Short Fiction of no consequence II

(This is essentially Star Trek fan fiction with the serials filed off)

Security.

The word sat on his assignment slip, staring up at him with beady little letters. Was that a sneer, crossing the t? And what was a y, except a slant-mouthed grin, mocking his hopes and dreams? Mocking four years of training at the Academy. Courses in astrophysics, hand-to-hand combat, engineering, diplomacy, military tactics, languages. A captain had to know a little bit of everything, if he wanted to keep his crew alive out in the void. But his favorite classes had been the ones on leadership.

So many courses in leadership.

And now, because of one little test, a simple mistake, he was sitting in a transport ship onroute to the finest vessel in the fleet... with an assignment slip that read "Security."


They called it the "Psych Test." Oh, not officially. Officially, it didn't even have a name. If someone asked about psych tests, they'd be told that all candidates were evaluated several times during the selection process, always by qualified psychotherapists. And all those papers and notations counter, sure. But not as much as the Psych Test did.

To hear the rumors, no one's was the same. Every test was tailor made to poke you in the dark places behind your eyes, at the little weaknesses that instructors and therapists (and your friends? There was no way they could have known about the cat if Jenkins hadn't told them...) had dutifully noted down. Members of the fleet had to be better than their weaknesses. Couldn't freeze in front of phobias, couldn't lash out in irrational anger.

When he was a kid, he'd had a cat. Siamese, beautiful eyes, name of Sparky. Sparky had disappeared one day, and he'd gone out of his mind with regret. Until a few weeks later, when his older brother had given him a present, out of the blue.

They'd never really gotten along, he and his brother, but the gesture was touching. And so, happy but a little wary, he'd opened the box, and looked inside, and after that he and his brother didn't talk much. Breaking someone's jaw in three places will do that to a relationship.

So when, in the last month of his time at the academy, he'd walked around a corner, to see a cadet he didn't know torturing the cat... He hadn't reacted well.

The scene was ludicrous, of course. It was the middle of the day, in a white, aniseptic-looking Academy corridor. And there was this guy, standing there with a knife, just... playing.

He wondered, later, how they'd simulated it all so well. That cat had looked REAL. And the look on the other cadet's face... He had seen that look before, on his brother, just before he stretched himself to find some new measure of cruelty. Either that kid was a great actor, or he was well on his way to failing his OWN psych test.

In any case, he'd reacted.

Cadets were allowed to carry sidearms, but never to draw them - the idea was to get used to them at your side, and, more importantly, to get used to NOT using them. He'd never fired his before. But he'd always liked to tinker...

They asked him, at the debrief, WHY he had altered the laser pistol. They were finely calibrated not to do any lethal harm, in case someone got antsy (or freaked out when the people in charge INENTIONALLY pushed their freak-out buttons). It wasn't against the rules, he said. He'd just wanted to know how they worked. He just wanted to know, if something bad happened at the Academy, that he could protect people.

They didn't bother to ask him what he thought could go wrong at one of the most heavily defended institutions on the most heavily protected planet in the universe.

So yeah, he'd shot the guy. Cranked his pistol past the easily-bypassed governing mechanism, past "stun" (because this was a big guy, and he wasn't taking chances) but not, NOT, he kept pointing out, up to Kill. He was never going to kill the guy.

They didn't seem impressed by that, oddly enough.

And the guy had crumpled, and his faculty adviser had run into the corridor and yelled at him to drop his weapon, and there had been a LOT of meetings, and now here he was, sitting on a transport with all the command track knowledge he could ever need and an assignment slip that said

Security.

Issue Nine: 23: Things Fall Apart

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 9
"23: Things Fall Apart"

Synopsis
In a flashback, King Mob and former cell member John-a-Dreams investigate a church in Philadelphia, searching for an artifact known as the Hand of Glory, In the church basement, they find a grotesque plant monster that John theorizes was an attempt by beings from another universe to cross over. The pair open a door, and are horrified by what they see.

In the windmill, Dane, freaking out about his finger, continues to demand that he's leaving the group. King Mob, worrying over the breaches in security that hindered the previous mission, suggests to the cell that John-a-Dreams is not dead, as they thought, but has joined the enemy. Ragged Robin receives a psychic warning that a group of enemy soldiers is surrounding the windmill.

In the chaos, Dane slips away, taking King Mob's gun with him. He also steals his car - a mistake, as King reveals, because his car is booby-trapped to explode in five minutes.

Improvising rapidly, the group manages to escape, killing several soldiers in the process. Meanwhile, Dane rams a barricade, and his tires are shot out. He bails from the car shortly before it explodes, killing his pursuers but leaving him relatively unharmed. Another soldier confronts him, but Dane pulls out King Mob's gun and shoots him.

The rest of the cell finds the wreckage of the car, and determines that Dane has escaped. King Mob declares that it's time to call "Mister Six."


Madness got us this far
This will be a short one, as this issue is mostly action, without a ton of introspective cosmic stuff. (Considering how heavy the next issue is with the big, weird concepts, it's kind of a relief for me).

Our title tonight is a reference to the I Ching, a Chinese divination technique that's a sort of Oriental version of doing the tarot. As the title indicates, the 23rd hexagram is Po, "things coming to an end" (although the actual pictured hexagram, both on the cover and the title page, is 27, which relates to feeding and nourishment. Hey, maybe getting split up like this is exactly what we needed).

