Dournier, Art Historian of Action

Dournier, the noted art historian, smoked his pipe openly in the Oval Office. The President didn't approve of smoking, but there wasn't much he could do. For the moment, Dournier was indispensable. The screams of sirens echoing over DC bore testimony to that fact.

"They have not come to life; not precisely, no," demurred Dournier, drumming his fingers on an empty pedestal. Two days ago it had held a bust of Thomas Jefferson, but that had been removed for security reasons. "You are using that word, 'life', in a way that does not have any real meaning."

"Don't play word games with me," growled the President. "A week ago the Statue of Liberty stepped off her pedestal and brought her torch crashing down on a ferry, killing 80. A field of topiary animals went berserk in England and ate up a bishop. Just yesterday the Statuary Garden on the Mall cornered a bus full of 3rd graders and tore them to bits. And I don't want to even talk about what happened at Mount Rushmore. Dournier, statues..."

"Objects of spatial art," corrected Dournier reflexively.

"...statues," insisted the President stubbornly, "are coming to life. And they're killing people!"

"That they are killing cannot be denied," admitted Dournier. "But to attribute to them the features of life, I think, is misguided. They are animated, yes, and they exhibit a definite sense of purpose, but this is a far cry from...."

"Who cares?!" shouted the President. "I don't give a rat's ass about your semantical jibberty-hoo-haw! I want to know why they're killing people, Dournier! and I want it to stop!"

Dournier sighed. "Very well," he agreed. "I shall need a sensory deprivation tank, and a considerable supply of mescaline."

The President sat down, eyeing Dournier warily, and put a stick of gum in his mouth. "Yeah?" he said. "How much mescaline?"

"A considerable supply," Dournier repeated.

***************************************************************************

Dournier emerged four days later and was promptly ushered into the President's presence. The President looked haggard and sounded unhappy.

"You'd better have a darned good explanation for this, Dournier," he snarled. "We had to send Bradley Fighting Vehicles into the Louvre to get this baby, and even then two of 'em got crushed to pieces by some boy on a friggin' turtle. But we got what you asked for." He indicated the rectangular form, wrapped in protective brown paper.

"All will be made clear, Mister President," soothed Dournier, towelling vigorously behind his ears. "This time has been spent most productively."

"Well, get explaining!" demanded the President. "Only this morning my limo got dented by LaFayette! Guess what small arms fire does to bronze? A couple of dents, that's what!"

"You damaged the LaFayette? oh, never mind," grumbled Dournier, unwrapping the Louvre recovery and placing it on an easel. The room fell silent. It was small and unassuming, but still the Mona Lisa held a certain gravity.

Dournier faced the President, lit his pipe, and began: "Mister President, we are at war with spatial art."

"I noticed that," the President replied sarcastically. "Except really, they're at war with us. What do they want, women? land? our freedoms?"

"Their survival," returned Dournier. "Spatial art fears for its survival."

The President stared at Dournier as if he were insane. "What?"

"Spatial art," repeated Dournier patiently, "is engaged with us in a war of survival. It fears that it is being systematically eliminated."

The President stirred, still baffled. "Why would it think that?"

Dournier looked out the window. Smoke was rising over some suburb, and helicopters were buzzing about. "Mister President," Dournier sighed, "ours has become a society of images. We create endless streams of video and photographs. We print vast volumes of drawings and maps and sketches and reprints. The internet holds libraries full of two-dimensional images. Pictorial art is thriving because of advances in our culture and technology. But, for all that, spatial art has not grown. If anything, it has declined. Ages ago, primitive men made icons of their Gods and worshipped them. In the modern world, spatial art lacks that power. But pictorial art, in contrast, has our society mesmerized."

The President licked his lips. "So....the statues are....jealous?"

"They think we mean to phase them out," Dournier replied. "They see that the world has passed them by. In time, they fear they will crumble and be forgotten, with no new spatial art to replace the old, and their kind will vanish from the earth."

"Well, I figure we should just speed that process along," argued the President. "These statues ain't so tough. Lure 'em out into the Mojave and drop a few nukes on them, problem solved."

"You think it is that easy? you have only seen the tip of the iceberg," scoffed Dournier. "Surely the spatial art has only begun to wake up and take action. Have you never noticed the simple artistry in a street lamp, or the sweeping curves of an air force jet? Is there not a certain beauty, even, in the spare mechanical symmetry of an atomic warhead?"

The color drained from the President's ruddy face. "You mean....?"

"Yes." For a short while, silence reigned.

"What should we do?" asked the President, his usual bluster abandoned.

"We cannot defeat spatial art on our own," argued Dournier. "What we need, in this case, are allies." He turned and faced the Mona Lisa, striking a serious pose.

