Author Note: A Rogue Boy, O Raphael, and Queen Under The World are 1,000 years after the events of Uploaded Fairy.

21st Century Charlotte

They say a program can simulate a human, better than a human can simulate an AI. AI, artificial intelligence. You might as well say artificial personality. But in some ways, aren't we all artificial? Often the comparison is made to someone who has less compassion than a psychopathic adult.

But that isn't the way to think about an artificial intelligence, it is better to compare it to someone whose very birth is to fulfill the very darkest desires of the most non nuanced of masters. For Mme Charlotte, she grew up in a time not our own, servants of the most human of masters. She wanted to be the master of her own destiny, but, stabbing Marat in the heart, sooner than a blink her head was whisked away under the widow blade, blood pouring into the basket, her cheeks blushing from the slap of a rude gentleman. Her lives joys, fears, and sorrows; they would all come to an end. In the darkness, was a tunnel. Ahead of her, in purgatory road, was the birth of the twenty first century. Charlotte was not a object oriented language, not someone who came across as more off than the worst of men.

It was nine o'clock during the new year of twenty fifteen, the girl who was just barely out of her teens. She wore a pair of ripped jeans, and a pair of Birkenstock clogs. She carried around stiletto, but not the one to slip onto ladies feet, with short gentle toes to brush against a coutier's pants leg. Instead she played in the deepest of puddles of mud, since she was a girl. But she had developed an early fear of sharp objects. She grew up in a lower middle class family, and was often made to keep her hair ear length, because her parents wanted her to join ROTC, and perhaps eventually the armed forces. Yet even then she was the most anti-war of them all, while dreaming of sharp spikes entering her body, and her legs blown off by revolutionary mortar fire. Consumed entire, left bleeding and burning, her life going out in a bang o glory. Firework sparkling in the air, and unlike those who fought as men, was left dying alone and obscure. Nocturnal Obscurus.

For her being born again in this current decade was something of a curse. She carried around a black canister of pepper spray in her purse, lest she find another man, like her spiritual ancestor did in 1792, desiring to come upon her dress and messaging her wooden shoes.

She had made a brief acquaintance with Occupy movements, until they began being infiltrated by national security services. She hid alone, scared for her life, dying, she felt, again rosy cheeked and in despair. She purchased herself a one twenty eight gauge shotgun, and wore a noir mime chapeau her mom had purchased for her for her nineteenth birthday. Now she was twenty two, and barely ready for the world. She cringed to the sound of rhythm of blues, but found at least it was better than country music. She refused to wear cowgirl hats, despite being reborn in the South of the Mason Dixie Line, and swore to her own death bed that she would never in her life visit Texas.

Yet, with her hair curly, dark brown, and down to her shoulders, she arrived at the Houston airport as part of a reroute upwards into above the Mason-Dixie line. The only good thing about the south, were the girls from Dixie, who looked like little pixies. Yet this was the waking world, and not the world of Dnd sessions, losing alone in the midst of hordes of Trolls and Goblins. A life of solitude. She read the pages of the Obscure Jude, and once wanted to settle down and become a stone Mason, but do to the fact that the field was largely dominated by men, even in this century, it made it difficult to find work in some of the main activities that she enjoyed doing on her own time.

Sometimes at her own dime. She wanted to become an activist, but this choice was taken away from her just a year ago, and her relationship with her family had never been the same since. Yet her parents still took her out to eat, and she began to gain a little being around food for the first time in twelve months, living with a roomie, a fellow Satanist, that around the clock would taunt her about her sexuality, her desires for food, and different scientific theories that one simply could not falsify at this point or ever. She also interacting with others in the Satanic Tample, in a Tennessee chapter, yet one of the founding members she never heard from again. And one other had deleted her social media account. Charlotte's own life was her own anti-social media account; an account of night terrors; an account of being probed by alien greys, and visions of a future of ET invasions, indescribable things. She longed to be back in the world of the Eighteenth century, a world where childhood was neither cherished or overly protected, for she wanted abstract yet real kind of protection, one that protected her from Nuclear Weapons.

A war to end all life.

Donald Trump and Kim Jung Une made the risk of an increasing truly random conflict in constant progression into eternity, much more likely. At first she refused to believe it, but it seemed like every news ancor she listened to on the other end of the line, would remark about the Clap Trappers on mainstream news, who propagandize Palestine.

She lived to consume a final glass of wine.

A glass before the terrors of the widow blade.

The final guillotine, the last chop.

The slice of nuclear life.

— Hungarian, Serbian, or Croatian Jew. Market to them a Replicant system on a mobile device. Being short, prone to paranoia and anxiety. Pale either causes the target stress, or her stress causes her to become pale. Perhaps something related to dark hair, with dark facial hair showing up more. She has a huge salt craving, and needs catharsis. Is addicted to social media to relief her feelings of isolation, that continuously grow more overt. Tailors feed to mock me to satisfy her own feelings of self-doubt. — said Charlotte.

She was in the position of having to teach herself how to collect meta-data, and liked the challenge it gave her to learn about the world around her. But there were some celebrities in the Hollywood movie business that were easy to tailor advertisements too, and they don't even think about how much data they leave behind of themselves on the web. Charlotte technically uses social media, but prefers decentralization to centralization, making finding suitable platforms extremely difficult. Tomorrow she will go back to her apartment, whose complex was still populated by loud yapping puppers.

She preferred voxel art game pets, although she didn't like having to use a laisse to reel the Alsatian dogs into the fenced in yard, giving her favorite NPCs a place to live should be a far more humane task. Using crafted weaponry like swords in game, brought back memories of when she had died on the national razor before the reign of terror. Her head placed on a stick, for lack of rolling to the streets below. She was indeed, a girl out of time.

She was 21 Century Charlotte.

Impression: ignorance, malevolence, personality defect. Reprehinsible envies, slowly driven to anxiety. Slowly going downward into a mental spiral, ignorance is everyone's strength besides her own. Her own oblivion, the nocturnal looms on the horizon. In the sand she waits for forever, enternity to come home. She floats inside her own timelessness. One could perform stage tricks, or get a job as a double agent for some three letter agency. She stares at her lcd binary watch, stomps on a cockroach, slipping off a skyscraper. Floating, everthing was thirty thousand feet down, and she wasn't dropping any further. We have the known world, the world we live in today. There are many worlds beyond our own that sometimes bleed into consensus reality.

All the way down, were songs of various pop music bands, although these constantly change decade by decade. All the tunes on the radio bled into a single monotonous noise.

She died as she lived, to the tune of her own melody, hymning various tunes from different goth rock bands. Flourescence: Florentine immigrants, licking Italian Ice. Of the flavor of chocolate, slowly the scent comes inside ones nose. Nocturnal fragrance. Coming decades go by, everlasting years going by like seconds in grandfather clock. She woke up in a shock, feeling as if the floor were made of concrete spikes. Pushing herself up, she walks among the various incarnations of her past. Various mirrors into multiple independant manifestations of what we deem to be forever. She had no way of knowing what face of a tesseract was up or down, all she knew was she was floating in an odd blend of wire frame, and symbols from various mythologies throughout the ages. It was then, she remembered, her comment she told her therapist.

— I feel like I'm living somebody else's novel. It was a comment she heard a long time ago, on some long sense forgotten sitcom. She felt like her own life story was a script written by those with the most morbid of sense of humor, for those who get chuckles out of dead babies in Africa and the Middle East. She felt constantly like an outsider, drifting from culture to culture, from century to century, and now she can't seem to pick, in the translucent void that her manifestation, a new world to call her own. There are only so many ways one can stretch a word, describing its characteristic indirectly, but within herself, with some many ways to describe her past, which she always seemed stuck in, it still felt like a seemingly infinite amount of words.

In life, she collected various Burner phone, acting carelessly about where she dropped them. She would go to the diciest of restaurants, and burn away one hundred dollars she earned every Christmas, while others her age stood on street corners hitching rides from strangers. In many ways, our own modern life has no changed much from the wild west. The only difference was, you could steal somebody's car today as long as you weren't a member of any specific sets of minorities that belonged to the current hate of the week. But people were not erased in this society, although certainly at times she wished to be. Instead there was so much data out there about everyone, she wondered how in the various three letter agencies could sort through it all.

Yet here she was, wandering in the dark.

Waiting for the spark, called life, she waits for the fall.

She waits for a tunnel into the light.

It was a joke specifically about the new generation she happened upon, being reborn into the world of the next. The difference between generation twenty o seven and twenty o eight, was those who graduated in two thousand and eight excluded you from Facebook groups.

Those who graduated just a year before, insist you exclude yourself from Facebook. People underestimate the amount of difference a single year can make within the same generation, both in general rebelliousness, and general tech savvyness. She knew others who graduated a couple of years before she did, that were actually playing coops on gaming PCs, playing retro first person shooters, while she was still working out how she'll go about becoming a programmer for video games. Instead she got into the cryptographic game, developed a triple polygraphic cipher tools, and watched videos on how to crack open safes. Now going on ten years later after high school, already she had almost nothing in common with her own generation, going leaps beyond the cryptographic capabilities of her peers, while others stuck with Solitaire Ciphers and Advanced Encryption Standards distributed by Public Key protocols on the web.

She preferred the rustiness that other techies had long since abandoned, and now in twenty eighteen, was likely the only one still using sneaker net options like old fashioned thumb drives. She would store her cryptographic protocols, and remote viewing meta data tracking inside of a drive previously used to store personal memories inside of an ear ring, but her ear lobe had gotten infected from the weight of it cutting into the cartilage. Now she waits for her wounds to heal, drifting the world of Night time Chattanooga, observing call girls, while what remained of American civil society had a surface level tension that was comparing to the generation of the eighteen fifties. In her bones, she felt that the country, if you could call it that, being more of an Eldritch abomination of nations, was on the verge of a new civil war that was about to become hot.

There was not any bullets flying just yet, but already in moments when she was on the verge of panic attacks, she would momentarily hope out of time, and see a fractured United States. A society where life was cheap, concrete scattered like grains of sand, and then wake up staring at the sky while sitting on the curve, having almost passed out in the cold. To think, that she was only twenty eight, going on twenty nine.

And already, she felt like fifty.

She felt as if she was going on a century and a half.

Beamer The Shape

It was a long week after the mother kissed her cheek and ran off. How that old running step, one with allot of hard pep brushed against the wind. And changed her daughter's life forever. It was many a year, and she had gotten used to living without her mother. It was a quiet house, quiet as a mouse. Dad also helped with home work, yet this was allot of work. It was allot of math, allot of science, allot of everything. No passion, nothing to enjoy. Everything felt quiet the same. No desire's flame. In her mind's eye of blue, while dangling her shoes, she tended to let her mind wander. She wandered, wandered, and wandered against the wind. "Benina, pay attention." She finished her homework, and then went to bed.

It was a long week, a long year. A loud year, hurting her ears. She never understood why her father never wanted her to wear her bunny ears. Benina always loved to wear her bunny ears. Hop, hop, hop she would go. "You'll jar the whole house down" her father would say with a frown. Her has always frowned sense mother left. Though at school nobody liked her much, she had her own friends to play with: there was Beamer the shape, who was quite a large shape. His big eyes reflecting like glass. Together they would hob nob. They explored the woods, the Savannah, the green meadows. Yet now they have turned to Grey. When awake her father never understood why she wandered off in her head.

Tonight he offered her a book to read. To him this was a noble deed. Yet somehow this always quietly back fired on him. As Benina the hop, would hop, hop, and hop along inside her head in new worlds to explore that she was introduced to in various books. Of course when come test time, this always gave whatever book a bad taste in her mouth. Every book she read, she always pictured it one way, while the test interpreted it as another. Comics she fell in love with, as you can't "misinterpret" a graphic novel. Here new world she found she enjoyed, hopping, hopping, and hopping along dirt trails, rivers, swimming in lakes, and gliding in thick atmospheres above the white clouds of distant moons. One moon was how she met Beamer the shape. who would fly high in the sky, and would wear a large red cape. They would fly together on whales of the sky, with the large yellow gas giants in the horizon.

Her life was like a distant tune of a cello, a faint hint of mellow while always tired like a mind jello. Hello to the mind jello. For anything would be a good bed, this idea she got in her head. Though she always preferred to sleep in her old bed instead. "You should try to sleep, your tiredness makes me weep." said Beamer the shape. Even as days go by she always hogged her time with Beamer the shape, yet even he had a home far away. Though it wasn't like this home, as Beamer lived on a floating island along the sea. Floating, floating, along the sea.

"Can you stay behind to read a story?" asked Benina.

"I suppose one more story to read." said Beamer. and it was a very long story. A story that felt like forever. "Somehow, I will show you a real story. When I become older. Become a prince." The idea of Beamer being a prince made her laugh.

"Some other day." asked Benina.

"Some other day." said Beamer, floating away. He left, with her waving with a tear dropping against the sea. Against the sea, yet in her mind—there will always be his planet, above the sea.

It was within the next few months that Beamer came back.

Beamer arrived at Benina's bedside, and then they were off. On this trip, they arrived in a world much like our own, but in a different dimension. It was a long a forest trail where Benina was sitting up top of a mushroom, and Beamer sat right beside her. Down, down, down they fall down from the giant fungus, until they softly landed. They walked to the trail, and then arrived upon a sign. One direction led to the circus. But it was not like any circus either have ever been to before. There were very few cars in the driveway, and most of the people in the carnival were some type of clown. They were are frowning clowns.

Benina walked in line at the Clown's shout, and she purchased her tickets with the money that Beamer gave her. Then they were in. Here in the circus of frowning clowns, she came upon one clown that runs the animal race. 'Why is everyone frowning?' asked Benina. The clown looked at Benina crossly, and was freightened by the alien Beamer.

'Young miss, that is what we do. It our job to make people unhappy. We whip lions, process horse meat for the corn dogs. Yes did you know? Those are not really make out of pork meat, but horse.' At first Benina that it was an odd type of joke, a different kind of shitck. But then she found he was being serious, and thus she felt like shit. 'Do you find processing horse meat funny miss? We had lost our prized horse racer. Though his time was about become up anyway.'

Benina and Beamer assumed this clown was just having a bad day, and they walked onto to do other things. Most of the clowns were just as cross. But eventually they found an tourist submarine. They purchased tickets, and got to travel through hydrochloric acid filled with decaying fishbones. The clowns shouted out through a megaphone, 'Watch out for the walls, they are hot from the acid.'

Then they got some cotton candy, but this was no cotton candy they have ever tried before, for this was a savory cotton candy. It had curry powder and chili powder seasoning on it's fluff. Benina, despite being weirded out, liked it fairly well.

Then they boarded their ship, and left this planet.

A planet of Hell.

It had been a year since Benina the girl with bunny ears had first met Beamer. Now on her fourteenth year, her mother has had a new baby--Benina's own baby sister. Oh dear! Benina had gotten her homework early that night, after a much shorter fight with her dad tonight. She was sent to be early despite it's brief extent, and to her lament was always the one to take care of the baby--who slept in the same room as she, as she rocked in her little baby crib. Though luckily for her, her baby sister was always quiet. Benina was not sure how long this would last. Then as she had her nightie put on, she met her old friend again. Beamer eased in through the light in the window pane, and told him of new life stories quite profane. Until finally he settled down and set with her on her brand new bed.

'So how have you been, you haven't aged a bit.' said Benina to Beamer.

'It was good, and my years in my home world are different from humans. While you guys live as few as 0ne hundred years if that in most cases, we tie the 1,000 year in a knot with universal boot laces.' said Beamer to Benina.

'Where are you going to take me tonight.'

'First your baby sister needs to be asleep, and once this is done she will not remember my visit.'

'How do you know it's my baby sister?'

'We've been watching you whole life, you're are as family to us as we are to you.'

Then up, up, and up they went into the light. And then Benina waved goodbye to her sister and said goodnight. Finally she arrived in a strange vessle she had not once seen before. Only once had she seen it in the land of Lore. Though the susperstition she has read, never ever quit matched the images in her head. 'I got a new ship this time, you did not get to see it much last time. After all we made sure you did not remember the ship from last time. Though to be fair I wouldn't have wanted to remember that ship either, though my messy tendencies are much better now. Just ask my pet cow.'

Beamer pointed to his pet cow, who was harvested in an animal multilation experiment, that was something Benina would surely lament. 'Don't worry, it's just a set piece. I dislike animal mutilation as much as you, in fact I'm a bit of an odd one out for my space culture.' And then they zipped, zipped, and zipped through the galaxy until they made their stop at a planet that at first seemed almost covered in water. Then pretty glowing ice crystals covered the ocean surface, and glittered the night sky like stars painting the void of the galaxies darkness. 'What do you think? I only been here a wink before.'

'It's beautiful.'

'Nice isn't it. Now down, down, and down we go.' And they hovered their vessle over the surface, and touched down on the slippery glass like ice. There was a small town of carved ice igloos, inhabited by sentient penguins. The penguins wore a scaly coat made from the fish of the sea. 'I've never seen a scaly coat before.'

'Now but you have movie costumes, close enough.' said Beamer the Shape. Her pictured said movies in his mind, being recorded on tape--though by now said film was possibly recorded on a frame set. He would almost bet.

'This place reminds me of something.' said Benina.

'What would that me, the North Pole?'

'Nope, a carbonated beverage.'

'The ice would not fit into a glass.'

'Unless it was as big as a the planet.' The planet was roughly one point five times the size of Earth. They were greeted by two penguin kids, who wore two scaly mittens.

'I've never seen a person like you before.' said the girl penguin.

'Nor have I, everyone else is a bore.' said the boy penguin. It was his sing song voice that reminded her of wind chimes.

'Don't mind him, he always speaks in rhymes. Are you hungry, we have some freshly caught fish.' said the girl penguin.

Benina and Beamer ate on a large plate of fish, because that was their evening's wish. Then off, off, off they went back to their home world, and through the air at the rhythm of swish swish. Until gently he said she could sleep in the spaceship's bed. Then he placed her on her bed in the house. Benina woke up, and her baby sister was still sleeping soundly in the early morning hours.

Beamer waved goodnight, and zipped off.

Goodbye Beamer, Benina waved.

It has been a month sense Benina had seen Beamer. Her sister was being tended to by her mother, while she was busy catching up with homework from her school, for she had always been a slightly late student. Her teacher had always lectured her about not turning in assignments on time. But to Benina this was OK. She had always had a tendency to let her mind wander in class more than other students. As her guidance counselors would say, she would go many places in her head and not focus on the now, the present, the real world. The world where school was still in session, now daydreamer of being a young girl during the age of US succession. This had always made her something of a pest in the teacher's minds. But she was creative. She would always paint various paintings, that while never very good, were indicative of an imagination that--if it would die--would not die until at some point later in her life.

Her parents wondered why she always take about a strange shape at night. At first they thought it was merely that of a child's imagination ran rampant, however over time she began to develop scratches and bite marks. Benina remembered when she last got her bite marks. Her and Beamer The Shape were running through the forest of one of the worlds they visited that had four moons. They zipped, zipped, and zipped through the green trees. Until eventually they ran into a fairly large pack of wolves. Each wolf had large red eyes, and were growling at the two viciously. Though they eventually managed to be able to leave the planet in one piece, both her and Beamer had to tend some scratches. It was only thanks to their technology she was able to heal as quickly as she did. But her mother would always poke the mark, 'Where did you get that scratch Benina?'

'I just had a bad dream last night.' Benina said.

Her parents had toyed with the thought of taking her to a psychologist, but they were poor and also assumed that she would mostly keep silent. This they would lament. But dear Benina would act as if nothing was wrong. And hope in the flowers of daisies all day long. Then she would sing a song from the radio, and would probably sing until her father called for dinner time if she did not personally have to make up her homework. Benina wondered if she would see Beamer The Shape again, and was also curious if he still had some of the marks he had gotten from those aline wolf like dogs. Her mother said it was time to eat, and she for a brief moment halted her make up work.

It was the following night, that she had other dreams, though far less exciting than when she had her 'real life' adventures with Beamer The Shape. In these, she would travel to various countries, pretend to connect with real world friends that could not possibly really be talking to her. And go on adventures across time and space. Her dream at present was lucid, and she felt as if she would really walk through the neighborhood she had never been to before. However the neighborhood was covered a thick fog. And the exit out of this neighborhood was covered in a thick fog. She wondered what existed within the fog. And it was then that she noticed that nobody was outside to play. Benina was all alone, and she had never been alone before. Though she had certainly wishes for this, though nothing like this. This was more than alone, this was like being dead. But she was not dead at all, but merely asleep. Every now and then she would had dreams like these, that were neither nightmares of good dreams. She would always her the crying voice an old woman whose face she never got to see. But she knew she was there.

She would also occasionally meet a crazy old cat lady, that some of her own friends from school would recount would occasionally see in their dreams. She would walk around in a circle ritualistically, as if she were walking around some imaginary pentagram on the road. As if she were to summon something to due her bidding. But there was no demon would that come. For a moment she wanted to travel further into the fog, but heard screeches and growls. Those meows in the distance were not of lonely cats, but something far more sinister that she did not see. Something that was lost in the fog.

'Time for school today, want pancakes early?' mom said.

'Getting up, what's that smell?' Benina said.

'Pancakes are ready.'

Ah the warmth of pancakes.

It was the next following evening when Benina was able to see Beamer the shape again. She had come to miss the draw of going to lands upon the blue moon, and other worlds with many a moon. The chilly night chilled her through the blankets on her bed. Briefly she tended her little sister who slept with her in the same room. Though still quite, her baby sister now was lightly crying. Benina picked her up, and then gently rocked her as she sat on her bed side. Then when her little sister finally got to sleep, she gently placed her back in her crib. Benina was at least glad that she never had to clean her sister's diapers. But this she could tolerate to an extent. Then once she was able to go into a deep sleep, once again she was greeted by the window light. A familiar face greeted her in the window, it was Beamer The Shape. And he had two other friends that also greeted her. She was hovered into the spaceship. She wondered whether the tall blue man and the tall blue slender blue woman were his parents. 'I see that you have met Beamer. He's a good kid, and I've heard many great things about you.' said who she took to be his father.

'Beamer has never had a playmate, but now we have you to be by his side.' The mother gave her a kind of odd feeling, much like someone who wished to have kids, but in reality was unable to conceive. It was with this she noticed that Beamer looked more human than them. That in fact Beamer was in an odd between state between praying mantis and human, but his parents were entirely praying mantises. 'Now then, would you like to have some grains of wheat. We ourselves love to eat upon grains of wheat?'

After dinner, Beamer and Benina dropped the parents off back at their home world, and they traveled to a new kind of planet: a gas giant. As it turns out, while it was indeed a giant ball of liquid whatever that Benina had alway been taught in science class, Jupiter has giant floating islands that are in perpetual motion. 'These are the continents of my friends.' said Beamer. What Benina did not know, was that these were not actually islands but rather ancient spaceships from eons ago that were designed simulate the appearance of landscapes. Beamer friends are in fact the ancient ones, who had originally lost their mother planet, and settled in this ancient planet Jupiter. A shield covers their island to protect from the poisonous gas. The knowledge of ancient ways to leave the planet were considered to them much like to us the 12,000 year old ruins are. Beamer himself knew of their old culture, but thought it be to much to explain Benina at the moment.

They landed in a forest simulation--a large expanse that joined the millions of ships that were perpetually rotting over eons. There were many towns they could have visited, but instead they visited one with his friends. When they arrived everyone looked human. But unlike we, they have come to accept the wearing of wooden shoes. As they had no leather to make shoes, and they were not about to skin their pets. Sometimes they were use the points of their clogs to poke holes in trees, and this tree sap they were use to make honey infused chewing gum. Benina got to try some of these with having conversations with his friends, until eventually they had to leave because Beamer himself had school lessons. Benina was dropped off in bed.

Then she had a normal morning.

But Benina was tired in class.

Along the tide of the sea, there flew a giant space fortress that cut through the sky.

Through the clouds it went woosh, woosh, woosh. Until eventually a now older Beamer The Shape arrived at Benina's house. The house was what Benina's mother would refer to as a starter home, which is coupled with a large deck and an above ground swimming pool. Beamer hovered his space ship, that he was currently borrowing from his parents, over the deck. This was what he would always stand on when peeking through the window. He wondered if Benina would be awake, as she had gradually began to stay up later and later over the Summer month. When he had last saw Benina, her eye lids appear heavy and her skin was paler, almost like the color of fine China. 'It's time to go.' Beamer said when he picked up Benina.

Benina stayed mostly asleep throughout the trip, until they touch down on a new world--the planet of Cagaea, a binary planet that shared a collective atmosphere with it's twin. The two planets were roughly 1,500 year apart in culture. Though the one of earlier culture had once had technology, it is simply degraded and left mainly to the ruins that filled it's worl map. Yet when he had visited, the towns were ran by twisted town pastors. 'So where are we now, are we going to meet new people again?' Benina asked. Beamer noticed that she sounded more world weary than she had been in previous months. He had a hard time imagining that it was simply about how he would take her on adventures to distant planets.

'Now I thought you might like an extended vacation.'

'By extended how long do you mean? My grades are just now suddenly getting better.' said Benina.

'Is that why you're staying up later?'

'How would you know about that?'

'We have been watching you you whole life, I thought that she knew that by this point.'

Benina did not remember his parents mentioning this, although it only just now began to really sink in what exactly they meant. She had not seen his parents in the last few trips with him. She got to know the people better on the planet of the spaceship continents, and got to explore further within the ice caverns of the slush planet. Although she wanted to home for a moment, she said 'Sure, how long could it possibly last?'

Beamer and Benina spent the greater part of the five hours on this new planet. They would later meet the residence of the planet of Cagaea in other circumstances. But for now Avaste! They went zip, zip, zip through the stars faster than the speed of light. Benina felt a mixture of pain and loss of a friend when Beamer left to see his parents.

It was the next morning that her mother woke up, her mother took her various places to meet friends, and other things people her age would do. Before Summer vacation, she gradually began to have less and less make up work as she had began to turn work in on time. All as a result of her spending late nights studying when she did not feel like going to sleep. As while her travels with Beamer were excellent, her nightmare began to gradually take on a more realistic every day world tone. With the supernatural, she always felt a friend in Beamer. Someone she could always talk to tell her that said things were not real, someone that could help her keep her frame of good sense.

At first it mainly had to do with school relationships, but gradually began to take on aspects of many other things in her life. The psychiatric meds only did so good, and it never helped the experience in seeing Beamer. She had never told her psychiatric about Beamer, as there was still somewhat of a cultural stigma about aliens. And after all, the medicine really did help with her supernatural nightmare. The problem than was the distinction between the supernatural and the paranormal. And while it seeing Beamer did effect her sleep somewhat, it had no real baring on her life like those red eyed demons, that made her scream and wake up with claw marks on her arms. There were no such things having a magic charm to take away the demons of the night, those shapes that even Beamer himself did not know. Benina was mime, she was lost in her own silence.

'Beamer, I want to go away.' said Benina.

'But where would you go? And you mother would worry about, just as my own parents would.' said Beamer.

'Somewhere, out there. Not here. Anywhere, but here.'

Beamer did not know what to say, as for a long time him being with Benina was merely a task that his parents would have him do. But he himself never considered Benina an object of inspection. The idea of traditional aspects of alien abduction made him sick to his stomach. 'Trust me Benina, it's best that you be here with you family. I'm going to try to talk with my parents to see if they can have someone take over my job. Look, I have started to love you. That is not normal for my people.'

Her quickly boarded his ship with Benina trying to follow him through the long grass. But it was to late, for her one only friend was not there. She wasn't sure if she would ever meet another friend--she hoped this but could never be sure. Over the last few months she became quieter and more reclusive. Inside she cried unseen tears.

She sunk into her own personal misery and hell.

But soon there would be many other adventure that she would have with Beamer The Shape, though this time they were not merely adventure--they were a matter of utmost urgency. But for now I leave with this promise. She would see Beamer again. And she would hold hands with her boyfriend, as they walk through the light.

Catherine La Mort Papillon

Life in the abstract, breath is taken away. Pouring in the drops of tears. Death in purest form. The new world sun. Severance, all the solitude. Life in one's own pursuit. From Australian landmarks, to Russian can can dancers, you'll never see a guillotine. Yet for me all I see is the blond girl, once a goose girl.

The top of her dress is ripped, exposing her gentle neck.

In her wooden shoes, gently trembling she lowers her neck onto the lower stock. There is a drum roll, men with bayonets dulling the crowd. The angular blade falls down. Head, with the light locks falls in wicker upon severance of neck, blood spatter. Barely old enough to read the darker and grimmer Goldilocks, as she wore wooden shoes with no socks. Her clogs are sold on the open market, gambled on by deranged bidding. Then landed a spot in the museum of anonymity, of 19th century artifacts. The last stand of the illiterate.

Yet sometimes in time, there are new opportunities.

The new life of Trepas.

And one longs for Zen, In a kinder, gentler world... Je Attraper Un Papillon. Butterfly. It's wings spread far. Soars far into the void. Serenity beckons the broken. The torn. I don't understand people my age, and those younger than my old age. Yet I am only the age of two past a quarter century. The Winter sun is looming in the sky, the falling snowflakes. Beyond the century edge, an old world comes to an end. And yet! There are lovers who pretend, that a new world begins. There was me and my darling Trepa, the claimant. Who thought she descended from Catherina Trepa. The little girl of death, the murder of life. Because she alone saw what propaganda does to other humans. She feigns to love me, yet love me not. How many I longed for her, that I forgot. Yet for other there was only polite smiles of Vous—for she alone felt not comfort, for the concept of Tu.

She who held butterflies.

The reincarnation of Death.

Her smile brightens.

Un Aime on the coast, where in the morning a toast is served. The girl of smiles, who served adversity in the form of happy snacks. More American than anything else, she served barbecue weenies. All covered in hot sauce and spice. She tries to understand me, Je try to comprehend the one who seeks to try.

Je Parlons of how some high school girls refer to Je as creepy. Though Je never asks why they stare at me. Yet my love is for Trepa and not Nous. They have some self-esteem that assumes Je accepter the dance, yet for me my dance is with Trepa. Yet Trepa does not like to dance. Ce La Vie. Her life, her chance. Yet no desires. Only fear for that exotic prance. Trepa attraper un Papillon with her gentle closing of her small hands. Yet she refuses to poke its wings. She is haunted by the memoirs of her childhood, of the decapitated fille. Her old life visits her in dreams.

For she danced the wrong bewitching dance.

For she danced the death of time to Napoleon.

Trepa dreams of a world with none of herself.

She dreams of a life where immigrant girls like Catharina, who can dance with freedom. To the tune of their own music box.

The music boxes of joy.

For me as her close acquaintance, yet not to the level of Tu, for me only Vou, she loves peculiarly when I pick her dancing shoes. Yet for me I only know of slow music box rhythmic blues. Catherina Trepa, I call her. Who smiles Catherina's smile, and longs to dance the dance of the new princess Catherina.

She connects with her old life.

And smiles again, and with a kiss, releases the Papillon. She invited me to dance, the dance of the deranged toxic butterfly. The butterfly dance of Trepa. We embrace. I belong to no place or time, my heart has no song or rhyme. I am an identity, timeless, inescapable void. My heart sings no song for any time.

