~ x-post of my Writing Battle short fiction stories; here is the first, my first Writing Battle piece, a 2000-word story using my existing character of Exen Excelsior from my past Laserwatch pulp fiction series. It is a sci-fi tale with a message about art in the 22nd century. Below you will find my intro & trio of parameters — Genre: ESPIONAGE | Setting: ART EXHIBIT | Character: DJ
Dylan’s intro: My story is pulpy and utilizes an existing character from some old stories of mine – who uses a multiform ‘laserwatch’ capable of solving most serious problems. The character of Exen Excelsior is primarily an exercise in *absolute confidence* wrapped in a fun-loving attitude inside of an action hero to rival James Bond or Ethan Hunt. Hope you enjoy my story!
DJ Excelsior and the Museum of Stolen Wealth
Exen Excelsior was never one to worry much about the odds.
He was like Han in that regard; you must never tell him the odds. Not because it would discourage him, but he’d mock you for it.
Exen overlooked the exhibits through the glass dome. A night wind cut over the rooftop. He repositioned himself for entry, carrying the slack of his tied harness perched upon his sneaksuit’s slick shoulder. Exen glanced down at his watch and blinked twice to start the ten-thousand-second clock ticking, then set it to one on the dot and activated the micro-laser to cut a man-sized circle into the glass. He was hitting the Omega sector to start his crusade, furthest from Dogma and least protected as a result. Ultra-armed SuperCops would be here in an hour or two at the soonest. All Exen had to do was gather his playlist before then and make his escape. Easy sleazy, sublime and squeezy.
For once, the odds were actually in his favor.
Exen saw it as a clear sign that his mission was true.
***
As Exen repelled down into the central atrium, he wheeled the outermost circle of his watch for three clicks. His whole body became shrouded in a cybernetic laser-mesh, only partially visible to the naked eye. The airborne infrared sensors from the facility interior, its first line of defense after the windows and walls, soon after graced his bottom and made no fuss at all.
Exen descended the final meters to the ground floor, then departed from his rope and left it hanging for a small reach. He dropped in a roll and donned his trinocular goggles for a multiview of subatomic readings. The black catsuit, with custom fit neo-tabis and toe-socks, protected him from silent alarms. Exen overviewed the museum’s rich space.
Upon the far walls were paintings, originals from the Old World. On the nearer walls were more modern conceptions, absconded from estates and formerly private collections throughout Nero’s purged districts. In the floor space were columns with glass cubes and spheres, each of them housing small to mid-sized artifacts. At the corners of the room were the most grandiose and real estate-demanding displays — the sculptures. They were mostly intact. Some looked as though they were wheeled right in from the past.
Exen took a deep breath and steadied himself for the work ahead.
He moved first to the sculpture of Donatello, the ninja turtle with the purple mask. Exen hit the side button on his watch two times in quick succession. The two-nanometer Liquid-State Drive (LSD) activated on the underside of his watch; out of the jolting second hand cast a continuous beam, colored in crimson. The LSD laser shifted its shape to encompass its target, coming in waves of varying length and width as it scanned over the granite crenellations of the mutant amphibian wielding a bō and best known for his extraordinary brain power.
Donatello was Exen’s favorite turtle, a fellow technopunk and kindred spirit.
Next, Exen scanned the other marble sculptures of Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson, and Buzz Lightyear; then he moved on to the statuettes of simurghs and devis and kami, handcrafted artifacts recovered from worlds over. His LSD absorbed them all as artistically-rendered three-dimensional models featuring detailed material and reconstruction schematics. He then moved to the room’s perimeter, shining his laser over Van Gogh and Rexpo, Daarken and Banksy originals on the vast wall canvases. All were taken from retro museums.
There was no excuse for all this hoarded art, Exen thought. There must be no forgiveness for such unconscionable thefts of such soulful creations. For his next show, Exen was planning a totally retro theme. Everything would be 21st century but reshuffled and remixed to perfection. He’d return this work to the hearts and minds of the world, with perfect reconstructions, one way or another.
Exen entered the east wing of the museum. There were shelves filled with LPs and cassettes and CDs; on the walls hung framed records of silver, gold, and platinum. Here un-bellowed the halls of music, where songs came to die. Every one of these devices stored the decidedly final copy of each record. The World.Gov first confiscated the servers of the major music streaming platforms, dumping them all into the Pacific Ocean. Then the Men In Black (MIBs) got really clever: they fanned out into industry channels, the clubs and stadiums and even the artists’ houses themselves to gather the remainder. No private mp6 file or FLACK track could be left behind to be copied, reproduced, or retransmitted. Of course, many musicians started to recreate their classic songs and albums using their own memories as the transfer mechanism. That was one such inception of the purges — of artists and collaborators, their lives grown forfeit for their numerous mind-crimes.
Such was the day that Exen Excelsior turned over his mask and became a spy, a rebel, and a disc jockey — all in one.
“Let’s see,” Exen murmured. He glided across the floor of light panels and vintage concert flyers. He ran his fingers over Bowie and Dylan albums at the fore, angling his wrist for the laser to capture every crenellation on the LP, saving its inner musicianship for his LSD. He nabbed their discographies, of which select songs would herald the beginning of his next 24-hour megastream. But he needed individual albums and other tracks, in other genres, to round out the listening experience. Twenty-two minutes left. Exen worked fast, rushing over to the proper alphabetical zones of the library to scan seven more favored artists and albums of his: 1) King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King, 2) Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will, 3) Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory, 4) Metallica – Master of Puppets, 5) Paramore – After Laughter, 6) Nas – Illmatic, and 7) Tool – Lateralus.