23 is the overtly relevant one tonight, though, considering our newly-formed fellowship is about to have a breaking. Dane McGowan, minus one fingertip, has had enough. Using magic and being invisible and going to parallel universes is all fine when you're just faffing around with a crazy old man. When fingers start getting cut off, it's time to re-evaluate the choices you've made.

Note is made of Dane's incredible luck - the car is shot before it can explode, he's not hurt in the crash, the explosion takes out the people out to get him. King Mob, super-spy assasin, barely gets out of this situation alive, while our favorite little punk breezes through. Is he just lucky? Is he using the magic powers Tom planted in his head? Or is it just that, as a main character, he's protected by a higher power? Dane's clearly special, but he's only special because Grant Morrison decided he is. He was chosen by a normal, human man with control over this reality (and yeah, the Invisibles isn't real, but we keep getting told that "real" doesn't matter) to be the Messiah. So of course he's not going to get blown up 9 issues in.


That one obviously couldn't take the pressure
This is also the first issue where we meet Dane's predecessor, John-a-Dreams (the name is another Shakespeare reference, this time from Hamlet, for a man who gets lost in his daydreams). It's interesting to see King Mob, here, in a clearly deferential role. John's the guy who understands what's going on here - KM just wants something concrete he can shoot.

This opening section throws a lot at the reader, and I don't know that all of it is understandable at this stage of the game. The whole thing has shades of Lovecraft all over it, from the bizarre plant monster in the church to the name-dropping of "Tsathoggua." The Hand of Glory is mentioned for a second time (Freddie and his young lady friend were discussing it when Tom and Dane encountered them in the park back in issue 3), in conjunction with somewhere called Universe B.

Later on, King Mob will describe the things that he and John see here (and which we won't for a long, long time) as a "prototype" community - first steps from an encroaching universe into our (or at least the Invisibles') own. So the question is... are we at war? Is it us vs. them? Does John-a-Dreams's description of the dead plant monster as "magnificent," show him as a traitor in the making? Or is it just that he's more tapped into the truth: There is no war. (Follow-up question: If you refuse to see sides in a conflict, can you be a traitor?)

Although, on the subject of traitors, Robin spends this whole issue hiding her eyes, at first under the brim of her hat, and later with her shades. And when King Mob derisively asks Fanny if she thinks one of the cell is a traitor, she's the one standing far back, freaking out. Of course, it's her psychic warning systems kicking in, warning of the approaching soldiers. But it's still something to think about.


Life just gets cheaper and cheaper
And how about those soldiers? Those faceless goons who want payback because King Mob's "Smile" grenade ripped a friend to shreds. These stormtroopers who rush forward into danger to save a comrade from deadly gas. Who joke to relieve the tension, who get nervous when they have to deal with something like Orlando. How about them?

They work for people and things that want to crush freedom forever, yeah. But to kill the first ones, King Mob has to put on Orlando's jacket. The Invisibles, with their witches and their martial arts experts and their super-spies, they're out of these guys' league, as distant from them as Orlando was from the team (KM looks a bit like John-a-Dreams in the jacket, too, and since we're meant to see something sinister in John for now, that just drives home the point.)

(Although, King Mob wouldn't be able to pull either of the tricks he does here, if his enemy weren't so focused on existing without identity. He can impersonate Orlando because Orlando was always shifting, and he can fake being a Myrmidon because they completely hide their faces. In a way, they're as fluid as De Sade wanted to be last issue, but with the intention of destroying freedom, instead of opening it up).


It makes me gag
Boy calls KM out on his ghoulish humor, and I have to agree. She calls it gallows humor, though, and I'm not sure about that. You use gallows humor when you want to distract yourself from something unpleasant. But look at Mob's face when he says he can always get another car. He's reveling in this shit.

I know I'm driving this point into the ground, issue after issue, but being able to kill that easily is pretty fucked.

Speaking of which, Dane kills his first human being here. We'll have to see what that does to him, whether he turns it into a video game like KM does, or learns a different lesson.

But that won't be for a few days, because the next three issues are all one-shots, jumping around and about the Invisibles universe. It's going to be a long, strange trip. See you tomorrow!

Issue Eight: Arcadia Part Four: H.E.A.D.

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 8

"Arcadia Part Four: H.E.A.D."

Synopsis
King Mob and Boy bring the psychic projection of the Marquis De Sade to an S&M Club in San Francisco, where he quickly makes friends. They tell De Sade that his mission is to design a utopia - one where everyone, including the enemy, gets what they want.

Percy Shelley continues to retreat into his writing as an answer to his grief over the death of his daughter, but, after an imagined conversation with Lord Byron in which Byron tells him that his remaining family is more important that imagining a utopia, returns to his wife.

Lord Fanny is shown to be unharmed after Orlando's attack last issue, and summons the Aztec god of death to drag the fleshless serial killer back to the land of the dead.

Ragged Robin discovers that the head of John the Baptist speaks in glossolalia - "speaking in tongues" - and that whoever hears it hears only what they want to hear. She tells the Cyphermen they can keep it, and has another conversation with the mysterious chess player about the language's use in the coming end of days.

The group comes out of their trances. King Mob is worried that the various interferences with the mission indicate a traitor in the Invisibles. Dane, traumatized by the loss of a finger, declares he is done with the group - just as unseen agents of the Outer Church prepare to attack the windmill.

De Sade, along with a young girl recruited from the club, pick up a young man named Thierry under a bridge in San Francisco. De Sade initiates him into the Invisibles, telling him he is to be nameless, sexless, identity-less - utterly fluid, and that he will help De Sade devise his new, perfect society. They drive off into the night.