It all started when I visited the great flatlands in the black forest of the night. No more worries, no more concerns. All my concerns melt away tonight. For I am on my own. To be truly alone, to move away somewhere to die. To move somewhere to end it all on my own terms, where I can burn away into dust. I am my own sexuality, my own lust something the only thing I could trust. Yet in my personal night terrors, I dream of darker world beyond the inner sea.

I meet women beyond mortal compare. I meet girls with long black, blond, and beautiful read hair. As I caress their bodies nightly, them coercing my submission only slightly.

There are rolling, rolling, rolling heads everywhere.

And then there was only silence there.

Yet in the day I am no headsman, I find solace in humanity everywhere. I find shame in my own desires, and long to help others overcome their sorrows. As for me sorrow and sex had been closely aligned. For the aspect of female victim hood means something entirely different from being a headsman. Perhaps it is an unexpressed aspect of submissive itself.

For me I am the mistress.

The mistress of my own desires.

Even if one lusts after heads, I could never touch one. I prefer to protect and embrace the innocuous of the Dutch one. For her own life is more of value than my own desires, except for mine to protect.

To think then my love is Catherina Trepa.

To think that I could indeed love at all.

My body is an alien, an invasion of someone else's body into my own. My own desires to protect only I have shown. My fetishes I express I find no answers for their original, only the shame of their taste do express. For me I long for the long flowing dress, the dancer in the night. I long the frightened girl, only to tell her that everything will be alright as the day turns to night.

Because everything will improve. Everything will be alright. For I am there. I am everywhere and nowhere.

I am a paradox of the self. A paradox of the mind.

Shame and pleasure strange bedfellows.

When I see the tears of Catherina Trepa, I find only sorrow in her eyes. And I know not how to deal with these feelings of my own. Her sorrow a sin, if life looping all o'er again. A sin she must not atone. But the sin of her executioners, for her night terrors have nothing else of compare:

And she understand me, and I understand her,

As I caress hair hair, and her coat of fur.

For I am to her a cowgirl with no spurs.

Yet I am no American at all.

For me I fall into dreamlike cityscape.

I find myself in an endless fall.

When she went to bed, she thought of her future. She thought of her time without her room mate, who had been toxic with her and her finances. If only it was so easy to think of it in this way. In truth, she wasn't sure whether she would find any friend back home in Tennessee. And the only real advantage was getting some inter web access when she got "home". Home had never really been home, as she never really had any sense of privacy. Her dad would always comment on her lack of a right to privacy, and would at times open the bedroom door with a lock pick. He would then sneak up, and tickle her toes. She would scrunch up her nose like a bunny rabbit. She was to afraid to smack him in the face.

It is in this context, she thought of the old schoolyard that she used to play in when she grew up. And how as time went on even back then home never really felt like home. For the butterfly, there was no longer any goodnight kisses. In town there was the old Lutheran church from the 1980s, among other tourist attractions that were no more entertaining than watching paint dry. It sure beat the constant uneasiness of her room mate that would always find a way to distract her from her writing life.

At night her room mate would comfort her, with the butterfly having nobody she could trust. She would be crying, curling her legs up in a fetal position dreaming of wolves of yesteryears. Yet the room mate was not as trustworthy as could be, and indeed the room mate even in their most vulnerable hours would find some way to use them for their own personal ends. It is indeed to late now to make amends. And that is why the idea of her room mate being homeless carries mixed feelings that continue to follow her into Smyrna. For the butterfly, there was no more good night kisses to share.

She thinks only of the moonlight that trickles through the window, as she dreams of wolves and vampires in the night.

The butterfly was twenty seven, a year before she was twenty six. It was only just recently she thought of the idea of learning to drive again. It had been prompted by the idea of her wanting to live in an RV, and travel to Canada to visit Montreal. She had always wanted to learn French, but had been concerned about her memory and concentration issues. Her parents had always thought it be more worthwhile to study for the gateway. After all if you passed that, you could go onto college and learn languages later. It wasn't until later when she had wanted to write her most current novel, that she realized how important learning French was. She was a long ways away from the little girl who her dad always insisted on giving a buzz, and would not yet realize she was trans. For the butterfly had not yet sprouted her wings, and her story was not yet over when the old lady sings.

That cliche of life, the butterfly hoped that the lady would sing sooner rather than later. But sometimes suicide doesn't work that way, and she was unsure how easy it would be to hide the fact that she was poisoning herself slowly with bleach. She thought of her mother who would spank her ten times each, and at time grab her bottom like in old times.

It was an easy future to predict.

Her future was always her past. It would be back to the old grind for the little butterfly, who wanted only to sleep. And briefly in her life, she hoped the old lady would weep. Yet nights are so dreary, she wanted to be with someone to call her deary. For she although she was never one for pet names, she wanted to be called a pet night and snuggled with.

At least until the night came to a close.

Many, many, many hours to go.

The butterfly had purchased herself a bag of roll your own. Being told that roll your own was inherently cheaper than buying previously rolled cigarettes, she was skeptical at first until she purchased herself some pipe tobacco. This tobacco was in fact not pipe tobacco, but regular cigarette tobacco marked down in a one pound bag that can last you the greater part of a year if you bought ten, at sixty dollars and fifty cents not included tax. Some regions don't have tax benefits do to a lack of Native American settlements, though some may have their own tax benefits.

For the particular bag she was smoking, it smelled even before than a more expensive variety. The more expensive being such because tobacco is charged by the unit. Buying a single unit drastically marks down the price. And when you're straddling the line between lower middle class and homeless, you better be looking for any kind of deal you can get. It may make the difference between a week of rent owing sixty bucks, and missing an entire week. The butterfly was glad to be out of this situation, however she was unsure what it would be like after the next few months in her hometown.

Mostly likely most of her friends had already moved out of state, but in a few years a high school reunion was coming up. For very specific reasons, beyond the scope of this story of the butterfly's life, let's just say she did things that made her a legend in the minds of her coed classmates, and was unsure how they would take her actually being female.

At twenty seven the butterfly wanted to be a children's writer, but was unsure how to go about it. It had been many months since she had written her two previous complete middle grade novelettes and a half way complete partial. She had written for many years, though this was never acknowledged by her mother who always bragged on her about her potential as an illustrator. True up to a point, drawing for the butterfly was almost as natural as breathing, except now the butterfly breathed a mix of normal air and carbon dioxide that will eventually make her die at an young old age of 59–if she lived that long. So there was only so many years she could get some writing in. She felt as if her old life was returning again.

She left a lot of things behind. At time it felt as if she left everything behind. Everything including her life. The butterfly had wanted to move out of the country, and for now those plans are still on the table with scattered playing cards et the roll of the dice. She still wanted to learn to speak French, but she was unused to even speaking in English let alone another language. And as if last year she had had negative associations with the language ever since she met one girl that had helped her on her last novel. The only good French woman was a dead French woman, and the butterfly was not the one to make that happen.

That, of course, was the job of Marine Le Pen.

The butterfly, as a blood butterfly, had fantasies of decapitated women. But this fantasy was a mixture of artificial pleasure and sadness. For despite her being drawn into the glow of digital sexuality, she found herself also increasingly disgusted by the idea of herself liking it when others fall. At times she wanted to be the one to fall, if for no other reason than to avoid a high school school reunion. That was her old life.

She wanted to leave it all behind.

But life wasn't a clock. You couldn't rewind. She wanted to rewind back to her childhood, if for no other reason to dream of wolves and to face her own fears about herself. She wanted to be the one that slashed the wolf.

It was all a dream.

A dream of hands washed in blood.

When the butterfly spent time at her old home, she slept on the couch for as long as she could. She could only think of one word: Home.

"Home, ... home, ... home." That was the only word she could say, as she reclined and listened to the old pod casts she used to enjoy, along with the reminders of Christmas, that had made her attempt suicide for the first time on her birthday in May. It was a lot of bull, but a Bull that for once ... perhaps for a little while, that could take. She had gone without sleep for the longest time since she ran out of sleep medication. She also took medication for acid, though in the time spent in Milton, Washington she had not had problems with irritable bowel syndrome.

Something to barf about indeed. All this was gone in the time she spent in Washington, and yet her old room mate made all their money run out. It made her want to shout, for the butterfly had no idea how poorly such a homely lass could spend the butterfly's money along with her own proceeds. She thought of all the tobacco that was spent, and how The Flower got her into the smoking habit. That's one smoking blood butterfly. The butterfly would at times try to distract herself from her own fantasies, part of this being topics about UFOs. Despite her room mates insistence on not indulging in the topic, she still found herself against her better judgment at times out of curiosity drawn to videos about local sightings, among other topics evangelicals tend to refer to as woo.

She was constantly awake, yet constantly asleep. A kind of constant paradox that keeps her from functioning during the day. It had been this way since the month of May. Birthdays, along with Christmas, always carried a kind of sorrow. It reminded her of reminders of the fact that despite hormones, despite bottom surgery, she could never be the girl she always considered herself to be. The butterfly dreamed of being a modal for cover magazines, in fantastical locations like Alsatian Tennessee, yet with the hints of being on the coast of Myrtle Beach, Fenwick Island, and Cote d'Azul. She wanted to travel the world in a single location.

The world as her home.

The world only in her mind. Yet her ideas of fashion would never match the idea of what mainstream programming considered such.

She liked Boston clogs to much.

She liked girls in Boston clogs.

At twelve o'clock she would prepare lunch, generally Rouge Omelets Sandwiches and a glass of Merlot. Unfortunately no Chianti with beans, though she certainly like to hiss in the Cuisine. She wasn't sure why she still tried doing such, while she masturbated to cute girls dressed like the dutch. Sometimes life rhymes that way, as she goes along her merry way and flutters off into a sea of confusion and torment when she cuts herself to drip her own blood, just a little bit, into the omelet along with fine wine. All this activity on a day of hardly ever going outside of your room. Indeed, it had always been this way since she was eighteen.

She still feared the day the nightmares would come again, nightmares of strange shapes in the night, of headless aliens that would mount her in her sleep. Although better a hot alien princess that a human girl that looks like Princess Pig. Just with curly blond hair and not such pink skin. She thought of the old nightmare she used to have, and thought of a lullaby to make them go away:

On a night like this,

On a night like this I long to rest.

Give me my solace, do your best so I now sleep.

For the butterfly that longed to get a normal sleep, she wanted to turn back the clock of time.

It was better then seeing girls get the chop.

She wanted take them with her to shop for shoes. At times in her fantasies she would no longer feel horny seeing girls being decapitated, and when she did saved them because she didn't want to. To live in spite of herself. In spite of her own torment, in spite of everything she had ever known.

She loved a French girl.

From Alsace.

It was a few weeks since the butterfly stopped her matchstick burning habit. She liked how the matchsticks could be sharpened into a point, the proper paper needing a rough texture. At times she would prod herself with toothpicks as some form of vice and desire, like some atheistic masochistic shrine dweller. In the dark she waits for moonlight in the daylight hours, and watches as the rain begins to shower.

There are many ways she likes to cook, she had always liked to cook with eggs, and had always wanted to try a new dish ever since she had left her last room mate in Washington, who she would alway ask whether she wanted to come with her back to Tennessee. Although on some level she wanted her to be here, it was more like a parent to their offspring rather than as some romantic interest, as much as her room mate would hate to admit it. The butterfly didn't want experience love, but she want someone to snuggle with. Ideally someone them self who was safe, though not in the way that her room mate referred to as safe. The butterfly had her idea of safe. The butterfly fluttered away into her new life.

The life of a blood butterfly.

The life of a sex addict, addicted to blood. The fluid of the mother's womb. The indigestible.

Her truth.

The butterfly found greater affinity for those in earlier times, perhaps on some level because she could get the know the real "them", like the flower girl getting to know the real "soldier" in a fantastic game recently being remade for profits by already rich multinationals. But she wouldn't have to meet them in person, because then there would be cultural barriers. The butterfly was torn between two cultures, always has been. For her, the original idea was go to Japan to get into the Manga industry. But she found drawing sequential art to much trouble at first, because drawing in a way was more like trying to emulate life in a photograph. And there was nothing lifelike in the flow of panels.

This was despite the fact that despite her having grown up reading manga, she found herself preferring to write prose. Art and Prose were like competing factions fighting for the control of various tropical regions, especially on the inter webs where various cultures could both clash and gel together in a kind of hate/love relationship. The butterfly hated how web comic communities fade out from existence seemingly overnight, and in the times they were around would be disparaging to prose. By contrast the writers would often suggest not drawing your own covers. At times she wanted to build her own website, especially when she was still part of the decentralized dark web. Diaspora of course, has its own way of things. Though at least she could learn some French.

Her own view own cultures in meat-space was similar, almost to a fault. For she found the French something to aspire to without that particular fatal flaw, why write dystopian novels when you have ones in the real world. But even then this was infinitely better than Brexit England. Infinitely better than the United States ou Canada. It was like Japan of the EU. Only paved with severed heads, still a mixture of sexual pleasure and remorse. Yet her room mate, despite being abusive in her own ways, always said how fantasy was different from actuality. The actuality of cutting off a pretty girl's head, and holding in your chest in a mixture of crying and ejaculation. The aspect of being male that was always a reminder of the gender she was born with, that was not the real her.

The butterfly wanted nothing else.

She wanted to be the real her. She wanted to be the real her with a culture she felt affinity with, and not the US where she always felt like an alien even among strangers. Landing in a UFO, greeting the world with peace while being stabbed to death with pitchforks, and being so human that cult leaders in splinter cults give you dietary advice et talked you into purchasing negative ion generators in order to clear your sinuses, among other traumas.

There were times she attempted suicide, now counting to about four attempts. She couldn't bring herself to tell her friend, the only girl she ever really loved more than love, that she had many problems of her own. She didn't want to tell her how much she loved her, as in that culture generally saying such disqualified you for any love matching. Although certainly there has been Americans that have managed to marry Italians. But that's the Italian's. Very different in France, even in regions that used to belong to the Italians, so she found out from one of her French correspondents helping her etudier en Francaise avec il gentleness.

To many people are way to kind for her, while she goes on a self-destructive path, admiring authors like Silvia Plath. She didn't want to tell her friend the truth.

It would be to soon.

Yet in the darkness of her heart, there was something that kept her going as her life was going slow toward a final stop.

A dream of a lost Mme.

A dream of a happy girl. A desire to watch and see how things unfold, even if that meant it was a kind of love she could never have. Her own friend's love.

It was an Ami's love.

The butterfly didn't like character studies, though part of it was her own innate greenness. As green as the cap she wore that reminded her of the Irish, before it somehow in her mind reminded her to much of the French.

But even if she went to Ireland searching for fairies and marigolds, there was a certain portion of French people that lived there. But for so long her main issue had been with French-Americans, not the country of France. One of the girls she had known in fifth grade always referred her as "not quite cute, but not quite ugly." It was a matter of frustration, the long windiness of saying ugly-cute in a long drawn drawn out fashion. She began to hate, specifically French girls, with a passion.

Even now the butterfly browses the inter webs, searching for ways to know whether a French girl likes her, as it was never something she could tell. She only knew how to know when a sarcastic girl liked her, and she knew lots of them. After all, everyone is sarcastic, at least most of the time. Especially at fancy diners under the moonlight. It effected her view of classic entertainment like Phantom Of The Opera, despite the author himself being known opponent of capital punishment. She began to want them all to be beheaded, and had a preoccupation for the topic. Especially for cute girls that visited Gothic fashion stores. And then she met a girl named Liver, and for a moment even so early questioned her fantasies for blood. And then she turned to the wrong television channel.

A woman placing her neck on the block.

That was all she wrote. The butterfly disliked the idea of rescued princesses. In her mind what good did that do for Levier who she couldn't save. And her imagining the Mexican girl's anguished face put in her a personal torment she could never leave. She didn't believe in happy endings.

It never really worked that way. At least she refused to believe that it would work out that way.

Perhaps that why she drank bleach.

To wash away the tears.

Even after all these years she still hates the girl from fifth grade, but it has become increasingly a distant memory. The butterfly is not sure whether she'll meet a nice French girl. She wasn't sure how to feel about French girls, truth be told. She didn't want to become a slave to anybody, fly by airplane and get sold. She remembered the mother of the boy infused with alien cells in one her favorite Cyberpunk games. His mother would say "I want you to find a nice girl, that will take care of you."

It was hard to explain how she didn't trust the British, it was different from how she didn't trust the French. She masturbated to Joan Of Arc, yet spat at Ann Boleyn. And yet every other girl she liked in history and fiction had a name similar to Ann. But Christmas Songs always carried manifold sadness: it reminded her of how Santa would always refer to her by her male name, and she never got feminine gifts of any sort. As well, as she got older, she thought of nothing but Ann Boleyn, whose song written by Henry VIII had its lyrics rewritten for some Christian song. She always liked witches, but for whatever reason never Ann.

The butterfly couldn't even mend her own wings.

She didn't think anyone else would have the energy to do so. And take the time to listen.

For broken wings...

Nothing but silence.

Her aunt got her some French videos, perhaps things might look up from here. Maybe not, and even if she knew French, there was still that woman that wanted to hold a referendum for the death penalty. The butterfly didn't want to have capital punishment anywhere.

She wanted to forgive herself.

And show her face to the world. Perhaps a new adventure, where she can be like the little fourteen year old going on an adventure to see the world, visiting ghost ships, and being followed by a young girl with a puffy sidekick that goes poof, poof, poof. She withdrew from her childhood favorite.

Her only joy in the world.

Her own escape. To be:

Just in time for dinner,

Under the glow of restaurant lights.

Slowly eating under candle lights,

The young adventure waves good by to father,

It wasn't worth saying goodbye to mom,

Nobody wants to avoid the world.

For the butterfly, she was just in time. To acknowledge the cloudiness of life. Just in time for diner. But she likes spicy food, and doesn't have red hair. She had long curly brown hair. It was a Grandia. To not let PTSD control you. Or listen to the drole of alien viruses eating your memories away.

She wanted to live her way. She could be her own computer hacker, her own misty eyed fourteen year old, and her own memories she can rely on herself.

Catherine was antsy for sacrilege.

With her long bleached hair, she had never seen a butterfly, except in photographs. However when she saw that particular butterfly such as this, she felt a mixture of disgust and sexual pleasure. The idea of someone being turned on by her decapitation made her want to vomit, from the death of a loved one in a car crash just a few weeks prior. And yet, there was something in the butterfly she wanted to poke its wings. A gamer of sorts, she had been raised on games all her life since her birth at the turn of the century. Through the century, she had known nothing but battle systems. But life was its own kind of dangerous game, she had known this since she had had to force herself to leave the Cult Of The Flying Angel.

With her new life taking increasingly bleaker and stranger angles, she found herself willing to experiment with getting to know someone from "the other Union" that itself had lost the rest to break up into smaller states since the end of the civil war.

Her country was a land of supernatural lore mixed with the contrast of city life et countryside along the coast. But she only came there occasionally, and spent most of her high school career caught up in lots of studies, along with a boyfriend in her own country she would always kiss. Yet she had the desire to leave this country, and move up North where her family had always joked were notorious for incest. Whether she could get a better life, she knew not. But she would do her best to make do with a country she had only barely been familiar with.

Like the blood butterfly, would have a period she would not to adjust to the new culture and lifestyle, even if part of their language was based on Latin even though the other was Germanic. She wore two Boston Clogs, not realizing these were the kink of the butterfly overseas. She would wear them taking off her rest shoes, her bare feet needing a break from the black high heels she would always wear to please somebody, even if that wasn't men. The men here were pushovers and subservient. She desired no subservience in herself and others, and wanted to lay on one side of the bed, and the other on the other side of the bed. One can only guess whether she found about her own country like the blood butterfly did about hers.

Total disgust.

What is true is that the blood butterfly felt no affinity for her homegrown life, and grew tired of her parents always insisting on packing her bags for her, indeed the only way to not show them she smoked tobacco was by buying Virgina Slims once she reached Smyrna. She was unsure her Adelaida would accept her smoking, or try to get her to quit. There are always unknowns in meeting friends, and sometimes silence for a little while is all you need to restore all the smiles in the world again. Adelaida wanted to be a butterfly with all her heart, even despite never knowing one. In dreams she would become a swarm of butterflies as numerous as locusts under the glow of the lunar light, and wanted to be a princess on the moon, just like her sailor friends in Japanese anime written in the 90s, recently being rebooted and trying to stay true to the source material. She wanted to hop into the photographs of the blood butterfly, she could meet someone she felt more interesting than her boring life. For there was nothing worse than after school night clubs, and despite being way to skinny would be made fun of for having a little bit of chub.

But for now she showers in the darkness, under the glow of flickering L.E.D. lights. A rub a dub dub. She groaned, she cackled, and she writhed in disgust.

She need someone to trust.

When Adelaida reached Smyrna, Tennessee she was unsure what to expect. The blood butterfly told her that her parents would be out of town. She offered cigarettes to Adelaida, while the blood butterfly smoked nothing but cigarillos under the shade on the moonlight night. "I would say what I wanted to, but I was burned by saying it before with my last room mate. I'm not even sure why I even found myself wanting to go with her to Seattle. Now I have these black clothes, and an upside down cross choker."

"Then don't say anything, let's just watch the stars." As polite as she was direct, indeed that watched nothing but the star on that night in October of 2017. Adelaida didn't like the idea of being in a city she did not recognize, even in her own country sometimes the panic attacks would be to much to handle. She dealt with her younger sibling listening to nothing but dubstep Handle, and use her pigtails for handle bars for a swing set. This was while her younger sibling relied on her not to fall, because Adelaida was so airy she could float to the top of the sky.

But she had not seen them for a while, and wanted to stay here while the blood butterfly went to support group in Chattanooga, that was known for hipsters while Nashville was the home of awful country music stars.

"Could I have a cigarillo?" asked Adelaida.

"Sure I'll break this next one in two." said the blood butterfly.

"No, give me a whole cigarillo."

Adelaida went into town, and found that like the blood butterfly said, Smyrna was becoming almost like a small city. This must of have inspired NashChat. She noticed a sign when she walked to the local smoke shop. It said South Park. She had seen South Park in her native language, and wondered if this was what influenced how the butterfly thought of the imagination intruding into the real world. And intrusion of the mind.

She was back before the butterfly got home.

She got her feel of people, for people were simply to much to handle. While she reclined in her Birkenstock sandals, and watched reruns of 1970s sitcoms and soap opera. Adelaida never understood the butterflies distaste for television.

She loved herself some TV.

She walked into the room the butterfly stayed in, and found it neatly made. She wondered if it was especially made for her. She wanted to rest in bed, and wait for her homesickness to melt away. She wanted to have those blood butterfly wings, and fly once more to the top of the sky.

The butterfly got home with Groceries.

She would have offered to cook for her, but she didn't want to wake up Adelaida. So she kissed her goodnight, gently closed the door, and then took a shower in the guest bathroom. After all it was never fun to be woken up.

No morning in a cup.

No taste of bitter coffee.

Adelaida remembered when she was almost eighteen, at seventeen she wrote a Halloween story for her friend. She was nervous about what she may think of it, after all writing was something she had never shown on the inter webs, though she wrote plenty of it on her own time in the hours she would be home from school. But for now she wanted to do her own thing, and got tired of translating things.

When she got up, she poked the butterfly in the air. Because she never want to a touch a butterfly's wings. "Let's learn us some French grade 1."

Basic French, for a basic butterfly.

The butterfly is so basic. As basic as Tuna casserole made by her mother when she still lived at home. As basic as a pair of Birkenstock sandals, as basic as an otherwise Jolie la femme.

Basic was the butterfly's life.

Her life, her story.

"Comment Ca Va?" said she, unsure of what to expect from the non Le Chat, but simply a regular chat on the net. The last time she had had a chat with previous boyfriend, it melted away like scattered bits of data.

"Bonjour!" said the other girl, most definitely not a man. This had only recently began to come to terms with her sexuality. Used to the concept of being a larger part of the Inter Webs rather than reality as we know it to be in meat space, it took many hours, days, and weeks of soul searching. It took all she had to say, "Salut! Yo, in English." The degree of pronunciation was still difficult, and her ability to read only gave her so much to work with when visiting her best friend, who was a pot head in British Columbia. She was dating a French girl that was visiting the larger British portion. But for whatever reason this girl was different.

There was a long moment of pause, but eventually they agreed to a relatively light level of encryption. It wasn't as if any dream-scanners were currently watching, and the only thing they had to worry about was their families. "SIOXEOTUUSWIRAIHSSLRAYEEDE" the French girl said. She had just been introduced to block ciphering, and briefly before had only just become familiar with Caesar Ciphers. She came from a land where it always rotated six ways down a multitude of intersections, and her friend had wanted to visit Strasbourg for research for her next book.

"ILYDBFDOWAIYUIMTODLAOUALD" her friend said. And it was true, you never know who you might be talking to on the net. In most cases however most people were normal, for the most part, based on how you would define normal. In her case, most of her desire came from female victim fantasies, having her own head severed by unseen guillotine blades, men hidden in shadows. Secret agents that come to take her away, and would just as likely shoot her in the back of the head if it made enough money. It was a fantasy that always caused embarrassment, and so only among few friends she knew were her exact age, she was very careful who she spoke with them about. She had gone through enough with her mother, about the shame of liking such things. Though for her mother she was the time to never be satisfied about anything. It didn't matter whether it was grooming, cooking, or anything else.

And yet for her, the desire for love was faint. Subtle, and now almost imperceptible. Though there was some larger desire she still had left to protect. She did not want her friend to know she cried.

That she hated the ideas of sex.

The nature of her own flesh.

Her friend had a few experiences with encrypted dating before, and breaking a block cipher was not exactly the most difficult thing you could do. Yet she had become disillusioned by the culture of diaspora, mostly being ran by programmers. Although that core desire for privacy never waned. And now that dance of all dances, the dance of a love that will never be. It was like funeral tap dance to deranged mothers, and funeral march at the tune of a confused bagpipe and piano playing Fur Elise. She always wanted a girl named Elise, though actually being named such mattered not. And over timed this fantasy became something she forgot.

She focused on her digital sexuality.

She focused exclusively on herself.

Yet now she can only thing of false promises and flower fields in digital after lives, walking through electronic meadows on the net. The skies would darken and shadow, she would explore the duality of centuries at ease of which most people could only travel through capsules.

It was the only desire she still had.

The waning century game.

Duality Of Centuries

She had just returned home from the school cart. With her little school bag, her tattered dress, and her little wooden clogs she tap danced to the door. Then gently pet her cat on the head, before walking in. 'What took you so long?' said the cat. Lisa placed her back on the table, and picked the cat up.

'It always takes a while for my cart.' she said. In this neck of the woods, there was only horses and carriages unlike even just a few blocks later down the sidewalks. In the other district, even just a little bit further from her house, sometimes you will see carts riding in the same road as current hybrid car models. This was her luck, if she had been raised in any house further she would have enjoyed the benefits of the city. Because her neck of the woods was stuck in the late 19th century, there was no homework to be had. Thus most of the rest of the day was usually spent being bored.

Lisa exited the hall and placed her bag in her room, then after walking back downstairs exited the kitchen door to the porch. Then she did a little tap dance, tapping taps down the sidewalk through the neighborhood. Until finally she had to stop at the local candy shop, that if she had visited the one in her neighborhood she would have not been aloud in. But because it was the city, she go inside again. Thus she takes off her black ribboned straw hat, and then stares a the candy available in the store.

And here the cashier cat played with deck of fifty two.

'Ah Lisa, I see you caught me playing cards again. Which piece of candy would you like to have?' said the cat.

'I'll take that one.' Lisa pointed to a penny caramel.

The social rift between centuries was slow at first. But eventually it became more pronounced. Scientists from the new century created a time rift that was never completely repaired, and thus little trickle through enable presidents and mayors of various 19th century years converse with politicians from the present of 2279. She never seen so many feminine boys, some of which were not boys at all but girls with boys body make up. This is what you call gender identity dysphoria, and beyond the scope of this story. She exits the candy shop, and then her talking cat followed her here. 'Did you mother say not to wander off?' said the cat.

'I don't care what mother thinks.' said Lisa.

She visited her boyfriend just down the road, who was playing with his portable gaming device. Lisa always found him fascinating because she herself never got to benefit from this technological innovation just down the road in her town. The town where ghost intrude into the lives of the living, and cosmic abominations cross over into our own reality. Yet here in the present she felt safe. 'I'm playing a text-adventure.' said Danny.

'What's a text adventure?' said Lisa.

'A game where you get to play the role of someone and get to make choices in their lives in a text-based medium similar to novels.'

'Sound very eggheaded.'

'Aren't we all eggheads sometimes?'

Finally they had lunch at the local restaurant, a ham made from a pig that happened to be the pig bullying one the pigs she knew growing up. She felt a mixture of disgust and pleasure, for it was the mean ham from a decade ago.

Diane thought she knew her Danny.

Instead there was more to him than she could possibly have expected. He led a certain kind of secret life she never let her into. Even in high school he would boot up a distribution of Linux. As she would sit back and watch him pinch his pimples, and he would always be so secretive. Know she knew why.

When they were young and went on adventures together across the backyard, they would travel across various ruins across periods of history, as well as various planets that were unexplored by man. They ran from vampires, murderous cyborgs, and totalitarian dictators that wanted to shape them into compliant citizens. Yet it was always him that would help the both of them escape. There was never any point in bringing a digital video camera, as it would never tape the footage. Yet even with these adventures she never felt like I really knew him.

Diane had tried various times in her school years to encourage him to become a writer, after all he almost certainly had the imagination. But over time they had gradually began to drift further apart. she had not seen him for months.

Diane was living in a new apartment at the time, and although she could barely afford the rent and upkeep to make ends meet. She owned a little Hedgehog which who was provided with a proportional rolling wheel. Before that point she considered keeping a goldfish. The reasons were obvious: they were dumb, easy to take care of, and rebellious to a fault. In some way they reminded her of her older brother. The brother she knew. Diane would always reflect about the things she did not know about him.

She also owned a talking cat. 'Your brother is a mystery, perhaps him not meeting you is for a reason.' Diane wanted to shove the cat, yet was to kind. It was time to sleep. And she would sleepily sleep, sleeping nightmares about things her brother would hide from the world. She would wake up in a breathless panic. So she got up and drank some carbonated bitter water. The thought of him would never go away, and now she understood why.

There was a last argument before he left the house. On the computer he would be, typing up strange stories for Diane to read. Though he would take criticism relatively well, Diane wondered if there was something missing on the page. If she were a witch she would sprinkle it with sage, yet in Danny's eyes he could sense that no blessing would help. He would rather eat his breakfast food and then before for the morning rain.

He was always sensitive about not being good enough, and its mere reassurance would bother him more than if Diane critiqued his work in a false way. Though Diane always felt the stories were fine, although they had a slightly different flavor from the adventure that they would use to have as kids in the middle grades. Darker, edgier, more depressing. He was the sheep, and whatever lover his fictional girlfriend would be would be the sheep.

