saw Jersey in a booth around the corner from the main drag. As promised, he was uncharacteristically accompanied by another: a slight, old man with a large coat and small fedora—the kind that never quite came back in style. Before I could slip into my side of the booth, he grabbed my arm.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” The old man talked with an Eastern European accent, his eyes bright with adrenaline. I pulled my arm away and flapped my coat around my shoulders. Pointing, he continued, “The jaws that bite—”

“Okay, Pops, that’s fine,” interrupted Jersey, and he guided the man’s hand back to the table.

I sat down. “He’s him?”

“Sure.”

“Sure you’re sure?”

Jersey pulled at his lager and sighed before answering. “The Claws that catch, always catch the right man.”

“Yeah, okay, Mr. Claw. I get the idea. So—”

Now Jersey cut me off, “And the Claws want to know when they get their money. The job was not, shall we say, easy.”

“When we get the information,” and I glowered at those impassive Zeiss implants.

“Beware the Jubjub bird!” the old man shouted again. This time Jersey rolled his eyes and recited along with the chorus, “and shun the fruminous bandersnatch.” But following this, there was no more.

I looked from the old man back to Jersey. “What the hell’s a bandersnatch?”

It was midnight when I finally unloaded the codger. The drop-off point was a warehouse, surrounded by oil-stained pavement and shantytown shelters, carefully constructed for maximum repulsive effect. This artificially authentic environ—with the buzz of raw electricity mixing ozone with the faintest odor of decay and uneven pavement hidden by the most conveniently placed shadows—this was psy-ops of high order. No one without business approached. Even some with business wouldn’t approach.

The old man was to be our Vorpal Sword—our ace in the hole. We paid the Claws high-precision Japanese electronics to snag him—the kind you can’t print with goop—knowing full well the government-funded research fried his brain. The extent of the frying? Well, let’s just say we thought we were getting eggs over easy, but the order came out scrambled.

Beware the Jabberwock—that much was clear. Our spooks said the MASINT indicated a focused energy weapon, but the specific effects were unknown. The Jubjub Bird: a Lockheed project straight out of the Skunkworks. All the requisite TS acronyms stamped on every page—and you had to do three hail-marys, I think, too. The specs were pretty fantastic, but what worried me was what we didn’t know. We didn’t know Bandersnatch.

But with our Vorpal Sword at hand, we began the neuro-reprogramming necessary to extract the intel for a counteroffensive. That neurological government ICE was bracketed on all sides with self-destruct triggers, so the docs stepped through the meat circuitry, debugging individual neurons. Long time this manxome foe we fought. Leads were few.

They say when you can’t figure a problem, quit. The answer comes of its own accord. Sage advice. I took a vacation, natch.

The breakthrough came in Sky Meadows. I paused at the top of a rise, sun optimistic; myself not so, truth be known. I rested, one shoulder against the carbon stained bark of a Tumtum tree. I had no signal here in this tulgey wood, free as it was of artificially modulated electromagnetism. I did not want an update on the progress; I came out here to prevent myself from being updated on the progress. Yet I was annoyed at being out of the loop. I couldn’t let it go. In uffish thought I stood, brows tight.

From the south, a drone like a massive turbine, but not the scream of ducted fans corkscrewing into the air. This drone was more elegant. Over the hills, a black dragon rose, whiffling. It bristled with winglets, the tip of each glowing with a red LED cluster—eyes of flame streaking even in the afternoon sun. But these protrusions mocked Bernoulli, none substantial enough to provide lift. As it tore across the valley, its anterior burbled with lightening discharged from titanium plates, an occasional tendril snapping out to a tree top, and cracking, teasing at the leaves.

This vehicle—this herald of healthy black ops—was our Jubjub Bird, and slung beneath its belly was the Jabberwock cannon. I had a Nikon in my pack, but I let be. Rule three of a highwayman: the recording instrument always comes back blank.

I was back at the warehouse, dancing the debriefer’s jig. GPS coordinates translated to WGS-84, plotted to the TPC. It was a clandestine facility in Virginia—even the public satellites dutifully ignored it, we discovered, when we tried to pull up the unclass data online.

Three of our fastest flying wings—Blade Interceptors—went out for imagery, but they met the Jubjub Bird instead. One, two, one, two—four discharges of the Jabberwock downed two of our boys, through and through, and nicked the wing of the third. Ignoring the damage, Blade-3 pulled a barrel roll. The Jubjub did a horizontal spin—previously unseen outside of vectored thrust powerplants—but the Blade came down on him from on high. With a Snicker-snack discharge of the proton gun and the Jubjub bird went down, taking the Jabberwock along to the grave. Blade-3 galumphed it back to base.

When a cheer went up in the wardroom, the slight, old man in the unfashionable hat approached me. Like at the Drome so many nights before, he gripped my arm—stronger this time.

In his accent, he spoke. “Hast thou slain the Jabberwock?”

“Sure, pops. Thanks to you, our Blades cut right through the Jubjub’s armor mods.”

His face lit up. “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”

“No, that’s alright—” But he grabbed me around the middle, and babbled in some unfathomable bastardized English, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.

The noise and the back slapping was getting to me; I made a quiet exit, stage rear. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting on the edge of the dock, looking out at the black glassy sludge that passes for water in this town. Like the twinkling of stars, city lights reflected off debris in the harbor.

A shuffle of feet behind me, and then that accent again. “Thank you.”

“What’s that, Pops?”

He stood beside me. “Thank you for the rescue. I—” He coughed, but it was a false cough. The kind used to hide some other involuntary reaction. “They did terrible things. In the lab. I’m glad to be here. Thanks to you.”

“Me and fifty other people.” I chucked a concrete pebble into the water. “But you’re welcome.”

We watched the bay in silence. In the distance, a foghorn—and all around us, the hum of electricity and slight smell of ozone and decay. The Vorpal Sword turned to leave.

“Hey, Pops. I still have a question.”

“Yes?” he paused.

“I never did find out—and now that you’re coherent, perhaps you can tell me. What is the bandersnatch, exactly?”

The man turned to me. “The fruminous bandersnatch,” he enunciated each syllable. “That’s the government you’re left with when you destroy their toys.”

-Ted