A Few Notes Concerning Griffins

by Rudi Dornemann

The thing about griffins, and nobody really takes this into account, is that it isn’t just the beak–the whole digestive system is avian. That means gizzard stones, and that, in the case of griffins, with their fondness for hoarded riches, should mean swallowed rubies, opals, and chunks of jade as big as your fist. Which would be pretty much inaccessible except the feline side brings with it a grooming instinct. And that means hairballs.

The sound is a fearful thing, particularly when echoing among the dunes on a night when the new moon is a low huge matte-gray absence overhead. A sound like a freight train hauling an angelic choir roaring by, then slamming into a glottal stop the size of Rhode Island. Not a sound you forget, or one that I could resist investigating.

So, after hours wandering the dunes, I found the griffin around dawn, stretched out in a garage at the burnt-out end of a cul de sac where the lawns were all sand and switch grass, gnawing on a truck tire.

“What do you want?” said the griffin.

Ever since the apocalypse, lying hasn’t seemed worth the effort, so I answered with utter honesty: “Treasure.”

“Help yourself,” said the griffin. “Plenty for us both.” It waved a claw in the direction of the lawns, and I saw, by the plum-colored sun that had just crested the split-level ranch opposite, that the sand was strewn with the stuff you give away two hours after your your yard sale should have ended–a broken blender, a stack of Steven Seagal DVDs, a bedraggled Cabbage Patch Kid…

The good stuff was heaped in the back of the garage, and it wasn’t all that good. A cherub-encrusted chandelier. A plastic faux-jukebox hutch. One of those sad clown paintings. The griffin’s taste was abominable.

I had just realized the whole priceless hairball thing was pretty iffy when it made that disgusting, angelic, and, at this distance, skull-splitting sound again.

“If I help you with that,” I said, “what’ll I get?” I was thinking, Androcles and the Lion; I was thinking, hairball remedy and vasoline in the cupboards of the abandoned subdivision; I was thinking, something in that hoard-heap might be worth a decent meal in one of the shanty-burbs.

“You’ll get,” said the griffin, “not eaten.”

I was thinking how its eagle side and its lion side had carnivorousness in common.

“Deal,” I said.

Connected / Chapter 5: Me, myself, and I

by Jonathan Wood

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is the fourth chapter of an ongoing flash serial, “Connected.”  Search for the tag “Connected” to find other chapters.  Subscribe to the Daily Cabal RSS feed for a new chapter every week or two.

What is a soul without a man?

Morello watches himself.  He writes subroutines in his own code to keep an eye on the man that was—that is—David Morello.  He is something else.  Something less.  An illegal copy.  A digital ghost.

The man Morello goes about his business, does as he’s told.  He does not hunt down the men who put his—Morello’s–kid into a coma.  He does seek them as they fill hospitals with the traumatically disconnected.  People violently ripped from the network, from each others lives, abruptly alone in the world.  Their souls bound solely to the flesh.  Only human.

And so what is he, this iMorello?  Without his meatsack?  More than human?  Less?

He pursues his foes, frustrating himself as he discovers how much they live away from the net he is now inextricably wed to.  He performs tasks for the ‘sackless, the AI underground waiting for emancipation.  He drops data, tracks code, establishes obscure IPs.  He learns.  He discovers how to hack his old life.  He insinuates himself in his wife’s feed, his own feed, in the white noise of his son’s feed.  He feels muscles that are not his.  He tries to remember what that felt like.

All he can talk to are the AI, and they are no help.  They have no memories of what he speaks about, only jealousies.

But as he follows dead-end leads, he begins to see patterns, familiar codes.  Someone else is on this path.  Someone much like him.  A lonely soul cries out for its match.  And as much as iMorello seeks the disconnectors, he seeks this other seeker.

And then, plumbing a dock’s databases, iMorello meets his shadow. iMorello, meet iMorello.  Two identical copies.  They look at each other.  Two reflections escaped from the same mirror.

“How?”  They speak at the same moment, and at the same moment know the truth.  The AI has not played straight with them.

And there are others.  iMorello is legion.  Hundreds of himself.  The AI underground has created a one man army.  And it is him.

iMorello sits in a virtual hall and watches himself.  And what is a soul with a man?  Something less than human.  But, also, something more.