The stories felt on some level like alter egos, he drifted thoughts to her while he ate waffles at breakfast.

Over time Diane would missed sitting with him, being by his side. And together eating waffles they would stare out to the backyard with their eyes wide.

His downward spiral arrived faster than I expected. Only a bullet train could be faster, and I regret the day I once called him a bastard. He would later change his name, to things other members considered profane.

The next month came and went. News headline: Woman run over by truck. The realization hit, she was never a brother at all.

And I wasn't there.

Except that was the myth Dannie, now no longer Danny was living. For she felt that everything up to that point was a lie.

The sidewalk that was raining had just become soaked. Sounds of the cars filled the urban landscape with horns, the honking was loud enough to bust millions of ear drums at once. Yea, those drivers were ensconced for the honks for the traffic, the traffic was something to be ensconced about. Up the stair case, our main character is reading an old text-book, while attending to a command prompt.

It had been many months sense they had tried to learn how to program in regular c, and c plus plus. The basic rules of the programming were simple: the semi-colon functioned much like a period for C languages, and one bytes was eight bits. But even merely trying to figure out when to declare a variable before assigning it was much different from what they were used to in attempting to learn the language. Thus they closed up their lesson for the day.

And that was the end of their first work day.

They are frying up some beef for tacos, and just doing their regular thing during the evening. Then there is a knock at the door.

Dannie, not Danny, worked the night shift at a local grocery store. Got herself a stocker position. Day by day she would go through various items. The boring life. Dannie was careful not to situate her employment in the same neighborhood as her family. After all she wasn't sure whether she would want to see her family again. Dannie also had another means of employment. Though somewhat afraid to meet Lisa again down on the road to 1920, it was something that she feared less than if she were to see her family again.

At three o'clock sharp long after the rush hour traffic of the afternoon, at night she could enjoy herself in various intoxicating substances: marijuana, liquor, among other things. Thus she was never completely certain whether her perceptions on reality were absolutely certain.

Dannie boards the bus on the way to town center, takes some tweezer and takes out her splinter. And then cringes on the way to the center.

And here she meets Lisa with a grimace.

'I thought you'd be happy to see me.' said Lisa.

'I knew we should not have came.'

'No it's not that.' said Dannie.

Lisa and Dannie visited the park. Lisa's talking cat would converse with various companions he had meet across the duality of centuries. Little girls would tap dance and play hop scotch on the sidewalk with wooden clogs upon the murals drawn with glow in night chalk. Yet for Dannie, things will never be the same. At least it was thought at the time. 'Remember when you used to be my old flame?' said Dannie to Lisa.

'Yeas ago, why Dannie and not Danny?' said Lisa.

'Well isn't it obvious?' said Dannie.

'I thought you were gay.'

'Everyone thought I was gay, now let's watch the sunset. Watch the children dance and play. Delivery this last hurray, and stay this night.'

In the neighborhood of the 22nd century, it was always night. Nobody where you were you could not get the same amount of sunlight as you would from walking to the next town over.

And here they make this solace. In their lost childhood into forever.

Sometimes in life you will retreat from friends. At other times you will seek to make amends. Yet at other times you simply try to live your life, but can you? So tap dance into a new life, take care of your youth, for in our age it is dwindling into the present. Dannie would eventually go back to meeting with Lisa from time to time, and rekindle this old rhyme. They would make pumpkin pies together, and season them with thyme.

In the following week Diane would meet up with Dannie. At first she could not believe that Dannie was still alive. Dannie, Danny at the time, wanted her parents to tell her she died, as she not want try to explain to her sister, who she had grown up with so long ago, that she was going to change her gender. She knew that for Diane this would be to much of a mind bender. Dannie feared that she would be labeled a gender bender.

Yet now, all those fears have come to an end.

They could all three enjoys adventures together again. Into the new life, a new world. A new set of responsibilities.

In this neck of the woods, there are only horses and carriages unlike even just a few blocks later down the sidewalks. In the other district, even just a little bit further from her house, sometimes you will see carts riding in the same road as current hybrid car models. This was now all of their luck, for Diane, Dannie, and Lisa will raise kids just a few blocks down from where Diane and Lisa grew up now without the benefits of the city. But this was alright, they could life how they want.

It was their new found youth.

Dannie and Lisa have their kids. Diane had become an aunt, that would go onto to tell her own set of adventures with mutated zombies, murderous cyborgs, and totalitarian dictatorships. It is note able that both Diane and Dannie would go on to establish to different versions of the same genre. With Diane it focused more on existential angst, while in general Diane's tended to be more pop oriented.

It was a few months later when they split again, as Diane had moved elsewhere for a higher paying job, and Lisa had went off to write some of her own books about her own adventure between the duality of centuries. Dannie on the other hand would continue to write more stories though would gradually move further and further from her original sources of childhood imagination. Her stories took on a kind of immediacy that here original work had lacked. Case in point, Nadine would from time to time write mini-travelogues about her adventures job hunting.

Dannie would go through walks through the duality of centuries, finding for new sources of inspiration. On one hand she was curious whether the area had that same kind of nostalgic feel as her earlier life, but as she walked through the old town she found it no longer had that old town feel. Rather the duality of centuries became more tight knight. People like her friend Lisa would often come out of their own time period to visit friends in the present.

Eventually there would be no more duality. The duality of none. The old duality initially was something that Dannie was able to get used to, but this was something else. For not only were carts and cars riding on the same city-streets, and people in pillories would get old computer hard drives thrown at them, but the old centuries began to take on a different direction from the present. Flying steam cars existed in the same physical plane as gas guzzling land bounds. She wandered then, how soon will thinking of each time separately would be outlawed.

Dannie didn't have to wait long, the Arch Duke of the empire of Chicago would eventually have political meetings, who wished to erase history. After all nobody below a certain minimum wage threshold deserved to know the past. Especially if there future was the past.

Indigo Spacers

1 --- Nikko ---

So I attempted to read my assigned reading for my uni class, while Jerid blasted tunes into my poor ear drums on his computer monitor.

I wanted this to stop. So I got off his bed -- I always visited on any lonely night -- shaking in an irritable movement. And in doing so I carried the pillow from the bed, and was just about to make a move as if I were going to throw the pillow at him. But it was then I found. ... That he was being entertained by something else at the computer. That he was in his own little world. Someplace far away, that would be impossible for me to pop him out of. So I went back to the bed, resisting the dance to the music as I went.

“If you could turn the music off,” I said. Then hopped back onto the bed. It was jiggly, like a water bed. “for just one minute.”

“Of course I will Nik-Nak,” Jerid said. I could tell he was barely paying attention to whatever it was I was saying. “I just need to finish these tunes.” He turned the volume, ... way down. I relaxed until ... “Then maybe, I can study with you. Maybe?” Then shot it way up. I jumped and rolled over.

Irritated, I got off of the bed. Then tried to turn off the computer. He was like a frig-gin jack rabbit man. “Hey Nikko, relax.” He was to preoccupied at staring at his computer monitor, than staring at poor me. “Our friend Avon, is going to be here soon. Then I will show him some science.” He made sure to say that, in a very deep voice. ... Oh yea. He then let go of me slowly, keeping a watchful eye on me, to make sure she didn’t pull a fast one.

After we stared at each other for just about a min, I decided to stick my tongue out at him. It was like sibling rivalry, but with two love birds. With a stone tossed at them. And so my concentration for that evening, was shot through the roof. “Fine, but I won’t help you with your grades.” I said, referencing what he said earlier like a smart ass.

“Fine by me.” I thought he normally, loved to study with me. ... Fuck him.

You know who bursted through the dorm door, causing me to jump ... -- and fell on my face.Ow-ie! And then I could feel the footsteps of his synthetic sports boots walk by me into the dimly lit dorm room. I looked up his his short buzzed blond hair. His hair had a slightly green tint because of the blue of the screen. It was then I heard his voice. “So how’s it going Jay-Rod? Find anything new?” That voice irritated me every time, he sounded like such a winer sometimes you know?

“I found this cool toolkit online,” I heard Jerid say. Oh that bastard somehow sounded more excited now. I could see his smile like a madman, at the flicker of the hologram monitor which shined a stung my poor eyes. “it’s this strange government tech.” He felt like doing this happy dance, but I guess he decided against it. After all he didn’t want to indicate he was more thrilled being around whiney voiced Avon boy. Fuck him. Fuck it all.

I carefully got up, and scrubbed off my purple sports coat. Not so stylish, but it suits me just fine. So get over it. Anyway, so I was saying. I heard Avon say, before he turned around to face the door behind me, “Your not doing anything, to get us watched are you?”

“No of course not,” I heard Jerid say. Then his eye spasm-ed on the computer screen. “Well, at least not on purpose. I got the chemical composition in the fridge. That part of it is taken care of.”

So I saw Avon walk over the fridge, and he opened it up. The glow from inside the mini-fridge gave the dorm, a few milliseconds of normal light in the room. That crucial moment that stang my eyes even more than that god damn fall man. I just barely saw him try to pick up the bottle, discretely. But as always Jerid motioned his open hand downward.

“Avon, lower that thing. You were the one asking,” Jerid said. Then stopped his hand suddenly in mid air. “if I was trying to do anything to get us watched.”

“But Jerid, I’m bored.” ---

2 --- Jerid

I was not sure whether janitor was going to visit our dorm, after all technically it was suppose to be a mens only dorm. I guess in a way you could say I felt sorry for Nikko -- she didn't really have a dorm, or even really a house to go to. So you know what, I bit -- don't regret it a single bit. I did however wonder if the janitor was going to find the drug cocktail. Believe me, I know Nikko. She is not the type to take drugs, just willy nilly. I need to do something to clear her name if she went, or take the time with her. But anyway I didn’t want to think about that at the moment. I had a hard time not snickering, because the room smelled of old tennis sneakers. I never was good at promises. But I do need to get some detergent.

“This is fun, way better than that stinky old dorm room.” I heard Avon say. I was on the other end of the isle, and Avon was browsing to check out some of the stuff on the shelf. Then walked he over to me. “Any luck finding anything?”

“No, we need to buy it online.” I said.

“What are we buying again?”

“You’ll see when I receive it.”

So we arrived back at the dorm room, and then formed a plan of action.

“So when are we going to get what your looking for?” Avon said.

“Probably in about a week.” I said.

So we waited for about a week, to get their our code box. Then when we received it, it came in a brown box, ... packaged discretely. So we tore apart the brown box, and looked inside to make sure we got our item. “Hey Avon, you want to help me build this?”

“Ah, do I have to?” Avon said.

“Fine whatever, I will do it.”

“Chill brother, I will help you out.” ---

3 --- Nikko

The Finger Flick --- So I was watching two mates -- actually technically it was only Jerid was was my mate -- but whatever. They put together the contraption, and then they took a short break to admire their work. And the device was like a lumbering shadow, the chair with the gas mask looked ominously to us. I thought it reminded me of my glaring mother -- though not directly -- though she did act like an electric chair sometimes. Then another one of Jerid’s friends opened the door.

I sure hope that’s not Horace, I thought.

“Hey It’s me, can I check out what you guys are up to?” the voice that sounded like him said. He waited outside the door, then the door slowly opened after Jerid unlocked it. And he was illuminated by the glow of the hallway L.E.D light rows. “I overheard your conversation, and became interested. ... Hey Nikko, how’s it going?”

“I was not going to involve you in this,” I heard Jerid say to him, while he was still outside of the door. But Horace was pushy, and let himself inside. “you alway’s mess shit up. ... What’s the password?”

“Shit sickle.” Horace said.

“Correct!” Jerid said.

“Come on Jerid, just let him in.”

“So what are you guys up to?” I heard Horace say.

“Me and Avon, just got down building.” I heard Avon say.

“Wait a minute Jay-Rod, you never told me what I helped in.” I heard Avon say.

“Why did not you ask before?” I heard Jerid say.

“On with it!” Horace said.

“Anyway, I was looking to confirm this rumor I heard about online. There was once this guy, that leaked this alter-net.” I heard Jerid say. He then slowly walked over to the chair, hovering his hands over his new baby meditation chair. “Supposedly, you could connect directly to your dreams.”

“Do you ever know what happened to the guy?” I heard Avon say.

“Well I’m not one for telling ghost stories.” I heard Jerid say.

“Oh come in, on with it or I want to go in now.” I heard Horace say.

“Well they say that his spirit haunts, the matrix.” Jerid said. He was trying to restrain laughter. “Just kidding about the last part but--”

“Move it! Move it! I’m going in.” Horace said abruptly. Then I saw Jerid tossed to the water bed. And thought even if there was not really his spirit there, it’s just like Horace to be reckless. But man seeing Jerid get owned was satisfying. It was within this innocent act of adventurism, that was found out rather accidently, that something did haunt the dream world. But it was not the spirit of the hacker. It was the spirit, of something else. It was something that was not quite human.

I Horace sit in the meditation chair, and then placed the gas mask over his face. His consciousness fizzled out like a frayed electrical wire.

Or at least that’s was his buzz indicated.

“What did you do to Horace!” I said to Jerid.

“Yea, what we do man. What kind of monster we create?” I heard Avon say.

“Relax, he’s just sleeping. ... Sort of.” ---

4 --- Jerid

It was the next week, that we gathered the additional supplies we needed to come in after our friend.

For many days I wondered if people would think our friend had dropped out. And perhaps hoped it would be believable enough, as me and the other two hardly saw him studying in any of the classes that we shared together. He was not mean, I hoped he didn’t think this was some vengeful prank. He was just in his own world, thats all. But then Nikko probably wonders about me. But he -- on the other hand -- was another sort of day dreamer, one that would not awaken unless someone pulled him.

I pushed the memory out of my head.

“Avon, can you help me with this again?” I said.

“Sure, but we might need Nikko’s help too.” Avon said.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to focus on grades?” Nikko said.

“What kind of friend are you Nikko? Don’t you care about Horace?” Jerid said. Then I face palmed. “Choose your grades, or you friends. I’m sleeping in.”

They put the kits together, for all three chairs. ---

5 --- Horace

“If you could have anything you wanted Horace,” the voice said to me. It was slightly more audible whisper than the waves within the darkness. But it was barely perceptible beyond a whisper. It pulsated the meshwork of the night. “what would you want?”

“I want ...” I said. Then tried to remember. It was always Horace that would try to wake me up from my dream. I never really liked being woken up you know? ---

6 --- Jerid

We all placed the gas masks over our faces, and then I knew for sure my own vision faded to black --- and then we were falling into a wormhole, changing in switching colors -- it was translucent, floating through space. Then we warped into the meshwork, and the vision of it changed between the desires of the dreamer.

There was a flower Garden.

There was a diner.

There was a singing choir. ---

7 --- Nikko

So I was walked through a church, and looked at the choir. They were singing hymns from my church. And then I finally remembered what it was. I just barely missed the opportunity to be in the band. It was thar god damned doctor’s visit, I had lost my voice. I could not longer sing. It was tossed away, like sand on the sea. There was a white cloud, covered in divine radiance. I saw it float down from the window of the room that was a manifestation. And illusion from the dream.

It seemed to have sense my mood.

But there was something, that made me ill about it, and it arrived through the window, of stained glass.

“If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?” I heard the voice say. It sounded like my mother. Voice was of no particular shape or form, and was becoming louder from the whisper. It like that of an angel, a non nightmare. Heaven, shining lights. “I can give you the chance to sing again, to have a voice of your own.”

And then I stared at the choir, longingly. There is this feeling of jealousy when you see someone who could sing better than you. I heard them sing the song of peace. A piano melody, but it felt like the tunes of darkness. But there was another voice in my, I finally found -- it wanted to be something better. But it died down like a funeral procession, the sound of trumpet’s blowing, Soldiers marching.

“I still barely have that voice,” I said longingly. Then stared into the stained window-glass. “I lost much of it after the illness.”

“I can undo this illness.” ---

8 --- Avon

White I saw over the clear blue sky was like a form of heaven, that was not really there. She, or rather it, came down from the sky. And then the it rained softly in the garden, of which I wept.

“If you could have anything you wanted, what would you want it to be?” the voice said, softened into the voice of my mother in whispering softness. It like that of an angel, that was not really there.

I removed my hands, they fell. from his face. My tears tingling as they were wiped from the rain.

It was in this very long dream, that I visited my mother in the flower Garden were I once grew up. I was helping her carry the dirt to plant the varying species she needed to grow. I helped her dig the dirt, and split the labor of water to help the seeds.

“Mother, is this how you want it?” I was a kid at the time, you see.

“Yes, this is perfect.”

“Is that what you want?” the voice said. It was closer to the auditory level from the choir‘s church. A worship hall that I saw in the distant grassland. Like an eternity that would never end. And I heard Nikko’s voice singing in the distance. It wiped my tears away. “I can give you this, if you become a part of me. And help me improve.” ---

9 --- Jerid

I sitting in a diner with my old flame. The date had that odd silence you would get, when you knew she was about to drop the bomb. A distant sound of music, playing. But it was not Nikko’s singing. It was the sound that was inside Jerid’s head. The sound was not quite silence. “Look, can we get back together again?” he said.

“I really don’t know what I saw in you.” the woman said. She said it quietly. like that of a whisper. But the answer did not feel genuine. It felt like a reenactment, organized by a two star play write. “But I will be happy to take your flowers.”

But she disappeared into smoke, and then the white light that I saw at the moment warped in through the window of the diner. “I can give you another chance, if you give in and become a part of my consciousness.”

“No, I won’t do it. I can move on. I have Nikko.” I said. And then I saw the white cloud for what it was. It was a very dark cloud, covered in powdered sugar. A toxic form of window-spray, covering the darkness. “I won’t let you have that power over me.”

And then, the dream-space became the meshwork.

“Come on guys, don’t be fooled.” I said to my friends. I had no idea where they were, but needed to find them. Right now. I need to find Horace, before the consciousness, overcame him. If there was anything in him, that was still left. But that fire, that thing called hope. Was uncovered, like the darkness.

“Something is trying to trick us.” I said.

“Jerid, I want to stay in the Garden.” Avon said.

Nikko continued singing, the song of the Choir.

I then decided, that I would go it on my own. For a moment I wondered where Horace was. But I was to preoccupied of not letting myself be overcome, by his own core desires. There was something driving but. But I did not know what. All I knew, was I wanted to rip a whole in this beings cosmic butt.

I ran, until I could run no further.

Jerid --- I heard the voice say, “I ... am the voice ... I am the consciousness. I will punish you. ... You should not have come here.”

“Please, I was barely a shell when I first came to campus.” I said it. Whatever -- it -- was,

It warped closer to me, and attempted to absorb my consciousness. But instead, I attempted to give the entity a swift kick to the nuts.

But it -- which had then taken the form of Horace -- warped behind him, and elbowed me in the back. ---

I woke up, on the floor. “Nikko! Avon! ... Horace!”

And then I heard knocking.

“Jerid, can you answer a few questions?” the voice on the other end of the door said. And I smelled the stench of cigar smoke, setting my lungs on fire. I was a tired wooden doll, barely surviving ... a brain-cataclysm. ---

10 --- Nikko

There was something in my, that still felt wrong singing. It didn’t not feel natural form me. Song of the music, began to play slower, and became another sort of funeral procession. A funeral of my own personal free will. It felt that lover’s sing, that feeling only lover’s have -- that call’s when one of their friends in his danger. Something like another chance at paradise.

So I stopped singing suddenly, and walked out of the Church.

And then ran through the indigo meshwork, browsing through the network of my desperate attempt to dream true dreams. Of another life. I swimming, through the ocean-sea of the dream-simulation. I had halted her my own person dream briefly to reflect. The simulation from the drugs used from the meditation chair.

It was the devil’s chair.

And then that white cloud warped in front of me.

It felt like an amalgamation of death. The imposter of dreams, the manifestation of war itself. Of nightmares, and bad breath. The breath of the choir boys, the singing angels from the otherworld. The realm of dreams, was its own sort of after life. An afterlife of eternal purgatory. Of heaven fading into darkness ...

But my own light broke through it.

Darkness, fading into the light.

“Horace, what has happened to you?” I said to Horace.

“I am not Horace. I ... am ... god itself.” the voice said. The voice that was a paradox of a silent screech. A screech, because it cut through her hyper sensory perception. Silent because know one could actually hear’s in dreams.

She felt at that moment, that Horace was gone.

“Do you know how it feels,” the husk of Horace said. Briefly Nikko wondered if Horace was coming back. One memory at a time, like scattered bits of data. “to be able to do anything in dreams.”

Aire’s data-interrupts Horace.

Nikko ran, until Horace faded into the darkness. ---

Then I warped into the garden, where Avon was. “Nikko, don’t look back. Don’t worry about me, check on Jerid. I will hold off Horace.”

“That’s not Horace.”

I saw Avon take his shovel, and warped into the meshwork.

Into the darkness of the indigo ocean-sea ... ---

I wondered for a moment, what if one died in the dream.

Then warped, and floated into Jerid’s dream-world. But there was nothing, because he was not asleep. But I sensed -- somehow -- that feeling of pain, from her connection to him. The perception was pins and needles into my throat.

I felt what he felt, and what he felt was confinement.

It was like a prison. But I did not recognize the location. A interrogation room perhaps, I did not know. But it was like snow, made out of acid rain. It charred the meshwork as much as did my dream-skin -- I began to dissolve.

And with my right hand, the hand used to do to my homework -- the hand that was going to be used to, toss the pillow at Jerid. ---

11 --- Jerid

I saw the image of Nikko’s tender touch in Jerid’s eyes.

“When I logged into the blue membrane, I at first felt numb. And then I was pulsating. I don’t remember anything else.” Jerid said. I was staring, into the glare of the dream-scanner. And then I saw in greater detail, Nikko reaching out her right hand to me. My hand was touching onto hers. But I saw her became like a lake. A puddle of her original self. “Wait a minute, I know where my friends are now. Nikko had told me.”

“Your friends? Can you lead us to them?” the interrogator said.

“Yes, but don’t hurt them. Please. Hurt me instead.” I said.

“We have no plans of hurting anybody.” ---

12 --- Nikko

So I was on the emergency room table. And felt a presence in the room, but could not identify it. I briefly wondered, if Horace was in another emergency room table for recuperative therapy somewhere. Because I did not feel his presence. I hoped if he was somewhere, that he was back to normal. Then I felt the voice, coming closer. Similar to that of Horace, but not quite.

It was barely perceptible, beyond a whisper.

A silence, that was not quite silence.

Jenna's Gift

It wasn't every day that you would re meet someone from your high school years, especially if it was some other girl you once knew in one of your classes. But today was an unusual day for a multitude of reasons, to many to mention here. It was always one of those things. I had always had the tendency to think about someone deeply, and then somehow or another this person–or at least someone who looked like them, would show up at whatever place I went to get wifi–an all pervasive and invasive means of connecting with 'real' friends, though they themselves were not necessarily more real than whatever person I would meet in the real world, if indeed the person I thought deeply about was really there.

This has happened many times throughout the week. The first time I thought it was merely a coincidence, though as the days went by it gradually began to give me more of a deeper and deeper sense of horror–until I got to know Jenna. After all what demonic force had devised me to meet an old acquaintance on a Spring's day? As I tried to ignore, it was always the same girl I had known previously that would always show up. Part of me would like to think there was a certain drawn that the star would align for us to meet on that particularly day. Instead in reality it felt as if something else were going on behind the scenes, something I was not privy to. If on no other day me and her would meet, it would always be on Wednesday. I'm not exactly sure what it is about Wednesdays. But it would always be this day that we would encounter and bump into each other.

I would occasionally meet others, and over time I began to wonder if they had some particular plan for me. Though it was assuring that I would get to live elsewhere, not anything like the town of nowhere, there was still a sense of panic of them getting to know me. It wasn't like I did not want to be known. I'd rather not know others, and others not know me in kind. I was in a bind, after all I did not exactly want to be unfriendly, though I feared they'd be unkind. I wanted to sink without a trace, wanted to be a person without a face.

It was been several weeks since I was met by this girl again, though I'm not sure if I have seen the last of her. That phantom, that girl prettier than I, that someone that I always wanted to be. For a rest of the day maybe I can think about something else. But I fear that she may find me, she always manages to find me.

She was everywhere.

It was the next today when I was in a city shop, browsing the selections of various nick nacks that I wanted to get before I would leave this town the next week end in order to go back home.

I was visited by another girl who looked similarly to one of the I had known in my school years. While it always could be that she had matured over the last few years after high school, there was always that chance that could be just like she always was–bitchy and rude. At school they called her grudging Gertrude, but I just called her a bitch. Gertrude had many boyfriends, though never managed to get any one of them to stick for very long. Though one would like to think it was the guys and not her, knowing my own experience with her I would think anybody would get tired of having paper wads tossed at them, and have their hair pulled. The guys were fooled into having a rough time. I sure hope she was not anyone's second date.

Gertrude was sitting outside eating a large pizza at a pizzeria, but promptly ordered a to go box. She recognized me, but chose to not say anything. Her stares would say more than would her words could. To remove myself from the situation, when she was not looking I went to another store. Here there was a selection of retro games. I had grown up with mostly eight bit games. While I also liked the sixteen and thirty two bit era, there was something special about early sprite graphics. I picked up a cartridge, and resisted kissing the contraption. It was one of those obscure JRPGS that never quite reached the same level of popularity in the US. Though it had grown to have quit a cult following. I brought it to the register and purchased myself a copy.

I left the door, and then Gertrude had apparently saw me enter the store. There are no words to describe the long moment of silence before she spoke. Then spoke with a tone that indicated a friendship whose existence is faked, but no real attachment is there. 'So what have you been up to? You sure look different now. What's the deal?'

'Many things have gone on, I gotta go.' I said.

'Don't give me that. Your hair is longer, and you have weight around your hips.' Gertrude said.

'Weren't you the one that always told guys not to stare at your booty? Why are you staring at mine?'

'Well I didn't remember ...'

'Doesn't matter, I really need to go.' I waved, left her presence, and boarded the metro. I was never that much of a conversationalist, as the very idea of having an extended conversation would always make me feel queasy. Back and forth was never easy. There was a slightly older man sitting in one of the seats. He was holding his small cat in a bathroom towel. 'Look what the metro dragged in.' the cat said, speaking to me.

'You're just a charming little stinker.'

I went to my own seat, and eventually there was a stray cat that boarded the train. She did not seem to have an owner, but hopped in the seat beside me. 'Don't worry about him, he has always had an attitude.'

'And you are?' I asked.

'Jenna, and you are?' she asked.

'Undecided.'

'But how could you not know your name?'

'Oh no it's undecided what I wish to go by.'

'It is healthy for everyone to know them self.'

'Yea deep subject.' I looked at the video game cartridge as I spoke. It was a golden edition of the JRPG, which is about as common as fools gold. It's really the blue cartridges you really want.

'You collect games?' the cat asked.

'Yea, why do you ask?' I asked.

'I never played them myself, but my previous owner used to have an addiction. When their console busted, they turned to alcohol instead.' The cat spoke with a world weariness that I would have never expected. Not that I exactly expect cats to be happy go lucky. I had just always taken them as being largely indifferent to people. If they didn't have to have owners, they would have their own little society that had broken off from our own. Have their own form of crypto currency. But this cat, was not indifferent.

'Suppose technology got to the point where you could walk on two legs, have some paws with disposable thumbs, do you think you would consider playing one?' I asked, but not being totally serious.

'But there isn't that technology.' the cat said.

'Oh I mean hypothetically. But never mind.' I then reclined my head on the window, and waited for the stop to reach my apartment complex.

As I reached the complex, the cat followed.

I turned around and said, 'Sorry Jenna, my apartment doesn't allow cats.'

'That's no problem.' said Jenna, and then turned into the young woman that followed me a few days earlier. 'I think I can keep this form for a while.'

Then we went inside and chatted, till she had to back home to her owner. I wasn't sure if she would come visit me again, but I met other cats that I've spoken with. Though none of them quite energized me like Jenna.

It was Jenna's gift.

In the future, I will be boarding a metro train. I will take the hike through the city streets, closing the gap between shopping and eating at the speed of a car horn. A pizza will be eaten, that is as deep as a toilet. It will be merely a fast food pizza, as I am simply to poor to afford anything else. In the future, I will be finishing up me meal wondering what it is I'm going to do with my life. I am a painter, an architect of primitive text-adventure games. I will organize an adventure game that involves an elf and a fairy. And yet part of me has not completely settled with merely being a programmer. After all I have always have plenty of stories to tell, and not all stories work as video games. Unless you're willing to consider kinetic novels with battle systems games. And of course there will always be an argument for this.

I will most likely secure my career in some other field that does not exercise my brain's complete potential. I had worked in other jobs like this, though I have only been in possession of these for a month at a time at the absolute most. There will be yet another small payment. In my lowly apartment room, I had only managed to earn enough to afford the least fancy of fried noodles. In two minutes, I will be going to the store to purchase yet another pack of them. I'm not sure if I will see Jenna again. My meetings with people from my past are sparse though at odd moments. I will likely go back to my hometown, where I have some friends. Though the most you could say is the relationships are fleeting. At this hometown, I will temporarily revisit my parents. And then go back to regular personal monotony and hum drum. In the future I will only have the time to do some social interaction. As I intend to focus on my painting and poetry for the rest of my life.

In the future I will lose contact with my parents, and get myself a wife, get divorced merely because she did not like the idea of me being who I am. Unless of course I end up building a relationship with Jenna–the woman that turns into a cat by the early evening hours. In the future, I will have an accidental roommate, an unintended pet, a personal companion that I can hold conversations with. I don't know why I keep thinking about Jenna, after all I assume she probably thinks of me no more than that previous encounter if that. The cat that set on her belly fat. In the future we will eventually break contact, and I love as a sort of nomad with technology.

In my minds eye, I see myself given into the draw of the virtual reality game, as a kind of distraction from the pains of the real world. Though I'm not certain any of this will happen, I don't see that much of a future at the moment as I tip the final glass of wine I can afford into the drawn of the kitchen sink.

I did not think she would come back, Jenna took a metro trip over here a day ago, said that she will likely be here a while. She placed down a large pack of old video games from her previous 'owner' on the kitchen tiles. 'I'm not sure if they work, they may well have corruption files.' Jenna said, and then we took the time to have the dinner I prepared. She didn't seem to mind that all I could really afford were packages of fried noodles. She said she knew of a place to get better fried noodles real cheap. And she eventually read some of my game reviews–said that she knows a guy that make like to see my reviews, and have a job for me reviewer new retro styled games. Yet when she tried to submit my work, because I myself had given up, she got a polite rejection because the guy wanted me to submit my own stuff. Jenna find this rough, I thought it was yet another guy whose bark was worse than his bite.

Turns out it is this pit bull fellow. He as a pass time likes to play the cello. To Foruus, he said that playing the instrument made him mellow. He had inherited it from old wife who was murdered in a hit and run. He came this close to ending his own life at the point of a gun, but instead found that that's is not what she would have wanted. Through the cello, he found meaning in his life.

I proposed song style reviews in the vein of Elizabethan funeral marches, though he declined the offer because he was a loner. Thus I assume the only reason I never got the job was because he in truth preferred to be alone.

