Sunday

Last night, I watched The Spectacular Now, which I rather liked. Today, I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which I rather didn’t.

There’s not a lot I can say about the former, which was both a lot different and exactly what I expected. And everything I could say about the latter is filled with spoilers. (Here’s one big one, with fair warning: it’s plenty shocking the one time the movie decides to stick to major Spider-Man continuity.)

I spent the rest of the weekend reading some Kaleidotrope submissions and writing. I’m working on a short piece right now that I’m trying to tie together, and then I also wrote this during my weekly free-writing group (before the movie):

He could no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead.

Only a year ago that might have bothered him; he remembered sleepless nights, empathy, doubts; even if he no longer had direct access to those emotions, he hadn’t yet excised their memory, and he could recall them well enough to know that he was a different man. Well enough, too, to know that he should probably be disturbed by that difference. If he wanted to, the shunt in his brain could be easily removed, a simple surgical procedure, and he could go back to being the man he’d been a year ago, doubts and all. But a conscience wouldn’t bring Stacy back, and it wouldn’t change what was happening in the world below. If Magnus went back to being bothered by all of this, it probably would just get him killed too.

His real name wasn’t Magnus, of course, but he felt he’d long gone past the point of real names. Who was left to question him? Stacy would had said he sounded like a mad scientist or super-villain, like something straight out of a comic book. Oh really? he might have asked her. Then what does a mutagenic plague that turns two thirds of the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies sound like? Because that’s what they were up against. That’s what he’d released into the world. It seemed to him like they’d moved past concerns about any of this not sounding believable.

Take the space station, for instance, or the nanobots that kept it operational: that was pure comic book, but it was also the only reason why he was still alive. The plague had found its way here, escaped into the atmosphere aboard the station just like everywhere else, but…

No, he didn’t want to think about that now. There were some emotions even the shunt wasn’t capable of blocking.

The point was, it was a ridiculous situation, but it was the one he’d been forced into. If circumstances dictated that he go from mild-mannered lab tech to super-genius mad scientist in order to survive, then, by damn, he was going to play the part.

Still, he wished he could tell which of the infected he’d brought aboard were living or dead. In theory, he was running these tests to save those who hadn’t completely succumbed. But as he looked through the observation window, they all just looked like zombies to him. He wasn’t much sure he cared about finding a cure.

Would it really be so bad to let the human race go? Magnus hadn’t released the plague — that had been Albert, the dumb lab tech he’d once been — nor had he even designed it — that had been the men who’d built this space station, almost as smart as he was now. But were things really worse now? Magnus sort of liked the quiet.

But he’d run a battery of tests all the same; it was something to do. He didn’t expect to find a cure, or to begin to care, expected he’d just have to vent the whole lab to space like he did when Stacy was bit.