Flex (32 page)

“You’re a ’mancer, sweetie. Like Daddy. Is Daddy evil?”

“…no.” Her eyes were full of wonder. “All the TVs say how good you are. Mommy’s mad at you and even
she
thinks you did a good thing.” Aliyah’s face, still tight with runnels of half-healed flesh, saddened. “
I’m
the bad guy.
I’m
the burner.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Paul scooped her into her arms. “The bad ’mancer pushed you into doing that.”

“That’s why I’m never gonna do that again. I’m gonna squash it. And if I squash it enough, I’ll be normal.”

Paul double-checked the door was locked and all the curtains drawn – then tossed the Nintendo over to Valentine, who looked at him in guilty puzzlement.

“Show her the rainbow road,” he said.

A double take. “…In
here
?”

“We gotta start somewhere.”

Aliyah struggled to escape. Paul held her to his chest as Valentine started the Nintendo, took a blissful breath through her nose, and…

The screen peeled off of the Nintendo DS, fluttering to expand into a picture window hovering playfully before Aliyah.

A fresh meadow breeze blew through the portal. The scent of green fields, rubber tires, hot sun on fresh asphalt. The clink of gold coins.

Mario, Peach, and Bowser waved merry hellos. They walked across the multicolored highway to clamber into their cars. Luigi tossed a white circle to Aliyah, who caught it between her hands: a steering wheel.

Aliyah stared, goggle-eyed, down at the invitation to race – then up at the new world beckoning.

“That’s the thing, sweetie,” he said, holding her close. “You, Aliyah, me – the world was hurting us. And instead of dying inside, or hurting others, we opened up new worlds within us. And this gift… yeah, it’s scary. Yeah, it’s dangerous. But to leave it unexplored would be to throw the greatest gift anyone ever got right in the garbage.”

Valentine had snagged her own wheel from Toad and was clambering into the racetrack, turning into a gloriously abstracted cartoon version of herself. Aliyah hesitated at the threshold, uncertain; she trembled as if she was afraid all this wonder would evaporate the moment she grabbed it.

Paul boosted Aliyah into the raceway. She also transformed into a sleek cartoon version of herself, a joyous black girl running toward a cherry-red coupe with gleaming whitewall tires.

In this new world, Aliyah had no scars.

As they gunned the engines and the racing clock counted down, Paul thought:
How will I teach her something I barely understand?

And then:
Well, that’s all parenting, isn’t it?

*
s
teps onto a wide stage
*

*taps microphone*

Testing, testing – this thing on?

This is a weird place to be standing now, man. I was fifteen when I started writing, and as I sit on my couch finishing up my book, it’s the week before my forty-fifth birthday. That means, yes, I’ve struggled for thirty years to publish my first novel. And with each book-less decade that passed, I dreamed of having my own acknowledgements section, like Unca Stevie did. I imagined what kind of pithy things I’d say after y’all finished My Book.

And here you are.

The cardinal sin of acknowledgements is to just list-dump a bunch of names and not tell people what the hell they did to help put this book into your hot little hands. So let us discuss the specific ways that people made this book better by reading my early drafts:

Miranda Suri wisely encouraged me to amp up Anathema’s personality in the opening scenes so that my Big Bad would be memorable enough to cruise through about 30,000 Anathema-free words before she showed up again.

George Galuschak asked the very vital question, “So why can’t Paul just use his own Flex?” which I actually had an answer for, but forgot to actually put in the book.

Daniel Starr told me Paul needed more specificity to make his bureaucracy fetish believable.

Mishell Baker was thrown out of the story by almost any off-seeming detail, and so highlighted a bunch of off-character moments I fixed.

E Catherine Tobler had some really good points on Valentine and how to describe her initially. Valentine is carrying a few extra pounds, but how do you tell that to the reader without a) perpetrating the societal hatred that chubby folks like me routinely endure, or b) downplaying the fact that she’s a BBW and letting the reader quietly replace the image of a fluffy goth with some generic skinny woman? Elise told me to think, and think wisely.