Hedonic Engineering and Development
After the grim absolutes of last issue, H.E.A.D. is all about subjectivity. If collective utopias always fail because the push and pull of human needs rips them apart, then it's time, the argument goes, to remove disparate human needs from the equation. Heaven for everybody, tailor made to their needs (even if those needs are, in the case of the poor Cyphermen, orders).

One of the things that used to bug me about the Invisibles is that, as starkly individualistic as its characters can be, one of the overall focuses of the book is on the positive aspects of letting your identity be fluid and malleable. That bothered me, because, well, my identity is ME. I don't want to give that up. As I type these words, I feel fear at the notion that I'm being unrealistic or overly-rigid in my defense of it. But that's De Sade's mission in the 20th century, learning how to increase that fluidity through the absolute pursuit of pleasure. It's a chance for him to act out every fantasy that's ever rattled around in his brain. That's the point, to create a prototype of a world where everyone can do what they want, and everyone can be whoever they want.


And they'll speak a language of utter-subjectivity, as Robin discovers when investigating the Head. (I wonder... is the text we hear the Head say after the Cyphermen wind it up with their big, goofy adventure-game style key what Robin's hearing? Or are those nonsense words and fragments of previous dialogue what WE want to hear?) A new/old language, with everybody hearing exactly what they want to hear, forever. It sounds... lonely. But better than the alternative, I think. Society can't be brought down by compromises and arguments (as the imagined Byron argues with Shelley - while pointing out the importance of small-scale, subjective happiness over the pursuit of utopia) when there's no need for compromise, and no way to hear arguments.

And in the process, we see another magical initiation, right down to the blue smoke, as Thierry is inducted into the order, blending and losing his identity, gaining his blank badge. (And he's standing against a literal shadow wall, painted with the words "Et Arcadia Ego... The last two pages of this issue are a super-compressed version of the whole comic up to this point, now that I look at it - we're seeing the story played out over 59 issues, but versions of it are happening all around us).

Obviously he'd never seen a trannie before
Speaking of fluid identities, we also of course have Lord Fanny, tossing aside the bits of her that Orlando cut off, and then taking on the identities of various Azetec gods and goddesses to dispatch the little punk. (Xipe Totec, the name Orlando throws around, was a real god, by the way, whose priests apparently walked around in flayed human skins. But he's a much bigger thing - not death, but rebirth, transformation, fertility - than the little demon menacing our crew). At the end of the day, it's that fluidity, that willingness to change and be changed, that saves the Invisibles today.


Just a game
Any time you see a chess game in a work of fiction, the tendency is to try to view it as a metaphor. And the mystery of Robin's chess-playing friend at Rennes-le-Chateau still tickles my brain.

He's still only ever moving the black pieces (who win, in the end, with a movement of the black queen (De Sade, being moved across the chessboard to the 20th century?) (And the white King is cornered and defeated by two black pawns before the win... Dane and Fanny defeating Orlando in his pretty white suit? This is what I mean about chess metaphors). So is he playing both sides? Or against an unseen (Invisible?) opponent? Or, as the framing here indicates, is he playing his game with people observing him and all of the events of this comic from a higher order of reality - which is to say, us?

Honestly, I don't know. He says "us" when he describes the future that everyone is hurtling toward. Is the idea that Death is just as much a part of the human experience as anything else? Or am I badly mis-reading this, and his ambiguity is the whole point? That it doesn't matter which side of the conflict he's on, since we're all going to the same place?


Weird shit goes on all the time
Not much more to say, as we finish our second big storyline, except that this issue gives a great spotlight to our central cast. I may make fun of King Mob for his super-spy aspirations, his big gun and his silly hat, but this issue makes it clear that, when he's not being forced into those roles, he's really just a party-nerd. He's willing to do the other stuff (gets off on some of it), but he really just wants to dance and talk about movies and be Grant Morrison.

Boy doesn't get much to do here, but she's dancing as well, along with reminding us that, for all the fun of being a psychic ghost in San Francisco, the body matters too (just like Shelley remembers that there is pleasure and happiness in his wife's arms).

Fanny we've already talked about, and even Dane puts in a good show here, even if he does throw a wobbler at the end. And while I still don't have anything like a handle on Robin as a character, her bored amusement at the Cyphermen's attempts to subvert or harm her is great.

In other words, this issue makes me like these characters... just in time to see them get shot at.

See you tomorrow!


(A few more thoughts on things I noticed while grabbing panels today, which I'm not going to integrate into the main essay because, disorganized mess that it is, I don't want to spend the time to work out where they go. De Sade tells Thierry he is leaving the house of the dead and entering the land of the truly living. Thierry stepped away from the shadows to do so. Meanwhile, the "living" shadow Orlando is pulled back into the Land of the Dead, by a spirit that identifies with an old world, old sun. So, is that the utopia we're headed for? A separation from the shadows that have haunted the entire Arcadia arc? Pulling away from the shadows being cast on the wall of the past, into the living ontic world of the future?)

Issue Seven: Acadia Part Three: 120 Days of Sod All

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 7

"Arcadia Part Three: 120 Days of Sod All"

Synopsis
In the windmill, Orlando eats Dane's severed finger, and Dane awakens. His cries for help rouse Fanny, who attacks Orlando. Dane attempts to use King Mob's gun against Orlando but the gun fails to fire. Orlando attacks, slashing Fanny across the chest with his knife before advancing on Dane.

