Ha!Ha!Ha!

by Steve Beaulieu

  He started swinging and punching and swearing at me. I could almost sense his impending death.

  I really didn’t want to fight him that day, but just pushing him forcefully away from me meant that he fell back and landed in an extremely precarious way. It was such a serious head injury, he died that morning right there next to me in the bathroom near the sinks and shower stalls. Everyone who was watching him attack me ran away, assuming that real trouble was close behind.

  His death and the ensuing electrical energy and power I received became my whole focus for my last two years in corrections. It was my singular focus.

  Contain it, hide it, control it, and study it.

  Coop’s dark energy and his haunting memories came to me slowly from his young life of violence. It was a private horror film that played itself inside my head, mostly in the wee small hours of the morning—as the nuns at the orphanage used to say—that included cruel behavior toward animals, the pillow suffocation of an older abusive relative, and the intentional drowning of a poor kid from his neighborhood. The dark thoughts and memories of this young monster were cold as steel and utterly vile, but I knew I could use them, and the power that came with them, for good.

  Who cares what filth is hidden inside an old car battery, under your hood? As long as it starts your car on those cold, dark winter mornings.

  I left the bathroom, but was detained almost immediately in the hallway.

  A number of the other boys ratted me out to the corrections officers, but I told them that Coop just slipped. Because he had no marks on him except for the head injury where he fell, they actually believed that I wasn’t involved. I got a couple shot demerits, but it was not going to get me in any more trouble.

  After the controversy died down, a couple of Coop’s crew tried to give me some trouble, but I told them to leave me alone.

  “Go away,” I said calmly. “I’m busy formulating the plans for my future.”

  Their snide faces laughed at me.

  When they started to get aggressive, and both took a couple swipes, I chose to remind them that Coop ended up dead by “playing with fire.” I was calm, but annoyed.

  But the two didn’t heed my warnings, so it required a mild display of my hidden strength. I just slapped one guy on the side of the head, open handed, and the other got a mild punch in the chest. They ceased their attack at once.

  “You’re crazy, Hacksaw,” one grumbled in pain as they ran down the hall.

  “I actually prefer to be called Victor now,” I said, not really expecting a reply.

  From that day, they kept their distance and never spoke to me again.

  • • •

  In my time that remained at the John H. Sunuhu Youth Service in Manchester, I became the model offender in the entire Correctional Service Department. I kept mostly to myself, spoke often of rehabilitation to my case officers, and mentioned my desire to seek gainful employment in all my individual and group counseling sessions.

  Privately, I mostly meditated in the deep swamp of power, memories, knowledge, experiences, and sensations that were mixing in my mind. I had many new gifts from each of them, residual kernels of useful knowledge from the lives of the dead that would make my life better, more impactful, more epic. This cinema was my favorite place to visit and I found that if I concentrated hard enough I could reach it without first passing through a deep cycle of sleep.

  When I was released, I imagined the possibilities of never revealing my true abilities until they were expanded to a level beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend. Or to contain.

  I was becoming superhuman.

  The strength pulsing through my core buzzed like a strobe in my spine, humming at a frequency that only I could hear in deep meditation.

  But I decided I must collect as many of these gifts as I could. This meant work as an orderly at a nursing home for a couple years. I was there as so many died. The things I witnessed now in our temporal world were extraordinary because of my heightened awareness, but the gifts I received from these individuals’ essences were on another scale entirely.

  At first, I wasn’t eager to kill anyone; I suspected that it might taint the transfer process, or negate it altogether. But I was relatively impatient for more people to die, to pass away, or to simply let go of their mortal coil, and join me, or join us in my powerful ghost mind.

  I don’t feel that their souls were trapped within me, only their raw power, and the impressions and afterimages of their knowledge, experience, and memories.

  It was the perfect crime.

  I stole, but only that which was being cast away, lost, or leaked out into the ether, at the moment of death.

  The nuns told me, "Those who endure death and grief in their life will be stronger for it.” Now I knew how right they were.

  And what I could do with this new gift was something that only a mind inhabiting the truth and judgement of so many minds — good and bad — could discover. My intellect, reasoning, judgement and ambition had amplified exponentially with my expertise, knowledge, and power.

  I tended to meditate for longer and longer stretches each day, after my collection shifts at the nursing home. Sometimes I used to go to the hospital on my way home on the slim chance I might be there exactly at the moment of passing to add more to my completeness, but it often felt more fruitful to go home and simply explore the gifts I had already received, in silence.

  I tried working in a morgue, even tried to become a crime scene photographer, but the aftereffects were too dissipated even after fifteen minutes. Unless I was there at the exact moment of passing — in those seconds following the final breath, the last heartbeat, or the withering extent of brain activity, it was too late. It diminished too quickly. I was also too distracted to undertake the training to become an emergency room attendant: medical school was not a place for my powerful mind.

  And I thought about visiting countries where starvation and epidemics were rampant, but realized that the transferred memories of those poor souls would be just glimpses of the mundane lives of the downtrodden. I wanted and needed the rich experiences of full, abundant lives to wholly maximize these gifts of death.