John Dale Beety didn’t like Paul much. Loathed him, actually. His feedback on what he disliked about Paul helped me turn a nebbishy, powerless blue-collar worker into something more sympathetic.

Josh Morrey said that Aliyah’s burns didn’t seem realistic enough. His medical concerns caused me to seek out my friend…

Cassie Alexander, a nurse and fine fiction writer who has worked in burn wards, who medical-checked my work to ensure its accuracy. If anything is off in the hospitals, well, that’s my fault, not hers.

And if we’re discussing other writers, well, to quote the great Dante Hicks, I wouldn’t even be here today without the help of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop (2008) and Viable Paradise (2009), both of which completely reforged me as a writer. If you’ve been toiling in the word-mines, getting nice rejections but never the acceptance level, then either of those workshops will help you level up. Thanks to everyone there who supported me.

Thanks to the creators of the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, John Scott Tynes and Greg Stolze, whose amazing magic system is engraved in the DNA of Flex. And yes, this book may or may not have been inspired by an offhand comment made during a Mage campaign, so thanks to Ian Griffith and Nathan Kossover for putting up with Joder, my pitchfork-wielding, vampire-slaying Amish ninja.

Also much thanks to Angry Robot’s very own Michael R Underwood, for handing this book to the right people at the right time. And super-mega-thanks to Amanda Rutter, my editor, for being the person who believed in Flex hard enough to persuade the Robots to bring it on board. Check out her services care of areditorialsolutions.com.

Now I’ll be shuffling off-stage in just another page or two – but remember, it’s taken me thirty years to get here, so forgive me for adding in a just few more folks. Thanks to my Mom and Dad, who have proudly supported their weird-ass son all the way in his scribblings (and my Dad even reads my stories!). Thanks to my special friend Angie, who knows old-school gaming and may or may not have a few habits I put into Valentine. Thanks to my sainted Uncle Tommy and my little spark, Rebecca Meyer; not a day goes by that I don’t miss you both. Not a day goes by that I don’t hope I’m making you proud.

Thanks to all of you who’ve read my blog – www.theferrett.com, that’s two Rs and two Ts. Someone once said that if Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, he’d be a popular blogger with a handful of short story publications. That was me, for a long time; some of you have been reading my essays for over a decade, and I know damn well a lot of you have purchased this book not because you gave a damn about this story, but because you were so fucking thrilled that Ferrett fucking sold the book that you ran out and bought it in vicarious triumph.

Ferrett did fucking sell it. Thanks for supporting me. And now that that bloom has been knocked off the rose, I really, really hope you like the book as-is, because now? Now I have no excuses.

But honestly, if you’ve read me for a decade, you know who I’m going to end by thanking. There is no other who has been more instrumental in my life. Nobody else could have talked me out of flying home when I bombed out at Clarion and was convinced I could never write again. Nobody else would be willing to read seven unpublished novels, watching her husband flail, never being merciful with her feedback because she knew I needed to be punched in the prose and punched hard. Nobody else could have flooded me with such love when failure after failure piled up at my gate, dealing with my depressions, insecurities, and social anxieties.

If I ever seem wise, or well-written, that is an illusion – a glorious illusion perpetrated by the love of my life.

Thank you, Gini.

Arf.

A
fter being bitten
by a radioactive writing bug at the 2008 Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Ferrett Steinmetz unlocked the ability to scale previously impossible publishing walls. Since 2008, his work has appeared in Asimov’s, Apex, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Shimmer, and Escape Pod, among many other publications, and in 2011 was nominated for a Nebula Award for his novelette, “Sauerkraut Station.” He lives in Cleveland, USA, with the best wife in the world, a small black dog of indeterminate origin, and a friendly ghost.

He blogs about puns, politics and polyamory at his blog
www.theferrett.com
, and can be found tweetering at
twitter.com/ferretthimself
.

ANGRY ROBOT

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An Angry Robot paperback original 2015

Copyright © Ferret Steinmetz 2015

Cover by Steven Meyer-Rassow





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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

UK ISBN 978-0-85766-459-4

US ISBN 978-0-85766-460-0

Ebook 978-0-85766-461-7