Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Read online

  I couldn’t wait to tell Isabel.

  ****

  A snafu in the payroll department’s flash-drive server kept me busy for most of the morning, and I handled the task with less than my usual acuity. I kept thinking of Isabel and how I would try to explain to her what I’d seen. The hours of the troubleshoot glaciered along until lunch time, and by the time I reached the company cafeteria, Isabel was already there doing her usual soup and salad. The urgency to share what I’d discovered drove me right to her table. I had absolutely no appetite.

  “What’s the matter?” she said as she regarded me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look stressed, Alec… You okay?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. You tell me if I should be–after I tell you what happened last night.”

  Speaking in a low voice, I related the details of my dream to her. She listened with great attention, even furrowing her brow a few times. It was an affectation that usually signaled her analytical side was in full charge. She remained silent after I’d finished.

  “So… what do you think?” I said.

  “Uh-uh. You first.”

  I wasn’t prepared for that. I had very much wanted her thoughts on this–something to possibly mitigate the outright crazy ones I’d been having. But she just stared at me, waiting… so I pushed on.

  “Well, I think all the things we talked about yesterday were percolating all night, and I worked it out in images that seem pretty obvious, no?”

  Isabel tilted her head in that coy way of hers. “I would say that’s a definite yes… but go on…”

  “Remember what we were saying? You know, about even us–not being able to recall information, things we know? Is it happening to us, too… getting … duller… dumber?”

  She nodded as if accepting the possibility.

  “Well, what do we all do now–when we need to know something? We Google it!” I said that phrase a bit too loud and heads turned our way. I slumped, lowered my voice. “Or we Bing it… or whatever search engine you want to use. We Ask-dot-com! We Edwin or Siri. Don’t you see what we’re doing?”

  Isabel allowed the hint of a grin to appear. “Of course. You’re saying our brain function is surrendering its abilities to something easier, something more facile. Alec, of course. Your dream couldn’t be any more explicit–we’re giving ourselves up to the machine.”

  “Exactly. I mean, it’s so obvious, it’s almost embarrassing.”

  “Psych 101,” she said, her grin fading away.

  “But that’s not the heart of it–I think the real issue is how we’re all doing it.”

  She looked off for a moment, as if working through the inevitable logic to an end point. Then: “I have a feeling the ‘how’ is not so obvious. So what does that mean? What comes next?”

  I could hear a touch of anxiety in her voice. I wanted to reach out and take her hand. “Is it that simple? Can everybody be so transformed so fast? In less than one generation?”

  Isabel stared into my eyes with scary intensity. “Have you ever watched little kids–I mean really little ones like my sister’s–how they use cell phones and tablets and computers? It’s downright creepy how good they are, how natural it seems to be to them.”

  “There’s your ‘one generation’ I was talking about.”

  “Where does it end?” she said. “Everyone losing everything? Talent, taste, intelligence…?”

  “How often do you do it?” I said. “How often do you hit the search engine instead of your memory?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know… most of the time if I’m at my computer or my phone.”

  “It’s seductive,” I said. “It’s easier than doing any real thinking.”

  Isabel held up her index finger. “No, it’s more than that. It’s the Web itself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Web has become a real–what’s the word?–a real entity. Amorphous and loosely integrated, but real. And it’s somehow become a vital link between our minds, our bodies, and our machines.”

  “The Cloud….” I said in a whisper, as if I were repeating some forbidden word. “Just what the hell is the ‘Cloud’?”

  “Exactly.” Isabel reached out and took my hands in hers. The heat of her touch was like a galvanic shock. I felt it all the way up my arms. “You know what, Alec? You’ve really made one of those leaps, I can feel it.”

  “Really?” I was listening to her, but marveling at the effect her hands touching mine had created.

  “Absolutely. We’ve created the Web, the Cloud, whatever you want to call it… and now we’re using it like some… some gigantic external hard drive for our minds.”

  The image took shape in my mind and it bothered me. It was too apt, too precisely correct. “Isabel, that just doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

  “We’re speed-dialing most of the time now.” Her gaze had drifted off to a point in the distance. “We don’t bother to learn that string of numbers anymore.”

  Again, her metaphor was as perfect as it was disturbing.

  “We’re giving up very basic, but very necessary, mental skills,” I said. “Somehow we’ve all started using our memories differently–remembering where to find something in the Cloud rather than in our own brains.”

  “Alec, like I said before, I think it’s more than that. You’ve opened a new door on this thing, but we still haven’t really passed through it.” She paused, removed her glasses, then rubbed her closed eyes as if they were irritated.

  “What’re you getting at?” I reached for her hands again. She didn’t pull away.

  “Maybe this ‘Cloud’ we’re all using now… this thing we think we’ve created…. well, maybe we didn’t.”

  I paused as I picked up where she was going with it. “Oh, Jeez, You mean maybe it was always there, waiting for us to become… become aware of it?”

  Her gaze once again bored into me. Her hazel eyes almost glowing. “Or worse, maybe it’s only now become aware of us.”

