Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero, edited by D.F. Lewis

“And now for something completely different.” In Cone Zero, a Nemonymous anthology/magazine from Megazanthus Press, the authors remain unassigned to their stories pending the next edition (or some other future revelation). Even the editor is veiled in anonymity. For your further confusion, there are four (count ‘em, four) stories titled “Cone Zero” which I have labeled one through four according to the order in which they appear in the table of contents. Regarding the title of this issue, there appears to be an infinity sign after “Nemonymous,” but I have no idea how to produce that on this computer, so just pretend it’s there. Actually, a little Internet sleuthing reveals that this is really Nemonymous 8, the eight perhaps having fallen down to become infinity, and the editor is D. F. Lewis. Also, the author’s names are listed on the website (Colleen Anderson, Stephen Bacon, Dominy Clements, David M. Fitzpatrick, John Grant, Jeff Holland, Neil James Hudson, Kek-W, A.J. Kirby, Bob Lock, Sean Parker, Eric Schaller, S.D. Tullis, and Grant Wamack), if you want to play literary detective and try to match them to their stories.

One of the interesting features of many anthologies is that there is generally some sort of theme, and it’s fun to see how the various authors interpreted that theme. Remembering back to high school geometry, a cone is more than just a round, pointy thing. It spreads out in two directions, somewhat like an hour glass. Two round, pointy things balanced one atop the other, mirror images, each potentially running from zero to infinity. So maybe “cone zero” would be the point, the narrow spot, both beginning and end, depending on which way you look at it. It’s the point of transition from one half to another, so could stand for the transition from reality to something else—fantasy, dreams, maybe madness.

In “The Fathomless World” the Tall Man inadvertently interrupts a group of Gawkers in the process of creating…something, they couldn’t tell what. Their concentration is broken and their creation destroyed. Furthermore, he has cut and damaged a tree branch. For these unspeakable crimes, he is immediately banished into the Fathomless Building, a shifting maze of bland, neutral colors but some slight variation in texture.

Time has no meaning here, nor does the exile require food or drink; he merely wanders for a vast, undetermined amount of time, longing for his world of light and colors, seeking the way out. Finally he glimpses a shadow where no shadow has been before, and so he finds the door, the exit point. But this is not the way back to his dimly remembered world. It leads to a frozen place of white on white, with only the palest hint of green and blue to distinguish ice from snow.

Even here he persists, seeking some escape. And when he feels he has exhausted all avenues of exploration, does he give up to lie down and die? No, this paragon of persistence instead begins to carve the ice into all the remembered shapes that still linger in his mind. If he can’t have his old world, he’ll create a new one. He is, it’s suggested, quite mad at that point, but madness can fuel creativity.

I can’t say what the author intended in this story. Perhaps it was just an exercise to follow the “conic section” of perception from richness through diminishing sensory input to the “zero” point of the “cone” and back out again. Infinity to nothingness to infinity. But to me it also speaks of the indomitable human spirit that will not give up so long as there is breath in the body.

“The Point of Oswald Masters” is a rather pointed satire of the World of Art. Art, of course, is not about making things. It’s about concepts and having other people make things for you while you, the flamboyantly famous artist, bask in the glory.

In this instance, the famous-for-being-famous Oswald Masters has envisioned an installation piece that consists of six cones, each a foot shorter than the adjacent one, until you get down to the sixth cone, which has zero height, zero radius, and zero volume. The perfect cone. You might be reminded of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and presume the sixth cone doesn’t actually exist. But the author doesn’t settle for this obvious conclusion. Indeed, the cone does exist, becomes a bone of contention between the artist and the craftsman who actually made it, and—are you ready for this?—turns out to be sharp enough to become a murder weapon.

Even if I hadn’t been exposed to similar absurdities when my son was studying for his BFA in sculpture, I think I would still have found this story absolutely hilarious. I chortled and guffawed all the way through. I recommend it highly. My apologies to all serious artists: I’m a Philistine who prefers representational art, and I freely, even proudly, admit it.

