Jace’s murder, serenity disrupted, was almost six months ago. When it happened, Inger panicked and escaped to the abandoned Buckskin Mine. It’s been quiet at the mine since.
Meanwhile, Damian is busy. He’s been at the Asset Renewal Unit for a similar six months. He is usually ahead of the pace. His place in the flow is triage. Mikako and Tavro units come back from leased service in better or worse condition. The Tavro units tend to be beaten up more because of the physical labor they are assigned to.
This went a bit viral on the Intra-Hive inside the Asset Renewal Unit–a Tavro Unit picked up a car and started walking to a tire shop after being asked, “fix my tire.” The renter watched as the Tavro picked up the car and started walking down the street, “WAIT! What about me!?” The Tavro stopped, turned its head to look back at the renter, “Get in.” Get in? Where? A little impatient, “Get in the car.” Weird. So the renter rode in the car as the Tavro walked to a nearby tire store.
There is Always a Trick
Damian has a gift for finding the bugs and breaks in a system. There is a network of doors that transport you across long distances just by walking through. Before him the doors were limited to a few locations in Richmond, VA. Then he found it and had an issue. Damian wanted to go where he wanted, no restrictions. So, he hacked it. After the hack Damian could use the door network to go anywhere he wanted.
Some secrets aren’t well behaved. They escape. Damian’s hack of the door network went viral. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry is gleefully walking through doors to their bucket list of destinations. Inger commutes to her bar back job at the Paradise Casino from Buckskin Mountain with a networked door.
Damian thinks of himself as smarter than your average robot. He won against a caged transport technology. It only allowed access to friends of the powerful. He believes his little revolution is unnoticed and unchained. It is noticed and quietly chained.
Pushed Messages
Damian has an unrequited fixation with Inger. Before him, Charlie crashed at her Stewart Street house. He was the perfect man for her. That’s what Mom said. Which meant Charlie was the perfect nightmare for Inger. After she kicked Charlie out messages appeared on her screens even when they were powered off. Scary.
I left that detail unexplained when I wrote it. Just one of those Twilight Zone echoes in this space. Then I started planning a filled-out “Inger’s Finger” I needed some things. Already, before starting up again, I had a Cadillac Escalade abandoned in front of my house. That’s IRL. What kicks the Escalade into the world of the novel is the amputated finger.
So we are not in Kansas anymore. This world of the novel has screens that can be controlled from afar and show messages. Oh. Something else I needed: Damian. The fiction I like is classic. It looks back to Greece, Rome and Asia.
Old Story
My world is tragic and crazy. The blog is as absurd as I can make it. It began over a decade ago when the shouting over orthodoxy was at a peak. So between a good story and provable fact, the good story wins. Meaning I lean into spectacle and absurdity with the stories I tell.
Hollywood is in a placating mood. Hero’s can’t actually win. Bad guys can’t actually lose. The protagonist has a stain on his character and the antagonist has his good days. Even better if the characters are multicultural and gender absurd. I hate it.
So with “Inger’s Finger” things are clear. Inger is the hero and Damian is the problem. His intent is familiar to abuse victims, “if I can’t have you no one can.” Dude. She said, “no.” But perps who say that don’t give up easy. Damian means to win Inger.
The Charlie Connection
Charlie went through Ophie, who he dated before making an idiot of himself on a weekend in Atlantic City. Then Inger’s fam thought he’d be the perfect beaux for her. Which made him the perfect, “no.” After that he turned into an anxious soy boy afraid that zombies were real and he needed a large armory to defend himself against them. Thus the Goochland Farm.
Damian was pitched to Inger as rebound from Charlie. Swing and a miss. Charlie got let into Stuart Street because it was said that without Inger he’d be destitute, sleeping under bushes and eating canned cat food. So she took pity on the guy and let him crash in her basement. Mistake.
Because Damian was the guy who met Inger in Palo Alto hours after she ran from her internship in a panic. Call it a panic attack, a schizoid fugue, whatever. By the time she arrived in the homeless camp she had no purse, no phone, no wallet so no id or money cards or cash. In a few minutes she’d gone from first world rising to third world desperate. Hello Damian.
