How did she find herself in these situations? Stuck crawling through the sewers on her hands and knees, she was still glad she was here. Even covered in waste and things she didn't dare contemplate, she was in a better spot than she deserved.
For years, she had used her gifts to take from people. The universe had blessed her with a useful mutation, and she'd all but wasted it just robbing private residences. Most mutations were small things, little switches in genes that altered how a person looked, or turned a protein on or off... often you couldn't even tell who was a mutant. A tiny percentage, though, had an obvious mutation. Those fell into two categories... obvious physical effects, like being covered in scales or having slit pupils, and obvious powers, like telekinesis, telepathy, or other related powers.
In the genetic lottery, she won big, and she almost wasted the whole thing. Sure, she'd been born into an upper-middle class family, and had been given every opportunity. Discovering she had a talent for moving things with her mind had come early, and she'd used it just to play pranks on her brothers and friends at school. Then came the first crime.
It was a small thing. She just used her talent to break into her school to alter a grade. She wasn't caught, at least not by the school. Someone else was watching though. Tom was a local thug, a small time crook, looking for a way to up his game, and when he saw Sheila breaking into the school with a wave of her hand, he knew he had it.
He had pictures, and he said he would take them to the school if she didn't do just as he said. Sobbing, she agreed. He started her out by using her to move cameras so he could enter stores undetected, then he had her lifting large objects with her mind to up their take, and finally, he simply sent her out on her own missions.
Eventually, someone more powerful noticed their activities, and tried to force Tom to give Sheila up. Tom refused, and Mr. Harris shot him. Sheila didn't want to go with someone who would so callously kill another person, but after living as a crook with Tom, Mr. Harris had plenty to blackmail her with. Sheila went with him, and at first it wasn't so bad. He had her doing the same kinds of jobs Tom had, but one night, he tried to take it further.
He walked into Sheila's room and started to take off his shirt. When Sheila complained, he just told her it was part of the perks of being one of his favorite employees. Screaming didn't help, he just smacked her, so Sheila did something she never thought she would. She reached out with her talent and grabbed his heart in a tight fist of mental energy, holding it still. When your heart doesn't move, it can't pump blood. If your blood isn't pumping, you tend to die pretty quickly.
Sheila watched as the naked man laying nearly on top of her struggled and died. Then she calmly dressed in something warm and walked out as if she were going on a regular mission, and she never looked back.
All she knew how to do was commit crimes, so she set herself up and stole what she needed to survive, almost always from private homes, so as not to draw too much attention to herself. Then she robbed the wrong house.
It belonged to another mutant. He worked for the government, in the army as a counter-mutant operative. Not her lucky night.
His gift was telepathy, and before she knew what was happening, he was inside her head. Somehow, he shut out all of her senses, all of her talent. As far as she could tell, she was in a black box whose walls were just outside her reach.
When the light and sound returned, she was sitting in a court room, watching as people left. Sitting next to her was her planned victim.
"Sheila, you just joined the army. If you play along and do every task you're given, you'll serve out two terms of enlistment, and then be allowed to leave without anyone stopping you. If you try to escape, try to disobey, or even do too much to irritate your superiors, you will be punished. At best, you'll be given more work. At worst, you'll be executed. Understand?"
"What if I don't want to?" She glared, debating an escape attempt right that moment.
"Well, for all the crimes you've committed using your talent, you'd be locked up... but the government doesn't have an effective way of keeping someone with your gifts in jail. So they could kill you... there are a lot of accidents in jail... or they could put you on so many drugs you'd be out of your mind. Hell, they could simply lobotomize you and remove your ability to use your gift."
That put the fear of God... well, not God, but something... it put the fear of something into her. So, she agreed to work for the army, and they set her to cleaning the plugged drains in the sewer. Damn them.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Nothing posted...
July 7th and 8th I didn't have access to the internet, so I wrote on paper... typing up my handwritten notes is possible... but I have the nasty habit of editing what I wrote when doing so.
Forgive me for the break.
Forgive me for the break.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
July 6th, 2011. Day #2
Four hundred years ago, humanity left the Earth behind. We'd already taken everything we could from under the ground, and we'd polluted the hell out of the air and water. The old dirt ball couldn't take anymore, so we just left it all behind. Sure, there were some die hard survivalists who stayed behind, but not that many. The vast bulk of the human race got on the damn shuttles and took the free ride to the space bases. Some went to the moon, others to space stations, but any government or corporation that could finance it was building a journey ship, so people had a choice about who they wanted lording over their lives for the next few generations.