Exen skipped away from the halls of music and rolled into the library. There was a towering, two-story spiral staircase next to every shelf. The collection was more massive than he’d anticipated. Paperbacks were housed in the low-lying shelves; hardbacks and leatherbounds rowed inside of the main shelves. Four of them in all, with the exterior walls stacked high with literary treasures to rival Alexandria. When the World.Gov exiled libraries from public life in the middle of the 21st and deleted vast swaths of e-book archives, “The Second Burning” is what the world took to calling it, or B-Day. It all happened faster than most could admit. Practically overnight, the world’s most important texts were burned to cinders and ashed into the dustbin of history. Except for in “Museums of Wealth” like this one, where exclusive access to books was sealed behind a paywall of just $499 per week as a Library Subscriber.
Exen moved fast, knowing the Dewey Decimal System like the back of his hand. Given he had to take each book, open it, and flip the pages before his watch’s laser-reader, Exen had little time to spare. He bagged twenty-four keystone books, sure to pick some of his most beloved. Exen aimed his laser at Kafka and King and Shelley and Barker and Woolfe and Clarke and Jackson and Herbert and Hesse and McCarthy.
What a wonder a book is, Exen thought. Melding minds and transforming souls with nothing more than marks on a tree. It only took a single glance, a few minutes of reading thereafter, to completely transport yourself into the psychic time and place of the author’s choosing.
“Books are magic!” Exen giddily shouted to the empty museum.
He moved with grace to exit the library and enter the cinema. Yawning forth before him was an IMAX screen shielded on either side by towers of DVDs, Color-Rays, and various sizes of film reels. They stacked high and represented one of the greatest selections of cinema ever assembled. The Omega Museum of Wealth that Exen currently walked was chosen as the flagship locale for cinema, whereas its collection of traditional art, music, books, and other pieces were auxiliary locales for their other respective flagships throughout Nero’s greater metropolitan area.
Hardcore cinephile Exen Excelsior hardly knew where to begin. He glanced around at the various sections of the wall, each interconnected by steel stairwells not unlike the fire escapes on urban apartments. Dramas, Comedies, Actions, Horrors, Westerns, Romances. So many pictures, so little time. He had about twenty minutes left before authorities would be here with their own laz-guns.
Exen grasped discs and unspooled reels, nabbing films by Ford and Capra, Kurosawa and Kubrick, Coppola and Scorsese, Woo and Miyazaki and Linklater and Costner and Nolan, among others. This was a faster process so the DJ saboteur moved quickly, pocketing over one hundred different movies into the memory of his laserwatch. As he did, Exen Excelsior could not help but reflect on the reality of these films’ effects on his life path.
What was cinema other than an alternative audiovisual odyssey into the human condition?
What was art other than a panacea for the forced presence of any individual time, place, or person? The art of cinema allowed one to visit other realities. By removing them from public view, one effectively took away the heatsink of an entire generation’s anomie.
Exen clicked his watch to the three o’clock hour, where he smithed takes for his audio log journal. He spoke in a pensive yet ecstatic tone of equal parts elegance and potency:
“Life. Life spits us all out into a thresher. Left to our devices, we scramble to survive. In philosophical terms, we are thrown — abandoned to harsh fates we must struggle to ascertain, let alone triumph over. All in all, art helps us to do such things. This, among other reasons, is why I chose to become a DJ — to spread the good wyrd on the ways in which we could live. Ad infinitum, movies and music and books and stories were other chances. Compounding choices. Different fates. To view them was not only to enjoy the pleasure of a satisfying creation, but to learn and experience and flow from one reality to the next. I, Exen Excelsior, have chosen this path to prove that the world is not over and never would be, despite such regimes of artless tyranny that we now endure. There are other ways that we could – and should – go.”
As he scanned the 2000s, his rooftop sensors flagged the presence of a ten-man death squad of SuperCops, armed with M8s and smart-lazers. There was no more time. The catalog of Dreamcast games in the final wing of the Omega Museum of Wealth would have to wait for next time. Exen made internal promises to return for Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, Phantasy Star Online, Slave Zero, and all the rest of the games for the world’s best forgotten console.
Exen ran back to the central atrium. He checked his watch; they were certainly early. He cranked the central ring to high noon, priming some nouveau lasers of his own. The SuperCops were already breaching the southern and western wings; through the various laser bugs he’d left in the pieces he’d lifted, Exen could hear commands to secure rooms, cover corners, and shoot to maim first and foremost.
“Ah, they want me alive,” Exen said. “Who would dare such devilry? Probably want to make an example out of me to the public.”
Exen’s heart thumped with a forbidden countering desire. He wished to make an example out of them. But here tonight he was outmanned and outgunned. There would be time enough for larger productions later. He set his watch to its most escapist, electromagnetically-propulsive setting. He spoke into the heat of his first burgeoning livestream as an outlaw DJ with the voice of a showman:
“Howdy lil lasers, today I am going to show you how to escape a ten-man death squadron of SuperCops with only your handy-dandy laserwatch, a rappelling rope, a strong grip, and a sharp mind.” ~
Thresholds of Transformation 