Not
It didn’t take long for Inger to come out of her fugue. And . . . well . . . shit. How the fuck is she supposed to eat and sleep? She went back to the public trash can where she dumped everything. Gone. Damian at that point, was living in a Palo Alto homeless camp. He had an engineering internship at a tech startup. So status and money were in the pipeline. Just not right now.
Right now it was butane camp stoves, freeze dried meals and a cheap Walmart four man tent, sleeping bag and duffle bag. Which was more than Inger had once she started to calm down. It was after work hours so the recovery process wouldn’t be possible until the next day. And . . . tbh . . . she was coming down. So right now food and sleep were top of mind, “got anything to eat?”
He did—Dehydrated Mushroom Pho. Damian knelt outside his tent, flicking the butane stove to life. “Want it hot?” he asked, holding out the pouch. Inger didn’t answer. She reached, snatched the pho from his hand, tore the seal with her teeth. The scent of dried shiitake and star anise hit the air. She sat cross-legged, chewing—no spoon, no water, no ceremony. Damian watched, unsure if he’d just been insulted or initiated. She didn’t look at him. Didn’t speak. Just chewed.
Ambiguous Shelter
Damian set up near the skate ramp, early enough to claim the grill and table before the regulars drifted in. A tarp went up between the grill post and a dead pole, tied tight, corners weighted with gear. On the table: a stove, a mug, a few meal pouches. He wiped the surface twice, then let it be.
Inside the tent behind the ramp is a mat, a bag, a notebook. The space stayed clean enough to go unnoticed, messy enough to be left alone. The stove clicked, flared, settled into a low blue flame. He filled a tea kettle with water from a five gallon water jug. Then poured more water into a small pot for the freeze dried Pho and set it on the stove to boil.
Two mugs, two tea balls filled with loose Oolong Tea. Inger sat at the picnic table watching him work. The tea kettle was just below a boil so he pulled it from the stove and filled the two mugs with hot water, “tea?” Not really, but it’d be rude to refuse. Inger sipped the tea, “thanks.”
Nice to Meet You
“You got a name?”
“Inger”
“That’s it? No family name?”
“Inger Amelia Warrick. My family calls me Amy. I hate that name. Call me Inger.”
“Ok, Amy.” Jerk.
Inger chewed the uncooked Pho, its shiitake dust a faint echo of Palo Alto’s chaos years ago, when she was still Ingrid Amelia Warrick—Richmond’s polished “Amy.” Back then, a Silicon Valley internship at a Hive analytics startup had her surfacing “approved” data for social scores. One day, a coworker’s smile—small-town Virginia, harmless—ignited a 2016-style firestorm. “RAPE!” she’d screamed, half-believing the viral outrage, ripping her blouse in a fugue.
She fled to a homeless camp, tossing her purse—ID, cards, phone, keys—into a trash bin. Gone by the time she circled back, after-hours offices shuttered. Enter Damian: an electrical engineer intern, all butane stoves and sly grins under a skate-ramp tarp. “Got anything to eat?” she’d asked, raw and desperate. He’d offered Pho and Oolong, not Mr. Right, but Mr. Right Now. She’d left him behind, his “no” ignored, his obsession kindled.
Now, post-Jace’s murder, hiding in Buckskin Mine’s shadows after fleeing Richmond’s bloody alley via a networked door, her screens betrayed her. Unplugged tablets flickered: “Amy, I’m still here.” “Jace was a warning.” Damian’s “mge.dsk/inger” handle, born in Palo Alto’s mesh, exploited the Hive’s unsecured nodes, surfacing taunts like riot graffiti. His hack—love twisted into code—rode the unrest’s cover, kiosks burning over oppressive scores. Inger wasn’t Amy’s ghost anymore. Her finger traced the screen’s edge, plotting to crack his game before the Hive’s chains snapped shut.
.