King Mob and Boy are lost on the "ontic highway" with the psychic projection of De Sade. Their surroundings quickly transition from the "Et Arcadia Ego" postcard into Castle Silling, the setting of De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom." The trio are forced to watch a slightly modified version of the events of the book (a vicious satire in which four powerful men kidnap several young people to an isolated castle and wantonly use them to fulfill their every perversion before killing them) before they are allowed to continue on their journey to De Sade's ultimate destination, San Francisco.

In Venice, Percy Shelley mourns the death of his daughter, wallowing in his misery. His wife, Mary reflects that it is easier for poets, because they are allowed to lose themselves in their grief, while she must continue to live.

Ragged Robin finds herself in the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, where she meets a mysterious chess player (Mary Shelley's carriage companion from the previous issue) who informs her of the mysteries surrounding the village. She enters the chapel at the center of the mystery, only to find a group of Cyphermen there. They claim to have already found what the Invisibles sought there - the oracular head of John the Baptist.


Transvestite v. Shadowman Smackdown!
Let's start today's analysis with a look at what's going on in the "real world" (i.e., the one with the time machine windmill and the fleshless Aztec knife nut). I was trying to put together some fancruft about Dane and Fanny being the ones to wake up because they're the most magically gifted of the cell, but really, I think it's just that the story demands the team be split up, and this way makes the most sense.

King Mob and Boy go with De Sade because they're the grounded ones who are going to be able to avoid taking anything they see too seriously.

Dane's gotta be in the windmill because getting the crap cut out of him by Orlando (and totally failing to do anything about it) is all part of his Hero's Journey thing.

Robin has to deal with the "Head of John the Baptist" because... I don't know, someone had to do it. I might have more on this next issue, when we get into the meat of what the head is, but no promises.

But most of all, it had to be Lord Fanny who took on Orlando.

I'm GUESSING that Orlando's name is a reference to Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, a semi-true, mostly metaphorical story of Woolf's female lover. In the story, Orlando is born as a man, lives a life of adventure, and then suddenly transforms into a woman. And while our Orlando takes the form of a male, he's similarly transitional - he wears the skin he chooses.

In the other corner, we have Lord Fanny. Without getting into her backstory, she's Aztec, too. A biological male who wears the appearance of a woman - a sexy, kick-ass woman, at that. Like Orlando, she didn't have her identity thrust upon her - she chose it (in a less messy fashion than Orlando's, I hasten to add).

It's her transitional strength that puts her on an even footing with Orlando here - high heels being wielded with a male's musculature, sexual characteristics that act as armor and can be thrown away when damaged - way more than Dane, trying to use King Mob's dick/gun and getting slapped around for it.

Sniffing at the skirts of mystery
Speaking of Robin, though, this is our first issue where she gets any time on her own, but I don't know that I have a lot to say about her yet. She's one of the book's big puzzles, but for now we'll just have to accept what she's presenting on the surface... even though we know that's a mask.

As for the man she meets in the churchyard at Rennes-le-Chateau, well... He's clearly the same man who rode with Mary Shelley more than a hundred years before (the man mentions that it's been 100 years or so since the priest Sauniere came to the town, placing Robin's segments at least in the 20th century, if not present day).

Last issue, I had him pegged as Death, and it's not as though the chess imagery here doesn't support that (not to mention the skull-shaped charm Robin's wearing around her waist!). His position relative to the board indicates he's playing both sides, although we never see him moving the white pieces.

If he is Death, he's as impartial as before, with his warnings about going so far after buried treasure that you pull up worthlessness instead (something I should probably keep in mind as this project continues).

Oh, and the painting he mentions Sauniere buying, "Les Bergers D'Arcadie," is, of course, the Et Arcadia Ego painting that names this arc, under a different title. Not sure of the significance, but I wonder if Morrison set this excursion in Rennes-le-Chateau specifically because the painting recurred there?


Guilty
The thing I can't stop poking at, though, is the make-up. This issue is book-ended by people in very similar make-up: white face paint, with red circles on the cheek. One of those is our very own Ragged Robin, confronted with Cyphermen and Rennes-le-Chateau and the head of John the Baptist. And the others are the...protagonists? Villains? Central characters of De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom." Is Robin's dark side being hinted at? Foreshadowing of poor Mr. Quimper?

I'm inclined to think it's the reverse, actually. Robin's make-up is her little way of pointing out the ridiculousness of her life. It's all pantomime, and she's just another clown.
The make-up worn by the Banker, the Duke, the Priest, and the Judge is a similar marker of theatricality. After all, in the same scenes where it's first shown, they're shown "getting into costume" as they put on their wigs and robes. De Sade was trafficking in the far extremes of brutality, not because it got him off (although... yeah, it got him off, and again we see that pull toward rage and darkness that sits in the man/movement, alongside the urge toward freedom) but to form an instructive lesson.



I'm not saying anything the text doesn't spell out on its own, but the events that Boy and KM and De Sade experience on the Ontic Highway (and, to jump back to our discussion of the cave and the shadows from a few days ago, ontic means "real" - we're into a "higher" level of reality here, closer to our side of the page, the stuff casting the shadows) are for our, the reader's benefit. We're the ones being addressed by the Judge after the world is ended in rage and despair. The original De Sade didn't write about "electronic tagging" or "DNA fingerprinting files." That's all for our benefit.