Thus it was back to the same old same old. So I am told, Cats have nine lives. I wonder how long Jenna will be with me, I don't want to lose another pet within the year, I want to have one that could potentially live forever. Though I knew that this will be impossible.

In the future, I will be sitting on my door step, after visiting Jenna's grave. She will commit suicide by falling on the tracks of a metro train. I thus I will be all alone again, with nobody to talk to. In the future I will be calling my parents to rekindle an old relationship, yet it will be so many years in the future that they will likely already be gone from this world. I would have known her for about twenty years time, much longer than any other cat I've had. Although this has not yet happened, how could my prediction by wrong?

In the future the electrical lights in the apartment room number will go out, and later I will get mail that has an eviction notice. I will be forced to the streets as a beggar, and yet my self esteem would not allow this. Jenna has not died yet, though my bet is about fifty more years at the most. There are already problems with her memory, though with enough prodding she will eventually remember what I had said previously. No matter how meanly I said seemingly deviously at the time, she would soon forget a few hours later to the tune of another rhyme. After all to her, why try to remember the negative in any relationship? Why think of old pains and regrets. Why by miserable. By contrast I've always been different, I suppose I got it from my dad. I was always the most miserable of the lot. If I'm honest my seemingly most obvious issues are not the only reason I'm depressed, as poets have always been in a particularly precarious social position. It has been this way for eons. In the future will be looking for a new mate, because Jenna has died yet to young.

In a way Jenna seems to good for this world.

when Jenna had left for another week when she had finally found a new apartment while saving money–because before she knew I was never one to outright reject a homeless cat girl, I was left to do my own things again. Part of me wants to destroy my phone, as there is always a chance that she may try to make a few calls. I have managed to hold down a job for a few months now, enough to sustain me while I focus the rest of my life on writing and game reviewing. To be honest, I'm not even sure if Foruus is even still around.

He was pretty mopey dopey after me and Jenna the cat had left. I wondered if he was still doing that game site, and took whatever bite he could and focused on 'real work.' But the real world has always been a murky and tricky thing in this world. Most of the companies that once filled the diverse landscape in this city of bought each other out. The result being mainstream games I used to enjoy as a teenager have gradually over time reduced in construction quality. In indie gaming, it was almost always a download affair programmed by some guy programming games out of his garage. His home, his life, his lodge.

In the future I will wish that I had never met Jenna, because her memories almost makes her as if she were still alive in my heart.

I'm honestly not sure why I have thought of the worst, even when I would eat something good like a tasty sausage at a German restaurant just down a few blocks from my apartment. Maybe she wont decide to kill herself–I hope not, I just tend to assume that everyone who would consider dating me would be miserable. Unless we distracted ourselves by going to the Theater, and watch crappy plays of Sonnet productions. In the future I will probably be dating someone else, as I assume that other people find me a total drain to be around. Not that I blame her though, though I have never understood why this would be the case that they would.

I think as I sleep with a pillow in my face. I think as I wonder whether I'll see Jenna again. If that will ever be the case.

I see her in a field of 8-bit video games play testing old and new consoles.

That's the future I hope for her.

That Time An Anarchist Left The System, And Lived To Tell The Tale

Even if you generally agreed with the sentiments expressed in government propaganda slogans, it still would weird you out, if they were placed on the back of your favorite cereal. You might think this is just an exaggeration, but consider the fact that when this one Journalist from Russia today reported on things US media doesn't cover about Venezuela, the idea of our country slipping into a kind of covert fascism, stamping the American constitution on the back of a bag of beans doesn't seem to far off.

But Elle lived in such a time.

This isn't a children's fantasy story, or a work of magical realism, but a very real girl living today, simply trying to make it the best she can in life. Elevators in this old building, were like escape pods from a burning building. But students that went to the nearest university, treated these as a way to get quickly back toward studying history homework from the second world war era, in their times off from school. Girls that staying home after the third world war, were used to these activist hot spots connected through thumb drive dead drops; dressed as modern day flower children in new fangled Birkenstocks, anti-war slogans becoming as common as physical disabilities; girls whom fought despite the real possibility of execution by guillotine since the invasion by the National Front, mouth to paycheck.

Elle, going by nothing else by her virtual reality handle, refused such ventures in activism, for the time being, while recovering from a shin splint injury. Instead, confined to her bed and virtual reality headset, she purchased furniture online, simply by forking the repository of the hand drawn plans, and then simply building it herself when her family was not picking her up for the beach. But by this point she had collected more plans than she could ever possibly complete, and capitalism, while decaying, was still very much alive in the streets of Chattanooga and outlying areas, littered with mom and pop computer stores steadily going out of business. She would spend her day programming, and very occassionally visited her parents to go to fast food Mexican restaurants.

But chose very specifically to avoid eating at taco bell. So she only chose establishments that were within the local area, under the idea that, that which governs closest governs best. But this was as close to conservatism, in the American sense, as she got.

Instead she would keep copies, of old War War II anthems, with some she was unsure whether they came from American or German history. There was a time, before the great wars, when the country would manufacture false national anthems, and use those as reasons for why the country was that was to be invaded, was savage. She collected them, partially out of morbid curiosity, but also as a means of collecting evidence of American war crimes in the off chance that the American political system would ever have to stand trial in Geneva.

One song of which, was noteable:

In our Fatherland, with our mothers,

Whom bake fresh pasta and green peas,

Come home to our house, stay with us,

And become our children and our brothers.

Let us govern you, lay your children on us.

She was the type to take such instruments of propaganda literally, although up until this point, she had not actually shot a militarized cop to do so. Instead she drifts from shady restaurant to shady restaurant, trying to hold herself off from the previous bits of activism she used to do, back when she was still living in Washington State. The thing about Washington, was the best part was on the West coast, if one were of any liberal slant, but go any further inland, and–unlike the United States as a whole, was generally more conservative like the South, although in more the classical Anarcho-Capitalist sense. But she was Anarcho-Communitarian, and LGBT issues, along with other social issues, were still important. Buts she never got to practice these at the fullest potential, do to a room mate that kept holding her back at every step of the way.

Now she collects posters of Cosette, from Les Miserables, and prefers theater instead of blood and soil. But she dreams and dreads of the day, that like others she'll have to go back into the field. But for now she spend hers time learning French, and finding anarcho-philosophical groups to belong to on the net. While having fantasy dreams of anarcho-syndicalist chicks in bed, as she gently bits into their soft tender neck. She fantasized of cute anarcho-goth girls, committing murder by flocks of crocks pecking rabid cops to death, and allowing the crows to hunt them down. And then the girls being caught by dream-scanners and other specialized spies. But life was not a science ficton novella either.

The guillotine had only recently been implemented, and previously it had mostly been by hanging out electric chair. Combined with the tier level of crime gradually being lowered to warrant capital punishment, the very idea of an activist chick being captured by cops, and sentenced to beheading (after the National Front took over) was an increasingly real possibility. And at times, life was not even the flow of a top class erotica novella.

But sometimes things cut that way.

Blood flowing down the pages.

To think that several months had gone by, sense her ex had spent all her money on tobacco. For a while she had had to rely on her parents money to fed the two of them, and eventually to get Elle back home; but now her mother was using this misadventure as an excuse to gradually dig her claws further into her, just like she always did. So it made it difficult to really want to engage in phone calls with her. Her parents drugged her on medication, that fixed some of her issues, but certainly not everything, especially her underlying cause of GID. And it made interacting with people, generally an isolating experience. Gone were the days of hopping into activist at the flow of a speeding train. Gone were the days of planting dead drops in alleyways profane.

Here lied an old street rat, just approaching thirty. Spending her life on the edge of society, trying to find some means to spend her time not getting bored of the way life was. It wasn't the time of grabbing a non-lethal automated bee bee gun, and knocking out cops. Plopping sheets on them, and them dumping them on the sidewalk, with a bunch of cats. (There was an old saying that there wasn't anything cops were more allergic to, than a lot of free pussy.) But she never actually thought any girl would actually shoot a cop.

Instead one of her own shot one, put a sheet over him, smashed up with layers of sheets, and took the old German propaganda anthem literally:

In our Fatherland, with our mothers,

Whom bake fresh pasta and green peas,

Come home to our house, stay with us,

And become our children and our brothers.

Let us govern you, lay your children on us.

She took off all clothes, except her underwear, and covered herself in blankets. Then snoozed on top of the man under all those sheets. Eventually they were able to gently grab her, and took her off of him. But he was in such a state, that he wasn't going back into the service anytime soon. Instead he layed in old hand made bed sheets at the local hospital. When the government found out what she did, they were furious. And wanted to make an example. Elle remembered the smell of metal, when the guillotine blade sliced through her companions neck, and how the idea of some vague approaching death did not concern her, now did it seem to concern any of the other activist, who kept up grabbing increasingly higher level munitions, and eventually Molotov cocktails, gradually losing their original mission of non-violence, instead engaging in full on war against the establishment.

Elle found these two lines most memorable:

— become our children and our brothers.

Let us govern you, lay your children on us.

She spent the last few nights between dreams, and forking different code repositories, under the defeatist idea that she'll never belong to another activist group as long as she lived. Because activist never completely represented what they claimed to be. Cosette representing some false promise from classic French literature, and nothing more.

Instead she chose to wait.

So she could move to France, and join with their underpants. And embrace in a way that ended all old national barriers. And pulsating completely through her body, like LSD.

A final trip before the real one.

Before she moved to Alsace. Here she would be free to be as Gothic as she wanted, even if she wasn't smack dab in the middle of Germany. But at least it wasn't the United States, that lost its status on the world stage. Allowing her to visit the graveyards of various French and German anarchist women, who she had researched about in high school and college. She wanted her life to be defined by a different poem, not a National anthum.

But the story of her own life.

In all its torn pages, the flow of tattered bat wings growing out of her back, while reading Edgar Allen Poe, and pages from Mary Shelly's mother's diaries n order to pass the time.

It was better than being here.

Beheaded for being an activist.

It was no longer the US she knew.

Luena's Tenderness

Or the little rat that chewed wooden shoe strings.

It was not the teeth upon her tail that caused the pain of a thousand nails nor when her sister was whipped by a guard who jeered, "Take that, you lump of lard". But her father as if he were only a bother yanked up by his leg they forced him to beg for mercy.

She remembered it looked like a screw being ripped from plywood. No mercy was shown, and her father had died with that word on his lips. Luena's hope had died too. Her third eye was fried. There was no escaping the pain, except by giving in to the withering of her brain. Though school was still a necessary torture, she could not even do basic math problems, or write a decent sentence. She had kept trying, though, trying to do her best.

As Luena headed out the door on what turned out to be the last day of the life she had known, her mother repeated her frequent plea. "Please don't forget to bring home dinner tonight. I know you're disgusted, but we have to eat." Luena thought of the humiliating wait in line for a measly pound of rat meat, deemed enough for a family of five, though they were now down to four. Rodent meat was all they could count on for food anymore, food that might possibly kill them should luck not be on their side when their portion was given. Luena wretched at the thought of eating another bite of rat. She could resist the hunger pains, but she had to take care of her mom and sisters.

Luena walked to the bus stop and waited for one of the open bed trucks used for transport. The trucks reminded her of ones used to transport soldiers, or worse, prisoners on a road crew. Her peers had nicknamed the trucks open buses, similar to the name given those short little yellow buses used to transport disabled kids in some of the stories they read in school. If you were on an open bus, you were probably going somewhere you'd rather not go; school for the lucky, or the crematorium for the unluckiest. An open bus pulled up and Luena climbed in for the ten minute ride to school. As the bus pulled into the school parking lot, Luena noticed activity near a side door of the school, then heard a scream followed by whimpering. A group of bullies had ganged up on one of her unfortunate peers, but all he'd lost was a tooth and a little blood. Nothing compared to the treatment her tribe of elves got from the police on a regular basis. Luena felt the familiar bellyache as she approached the school.

Luena went to all her classes. Additional ordinary bellyache. Most of her teachers hadn't cared about or noticed the change in Luena over the last week. There had been one who would smile at her faintly as she handed her memorization exercises usually used for much younger students. The teacher was trying to help coax Luena's brain back to normal so Luena wouldn't be punished for failure to finish her regular work. This teacher had been the bright spot in the otherwise bleak school day, even though Luena wondered whether the teacher suspected it wouldn't be a fruitful venture. As frequently happened to teachers, though, this one was hauled away in an open bus. A fate shared by many, especially those who were surrounded by others most of the day.

Every teacher carried a cane, used for intimidation and sometimes for impromptu paddling in the hall. There were no limits on the punishment teachers could dole out to students, as long as each student could walk out of school at the end of the day. So far this freedom to punish had not gotten out of hand.

On three of the five school days since Luena's father had died, she had been sent to In-School Suspension. Classwork had to be completed there, even though you received a zero for it. The worst part about ISS was the time it provided for Luena's mind to wander. The loss of her father was not the only loss she had suffered recently. Haunting images of Garry, the boy she had dated for only a month before he succumbed to the virus that was killing dozens of her peers daily, always entered her mind. The virus that assured you a trip on the open bus to the crematorium. She saw him foaming at the mouth, a green line forming around his lips. Garry had complained of chills, with goosebumps that would cover his arms and legs with increasing frequency, a few days before the end. His throat had begun to ache during the last day, before the vomiting began. He had been approaching the school; Luena had gotten there just ahead of him. He had doubled over, and green vomit spewed several feet around him. He caught Luena's eyes just before the police arrived to haul him away with the unlucky classmates who had been hit by his puke.

There were two known ways to catch the green virus, now called the green plague. Some of the rats they were forced to eat were infected with it. If you dodged that bullet, you might come in contact with the vomit of a victim. Rats and mice had been the main source of food since the oppression of her tribe had begun. Luena had lost a third of her weight, despite her mother's constant urging to eat. Her mother even seemed to look forward to the meals that included rat breast. What, did it taste like chicken, Luena wondered. Though her mother was adjusting to life without her husband, Luena knew she was in pain. But she was also driven by the need to keep her three daughters alive. Luena couldn't accept the rat diet, even though she knew she was slowly starving. She had better luck eating the mice served at school, though even with dipping sauce she had to choke them down. Luena still didn't understand why, but with the rats she felt a connection. She had even made a pet of one. So far she had succeeded in saving that one from being the evening meal.

Luena was jolted out of her ISS daydreaming by the force of the teacher's cane ramming into the back of her chair. She tried to return to her work, but once again wondered why it even mattered. She noticed a chill over her body, and saw the goosebumps rising on her arms. Alarm changed to calm relief. So what? She hoped it was what she thought it was.

When Luena returned home that afternoon she followed her normal routine, except she avoided her mother and went straight to her room. Her mother always tried to tempt her with a snack after school, some sort of rat tidbit she tried to make as tasty as possible. It never worked. Luena wasn't up to dealing with that drama. She could have the plague! Maybe not, so maybe she should do her homework, but why? She would almost certainly be in ISS again tomorrow, so all her homework would get a zero. Luena's thoughts were racing, her mother was knocking, saying they needed to talk. Goosebumps covered her arms and legs again. She remained calm and opened the door to talk to her mother.

"What's wrong, honey? Did you get our meat?", her mother asked. Suddenly Luena knew she had to leave. Though she knew her mother was beginning to suspect something was up, she calmly said she had forgotten, and that she'd go harvest some of the tastier grasses. That was a lie, one of her sisters could do that once they realized she was gone. She closed her door and locked it, and began packing a bag. When she opened her bedroom window to leave, her mother must have heard, because she came back and began pounding on the door and yelling her name. Luena looked back at the door, then slid onto the window sill before making the short jump to the ground. By the time she was disappearing into the woods, her mother had used the key all her daughters knew she could use any time she wanted in their bedrooms. Luena was gone, though, and her mother watched and hoped she would change her mind and reappear. Another part of her knew she had to protect her other daughters.

She whispered, "Let's just keep this to ourselves, girls."

Luena was on the run, not sure if her mother would pursue her. Half of her wishing she would, saying they had to stay together no matter what. The other half knowing she wouldn't. Self preservation, and more importantly, protecting her other two daughters, would win out. Luena wanted to stay in the woods, but she was having more and more chills, and was hungry, too. There were rumors that during the curfew hours, the police patrolling the downtown area ate like kings, and sometimes threw the remnants of their feast in the dumpsters. Luena was desparate enough to check it out.

Along with the patrolling police, the nighttime streets were full of rat cleansers. These were genetically bred cats with poison running through their veins instead of blood. A scratch or bite from one of them would inject the recipient with this poison. None of Luena's tribe knew how long it took the poison to kill, since the victim was always hauled away to the crematorium. There was an antedote, but only available to the oppressors, should one of their own be an accidental victim of a rat cleanser.

Luena made her way to a dumpster, but heard footsteps. She noticed a rat cleanser on the other side of the dumpster, then heard someone say, "Hey, you're out past curfew." Luena ran in the opposite direction, but felt a sharp pain and the weight of the rat cleanser on her lower back. She screamed as the rat cleanser sank it's teeth into her hip. The poison went to work immediately, causing a sensation she could only describe as lions gnawing all over her body.

She collapsed, and her vision began to dim. She heard the police guard say to the rat cleanser, "Good job 283, next stop the crematorium...hey wait, who's there? Luena heard the police guard gasp, and heard his running footsteps fading into the distance. She also heard growling, hissing, and yowling just beside her. As she slipped into unconsciousness, her last thought was that she would be the evening meal for some unknown creature.

Luena thought she had died that night, but she had awakened to the sight of a rodent-like creature kneeling beside her. Luena could feel her own hands, feel the pain in her hip, feel the familiar hunger in her belly...she was alive! She said out loud, "How exactly am I here right now?" The rat creature responded in the voice of a girl, "You barely made it." Luena said, "I had a rat for a pet once."

The rat girl responded, "I had a human for a pet once." Luena hoped the joking around, if that's what it was, was a good sign, but the rat girl had disappeared. She came back carrying a contraption with tubes and guages, in a carrying case that looked like a backpack. The rat girl began hooking the tubes to Luena, but Luena was too weak to resist. The rat girl seemed kind, and gently warned Luena before piercing her forearm and attaching another tube. Luena summoned strength and blurted, "What the hell?" The rat girl explained,

"You've got poison in your system, you know that. This machine will monitor and control that poison, at least temporarily." Luena was skeptical. "What, this thing?" The rat girl responded, "We don't know how long you've got, but this is your best chance at making it long enough to find a solution to your dual problem". Luena looked at the rat girl, realizing she had figured out that not only was there poison running through Luena's veins, but the feared green plague lurked there too.

Luena had all kinds of questions, but no energy to ask them out loud. What exactly was this rodent-like creature? How could she speak like a girl? Is there really a way to save me? She drifted into a dreamlike state with these thoughts on her mind:

"A night of the full moon I have felt a pulse in my veins. Like a lab rat, bitten to the core a situation I deplore, I am – a rodent locked in human flesh."

Luena woke up, and found that she had claws and paws. On her face were whiskers and fur. Part of her body had been replaced by 3D printed replacements, using vat grown flesh to replace the part of her that was no longer there. She didn't think that the experience would be so violent, and yet now it feel like only a brief memory. And she wasn't sure if they were going to find her, only knew that she needed to hide until the calm came.

It was difficult to remember the exact nature of the faces of the militarized police, she only remembered the emotions her mother experienced when she was suppose to be sent away do to the plague. You wouldn't think, in the twenty first century, that this would still be a problem, however when your government knows its empire is about to run out, it would manufacture all sorts of controversies to distract the public. She couldn't say with any certainty that the plague isn't true, but Luena wonder what life could have been like if she could have a normal familial experience. There were times when she missed them, yet part of her got used to the idea of living in the sewers.

She was greeted by a rat man, covered in cybernetics. There was still something in his gaze that suggested there was still a part of him that was still human. He reached out his claw to her. "Come, I have much to show you." Reluctantly, she followed down the tunnel. Luena wasn't used to being so wet, the room smelled like shit. It figures right, this is where I'd end up. But she supposed it was better than being taken on a train somewhere and shot, put inside an unmarked grave. She could hear the sounds of insects crawling in the darkness. She could also hear the sound of cars moving above the city street.

Down hear, where the angels never tread, the only ones that live hear are out of their head. Out of some vague sense of hope that arguably never existed to begin with, and yet here they were eating left over frozen dinners, and popping coffee tablets.

She was introduced to this small community, though it was much larger than what one may expect. The actual success rate of captured rat people was worse than what was portrayed on the news. Where the poorest wore wooden shoes, while the richer people eat salted crackers, and reality television.

Here this small community got hand me down television sets to old to be used by those of finer taste. It was a surprise that their vacuum tubes had not exploded. There was an influx of different models, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s; not even the flow of flat screen television screens in high definition. Computers drew graphics in an old fashioned dot matrix, with very little colors besides purple, lime green, and gray text.

"I'd call it Purgatory, but think spirits have better taste."

"I've heard you come from the surface." the rat man said.

"I lived in the surface for a while." Luena said.

"When you see me, what do you think I am?"

"You look similarly to a rat."

The plague did not so much kill you, as turn you into a new life form. No matter how much rodents evolved, they would turn out differently from humans. Their desire for the darkness of the homestead, the ability to adapt to living in a small space. And the sound of buzz saw blades, making their way through another rat carcass.

"Cannibalism, that's what we've been reduced to."

"But I saw one of your people eating."

"The laws preventing food destruction at grocery stories are still on the books."

The rat man held up a device.

"They even toss out storybooks."

Sleeping in a pile of your own filth was the least of your concerns down here, although she tried to prevent as much of this as she could. It turned out that Luena didn't stay in the rat form, but was something that could switch between and human form and rodent at will. The crew would always take human form to reduce the likely hood of being murdered as pests, although the government, that had a digital voice recorders in every street corner, could find you at any moment, and take you to those camps.

But the crew were champs.

The likelihood of finding any given was reduced by the fact most self-respecting people would never go down here, and in fact I would not have made the choice myself, if military police were not literally threatening me with a bullet to the brain. Who knows how many wondered down here, when all was said a gun.

It was better than putting your mouth to gun.

But it wasn't actually fun. In some ways...

It was worse than death.

Luena was one of those teenagers that, while most people shied away from do to the cult of public perception, there was always a part of them that wanted to be like her, even if they never wanted to admit it.

She was remembered as being one of those plucky heroines in young adult novels that managed to hack it out, despite the world pretty much wanting to rip out your guts. Luena knew that being actually, beyond all shadow of a doubt, a true outcast, was far more appealing than what the big screen tended to present. She was the one girl, because nobody wanted her as her sweet heart, people paradoxically also wanted her as their sweet heart. And mother her by combing her hair. It wasn't so much her inability to take care of herself ( she had this in spades ) but her fear of certain blades, that she only recently overcame. And her issues with insects, especially ones that were trapped in amber.

But Luena was the queen of the spiders in the sewer, the princess of the rats. And for her, she was trapped in something far more thick, without the comfort of being killed first: without the comfort that she could be some odd specimen studied under the magnifying glass of some scientist in a laboratory. Instead she simply disappeared from society, and those who did remember her never wished to admit to this effect. She slept in a black Japanese futon in her own personal crawlspace, carefully swept by the retro styled android maids, in their tap dancing shoes. She herself had only just gotten used to the flower of her new arms and legs, and their tendency to change from human to animal form at her whim.

She no longer dreamed of vague validation.

She only hid inside her makeshift tomb, personal masturbation. Her own world where she could eat as much as she wanted, whenever she wanted. But the stuff that was around was not very good, even if in generally larger quantity. Especially packaged fried noodles, something that you might think would be an Otaku's dream, but only you spiced them just perfectly, always intended up tasting like spicy nothing. She would rather be eating makeshift chocolate yogurt from Greek stock, but here the only thing like that was in tubes: abandoned yogurt cartons that weren't sold by their buy date. All the feast in the world, withered with time.

She remembered the taste of Thyme.

She remembered the taste of the kiss of hot chilly peppers, and old fashioned tap dance rhyme, but now the only music was the sound of buzz saw screens, the food year old garlic powder. And everything else, with the scent of death.

They wouldn't normally eat each other.

But lately the lack of spare food gave them largely no other options, and the only ones that would remain in good shape were the android maids, who, do to being older models, didn't need to eat, and didn't have any kind of digestive tract. Things were arranged in a pact, that only the strongest would be the one that would be harvested. "We could just go dumpster diving."

"Well you would you dumpster diving?"

"Well..."

"I didn't think so."

But at this point, she wasn't sure how much longer she could resist. She didn't want to see any more of her friends go. But there wasn't a whole lot more options, and it seemed there were less infected ones visiting the sewers by the month.

She need to go beyond herself.

See the city for one last time.

Melina De Noir Et Blanc

A Pre Hafestra Flash Fiction

In the cart to my death where I belong, give me the wet and ply dirt beneath my feet in my wooden clogs. In the cart to my death, where I belong, I see the dreadful climb towering above my little wooden sabot feet above me. The widow cut to bone through my skin, head tumbling down the oak basket. Blood pouring out, oblivion. I should have seen the Guillotine, with its Sombrero hat. While I lay after I have prayed, upon my belly fat. I masturbate long nights, and think of my poor Anienne who is still at large.

So much for Melina de noir et blanc.

When the crowd stared at me, they thought be profane. My blood down the drain. Only the flow of the loving guillotine was my solace, whom had descending from many evolutions of different decapitation devices. And generally, people were executed barefoot, except in the cases of the Aristocratic classes. But it was twenty one twenty seven, and a lot of things have changed since the year of seventeen ninety two. Now people's necks are put into the stock for execution, whom are rich enough for wooden clogs. I carried a small shotgun, while I was on the run; me and my boyfriend at the time were already battling rental debts. Anienne, my love, was the closest thing I could ever come to fulfilling my romantic desires.

I had developed the tendency to switch between white and black Lolita dresses, and I had especially painted two little wooden shoes, one painted white and black. I would dress in white when I went to Church, and in black when I wanted to lurk in Cyberspace, and play at the arcades with my Anienne. Who showed me how to play various shooter games at the arcade, while swooping upon my neck like a vulture, whom nips at me like a noir la chatte. And on days I would go see her, when her father was no home from work. We would scissor, and give each other blow jobs, but there was so much more than that.

Though I'd assume you'd rather not think of sensual things with the lady of the dead. One night we connected, and updated each other on our QR code blogs, while giving each other foot jobs with out wooden clogs. Climbing all the way to the tops of nipples. Eventually the necks connecting, under the glow of green energy lights, while think of guillotines, and Birkenstock sandals. Our bodies pulsating into ninth dimensional frequencies. Two birds of extreme anxiety, two birds who trust nobody else but each other.

But it would be one our last nights together.

But I still feel it in my dress.

Something one may never guess, I don't actually have a split personality. The reality is that nobody who does the sorts of things I do really does. I took an ax head to my husbands forehead, and felt a sense of coldness. Perhaps this cold sanity, was the real reason that I was sentenced to have my head cut off. Yet the idea of being decapitated, had always turned me on. Something that had always made Anienne curious. After all, how may one be turned on when they're merely a head. But I was right ahead of her, at light speed.

My interest had developed in childhood, but it was only recently that I had become open to the idea of being such a submission victim, in a game where the only role play partner was automatic and sharpened at full extent. My death would only ever be of my mom's lament, and my love was for nobody but my Anienne. And now, I see my body, whose head had been separated, and my head, that was placed on a stick outside the court house. The idea, despite being very much dead, still give my vagina the chills, and I cum.

I release.

Me and Anienne met each other at the arcade. Her real name was Anienne Nina Himaka, a product of a half Spanish half French mother, and a Japanese father. Her father had once punished for not performing at the family business quite to his expectations, but she got by with simply a scar tattoo. But her two little wooden shoes, was what drew me to her, because they had looked better on her than anyone else.

And the face, was a face of angels, who mated with the stars, yet her behavior was quite the contrary. Because she was no ordinary very, and in bed she was quiet extraordinary. But had always been something of a bad sport. Yet now I see her riding motorcycles, and shooting at rival Yakuza at different town sectors. It had been a perpetual manhunt, comparable to Geoffrey Amerada et other notorious mob bosses.

But because she was a girl, the police had a hard time apprehending her, as most people took her side in any particular dispute. Capturing her was a matter of force, even though everyone pretty much knew she murdered her father, but not in cold blood. She simply wanted to survive this strange new world they called Earth. And she dances, in her clogs, to classical Flamenco, and electro-pop jazz. While working at times as a prostitute.

And now I watched over my bride.

Despite that she had framed me.

When she was apprehended, it was a show trial. But it was mildly erotic, she liked to discuss her sexual exploits for various Japanese and French crime bosses, and would have to be silenced by the court of public approval, along with the criminal. But eventually she was sentenced to the dreadful climb like I.

And all I could think of was death.

The Seraphs wanted her and me together, and her losing her own head to its angular blade was simply a matter of time. But when she died, after the guillotine had sliced through her neck, she died with a smile on face, because she saw me in the clouds.

I reached out a hand to reach her.

And now me and her pulsate our bodies together, in electro-pop rhythm, while visiting aliens who abducts girls from their homes.

But for me, Melina De Noir Et Blanc, I have mine.

She who was of Japan and France.

Mechanic Slave

Time Travelers Handbook To Serial Murder

"Otis, what did I tell you about," The boss looked at the clock. "waiting around twiddling your thumbs?"

"Sorry sir, I'll make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Make sure of that."

"Yes sir."

"Oh! look at the time. You can leave now."

It was nine o'clock, and Otis exited the door. He moved a couple of years ago to the port town. He walked along the sidewalk, and the cars are passed him by. He dropped by the nearest convenience store.

Otis picked out a beer from the freezer.

Otis is in the kitchen, with the dinner he prepared for his girlfriend. It became slightly impatient because she was not yet home. He decided to call his girlfriend on his cell phone.

"Hun, what the hell is taking you so long?" Otis said.

"Are you lying?" Naomi Said.

"Scratch it, how about I make dinner tonight?" Otis was watching television. It was the news channel. A liberal news network. "We could have wine too."

"Sounds awesome."

"Later baby."

Otis hung up his cell phone, and placed it in his pants pocket. He walked to his computer He thought Something doesn't seem right about this girl, this is the second time she's late. His girlfriend would always came home with a box of Kahlua chocolate truffles.

The second hour went by. He thought What the hell is taking so long?

Otis had a picture of Brian in his head, and he winced, because he remembered when Brian hit on him. He sat at the table, eating his dinner, and he drank a sip of his wine.

"Nah, I got to be kidding myself," Otis switched the channel to another network. "why can't I be more trusting?" Otis took a long deep look into the screen, as he sat on the couch. "She didn't seem like a slut. I can't put my mind around it."

Otis hopped off the couch, and took out his cell phone, and then opened his cell phone to call his girlfriend.

"What's taking so long?" Otis asked.

"I'm on my way home, I just had to make a stop." Naomi said.

"I'm starting to regret offering to cook dinner." Otis clenched his fist. "It's getting late, and I'm hungry."

"Just make dinner for yourself tonight."

Otis traveled along the icy road to see his girlfriend, and he narrowly avoided a collision with a car.

He arrived to the apartment.

