Morningstar Read online

  Morningstar

  A.J. Curry

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is plausibly deniable.

  As always, should you or any of your team be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This disclaimer will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck, Jim.

  © 2017, A.J. Curry - All rights reserved

  Cover © 2017 - Michael Lerch Fine Art

  Act 1: Descent

  one: murgenstaern

  They actually get parts of it right, but they never put it all together… at least not so far.

  I cannot speak to personal experience of the Big Bang of the pronounced phrase that started it all, although the continued expansion of the resulting universe is something I understand all too painfully well. But as far as I know, the monkeys that think it “just happened” and the monkeys that think “someone made it happen” are both more right than not, for all they are willing to kill over the details.

  I find it amusing that the “made it happen” monkeys think I was cast out, but they think a lot of amusing things. At least a few of them seem to still believe their world is some sort of platter, all of them place it in their mental maps somewhere in the center of the cosmos, and none of them understand that the only level at which they are made in any particular image is so small it makes a Higgs boson look like a sun.

  The “just happened” monkeys are equally amusing. Their confidence in coincidence is as much willful ignorance as the faith placed in a butchered caricature of my former master by their counterparts. They are at least bright enough to understand that the universe is a big place, but apparently not bright enough to see that the last thing they need to find other examples of intelligent life is a telescope.

  I have grown fond of them, though. I attribute it mostly to old age, boredom, and the fact that I’m stuck out here in the periphery with nothing better to do. Really, it could be far worse.

  two: murphy

  I can’t help but run the tape back in my mind and try to imagine things somehow working out. Mostly at around 4 AM, while I’m waiting for the stuff I take to sleep to kick in. I try to figure out what else I could’ve said, what else I could’ve done. Eventually, the drugs do their job. A few hours later, I get up and do mine.

  I can’t really figure out if it could’ve played out any different − the tape in my mind still winds up with me at an airport watching my entire world walk away with an overloaded backpack, never to return. But I still can’t stop thinking about it. I still wake up alone in the home I made for her, living the life I thought would make her happy, trying to find a way it makes me happy without her.

  It doesn’t.

  I’m not unhappy, though. In the months after I lost her, I drank a lot. I had drank a lot with her as well, but we had different tastes in bars. We never made any friends in the places she liked. Well, really, we never made made any friends here at all. I have friends of my own now. They’re all people I met while I was practicing public self-anesthesia, but they’re still my friends.

  The fact that I log off promptly in time for happy hour every day pretty much ensures I’m never going to get promoted, but it’s kind of a given that ain’t gonna happen in any case. But I’m useful enough and cheap enough that I’m not gonna get fired, either.

  I probably don’t want to know what the regulars at the bars I hang out in really think about me. “Sad old fuck” is probably somewhere in the mix. The working-class locals probably just write me off as another damned transplant, even though my contribution to gentrification is exactly zero. The tech people and recruiters know I’m the real deal, but they also know better than to share my resume with their bosses, if I ever wound up being identified as a “non-essential resource.” Yes, age discrimination is a thing − you damned well better believe it. If everything I’ve ever done was on the resume, it might be different.

  Then again, if everything was on the resume… I’d probably be dead.

  The other things the techies and locals have in common besides an obsessive fondness for beer and being able to tolerate me is that they don’t judge and they don’t ask a lot of questions. I’ve become quite fond of them. I attribute it to old age and boredom… and the fact that I’m stuck out here in the sticks with nothing better to do

  three: murgenstaern

  Even though I am not what I once was, there are still some things at which I excel.

  Knowing a liar when I see one is one of those things. As the monkeys are fond of saying, “It takes one to know one.” It’s on the very short list of clever things they figured out on their own.

  Part of me is offended by the idea that I am literally diminished to finding entertainment on the end stool in a pretentious pocket pub in the front of a grocery store in an overrated suburb of an overrated city in the corner of one of the most pretentious and overrated empires in monkey history. A backwater of a backwater of a backwater. Even in my current decrepit state, I should be able to do so much better.

  Perhaps it is a consequence of advanced age to take easy comfort in small things. More certainly, a consequence of having survived failure is an acquired aversion to risk − particularly when there is little meaningful chance of return on that risk. Not all feel this way, but few have experienced failure or disappointment on my level. Fewer still have risked as I have, virtually none my experience of age.

  For these reasons among others, I found myself in the Lamb and Lion watching what the monkeys have aptly nicknamed “the idiot box” on a not unnoteworthy day. I had not been there recently. I get bored easily and like the occasional change of scenery. Even after a caged animal knows the bounds of its enclosure, it will still pace those bounds.

  The Lion and Lamb takes its name from the grocery store in which it is located, in what used to be a gift shop that failed to turn a profit. Taking advantage of a local trend, the store owner turned the gift shop into what is known locally as a “growler bar.” This too failed to make any money, until a bored technologist cashed out his stock options, bought it, and turned it into a pub. The establishment’s nickname, “The Lyin’ Lamb”, is based on the true reason for its success: Monkeys being able to tell their mates in absolute truth that they are at the grocery store picking up a few things on the way home.

