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Author Website for Jess Sebastian

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The Model Ten

January 20, 2021

Joey stepped around the pulse trees, lifting her hair away from the back of her neck for a moment. Behind her, Thea crashed through the underbrush, servos whining to push it forward. Joey watched the large quadrupedal machine catch up to her, and then cock its head. She knew it was a result of a worn bearing in its neck, but found the affectation endearing all the same.

“Not long now,” she said, “Just back through that damn mud.”

It had rained a couple nights before, and hard, washing away part of the dirt packed path. There was almost a perfectly straight demarcation where a rivulet of runoff water had passed. Dust and then sludge. She dropped one filth-caked boot into the muck and then the other. There was an unpleasant sucking sensation with every step. Thea had a harder time of it, the heavy coil it carried pushing it in deeper. Joey walked slowly, pursing her lips. The familiar pitch of Thea’s motors had raised an octave or two. There was little she could do about it. This was the path.

Just over halfway through the ground slurry, Joey heard a loud metallic ping and flinched. It was a sound that she’d come to dread. Thea toppled into the mud, beeping as soon as its center of gravity was misaligned. Joey squished back over to take a look, too tired to give voice to her epithets.

The front left actuator had popped. Again. Ever since the original had blown out a year ago, she’d gone through three replacements. Not one breakdown in ten years and then all at once. The problem was Hab Threes shitty printers. Even when she’d sent over her own schematics, there was no accounting for inferior materials.

Hands slipping in the mud, Joey leaned down and set her shoulder to the underside of Thea’s chassis. With a grunt she pushed herself upward and they limped forward together. Each step was a strain on Joey’s back, and a sharp edge dug into her collarbone painfully.

Finally they made it back to the main road and Joey collapsed onto her back, panting and covered in drying mud. Thea stood unsteadily on three legs, its fourth tucked up against its body.

Joey heard a voice from down the road. “Hey Jojo!” She lifted her head to see Henning jogging towards her. Behind him, Tex moved silently, the discharged coil it carried hardly bobbing at all. “What’s wrong? Its leg go again?”

Joey sat up, and braced for the argument she knew was coming “Yeah.”

They looked at each other, silent save for the wind pushing through the pulse trees and the humming of Thea’s micro-adjustments to stay upright. Joey would wait as long as it took, and Henning knew that. He broke the standoff early.

“You should—”

“I know,” Joey said.

“Why is it such a problem?”

“I like Thea. I know how it works.”

“It’s not working very well right now,” he said. Joey scowled at him, and Henning went on before she could respond. “And don’t be blaming Hab Three for this again. It’s not up to them to keep making custom parts for an antique.”

“Okay then. I don’t blame anyone. It just happened and I’ll fix it before the next run.”

“Joey!”

“What? Why do you care what platform I use? What’s it to you?” She felt the words sting her tongue on the way out. She was tired and frustrated.

“You are being absurd,” Henning snapped back, “Even if I didn’t care about you, I care about the network. One node goes down and—”

“I’m very aware.”

“Are you? Because I think if you were, you’d be a little more concerned about making sure that piece of shit doesn’t shatter a coil on the ground and leave us to hoping the emerge team can get there fast enough.”

Joey didn’t say anything, but she did get to her feet. Henning took a step back and ran his hand through his hair.

“Listen, I’m sorry. Just…if it’s a money thing, I could—”

“It’s not a money thing,” Joey said.

“You are so frustrating! What is it then?”

“We shouldn’t have to pay for them at all.”

“Sure, but we do. Get ov—” He cut himself off. “Whatever. I tried.” He strode away, Tex gliding after him. Its polished head tracked her as it passed, reflecting the afternoon sun. She watched them go, and then looked over Thea. Its yellow paint was brittle and flaking off, dented from a decade’s worth of misadventure. She laid her hand on its tilted head.

“Let’s get you back to the shop.”

Six weeks later something else broke. Some fiddly part deep inside its core popped when Joey went to turn Thea on, followed by a wisp of smoke and an acrid stink. Joey had to call in a favour to get a runner with a day off to cover her route. She also had to promise that their drinks would be free for a month. Joey did not need to mention that her substitution was to be kept from Command — there was already an understanding.