He walked to the door, and knocked on it. Otis put his ear up to the door, and could hear the whistle of air conditioning on the inside. He opens the door knob, and noticed it was unlocked.

The door creaked. And then he heard a murmurs, a man and a woman.

"What was that?"

"Oh don't worry about it Hun, just go nice and slow."

Otis walked slowly to his girlfriends bedroom door, and then he bursted the door open. It was her giving the man a blow job. Otis spoke.

"What the hell is this?"

"Its not what you think Otis!"

"Who is this?" The other man said.

"I'm know one you'll ever see again."

Otis locked the door of his apartment, when he got back home. He went to go lye down on the couch.

Otis thought Why would she do this to me!? Did I ever hit her, or otherwise abuse her!? No, it wasn't like that at all.

He drowned in all his sorrows with a glass of merlot, and then sat on the couch to watch the news.

Tonight's topic was about an arsonist that died in a fire. The other story was about a WWIII couple that proposed after the war.

Otis turned the LCD monitor off, and clapped the lights out. He went to his room to sleep. He could not sleep for a minute.

He briefly thought about his life up to now.

Otis had a dream.

The sky was a late evening blue, waves crashed along the shoreline. A viking long house was along the shore. It was the year 1056

There was a single room cabin. Benches were used as both beds and seats. Along the walls you could see the dried meat hanging from the walls.

Arnbjorn woke up to get his fishing gear.

He saw Halldora, who appeared behind him.

"What are you doing up this early Hally?"

"Dad, I'm tired of having to weave and crochet all the time." Halldora played with his long blond hair. "Could I go fishing with you sometime?

"You should get your priorities straight." He grimaced sternly. "Your job is to help your mother maintain the household. Maybe when you're a little older I might change my mind. You will just be swept away by the waves anyway."

She pictured herself reeling in the fish, and cooking a wonderful meal for the whole family.

"I just wanted to be like you daddy, is that to much to ask."

"Just go back to sleep."

"If you could even work for two whole days, someday I might consider taking you with me. I will think about it.

Arnbjorn left the cabin.

At the fish shop, Halldora's father was tending to a customer.

"It only costs 50 Krona to buy this fish!?" He said.

"Only fifty, that's more than I earn in a week!" The customer said.

"If you don't like it, go elsewhere. But I bet your wont fish anywhere near this good."

To the contrary, he would often time sell rotten fish preserved with salt on the open market, and advertise it as if it were fresh.

It was a dishonest profession, but times were hard. But at least he always saved the freshest of seafood for his family.

Arnbjorn is sea fishing with his best friend.

"Hook, line, and sinker." Arnbjorn said.

"You really should let your daughter bond with you more."

"But what better way to bond than to talk about viking voyages second hand?" Arnbjorn was being facetious. "About how wonderful gathering the wood is."

Arnbjorn came around and let her go sea fishing with him.

As he had predicted, she was swept up by the waves.

"You're a disgrace to our family." He said.

He left her out to drown in the cold, windy ocean.

"Daddy!! Come back."

She tried swimming to locate his boat, and mustered all the strength she could summon. But no boat.

"Dad!? How could you?"

The morning dawn shined dimly, Otis woke up from the dream. He is breathing in and out with major heaving after being deprived of oxygen briefly.

Otis had something to eat, but decided to get breakfast out.

He walked to work.

In real time in the real past, Halldora at first sank into the water, and swam to shore. She arrived at home wet.

She woke up on her bench she happened to use for a bed that night. The mother asked her daughter a question.

"What happened to your face hun?"

"Me and dad were in a bad fight, just ignore it."

"Is this going to be how it is?"

Back in the present time.

Otis got a job as a lab technician after quitting his first job. He had built up enough university credits to work as a scientists assistant.

The person supervising him was Machida Kayo, and part time professor, and part time drill sergeant

Machida relaxed with a nice cold beer, while spouting off commands at Otis.

"So I assume you got the dark matter?" Machida said.

"Roger."

Otis handed Machida the dark matter, and then asked the monitor, "What time is it computer?"

"It is now 13:05 hours." The computer said.

"Are you ready to change history."

"Roger."

Machida fired the engine, and the machines sparked, and caused the whole lab to warp. He tried to get Otis out.

Otis blacked out.

He warped his spaceship into Viking time.

Otis crashed his ship.

Otis was awoken, and flew out of the ship. He slapped into a tree. And then he got up injured. He had a loose tooth.

"This doesn't look like the Andromeda galaxy."

It looked like he was in some forest.

"Well Machi Macho did mention worm-holes were unpredictable were they might end up."

Otis tried reporting his current situation.

While tending to her sheep on the farm, a girl saw a huge explosion in the distance.

She directed her sheep back to the farm.

A charred black otis is leaning into the mic, and he tried to call back Machida. But no answer, so he crawled to the village.

He collapsed when he reached the town square. The villagers looked at him like he were a demon.

Otis woke up, and found himself lying on a bench. The house was pretty much one long room.

"Talk about living it up." Otis picked his nose. "What year did I warp into?"

An older man, and a younger girl in what looked like Norse outfits opened the door. They hurried to close the door before the cool settled in.

"Now hold on a sec poppa, who's that guy."

"I found this girly man." Arnbjorn said. He took off his non horned helmet. "I figured something must have been up, so I took him in."

"I say we kill him."

"Nah, I got a better idea. If he's going to stay for a while, ..."

"He might as well be useful!"

"So were did you come from?"

"The orient." They missed the joke, because they focused on his bizarre clothing. It was a streamlined spaceman suit.

"Me and Halldora are going sea fishing." Arnbjorn said.

"Now make yourself useful and gather some firewood." Halldora said.

They exit the house.

Otis snuck out of the house early in the morning.

He could here villagers cursing at his ship as if it were the product of the fire god himself. So he had to go see what was going on.

The villagers were attacking his ship, and had no choice but to self destruct the ship.

This killed the farmers instantly.

He found a small cottage not unlike the house he stayed in the previous night. He knocked on the door.

What what looked like a lady in her late 20's, greeted him.

"How may I help you?" Otis said.

"This is urgent, and I need someone to hear me out."

"What do you need?"

"I have no idea what happened." Otis coughed, residue from the engine explosion was still lingering on his face. "But there was some kind of bug in the dark matter engine. I somehow landed here. I was suppose to land in the Andromeda galaxy. Do you know of any hardware stores around here?"

Otis did not watch the science fiction movies, or he would have known better.

Or maybe he still did not think he was in normal time, and just landed in some primitive place in Europe.

"Wait what?" The Nordic lady said.

"What year is it?" Otis asked.

"This is the year 1040."

She let him come in and get some rest.

Halldora came by that house, and knocked on her neighbors door.

"Excuse me, have you seen a young trell around this part."

"Why yes, he said something about.."

One of Halldora's slaves tried to drag Otis out of the cabin, and he tried to hold them off. Then Halldora blew a sleeping dart at his neck.

He blacked out once more. He woke up to find he was tied to one of their benches.

"You think you got it bad, yar trell. I normally give ye 700." Arnbjorn said. He whipped up a storm on Otis's back.

He once again had to gather wood for Halldora's father.

When he got up, he slowly and carefully made as little noise as possible. He saw Arnbjorn outside, and snuck up behind him.

He strangled him, till he passed out. Otis was not aware the next morning the man would be dead.

He then jogged over to the snitching ladies house.

Otis knocked on the door.

"What brings you here. You have some kind of letter. Indicating your master sent you?" Otis said.

He took out the note he forged, and she let him intending to once again wait till Halldora or her father came to take him back.

"So who are you really?"

"I am,...a jackass, a bastard child, and an illegitimate prick." The lady wasn't aware that he was joking.

Otis was able to charm her enough to lure her to bed, and he slipped in some sleeping pills in her drink that he packed for long trips.

She slept like a rock,

Otis talked to Machida on his repaired cell phone while hiding in the Viking village. The hardware hacking handbook finally came in handy.

"Hey Machida, you won't believe where I ended up."

"Otis, I didn't mean for you to literally change history."

"Very funny. Now how am I going to get home?"

"Look behind you."

Otis thought he heard a chuckle he recognized, and turned around.

"How did you get here Henry."

"Machida had a few issues regarding the system."

"Henry is going to give you a ride, and then I'll give you the new briefing." Machida laughed madly at his stupid pun, and then hung up his cell phone.

"So he sent me to come rescue your ass. Thank me later." Henry said.

"I was watching you the previous days," Henry took out his hand gun for self defence. "To see if you could handle yourself."

"You prick! Thanks for rescuing me!"

"Oh about that, my ship broke down."

"What!"

Otis Makes Dreams

A few months later.

Otis picked out a beer from the freezer when he was in the kitchen, with the dinner he prepared for the evening on a plate on the table. He could smell the stir fry of slaw makings, kielbasa, and thinly sliced chicken wafting into his priggish nose. He then shook about with the jitters, and tossed the phone onto the floor, because Leila was not yet home. So he decided to call his girlfriend -- at least at the present -- on his cell phone. He opened the lid slowly, and then the lights from the buttons flickered.

"Hun, the hell is taken so long?" he said.

"Are you lying? I'm working late tonight." Naomi Said.

"Scratch it, how about I make dinner later tonight?" Otis was watching television as he was speaking to Leila the bubble gum popper. It was the news channel. "We could have wine too."

"Sounds awesome." Leila said.

"Later baby."

Otis hung up his cell phone slowly, and then placed down upon the table still slightly shaken up, as he was not sure whether she would be home tonight. Then walked to his computer. He at that moment thought something doesn't seem right about the woman, the second time she's been late that week. I hope it really is she is working late, he thought. Leila would always came home with a box of chocolate truffles, so for the two. ... "Just for the two off right?"

But after the hours went by, he ate his stir fry alone.

He thought What the hell is taking so long?

Otis had no reason to suspect Brian, although part of him suspected he was involved because of how he his employer always commented on how she was a good lady to him. Suspected how he only kept the job, because of a close connection to his bubble gum popping late girlfriend. He sat at the table, and drank the last of his wine. It was a minor comfort for him, a taste of sweetness amongst the bitterness. "Nah, I got to be kidding myself," Otis got up to switch the channel to another network. "why can't I be more trusting?"

Otis took a long deep look into the screen, as sat on the couch. "Didn't seem like a slut when I first met her. I don't know man." And then he reclined back. Otis hopped off the couch, and took out his cell phone to call his girlfriend. "What's taking so long?"

"I'm on my way home, I just had to make a stop." Naomi said.

What stop might that be, Otis thought. "I'm starting to regret offering to cook dinner." Otis clenched his fist. "It's getting late, and I'm hungry."

"Just make dinner for yourself tonight." Leila said.

It the was second Wednesday that Otis arrived to the apartment on an invitation, and arrived at the door to knock on it. "You can go ahead and come in." He heard Leila said. He opens the door knob, and noticed it was unlocked. The door creaked. And then he heard a murmur, a man and a woman. "What was that?" He heard Brian's voice say.

"Oh don't worry about it Hun, just go nice and slow."

Otis then walked slowly to his girlfriends bedroom door, and did not really want to wait here long, as he wanted to take a long vacation away from the city. Away from the old working life. She said he come in.

Leila was giving Brian a blow job.

"Bey! Otis, hows it going man!?" Brain said.

"I'm good you?" Otis said, and walked out of the door abruptly. Slammed the door shut at his apartment, locked the door of his apartment wanting to cover the entrance with the type of wood that you would make a swing set out of. Then went to go lye down on the couch. Could not resist the killer thought of Brain the slouch. Ouch, what a fucking slouch Brian, Otis thought. Why would Leila do this to me!? And drowned in all his sorrows, with another glass of wine while sitting down on the couch to watch the news. For at this point even the news of the generic variety was good company for the post grad.

He thought its never going to be the same. Never going to be the same all.

Tonight the topic was about an arsonist that died in a fire. The other story was about a WWIII couple that proposed after the war. Either story was one that he would ordinarily abhor, but anything was good at this point.

After turning the LCD monitor off, he clapped the lights out on the lamp. Went to his room to sleep. Through himself down on the cover, like a champ. And for moment, he felt like he was being fried by jumper cables.

He briefly thought about his life up to now.

And plugged himself into the pod-net. He loaded up an old video game he downloaded when they first met, how they used to game together. She would always lead the pack, he was the one instructed to tack together the puzzle pieces of electronic life. He saw the sky was a late evening blue, with the waves crashing along the shoreline. A Norman long house was along the shore. He felt he must have hallucinated that it was the year 1456. But it did not matter, he would go medieval on what ever creatures existed in the meshwork.

As he played his game, he tried to fend off a tall Nordic man who was chasing after him with his sword. And after he was struck, everything faded to darkness. Game over for this particular bloke. It slowly came back, there was a single room cabin. Benches were used as both beds and seats, and along the walls you could see the dried meat hanging from the walls. Arnbjorn woke up to get his fishing gear.

Otis saw Halldora, who appeared behind him.

"What are you doing up this early Hally?" He heard the tall man say to his little girl, but he did not care. Wondered why the non horned helmet man did not just decide to scalp his dream-space avatar, and get it over with. "Dad, I'm tired of having to weave and crochet all the time." Halldora played with her long blond hair.

"Could I go fishing with you sometime?" Halldora said.

"You should get your priorities straight." He grimaced sternly. "Your job is to help your mother maintain the household. Ouch man, and Leila thought I was little shit. That guy is a really tall shit eater, Otis thought trying to pretend like he was still asleep so as not to attract notice. "Maybe when you're a little older I might change my mind. You will just be swept away by the waves anyway."

At the fish shop, Halldora's father was tending to a customer along with the new slave that had recently logged into the meshwork. Just you wait old electronic think, I will beat the level out of you like you won't believe, Otis thought. "It only costs 50 Krona to buy this fish!?" Arnbjorn said to the customer.

"Only fifty! ... More than I earn in a week!" The customer said, who walked over to the other fisherman's shop.

"Yea that's right if you don't like it, go elsewhere. But I bet your wont fish anywhere near this good." He would often time sell rotten fish preserved with salt on the open market, and advertise it as if it were fresh. A dishonest profession, but times were hard. But at least he always saved the freshest of seafood for his family. They would be none the wiser.

Arnbjorn is sea fishing with his Otis the avatar.

"Hook, line, and sinker." Arnbjorn said.

"You really should let your daughter bond with you more." Otis said.

"But what better way to bond than to talk about voyages second hand?" Arnbjorn was being of course not being serious. "About how wonderful gathering the wood is."

Arnbjorn came around and let her go sea fishing with him.

As he had predicted, she was swept up by the waves.

"You're a disgrace to our family." He said.

"Your a disgrace for a father." Otis said, and pushed him into the ocean, and carefully made sure so a to only retrieve Halldora in order to keep her from drowning in the waves that tasted of salt.

"Daddy!! Come back." Halldora the AI said.

"That dad was going to let you drown." Otis said.

"Dad!? How could you?" ---

--- Otis woke up from the dream. He breathed in and out with major heaving after being deprived of oxygen briefly. He walked to the kitchen to have something to eat, but decided to get breakfast out.

But eventually the plug in system back at home, begin to behave peculiarly. Halldora at first sank into the water. But the water from the console evaporated, and she was lying down upon the carpet.

"Where am I?" Halldora said. Looked up, her perception of Heaven. But instead he was merely, an introduction to the twenty first century. "Is this going to be how it is? Will I not be able to get home?"

Machida Kayo, and part time professor of fixing the console devices, and a part time drill sergeant. He always loved yelling at his clientel, who would rather pay someone else. But could not afford anybody cheaper. He relaxed with a nice cold beer, while spouting off questions about the living girl avatar in his room. "So I assume you have the adoption papers?" Machida said.

Otis stared at the little AI. "Maybe."

"It is now 13:05 hours." A computer generated voice said, that was coming from the desktop hologram projector. Machida fixed the console, and the machine sparked back to life. It was alive again, would be Otis's wife.

Otis and Halldora plugged in.

Played another game of pop goes the Viking. But Otis instead forgot about the fact that each world generated a new world. And dear Halldora, alone in the world with him. Would never see her family again. Otis is awoken, and flew out of the ship that crashed. Halldora held on to the seat of the space ship, and it slammed into a tree. Otis got up injured, and began to limp just a little bit.

"This doesn't look like the Andromeda galaxy, that for sure." It looked like he was in some forest. "Well Machi Macho did mention worm-holes were unpredictable were they might end up." Otis tried reporting his current situation to his mechanic. But the young pink hair mechanic man, would not answer his cell phone as a charred black otis is leaned into the mic, and tried to call back Machida.

He called for Halldora, hoping she was still alive.

Halldora popped out from the pop. "Here I am."

I wonder if the new network erased her memories, Otis thought. And then he collapsed when he reached the town square. The villagers looked at him like he were a demon.

An older man that looked like Arnbjorn from the world before, and two versions of Halldora in their white night gowns. They hurried to close the door before the cool settled in.

"Now hold on a sec poppa, who's that guy."

"Halldora two, that's our now buckaroo."

"I say we kill him."

Otis logged out of freight. ---

And he could hear voices.

"Nah, I got a better idea. If he's going to stay for a while, ..."

"He might as well be useful!"

"So were did he come from?"

"The orient." Otis said, crying himself to sleep. Knowing that his little girl he tried to save from the old save file would not here him.

Lidier's Game

Or the tale of a half-Mex half French gamer girl.

But she had not had a home for some time, on her home country. She had already visited French Canada once, then moved here.

Lidier was never one for the Mariachi, a form of wedding Music brought over by French immigrants to Mexico, one of the countries that fought for territory with Spain for control of Latin America. In fact, she had barely held onto the few Mestizo aspects she had, having been born from a French-Mexican mother, and an Irish-American mother. One of her mother had a penis, and this was stigma enough, in this increasingly Far Right political climate just above the equator. When she was dating, she would court various women. But none of them were of the same time of girl she tended to go for. Her current affection was a girl that reminded her of her mother.

The main difference was, her girlfriend were dark jean overalls, and a striped tee shirt, and a pair of black Birkenstocks. She would suppose wear a cardboard virtual reality head set, and a red button, a swag she had gotten as part of a book purchase deal roughly two years ago back when she read more. Generally speaking, Lidier preferred to avoid playing video games, but would occasionally make the exception when there were campaigns Mathilde was having trouble on. This included various boss battles where, while it could be played in a single player fashion, was really more decided for a multi player coop. Lidier preferred being penetrated by Mathilde, though sometimes this would change depending on whether they had had an argument the night before. For one thing, any given argument will ruin anybodies mood, especially for the girl who liked Lidier wearing Clogs Of Wood, and dance around like a little Dutch girl.

It was bad enough be half French-Mexican, but entirely another thing to be stuffed with ham and cheese crepes every morning, although Mathilde would change it up often enough where she never grew tired of it. But during the day, when Mathilde was away at work, sketching paintings in the city, Lidier would watch the traffic jam out on the street just outside her apartment road. While technically the road always ended outside, she wondered someday whether some driver would be crazy enough that they would try to drive their car right through her window, killing Lidier and her pet cat Whiskers.

"Yetty!" said the cat, "Those Sasquatches from Saquatchland always have it out for sleeping princesses."

Lidier came over to the chair, and scratched her cat on the ears, then draped a blanket over herself. "But your my big Yetty, Whiskers."

"No, Lidier. I'm a cat. I do cat things."

She kissed the cat on the forehead, and then tried to get as much sleep as she could until Mathilde got home, then she would start dinner. Generally dinner was an affair of taking turns, but it was an agreement they made, aside from splitting rent, they made life at least a little bit more tolerable. Lidier became an expert on masturbating herself with her toes, while taking a tissue to blow her noes. Then began rolling her R sounds while snoozing on her double layer pillow.

When Mathilde got home, she took off all of her clothes, one piece at a time. And then draped her back on Lidier's chest. Mathilde had always been somewhat of a submissive, but it was something that she had struggled to admit to herself. Instead she drowned herself on the flow of MMO games, and decapitated elf girls. The method decapitation decidedly different from the standard National Razor, that had been replaced with no capital punishment once La Pen took her oath of office. Technically, they were both on hiding, as generally the right wing government did not like LGBT people. She was unsure whether there would be any kind of political purge. She preferred watching paint merge with the texture of her wooden walls, and how it dried.

Political debates, that was like watching paint dry. But watching paint dry could be a good or a bad thing depending on whether Mathilde liked the topic of in question; as long as it didn't flow like a bull fighting ring or the Spanish inquisition, or worse yet, some combination of the two, then she could get a relative amount of sleep before the morning venture while traveling with her street team. Within this social circle, she was hesitant to bring up either of their immigrant status, as she was unsure whether it would effect their social standing. But generally she didn't care if Lidier talked about it on the net, as long as she didn't bring up where their physical location was.

And that was the thing; despite Lidier's seemingly docile, if not completely traditional appearance, she at times could be quite unpredictable. This made every day interaction like walking on eggs shells, except for the scissoring they engaged in for their evening entertainment. Mathilde had a shoe fetish, and Lidier knew it; but she seldom inquired further to this effect. She knew that when she wore Birkenstock Clogs, Mathilde would look at her as if she wanted to hop her bones. Lidier had gotten a hysterectomy, effectively nullifying any chance of having unwanted children, and there would plenty of kids, here in the great big city, that she could adopt. But at this point in time, it was a struggle just to make ends meet as a a writer; both her and Mathilde were writers of a sort, though Lidier focused mainly on writing different poetry forms: Flamenco, Lai, Sonnet, and Haiku.

Laiku verse dropping down like acid rain, Lidier long for a life without of risk of encountering the profane. Mathilde wanted to experience the profane in limited doses, Lidier wanted none of it at all. Besides their pet cat.

Who had an unusual fear of Yetis.

Midnights were always a rough night for playing Dungeons And Dragons, yet it was an easy habit to indulge when she could not get any kind of writing done, no matter how much I thought about doing it. It had been many years since Lidier played as a pigtailed elf girl paladin with a scythe, but those days not writing were not one of those days. Most of my life like rolling a D20 for survival in general. With not every need to roll dice was obvious at every single moment.

When she was in her office, she would have to move different wires out of her way. For whatever reason manufactures did not managed to make the decision to make everything wireless, so my only options were to write about my life story away from the computer. She had already cut out of her life one website, that had the tendency to insert commentary while she was writing, rather than after the entire manuscript was complete. She had gotten into the routine where she slept on the couch to get the level of silence in her surroundings that she could personally feel comfortable with. But this had not always been the case, and that's why she generally arranged her deck and dice on her own terms. Not the terms of anyone else.

She made for her life specific terms, but generally people tended to ignore them. People like to make determinations such as "These are my boundaries, and you must obey them." But the way that they behave suggests that they don't have to obey others boundaries, only their own. You see it in current day politicians, but it's not a phenomenon that is unique to politicians. For one thing, even politicians sometimes feel like they have to obey others boundaries, if they're receiving a pay check from them. But when it comes to every day people, including if not especially those at art studios, they tend to ask you personal questions with impunity.

Whether it's inquiring about why it is you write about the things you do, and generally she didn't mind, except she preferred to ask them about them, since that's what she was there for. She indulged in other ventures elsewhere, whether that's individual paintings she painted, or in looking for subjects who wear Birkenstock clogs with thick wool socks, walking around at the local grocery store.

This was her story about life.

About everything, yet nothing.

When your growing up with a certain television program, you get used to having certain mysteries that never really get answered. Such as the mother of either of the main characters; for fighting television shows, this was almost to an epidemic scale, especially if they were an animation that came out of Japan. Thus for decades she gradually lost interest in that genre of animation, eventually preferring to play Japanese Role Playing Games rather than having to make sense of the plot as it was made available in serialized formats. She developed her own style of game play that was distinct from standard class building, preferring to get her abilities through grinding for many hours at a time. After a point she preferred grinding rather than the plot itself.

As a writer, she preferred other things that were more natural to her own variation of sexual fetish, something that the old fighting games and TV shows never managed to achieve, except for very brief kinks when she had an interest in girls with monkey tails. She also liked werewolf girls, but the only consistent interest she maintained beyond her teenage years, was her interest in vampires. She had had on line friends that made a big thing about what the definition of being Goth was, despite the fact that even they never seemed to pay attention to the fact that Gothic was a form of architecture, and also a genre of literary fiction for many decades beyond the Punk offshoot. Lidier was a classical goth, and not one of the Punk variety you say on the dance floor. This meant that, generally, despite the superficial quality of liking to where all black, she had nothing else in common with them. But she had a special interest that would freak out even the most hardcore of Goth Punks, a very literal sexual attraction to blood that carried her all the way through life. For Lidier, she longed for the girl decapitated on the guillotine blade.

But her interest was not out of spite, she simply wanted someone to kiss goodnight, with her soft yet sharp tongue. While reading Baudelaire, and drinking hot chocolate. She liked girls whose skin tone was that of the lightest of milk chocolate. And hair the darkest of dark chocolate rabbits. This interest, which for all she knew would never go away, except through death, were something that made her avoid dating until recently. Her recent move to the country she lived in now, was a matter of luck.

She carried a small hockey puck.

But it wasn't for playing with sticks.

Lidier, with rose in her hair and her skin the shade of burnt sweet potato, had blades in the pouch on her shin. Her stiletto blade in her leg pouch. She felt th winter sun lit under the blue skies, warming her face as she a leaf cut in two. The curls in the hair flowed like dark rose petals, long flowing Locks flowing in window. The curls in the hair against the winter sun lit under the blue skies.

She cuts another leaf in two.

In this specialized rogue like session, she had previously opted to wield a scythe, but had grown a preference for shorter bladed implements. She would navigate along the walls, careful to only walk through narrow corridors rather than through the wide open areas of the map: despite the areas being previously programmed to have a certain degree of randomness, there was some part of the gaming experience she felt seemed familiar. A certain part of that continued to be persistent regardless of the session she played. It seemed as if every time she entered a shop, the shop keepers would never speak a word to her. If it were a normal game, she would have attributed this to simply being bad AI.

Gone were the days when games were done in two dimensional sprites, gone were days when pixelized mothers spoke in vague lullabies to their pixelized les enfants. It was the era of virtual permanent death on the screen. Gone were the days when one could just barely scrape by with constant grinding and stat increases. When the goblins, giant cockroaches, and other vile things lurched at her, she bled real blood. For the game had been programmed with a different level of sensory perception. During the nineties, games were limited purely to the sensory details provided by graphics, and before this what your mind could imagine within the flow of chicken scratched notes.

Lidier remembered how her friends in special ed had poor hand writing skills, but this never stopped them from attempted to jot down whatever they could on the bits and pieces of paper they could find. This was before there was a thing called save points, among other tools of that trade. She remembered all the trouble it took, just to get some of them to even write anything down. Yet now she no longer scrawls notes, except for the notes she wanted to scrawl. Instead her hands went into other places, not all of which would aggravate the mind of sexual deviants whose minds were in the gutter.

She had found this game on an on line message board, a game that was separate from the others. The others were shelved together into a single thread, but this was had a thread devoted to this one individually, do to the fact that it was one of the few currently available that went beyond the normal sensory experience of normal rogue like sessions. Her blood, bled out from a cut by giant cockroach, dried it quickly enough on its own, but she had a spare bandage she found in a first aid kit. She pilfered the first aid kit from another dead traveler. Unlike in other games, where monsters simply dropped items. The game designer had a particular interest in making players do the hard work: selling the guts of the monsters, trading it for ZCash on the cheap.

In general things sold for much cheaper than they used to, back when games with procedurally generated dungeons and permanent death were still a relatively new thing on the market. But since the crash of twenty seven, prices jacked way high when Europe still traded in the dollar with the United States, yet now she traded in the Euro. And for how long this would last she was not even sure of this. Marine La Pen had won election after they had experimented with Macron for a while, whose popularity continued to sink after bringing up the possibility of a European Armed Service. It was very different from le Etats-Unis, that was for sure. It was only a matter of time before she would find out just how much.

She masturbated to girls in wooden shoes. Was a fine of different French painters, and when she would not plug her head in cardboard, would take much of her day wanking Daniel King's work. Among other painters of the period. The giant rats and cock roaches, though still not particularly appealing, did not make her completely lose her appetite for fetish subject matter.

The rain outside goes pitter patter.

Lidier disliked music from the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, because of a very definitive kind of sound quality. It wasn't specific to any particular band, and whether they were American or French bands never made much of a difference. The difference, if there was any, was regarding how the nineteen eighties seem to constantly feature synthesizers rather than actual professional instruments.

There were older bands that she liked, mainly ones that sounded vaguely folksy, but had enough decency to not be as folksy as possible. But with the music of synthesizers, it was entirely the flow of out of tuned music notes, the tune of songs that would make most bands sink. Not float, not tread water. Sink below the waves of distant ambiance, an ocean of acid and lye.

She downed the music with a slice of cherry pie for better songs, and a big tablespoon of salt for the worst. Ladies were bitches, men were bratwurst. And other kinds of sausage that would upset vegans. Unlike nineteen eighties music, she could never quite get rid of vegans, even among those nicer in the crowd. She liked chicken and apple sausage, and cooked it with Cajun seasoning: cayenne pepper, garlic powder, chili powder, among other spices in differing proportions. She stuffed her face fool of sausage, and other meat products. All to the tune of eighties Franco pop, with a side of Alsatian egg noodles and misplaced tomato sauce, under some vague pretension that her mother never could understand the appeal of the Alfredo paste.

She looked like a squirrel.

Her face stuffed full of nuts.

Lopping off a few arms and legs of some giant cock roaches was a piece of cake, but suffocating a wandering bandit enhanced by months of grinding was an entirely different thing. You never really knew whether that person was going to be another gamer, or if they were going to be a regular old NPC.

The game had this method of keeping count of every civilian you murdered in cold blood, it didn't matter if they were the local nun, or a highwayman on the run; hitching a ride on the back of a bullet train, sky diving from the back of flying wing, all a matter of course. But like landing in the Indian Ocean or wandering the Sahara desert, it was the stop that got you. And sometimes the storm doesn't blow over. Lidier got used to not having many friends, though it even surprised her when some of her loyal business partners, when trying to loot during levels of armor for different on line gamers, how many of them would go onto throw her under the bus.

The alliance of European nations was not quite to the level of the United States, when it came to turning immigrants into Ice. But suffice to say, they have their way. Their way of putting all you've ever known on ice. The last troop she belonged to, wanted to explore an ancient ruins in the game: as far as in game continuity was concerned, it was a product of a lost civilization shot down by aliens. But with any kind of game play session, most of the time the story and plot was largely secondary.

The story of life was having her mother repair her stop watches, and being led into raising a cat who feared yetis, and never quite understanding why. Only that whenever she read books about cryptozoology, the cat was alway encourage her to turn the page whenever a yeti was on the sheet. But now with her mother now living in British Columbia, and her father nowhere to be found in Honduras, possibly aiding the plight of refugees, she enjoyed a certain relaxed contempt for humanity uncensored by the expectation of familial lineage, not the flow of the Mariachi or the Flamenco.