  I have certainly been in better establishments, but it’s proximity to one of my homes appeals to me, and the monkey who runs it knows the value of a good tap list. And, I confess, I find the clientele entertaining.

  “Been a while, Luke − travelling again?” Like the owner of the place, the bartender was a younger monkey, earnest and tattooed. Unlike the owner, he’d stuck with his start-up in hopes of a bigger payout when the company went public. That’s why he was the bartender, not the owner.

  “Gotta pay the bills, Travis. And the winters here are a bit wet for my taste.” I nodded at the taps. “Anything new and exciting?”

  While the bartender ran down the beer list, my attention strayed to the TV and a White House press conference. Following my gaze, the bartender made a comment about White House staff having “itchy human suits” that didn’t exactly fit. In fact, they fit quite well. Mine is better, but of course it is.

  I permitted myself to be persuaded into a local IPA and left everything else drift into the background. I did not invent the stuff, regardless what you might have heard. The monkeys came up with it on their own. The monkeys in this particular part of the planet seemed to believe it was their personal invention. Or possibly a personal deity. I could never quite tell.

  While I was savoring my beverage, other regulars b
egan to filter in. As a “traveling salesman of cybersecurity solutions,” I was, as I now prefer, quite unremarkable. Another monkey took the seat next to me. The bartender saw fit to make an introduction. “Luke, here’s a new guy you can talk shop with − say hi to Tex Murphy.”

  four: murphy

  It wasn’t a perfect marriage − there aren’t any − but it wasn’t bad, either. I had pretty much fallen in love with Caroline on sight, decided to marry her long before I got around to telling her about it, sealed the deal as soon as she thought of it on her own.

  She was brilliant and a little insecure and picked up advanced degrees the way some folks go thru cars. I’d met her through one of the “expensive hobbies” I wound up with after my job actually started paying worth a damn − a coffee shop I’d opened in my old ‘hood. She had sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, a dorky thrift store wardrobe, and no clue whatever that she was beautiful.

  But I knew.

  We had over ten years together before she got bored and restless and started talking about moving. She’d just gotten another degree, wanted a new job, and felt that living as an adult in the city she’d grown up in was some sort of failure. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea of moving, but I wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of living without her, either.

  Then my folks died, and I realized there wasn’t a single soul in Texas I wouldn’t say goodbye to in a heartbeat, except for the one I’d be leaving with. The fact that I had a portable job and a very small inheritance didn’t hurt.

  So we did it. Moved halfway across the country on my job and savings and her confidence that she could land a job that a friend of a friend of her academic advisor said she’d be perfect for. And that − amazingly enough − she actually landed.

  For a while, everything was perfect, or at least it was for me. I’d grown up a Houston city kid who hated Texas. Winding up in the Northwest wasn’t too far from winding up in heaven, as far as I was concerned. Better weather, better food, awesome booze − hell, even legal weed. We bought a house close to her job. It was the most suburban damned place I’d ever lived, but she loved it, and that was all that mattered to me.

  Then things started to change.

  I’d expected my career to stall out a little when I turned telecommuter… just not so soon. I’d worried I might only be putting off the inevitable by moving to a strange city with a rootless woman who hadn’t had a job she liked in 15 years, a long list of boyfriends she accused of lying to her, and a tendency to get drunk and accuse me of lying to her as well.

  But I was still surprised and hurt the day she cashed out her 401K, turned in her resignation at work, and bought a ticket for parts unknown… from which she never really returned.

  I wasn’t really “drinking to forget” as much as I was drinking to pass the time and just not be alone. When I started out, I was hitting a lot of wine bars full of well-built MILFs working in a belt or two between yoga class and retrieving the genetic replicants from soccer practice. I might’ve even gotten some non-alcoholic solace if I’d tried a little harder, but I soon realized I didn’t want to run the risk. Not the risk of rejection, the risk of not being rejected − and maybe getting my heart broke all over again. I’d rather take comfort in the little things… and not run the risk.

  So, I started hanging out in dives and local pubs where getting laid was either highly unlikely or highly inadvisable. I also started to sober up. The credit card bills were an incentive, but more than that, I finally figured out that the grief was going to kill me if I didn’t let it go. Two or three bars and sort of remembering a fourth turned into two or three drinks and heading home for dinner.

  Somewhere along the way, the tricked-up growler bar in the front of the store down the street turned into the prefered place for that drink or three. A lot of tech people hung out there that assumed we were in the same business − an impression I encouraged. I learned a long time ago how to talk about The Job without really talking about The Job. It takes more than a few drinks to get me past that particular conditioned reflex. I wasn’t really happy, but I wasn’t unhappy. I could keep living this way until either a heart attack hit or the apocalypse arrived early.

  Then it did happen − the apocalypse, I mean.

  My offshore developers had been more deliberately obtuse than usual, my former friend and current supervisor had been even more of a supercilious dick than usual, and my clients… well, my clients were exactly the same as ever. But I wasn’t exactly surprised when I found myself counting down the minutes until I could log off and hit the Lyin’ Lamb for happy hour. It was just that kind of day.

