Z World (Stories)

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Z WORLD — The old ones had grand and glorious machines. They could fly across oceans. Their sailing vessels filled the skies. They inhabited glittering cities of light. They mapped the stars and sent men into space—but they went mad and destroyed themselves. We are their offspring. Z World is so named as it stands at the end of that old world, faint traces of which can still be seen in our world, in ruins and refuse not yet been reclaimed by nature—its rolling hills, farms, forests and streams. We do not know what lies beyond our shores. Our seafaring vessels are not capable of traversing the globe. Over many generations our people have engaged in battles but nothing like the great wars of the past. We live a peaceful existence. We feel blessed. We share a common language with the old world, with our ancestors; even so, many of their words seem foreign to us and are difficult to decipher. The old ones were capable of great magic. They were able to record and transmit images of themselves across great distances. This art has now been lost. We do have transcripts of these talking pictures along with faded photographs, ragged books and other deteriorating volumes archived in makeshift libraries. Sadly the largest of these libraries recently burned. This is why we have decided to compile and distill from the existing archives a few stories that moved us. We are thinking of future generations, that there will be a record not just of sacred texts, of poets and philosophers (of that we have already made abundant copies), but we wish to produce (using the archives and literary techniques discovered in the books of the old ones) a record of the final months before death and the whirlwind overtook them. 

WHITE NIGHTS (NOVELLA) — Robert Rouan is a kind of Don Quixote with a heroin habit. Strung out and desperate for drugs, Rouan stabs a drug dealer in a scuffle in the North of Paris. He is then locked up in the Santé, an old prison. After rumors spread that Rouan is a spy, he is brutally beaten and falls into a deep coma. Decades later, Rouan awakens to an altered and damaged world, marred by wars and the collapse of the U.S. Government. What is left of America is under quarantine: where life is controlled by monolithic corporations and its inhabitants live in misery. 

"During the day prayer rugs were set down. Over half the inmates in the Santé were Muslims originally coming from Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, West Africa and Morocco, in the last generation or two. Prayers were said throughout Block C five times daily. Many of the inmates studied the Quran. Most of this activity was clandestine; it was not approved of by the prison authorities; catholic chaplains were made available but very few imams were officially sanctioned and made available to the prison population. Located just south of the Sorbonne on the Left Bank, the poets Paul Verlaine and Apollinaire had once been incarcerated behind its towering walls as had members of the French resistance during the second World War. It now housed the assassin, Carlos the Jackal, and an assortment of thugs, petty thieves, murderers, rapists, psychopaths and even transvestites. This was not what Rouan's fellow countryman in the United States imagined when they thought of visiting Paris. It would be hard for them to picture what life was like in that graying fortress, built in the nineteenth century and designed more like a castle than a prison with its turrets and oval passageways..." 

PETER PAN, UFOs & THE MARLBORO MAN (SHORT STORY)