Several years ago one of the cracked mirror reflections of a mysterious minister of slack known in certain spiral corridors as Cardinal Sin came up with a list of story titles and announced to his virtual online classroom that we could pick a title and then write a story about it. There were at least thirty titles to choose from, and the one I liked the most was Speed Demon.
It just had this ring to it. In my mind one of the first things it conjured was Rat Fink in his hot rod going God knows how many mph with his great big slimy tongue lolling out of his mouth. I almost immediately thought of it as a tattoo, for some odd reason. Most of the titles in the list the Cardinal came up with had something to do with high velocities. FTL was one of them. So was Survivor's Guilt.
The story formed itself in layers working their way out from some of these core concepts. I thought of a guy who loved to skateboard as a teen but now works as a service engineer in a future where travelling hundreds of miles in a short time has been enabled by antigravity jumpsuits. And not much else has changed, except that the main character likes to drop up into the sky on nights when the Aurora Borealis is out in plain sight. He aims to launch high above it to see if it's still visible from that angle. Maybe it'll disappear like a rainbow around the bend.
I wanna make my hero a likeable guy and everything, so I settle on naming him Jud Roth, after the Big Daddy himself, Ed Roth who created the Rat Fink character as a sort of nemesis to Mickey Mouse. So anyhow, Jud's older now so he doesn't really skate anymore, but at least he's jumping into the mesosphere for a lazy dip before dropping back down. Sure he used to be the fastest back in the day when he was a kid. And now he's about to break the all time world wide human speed record.
This image was prompted by AI algorithms and the words "man in power suit falling through spinning vortex in space" with the key words "gravitational lensing" tossed in, for good measure.
Now if that don't look like a dog in some tracksuit skateboarding out of some graffiti vortex or funhouse of mirrors, I don't know how but that's a dude on a skateboard. Never mind that my character (Jud) used to love trick skating or what not, He’d sprung for a tattoo of a Rat Fink Comix style skate punk, with red veined eyes bugging out of his head and drooling tongue lolling out of his mouth, wearing spiked leather pants while riding a skateboard into a spinning vortex. He had it inked right between his shoulder blades.
So even though I didn't go with this image for my story, I've put it up as the Freezine banner art for the moment, as well as here showcased on Eyeseat. I think what I'll do is rather than keep one fixed image to represent Eyeseat, I'll just keep switching out the Banner Art and put it instead of title and description so that it shows up on mobile devices automatically. So I figured Jud would have a counterpart on a neighboring exoplanet, which is where our man I'dchii K'riccian steps in, with his nine foot long wings and his blood ancestry to some angels which Gurdjieff wrote about.
The way the tall and slender Birdmen of Kiriick became, in a sense, the true protagonists of my story may just go to show how I've constructed some of my sand castles from a sense of inversion. Focusing on the electromagnetic aspects of the story and the fact that birds experience magnetoception made writing Speed Demon a real challenge for me. How would I fulfill it's silent plea to deliver unbelievable speed, and what's so demonic about it anyhow? Little did I know at the outset how much resonant irony would fall into place beneath the shadow of the title.
Here is yet another iteration having used the exact same sequence of text prompts I used for the last image. I've really come to associate this one with Jud's Fall even more, as a sort of abstract realtime rendering, if you will. He's twisting over falling fast, perhaps only captured in bodily blur by a lightning quick shutterbug camera, but whatever the case may be, I cropped the above section and adjusted its brightness and shadows along with some other minor modifications to the color, temperature and hue.
This has been an impromptu recapitulation of a singular aspect about my story Speed Demon. I leave it here to rest in Eyeseat for posterity.