My great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats grandfather got hired on as a hullman on one of the Mega-corp's ships, so his family was guaranteed a spot on their ship. He worked his ass off building this hulk, and then once it was moving out into the black, he got assigned as a hull maintenance worker. Anytime the ship encountered debris, even tiny dust particles, someone had to get in one of the few exo-suits and take a walk into the black to make sure the hull was still sound. That was what my great-great-grandad did, and its what our family has done since. Some smartass flunky about three hundred years ago decided that it made sense to require families to train their children in their own trade, to make sure that each trade was preserved. That also meant you could only marry within your own trade. With a single bureaucratic nod, that flunky created the castes we've got to live with today.
What they didn't expect were the wars. When our ship, the AmBanCorp, launched, five other ships launched in a parallel course. We were all aiming at the same damn star, because the scientists were sure it had an Earth-like planet orbiting around it. Six journey ships and one planet... well, it wasn't an easy situation. At first, the ships just ignored each other... that lasted more than a century. There was even talk of sharing the planet. That didn't last long. One of the ships figured out how to time launching the waste from their propulsion so it trailed directly into the path of a rival journey ship. The spent fuel was deadly for the ship and all its passengers. That first ship didn't have long to celebrate their victory, as the other ships banded together to destroy them.
With just four ships left, their attacks were small and petty things, mostly meant to slow down the competition. By common agreement, lethal attacks were off the table. Everyone knew that if one ship broke that rule, they would be destroyed by the survivors.
Eventually, the four surviving journey ships settled into a kind of peace. They'd moved far enough apart that they couldn't easily be attacked, but were still roughly tied in their race for the planet.
My great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats grandfather got hired on as a hullman on one of the Mega-corp's ships, so his family was guaranteed a spot on their ship. He worked his ass off building this hulk, and then once it was moving out into the black, he got assigned as a hull maintenance worker. Anytime the ship encountered debris, even tiny dust particles, someone had to get in one of the few exo-suits and take a walk into the black to make sure the hull was still sound. That was what my great-great-grandad did, and its what our family has done since. Some smartass flunky about three hundred years ago decided that it made sense to require families to train their children in their own trade, to make sure that each trade was preserved. That also meant you could only marry within your own trade. With a single bureaucratic nod, that flunky created the castes we've got to live with today.
What they didn't expect were the wars. When our ship, the AmBanCorp, launched, five other ships launched in a parallel course. We were all aiming at the same damn star, because the scientists were sure it had an Earth-like planet orbiting around it. Six journey ships and one planet... well, it wasn't an easy situation. At first, the ships just ignored each other... that lasted more than a century. There was even talk of sharing the planet. That didn't last long. One of the ships figured out how to time launching the waste from their propulsion so it trailed directly into the path of a rival journey ship. The spent fuel was deadly for the ship and all its passengers. That first ship didn't have long to celebrate their victory, as the other ships banded together to destroy them.
With just four ships left, their attacks were small and petty things, mostly meant to slow down the competition. By common agreement, lethal attacks were off the table. Everyone knew that if one ship broke that rule, they would be destroyed by the survivors.
Eventually, the four surviving journey ships settled into a kind of peace. They'd moved far enough apart that they couldn't easily be attacked, but were still roughly tied in their race for the planet.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
July 5th, 2011: Day #1
Dreams. I forget who said it, but they're a crazy sort of thing. Humans are so rational, so focused on everything following rules and making sense, but every night, we close our eyes and have what amounts to an acid trip. Depending, of course, on what kind of dreams you have.
Mine follow rules, my rules true, but rules nonetheless. They are peopled by familiar faces and places, and I am in control. Sometimes I am the central figure in my dreams, living them out like a second life; while in other dreams, I serve almost as an omniscient director, pausing the flow of the dream, rewinding and re-shooting the previous scene to make the outcome more pleasant. Or more terrifying, if I'm in one of those moods.
For the longest while, I thought everyone could control their dreams. Call it the arrogance of youth, the belief that everyone perceives the world the way you do. That everyone interacts with the world in the same way... yours. It wasn't until I met someone that had true nightmares that I realized other people couldn't guide their dreams, couldn't decide when and where they wanted to be in their sleeping mind.
Now I know that I'm abnormal, whatever that means. Some people call what I do 'lucid dreaming,' meaning that I'm always conscious, even while I'm supposedly unconscious. I simply think my own personal arrogance extends that deep into my psyche. When awake, I have supreme confidence in my ability to control any situation I come across; why should it be any different while sleeping?
I want to share two examples with the reader, two places I've been that I find interesting. We'll begin with last night's dream.
