Being Human

By Terry Hayman

Five science fiction and fantasy tales close to home and heart. In "Call My Name”, find out what sort of power someone can hold over you in the future if they know your true name. In “Dropouts”, figure out exactly how and why things in the airport are just...wrong. Also "We Don’t Know Where You’ve Been, Mr. Jones”, "The Last Hotel", and "Real Death", with a foreword by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiero Publishing
• Release date: Nov 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452346564

Terry Hayman

Raised in five different countries and currently living with his family in one of the most beautiful places on earth, Terry is a full-time writer and actor who accepts struggle, believes in goodness, and seeks truth always.

Book preview

BEING HUMAN

Terry Hayman

Copyright © 2010 Terry Hayman

Published by Fiero Publishing

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Table of Contents

Author foreword

Call My Name

Dropouts

We Don’t Know Where You’ve Been, Mr. Jones

The Last Hotel

Real Death

Afterword

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Foreword by the Author

Short stories are probably the most natural form of storytelling that humans share (maybe that animals and aliens share too). They arise out of an event or idea, are usually self-contained, and are able to be consumed in a single setting. Not only that, but the theme, the point of the story, is usually clearer because there’s frankly not the time or space to develop a lot of distractions.

So where did these particular tales come from?

Call My Name is my take on the idea found in many old belief systems that we each have a true name, and anyone who knows our true name has a certain power over us. The question is, of course, what sort of power and will it be used for good or ill.

Dropouts comes from too much time spent in airports playing What if? with myself and my children.

We Don’t Know Where You’ve Been, Mr. Jones. My maternal grandmother had Alzheimer’s and my father suffers from dementia. ’Nuff said.

The setting for The Last Hotel actually came out of a writing exercise I did down on the Oregon coast. Throw in a little questioning of ’Til death do you part, and there you go.

Finally, Real Death. It started out as a simple exploration of what it would be like to not die, then went further.

Here they are. Nothing pretentiously literary or complicated. If they give you a little ping of new perspective on the world around you, great. If not, I hope at least that they’ll entertain, because hey, the stimulation of our mental pleasure centers, is a big honking part of being human.

So settle into your easy chair, bus seat, bathroom throne, or wherever you do your best reading, and let’s go for a ride...

--Terry Hayman

North Vancouver, BC

November 25, 2010

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Frallon has been helping run the eerily well-balanced City Central his whole adult life. But now, just when he's about to move into the very nerve center of power, a stranger calls his true name and sends him into a whirling insanity, where truth is illegal and being human is the worst crime of all.

Call My Name

Terry Hayman

Copyright © 2010 Terry Hayman

By day five, the recirculated air of his sleep room was beginning to stink and Frallon thought he was going mad.

No, said a voice inside him. You’re not going mad. You already went mad. You’re struggling to go sane.

Frallon limped over to his comm desk and leaned on it with weak hands. Date, time, location, food and water credits? The graphs came up. He was still in the City. Level Thirteen. In his sleep room where he’d spent every night of his life from the time he’d been weaned from the birthing den. Frallon had been designed at birth to work on this level, to manage the information flow upon which City Central relied. He was a flexible information worker with an eidetic memory, exceptional multiple processing ability, advanced pattern recognition.

And now, a prisoner.

His comm desk buzzed under his hands and he jerked back. It was Overseer Dahvid again. She told you she was your mother, didn’t she? asked his smooth-cheeked mentor with no preamble.

Yes.

Dahvid’s face smiled at him from the connector and Frallon wondered again at the man’s age. He could be eighteen or eighty-three, age-arrested to preserve his valuable genius. No need to be ashamed, Frallon. This...connection to mother. It’s instinctual. Primitive and dealt with for most of us, but instinctual. The anarchists used it on at least two of the others we extracted.

But--

Did she ever offer you proof? Of course not, for there was none to give, was there? Just a story.

A story. Fiction. How he came to be here. What was truth and what was construct? Frallon was no longer sure. What he did remember was that ten days earlier....

***

Frallon was careful to tamp down his emotional buzz as he stepped out onto the Level Thirteen Promenade and paused. The mile drop below him and quarter mile above, through its race of walkways and rushing air trams and swarming lunch hour crowds, felt like his circulatory system.

He’d been raised here, ambling along in his controlled group of B-section children, listening to the drone of the minders as they moved from module to module, discovering through endless, varied games how City worked. Until finally, more so than for any of his playmates, City became a part of Frallon. He felt the hot wind of its breath, the thump of its pulse, the clamor of its human engine. He understood it without thinking. Knew its rhythms. Helped manage it every day from his Comptroller station.

And the rumor Frallon had heard this morning was that he’d been targeted for something more. Whether through Dahvid’s doing or Frallon’s own reliable service, Frallon was being considered for City Planning. Barely in his eighteenth year, he would make policy, not merely enforce it.

For reasons he couldn’t isolate with a clear idendicat, it stirred the same sort of lurching impatience inside him that he’d felt as a young child when he’d mastered a module ahead of his programmed time.

Which was why he’d left his office at lunch to spend a few minutes back in his small sleep room. He had to compose himself. If he was getting a promotion, it was doubly important he model the self-control all City

Reviews for Being Human

[22gnomes-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I bought this book based on a recommendation from an author I follow on Twitter. At first I struggled with the idea that a new vampire would have absolutely no understanding of humans at all, but it was interesting to see him learn from his twin brother. I found Tommy to be a fascinating character, and I think anyone who has struggles in life can relate to him. I love how the book progressed and he evolved. The end made me cry and I was actually disappointed that there wasn't more. By the time I got to the end of the book, I didn't want it to end.

[shadowkissed_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this truly original tell of vampires, society and the bonds of family, you will find everything you’re looking for in a great novel! Just as our narrator, Tommy, has a hard time understanding why humans do what they do, I’m having a hard time sorting out my emotions after reading Being Human. This is one of those stores that makes you step back and think. The main character that the story follows is so well written and truthful that I have a strong suspicion the author must have been turned into a vampire herself. Tommy went through so much confusion in his years spent learning how to be human again after forgetting everything he knew from his human life, and being left only instincts and one thought…Survive! As you watch him understand and grow you get a first row seat on the inner workings of what love really means and the power of family bonds. This story tugged on my heart strings when Tommy would do something sweet (even if he didn’t understand why) and made me laugh when he would try to understand the complexity of human emotions (which I don’t think even us humans understand). It’s so refreshing to read about a different kind of love and get a whole new take on the vampire’s genre. First person narrative is always one of my least favorite POV’s and runs the risk of being read like a little girl’s diary but Lynne did a wonderful job of keeping me interested and an even better job of making the story line flow. Even if you don’t like vampire stories I hope you will give this book a shot, and promise you won’t be let down!shadowkissedcassie.blogspot.com