“Just what I meant,” said the gruff woman at the fabricator. “Can’t be fixed.” Joey should really have known her name by now.

“Maybe at Hab Three?” Joey asked.

“They’d have the same problem like as not. Nozzles not set up for the kind of materials you need.”

“What’s the point of a machine that can print everything, if it can’t print anything,” Joey muttered. She cast a worried look at Thea’s open core on the workbench.

“This thing’s working days are over,” the woman said, “It don’t owe you anything.”

“Yeah, thanks anyway.” Joey felt a prickle at the back of her throat. She wracked her brain for any other kind of solution.

“Uh, listen,” the woman spoke up, “I can’t recommend it as a forever solution for running, but if you just wanted it up and at ‘em for some extra help around the house or something…well I hear Hab Six has got some personal printers. You might find someone willing to do the config change there. Probably expensive though.”

“It’s worth a shot! Thank you!” Joey hurriedly started packing Thea’s core back up.

“You really like that thing huh? Can’t say I don’t understand,” The woman gestured to some kind of powertool on the bench beside her, “I’ve had that there for damn near fifteen years. Don’t know what I’d do without it. Don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

“Don’t I know it. Thanks again and take care.”

“Good luck.”

It was late when Joey made it back from Hab Six, freshly printed part tucked safely in her rucksack. She flicked on the lights to her workshop and let out an audible gasp. Thea’s chassis was gone. In its place was a new platform, shiny under the fluorescents. Joey could hear her heart in her ears. There was a card placed on her workbench, and she read it with a shaking hand.

Congratulations! In honour of your many years of service, Command has gifted this new platform to you free of charge. Below that was a handwritten addendum. Let us know when you have some time to take a couple promo shots. The news eats up that kind of thing.

Joey looked back at the machine. It was a Tessellated Enterprises Model Ten. The same one Henning had. She hurried across the floor to the shop communicator, giving the interloper a wide berth. A quick stab and Henning’s comm was ringing.

“Hello Joey,” he said. His voice was clear. He hadn’t been sleeping and must have been waiting for her to call.

“You ratted me out,” she said.

“I saw someone else on your run. I helped you!” he responded, sounding rehearsed. “You were playing with everyone’s lives. It was a mistake waiting to happen.”

“It was my mistake to make.”

“I just wanted to help! Joey I—” She hung up on him.

She stood in front of the Model Ten, stuck in its dramatic pose for a photo she would never take

***

When Henning next saw Joey it was a few weeks later at their usual crossing point, on the way back from charging their respective nodes. She was a ways down her path, half-hidden by some trees. Her Tex glided into view behind her, looking incongruous and unfamiliar as her companion. Henning and Joey stared at one another for a long while.

“Jojo!” Henning eventually called out. He moved forward to meet her, losing sight of her momentarily between the pulse trees.

When he arrived at the clearing she’d been standing in, she was gone, having left no footprints. Her Tex — with its advanced distributed balancing procedure and individually actuated footpads — had left none either.

Embedded Heart Released!

April 23, 2020

Embedded Heart is FINALLY out! The all caps are indicative of a laborious process, since it was written all the way back in 2016, shortly after Iconic Space. The delay was multitude, starting with the arduous task of assembling attempts at traditional publishing, and even when that was set aside, it was ages to do editing and re-writing. And then was the treacly process of finding a cover artist (though Steffi knocked it out of the proverbial postal code) and muttering through the indesign layout process. All to arrive right in the middle of The Event!

Still it is here, and it was fun to work on the actual writing parts, distant as they seem. There is adventure and romance and a tasteful number of butt jokes. (A fraction of my capabilities were it not for restraints like “plot” or “cohesion”.) It is fairly escapist as well, which is good timing, and I hope it’ll be enjoyed!

The Dumb Decade: Ten Years Without a Smartphone

January 5, 2020

or: How I Never Stopped Worrying and Haven’t Come to Love the Bomb

It was never a decision until it was. It wasn’t about anything until it was about a whole bunch of anachronistic personal concerns.