It can be easy to see the things that the Outer Church does and blame it on the archons - the monsters made me do it! But while they may supply the supernatural mojo, 9 times out of 10 it's us doing the actual killing and crushing and raping. Everybody on The Hunt was 100% human.

And even then, it's not them who pull the trigger. That's the last joke, that it's the prey, the blank brutalized faces, as Big Malkie might put it, who are the ones who actually end it all in our little playlet... once they've been put in front of the button, of course.



If Arcadia is about the conflict in the human spirit between idealism and cynicism, then last issue's trip through the Terror was cynicism's triumph in the "real world" - the shadow - and what we see here is the platonic ideal, the true object casting that shadow. This entire issue is tinged with failure - the events in Castle Silling, Dane's impotence against Orlando, Percy Shelley's descent into melancholy over his daughter's death, the Cyphermen discovering the head... The case that's being made to us is that humanity is flawed, un-savable, and the idealists are so lost in their ideas that they ignore the people they love and get them killed. It's a damn grim message.

Thank God this arc is four issues, not three, huh? See you tomorrow for the counter-argument, San Francisco-style!

Issue Six: Aracadia Part Two: Mysteries of the Guillotine

The Invisibles
Vol 1
Issue 6

"Arcadia Part Two: Mysteries of the Guillotine"

Synopsis
Having psychically time traveled, the cell meets up with Etienne, a member of the Invisibles, in 1793 France, during the Reign of Terror. Etienne guides them to their target, revealed to be the Marquis de Sade. He also tells them that strange, insectile creatures have been seen in Paris. King Mob identifies these as brainwashed enemy agents known as Cyphermen, sent to disrupt the mission. The group witnesses several bloody executions, as well.

De Sade, in his capacity as an administrator in the revolution, is touring disease-infested hospitals. He comes across a room where three Cyphermen are cutting a woman open. They tempt him to join them in an exploration of his flesh. He begins to give in, when King Mob appears, weilding a weapon designed to destabilize the Cyphermen's psychic projections. Having driven them off, the group tells De Sade that they are bringing a psychic impression him to the future, which his true self will join when it dies.

Sensing that the murderous shadow creature Orlando is growing near, the group attempts to return to their bodies, but finds the way blocked. King Mob suggests they focus on the image of the postcard in his pocket as a physical link back to their bodies. However, something goes wrong, and Boy, KM, and De Sade instead appear apparently INSIDE the postcard, with the others nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, Orlando enters the windmill, to find the five cell members still in trance. He begins his attack on them by cutting off one of Dane McGowan's fingers.

In a series of scenes that run throughout the issue, Mary Shelley is seen traveling, at her husband Percy's insistence, with their two children to join him in Venice. The hard journey is physically draining on the children. A mysterious man also travels in her carriage - he offers her an apple, mentions that he has met both of her parents, and warns her of the price of idealism and utopia.


The religion of blades
Maybe it's wishful thinking from having started this post quite late, but tonight's issue is a bit less complex than yesterday's. Not that it doesn't have its major points to make, but there are fewer and they're hit harder.

This is a story about the prices we pay when we try for Utopia, and the human reactions that keep us from achieving it. As such, we'll spend most of it in one of the idealist's great warnings: The Terror during the French Revolution.

We start with the Tricoteuses (literally, "knitting women," those who sat and watched the executions as they went on day after day). Percy Shelley might want us to believe in a higher world, but these women (and men) will always be there to remind him that what people want is blood and spectacle, human sacrifice and gods.

Orlando's presence in our story demands a parallel between his own roots in the Aztec civilization, and the bloody deaths of the revolution. In both cases, death was used as a way to beseech a higher power, to beg it for relief from life's woes. Thus we have Saint Guillotine, saint of getting back at those who had the audacity to live above us. We have Liberty, the spirit of getting even.

The past stinks
And time travel itself isn't that great. This is no idealized past we're visiting: just a stinky, filthy place where everyone is just as confused about whose side they're on as they will be in 200 years.

Not to mention that it's crawling with insectile counter-agents, brainwashed by high frequency subliminals (seemingly the opposite of the ELF that the nutjob in the park was worrying about a few issues ago). Thank God King Mob has a gun with him that he can shoot them with. Yay, guns!


De Sade
I've always found the Cyphermen's attempts to subvert De Sade interesting. I don't usually associate The Enemy in The Invisibles with temptation (although, now that think of it, a few events down the line call that into question) so much as coercion and repression. But they come close, here.

It's a reminder that De Sade is not JUST a philosopher and libertine, that his drives push him toward something it's hard not to describe as evil. He would never cut a woman open himself, I think, but when it has been done for him? When there's nothing left to do but enjoy the spoils? That calls to him.

We think of the Outer Church as a foot stamping down on deviancy and self-expression. But there is also that element of it that is embodied in The Hunt, the part that revels in saying "We are so above you that morality no longer applies." As much as De Sade's drive toward freedom pushes him to The Invisibles, his drive toward cruelty pulls him to the Church, to worship at the impure altar.

(And speaking of the Church, it really is no surprise that all of the worst elements of the revolution are contextualized as a religion, is it? Remember, kids: College good, church evil!
I'm being facetious, but, like I wrote last time, a college is challenging, often formless, while religion, as detailed in the 5-step mysteries (in the sense of a religious ritual) of the guillotine, is structured, comforting. It appeals to the part of us that wants familiarity and the ability to just follow orders without having to think.)