  • • •

  Now more than a decade later, with hundreds of gifts bequeathed to me, I can say that this is truly my world, and although many of these poor souls have been completely forgotten by their petty families and friends, I remember them all.

  I grow wiser, more powerful, and invincible every day.

  I cannot be hurt by knives, bullets, or fire now, and I have boundless strength and energy that I have—to date—only tested in private.

  My shrewd and cunning mind, thanks to the whispers of dead bankers, politicians, and businessmen, has made me wealthy beyond my wildest imagination. I bought my small coastal Massachusetts island and I’m preparing for the next phase in my development.

  I am clearly the next evolution of humanity—a conduit to collect this generation’s power and experiences and focus it like a prism, balance it like a fulcrum.

  When the time is right, I will arrive. We will arrive.

  I feel as if I am the head librarian of a massive archival mind filled with the best and worst of visceral human experiences. My skills have made me the conductor of a symphony orchestra of life energy, each deep with decades and decades of knowledge and memories. I am the general of an invisible army that serves but one man, and that military grows in strength and capability each day.

  Now when I am near someone approaching death, I can smell the scent of their last breath, and its struggle to hold on. I know the fear in their eyes and the hope that perhaps a loved one or dear friend will be on each side to guide them across the darkness.

  I console these people by whispering to them that they can come with me. “I will hold a part of you here with me, with us, for all time. That you can rest easy knowing. Sleep now, friend. Your energy will be used well to serve me and my bright future as a new higher order of human.”

 
• • •

  That’s when it happened.

  I decided to work for a time as an enforcer with a crime family, the St. Germains in Providence, assuming that I’d be on hand for a whole range of untimely deaths. I very rarely actually pulled the trigger myself, but I was there for a number of shoot-outs, stabbings, and beatings, many that led to successful transfers.

  Mr. St. Germain sent me and another big guy, the “muscle” he calls us, to accompany his son Jimmy, to collect tribute from a rival syndicate’s boss. It was a tense time in Rhode Island’s underworld because a number of minor crime organizations were contesting the St. Germains' decades-long dominance. Mr. St. Germain himself expected the region to break out into an all-out mob war within a few weeks.

  “We’re here to see your boss. I’m Jimmy St. Germain,” he said to the security guys at the door of the old brownstone.

  “We know who you are. You need to—“ the henchman said, attempting to signal that he would pat us down.

  “We’re not going up there unarmed,” Jimmy said. “Besides this is just a courtesy call, a friendly visit. We’re just gonna talk to your boss, just us guys, with all of you around.” The way Jimmy smiled at him, wagging his condescending index finger at their crew, I thought it would get bloody right there on the street. “You’re not afraid of having three St. Germain guys down here are you?”

  Within a few minutes, we were upstairs and surrounded by a roomful of armed thugs in what looked like their command center.

  Mr. Strumpfler, a small-time loan-shark-turned-mob-boss, signaled for his guys to try to calm down, but everyone was on edge, especially a number of technicians in the room installing a LAN for the syndicate.

  “Yeah, Jimmy,” Strumpfler said, “let me show you what we’re up to. This is a local-area-network, with a virtual private network, and behind… a firewall,” he said proudly, sounding like he was reciting some buzz words he’d just learned an hour ago. “My guys have secured a new computer network to my… associates,” he smiled, “all over New England, from Portland, Maine to New London, Connecticut.”

  “Why are you telling me this crap?” Jimmy snapped.

  “Because I can help set this up for your dad: moving money, wire transfers, off-book investments, all sorts of financial stuff becomes possible now without the Feds poking in.”

  “Well, he doesn’t care about your friggin’ network,” Jimmy said, “I just came here to collect the new tribute that my father says you owe.”

  I could sense the end of Jimmy in that moment. His own cells, throughout his body, from those delivering oxygen to the synapses firing in his brain, they all knew: he was about to die.

  It was hazy what happened first, because I was almost giddy preparing for the new energy.

  When the shooting started, Jimmy killed the boss, and a bunch of his men before he got himself shot. The other St. Germain enforcer who came with us went out in a blaze of gunfire that took out a few more of them before he went down.

  I was hit a few times, but bullets only tended to make small holes in my clothes now and rarely even broke the skin. I shot a few goons myself who were still being aggressive just as I wanted to enjoy the process of accepting the energy gifts of all those fallen around me.

  I could see that Strumpfler had a long sordid career, and my insights into the St. Germain family also jumped in a heartbeat. This firehose of data—memories, echoes, experiences, was coming fast—faster than ever.

  At that moment, the server network in the room shorted out from all the gunfire that had impacted the computers, and another rush of energy swelled within me. An unexpected kind.

  It was a new pulsing sensation, and one that included a rush of machine-based information, memories, and experiences. I sensed an infusion of millions of lines of code, terabytes—no petabytes of data storage, and I was slowly beginning to comprehend it all. This was miraculous.

  I could see their entire multi-state computer network behind the firewall, across the VPN, and across the region through their backchannel darkweb connections, even sensing a few nodes up near Manchester, New Hampshire, where this all started for me. Their entire business, its assets, its plans, personnel, activities, and every facet of data came along with the incredible upgrade I received.