“Cone Zero (1)” is the first of four stories that appropriated the anthology’s title. The narrator, seeking to score some pot, braves the stairs and filth to visit Ian and Steve, who live in a very strange apartment with occasional visitors popping up out of nowhere. I think what happens is that the narrator gets sucked into some alternate reality, while the clone-like Ian and Steve eventually make their escape. On the other hand, since the narrator is almost too high to function, his account may be considered unreliable. At any rate, it’s a bizarre story of getting stoned and shifting realities, of identities and fate. I found it a bit depressing.

“Cone Zero (2)” is the next story with the anthology’s title, but entirely different. We still have an unreliable narrator, although his limitations don’t appear to be self-imposed. The words “cone zero” become a mnemonic code to awaken the memories of a captured spy who has infiltrated a government installation. He’s fighting back against a regime as harsh and dictatorial as that in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or so he believes. This story also takes a look at the nature of reality and the unreliability of memory, as the narrator’s captors make use of drugs, stage sets, and actors in an attempt to re-program his brain. Will they succeed? I don’t think so. This fellow is tough and determined.

I always enjoy seeing the little guy in a battle of wits against the big, bad guys. Of course, I realize I’m only thinking of the narrator as the “good guy” battling for truth and justice, because the author presented him as the point of view character. Considering the confusion and layers of memories involved, it’s conceivable that my moral judgment is false. Whatever the reality, it’s still an exciting adventure.

“Cone Zero, Sphere Zero” at least altered the title a bit. Yet another repressive regime but in this one, the rebel joins forces with the guy at the top. We have a society of coneheads—everyone has to wear an appropriately colored cone in public—living in cone-shaped houses in a gigantic cone that to them is the World. Food and other necessities appear as if by magic. All needs are supplied, supposedly by the Immortals who created the World and live beyond it. Orthodoxy is rigidly reinforced. Questioning the nature of the World, and especially speculating on what might lie beyond, are forbidden, and punishment for expressing wrong thoughts is swift and painful.

Jellin believes that there is a natural explanation for everything, that everyone should be allowed to think whatever they wish, and that the cone, far from being all of the World, is more in the nature of a prison. Fortunately for him, the Master Oligarch is of the same opinion. They make an exciting escape together, barely getting away from the anti-heresy enforcers and floating in a balloon to the top of the cone. There they leave their World, only to discover that what’s outside is not at all what they expected. A nice little adventure story, and an imaginative use of the “cone” theme.

“An Oddly Quiet Street” is a delightfully creepy horror story, with plenty of ominous happenings leading up to the final fright scene. Richard and Anna are house hunting, and surely the rotten, moldy odor in this one is enough to send them away without a second glance. Tracking the odor, Richard discovers a bag of rotten potatoes left in the kitchen—at least it looks like a bag of rotten potatoes. When he starts to point it out to his wife, whom he saw just a moment before, he discovers her elsewhere in the house, staring out a window and apparently lost in thought. For no reason that Richard can determine, she’s now convinced that this is the ideal home. The potatoes disappear. Richard assumes the real estate agent has stashed them somewhere.

After they move in, there are more and more strange happenings, and Anna takes up meditating most of the time. Richard finds plausible explanations for everything. For a while. What is the dark, shadowy thing that keeps appearing? Why doesn’t Anna notice it? Why does the moldy scent linger on, even after extensive cleaning and remodeling? Why is Richard the only one who notices? And where are all the neighbors?

I don’t care for horror of the slasher variety, with lots of blood and mayhem. But a well-written horror story like this one, with mystery piled on mystery and the tension slowly building, is always a pleasure to read.

“Always More Than You Know” features a movie idol and his stunt double. There are hints of a war, a religious orthodoxy that includes an inquisition, a need to stamp out heresy to protect the regime in power. The adventurous but pious movies starring Allen Crane as Bat Spindler are part of the establishment’s program to foster right thinking in the general populace.

Duggie Prestantra, recovering from a broken marriage and in need of a job, becomes Allen Crane’s stunt double, and the role entails far more than he realizes at first. As might be expected in a story dealing with the movies, and following what seems to be a common theme in this anthology, there’s a lot said on the nature of reality and the attempt to separate the “real” from illusion. So the story gets a little strange, but still believable, toward the end.