An apple from the teacher
And meanwhile (25 years later, 175 years ago...) we have Mary Shelley making her way across Europe, at her husband's idealistic insistence, with two sickly children (neither of whom is long for this world, I regret to inform you).

Her journey is the human cost of revolution on a personal scale. A change, made with the best intentions for the good of all, with terrible consequences for the weak and the sick. And with a mysterious traveling companion, who offers wisdom and apples.

I read him as Death, a conclusion that took me a surprising amount of time to come to. He is not hostile to the goals of the Invisibles. But he is also a reminder of the costs. He is with you, when you try to change the world, kindly, offering support, but still taking his due.


Sacrifice
Case in point - Orlando's arrival at the windmill. Dane has been sick for the entire trip, and while it's possible to interpret that as inexperience, it seems more likely that his own psychic warning systems are just kicking in much, much more strongly than the others. And as the guillotine falls in human sacrifice in Paris, so does Orlando's blade fall on Dane's fingers... And like les tricoteuses, he has no intention of stopping with one cut.

In fact, let's reverse the metaphor. Orlando's going to disassemble everyone, as he puts it, bit by bit by bit... So what does that say about the true purpose of St. Guillotine?

Issue Five: Arcadia Part One: Bloody Poetry

The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 5

"Arcadia Part One: Bloody Poetry"

Synopsis
King Mob is in Indonesia, having received new orders for his cell. He watches a traditional wayang puppet show, makes a dedication to the god Ganesh, and then sets out for London via a "shortcut" that takes him through an alternate universe where the Berlin Wall has been rebuilt and the countryside is devastated by war. He spends time with a young mother and her baby, deformed by chemicals released during the fighting, before setting off for London.

Scenes also show the romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley debating on the relative merits of cynicism and idealism. Byron believes that people are driven by base urges and easily controlled, while Shelley asserts that it is the poet's duty to find a higher world and lead people to it. To illustrate his point, Byron takes Shelley to a madhouse where a member of the Invisibles (which the two poets are also revealed to be) has gone mad in the pursuit of such a "perfect world."

Dane McGowan trains in hand-to-hand combat with cell member Boy, who tells him that he was recruited because the cell had recently lost a member. When Dane points out the difficulty of deciding whose side anyone is on in the current conflict (including their own), Boy grimly agrees.

The creature called Orlando speaks to a man in a park, declaring himself to be the Aztec god Xipe Totec. He kills and flays the man, and then, wearing his skin, approaches the man's children.

That night, the cell is gathered for dinner as they wait for King Mob to return. Dane continues to ask questions about the organization, and is told that the group tends to work on its own, although they have worked with someone named "Big Jim Crow" who operates out of Haiti. King Mob arrives and reveals the group's orders: They are to travel back in time to retrieve a member of the order and return him to the present.

King Mob also shows the group a postcard he received. It is of Nicolas Poussin's painting "Et in Arcadia ego" (also discussed by Byron and Shelley), depicting a group of shepherd in an idyllic landscape dominated by a tomb that reads, in Greek, "And in Arcadia, I" as a reminder that death exists everywhere. The card is signed Xipe Totec as a taunting warning from Orlando.

The group drives to a seemingly abandoned windmill, where they begin a ritual to thrust their psychic presences backwards in time to the French Revolution, where their target awaits.


Arcadia
All right friends, initiation is over. It's time for the training wheels to come off.

The first four issues of The Invisibles are told almost entirely from the perspective of Dane McGowan, which is useful, because Dane knows as little about this world as we do. And they were about his education, which meant that he (and we) were getting things explained to us as we went along. The explanations might not always make sense, but they were there. It was a small-scale (okay, actually huge, super-important scale, but humor me) story of one person struggling toward enlightenment.

Well, all that bullshit is over. If Down and Out in Heaven and Hell was about how you prepare yourself to be an extradimensionally attuned warrior magician, Arcadia is about the breakneck, confusing, dangerous experience of actually being one. It's vast in scope, and there is no time for hand-holding. When King Mob tells you we're relocating someone on the spacetime super-sphere, or going surfing on the ontic highway, you're expected to work out what's going on for yourself (and be quick, because Orlando is still coming).

Happily, there's still a little breathing room at the start of this one, as King Mob makes his way back to London through all the myriad ways. So let's get started. (This issue jumps between a lot of different perspectives, so for the sake of clarity, I've given each its own section).


Shadows
So you're chained up in this cave, right? And there's a light behind you, shining on objects. But you can't turn your head to see any of them. All you can see is the shadow the things cast. So you convince yourself that the shadows are the objects, even as you see them blend together and take on new forms. The shadows are your reality, and they're mutable.

King Mob watches a shadow play, somewhere in Indonesia (I have no idea how he got there from last issue - presumably he's on his way back from getting orders at the Academy). And his companion tells him, speaking of the puppeteer: "His job is to make us laugh and cry. Very clever man. The dalang is more than a puppeteer. His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two great armies, but there is no war. There is only the dalang." Maybe I'm over-emphasizing this point, but it's laid out right there in the text, folks. We are not at war. We're just seeing shadows on the wall.

Percy and George
My first few times through the series, I had a lot of trouble with the scenes between Byron and Shelley; they seemed tangential, distracting from the action. But reading them now, I see that they are, essentially a mission statement. We've seen what The Invisibles aren't, the things they oppose, with our trips to Harmony House and our glimpse of The Hunt. But so far, they've only acted in destructive capacities (Killing people and explosions? Fucking brilliant, mate!).

