Epilogue
Dear Reader,
If you’ve read this far, thank you! This story was a departure from my normal work, or maybe it wasn’t. I seem to write stories of redemption. I’m honestly not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s because I spent many years with a low opinion of myself. I seek approval from others. Approval is a sort of redemption. The knowledge that one is good enough redeems one from not being good enough. I suppose that’s it.
I kicked this story around for years and never got anywhere with it. In its original form, it was the tale of an immortal youth and a dying assassin. Their relationship was similar to this story, as was the origin of that relationship. Instead of Marvin getting trapped in the system after his father’s death, he was instead turned into the ultimate soldier after a falling out and estrangement from Tom. In that version, Tom was much coarser than the sweet man we have here. As an example, in the original story he would shoot Marvin to prove the youth’s immortality to any third party he wished. I like this version of Tom better.
The artificial intelligence aspect came from a lecture I attended a few months ago. The speaker explained that what we currently refer to as Artificial Intelligence is really just text prediction software. He opined that there was no path from what we have today to genuine artificial intelligence. The idea of that difference wormed its way into my head and eventually found its way into this story.
In the original tale, the enemy was a third party. Some shadowy menace who wished to turn the ultimate soldier program against the world. Marvin and Tom were needed to stand against that. The entire story was also told in the present day. I envisioned an eventual sequel where Marvin was trying to deal with life in the distant future, but that story never made it onto paper in any form.
I’d been trying to write a final sequel to Wasted Life, the Law Edwards mystery series. I was frustrated with the work and the story was going nowhere. In desperation, I turned my mind to this tale as a way to break through my writer’s block. To my surprise, this story was aching to be told.
Each of my tales has taken about a year to create from the time I started to work on them in earnest to when I began to publish them. This one leapt onto the page. I wrote it in two months of near frantic work. Everyday a new idea would enter my head and demand I put it on paper.
I got the story down and read through it a few times to edit. I liked it. I knew something about it wasn’t quite right, but I started to publish anyway. It wasn’t until I posted the chapter when Marvin kills the junkie home invader that a comment showed me the trouble. Jim Norman, a steady commenter on GayDemon, referred to Marvin as a sociopath.
‘SHIT!’ I cried. Jim was right. In the story I had written, Marvin was unrepentant. He killed bad people and fuck you if you don’t like it. That didn’t make him a terribly sympathetic character. Jim showed me that for Marvin to be worthy of Lac, he had to see that he was wrong.
I didn’t publish for one day while I frantically rewrote the second half of the story. The final result is better.
The funny thing is, I personally don’t have a moral problem with what Marvin did, but I acknowledge that it leads to a dangerous place. Vigilante justice isn’t justice. Our own justice system is deeply flawed, but it’s far better than the populace taking the law into their own hands. Street justice will eventually devolve into barbarism. There’s no room for that in civilized society.
As for the subject matter, a lot of what is written here was my way of dealing with the horror of my father getting older. He’s a seventy-year-old tradesman, a welder. He finally retired two months ago. He’s in poor health because, like a lot of men of his generation, he never took care of himself. His respiratory system is shot from smoking and weld fumes. His knees are no good from too many years spent standing on concrete and from carrying too much weight. The final straw and the thing that made him retire was when he tore a tendon in his shoulder. He can’t lift his left arm, his dominant arm, at all. He’s scheduled to have surgery for the shoulder in October, and then he’s got a long recovery to deal with.
He kept working, not because he needed the money, but because he didn’t know what else to do. It was easier for him to just do what he did his entire life and get up every morning and go to work. It broke my heart to see him keep doing it, because I knew the work didn’t make him happy. I think it was the only thing that made him feel useful. I begged him to look for a hobby, anything that didn’t involve getting up at 5AM to drive to an extremely dangerous section of Philadelphia to spend the day welding in a pipe factory with no cooling in the summer and barely any heat in the winter.
Jim Norman observed that it’s hard to lose a parent. I don’t yet know that pain but having to witness my dad as he ages has been difficult. It’s especially difficult because so much of his pain and infirmity is due to his own destructive habits.
Anyway, that’s where the character of Tom came from. It’s also where a lot of the details of the relationship between he and Marvin came from. The teasing banter between the two is almost an exact representation of conversations I’ve had with my father. I’ve been doing my best to spend as much time as possible with the old man as I can to better enjoy the time he has left. It was that same urgency which compelled me to tell this story.
As for the piggy scent lust and the fisting, I didn’t expect that to be as polarizing as it was. Shrug. I wanted to try something different with this story, so I did. I’ve personally explored the periphery of the hole stretching kink, mostly through my favorite Square Peg brand toys (www.squarepegtoys.com). You might call that a shameless plug. (Get it? AH HA HA HA HA!!)
Anyway, the shameless plugs have brought me a lot of physical pleasure, and I thought it would be fun to explore the…the hobby, I guess, in a story. I’ll likely return to more traditional modes of intimacy in the next tale.
As for Marvin and Lacas, I don’t think we’ll see them again. I don’t think they have anything more to tell us. They have each other now, for good. When the characters are happy, the story is over.
By the way, Lacas is named for my favorite brand of food service coffee. Lacas coffee (www.lacascoffee.com) is local to the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware area. It’s delicious. They also make tea. I have a box of their teabags on my desk at work. When I was looking for a name for Marvin’s boyfriend, my eyes kept returning to the box of tea. I wrote the name down as a placeholder until I came up with a better one. That never happened because soon, Lac was fully formed in my imagination, and I couldn’t picture him with any other name.
Thanks for reading. A special thanks to Jim Norman for his daily comments on GayDemon. Another special thanks to Bill, Don, Earth-Boy, and Howard for emailing as they read the story on Nifty. Thanks, guys!
To the rest of you, thanks for reading. Think about dropping a comment or an email now and then, if not to me, then to the other authors you enjoy. It doesn’t have to be much. A little message to let the author know that you’re enjoying the work really helps. It helps me, anyway.
I hope you’re well and I look forward to seeing you next time.
Thanks again!
Yours,
Sam Stefanik
PS: Did you notice the error at the end of the last chapter? When Marvin and Lac were outside under the tree, both nearly naked, it was early in the morning of November 29th in Philadelphia. It would have been COLD outside. I realized the mistake a week or so ago and almost rewrote the scene because of it. In the end, I decided to leave it because I liked the scene too much to change it. I’m telling you because I couldn’t let the error go without coming clean about it.
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