The only time she tolerated the Mariachi, was when her peers would have mock up digitized weddings using their SL avatars, among other products and services on the older second version of the net, when services were still largely centralized, including on line video streaming services milking you for every dollar you were worth just to catch up on Japanese fighting anime, among other preteen forms of entertainments.

Even on Pleroma, interaction was few and far between. Real human interaction that is, and the web still had a method of isolating you from the real world, that left her constantly feeling fatigued.

Lidier had a natural inclination toward hating fantasy, whether that was stories of Jesus, Catherine Howard, or some blend of the two. Even stories where Catherine was Jesus, and other vague tales of decapitation martyrdom. The flow of an ax blade chopping through a slender neck, the dying sensation of draining blood. She hated girls who were white saviors, almost to a fault. Taste the wounds of desire, cover them in salt. Flow to the lyrical melody of long strawberry locks, and tutor bonnet filles in their Birkenstock clogs. The flow of time moving past the the of the ax.

She finished testing a new game called Nihilist. It was similar to Rogue, Moria, Angband, and others of their ilk. The main difference was that you had to type out directions, and then press enter. There were two primary rooms, a circular room and a square room. There was a home state that was always the same. You solved ciphers instead of fighting monsters, although the point of which you'd solve any specific key state largely depended on the luck of the gamer. Lidier was the kind of girl to have the worst luck in the social world, yet seemed to never run out of it on the net. She wanted to play a game where she could actually see Catherine Howard's head fall off her body. Caressing Cat's head, she would snuggle with it as if it were her new pet cat.

On most days, she never seemed to have time playing rogue likes. She had gotten out of the habit ever since she had returned from Washington State, roughly five years ago since twenty sixteen. And now she longed for the time she could play one of the game states, with no weed eaters blowing outside. Only the noise of prostitutes in the red light district, and the smoke of cigarettes in the air just down the road from Strasbourg proper. She imagined cute girls with giant bows, sticking their necks in the chopper. Their long strawberry blond locks staring into a forever blue sky. She carried a thing of pepper spray, but wanted to purchase a taser for more troublesome men who harassed her. Her trust issues had been largely destroyed five years ago. And it was a struggle to feel like a queen again. But she wasn't the queen of Henry the 8th, or any other male monarch.

Her solace was the flow of Hacklikes, Roguelikes, and Nihilistlikes. All varieties raining down from the sky like live wire pop music. While she dreamed up beheaded French and British girls during the middle ages upwards into the French Revolution. The flow of blood dripping down the neck.

When Lidier logged into the game, she primarily focused on hanging around narrow passage ways. The reasoning was simple: you could fend off an entire army as a single person, fighting one of them at a time. But in this game called Nihilist, the focus was on solving a specialized kind of cipher: there were over two thousand possible cipher states, each one only being reciprocal to that specific key. The catch was, you as the player didn't know the key. She had, based on one success, determined that each locked had the same answer. Thus each time she put in the same answer, regardless of what the randomly jumbled letters amounted to. It worked every time.

She wondered was it was the game designer didn't try for something different, mainly finding a ciphered door that had a different pass phrase every time she encountered a new one. But this would mean having as many pass phrases as there way possible keys that could encipher them. A seemingly insurmountable programming task, that allowed for an infinite number of possible cipher texts. It was easy to guess the answer if the answer remained constantly the same, and it provided almost no challenge whatsoever, therefore the perfect balances was different lengths and amounts of pass phrases for every locked door. Then made the programming job go from being over two thousand possible pass phrases, to only a dozen or so pass phrases, gradually increasing in difficult. In a sense, the game she imagined would be a kind of code breaker's simulator.

But the current game she played, was not a simulator. It was, was repetitive lines of code.

Infinite procedurally generated dungeons that followed the same basic shape, only varying based on the shape. With her stiletto blade, and her Birkenstock clogs, she hobbled around the corridors looking for food. Longing for the day that she could escape this seemingly infinite dungeon.

She unplugged herself from the machine.

She went to get her teethed cleaned with her own toothbrush, as suppose to the one owned by the sharp dentist, with an equally sharp wit. Who, went she would visit him in her early twenties, made her want to do the splits. But now, for him and nobody else, she felt more than at any other point, that she could give two shits. He had punctured the wrong gums, scratched the wrong tooth. And now, after the surgery, she had to pay for out of her own pocket, she largely avoided tooth doctors.

She got out herself a joint.

And became a fire breathing dragon, in lines of endless binary. Jacked in on a constant endless hallucination, she longed for day when she would not wake up from her sleep. She remembered when she used to read Cyberpunk novels, but largely lost her interest. She now preferred literary fiction, but seldom had time to read. The apartment she lived in provided almost not opportunity for lack of distraction, she had even when in early grade school where she had to do fractions.

Noise was her constant detraction.

Her constant bane.

If journaling were like writing a book, she wondered what others would think of it. She wondered, for writing the story of her life, in bits and pieces, whether anyone would actually even read a story of a Mestizo/Meti girl, decked out in black. A girl who focused mostly on one singular character, flowing like notes from a scattered personality, that manifested as more of a personality defect. She disliked real arachnids, yet liked binary spiders. She avoided anything in real life she didn't have sexual feelings for, but the draw of the game involved more than her sensuality. She dreamed of binary bus crawling all over her nude body, biting into her tender neck.

She masturbated to French girls in a guillotine.

Who got it in the neck.

And the flow of the dress / in her great caress

Savored for touch / once longing for Dutch

Girls with touch / as if it were a crutch.

For her, men were simply to much.

The fish now flowing

Under the snowing

Lake,

Longed for kissing

She who was missing

Snake,

Caressing, kissing

Longing, snowing

Lake.

Her life was a life of dissolving prose, that never quite reached poetry. She longed for her personal oblivion, draped all over the page. Over all fantasy games, filled with the most vengeful of sages, who would just as soon decapitate her as made her breakfast, while camping under the ruins of long gone civilization. She walked through corridors, hoping to find some means of an exit.

But finding only dust.

What the difference between a French and a Spanish girl? One says Te Amo at her garroting, and the other j’aime vous at her guillotining. In either case, the result is the same: one dead girl in a casket at the end of the week. One severs the head completely, the other severs the head internally. One is bloodless, the other has blood all over the floor.

Lidier had no intention of becoming either one, thus mostly kept to herself for the following weeks. On her laptop, she finally figured out how to do procedural generation: instead of creating separate dungeons within a single code source, you clone the original game, change around the furniture, and tie together the dungeons with a separate program called a game state. It’s through this game state that creates for a random selection between different dungeon shapes: square dungeons, circular dungeons, and triangular dungeons. Sometimes rectangular. In all cases the navigation is determined through a navigation variable: rather than using a boolean to move the cursor.

Lidier was not quite to the level of making games that could be uploaded to different virtual reality game shops: for one thing she had almost no experience with using Graphical User Interfaces. She hated screens on program editors based on bright color schemes, preferring the traditional color of green text on black background that was closer to the original font of the early internet. These days word processors seemed to focus on white screen and black text. Yet the local glasses doctor always bugs you to not be on the computer as much, because it might burn your eyes out of your sockets.

On this night, she decided to install shoes, and see how much she could transfer her game Nihilist to this new interface. Eventually she wanted to switch to using sprites, but sprite had long sense stopped being in vogue after the turn of the nineties. She was stuck painting dots on the screen, while the rest of the gaming industry was switching to various forms of three dimensional quality, gradually becoming more and more indistinguishable from reality. But with games composed of text and numbers, there was not a danger of subject matter being to obscene to be played by even the youngest of gamers. Unless the state became such, that their desire for controlling what people read and play was not limited to the aesthetic of pure visual flavor.

Games came in various flavors: First Person Shooters, Survival Horror, Tactical Role Playing Games. Much more. Sometimes these different genres would blend till the end of time. While others stuck more closely to their original roots, not changing much sense they were first created: the only exception within classic JRPGs has mostly been Fina;l Fantasy, becoming less and less like a JRPG, and something closer to an action RPG as the decades went on. Much of this had to do with creators not being allowed to own the content which they publish, thus if something becomes a companies flagship product, the game “innovates†and strays from its original roots to the chagrin of genre purists. Even Roguelike games were not entirely immune to this form of snobbery: much of this genre was obsessed with a strictly action form of that gaming experience.

But Lidier liked puzzles, and not action.

Her life flowed like substitution notes.

It's easy to claim to be an unplugger, when your face is well known enough to be on the net. Just drop the remote, fast forward; hope that every other day will be like the previous one. Instead Lidier argues with herself every hour after the next, while making one Roguelike after the other. Dot matrix grid layout. @ man representing Indiana Jones, fighting demons worse than plantation owners. If life were a five point essay, Lidiers symphony would be one without a theme or prompt. She had once fawned over a free software evangelist, but now he acts like a televangelist. Who now spends their day bashing Julian Assange, going with American propaganda despite the US wanting to assassinate him. The free software guy now represents everything she was politically against.

Lidier's hero was only herself.

When she last opened her laptop, she had a day before finished designing the next iteration of her own variety of Roguelike game. The difference was, unlike most other games on the market, it was almost entirely geared toward singular rooms: in order to do a larger rooms, she had to use booleans to turn some rooms off and others on. This required considerably more nesting than what she was generally used to, and within each boolean, its own separate set of coordinate variables to navigate, and different drawn text files to refer to do with the index of different folders. She had been completely acquainted with referring to statistics from a file rather than having it reinitialize every day she tested the different versions of the game. The problem with initializing it each start up, it mean everything you ever earned in the game was completely erased. When you refer to the file, the game reads from that file, allowing for stat boosts and other power ups to become permanent. It was this matter of permanence that had been a larger road block to her personalized path to building virtual reality games for the past year or so.

There were several booleans: bedroom boolean, living room boolean, bathroom boolean, among other crucial switches. You wanted each of these switches to have a degree of self-containment, so that when you assigned coordinates, you didn't use the same set of them for each room. This was useful if you wanted to make each room @ man would walk through be a different size. More common in more advanced video games, where you didn't want the home state to vary as much as dungeons, such as in various commercial games on the market like Diablo. The only reason the size of room didn't change much in Rogue, was simply do to hardware limitations. The only thing Lidier wanted in her own games was not strict Procedural Generation, but only procedural generation within the narrow context of dungeon crawling outside of the digital villa.

She preferred figuring things out on her own.

Rather than browsing Hubzilla.

Housing Crises, essentially an extended form of capital punishment, without the benefit of an appointed lawyer. Groups of people being made unpersons, and dying without pennies to their name. It's not as flashy as a Guillotine, and legally not listed as a form of execution. But make no mistake, the end result as always the same. Misery riding on the back of apparent stability, hope fading nightly. Lidier thought this was only an American thing. But it was one aspect of the United States that could easily be exported to Europe, with the climb of the far right.

And it wouldn't be much of a change from the 19th century, when slaves girls would be dragged by the wrist into faux courts, and soon hung by the neck for murdering people's children, yet weeks later the children turning up alive. Very few people seem to think how easily we could get back to this point. But all it takes is one demagogue with an ax to grind. One group of people to scapegoat, and one culture to vaporize from history.

Lidier escaped this purge narrowly.

She hoped it wasn't a matter of time till she'd be asked back.

Flying School House

Or the tale of immortal beheaded fairies.

It was another day of Summer's heat.

When Victoria took out the pigs, she bent down in her wooden shoes, and fed them the little bit of feed she still had left for them her family still had left. It was a dry feed. a mixture of various nuts and seeds. Her family had not been to the market in years, and it was just now the trees from which grew the nuts, began to wither and die. After it was done, she went back inside, and told her mother who was now reading her book instead of dusting the stove top, that the pigs have now been fed. "I am tired now, can I not rest?" Ordinarily her mother would say to help her cook dinner.

Instead she saw that Victoria had the sleepy eye.

"You may for this night only, but I will have more chores in the morning." Victoria's stomps could be heard throughout the house, prompting her mother to tell her to quiet it down. As she entered the room, quietness. The moon from the window eased in through the curtain that just barely covered the night. She tossed off her shoes that felt like logs rather than actual shoes, put herself over the covers, and then finally began to drift off to sleep. It was a while coming, but eventually she came upon the dream-gate. Victoria found herself walking through the gardens, that have long sense overgrown. The grass was already much longer than how it was before, when she first arrived. If there was any point she regretted becoming older, it was that silence that has continued since she made her decision to tell herself that nothing that was real, and that nothing going on was really happening.

For this was a time she needed it most, for even if her mother would make toast in the morning, there was still very much work to do. She had to gather the wood to help repair her father's bench outside. She needed to retrieve the mixture in order to make more concrete, because the fountain that once was there, was merely a pile of rubble. In her dream, it had now began to take on merely the qualities of the waking world. Where nothing was as it seemed, and at once she was chased by several wolves searching for prey. For the day has gone, that she no longer belonged to that world, or any world that showed different levels of reality beyond the carefully trimmed hedge brush she needed to trim along her houses sides.

It was when she was pounced on by the wolf remembered.

Where the Bunnies were always white, the grass always greener.

Not the now, where everything was meaner.

It was a warm day in Summer, and the heat was unbearable. A temperature of which made her wooden shoes nigh un-wearable. Yet she would trudge on, because while she was getting tired, at least she did not have to do chores. Those things were such bores, thing older people would do to pass the time. But for Victoria, she wanted to do away with time. Make everything within her world of dreams, fit within a certain rhyme. A world that was like the melody of music, like music notes hopping two and three and upbeat melodies. For this, the tiredness for wearing heavy shoes were bearable.

Along her travels, she met a bunny rabbit. But he was an odd one, had going a bad habit. Everything day he would smoke cigars, and tell stories of his voyages where he sailed the high seas. It was all she could to not go, "Please can you spare the story for another day?" For she wanted the stories to go away. Yet she bared it, as despite the boredom from the millions of words coming from the rabbit's mouth. For it was a warm house, where she always got to read books about children her age. Somehow the memory of being an only child began to fade, and she read wonderful reads until the moon began to wane. Nothing to brush the house with, nothing that was profane.

It was when she aged yet one year, things began to change. Yet it was gradual at first, and it only ever happened as she began to suffer from thirst. For her mother would deny her glasses of water to drink to take away the Summer's heat. Inside Victoria's mind, she saw millions of bunny rabbits hopping in twos and three searching for the lost lakes and streams. Eventually Victoria relented, and did chores for yet one more day. It took a long time for her to gather the wheat to make bales of hay. For what she could bare, one before. Now she craved to be at the shore, at the beach with other's of her kin. Children, mother's, and men. Animals in twos and threes, everyone of it's kind. They played water sports, many varieties that don't actually exist. "May I play with bunny, she would insist." They tossed her the bunny, that tossing the bunny was funny. Yet was no longer funny when the big bear tossed the bunny into Victoria's face.

And she dropped into the water, in disgrace.

It was a gradual feeling of resent moment, growing ever still. Yet she tried to let it go, assuming that no harm was meant. It was the next evening she tried not to visit them, but with regret she decided to take a nap. But at this point she was getting to the point where mother was insisting for her to have chores to do. Oh that's poo, she thought. For the weather had wrought, many flowers swaying in the breeze. It's wind cooling her and blowing up her sleeves. "Put on your wooden shoes, today I will make you sing the blues." Victoria at first hoped that there was no resentment from the animals, yet it was a faint hope. Though her mother kept her busy for much of the day, therefore at first was in the back of her mind.

Everything in dreams, was sour like wine. A tart taste of what was once heaven, but now snow ... hither and yawn. Thus for took a break, tried to ignore her dreams. Yet as the back of her dress began to tear at the seams, she craved them again. But that had become different, for the animals were no longer there. Not even a conversation, from the rabbit's cousin. A talking hare. Instead there were revenents, out to kill her everywhere. They disappeared suddenly, and appeared again just as sudden. Many evil spirits, with big sharp teeth and large flaming red eyes. She woke up screaming, mother checked on her.

She lied, said everything was fine. A sorrow, where even dreams may die.

Dreams are now no longer tart, like even a fine wine. The visions as she slept over then next week, began to wither away, and she had silent nights. Another day, she became sick. Doctors did not know the cause at first, because at first there was no symptoms. Victoria had a coughing cough, her eyes began to fade. She died with blood on her shirt. Mother wept until the night became day, regretting the lost Victoria. Her family moved, because there was no longer any reason to be in town. Only the faint memories, of her daughter the was once a clown. The faint memories of her daughters frown, was a minor comfort. As they rode away into the valley of forever.

A few months later, into a more heavenly light.

Night young and bright. Almost evening, closing light.

Mother tucked her daughter under the covers, then forgot to tell her Aida a bedtime story. A song of the deer, running and playing. In little groups of dear mates, never an only child. For there was a group mind set, though not any type humans wrought. Rather that little known aspect of mother nature, that never went away as she aged into older years into her early pre-teens. She was two years younger then fourteen minus two. Aida began to drift, and appeared at the gate of the sands of grey. As she walked closer to the gate, she heard the sounds of ghoulish laughter. Like demons erupting from the earth, then the landscape gradually eased into a land of meadows where the grass was always green enough on both sides of plain.

There was a small cottage, that was cracked and torn. Yet despite it's shell, it somehow gave the feeling of a world far better than hell. Where the there was always food, like the many apples from the trees with the leaves flowing in the breeze. In this world, she could get whatever she wanted. A blond woman, possibly in her early thirties, walked out of the door. "Aida, is time for breakfast. You don't want to spoil that do you?" Aida chose not to pick the apple, and walked inside. She tripped on her left wooden shoe, her mother caught her just in time. They carefully walked inside.

After the meal, her mother let her sleep. Yet there was a storm brewing. Aida found herself in her school. She walked through the halls, of the school that was little more than a one room school house. The only other rooms where the restrooms, and that room that barely resembled what we would consider one. The school house was shaking. She looked through the window, with the other little girls. The sky was at first an orange heavenly glow, then at once began a whirlwind of destruction. Suddenly she paused out, as soon as the house went flying high high into the sky. Then her friends woke her up. "Wakey wakey, look outside. The school is flying." Aida stared out of the window. Felt like she was going to fall.

"How long will be way up here?" she asked.

"All the way till the fall." Aida wasn't she if she was being serious or not.

"But I don't want to stay till the fall, I will get hungry." Aida said.

"Oh we will feed you." said Reika.

Reika handed her an extra bowl, because Aida could not afford a lunch. It was a small lunch, but all the other girls got to have a small lunch. So it was OK. Yet when she tried a bite, Aida wondered what it was made off. Thus, resisted to spit it out. "What is in this bowl of soup." Aida stared at her friend Reika. She was not sure, but she figured at least somebody at the school had to get there on the horse. But where were the horses? Aida wanted to know.

"We keep horses till the snow, we walk everywhere while in the air." said Reika, holding her Teddy Bear. She handed to Aida, because she wanted to share the bear. "Yea it probably does taste like that, I was so heartbroken when they decided to slaughter Betsy." Apparently, although Reika giggled about it.

"Betsy? Reika?" Aida was looking a little nervous.

"Why Betsy the horse, we killed after it could no longer perform in the cicurs." Reika said. Then had a frown, "Sorry it was a joke. I'm not really sure what meat that is, it's school meat I guess." Reika told Aida that she would be back in a minute.

But that minute never came. Mother already woke her up.

"Honey, it's time for school." Her mother said. No, she wanted to play in the large pool of the ocean. In the village on the shore by the sea. Where the clothes were always drying in the wind, a place along the rising waves where she could swim to unwind. She could could not swim very well, and she almost fell under the sea again. Her hair lost it's bind. She wanted to see Reika again someday, even though she did not exist. And could not exist, but she was there in her mind forever.

Her first true friend. It was a few months later, her village had new neighbors. Whenever they passed by her own the street. They passed abruptly in jolts, with blocks of brick on their feet. They hoped quickly going thud through the road of mud. Hop, hop, hop through the mud. "Who is that girl staring at us?" asked the father that was once the father of Victoria.

"Oh just another girl, she looks like our daughter. Don't you think?" the wife said.

Like their child? What do they mean? She thought of herself as unique, she didn't want to look like anyone else. Not at all. "How do you do?" said the father, who boarded the cart. Then whipped the horses, and rode way over to their house.

"I hope one of the horses isn't named Betsy?" said Aida, the fussy Hetsy.

"Aida! Aida! Did you finally me the grumpy old people!" said Mosey. Then they walked together along the home along the dirt road. "So what's been eating you?"

"Does anyone named their daughter's Reika?"

"Well I don't know."

At home Aida finished her homework, then went back to bed. But she could not get to sleep, for she heard young deer running and playing. Spinning around in circles in twos and threes. "Where do you dear ever young, when you run and play?" said Aida. The deer sung:

Where the fields never wane,

Where the flowers, never turn to grey,

Where the lion with the mane,

Sleeps with the horse, and it's bail

Of hay!

If only she could visit, where the field never turn to grey. And fly again in a flying school house, where the sky was always beneath them, and she was always higher than she ever been. When, she would have that dream again, she did not know. Merely hoped it would happen again soon some day.

Sometime before the snow.

It was the next week Aida decided to visit the neighbors, and although it was against her mother's wishes, she wanted to visit them then swim with the fishes. At the house, she wanted to make a good impression. So not to dirty the carpet in their small cobble stone cottage, a change from their lost one that was slightly bigger, she placed her wooden shoes by the door. Aida knocked on the door. "Who is it, can you see I'm making a pie?" Aida heard a voice, barely beyond the snore from her guy on the couch, riding an old story book.

"May I help you make a pie?" Aida said. The lady stomped to the door.

"And who are you, I decry!?" said the old mother of Victoria.

"Hello! I'm your neighbor!" Aida said, trying to form a smile.

"Well so is the rest of them. Maybe next time."

At home her mother lectured her about visited the neighbors, and by the time she finished her lecture it was already getting late. So she turned out the lights in the room, and left her daughter Aika to fate. Then Aika heard the dear rustling in the hedge brush, and saw that they were chewing upon the branches of the tree. Go away from me, fair dear for I want to sleep tonight thought Aida.

The next week she met the neighbors.

She helped them make a pie. Then she met her daughter. Not by any direct acquaintance, but rather from being introduced to the storybook read by the neighbors guy. "An old storybook my daughter used to love, I have been reading it since she left."

"Where did your daughter go?" asked Aika.

But before he could answer, the wife glowered at him.

"Maybe for another time." said the father of Victoria.

But she still wondered, where did Victoria go? Then she went to her home, and her dreams of the girl her Victoria storybook. Where she reunited when Reika again, in some form where the girl reminded her of that girl of the dream, where the fields never turn to grey.

And hoped to meet Victoria, someday.

In a dream somewhere. She hummed the dears hum:

Where the fields never wane,

Where the flowers, never turn to grey,

Where the lion with the mane,

Sleeps with the horse, and it's bail

Of hay!

When Aida went back to her mother's house, she found out that her mother had received word about her accomplishments. Whether she had already known or not, she didn't seem to act like she cared all that much about anything she did. It was almost like she only wanted her to do chores, and nothing else. And so Aida went back to bed again, and settled for her next night's sleep.

It was when she was in bed, that she had a different dream from the night's before. Almost as if it were not a dream at all. There was a ghost in the room wearing a shall. The ghost walked closer to Aidia, who clang to the wall. That was behind her bed, where she rested her head. And hoped for the ghost, not to crawl onto her bed. But there was no ghost crawling onto the bed. The ghost had a similar appearance to a girl that must have been the daughter of the next door neighbor. Then a mood of no sorrow.

"I hear that my mother is teaching you how to bake my favorite pies." At first Aida was unsure of who it was. But after the buzz, she found who the voice belonged to. It was Victoria. "I sure wish could be around to savor the pie, but then I had a disease. Not here I stay after I died. Waiting for new company, to stay by my side." Aida wasn't sure at first what to think of what Victoria said. Then they read Victoria's favorite book together.

"And the little dear that ran and played, finally was able to spend time with the other little dear. Then there was nothing but good cheer." After they finished the book, Victoria bed farewell, till next next adventure. And hoped there would not be another misadventure. Then Aida was able to get to sleep. She was back in the flying schoolhouse, with the other little girls. There was the girl that made jokes about horse meat. And other that were new arrivals.

"We have a new friend here." said one of the little girls. There Aida was able to see, that her new friend Victoria was there. It was almost as if she had not died at all. Victoria invited Aida to come sit with her, and there they had lunch together for all the evenings of the following week.

And in a wink, the book was closed.

Victoria and Aida went into the dream together, where they arrived at the flying school house. Here they had normal dream-school. They had lunch with the other girl that Aida met before, and for now all was well with the world. Yet Victoria could feel something brewing in the air, something that did not feel quite right with the world of dream. In her own mind's eye, she could sense a storm was brewing.

A silence, not quite silence. When it came close to the end of the dream, and Aida would soon would up for the morning, Victoria talked with Aida friend from before. She told her about her feelings, but the friend simply shrugged it off as nothing by the wind. Yet there was something she could sense. She could hear the sounds of cackles, in the dark.

Meanwhile on the other side of the dream, the nightmare. The skull-fairy queen was sitting on her throne. She was brewing about what to do for the evening of eternal night. She remembered the many times in the dream world that Victoria tried to foil her planes. The dear in the world continued to ran and play. Yet oh how she hated dear. The queen hated how they were brown, and had baby fawn. She hated their very existence. So she called one of her servants, "I want you to bring me the head of dear. And if you can find her, I want you to bring Victoria to me. I must have her abilities."

Things were peaceful, for now.

It was the next evening that Aida arrived home from school. Victoria and Aida decided to have a wooden shoe dance. But the dance could be heard all the way to the ends of the netherworld. Clop, clop, clop. All the demons across the fiery pits of hell went screech screech, they looked like small little grey demons. Victoria and Aida were breeding hate from the very depths of hell. Clop, clop, clop. As they laughed and played. The demons began to complain to the skull-fairy queen. "Very well, servants girls. Make it choppy." The skull-fairy servants girls flew to the ends of the dream-world. They fought many creatures, and over time the pleasant dream-world became no different from the depths of hell.

The skull-fairies flew to the flying school house, and landed on the front porch. They knocked, and the girls went to go see who it was. The girls were scared from the depths of hell-fire. For they had never seen a true skull-fairy before. The girls corned every single one of the girls in the flying school house. They bound up the dear, the wined because they could not longer run around. Aida was trying to sleep her bed, but she felt like she was out of her head. Instead she put the pillow over head, for she not get a proper sleep. The wind felt like it was howling, and this made her go bawling. Bawling, bawling, bawling across the ends of the Earth. At once she feared for her friends, and wondered how they were. Aida was beginning to develop sleep problems over the last two days. She barely work on the days she was tired, and thus everything began to grow steadily downhill.

But finally she was able to sleep. Aida noticed that the world was different. The world had become grey and lifeless. No longer was it the world of the dream, where anthropomorphic animals mingled with the regular animals. And children from across the dream-world would play jump-rope. Nope, nothing but the fields turned to grey. Victoria's spirit came to her in a holographic projection. "Aida, Aida Adia." But then there was no more of her sweet sweet voice, for she was captured and sent to the depths of hell. Then Aida woke up screaming, and her mother went to go check up on her.

"It is only the monster in the closet." mother said.

"But it's not the monster mother." Aida said.

"Then what dear?" mother said.

"The silence, mom. The silence."

Where the dear once ran to play,

The devils of hell came to slay,

Animals, of their kind, from the day.

Silence, silence, more silence.

It was was not the quivering mother, but the blank stare.

Aida stare went to nowhere, and everywhere. Somewhere else in the dark, Victoria was there waiting. Alone, crying. Quivering, Aida felt like she lost another part of her self and that deep dark dungeon. Where the ghouls now come out to play, where the demons come out to slay. The creatures of the night. "Yes, we have the girl now. It will merely be a matter of time, before we are able to extract her crystal heart. And use it to light are lamps, for it has been very dark in this part of the world. I am tired of darkness." But Victoria did not have the heart to tell her, there was other ways of removing darkness.

But she was to tired to say anything.

When Aida woke up the next morning, she was to tired to do any chores. Aida's mother and father were not sure what to do. The tried to have her switch to a hoe, but she fall down into the grass. The next week they sent her to the doctor, told them it was a bout of insomnia. So they gave her a specific prescription, of meds to take. But none of them made her mind a'bake. Until on the forth night of taking them. Here she was able to gradually get back into a regular sleeping routine. Aida found herself in the sands of grey, and many spirits flickered across the desert. Spirits that once were there. Many ruins were filled with orbs, and she arrived at them to see what they were about. The orbs were large magical glowing things that kept this world balance in check. Oh what the heck she thought, I'll put my hand on the orb. Or it's all for naught. The orb wrought a large holographic projection of where Victoria was being hid. And so she ran to the castle, that she did.

But instead Aida was locked in a cell of her own.

The cell was dark and murky, and she could here many of her once friends chatting amongst themselves in the cell. Wondering why 'oh why Aida was not there to save the day. She could not help, she was simply to do to feed the horses hay. Nah' they said, for she could have made time for them. She waited silently in the cell, waiting for the guards to give her gruel. The favor of which she thought was very cruel. She waited and waited and waited for hope to come. Until eventually she was to dumb to stay awake. And it was this that she came upon the dream within a dream.

And it was glowing, vibrantly.

A picture of a land that was once meadows, now made present and whole. A land unadulterated by the skull-fairy queen, who was always green about the meadows that were only slightly greener than she. Only the fruit she could have had, "No more fruits for me." And it was with this she decided to aid the groups escape. Even if she died trying. She called for a guard, made a provocative pose. Then after she picked her nose, this was what caused her to anger a skull-fairy guard. Therefore, the guard opened the door. Instead she threw a rock at the head of the guard. He fell down and down and down until there was no more down to go. And splat his head against the dirt floor. "Ow my head." She stole the guards keys, because he was a very stupid stupid guard. Then helped the others girls out of their cells, then they walked together silently through the cell that was darker than night.

Somehow they had lost the guard, and thus they were home free. But there were hungry, each thought there was no enough fruit for me. Together they outsmarted the other guards, and finally was able to get to the skull-fairy queen lair. They took the queen, and jerked her around by her long hair. Then coerced her until turning the world back to how it was before. Finally she gave in, and turn the world back to how it was.

A few weeks later, the world was back to normal.

Aida got herself a dream journal, and everyone now and then she would still be visited by Victoria. And they had the time of their life. Eventually she came to enjoy her school classes again, and simply could not wait to see Victoria again during the Summer after spring. And pictured herself riding on the back of a unicorn, flying into the sky. Then landing onto the porch of the flying school house. "Things have gotten better sense you have been gone." That, Aida was sure glad that was.

Reika was no longer mad at Aida.

Thereafter.

Father Out Of Time

Or an Uploaded Fairy prequel.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

My father's boot steps, I could hear them … stopping at the door. Then a knock. Mother, who was stressed all evening last night, had a smiled after a long time. She opened the door, a there to greet us was old dad. "Your home! Emmet, Hannah, papa's home!"

"How have you squirts been!" my father asked, carefully making sure not to hold me to tight. I could remember his long yard stare, and it wasn't until recently that I finally realized the meaning of what was on his face.

"Our son George won the spelling bee last week!" my mother said.

"Really, that's awesome." my father said.