  “Izzy, you’re scaring me.”

  “It could be some kind of super-presence, super-brain-thing… I don’t know… but once we started tapping into it, well, I’m not sure what could be happening. I mean, it could be using us, draining us.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Not only our ability to process or retrieve information, but our essential selves–you know, whatever it is that makes us human.”

  Neither one of us spoke for a minute or so as we let that last thought sink in. And then it was time to go back to work. I think we were both thankful for the forced break in the logical progression we’d been following. We both needed time to let the ideas we’d been floating to take more substantial shape and meaning. We needed time to think, and suddenly that seemed like a very important thing to do.

  ****

  That evening, after I’d finished one of my super-fast, super-easy microwave dinners I knew were nutritionally suspect, I picked up an article in one of my subscription science magazines. Call it serendipity or synchronicity or something less likely but more unsettling….

  The article discussed a European project involving robots which have exhibited “emergent behavior” when they interact in “swarms.” Some of the researchers believed they could accelerate the process by hooking the robots into selected parts of the Web, which endowed the mobile machines with the abilities of updating information and adapting to changing environments. Not certain where these experiments might lead, one of the researchers interviewed mentioned possible uses in drones or self-driving automobiles or servant-bots.

  In the past, had I read something like that I would have smiled and imagined something inane like: wow, we’re living in that science-fiction world I read about as a kid. But now, I am far more prone to thinking: we’re living in that apocalyptic horror story you read as a kid.

  The notion of hooking up robots to the internet so they could essentially replace a lot of our basic decision-making
drilled through me like a dentist’s best friend. I sat there under the glow of a single reading lamp, letting the magazine drop to the floor as I closed my eyes and invited whatever thoughts may come. And one of them was the phrase “the ghost in the machine.”

  I’d encountered the phrase in a variety of texts and conversations, and I knew I’d learned who first posited the striking image, but in my own personal game of Jeopardy, I just couldn’t remember it. And of course you know what my initial, knee-jerk impulse had been–just Google it.

  Never before had that thought ever instilled the absolute chilling terror I felt at that moment. I stood up, paced the room as I forced myself to think, to fire up the search engine in my thickening skull, and literally forced the memory to the surface like a hot column of magma–the name of philosopher Gilbert Ryle, back in the forties. He’d been rebutting the concept of dualism, the idea of a ghostly connection between the body and mind. The memory-thought rose in my mind and led to my recall of Arthur Koestler, who’d later borrowed the phrase to explain how the “old” evolutionary layer of the brain is the atavistic ghost in the machine, responsible for primitive responses like hate and anger–as opposed to rational thought.

  But neither of them had ever conceived of the New Machine in which we may be becoming its ghosts….

  I called Isabel and spent a few minutes relaying my experiences and thoughts of the evening. She listened intently, peppering a few observations into my monologue, and finished up by telling me that all of this stuff was making her feel scared and, more importantly, very much alone.

  Despite the hour, she asked me if I would drive over to her place as soon as possible.

  ****

  That was several months ago.

  Since then, we have become inseparable, sharing not only our affections and our emotions, but also some searing bouts of rationality about what is happening all around us, and if it’s building to a true endless series of doublings. In response to the process, she and I have been spending many of our hours together developing something that may be able to burrow deep into the ever-expanding Web–we call it the “CW” which is our acronym for a complex block of code that can invade and ultimately break apart the Web, dissipate the Cloud. In the argot of the computer geeks like ourselves, it is a worm, a conqueror that may free us from the cyber-absorption of our essential selves.

  ****

  What we have done has turned out to be a very lonely endeavor. Early on, we had hoped others might have tapped into the phenomena we see so clearly. But it never happened. Regardless, the Cloud is an ever-spreading penumbra, a harbinger of a great scouring storm. My greatest fear is not that one morning I will never wake up; but rather I will, but will no longer remember my purpose. In fact, a greater fear is that it is already taking place and I am too dulled to notice.

  Over the months, I have been keeping a journal of the events told in these brief snippets. I see in past entries that we have been watchful of any sign that our worm is having an effect, and I must report I am confused. I have this feeling that the notes, the entries are important, but I can’t remember why. I am noticing differences in the patterns of everyday cultural interaction, but I am uncertain if they are needles pointing in good directions or bad ones. It is either too early to tell… or too late. But I have this feeling that I no longer have the means to really know.

  Lately, the events that swirl around me and the hours that contain them feel less and less cohesive. I am aware enough to know that I am having trouble divining the true sense of things. But I feel ever more disarmed to do anything about it. I have a vague notion that things are not only not right, but actually bad.

  And now, I have blinked my eyes into wakefulness, and sensed a warm, naked, body next to my own. As I lift myself over her, she too awakens with a start. Peering into the hazel depths of this woman’s eyes, I realize I cannot remember her name.

  ****

  Remembrance by Tom Monteleone

  I honestly can’t remember when I first met David Silva. In person, I mean. He rarely appeared at conventions or other gatherings of writers and publishers, and he was one of those guys that many people “knew” only through correspondence or phone calls.