In 2009 I withdrew a refurbished nokia E71x from its uniformly brown box, having just purchased it for one hundred dollars at an excess cargo store. I did not know then that it would be my communicative conduit for the entire next decade, nor that it would eventually become a kind of symbolic totem. A physical extension of futile concerns directed at Consumer Data Privacy, Corporate Ecosystem Control, Global Manufacturing Ethics, and Guided User Experience.

Seems like a lot of connections to have for something that still boasts about its blazing fast 3G every time it is turned on.

When its temporary plastic screen protector was still intact, my phone would not have looked too out of place. In 2010 the handheld personal computing revolution was still in its relative infancy, and the iPhone was the undoubted leader of the charge. However, it was still just enough of a status symbol that the various X, Plus, Pro and Max designations were unneeded to secure it above the filthy digits of the average consumer. Android was also in early days, infamous for being the dark-horse choice of those already exasperated with the ubiquity of apple’s broad marketing.

There was not an absolute consensus is the thing. No sea of shiny rectangles. There were cobalt blue sliders clicking open to reveal their secreted keyboards, next to chunky grey flip phones. Emojis were still emoticons and text messages were one hundred and sixty characters long.

I don’t position this as some sort of lost paradise, the navel gazing, nostalgia tinted, halcyon days of a bygone youth.

It’s just somewhere I never left.

It wasn’t intentional at first, since the nokia was easy to continue having. It never broke and it never slowed down under an onslaught of obsolescence-minded updates. Freshly graduated and frugally minded it was a non-decision to just keep it until it ceased functioning.

That wouldn’t happen, and I kept on keeping it. Even when friends would offer an old (yet vastly newer) phone, I would give them a hopefully graceful refusal. It became an active, continuing “lifestyle choice.” Maybe it was a kind of techno-luddite elitism, or a resistance to change for the sake of it. I honestly didn’t think about it all that much at first. It just was my phone. I had a phone, and it did all the things I wanted a phone to do. Nearly all the things a phone could do.

Those are no longer the same thing. The nokia is now so far into being technologically deficient that there are minor social consequences to keeping it. Its inability to display emojis was disastrous for a message received with the intention of being preceded by a winky face. This simple pictorial aimed to lift the emotional tone on its broad shoulders but was instead neatly excised, allowing the brutal truth of the text to land unsoftened. Similarly, a friend once messaged that he would not be able to make it to the previously planned games night, followed by a picture of his newborn son. Pictures also do not display, meaning my return message of “Oh, that’s unfortunate,” was perhaps the incorrect sort of response.

There is a literal disconnect between my existence and the app-focused striving of every business, from banks to parking garages. I have never ubered an uber or insta’d a gram. I would say this is similar to being of a different era, but grandparents worldwide have proven proficient enough at leveraging social media to share pictures. I’m offline the moment I step out of my apartment, which precludes me from checking my feed when waiting in line, or from retrieving a fact to bolster an argument. I’ll sit awkwardly across from someone checking their notifications, unable to even politely pretend to do the same convincingly for more than a moment.

Even the basic structure of modern communication has moved past me. I still treat texts as if they were an email. Formatted paragraphs that tick away at the now ornamental character counter. The messages I receive back come fast and thick, understandable since the interface of the other person is that of a bubbly chat window. Heaven forefend that two of these ping-pong conversations happen at once as they march into my sole inbox as a mess of unthreaded messages.

So many little difficulties and literally no barriers to having it replaced for “free.” Still, it was my phone for the decade. And as twentytwenty begins it remains so. How is my dogged insistence against an upgrade any different from the cyclical process of finding a new cultural boogeyman? Isn’t any excuse I make in favour of keeping it just another rationalization from a too-earlily ossified mind, justifying a bone-rattling fear of change as actually just being prudent, thank-you-very-much?

Perhaps so. I certainly feel at odds with the mechanics of the modern internet—old man yells at cloud computing. Like Netflix’s insistence on shuffling the icons and order of shows in “My List.” Or when it tries to autoplay the next episode but I want to digest it for a hot second and hang out with the credits, so I sigh and find the setting to turn that off, but then it still zoops the ending of a show into an stupidly small box and tries to autoplay a trailer for another thing. And all this even though tuca and bertie still has jokes to tell. It’s a netflix original™, they have to know there is still a joke. Don’t take that joke from me!