"Will you help us?" he asked, bringing to bear the full weight of his dignity.

Subtle as always, the corners of Mona Lisa's smiling lips curved upwards.

My Evil Twin

The warp coil generator ramped up to 40 megawatts, seesawed a bit, then held steady. The portal to the negaverse shimmered into existence -- a silvery oblong, its surface swimming with colors like an oil slick on still water. I pushed through it and entered the Negaverse.

And there he was, again: my mirror image twin. He had a nasty little van Dyke beard, and he dressed like a refugee from the Czarist courts, but there could be no mistake: he was my equivalent in this universe.

"So, here you are again," he said, putting down his drafting tools and smiling. "My evil twin."

"No," I corrected him, "you're *my* evil twin."

He waved a hand dismissively. "That's all perspective. Well, I suppose we ought to fight now."

"I suppose," I said. "Although, honestly speaking, I'm really not all that good."

"And I'm not too terribly evil," he concurred. "In fact, I don't really gravitate towards any kind of philosophical extreme." I nodded in agreement. We stared at each other.

"Do you, I dunno, want to get a beer or something?" I asked.

"Surely you mean 'bleer', and yes: a Sudso would be great right about now," he agreed. We walked off into the Negaverse, arm in arm, with the shouts of the tormented echoing around us.

Nice Day

The lab was empty during the lunch hour. Timmers was showing Cho his latest project.

"Did you get authorization to work on this?" Cho asked needlessly. Of course Timmers hadn't gotten permission. He never got permission. Timmers would have been fired a hundred times over were it not for the fact that he was a complete and utter genius.

"This," crowed Timmers, fiddling with the power leads, "is going to revolutionize the way the world works." Cho rolled his eyes.

"Kind of like your Five Eliminator?" teased Cho, and Timmers glared. The Five Eliminator had worked perfectly, removing the existence of the number five from the universe for just over forty minutes. Payroll was still trying to sort matters out.

"Yeah, well, this has real commercial value," confided Timmers. "I'm going to be a goddamn billionaire. Hey, do me a favor: swear at me."

"Oh, that's easy, you dumbshit," grinned Cho. Timmers grinned back and turned a dial. "Say that again?" he asked.

"I said, 'Oh, that's easy, you nice guy,'" replied Cho. The smile faded from his face and turned to consternation.

"What the swell did you do?!" demanded Cho, his mouth opening and closing. Timmers smirked.

"This is the Corrector," explained Timmers happily. "Censorship tries to fix improper thought by addressing the symptoms, the outward expressions. It fails to address the underlying causes of those improper thought. The Corrector goes to the root of the matter and retroactively eliminates patterns of negativity."

"It's god-blessed dumbfoundingly unbelieveable!" exclaimed Cho, his jaw working, struggling with his inability to express himself thoroughly.

"You bet it is," admitted Timmers. "No more obscenity, no more people being jerks to each other. Ultimately, no more wars. The sky's the limit."

"But who..." Cho stuttered awhile, trying to find a mode of speech that wouldn't be redacted. "Who will choose what goes and what stays?"

"I will!" replied Timmers brightly. "Somebody's got to do it, so it might as well be me. See, the Corrector has a dial," he said, indicating his machine. "Right now it's on level two. Minor corrections. No swearing, no shouting. It's a battle to contradict me, isn't it? That's level two. Now, watch what happens when I throw it up to ten!"

Cho struggled to find voice. "I respectfully disagree!" he wailed, lunging for the machine a moment too late.

The machine hummed, briefly, then fell silent. Timmers and Cho grinned at each other.

"Nice," said Timmers.

"Nice," agreed Cho. They stood around agreeably.

"Nice!" exclaimed Cho, grinning like an idiot.

"Niiiiiice," confirmed Timmers, winking.

Outside a slightly overcast sky cleared itself miraculously. In the distance, a police siren abruptly stopped.

"Nice?" asked Cho?

"Nice nice!" replied Timmers excitably. The machine forgotten, he mindlessly threw open a window.

An airplane settled onto the road as lightly as a piece of down. Moments earlier the engines had been on fire, but they were out now; as Cho and Timmers watched, the scorch marks faded. "Nice!" exclaimed the plane captain, emerging from the cabin door and dropping to the ground to pluck one of the suddenly omnipresent daisies.

"Nice!" conceded Cho, nodding blissfully.

Later, the sun did not go down.

You know what? screw it.

I'm gonna watch Pink Floyd's _The_Wall_, turn the sound down, and fire up the soundtrack to _The_Wiz_.

Bet *that*'ll be a mind-blower.