It began as a simple rehash of the tired vampire noir. There was a coven of pale, blond vampires, seen in a blue tinged world. They were beautiful, but filled all the stereotypes one expects of the genre. Their leader was tall, strong, cold and harsh; his second was lithe, feminine, but slim; there was a reckless, callous fool; and the final vampire was a quiet one, darker than the rest.
The heroine of my dream wore Jessica Biel's face, but was often cast aside as I decided not to focus on her. Even now, I don't know why the vampires wanted to turn the heroine into one of their own. Yes, she was pretty... though, she was a brunette which would clash with their blond clan dynamic... but, other than her looks, there was no real reason for the vampires to want her.
In all honesty, I spent the night developing the characters of the coven. I would begin a scene in the lair of the leader, him sitting behind a large, mahogany desk in a library, flitting through forms and papers, then pull back, rewind, and add a fireplace, flanked by servants. Humans, kept to feed their Master, as evidenced by the bite marks on their necks and wrists. He wore a business suit in the modern mode, hair laid flat on his skull. In comes his second. She wears black, form fitting silk. She moves with a casual grace, reporting to her Sire that their rogue has created another scene.
The camera flits away, we're in a penthouse, bodies and blood litter the suite. Out from the bedroom walks the reckless vampire. He's wearing minimal clothing, a loose white cotton tank top and a pair of boxerbrief underwear, both marked with bloodstains. He stretches, muscles moving in the cold, bright moonlight. Suddenly he twists and finds the second sitting, neatly, in a lounge chair. In the chaos of the suite, she is the only piece of order, and it gathers around her, like water pooling in a depression. She chides him for creating such a mess as she rises from her seat. He tenses, eyes flicking for the exits, but in a flash of fangs, he dies. As the second leaves the suite, one more body grows cold in that room covered in gore.
With a long shot, my mind's camera pulls back out the window, into a snow filled sky, spiraling around the cityscape of my dream. It's not New York, Chicago, Seattle, or any other city I know well enough to recognize. It is simply a city, full of buildings and people. Full of cold. Falling with the snow, the camera lands in a public park where our heroine walks, pushing a stroller. Inside is a baby, sleeping, and wrapped to protect it from the cold. I don't know why she has a child now. It doesn't make sense. I pause my dream, and the stroller, and the child within, are gone. Now, the heroine walks alone, a long, dark coat with a matched set of gloves and a scarf. There are bright, white Christmas lights hanging between trees and posts, creating globes of light in the snowy sky, but doing little to actually light the park or its paths. As she walks, her breath puffs, adding to the misty feeling. The snow thickens, and now we can barely see the trees at the edge of the path. The heroine is afraid. Suddenly, she comes face to face with the second, dark eyes and bright fangs framed by straight blond hair. The heroine tries to run away, ducking and dodging. (I feel glad that I got rid of the stroller earlier, knowing it would have hampered her escape attempts now.) No matter where she dodges, how she flees, those eyes find her. Even from my perspective, all we see are the dark eyes framed by that light hair.
After a moment, I realize my dream is becoming repetitive. How many times can my heroine be startled as a vampire leaps from the darkness?
I open my eyes, awake, but not rested. I enjoyed my dream, yes... but it was not the peaceful sleep one expects. I did not rest, even though I slept.
Another dream I had, months ago, was a different sort. I still knew it was a dream, but where last night's dream moved in movie time, cutting from scene to scene, this other dream felt like it was real time.
After I relaxed my mind and drifted off to sleep, I found myself in a small town. It looked like a stereotypical town you'd find anywhere from the Depression through to the 70s. There was a main street, lined with shops; side streets filled with houses, each with their own yard and kids; and as you left town, there were farms for as far as the eye could see.
I was standing there, just taking it all in, when my life kicked into gear. A young woman grabbed my arm and pulled me along with her to the bank. We were buying one of those farms. Even in the moment, I never caught her name. She was simply my girl. The man at the bank didn't want to loan us the money we'd need to start a farm right, but I put some pressure on him, reminding him who my father was. One part of my mind knew that would do the trick, and it did, but the more conscious part of my mind, the part that knew this was a dream had no idea who my father was, or why he had the influence to make a banker loan us money. I decided then, though, that it did not matter. As long as the dream moved along on its own, I wouldn't stop it for little details like that.
My girl and I signed the papers, and we became landowners with enough extra cash to buy the numerous things one needs to farm properly. After the bank, we walked to a supply store and arranged to have enough seed and supplies for a couple of years delivered. My girl wandered around while I argued with the clerk about extra fees, the whole while, she had a small, secretive smile on her face, as if she were used to me bickering over little details.