And (hear the sound of a wooden box that once held soap being dragged into position over asphalt), let’s take a moment to yell about how the same feeling crackles at corporations. They cloak themselves in whimsy while advancing their monetary interests at all (underpaid human) cost. amazon’s sanitized to the point of parody commercials about a delivery driver bringing joy via hand presented Christmas gifts contrasts comically against the grim reality of warehouse injury and carefully deniable courier disasters. The likely contents of that package are a NIMBY’s top tech gift, an amazon ring! You know, the ring that has poor cybersecurity since it’s not there to be useful but to collect data that amazon can sell to cops.

These frustrations kind of map onto what the smartphone is too. They are carefully engineered to increase engagement, the subject of millions of dollars of design and flow consultation. Creating patterns among users and then harvesting them as grist for a machine designed to turn information into advertising. It’s an accepted reality, a trade off among a certain generation, and not considered at all by the next.

But it still unavoidably irks me. This might be is what it is like to see social upheaval, and to be ill equipped to deal with it. (At least my dislike is directed upward at the tech monarchy rather than at oh, say…gender nonconformists.) I know that were I to start anew with a modern device, I’d struggle against its inherent design maybe only for a short while. Likely it would not be too long before I gained competency with typing on a touchscreen, and most of the bloatware and tracking could be uprooted with a rootkit. However it would still feel like a demotion.

Purposely built, single use, equipment is what I have a great affinity for. GPSes, shoes, mp3 players, backpacks and monitors; all things I want designed for durability and usability. And that’s something I’ve found in my phone. It does its limited tasks, and has done so for ten years. I still like it.

I’m no stranger at clinging to maybe meaningless crusades, (not eating meat, trying to get traditionally published, not causing a rube goldberg of suffering at every step of my consumerism), and so, in the dawn of the new decade, I’m still carrying this phone with me.

I don’t know long it will be viable, or what I’m going to do next, but for the time being—as my common refrain goes to those first marvelling at its anachronism—at least my battery lasts for a week.

Iconic Space Released!

January 1, 2020

Iconic Space is now out! As of…May 22nd 2018. An adherence to some imagined sense of order means making an announcement post one-and-a-half years after makes a kind of sense. At any rate it is, or was, out.

Iconic Space is a story about the clash between identities. About what happens when the ideas that we tell ourselves about who we are start to conflict with the base nature that others have held close to themselves. Very much a product of certain events in late 2016 when I was writing it. Exhausting to consider at this point perhaps, but it’s also got a harrowing desert journey, a bunch of mind-melding psychic powers, and a spaceship. It’s also a much better book than my first one!

Short Stories

May 29, 2017

Two of my short stories have been posted on Commuter Lit!

The Whole Truth – (About identity and purpose)

aaaand

Star Power – (About identity and purpose…in space!)

 

 

I.I.I. Released!

July 12, 2016

September 10th marks the release of my first self-published novel, Independent Investigators Inc. Maybe not literally, since it’s been secretly available to buy from various places for a little while, but since I get to pick, that will be the official start date for the paperback!

It’s been a long time coming, and my initial planning document is dated November 1st, 2013. And that does not include the months of gestating the idea. Since then I’ve learned so much about writing, rewriting, rewriting again, formatting, printing, last minute rewriting, and production.

So, Independent Investigators Inc. It’s a story filled with lovely contradictions. There are serious murders and mysteries to go along with them, but at the same time there is an Underwear themed gang lord who has a metal plunger as a weapon. It’s about getting to the bottom of a convoluted conspiracy in a futuristic city that sprawls across three levels, but also furtively about identity and one man’s internal struggle to define himself as something other than his hobbies.

It was a great pleasure to write—telling the tales of Louis, Janne, Milena, Dee, Frederick, Hild#, and Skivvies Karl (which one is the undies one I wonder?)—and I hope it will be as satisfying for you to read!

[Function: Introductory Post]

July 11, 2016

Okay, let’s get started.

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