Byron and Shelley are talking about what the Invisibles hope to create - with Shelley as the idealist, dreaming in the sky, and Byron as the cynic, trying to keep things grounded. And without these arguments, The Invisibles is just a story about rebellion, instead of revolution. If Byron is right, and the poets are going to rot in their graves without ever moving the human spirit, we might as well just burn everything down, McGowan-style.

The airy ship of dreams
But idealism is dangerous, too. When we push ourselves to dream impossible new structures for society, reality, we leave ourselves open to being crushed by the task. Our minds can wander so far afield that they can be sidetracked and never return, like the Invisible that Shelley and Byron visit at the asylum.

(Side note: I think this is the first time The Invisible College is referred to by its full name. It's worth noting that the Invisibles style themselves as a place of learning and collaboration, while the Outer Church names itself after a hierarchical, instructive structure)

And he's obsessed with shadows, too, with light and darkness. Like our friend in the cave, he's bound by chains he cannot see.

"Can it be the same hand which plays both white notes and black? My skill is gone. Black wars with white. Keys like chessman." As a dalang, the madman is failing, lost in the illusion of shadows.


"Boy." That's a stupid fucking name for a girl, anyhow.
I've always loved that line, I don't know why. It's a confused kid, getting his ass kicked by a girl, saying a dumb thing, but it's also kind of true, which, knowing the Invisibles, is probably the point.

So let's talk about Boy a bit, as she trains Dane (in a sequence that starts with more shadows fighting on the wall). In the group's current elemental symbolism, she's earth, stability. She's the Elfayed here, the one whose job it is to call bullshit when things get too weird or metaphysical. She answers questions with straight answers, and she teaches Dane that, as great as psychic powers and magic tricks are, survival means you also need yoga, and how to throw a punch. She's the argument that being Invisible isn't just castles in the sky and weirdos in fetish suits. It's normal people getting pushed around for too long and fighting back. And because of that, she's also the one most likely to become skeptical of the cause, when things become too convoluted or confused.

It can be easy to dismiss her as "the boring one," but she's also the one willing to relate to Dane on a personal, human-to-human level, talking about home (in the mystical, Narnia-like world of New York!), and the one who reminds him that part of not going crazy is keeping a sense of humor. Is it any wonder he fancies her?


Gandhi, from that film
While earth seems a good fit for the practical Boy, (and water a good one for Lord Fanny, who lives in boundary conditions and liminal spaces), I'm not surprised that King Mob, as he'll mention in a few issues, isn't really comfortable in the air, "leadership," role. It's not that he's a bad leader, as into his spy-badass role as he is. It's that he seems so much happier when he's out on his own, as a tourist.

We start with another meeting with Ganesh, and a quick reminder that, for KM, gods, whether they be pop musicians or elephants, are just concepts to be adopted and used, not concrete entities.

And then we take a strange jaunt into one of King Mob's shortcuts, into a world where World War III was a reality, where children are born with one beautiful blue eye, where the Berlin Wall is back and bigger than ever. Gideon's attitude here is interesting - at no point does he express pity for the people he meets here. He treats the baby like any baby, he is kind but he doesn't wring his hands about the horrible things that have happened. This is a King Mob I could really like, a walker in strange and distant lands who realizes that, no matter what has been done to them, people are just people.


Orlando
Meanwhile, back in London, we get our first glimpse of the ominous Orlando - in the flesh, as it were.

Orlando, as he tells his victim, is from "the place of the unfleshed." It's not just that he's inherently fleshless - he's not just a creature of shadow - but that he's "un"- fleshed. I read that as a loss of flesh, a shadow that has had the object that cast it stripped away. Information without context, and desperate to reclaim it.

And there's something so creepy about the way he opens his arms to his victims, and the way they seem to walk willingly into his embrace.


Space-time Supersphere
And now the gang's all here, and it's time for the mission: Psychic time travel to the French revolution while being stalked by an unfleshed serial killer with a knife fetish. Boo-yah!

Why a windmill? The only guesses I can offer is that it's an intersection of two circles, one rotating around the other like a prayer wheel (like a mandala). And then, once more, we're looking at the shadow wall. And just because the shadows aren't real, doesn't mean we can't use them. They're as real as the man reading the news on the telly. Feel the shadows, interact with the shadows, step into the shadows. Travel backwards along the shadows... and step back out just in time to see a Frenchman getting his head chopped off.

Next time: Mysteries of the Guillotine

Issue Four: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 3

The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 4

"Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 3"

Synopsis:
Dane McGowan remains euphoric after his previous experiences, but Tom insists that he will soon be dying. He continually reminds Dane that death is nothing to fear, and that he will soon be joining the Invisibles under the code name "Jack Frost." Dane remains ambivalent. Later that evening, Dane ecstatically burns the stolen sports car they have been driving around in, and Tom tells him that tomorrow, they jump.

Tom gives Dane more of the blue mold to smoke, and then leads him to the tower (Dane hallucinates cash and blood flowing out of a sewer pipe, and babbles to the people around him that the city is built on a lake of "blood and sweat and shit."

At the tower, Dane hesitates, saying he does not want to learn magic. But Tom takes his hand, and asks him to trust him. Together, they jump.

Dane falls for a time, and then is suddenly transported to a strange, rural landscape. He immediately sees the solid-colored circle that he saw during his previous "UFO" experience, this time much larger and closer. He flees from it, grabbing a bike he finds and riding away. He eventually comes across a ringed planetoid floating in the sky, the sight of which brings him to tears.