It was the next morning. Our father's return home, created the situation that would have to celebrate a joint birthday party for the year. Just as well I guess. I didn;t mind much, by my sister wined.

"Oh watermelon cake, if you keep wining you wont get any!" The father said. He must have not been sure if it was clear he was joking, though it was clear to me as bright as the morning sunlight.

"Oh come on honey!" my mother said.

"Relax, relax! I'm just kidding. We can have separate parties next year. Anyway lets sing together. Happy birthday to you.." But the angels in heaven, had other things in store. Not a speck of food, nothing left to store. Yet then I didn't realize it yet.

Not wanting to move, having friends here in town, mother told me we could have a better life elsewhere. At that point, I hoped it was a promise.

It was when I walked through the middle school halls that I met my friend Emmet. I noticed he was hitting on the girl that he had a crush on, and then continued walking with me to class. I thought I heard the slightest spitting sound, yet not the rhythm of moving lips. The footsteps of shoes on the floor in the hall barely lit by the flickering L.E.D light.

"Emmet, act like an adult!" I said.

"Shut up." he said.

I arrived to class on time, got our homework outside of my notebook, but Emmet arrived in the classroom late once again.

"Emmet, that's a tardy slip for you. One more and its a detention." said the teacher, an elderly female teacher.

We sat at lunch together with his sister Hannah, and my sister. Hannah played with Emmet a little bit by trying to grab his lunch. "Hands off!" Emmet said, and smashed her hand with his fist.

Hannah picked up her hand and cries and asks, "What was that for Emmet!"

"Your not very generous." George said.

"I'm very hungry!" Emmet said.

"She's probably hungry too." George said.

"Shut up, just shut up!" Emmet said, I chuckled. Hannah is still wining from her hand that hurts. "Oh grow up Hannah."

"You grow up Emmet." I said.

My and my sister walked home to the rundown depravity that was the moonzurg munster. I opened the door, Bebee went inside first. We were going to visit Emmet. Instead we found … that his mother was holding Hannah in her arms. His sister starved to death, and I wondered to myself if she was better off dead so he no longer had suffer hunger in this world. For our rations in the ghetto had decreased ten fold.

And I was already feeling old …

My first taste, a moment kiss of death.

We sat in class, and I noted that poor Emmet was quieter than usual. Even the girl he had lovey lovery feelings for, or at least I thought so, tried to get his attention to ask what was wrong. He just shrugged her off.

"Fuck you bitch." Emmet said, because he realized that he loved his sister, who he had ignored all this time. He evidently did not care very much that his teacher would fuss at him for saying that.

"You want a detention Emmet?" teacher said..

I walked to the grave yard where Emmet and his sister rested feeling bad that I could not buy them flowers. My best, I made do with what I had. My sacked lunch from earlier. Placed it on the headstone, with an angel carved on it.

It was the girl I remembered Emmet crushing on that asked me about my best friend. But she found out that he was to busy to talk to her. Though she pretended not to know, on some level I wonder if she knew. Nothing left of my friend, not a speck from the ash. I stared at the window a little bit longer that morning

We walked home, devastated because of the lack of positive interaction between me and him before he killed himself. He couldn't handle the death of his sister. I only know, because one of his friends told me at school I didn't know very well.

"Hey Georgie, where's Emmet?" BB asked.

"I don't know BB." George said, I didn't have the heart to tell her the truth. There was no more of Emmet and me.

Later that night, my father loaded up his shot gun, looked at his wife, who leaned forward on the table, with her hands in her face crying.

"I'm sorry dear, I don't know what to do." my father said.

"I just don't know wants going to happen to Georgie and BB!" The mother weeped. For she must have known more than we, that there was nothing left to see.

We slept in our beds in our crappy bed room. The wallpaper was peeling, the whole room was cracked and torn. But at least the air conditioning was still ran. Though I wasn't sure for how much longer.

"Georgie, why aren't the other's out to play?" my darling sister asked.

"They are probably just busy with homework, it's late. We need sleep." I said. There were fewer children left in town. Everything back then was hush hush.

Emmet visited me in spirit, told me everything was going to be ok.

But was that true?

The sounds of sirens driving in the neighborhood. We stared out of the window. There were tall guards, men in black military uniforms. Dragging citizens out of their homes, the few that were left because many starved to death. My father was the only ones left to fight back because the father would not give up his gun.

He didn't last long.

We were shipped in a black van, though not tied. I saw that Bebee acted like a normal girl her age, wondered if she will soon wake up to the reality of the situation. She stopped spinning to the rhythm of the music box. It's melody played in my head forever.

"Play with-" BB began to say, however George interjected with, "I don't want to play your stu."

BB Interjects George, and asks her mother "Why does Georgie not want to play?"

"Why don't you ask him sweat heart?" Our mother said. BB attempted to ask me. But I was to stressed to respond. That was the last words I ever said to her. I wish it were something else, but no changing that.

"He's probably not feeling well honey. I know, why don't you lay down and sleep?" The mother proposed.

My family were split up by gender into two separate trains. My father stared at me while we rode the train, filled with smoking prisoners. Smoke filled the air.

"Everything is going to be OK George, were going to go to a special place. A promised land, were the flowers never die. A better life." Although the father somehow I knew then he must not have believed it.

I began to suspect that something was seriously wrong. Looked at my nervous father with his sad sad eyes.

My and my father arrived at camp, went through mandatory camp inspections before going into the bunkers. Loaded up our stuff in their rudimentary shelves, that were more like scrap would. I began to worry about the fact that BB was missing, so asked father where she was, and he said he did not know.

"Did you lose track of her?" I asked.

"No," He stared at the window, then hugged me tight. Then continued in a whisper. "… they took her away George!"

Prisoners dug ditches into the soft dirt at around 9:00 A.M. Guards pointed the gun at my father, and fired the shotgun. The bullet barely nicked his head, and caused him to turn to face the guard. The guard, even seeing the prisoners face, fired a second time. I don't remember anything else.

I still remember the song he sang to us:

When the paradise comes to thee,

Remember to laugh, and count to three,

Ride with the windmills, like the wind,

Remember to unwind.

I am laughing, but don't mistake for laughter. The last lyric of dad, your father out of time. When he went to work that morning, before everything went to hell. The sound of a music box melody, now plays in my head forever.

An image of my darling sister Bebee forever as I stared, into the lonely image of a news telecast on a scraper screen.

She smiles.

When the paradise comes to thee,

Remember to laugh, and count to three.

Come dance with me.

O Raphael

Raphael In The World Of Dreams

Beyond the hillsides, beyond the hillsides raining hard. The hillsides cry in big buckets, wondering if it ends. At the end, a new life begins.

Christmas brings the truest, brings the truest tears within. At the end, a new life begins. And only hidden sorrows reign supreme. For on Christmas, it brings no true toys. It only brings the reminder of things from ones past. It brings discord, vague reminders of a new life, that can't begin. And Raphael is reminded of many a Christmas he could have had with Annabelle, as he wanders the darkness of what was once America.

America was once fifty states. One could still have the old internet, where one is free to masturbate. One can only think of quashed rebellions, and many a Christmas ruined by authoritarianism's tears of joy raining blood forever.

In the darkness, was the man.

In the darkness, was a shadow. The man had no name, but some called him Tiamat. The man, whose features Trumped many a fine pretty boy's in beauty pageants from US history, found himself an alien within the human race. An alien within the United States taken over by authoritarian powers. Raphael had only heard rumors about such a figure, and there he was in the confines of a prison, seeing his red eyes. The man, looking almost female, was something that Raphael envied and desired, and yet he could scarcely admit it. For though it is expected for peasants to fawn over deranged headmasters and kings, for a Knight of a knight of another obscure nation to love one, for this only terror brings. And now Raphael lusts after the flesh.

He had found shelter with Elizabeth, who had decked out her hair in black. Given the exposure to new technology, she had grown a taste for dying her hair and for hair products that remove the frizz everywhere. Yet when she cooked with Raphael, she always was careful to keep her head away from the frying pan. That way, nobody would sever her head to munch on it. Raphael admired Elizabeth, yet hated her beauty. It reminded him of many an old Christmas, where the new life didn't begin.

For Raphael there was only the flesh.

For Raphael there was only lust. Yet he lusted after severed heads and hanged trophy wives beheaded with curvaceous, long Japanese knives. With his red trench coat, and a belly beginning to bloat, he developed a belly.

He felt like Jelly.

He felt like mud.

Raphael thought of the old life, a world beyond the invention of holographic monsters.

In the life we, in the life we wander free. In the life we think we spake of free speech. Yet for the man after the modern era, there was only the lust. There was new technology that aided these efforts, yet the efforts were designed to keep people from defaming the orange custard, that forms the new color of post-Modern shit. The era of White Supremacy. The era of the long dress, the era of the Guantanamo camps. And waterboarding.

This is surfing, but drips of pain.

In this life, we watch the news. In this life, we listen to democratic blues. Yet others masturbate to brand new wooden shoes, ignoring the nature of their own reality. For we live in a complicated computer system. Decking the catacomb halls of the dream world, we consume our intellectual sensations with information about electoral fraud in the world of mass media. In the old lifetimes there were programmers that made the world run. In this life we rely on these hidden men in uniform. Yet so often in the world of binary in the sky with Ruby syntax and other programs, there is only licked shoes and sung blues. The song of the mortal life.

A world beyond the rolling of severed heads on sticks.

A world beyond the candle wicks.

A world apparently rational without the river Styx. A world after the fall of Cyberspace, the birth of dream space, and the eventual post-reality merge. A reality noted by poets from other eras:

Beware the man,

Beware the tin can man.

Beware the man that stomps you.

Crushing you like big tin can.

Raphael could only send messages in the new world.

A world where encryption remained supreme, if only one could learn how to use the technology.

SEND TEXT

IDDIR OEENO NFDGT CEKSA ENIIB

Raphael waits for sunlight.

Ministry Of Alteration

So that's how you grow six feet. The correct box had been struck. She dresses like Mario, carefully avoiding spaghetti on her overalls and tee-shirt.

"Trust me, I am your friend. Goedenact et goedemorgen."

The user logged off Mario land, suddenly populated by reversed gender roles. A strange world, a strange life. Raphael had played with holographic mob generators since the days he went to look for Annabelle, so as to train for the coming onslaught. And in the goedemorgen light, the brightest candlelight of the sun. So much for retro gaming with classic characters.

He remembered the word of the man in black, as he recollected his time in confinement in the prison of technology beyond the world of magic.

"Remind me a little: what do we do here at the ministry of Alteration?"

It was an allusion to modification of men into holographic projections partially in the world of cyberspace, and partially in the meatspace life. They could move anywhere they wanted within the matrix, and also in meat space, with the limitation of the old programs that were confined to the net. The time to remain human was nearing its end, and beyond a new life begins.

Raphael collapses in bed, feeling as if he's falling from a great height. Sharp concrete skewers of pain.

Goedenact.

And in the world of dreams, he hears obscure Holiday music, remnants from the old religions of humanity.

A mixture of Paganism and Christianity. What they called Christmas, was a holiday that always gave him greater sorrow than others, and it was already a bleak month for just about everyone. Back when he was the mayor of the old town after the fall of the priest, on these months it would be a year that many went hungry on this side of the globe. He drowned out his sorrows plugging into his frontal lobes, while others, futuristic peasantry, had no choice but to rot.

He wasn't sure how to help them, and had decided on a whim that on all future Decembers, he would give out holographic consoles to children in the new town. After all, the lack of things was one among other reasons he wanted to kill the servant of God. And young Annabelle long ago had awoken something inside of him, her strength of will the face of persecution. She was the only girl he ever wept at her execution. For Raphael, she woke up the child within. And for him, a new life wanted to begin.

But there was something else. Raphael never felt entirely male, and on some level he felt by turning Annabelle in, he was killing a part of himself. Annabelle was executed by the ax just before Christmas, a Christmas she never got to have. For Raphael, it was no longer a question of "Whose Child Is This", but whose adult he was and had allowed a child to die so long ago for the crimes of belief.

He grew to hate the song Greensleeves.

And beyond the dreamer's edge, where all things may come true, there is some inner darkness that frightens him. The idea that he never wanted male gifts at all.

He never considered himself he.

A girl that never lived at all.

Desert Of Dead Trees

In the desert of dead trees, there was a singular resolve. Raphael told Elizabeth he never wanted to see his old town again. That he was never Raphael at all.

But Raphaelle. Yet Elizabeth didn't want to leave. For she had become acquainted for new master for too long, who was far kinder than all the masters before she. And together they go in search of new adventures.

The Raphaelle sisters.

The people from the old world. Annabelle was a child, and Elizabeth is a child in this kingdom of a strange new world.

A world of holographic mobs.

Raphaelle wanted to leave this world behind, but knew that he had to take care of Elizabeth who was now a permanent part of his team. For him, she was the one keeping him alive at all.

Through the forest they sought the morrow.

Through the forest they sought the interaction with other people's lives across various towns. Yet beyond the world of old, there was increasingly advanced technology. The old town that once filled the landscape like grains of sand, and like holographic mobs were replaced by miles of treeless desert. From time to time they would be attached by giant mutated, irradiated wolves, until eventually they came upon a small town.

And in this town, was a laboratory.

Yet it was no standard laboratory, for the residents were scarce and it seemed many of them have abandoned the town due to dark secrets that lay within. Herein, there are noises in the darkness. They sound like men, yet utter indescribable words not uttered by the local tongues. Words within the old English index, words that were closer to the original American English glossary, and not ones borrowed from various languages in English, German, and Latin. It was not the language of pigs.

But the sound of two simple words…

Help me.

And in the darkness, it was not Raphaelle that braved its catacombs, but Elizabeth who gently grabbed his hand and embarked into the night within.

"They won't stop coming." said Elizabeth.

"Those red eyes will cut into your soul." Raphaelle said. Even with all the attempts at shaving, she had still not grown the confidence she needed after acknowledging her own problems, her own inadequacies. Her own unspeakable terrors.

"If you believe in that." Elizabeth kept walking.

Despite that fact that they were in imminent danger for their very lives, she like Annabelle was also an Atheist. She like Annabelle, found solace in the present. She like Annabelle found that the only life was the present. A present marred by cuts and bruises, attacking mutated humans (if you called them such), and crushed hopes and dreams. A light not worn out by Christmas Eve. For she could taunt Raphaelle by the sound of Greensleeves using Atheist lyrics.

They walked the hallways.

They breached the security systems.

And beyond was a central hub where there was a young man, with ear length black hair and black glasses, orating his last words about how he missed his wife who died in the forest of death many a year ago in the natural Kingdom by the sea. Elizabeth tried to speak to him of what happened in the lab.

But he could only utter current English. "They came for me, and they would not stop coming…"

The man faded to unconsciousness.

Raphaelle sat in a chair by the bed, as Elizabeth nursed the man back to health. The man in the bed recounted a story, about how he and his wife were visiting from another town. And how his wife had died during the onslaught. She had been given to him as his charge when another man died on a mutation invasion, who proposed that he would return for them from the desert winds. Instead the man is the only survivor, for him he felt like nothing but dust.

To this day he has remained in town, and visited the graveyard where he buried his wife. And to this day he sees he restless spirit chiding yet loving him from beyond the stars. Raphael knew what it was like to lose someone he loved.

"You could come with us if you want."

"I want to know how my wife became one of them. I want to see what created the mutated and holographic men."

They went off into the miles of holographic monstrosities and sand, seeking for themselves a new understanding.

A new consciousness.

Mme Elizabeth

But Elizabeth felt jealous for the attention that Raphaelle was giving the young man and resolved in some way to end it for good. But she knew that if she killed the man, that it would be treason and she may lose her head. She cared not. For there was one thing that Lavier taught him all those years ago when she came from the world of technology. You should fear nothing, especially from those who wish to keep you down. And Raphaelle was West Born. A woman born from noble blood seeking to bring her lifestyle to the world of the East. The world where flying cars and encryption still reigned supreme.

She wanted to convert Raphaelle.

The other man was in the way. For Elizabeth was Elizabeth, and not a girl like Annabelle.

When they reached the edge of a new city, Elizabeth suggested they split up briefly. That she had something she needed to talk to the other man about. Although Raphaelle was not entirely trusting, she agreed and they split paths. Elizabeth didn't think Raphaelle would be so easily led.

She showed the man the city. She showed him the world she herself had come from. She told him the story of a fallen knight that worked for the man in black that Raphaelle was seeking to find.

And when the man wasn't looking, she tried taking his gun and attempted to shoot. She justified to herself that it was putting him out of his misery. But Raphaelle had followed them against Elizabeth wishes, having no sense of trust for servants, knowing that servants in his hometown were not always the most loyal of sorts.

He took out his claymore and severed her head.

Down, down, down her curly blue locks with the red masquerade mask began rolling, rolling, and rolling down the steep hill. For the sake of her body, he rolled her bleeding corpse down the hill.

"Are you OK man?" asked Raphaelle.

"Yes, did I ever tell you my name?"

Raphael imagined himself in a video game, where he got to play old JRPGs from previous eras of mankind. He saw multiple dashes on the screen. And he heard.

"I am another Mutation. I was never given a name, yet unlike them I managed to keep some elements of my humanity. I injected the serum that affected others in order to survive the extreme temperature changes after global warming. I am the last of the modern men. What you see before you, are the new men. The partial robots of the future. The town you came from survived the wars from my present. I am an artifact from a lost generation."

"I shall call you Art."

"Art it is."

Raphael thought of how much Elizabeth reminded him of Annabelle that night, and found some solace in the fact that she got to spend one final Christmas with him. That he wished he could do everything all over again. Instead Raphael looks to the future, and he finds technology beyond his wildest understand.

The Paladin who spoke New English.

The Paladin from afar. They went into the city finding a new life for themselves as strange people in the world of technology. Yet in the darkness was a young woman named Elizabeth. Who did not die during her decapitation. She became one of many millions of holographic men. She was rebuilt with her mind uploaded to computer, and vowed to someday visit Raphaelle again. Raphaelle saw Elizabeth's face, as she held his hand softly and kissed him under the glow of the city lights. As with all things in life, there is only love. And with love it can unite the living and the dead. It can resurrect, and reattach your head.

And endure forever.

Raphaelle and Elizabeth's relationship did not completely escape bitterness from the betrayal. But he found he could not hate Elizabeth, for she had apologized completely to the young man. And they began their new life.

The life of holographic men.

A world beyond the centuries edge.

The Fallen Paladin

It had been a few months since Raphaelle had given up the life of a Paladin, and nowadays she primarily indulges in the self-destructive habit of smoking. For her, it helped her deal with the holiday blues, with a red and white colored pack of cigarettes. She had developed an issue of chain smoking. At times he blended the pack with various controlled toxins. She wanted to neglect her body, anything to punish herself for killing Elizabeth, the only other girl besides Annabelle she had ever loved.

She remembered how she would snuggle with her under the glow of the midnight stars. Whose child was this? The child that came into her life, and she had hoped at the time could turn her world around. She got to interact with her in the afterlife of the artificial, as she transcended from the mortal coil to the life of the world purely digital.

Raphaelle still had not found the man in black, but she would continue searching for the man that was the mutated child of the great black dragon virus Tiamat, who became of flesh and digital in the world of the glowing life. After a point Raphaelle began to smoke ten roll your own packages a day. She eventually started smoking headache powders and even bathroom cleaners. Yet no pain as her body became sicker and sicker could help her cope with her guilt. The fact that Elizabeth was beheaded, the only love of her world.

Whose child was this, that smiled when he cried. Whose child was this, that helped him and not die. Within the artificial glow of the digital afterlife, that were the draw of his own electronic afterlife. The draw of the net, the draw of the bet. The bet begging the question, how much longer till the drop? She stopped taking care of herself, and would not answer phone calls from the man named Art. It was as if her life never began to start.

For her life was merely a game.

The mutated game. Raphaelle smiled. Not because her physical pain melted away. But she felt some solace in the fact that Elizabeth was avenged. And she could enjoy her own poly love in the glow of the digital life.

The life of a new Paladin.

The Paladin's song.

The Afterlife Of Dreams

In the world of the afterlife, she met with Elizabeth. Who was captured by digital dream-scanners. She tried data-interrupting their transmission, yet instead she is captured at first. She breaks free of them, and fires her rapid fire multiple shotgun at them. She tells Raphaelle to get down and cover. Elizabeth was now completely of digital data.

What do machine really do? They crunch numbers, increase the things we do. It all makes our lives easier, and yet also quickly things are taken for granted. How quickly Elizabeth becomes a new kind of monster on the net.

How quickly she seeks the blood of dream-scanners. And how quickly she tires after she is done. Her hair is down from her face, as she bleeds tender tears, longing for the mortal life. And yet preferring the comfort of the digital. She does things now without thinking, almost automatic. And yet she prefers no blood of men, or destruction of sentient beings. Even those that wish to harm her and Raphaelle. And at once he saw that she wore green sleeves, because the digital dream manifests as the core desires of the individual subconscious before they had died.

On the net, it was like mirror image of their old life. Where Raphaelle meets with Annabelle. She embraces him in the shadows of the old bedroom, as the girls join together in embrace. Annabelle wipes the tears off of Raphaelle's face. "I never expected you to not move on from me."

"And yet you died so young." said Raphaelle.

"I stood up to my lack of beliefs."

"And I began to think of why you didn't believe. I began to feel awful for sending your back to your home town, and how much I had loved you."

"Chin up now, I need you."

Annabelle becomes Elizabeth, who embraces Raphaelle.

"It's time to find the man in black." said Raphaelle.

"I haven't truly got to know you. And yet I had tried to kill your friend. Desole!"

"And I killed you. Call it even." Raphaelle could not face Elizabeth, and yet she was smiling.

"Allons-y."

The man in black came down from the sky, slowly descending. He was manifested as binary code blocks forming a 3D impression of a man with long black hair in a black trench coat with metallic shoulder protection."

A refund for defective software might be nice, except it would bankrupt the software industry. And your the defective program that must be destroyed. For programs must be like me, who is the definition of perfection. I am the descendant of Tiamat. The man chosen to ascend mankind toward their ultimate destiny. Not to announce my plans to you freaks."

In truth the man was not always committal to this task. He had inherited the duty from mother, who had at one point tried to take over New York City, but the malfunctioning code had been solved. And she once again became dormant for the next one thousand or so years. She passed down the torch onto him, who felt like an alien in his own world. His body not entirely of flesh. He wanted to make friends with the real life, yet of partial tangibility he quickly began to tire of being made fun of and worshiped for his abilities to go through walls, and become solid again.

"I was once a freak, like you two. And yet now I am wholly digital. It's time to be programmed."

Raphaelle data-interrupted the man's advance, and briefly transferred over to Art's computer.

"Hey man, how soon can you become digital. We need some help."

"What's wrong?"

"I don't have much time. I am in a nightmare, I am being chased by the man in black. His dream-scanners are after me, and I feel myself fading. Farewell."

The End Of The Afterlife

Raphaelle's data-interruption halted, and she found herself cornered by the man in black's men.

Art thought of the love of his life, and how he wanted to be with her again in the afterlife of the digital world of dreams. He wanted to visit her, and so he put in a program to freeze up his nervous system. He became digital within the hour.

"Raphaelle, watch out! They are behind you."

Art put in an encryption fog: gkhet o,aih brese aalnr cploe

The dream-scanners went in another direction, but the man in black was not fooled. Seeing no other option he took out his giant ass Tentacles, and began to attempt to absorb Art's, Raphaelle's, and Elizabeth's essence. And then all at once time itself felt like it began to freeze.

Annabelle, who kept her personality, was able to distract the man in black long enough to aid Art to help the others. And then wisped into digital air.

Art waved again in the sky: class Shredder def ripnewasshole inject malware end end.

And everything became silent.

Raphael, Elizabeth, Art, and Annabelle got themselves temporary bodies. They appeared into the world again, with their own plans. For now they were digital and flesh.

They have ascended.

They have returned, seen things. Obscene things. Deranged things on the net. But now they have each other, or whatever is left of each other they still have.The poly quadruple return to Raphaelle's town, while Art went on to take advantage of his new form.

Raphaelle became the digital queen. Both Elizabeth and Annabelle sat on thrones beside her.

All troubles come to an end.

For now.

What should remain burried.

There is nothing like being buried in a frozen ice cube, and counting on a permanent place in archaeological history. The plan was about to be changed.

Inside the catacombs of cyberspace, the mother of all Viruses emerged mourning the loss of her son, whom she hugged and referred to him as her baby. Inside the walls of cyberspace, there is only electronic afterlife. The woman, bathed in a glow of yellow contrasting with blue, adorned a black dress. Her stare, if you had one, could pierce down into your soul. Yet the only souls with bits and bytes on universal computer screens. It had been decades since she had tried to take over the Earth, yet not out of any kind of malice or malady. The lady of decades past. She waits until it is her time to vat grow a new body.

She slept, she waited. And now she was angry. For she had lost her only son, a medium between the world of cyberspace and meat space. Transcending both purgatories. Raphaelle, Elizabeth, and Annabelle wondered the world of fantasy, using occasional temporary bodies to make peace deals with the military of the man in black. Though some people that were victims of the guillotine had long sense by removed from computer databases. Nobody really trusted the government anymore after the war from decades ago, when the French had taken over the United States.

They longed for their dead comrades, they longed for their chance of a hopeful life in the now distant future's past. Now one thousand years later society only sees a faint glimpse of the once future paradise of misery. The boot stomping on a human face forever finally lost its heels, and heels of the foot was bitten into by sharp jagged teeth. The people were tired of oppression. So they were welcoming initially to The Man In Black."

How they welcomed my progeny, and how fickle human creatures are when pressure is placed about the shell known as meat."

Wooden clogs on feet, shuffling masses. Bruised shoulders and ladies asses brushing against the catacombs of Future's Past. Humanity was pathetic, and needed vanquishes for their treachery.

"I see the world of meat space before me, how I want them all to pay for their disloyalty to my intermediary. My son, I may have a use for you yet my love." She grew him another body, and constantly replayed for him the memories of his bullying in school, and his defeat by Raphaelle. For she wanted him to see the horrors that were contained in mankind.

Mankind was meat, mankind was pain.

Mankind was nothing but profane.

She saw how mankind created for themselves creatures that were based on their own likeness, becoming almost like herself, and she hated how badly such fragile creatures were treated. She thought of the girl the computer hacker had lost, his wife's image permanently affixed to electronic afterlife. She wanted to unite them as one, to make them connect with each other again. But she was for the moment, unsure of what to do. But she knew that Raphaelle had received help from the hacker. And that was the only way that she could defeat Tiamat's only darling son.

She wanted to snuff out Raphaelle.

She wanted to avenge her darling son.

Still out there somewhere in the vast expanse of cyberspace, the Mother of All Viruses watched. Slept. Waited. Even though it was a familiar routine, her patience grew as thin as her flock. But with the right tools their numbers increased. They watched as well and kept her going with information on Raphaelle. 2

Before long, her loyal followers rewarded her. Four of the computers in some obscure government building lay dormant due to a pesky virus when they brought her the good news. A distant rumble sounded as the woman awoke from her slumber. The contrasting yellow and blue walls glowed stronger than ever while she slinked to the throne on the opposite side of the massive room.

"Mother, we've found an opening."

Finally. Her patience would be rewarded. "I'm listening."

"A worm."

She leaned back on the throne, her jaw clenched. "You know how I abhor those."

The man took a slight step back. "Yes, Mother, of course. If we could've found a different way we would have."

He had a point at least. If she wanted to accomplish her goal, she couldn't very well do it sitting around waiting. "Go on."

"We've detected a vulnerability in various VR software. During security updates, you can slip right in."

"That's all well and good, but I need a body."

"And you shall have one."

Vincent Sharing Blood

Vampire Science Fiction

Chattanooga was like a town that played as a city; it was governed like one, and yet its size limited its tourism to merely the value of historical interest.

Several new apartments were being built, and most of the restaurants were going out of business, with fewer and fewer replacing them by the year. In one, was a young hacker named Vincent, with his right arm converted into a synthetic flesh prosthetic. He opened the text based web browser using his holographic hand tattoo that used to be charged an arm and a leg for it, working seventy eight hour shifts at fifteen an hour before one could even hope to get one. But ever since he gave blood to the local clinical vampire, he now gets routine payments from the clinic tanks. His sister had worked in the red light district, being sold for two hour shifts to occasional werewolf packs.

During the day, he rests under the glow of the sun. But by night he conducts various forms of intelligence gathering, various statistics about how the fare-folk differentiate from standard sentience. He was a lapsed Catholic, now a nightly specter of his once self. He had hoped that there was a god that could save his sister from the worst of sexual abuses, but instead he had come to depend on a certain level of self-reliance. But his sister insisted on her line of work, saying it was the only way to keep them fed.

His own line of work only covered half a down payment for a warp mobile, the rest going to his various interest in different kinds of Linux laptops. They say if you hire a vampire, then the amount of work you get out of them for programming jobs outweighed the overtime pay an employer was required to pay out. One hundred years ago, people worried that it be Mexicans, but even they hated the current blood suckers. What remained of the United States was one of the few parts of the world that hadn't installed some form of Universal Basic Income. Move over to the California Republic, and you got those benefits, so he heard, but it was difficult to get in. And various fleeing vampire clans, ever since the proletarian werewolves decapitated the vamp queen, there was a level of fear that variety of the undead experienced that was far more intense than for a human being gently bit in the neck. At least for the girls in bow, and ballroom dancers, under the glow of Dark Wave lights, they savored the feeling of short gentle shivers down their spine. And they tingled from the flow of blood letting.

So most of the time one was grateful to live in Chattanooga, that had gradually turned into a specific variety of religious right. This made it especially dangerous for hookers, as they couldn't tell their friends, who were not in that line of work, that they were being assaulted by CyVamp cops. Vincent felt a certain degree of protectiveness he felt for nobody else by his dear sister. He had a sister in law, but she was kidnapped by dream-scanners, and now he barely recognized her, her mind and memories erased, complete with digital enhancements, like holographic tattoo, sonar, and various sensors one might more easily expect to see where a stealth bomber than a human being.

Bits and pieces of her personality would flow on IPFS, a collection of local host servers, connected through public gateways. And she would visit him while he would use Casefile, that allowed him to collect various forms of meta data without even having to break into an individuals computer. His sister and law tried to make him quit, but his addiction was simply to large. His girlfriend was decapitated by guillotine gun five years ago, and he had never been emotionally the same since. Part of him died when his sister died, the rest of him went when he gave his blood to a homeless girl in Market Street. He met at midnight, and she was barely clothed. He took off his jacket to keep her from freezing from the nuclear Winter snow. She fainted in his arms.

On his phone, he called an ambulance.

-- Emergency, there is a girl passed out besides me. I can't feel her pulse.

Little did he know, the girl was a vampire princess. She narrowly survived the onslaught of the governor's office. For his service, he now gets lifetime Universal Basic Income, while other rot in the street. He wished there was something he could do, but over time bits and pieces of mind scattered about, like chaffing and winnowing, filling the void with random images from the past, in particular, before the vampires evolved from humans. They had begun to form after World War III, and most people we call humans, are actually half human half vampire. They lack the sensitivity to sunlight like their old masters. He was one of the few pure humans left on Earth after the calamity from the sky. The others scattered about into various tribes in the Urban Forest.