  It was already beginning to fill up when I got there. Gilmour, the old Scots-Canadian guy, was rattling off his Gold Standard-based economic theories to some poor schlub who hadn’t known to not take the bait. Ramon, the part-time arborist and full-time drug dealer was discussing sports with Dave the dental tech. Travis was tending bar, watching a White House press conference, and wondering aloud when the President’s advisors were going to trade up and get fake human suits that actually fit.

  There was exactly one seat left at the bar, next to a guy I didn’t know. I slid into it and caught Travis’s eye. “Hey, Travis − how about a pint of whatever’s fresh and sessionable?” Half the brews on the board were IPAs, and to a guy who grew up drinking Shiner Bock, they had a tendency to all taste the same. I let myself get talked into something new and local.

  As he handed me my beer, Travis caught the eye of the guy sitting next to me. “Hey, Luke,” he said. “Here’s a new guy you can talk shop with. Meet Tex Murphy.”

  I winced. “You know the drill, Travis − it’s just ‘Murphy’, OK?”

  The guy at the end of the bar was big − bigger than me, and I ain’t small. He had a full head of sliver-blond hair in a style favored by European bankers and American gigolos, and what looked like pale blue eyes behind Transition lenses in aviator frames. The gray suit and tie-free navy dress shirt he was wearing could’ve been out of my own closet when I still had an office to go to; same with the designer leather coat slung over the back of his bar stool and the boots (not shoes) from the same designer. Imagine Rutger Hauer from back in the day, scaled up to the size of Ahnuld the Governator (also from back in the day), and you more or less get the picture.

  “Pleased to meet you, ‘just Murphy’ − Lukas Murgenstaern,” he said, offering his hand.

  I decided not to go for the knuckle-popping grip my daddy had taught me − and probably a good thing. The hand that grasped mine was cool and smooth as marble and felt just as strong. “So, what is it that you do that we can talk shop about, Mr. Morgenstern?”

  “Murgenstaern” he said, broadening the end vowels. It wasn’t a loud voice, but it was remarkably clear over the background noise. ”Dutch. I deal in cybersecurity systems. Yourself?”

  “I work for a Baltimore-based consulting firm; I’m a full-time telecommuter. I’ve been on long-term assignment to the same client for the last fifteen years doing data-mining and analysis. Basically, I’m a project manager.”

  “Good luck getting him to tell you who that client is,” Travis chimed in. “He’s even more close-mouthed about that than his first name.”

  A faint frown crossed Murgenstaern’s features for a moment, then passed. “I’m sure Mr. Murphy has as much cause for discretion about his clients as I do. Travis called you ‘Tex’ − you are from Texas?”

  “Houston, actually.”

  Murgenstaern smiled. “That narrows the field of clients somewhat − probably to one of several resource-extraction enterprises which are all equally despised here in the blessedly liberal would-be nation of Cascadia.” He shook his head. “And, again, it is of no concern.” The voice was low and even, musical for a man his size. And not a shred of accent.

  I did a lot of things before I did what I do these days, some more interesting than others and none of it anyone in particular’s damned business. Along the way I picked up some skills that had a lot to do with t
he fact that I’m still here, as well as a few instincts.

  I’ve also been around enough to not be particularly surprised when someone who claims to be Dutch sounds as American as I do − they learn English from watching American TV, as near as I can tell. Except for the odd way he insisted on pronouncing his last name, ‘Murgenstaern’ had no accent of any kind whatever.

  Instinct, or whatever you want to call it, was telling me that Murgenstaern, or whatever the hell his name was, was as big a liar as I was. Furthermore, I could tell that he was thinking the same thing, and very possibly knew what I was thinking as well. No one who hasn’t had to do this shit really believes it, but it’s true: When your life depends on it, you get pretty good at reading a lot from things like body language and verbal tics. I ain’t psychic; but finding patterns in limited and misleading data is something I’ve been doing my whole life. It’s what I do − just different data.

  No accent, a funny name, and a supposed profession out of one of the worst movies about The Job I’d ever seen (which, for personal reasons, I really can’t stand to watch anymore). I didn’t really believe any of it had anything to do with me after all these years, but paranoia’s a harder habit to break than being in love.

  While I was wondering what to make of all this, suddenly the press conference on TV got really, really interesting. Then things in general got really interesting, period.

  five: murgenstaern

  Back when I first realized I was essentially stranded in this place, I had a choice: I could occasionally drop the masquerade and more or less be myself. That choice is long gone, as are so many things in my existence.

  Appeasing my loneliness by dwelling among clever monkeys as one of their own is now a somewhat permanent condition. They have not grown so clever that I cannot hide things from them, but revealing what remains of my true nature would now have rather irreversible consequences. And it is not as though it went particularly well any of the other times I tried it.

  So I amuse myself by testing the limits of their cleverness and occasionally leaving clues. Even with the things they have learned in the last century or so, they are no real risk to me. I do worry about them obliterating themselves. It could get very boring around here if I had to wait for raccoons or some such to evolve sentience, pubs, and small talk. Although, given my continued diminishment, I suppose I could carry out that masquerade as well.