"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
A day spent mostly knee-deep in building instructor and student materials for online, with periodic checks on the terrible news that keeps coming out of England.
This evening, I got somewhat soaked in the block and a half between my office and Grand Central, but the rain had of course stopped by the time I actually got home.
Today was hot and slow and boring, and occasionally all three at once.
I didn’t sleep very well last night for some reason — despite some thirty-plus years of experience — and all day I seemed to be feeling it. I think I got about eight hours altogether, but it was in bits and pieces, and one extra unbroken hour at the end would have been quite nice.
Oh well.
A quiet day, a rainy evening. I spent it doing the crossword, watching a couple of Torchwood episodes — I think I’ve revised my opinion of the new miniseries to “mostly awful” — and writing. For instance, I wrote this at my weekly writing group:
“Someone is killing our spies,” said the prefect, sipping at his tea. “It’s getting on Consul’s last remaining nerve, I can tell you.”
“I thought officially you didn’t have any of those,” Marcus said. He let his own tea grow cold on its saucer. “Spies, I mean. Isn’t that Consul’s position, that espionage…what was it? Is detrimental to a free and open society?”
“That is the party line, yes,” the prefect said. “Regrettable, but a political necessity. And yet we still have enemies, as you are well aware. The Nelgreb, for one, have been encroaching on our space for years, to say nothing of the Praxium Affinity and their deathships, who would gladly wipe us from the face of the earths if given the chance.”
“Hence the spies,” Marcus said.
“Hence the spies. Yet now, they appear to be turning up rather…well, murdered.”
“Enemy agents?” Marcus asked. “The Affinity doesn’t usually like to get its hands dirty like that. And even the Nelgreb don’t often stoop to kill individuals…unless your boys and girls got sloppy and provoked them?”
“They did no such thing,” the prefect said. Marcus enjoyed watching him bristle. “These were our elite cadre of intelligence officers. But you misunderstand me. These were not field agents.”
“But I thought you said — ”
“Someone is killing our spies at home,” the prefect said, well aware he now had Marcus’ full attention. He even smiled, damn him. “Someone is murdering them one by one within the Citadel walls.”
“That’s not possible.”
“And yet…” The prefect reached for a folder in the open drawer behind him, then spread the contents on the table beside the teapot. “Eight officers in total have already died, in rather a gruesome manner. You’ll find vidgraphs in there, detailing the attacks…although, I warn you, they’ll likely put you off these delightful cucumber sandwiches.”
Marcus let the man eat. Eight officers, and in the Citadel no less. Such a thing shouldn’t be possible. There was Homeworld conditioning, for one thing; he’d undergone that himself before the long exile, and he knew for a fact the psychological blocks were nigh impossible to break. But there were also external safeguards against it. There had been no real violence in the Citadel for almost two hundred years, much less a murder, much less eight. Off-world he had seen violence, quick and brutal death aplenty, but here in the heart of the empire’s government, he’d never seen anything like what was in the vidgraphs playing out now on the sheets before him.
“So you can see why we requested your particular set of gifts,” the prefect said, dusting crumbs from the side of his mouth. “Why we allowed you to come back.”
It was an odd attempt to mix the genres of international intrigue, space opera, and slasher horror of all things, but I had fun with it.
Then this evening, I watched The Joneses, which was decent.
That was Sunday.
A quiet day, spent mostly cleaning and watching episodes of Breaking Bad, from the second season.
Oh, the exciting life I lead.
Today was almost indescribably boring. It had the drawback of also being almost indescribably loud, as construction, or demolition, or whatever it is continued outside our office windows all day. It was especially grating today, and I left around four o’clock. (I got in around eight, so it’s not like I was skipping out particularly early or anything.)
I did finish reading Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight on the train ride home, though. It’s part of the Neversink Library, a gift from Heather, and it’s the second of those books that I’ve read thus far. I liked it, although not quite as much as Georges Simeon’s The Train, which actually takes place only a few short years later, as World War II is getting underway. Keun’s book is set in Germany just as the Nazis are coming to power in the late 1930s, something she had first-hand experience with. It was published just a few years after she herself fled the country, and it’s a sometimes chilling and personal look at a nation descending into hysteria and violence. It does feel perhaps a little unfocused near the end, but overall I quite liked it.