From there, we drove out to our farm, and began a life. We moved in what little we owned, bought what else we might need, and went from there.
Think about the last time you had to watch a clock, to really pay attention to how long a thing took. You could feel that time pass. In that dream, I felt time pass. I worked my farm and I lived my life with my girl. We grew crops, we had children, and I felt every hour of it. There were good times and bad, we grew old. We had to sell the farm, eventually, because my kids didn't want to be farmers, and I was too old to work the land anymore. My girl and I bought a home back in town, one of those houses on the side street with its own yard, and my grandkids played out front.
My girl died. She was old and tired too, but I still thought I should have gone first. After living a few months without her, I sat down on our porch and closed my eyes.
I woke up in my bed, feeling weary, tired, and stiff. I'd just lived sixty years in eight hours of sleep. Thinking about it now, I still feel my heart lurch when I remember the joy I felt at buying my farm, how angry I was when my son said he didn't want my damned old farm, and how broken I felt looking at the quiet, dead body of the woman who shared my life.
That was a quiet morning for me, as I tried to process my dream. Those emotions were real, and I felt raw for having so many all at once. In the waking world, our emotions come for a given situation, and we have time to heal before we face the next onslaught, but that morning, I felt a life's worth of triumphs and tragedies.
Throughout that long dream, I heard that quiet voice in my head. I knew I was dreaming, but I also knew I was living. If I stopped to worry about the details, I'd stop living, and then where would I be?
Dreams are powerful things, crazy as the day is long. What separates a dream from reality? The only thing that differentiates my dream-life from the life I'm living right now is that more people agree that this is really happening. I could be dreaming now, only to wake up when it's all over and start my day in my real life.
Mine follow rules, my rules true, but rules nonetheless. They are peopled by familiar faces and places, and I am in control. Sometimes I am the central figure in my dreams, living them out like a second life; while in other dreams, I serve almost as an omniscient director, pausing the flow of the dream, rewinding and re-shooting the previous scene to make the outcome more pleasant. Or more terrifying, if I'm in one of those moods.
For the longest while, I thought everyone could control their dreams. Call it the arrogance of youth, the belief that everyone perceives the world the way you do. That everyone interacts with the world in the same way... yours. It wasn't until I met someone that had true nightmares that I realized other people couldn't guide their dreams, couldn't decide when and where they wanted to be in their sleeping mind.
Now I know that I'm abnormal, whatever that means. Some people call what I do 'lucid dreaming,' meaning that I'm always conscious, even while I'm supposedly unconscious. I simply think my own personal arrogance extends that deep into my psyche. When awake, I have supreme confidence in my ability to control any situation I come across; why should it be any different while sleeping?
I want to share two examples with the reader, two places I've been that I find interesting. We'll begin with last night's dream.
It began as a simple rehash of the tired vampire noir. There was a coven of pale, blond vampires, seen in a blue tinged world. They were beautiful, but filled all the stereotypes one expects of the genre. Their leader was tall, strong, cold and harsh; his second was lithe, feminine, but slim; there was a reckless, callous fool; and the final vampire was a quiet one, darker than the rest.
The heroine of my dream wore Jessica Biel's face, but was often cast aside as I decided not to focus on her. Even now, I don't know why the vampires wanted to turn the heroine into one of their own. Yes, she was pretty... though, she was a brunette which would clash with their blond clan dynamic... but, other than her looks, there was no real reason for the vampires to want her.
In all honesty, I spent the night developing the characters of the coven. I would begin a scene in the lair of the leader, him sitting behind a large, mahogany desk in a library, flitting through forms and papers, then pull back, rewind, and add a fireplace, flanked by servants. Humans, kept to feed their Master, as evidenced by the bite marks on their necks and wrists. He wore a business suit in the modern mode, hair laid flat on his skull. In comes his second. She wears black, form fitting silk. She moves with a casual grace, reporting to her Sire that their rogue has created another scene.
The camera flits away, we're in a penthouse, bodies and blood litter the suite. Out from the bedroom walks the reckless vampire. He's wearing minimal clothing, a loose white cotton tank top and a pair of boxerbrief underwear, both marked with bloodstains. He stretches, muscles moving in the cold, bright moonlight. Suddenly he twists and finds the second sitting, neatly, in a lounge chair. In the chaos of the suite, she is the only piece of order, and it gathers around her, like water pooling in a depression. She chides him for creating such a mess as she rises from her seat. He tenses, eyes flicking for the exits, but in a flash of fangs, he dies. As the second leaves the suite, one more body grows cold in that room covered in gore.