  My first contact with him occurred when I sent him a short story for his wonderful magazine, The Horror Show. It was during the first year or so he’d been publishing, so I’m thinking it was probably around 1982, which makes it more than thirty years ago. Hard to believe that much time has ripped past us, but numbers–unlike writers–never lie. Regardless, the reasons I was sending him a story were manifold: (1) I had only recently made the conscious decision to write horror and dark fantasy as opposed to the science fiction I’d written in the seventies. (2) My pal, Charlie Grant, had convinced me that I wasn’t a very good SF writer and I’d be far better off casting my runes with mystery, suspense, thrillers, and of course horror. (3) I wanted to get published more than I wanted to breathe.

  There was only one problem: during that pre-internet, Permian-like era, there were very few venues for horror or dark fantasy. There was Stu Schiff’s Whispers, and a small, semi-pro effort called Haunts, and another with the suggestive name Footsteps, but other than that, not so much.

  Until 1982, when a new publication appeared and almost immediately started making waves. Because my first agent, Kirby McCauley, had been one of the Founding Fathers of the World Fantasy Convention, I became plugged in to the inner workings of horror and dark fantasy publishing just as it was gaining prominence in the marketplace and in literary circles. One of the venues that had everyone talking was this new magazine called The Horror Show.

  Its editor was a young guy who was also a writer, but seemed hell-bent on being an editor and publisher as well (As someone who’s worn all three of those hats as well, I can tell you it’s an act of pure hubris, and shot through with three times as many ways to fall on your face). Somehow, Dave Silva was attracting a new generation of young, talented writers who were writing some of the best horror fiction being published anywhere. The list of names is essentially a Who’s Who of the entire genre: Dean Koontz, Joe Lansdale, Bentley Little, Robert R. McCammon, Poppy Z. Brite, Ramsey Campbell, William F. Nolan, Graham Masterton, and Elizabeth Massie are among the most notable. Its covers featured artist J. K. Potter and other young visionaries.

  In other words, The Horror Show quickly became the place to be in the mid-eighties. And so, I added Dave’s magazine to my list of venues in which I wanted to see my name–right below Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Whispers. Over the next few years, I sent him more than a few stories, and he always rejected them with thoughtful notes brimming over with ideas on how to make them better. His suggestions usually made lots of sense, and I ended up selling most of the stories he’d made better. When I finally sold him a story, I felt like I’d been admitted into an exclusive club–and in many ways, that was true.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is that knowing Dave and working with him made me a better writer. We corresponded erratically, but enough to stay in touch, and on the odd occasions when he would show up at a convention, I always enjoyed hanging out with him and his partner in crime, Paul Olson. Every time I saw one of his stories in an anthology or magazine, I knew I was going to like it. Like a lot of us, he had more than a dash of Bradbury in his prose, and that was always a good thing.

  When I started reading for the first volume of my Borderlands anthology series, Dave sent me a story that was so personal and so powerful, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was one of those tales that had the potential to be a classic, but there was something missing. He had written up to the point where he had to take the leap to greatness, but something was holding him back. Because the story examined the dynamics of the death of a loved one, I knew Dave was too close to the material to see what he’d created. I told him he’d included all the elements for a truly memorable piece of imaginative fiction, and all he needed was an ending–the right ending. He wrote me back
and said he’d spent himself on the piece and he couldn’t take it the final step, but if I had any suggestions, he was willing to listen. I wrote him back what I thought might work as the final scene, the missing piece that would pull everything together. I didn’t push him or threaten him; I just told him I wanted to buy the story if he could take it to its final destination.

  About two weeks later I received Dave’s rewrite and he’d nailed it down like a cheap sheet of plywood. I loved it so much, I made it the lead-off story in the very first volume of Borderlands, and it went on to be nominated for every short fiction award in the genre, and carried off the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. I can remember telling Dave he had to show up at the HWA Awards banquet in California–because he had a great shot of winning. Reluctantly, he agreed to be there. When they called his name for “The Calling,” I watched him get up from his table with a flush of embarrassment on his gentle features as he walked slowly to the podium to get his very own Haunted House. He was so nervous and slump-shouldered, he looked as if he was headed towards the gallows.

  Everyone gave him a standing ovation, and I think it shocked him. He was always so quiet and unassuming, I truly believe he didn’t like any attention cast his way. Dave was the kind of guy who dedicated himself to doing his best, whether as editor or writer, but because he was so quiet about it, I don’t think he ever got the lasting recognition he deserved.

  Let’s hope this beautiful tribute anthology changes that.

  Tom Monteleone

  TRU-BLOOD

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Gnawing his right index finger, Tru-Blood studiously eyed the little squirrel. It wasn’t grown yet, just an adolescent, so it was small and delicate, the bones wispy and soot-covered. He withdrew the burned carcass from the stone fireplace where it hung from a sharpened stick. His mouth salivated instantly, so much so that a wriggle of liquid slipped from the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t eaten in days.