  This bloodbath brought such incredible bounty to my collective.

  • • •

  As I exited the building, killing a few more thugs on my way down, I realized that I was now ready to assume my greatest achievement. I was becoming an evolution of mankind that included our technology. I was a singularity. Man and machine, but in the hands of a man strong enough, deserving enough, to handle the machines.

  This would be my long-awaited Hacksaw’s formulation, like those nasty kids sneered in juvey: “That Hacksaw, he’s always formulating something.”

  No, I corrected myself, this is Vincent’s arrival.

  Then the surprise. On the sidewalk, heading back to Jimmy’s car I sensed something new. The deaths, the life energies, the echoes, the memories, the secrets, the experiences I had just been given weren’t just those in that Strumpfler building.

  No.

  I was sensing the energy from many, many others: lawyers, accountants, business people, bankers, stock traders, software engineers, and more among my casualties. Everyone on that network died at that exact moment when the network went down. The pulses of energy, the gifts of their deaths, were pulled across the network to me when the local energy transferred. I have now become a lightning rod of death, even across artificial networks.

  And now truly understanding this power I possess, I am formulating plans to send cascading failure across the entire world wide web, the full global internet, and capture the shared energy death of anyone on their device, portal, or computer at that point.

  And I’m very close to understanding how…

  Are you online?

  A Word from A.J. McWain

  Thank you so much for reading my story, Hacksaw’s Formulation.

  I’ve been a fan of sci-fi (and superhero) stories, shows, and films for years—everything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, Superman, Batman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Matrix, and the Walking Dead. My favorite authors (right now) are Ken Liu, Andy Wier, and Ted Chiang, for their constant inspiration.

  I’m trained as a jazz musician and composer (New England Conservatory), but also served in the Massachusetts Army National Guard in Iraq and Kuwait, and have been teaching college-level jazz studies for years.

  I started publishing non-fiction (music books) a few years ago, but have written stories for as long as I can remember. I’m shooting for science fiction, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and sci-fi techno-thriller stories all mashed together.

  This particular story is dedicated to those amazing musicians and friends who encouraged me to use their names in my work. I live in New England outside Boston with my amazing wife and precocious daughter in a house built in 1900. For more information about my recent writing and upcoming projects, please visit: www.ajmcwain.com.

  PRISONER OF WAR

  BY STEVE BEAULIEU

  PRISONER OF WAR

  BY STEVE BEAULIEU

  JUST AS HIS EARS stopped ringing, another missile hit not far from his position. The high-pitched squeal was his whole world. That and the fear. He could actually taste the fear. The base hadn’t seen any kind of conflict in several months, maybe even closer to a year.

  Eli Zoeller thought the assignment was perfect until now. All his other colleagues were sent into Kabul, where hundreds of journalists had been killed over the past five years. The enemy of the United States had made a point of executing reporters as a protest to the western media and what they believed to be its negative influence on the world.

  When Eli found out he’d been assigned to a base in southern Farah, a province in the western part of Afghanistan, he took all his friends out to celebrate. But now, he’d give anything for one of those drinks they’d shared a few weeks ago.

 
Gunfire had broken out all around him. He’d long since dropped his camera and recorder. It was no longer about the job. The war had come to him, and Eli just wanted to stay alive. He ducked behind a stack of sandbags and covered his head with dirty hands. He’d wanted to make a name for himself, obtain the story of a lifetime—he just hadn’t expected his life to be so short.

  “Run, now!” a soldier shouted. It took Eli a second or three to realize the man was talking to him. If he hadn’t been so terrified, he might have thought better about standing in the middle of a shoot out. Bullets whizzed by. Between the explosions and gun shots, Eli could hardly hear the wails of agony coming from all around him, but he knew they were there.

  Dust kicked up, making it difficult for his pale eyes to see anything more than shadows. His heavy boots pounded the sand and he stumbled more than once. Ahead, he could see a gathering of soldiers behind a makeshift covering. He dug deep and pushed himself toward it, feeling the sweat pour down his forehead, stinging his eyes. No matter how many times he’d heard how hot it would be, he wasn’t prepared for such immense heat.

  Eli dived behind the wall as if sliding into home plate.

  A soldier firing an AT-4—a massive launcher Eli had once thought was called a bazooka—stopped long enough to shout: “Loading up civilians on the South side of the base. Get yourself over there, ASAP.” He pointed and Eli didn’t hesitate.

  “Black on ammo!” another soldier cried as Eli started off downhill toward the caravan.

  A series of humvees sat parked, soldiers motioning for the civilians to hurry up. Eli loaded in and found hot metal to plant down on. The vehicles were nothing like the luxury Hummers back home. Eli realized how green he really was the first time he got into one of the tin cans.

  Surrounded by metal and terrified civilian contractors and DOD officials, he closed his eyes and prayed. After saying, “Amen” to a prayer he barely knew how to pray, another sound, this one louder than any other, echoed and reverberated through Eli’s chest. The soldier outside his window looked upward, a smile on his face.