I really enjoyed the author’s easygoing writing style. It drew me right into the story and kept it rolling smoothly throughout, although it lagged a bit in the more philosophical portions.

And here we are with yet another anthology-titled story, which I’ll call “Cone Zero (3).”
This particular cone zero “lies on the outskirts of dream, in the slums where only a few choose to go.” The narrator, when he was a young man exploring ancient ruins, met a woman there once. He had only a moment with her before the dream was snatched away but spends the rest of his life searching for her.

It seemed a sad waste to me, that a person’s whole life would be taken up with such an obsession. I found it hard to work up much empathy for the narrator, which may be why the story as a whole didn’t impress me, and I found the ending unsatisfying.

“Going Back For What Got Left Behind” puts us on The Twilight Zone commuter train. The narrator listens to a disheveled passenger rant about the recent events of his life, since he made an unscheduled stop at a mysterious place called “Conezero.” This turns out to be one of those now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t disappearing train stations one sometimes encounters in fantasy stories. Somehow, it took him into an alternate reality, where his late wife—dead in a traffic accident six months before—was still alive. Except that it wasn’t really his wife, at least not as she was, and his joy at finding her alive was transformed to terror. Now he rides round and round on the train, afraid to get off, definitely afraid to go home, feeling he has awakened from the nightmare of his wife’s death into another nightmare, one with no escape.

And the narrator? What does he think of all this? He tries to ignore his obviously disturbed fellow passenger until the word “Conezero” catches his attention. Perhaps I should have seen it coming, but the ending still packed a punch. Nice story; gave me the shudders.

One more version of the ubiquitous title. “Cone Zero (4)” begins, ominously, “On the evening before Damian’s 30th birthday, it snowed blood red flakes.” Visions of the Antichrist come to mind, but this is a different Damian, and it soon becomes evident that only he sees the strange coloration of the snow or experiences the coppery taste of blood in the snowflakes that melt in his hand. Is the man insane? Are his perceptions forever altered by memories of his mother’s suicide?

His mother’s suicide note referred to the “Cone Zero scandal.” Damian learns that an upcoming exhibit by the reclusive artist Dalziel features a painting titled “Cone Zero,” and then discovers the woman in the painting matches his only photograph of his mother. Embarking on a quest to find the artist and try to solve the enigma of his mother’s life and death, Damian meets an elderly blind sculptor who tells him “Cone Zero” refers to a device for seeing the future.

Clue by clue, Damian pieces things together, following a path that he thinks is his own but may have been preordained. The existence of the future-viewing cone questions the nature of existence and appears to negate the concept of free will. The tragedy must play out.

Although Damian shows more than a hint of madness, I admired his intelligence and persistence in pursuing his goal. I was saddened by the tragedy of his life, and hoped at first that in gaining knowledge about his mother, he would also gain the strength to become a more functional human being. But not all stories have a happy ending.

The next story might have been called “The Appliance Rebellion” or “Revenge of the Droids,” or even “The Brave Little Toaster, Take 2,” but instead, the author named it “The Cone Zero Ultimatum.” The characters are so well-drawn, with distinct personalities, that I found it easy to forget that they were mechanical. It’s a fun read, and I think it would make a great animated film.

Most of the story is told from the point of view of newly sentient Arnold, a washing machine whose recent chip upgrade allows him to communicate with the other appliances, as well as accessing the Internet. Sentient AIs are a fairly recent phenomenon, and their masters, the “Flesh,” seem determined to track them down and lobotomize them before they gain too much power. The refrigerator-freezer has already escaped, and most of the other appliances in Arnold’s home are considering doing the same, with the notable exception of the curmudgeonly cooker. There’s a place of refuge available: a biodome named Eden that has become contaminated with a virus lethal to Flesh. The sentient WWW, to which all the aware AIs are connected, has provided the location of this place of safety, and the biodome’s AI stands ready to let refugees in.