With a long shot, my mind's camera pulls back out the window, into a snow filled sky, spiraling around the cityscape of my dream. It's not New York, Chicago, Seattle, or any other city I know well enough to recognize. It is simply a city, full of buildings and people. Full of cold. Falling with the snow, the camera lands in a public park where our heroine walks, pushing a stroller. Inside is a baby, sleeping, and wrapped to protect it from the cold. I don't know why she has a child now. It doesn't make sense. I pause my dream, and the stroller, and the child within, are gone. Now, the heroine walks alone, a long, dark coat with a matched set of gloves and a scarf. There are bright, white Christmas lights hanging between trees and posts, creating globes of light in the snowy sky, but doing little to actually light the park or its paths. As she walks, her breath puffs, adding to the misty feeling. The snow thickens, and now we can barely see the trees at the edge of the path. The heroine is afraid. Suddenly, she comes face to face with the second, dark eyes and bright fangs framed by straight blond hair. The heroine tries to run away, ducking and dodging. (I feel glad that I got rid of the stroller earlier, knowing it would have hampered her escape attempts now.) No matter where she dodges, how she flees, those eyes find her. Even from my perspective, all we see are the dark eyes framed by that light hair.
After a moment, I realize my dream is becoming repetitive. How many times can my heroine be startled as a vampire leaps from the darkness?
I open my eyes, awake, but not rested. I enjoyed my dream, yes... but it was not the peaceful sleep one expects. I did not rest, even though I slept.
Another dream I had, months ago, was a different sort. I still knew it was a dream, but where last night's dream moved in movie time, cutting from scene to scene, this other dream felt like it was real time.
After I relaxed my mind and drifted off to sleep, I found myself in a small town. It looked like a stereotypical town you'd find anywhere from the Depression through to the 70s. There was a main street, lined with shops; side streets filled with houses, each with their own yard and kids; and as you left town, there were farms for as far as the eye could see.
I was standing there, just taking it all in, when my life kicked into gear. A young woman grabbed my arm and pulled me along with her to the bank. We were buying one of those farms. Even in the moment, I never caught her name. She was simply my girl. The man at the bank didn't want to loan us the money we'd need to start a farm right, but I put some pressure on him, reminding him who my father was. One part of my mind knew that would do the trick, and it did, but the more conscious part of my mind, the part that knew this was a dream had no idea who my father was, or why he had the influence to make a banker loan us money. I decided then, though, that it did not matter. As long as the dream moved along on its own, I wouldn't stop it for little details like that.
My girl and I signed the papers, and we became landowners with enough extra cash to buy the numerous things one needs to farm properly. After the bank, we walked to a supply store and arranged to have enough seed and supplies for a couple of years delivered. My girl wandered around while I argued with the clerk about extra fees, the whole while, she had a small, secretive smile on her face, as if she were used to me bickering over little details.
From there, we drove out to our farm, and began a life. We moved in what little we owned, bought what else we might need, and went from there.
Think about the last time you had to watch a clock, to really pay attention to how long a thing took. You could feel that time pass. In that dream, I felt time pass. I worked my farm and I lived my life with my girl. We grew crops, we had children, and I felt every hour of it. There were good times and bad, we grew old. We had to sell the farm, eventually, because my kids didn't want to be farmers, and I was too old to work the land anymore. My girl and I bought a home back in town, one of those houses on the side street with its own yard, and my grandkids played out front.
My girl died. She was old and tired too, but I still thought I should have gone first. After living a few months without her, I sat down on our porch and closed my eyes.
I woke up in my bed, feeling weary, tired, and stiff. I'd just lived sixty years in eight hours of sleep. Thinking about it now, I still feel my heart lurch when I remember the joy I felt at buying my farm, how angry I was when my son said he didn't want my damned old farm, and how broken I felt looking at the quiet, dead body of the woman who shared my life.
That was a quiet morning for me, as I tried to process my dream. Those emotions were real, and I felt raw for having so many all at once. In the waking world, our emotions come for a given situation, and we have time to heal before we face the next onslaught, but that morning, I felt a life's worth of triumphs and tragedies.
Throughout that long dream, I heard that quiet voice in my head. I knew I was dreaming, but I also knew I was living. If I stopped to worry about the details, I'd stop living, and then where would I be?
Dreams are powerful things, crazy as the day is long. What separates a dream from reality? The only thing that differentiates my dream-life from the life I'm living right now is that more people agree that this is really happening. I could be dreaming now, only to wake up when it's all over and start my day in my real life.
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