We then see Dane going to an address Tom gave him before the jump, which is seen to be a school. King Mob's cell is there, and they introduce themselves. Ragged Robin is a young woman wearing clown make-up. Boy is a young, tough-looking woman. Lord Fanny is a glamorous transvestite. They are all people Dane has seen during his life on the streets, and he also recognizes them as the fake Hunt that menaced him earlier.

King Mob tells Dane that Tom is dead, and asks him if he wants to join the group, saying it his last chance. Robin senses that enemy agents are about to arrive, and the cell runs. Dane follows them.

Meanwhile, a high-ranking member of the British government contacts someone named Orlando, who appears to have a grudge against King Mob, telling him where to find him and his group. Tom is seen descending into the darkness below the city. As the soldiers of the Outer Church arrive at the school, they find it deserted, except for a pinless pink grenade with the word "Smile" written on it.

Initiation
So, we're still in initiation mode here in Invisibles land - last issue, Dane McGowan cast away the person he was, but it's yet to be seen who he's going to choose to be. And it's still initiation for the readers, too. There are a lot of ideas being seeded here that are going to come up again and again in The Invisibles, so we'd better get used to them now.

Case in point: Tom, telling Dane that he can see the entire shape of his life. Not a single moment, or even a thread running through events, but a shape that comprises everything he ever did.

And that flows quickly into a discussion of the difference between "I've a sadness on me," and "I'm sad," the way that the shapes and structures of our language reinforce and dominate the ways we think.

And Dane is still afraid of death. He's still afraid of the fight, still afraid of choosing a side, because once you've chosen a side, it's possible that you chose wrong. He's still not ready.

Last time, he was trapped in Jack Frost. Today he's Dane McGowan (and that's fine, for a time). But soon, he's going to have to BE Jack Frost, the warrior/sorceror/protector. Not a thing he hides behind, but a thing he is.


Tomorrow we jump
Dane and Tom have been riding around in a beautiful little car. Where'd they get it? Where do you think? Dane's always known how to hijack the system, remember?

And then burn it to the ground. King Mob's barely in the issue, but this scene is as much about him as it is Dane. Explosions! Killing people! Brilliant! But Tom's tired. He's not sad to see one more explosion, but he's ready to go. For Dane (and Gideon) there's always another car, another explosion, another excitement. But Tom knows better. That stuff is fun, but it's not important.


A lake of blood and sweat and shit
I do not think of The Invisibles as a particularly funny series, but the quick jump between Dane saying he's all right, and him being utterly whacked out of his gourd on the blue moss and ugly truth, makes me laugh. As does Tom's line, "I'm his keeper. He wets himself."

And there's probably something to Tom telling Dane to be blue smoke, as they enter the tower. If there's no such thing as blue mold, then it's just Dane getting high on his own mind, isn't it? He's the blue smoke already. So why not embrace it?

Jump!
The view of London from the top of the tower is like a postcard, Tom says. Something you'd give to the sick or the infirm to cheer them up. But Dane's neither of those things, and it's time to give up the comforts of the world. It's time to jump.

So what does it take to be Invisible? It's more than just letting go of yourself. It's more than just seeing the machinery below the world, and the truth about cities. It's looking at the world that you know could keep you fat and happy for the rest of your life, and believing your friend when he tells you there's something much, much more. All you have to do is reject the world... and jump.


Barbelith, again
And it's okay to be scared (it's okay to cry). The end of the world, even if it is just your own world ending in death, is scary, the first time you confront it. It's scary to be born, to cross from one threshold to the next. The unknown is scary, too, when you see it looming like a stop light right in front of you, two-dimensional and solid and strange.

It's okay to run for a bit, to ride your bike and just enjoy the sensation of rushing air, until you can alter your perspective and see that it's not a circle.. it's a sphere. A beautiful planetoid. And when you fall or jump, it's what's waiting to catch you, after you've woken up from the dream that is the world.

Barbelith.

(Digression: Let's talk about the landscape where Dane finds himself after the jump. It's reminiscent of the park where he and Tom threw the Frisbee (a bright red, solid circle) at the start of the issue. And it has a scarecrow, looming in the foreground, and then being blown past. I THINK that might be a representation of the Outer Church and the archons... something designed to frighten and warn, but not truly dangerous. But I'm not sure.)


Learn to become Invisible
And once more we're back in school, and the big exciting spy plot that's been on hold while Jack Frost was being born kicks back into gear. Tom's dead, and we can miss him, but it's not sad. He's gone somewhere else, is all. Woken up. Been born.

And some of this has been a game, of course. Allies dressed as enemies, playing various parts and keeping an eye on our boy. But don't fool yourself: The Hunt is very real, and Orlando is coming. Just because death is no terrible thing doesn't mean the other side won't hurt you and hurt you and hurt you before it's over. And no acknowledgment of false dualities is going to stop Orlando when he's playing with you with his knife.

And Dane's still asking what's real, but I don't think he means it anymore. He already knew: there is no blue moss. There's just you, and the things you can see and do when you believe you can. And when you realize that, when you accept it, that's when you know the truth: you've always known the magic. You've always been Invisible.

And Tom O'Bedlam walks down into the tunnels to see the spires and meet the Harlequin again, and the myrmidons kick down the door of an empty school house, and it's time for another big, fun explosion.

Smile!