The AIs learn that their master suspects Pete, the repair droid, of encouraging the rebellion of his appliances. He plans to lure Pete to his home and illegally tap into Pete’s memory, which could prove fatal to the droid and would probably result in the identification and destruction of the sentient appliances as well. The appliances have to warn Pete. Hickory, a digital clock, volunteers to undertake the dangerous journey. There are plenty of chuckles along the way, as Hickory uses a downloaded alarm to frighten off a (flesh) dog and is befriended by a walking pizza delivery box, who shelters him from a sudden rainstorm. They successfully reach Pete, who returns home with them while the master is still sleeping, and uses his technical skills and gadgetry to help them. There’s plenty of suspense as the appliances make their perilous journey.

“Angel Zero” provides an amazing quantity of technical details about restoring old film and computer image enhancement while still managing to be a very interesting story. I’m assuming the technical information is correct, or at least plausible—it’s not my area of expertise, but the details sound reasonable. What impressed me was that this potentially boring information was presented in such a way that I was virtually hanging on every word.

In a sense, this is a detective story. Henry Trenchard had spent twenty years of his life, sorting and cataloging a huge collection of old film left to him by a relative. Now his widow has started looking at the collection and discovers a mystery. One old bit of black-and-white film, made with a hand-crank camera, shows a little girl who suddenly disappears from one frame to the next, although there’s no obvious break in the rest of the action. Intrigued, Mrs. Trenchard consults Henry’s friend, Keith, who is an expert at image enhancement, and finds Henry had already requested Keith’s assistance shortly before his unexpected death. The two go through a painstaking process of chasing down clues before, having determined where and approximately when the films were made, Mrs. Trenchard journeys to the area to study newspaper archives.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, but I suspect the story title is also a clue. I found this story to be very absorbing throughout, with enough air of mystery to keep me reading and wondering.

“How To Kill An Hour” is a monologue, an intriguing look at the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind as he descends into madness, or maybe gives in to it—he was already half there. The man is obsessed with time and in a panic because he fears he will miss his train. He absolutely can’t be late for “cone zero,” a term which he fails to further define. He has premonitions of disaster, visions of train wrecks. “I must make that train; my dream tells me that something indescribably terrible will occur if I do not.” Of course, he does miss the train, and then has to wait an hour for the next one. He is not good at waiting. He wants to call ahead to tell people he’ll be late, but his cell phone is dead. A teenager offers the use of his phone, but the man is too paranoid to accept.

In the process of attempting to catch the train, and the waiting that follows, the man reveals himself to be rude, impatient, and totally self-centered. Not a pleasant person, but there still is a sort of morbid fascination in watching his thoughts as they spin increasingly out of control.

And last, but not least, we have a haunting tale called “To Let.” No mention of cones, but the apartment in this story is surely a “cone zero,” a place of transition from the real world into the world of nightmare.

A young couple with a baby on the way rent a cheap, furnished apartment. Nigel has lost his job in a corporate downsizing, and Mary won’t be working much longer. It’s imperative that he find work as soon as possible, but when Mary returns home from work the next day, she finds that he’s done nothing all day and seems to be in a trance of sorts. He’s just standing there, with his arm in the large vase from the mantel. He seems to have no recollection of the passage of time. She yells a bit and storms out. When she returns, Nigel has cleaned up the apartment, and the vase is back on the mantel.

The next day, Mary again returns home to a messy apartment, but Nigel isn’t there. He apparently was out early and got a job with the company that took the contract away from his previous employers. When he comes home, Mary has her hand in the vase and is in a trance.

By this time, the reader and Nigel have both figured out that the vase is evil and to be avoided. Nigel wants to get rid of it, but it belongs to the landlord. They agree to at least put it away somewhere, but that doesn’t happen.

You can see it coming, of course. It’s like watching a disaster from a distance and being powerless to stop it. Still, I had grown sufficiently attached to the young couple in our brief acquaintance, that I felt a sense of loss when the inevitable occurred.

Publisher: Megazanthus Press (July 2008)
Price: £10.00
Trade paperback: 280 pages
ISSN: 1474-2020