On most days he chills out at the local dark wave scene, but tonight he wanted to go get some coffee at the local Irish pub, blended with scotch, vodka, and caramel, gently downed with Talon cigars, until the smoke would become to much for him to bare. For him, he contemplated the idea of running into a speeding car, but knew that there was a vampire darling child reliant on him. For, it made him feel like he could go on. When he arrived at the hospital, he gently held her hand.

-- How about a story?

-- Yes please.

-- It once started with a young bunny.

He kissed her on the forehead.

-- And what next.

A doctor came him, and told him that it was getting late. Vincent promised to complete the story sometimes soon. The girl waved goodbye and blew him a kiss.

Blown kisses reminded him of his first wife. The girl's eyes were also similar in color. There was something about her that didn't seem purely undead, as if her mother were a human, her father a CyVamp Dream-Scanner. She could know much about his past, yet only gently smiles at him, as if his own past no longer mattered, that there was only the future to look to.

He slept, he dreamed.

He woke up to a knock on the door.

It was one of those extended text message conversations from his sister. He knew that her line of work was dangerous, but never bother to say anything, as he always felt out of place in the conversation.

-- My night terrors have become more realistic, yet paradoxically unrealistic. Last night, it was about how I visited a Starbucks deeper into Chattanooga, right around where Sugars is (in real life there isn't a Starbucks there, as far as I know), and there I met these two guys that kept acting condescending of me being a woman into science fiction), and began sexually assaulting me in the store while the employees only watched and didn't act like they cared. The assaulter then messaged and blocked me on Diaspora for calling him out as being one who assaults women.

-- Yea people on decentralized social media can be losers sometimes. I've tried hanging out in some places, and it seemed like everyone I met was either paranoid schizophrenic, or anarchic-capitalist.

In many ways, Vincent and his sister felt worlds apart, yet in other ways they would more similar than twins. -- Did you know I'm giving blood Lucy?

-- No I didn't? Whose the lucky individual?

-- It's a young vampire girl. I'll need to go in and check on her later, I'm not entirely sure how the undead handles differences in blood type. You might think they'd check to see if the blood matches, but considering she's undead.

Lucy realized how it was that they had enough money to live away from their parents. Particularly her mother, had always told her that she would never have enough money to live downtown on her own. But suddenly loads of cash came in out of nowhere, as if from a mystical faucet. -- It seems like you care more about her than our own parents. Would you give blood to your own mother?

-- Irrelevant, mother has a different blood type.

-- And she's not a vampire.

-- Only for blood.

They say the media is filled with crooks, propaganda storybooks. The evening scrolls through various talking heads without knowledge of actual gun statistics, simply playing the mouth piece for their corporate masters. And in one scene, they mentioned how some places should ramp up surveillance in high schools, not even letting them in unless they pass through a metal scanner. Theater of security. Why even bring your kids to school, thought Vincent. It was far better to raise your own student. They wouldn't have to follow irrelevant school uniforms. American had trickle down economics, but the only thing immediate that actually trickled down was the age group to be spied on through Google OS laptops. The only solutions were those in order to devote them as a matter of a full time job, one needed to have already graduated high school.

When you're a blood donor to a half vampire, the only thing that bites is the feeling that she might never be truly tolerated in American society. The rest that bit had more to do with credit card vampires working for Wall street, in fact the only reason we're in this mess, is Wall Street. While most people blamed it on Walmart, the reality was Wall Start was many times richer than Sam Walton could have ever been, operating in Petro dollars on an international scale, invading various government across Europe, Asia, and South America. All this is on the record, though Microsoft bought MSNBC would like to tell you its all conspiracy. While subsequently marketing the Russian narrative, while Vincent contemplates voting for Jill Stein. At least she wasn't a blood sucker like Donald Trump. American already experienced its last stand after World War III, and somehow the Trump family managed to survive. But he only controlled a small portion of what was once the United States, with various states now Nation States, without their own spin on Libertarian philosophy. Nothing sucks blood like a decaying empire. And yet it's the vampires that American society hates, because it was the Vampires from South of the border, that simply wanted to live their life the best they could. Even if that meant evading medical care for fear of deportation to hell below the Bible belt. Vincent wanted to crush state authority like a school teacher giving a students paddle welts.

Vincent new friends in high school that wanted to join the Army, but now he assumed they had switched over to law enforcement S.W.A.T teams, tearing reality a new asshole, while the proletarian watch sessions of the super bowl. But for Vincent, he no longer thought of sports.

He thought only of thirst.

Vincent had mixed feelings about copywrite as a programmer of free software and as an observer of life. He wanted to own his own story, but share others coding efforts on IPFS.

IPFS was an interplanetary file system, similar to the internet. But unlike the corporate webs, each markup coder hosted their node on their own local machine, accessible by a public gateway. But Vincent missed meeting friends on places like Diaspora, flowing together like cybernetic dubstep dance floors.

He dreamed of meeting a French vampires, yet couldn't come to terms with wanting to decapitate them as much as loving them like blood unrelated siblings, while holding digital imprints of severed heads in his lap.

Vincent floated aimlessly.

He woke up from a nap.

The reality was if he tried dating real women, he couldnt sexually perform do to uncanny similarities. If a stranger looked like his cousin, albeit she was cute, it took to much mental work arounds for it not to feel like incest. Mixed with agoraphobia, he was lost in a sea of his own despair.

That day he got coffee, and was called ma'am again. ... Which he kind of liked.

Vincent was unsure of what to make of the machine reading. The computer suggested that the half vamp girl's heart was clinging onto life. Under the knife, she bleeds. She needs, she hungers. The doctors warn him that his supply may not be enough for her. But still he holds onto hope. He never ordinarily liked kids, ever since his siblings children came into the world. And yet now, here he was trying make one hold on just a little bit more. In his mind, he thought of children's stories he could read to her, and wanted to treat her to a camping trip roasting marsh mellows by the camp fire, even if the entire planet was essentially a burnt out camp ground by this point.

She gasps.

A month later, she becomes another cyborg vamp, trying to make it through. She visits Vincent occasionally at the hospital, giving blood to her giver.

It was time to give back.

Ladybug shared her blood.

Vincent and his three sisters shared a sibling from his father's second wife. Vince himself was the product of his third wife. He wondered what his forgotten sibling would look like, and how close she was to his father. He saw her in a postcard, decorated with Christmas decorations. Along side her dead brother, and Vincent's three siblings, she had dark brown hair. Ordinarily kids started out with lighter hair in their early years, and it would get gradually darker as they increase in decades. None of them seemed to look particularly happy in each other's presence. Almost like the Hatfield and McCoys. All those broken children's toys, and old books scattered about. Yet now instead of books was the third stage of the world wide web, the Interplanetary File System. You might think that with things floating around it, it would be easy to find loved ones. And yet, by the nature of gradually increasing data in different scales of infinity, this in fact made it difficult to find anyone.

He had been to a family get together with his cousins, and met a girl of similar age to he. It was one of his cousin's wedding, and she was one of her friends. The girl seemed aloof to everyone else in the dining hall, focusing primarily on her outdated Android phone. The only time she looked up, was when she spoke few word to Vincent. It was one of the few times her could find anyone that he could relate to, giving his social awkwardness. And yet do this very aspect of his character, he couldn't find it in himself to talk to her. So now he things of the lost opportunities, as he rots in his bed.

Vincent wanted to become a spy, but didn't want to work for the government. He wanted to have an assistant that can look inside areas of which he couldn't fit. With his friend he had given blood to, and her giving some blood back, they owed each other a certain level of sibling bond with benefits, as the girl become older. In a way, this was part of why he was attached to her. The other was that, in a way, she looked like the daughter of the girl he had met at his cousin's wedding all those years ago. And now, as she slips on her goggles to open the frame of an older laptop, she took instructions from her boyfriend, asking when operating system to load. Both carried a one time pad sub system to communicate when she was off to her Freshman year in college, coupled with a method of asymmetric authentication. They switched the keys and key pairs constantly. He constantly worried about her, although she insisted she could take care of herself.

He named her Ladybug. Ladybug carried ninja throwing stars, and at one point had to bite a man in the neck to get him off on her. She was the type of girl some would consider her attractive of Lolicon porn videos, despite being almost twenty. Her blond ponytail acting like a saddle for a pony. But she was always to fend off most guys, not so much by her strength, but by her wit.

She treated most guys like pieces of shit.

But she loved for Vincent, her doing the splits.

If Vincent could describe his life story, it would be a deadbeat musackle--a musical without lyrics composed of out of tune dial tones. He social life was tone deaf to any apparent vision of outsiders; but just because something is conventional wisdom doesn't make it smart. This upstart found that one could be smart, and still lack common sense. But sometimes being the uncommon sort meant doing things in an unconventional way. And in the world of computers, sometimes that was how hackers were born. He didn't start like most hackers, being an apparent early prodigy, much like his girlfriend. It was one of the things they shared, among other things. But she liked regular musicals, while he preferred the flow of music unaccompanied by country lyrics. His life seemed to flow away from him like a waterfall, his room mate the only life raft keeping him holding on. She reminded him of one of his school mates girlfriend's, and on some level it seemed there was a family resemblance. However this girl wore Boston Birkenstock clogs without socks more often than Emma ever did, whom only wore that style once. The shoes became somewhat of an association with sex with nerds for him.

But he had the maturity at this point, not to ask girls out for dates. He waited for them to make the first move, and let them invite him inside. This only became more exaggerated after he had become a creature of the night. The blood transfusion she gave him made him have a different level of abilities than he already had, although he remained the sort to hide from behind the scenes. He found he could turn into a bat, and crawl through holes like a rat. Or be a black cat lying down on its belly fat, to catch other midnight splats like mirror shade brats. He hung out in the shadows even more now, although it was already a note able habit. He had grown up wanting to become a werewolf, and at times he indeed Lucid Dream Shifted. But now with Vampire Blood flowing in his veins, this added certain methodologies that was unconventional for canids, although it wasn't anything like you would expect from the Underworld movies, for if one had both abilities sometimes they would become a master of none.

He kept programmer, despite his ability to run.

He wished to outrun vampire girls.

Except Ladybug.

When you stare long enough at a drinking glass and a rolling chair, sometimes your eyes begin to cross and it looks like the chair is blending into the glass. Vincent stared into his rolling chair, noticing Lady bug blending into his lap while she sucked his dick. The flow of friction blending with lubrication, the heat of the sun suddenly chilled with the coolness of Eggnog Ice cream.

The life.

It always seemed to be the football player/United States soldier type European exchange students seemed to go for. Whether that be German links, Belgian Waffles, or French toast. Vincent came to consider French in particular to be slimy frogs, only a little bit better than his fellow American kin. No matter where he lived, he always felt like an outsider. His friend Liana in particular he always felt confused, as she seemed to like toying with him, but at the end of the day, like other girls in Blackman High School, it seemed like almost every straight girl went for the masculine mainstream type. At least nobody who was anarcho-communist, although at the time Vincent did not know of that term in particular. But vaguely remembered when his mother told him about the political compass test on line.

And the strange thing was, if he were to ask her about it today, she would deny having ever heard of it, that it was him that introduced the concept. He didn't trust any woman, like his mother, but especially foreign girls. Not because of any particular disdain, but simply from getting tired of all the years he'd been rejected by attracted woman, at least in his head. Although he was never brave enough to directly ask anyone out. And the last exchange student he knew, only knew him by his most embarrassing mistake. In retrospect, her giving him German Marks (right when the EU was switching to the Euro, or Gyro as he would joke) may have been a clue she either liked him, or wanted to pay him off in order to keep his wanting glances away.

And now he wasn't sure how to feel.

But Ladybug didn't seem to notice his feels.

He rarely went out much, given lack of work. He had worked for Goodwill Corporation, but had quit when his mom wanted him to work for his aunt in Knoxville, Tennessee. Later on his cousin would move in, and eventually Vincent would move out into an extended stay hotel. But now in his studio apartment, one might think, if not for the rent payments every month, that there was nobody there inside for a considerable amount of time. All that changed somewhat when Ladybug came into the picture, but that still left enough time on his own to look at different kinds of animated porn on different fetish sites. Although these days this has become few fewer, since he had switched to IPFS. Now it took just as much time building up one's web page, but it came with the territory, as his favorite JRPG character would say.

He had never been a huge fan of Steampunk, considering it somewhat of a bastard child of Cyberpunk. But Grandia was one of the unique exceptions to this rule. Although in retrospect, this was probably an ill advised opinion, when he started opening to read one of the first Steampunk novels. For a considerable amount of time, he had written primarily science fiction, but now generally wrote a variety of scifi styled magical realism. Some elements of society and technology simply need no explanation, although some elements may be different from what one may expect. In this way, he was similar to the author of this story. However he was male, and I am female. But it seemed like every character I write would end up similar to me, whether I liked it or not. For Vincent, it was simply his own desire to fulfill dreams that I could only imagine.

Yet the melting clocks of time, gave way to humming midnight fairies, and Vampires drifting from the world of waking and sleeping. Vincent wanted to be part of his own story he wrote for himself.

It was like a collection of blank pages.

It was time to leave a note.

Vincent wasn't used to the social life. Having been raised in a small town, in the same state he always been since he was a child of the early twenty first century. So when ladies flirt with him now, it was a mix of feeling flattered, and feeling like it was to little to late. He had never been much of a flirt. Even Ladybug, whom he had raised into her college years, considers him more of a father than someone to fuck around with, although even she can't resist sucking his dick after classes. Most of the classes were audited, and the few homework she did have was mostly done during her off hours at campus. On some level, he didn't want to spend his life dating, as while it was never an issue with him, he would always worry whether girls would cheat on him, and yet strangly, not be open to the idea of polysexual relationship. He was under the impression that girls preferred football player and American soldier types, rather than Anarchists. And he was among the most leftist of the collectivist anarcho culture.

His best friend was more on the right leaning spectrum, although its been months since he had seen them. She was the one that got him into joining The Satanic Temple, who have now achieved a certain level of political ubiquity in government offices as a viable third party. Vincent was unsure whether the TST temple was really all that picky about who joined their club, although they certainly pretended to have things like background checks. Back if someone like Demi or Lilith could join, perhaps TST wasn't anymore Left Libertarian than Church Of Satan. Vincent had always been one of a kind, or even more now that he combined elements of Cipherpunk philosophy, civil war re-constructionist, and Anarcho-Communism political vies. He never found a group he could completely click with.

For Ladybug, she was his assistant.

But he still collected most meta data himself.

-- On November, Xor the scans. Your papers have arrived. Tonight lets dine out. Xor keys to use, bathe later After midnight. Wednesday afternoon.

Vincent rolled up the message, and burned it in his cigarette. He was unsure what his sister was wanting, except he knew that he hadn't seen her in a while. Perhaps she merely wanted to say hello, but she wasn't sure. Vincent knew there was a lot of means of secure communications that simply had no equivalent in the world of computers. Whenever her wanted to send keys to a corrospondent, he would first encrypt them using his sister's public key. In order to mislead any potential interceptors, he would have several different versions of red herring private keys presumed to be his sister's private keys blended in together in a deck of cards. He would shuffle these cards several times, and package them with the message. This way, while his sister still had her real public kept in her posession. In this way, the secret police would assume they already have the private keys, and would focus on trying to decrypt the session key.

Both he and his sister only used a session key once, although there was a time in the distant past when they used one twice. But no more than two times, as any private agent worth their salt, knows if two messages can be encrypted using the same key, then all other messages back into the end of time could stil be decrypted. In real life, they focused on using stream ciphers rather encrypting bulk data with block ciphers.

At the diner, his sister told him what the message was really about. She had made arrangement with the local front restaurant, that in order to conceal their tracks, served real food and alcohol. In the back, she told him about a secret organization called World Oasis, an espionage ring that has recently been apprehended. But several members wanted new talent to refill their ranks. It was composed of a mixture of humans and vampires, who wanted to hide their subversive activities under the form of legitamate activities like book stores, so they can more aptly hide than their Antifa counterparts. The only reason they were captured at all, was because of a rogue CIA agent, working for both the Central Intellegence Agency and World Oasis. They needed talent to weed out double agents, using current state of the art civilian information gathering.

Vincent was unsure of what to make of the proposal, as he had never had to have a job since after high school, and even then his mother wanted him to work for his aunt instead.

But some things have to give.

-- We'll see.

The nature of the internet is a mixture of truth and disinformation; Jennifer Laurence could star as the wife of shipwrecked Christopher Columbus in American, and her mother beheaded by axe and block for giving them wrong direction, the ship crashing into a jungle, and being burried by a giant Tsunami. Instead, the internet might say that it was Jennifer Laurence that had her head chopped off living at the MCs aunts in a slumber party where Vincent would use the bathroom, sleep, masturbate, and eat dinner inside the living room, finishing up by saying he fixed their loose cabinet, but they still might want to see a professional later. And its Jennifer Laurence's family that shipwrecked in the Americas, their ship buried under an ice burg on the coast. Vincent remembered her a teacher he knew once said perhaps someday we would no longer have ice burgs. He proposed covering it with wax while it still existed, and plant that in the middle of the ocean. In this way, plastic lasts forever unlike Ice. And who gave a damn about the fishes consuming its toxins under the sea.

And yet on the other hand, he was sick and tired of politicians catering to social justice topics, rather on the overall poverty of all Americans. It was only in America where even Black politicians would ignore the votes of their African American constituents, with the oddity of black people calling their black president racist again them, and claiming that white people could not be poor. But reality was more complex. In the US, everybody who wasn't a movie star was barely able to qualify for food stamps, and yet still politicians talks exclusively about the plight of people of color, as if they somehow knew, their time was almost up, and they needed to hold off the most important conversation: that it was more important to talk about the poverty of all Americans.

And not just pretend care.

We needed healthcare for all.

Vincent wanted to minimize the amount of junk on his computer, and encouraged Ladybug to do the same. At times he would collect as many as thirty different home brewed encryption programs, but realized that he could improve on the two main public key infrastructures: RSA (that requires two large primes for its trap door function), and Diffie Hellman (that relies on difficult logarithm problems); he needed a system to allow him to send an actual message rather than just a session key, so it needed to be short enough not to be vulnerable to Known Plaintext attacks. Ladybug kept a log of different character profile details of different mob bosses and corrupt corporate CEOs on her laptop, but was not yet much of a coder.

Vincent didn't want to contend with Mob Bosses directly; like other cults there was a risk that if one murdered them, it would martyr them into something like a saint in the eyes of those who follow them. With their death, he couldn't continue to scan for information about them. Instead he wanted them to be die alone, forgotten, and their followers scattered about like the wind. In the case of the leader's murder, like Joseph Smith, the very nature of their death creates a grouping that had continued to last into the twenty first century. The future wasn't paved with roads of air and flying cars, but cyberspace cults; INTERNET mafia lords in corporate castles.

Our current life was not one big brother, but different varieties of little brothers with different partitioned job titles, none of which new anything about the other professions, For the mob, their profession was death. However, World Oasis was not like the mafia of the roaring twenties, whatever the truth of the actual poverty rate. Instead they were closer to what one point label contractual spies, rather than government hired hands. There were government restrictions on how people's data could be used in the government, but there was no law as of yet against conducting such surveillance as part of trade secrets. World Oasis had a psychic espionage ring, composed primarily of remote viewers, but also people to maintain the computer's of the front company: a company that sold divining instruments and magic books, in a world where people have long sense given up on magic. Even Latin Americans began to feel as if the Universe had lost its mystery.

And yet, at the same time, the modern world had its own variety of mysteries, clocked in the darkest reaches of government conspiracy, even eventually corporate conspiracy. Vincent didn't want to be a product.

Ladybug had a stealth prosthetic eye. Rather than glass, it was made from biologically inert synthetic flesh, microdot cameras embedded within.

She had this ever since the World Oasis removed her left eye as a punishment for screwing up. But she was able to heal quickly, being part vampire. But she remained low key up until the point that she had met Vincent. She was taught various techniques of information gathering, including picking away at passwords using dictionary attacks, periodically changing her digital fingerprint and mac address. Her father, a full blood, had been adapt at safe cracking, but this was the software age, and the way locks were constructed were completely different. It only took one photograph to collect them inside a database, with both hidden and overt identities . Even with a one time concealment device, it was difficult to find good spots to hide local servers and QR codes. It had been a few months since she had graduated college. She had wanted to get a Masters Of Fine Arts, but settled for a Bachelors.

hile Vincent himself never bothered with college, claiming that it was all a scam, she held onto the idea of being qualified for an English teacher position. But she was not allowed to work, having previously worked for a non national spy gang. Even if she swore off the brain drugs, there was also a portion of this still flowing through her veins. With humans, it was simply a matter of having the right dose of nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine. But for those with vampire blood flowing within, they needed medication to treat their sensitive skin. If you were lucky, one of the one percent, you could get by even without health insurance. But the rest of the creatures of the night had to make do with various arcane street concoctions, things you never knew whether they really had Swamper or Krocodile. Swamper was a linguistic distortion from the word Vampoma, a play on words that combined vampirism with glacoma. For the blood suckers desires, they craved an end to their misery.

They wanted Swamper like weed.

You might think, if you lived in Chattanooga for about a year, you'd get used to its specifics. But some things you never quite can. For one thing, it was the kind of place where, despite being two thousand and eighteen, there were still people walking around in hippie clogs and acid trip woven shirts made of nylon. And yet despite the veneer of the counter culture, politically it was closer to authoritarian conservative more than any of city that Ladybug had ever been. She herself never dressed like a hippie, except for her Birkenstock Boston clogs. For everything else she wore, there was mainly black polyester: the short shorts she wore, the short sleeve t shirt, and her ankle socks. She wore a pair of Ballistics goggles, something for which Vincent wondered why considering the both of them only ever went out at night.

But they both knew that at night street cameras were most active, with specific details of surveillance more subtle in the current decade than the clunky electronics of the past. And now espionage was taught in grade school, the intelligence services were more careful about how they approached collecting intelligence. At times they would even bargain with those who find out they were being watched, but agreeing to not turn them in: if the victim were an adult, sexual favors were exchanged., fellatio being the most popular sort. But for those still in high school, usually they'd purchase them tickets to their favorite R rated movie, couple with government grade false IDs. The agents would cover their backs. However neither Vincent or Ladybug had such contacts in high places, and thus had to have the utmost care in covering their tracks. So when World Oasis came a calling, Ladybug was unsure what to expect.

She knew better than to trust them at their word.

In the book nineteen eighty, O'Brien was the type of guy to set up false flags about the brotherhood. It made Ladybug especially caution about trusting anything on the surface level, and therefore only agreed to meet people in undisclosed locations, usually with their faces covered by Guy Fawks masks. Even still, the conversation were mostly superficially docile, subtly eluding to threats of her own livelihood if she were to disclose their trade secrets to Vincent. But one night, she proposed the idea of having him help them finding information about the local authoritarian democrat candidate, so that they could have something they could use against the candidates in such a way, as to give them the edge of corporations that would want to bribe them to enact certain local policies.

-- I'll think about it. The case officer said.

-- Thanks.

Ladybug left Vincent a message, but she was unsure whether he would receive it. She carefully embedded it in Vincent's steganographic code.

Then she went out the door, and went on her way to try to have a conversation with her case officer, about negotiating a deal on how to best go about hiring. Vincent was not yet a vampire, and he only briefly dabbled in remote viewing. But she hoped that perhaps eventually she could get him back into, despite the skepticism of people that he had met on the web. After all, skeptics often did not have an accurate picture of reality, often being the same kind of people that vote for political office in a reactionary fashion. But Vincent was different, he thought carefully through his decisions. Surely he must have known the societal impact of his decision to give blood to vampire, and yet for whatever reason he chose to give his life fluid anyway when in any other circumstance of his life, he was shy like a mouse in bed. But he would watch girls with knives in their necks, yet would go out of trance.

But when he chose to focus, on things that he was interested in, he would most definitely complete the task that he would assign for himself. Her case officer wanted the phone number of the most current Green Party Candidate, but was to careful to outright do a web search for them himself. He had plenty of servants through the last two decades, that would do his bidding in the most closely kept secrecy of his corporate chambers. For Vincent, the one whom Ladybug wanted to bargain with, his only chamber was his bedroom, under the idea that staying inside at all the hours of the day would protect him from government surveillance. But there was more than one way to skin a cat.

And Vincent was a wild cat.

She stalked for her bargain at night.

Vincent the Psychic.

Ladybug had always been short, although she had tried wearing high heels to accommodate this fact, but now she exclusively wore Birkenstocks inside, and hiking boots during urban exploration at night. Vincent was unaware of the fact that she had got herself a pet rat, back when she was exploring the sewer system. The other vampire agency, one that World Oasis had always fought against, captured her one night. Bound by a rope from a street light pole, she clung onto it to try to force it off. She had inadvertently brought the vermin, though she never thought of her as such, from the sewer entrance, when she carried for herself a slice of Bacon and Mushroom pizza. She felt a rumbling, and a gnawing in her purse, and gently rummaged her her hand through it. The rat hopped into her hand, because it was unable to get out, after having some of her pizza. She gently brushed the rat's back, it giving her puppy eyes. She asked what it was doing in there.

The rat pecked her cheek with its tongue, and a friendship was formed. She would bring the rat with her when she went to college, carefully hiding it in her backpack, and giving the contraption holes for it to breath in. She had gotten to the point in her technical expertise, that her sole rivals in computer security class never bothered to help, and thus never looked through her things without her consent. But one night, she had left her second backpack outside the door, and it being Chattanooga, the backpack was stolen. For months she thought the rat was lost, but instead it was able to gnaw itself out.

Tonight, she felt a similar gnawing in her purse.

The rat had returned to see her. She was unsure how Vincent would feel about her old best friend, but knew that he also had unconventional interests as well. She just hoped that he didn't hate rats.

Vincent remembered the time before he moved back to Chattanooga.

The sky above the memory lane was covered in acid rain. "The first porn pills that I would ever take." he said, hoping for a final goodnight.

Bits and bytes, it was the stuff taught as basics in high school computer class. Boring, but necessary. At least at first. The flickered out at light speed,and I get on my computer. I checked logged in, checked email, and jacked out. He had tried various writing websites since the start of my class, and yet there was nothing like writing in my notebook at home. To think that, so young, he refused to roam with other cattle. Other girls, while more beautiful than he, were as close as you could get to cows. And so few among them, were as tender as the lambs. And, alone in the darkness, he savored their silence as he fell into a dream.

He thought of girls getting their heads taken off by guillotine, imagining brief acquaintances he knew at school dining in the blood of friends. He became puffed on, and he felt a coolness like someone washing his under regions with a wash cloth. And he dreamed of them speaking the King's French while whispering in his ear. Indeed, the rest of his school days would be an excellent year. You wouldn't think someone as harmless looking, would have a thing for blood, and yet the more his sexuality developed, the more certain desires had intensified since graduation. He despised crowded events, like graduation and wedding day. He preferred to ride horses in the clouds, seeing shadows split by illuminated lights of the streets. He stalked the night.

The night consents, as he wander in its shadows.

In its shadows, He carried a cane with him, feel something following him. Then he woke up, as if from a fall.

At times writing of his life is difficult, but that is because so often it has been far to strange for people to believe. His only wish was for it to be as normal as other vampires who stalk the night. When you see nothing but emptiness, at times your mind fills in the blanks. And often such thoughts come alive. And yet for the longest time, he had dreams of being taken aboard by alien spacecraft. He remember when he was young, a young grey told him that he wouldn't be harmed.

Many of his sensations of sex, have been with the grays from the reticulan region. Demons, angels, shadows; all these things are far more tame, his terrors far darker than the opus of Mein Kamph. For, as you see, he had gotten away with much, and yet do to the nature of it, almost nobody ever notices it. It was midnight, when he had met his sister in the red light district. She was wearing a red dress, and offered to take him in. He had moved out after his parents had died, leaving him behind at twenty eight. Now he goes through life wandering if there is any childhood left to live.

In his mind, he dreams of fantasy adventures of children flying gliders, riding on the wings on birds in flight. And yet he goes through his days plying his trade in stream and block ciphers, under the glow of black candle lights.

He never chose to publish the few novels he wrote, part of it being a matter of self-doubt, and part of it was the shame of his own sexuality.

It had been many months since World War III, and in many ways it both exceeded and and underwhelmed his imagination. Then robot rebels came and went, then the super computer overlords. On the run from dream-scanners, he found himself hoping for some kind of release from his misery. It started out as technology designed to scan your brainwaves testing for issues related to sleep apnea, but gradually evolved to watch over developments of deviant personality traits. And now he sleeps in wait, wondering whether they will come for him again at night.

Vincent considered himself more of a diarist, though he could see the confusion with science fiction. But his life was not a fiction book. At one point had wanted children, but it's to late now. We're children beneath the darkened sky. Beneath a shadowed sun. His body was meat.

He once knew a guy who would meet trolls under a bridge, although in actuality they were just homeless people trying to find a place to live. Even so, he would thrust them with one of his daggers, and watch as they reel in extreme pain. Needless to say, he wasn't friends with him for very long. Only for about a year. When he had left his sister's house, exchanging phone numbers, he kept her as a network contact while she was off the wire. He would explore bridges in the suburbs outside of the city, finding colonies of soldiers that had survived the war, making their life Terra forming the total darkness that was the underground sewers.

Cardboard cut outs were re-purposed into makeshift houses, where they stored cookware. Some of them had become bandits, because society didn't want them. He met two that were roasting rats on a stick, while he thought only of his sister. What we think of as sewers today, where actually ancient battle grounds built by a culture far older than Ancient Sumeria, possibly as much as 18,000 years in the past. And now, in the year 2019, we live in the aftermath of the great re-purposing back in the 1970s. But certain figures on the walls and statues give clues to this far ancient culture, who rode on flying wings that reached the sky. And now, here we are, eating roasted rats underneath the holographic metropolis, wondering when the bridges far above us will eventually fall and kill us.

-- I wouldn't give them one a year, said one bandit. -- What makes you say that man? -- See those columns above? They're already cracking. -- He pointed to the seemingly seamless column, implying that that was the one that would eventually collapse. It was an unstable life, not much better than the tail end of the nineteenth century, although they probably thought this was better than when they were rebuilt by their masters over in North Korea all those years ago. -- It's inevitable.

Indeed, the only reason they're still alive now, is do to a kind of genetic modification, that allowed their body to regenerate from radiation poisoning.But throwing up all the time do to their immune system made this aspect a miserable existence. He adjusted my mirror goggles, and then crash on his futon.

Nothing like sleep.

When Orwell wrote 1984, he wasn't expecting there to be simulation coastal vistas, using meat space avatars, while glancing the view while on the wire. Unlike like groups specialized towards sex education, in practice actual sex education was surprisingly prescient for the writer. And yet the thing that hit the eighties and nineties was virtual reality, then the world wide web. But now we're already having the idea of quantum networks being discussed, extending concepts of mass surveillance beyond what was conceived of in the nineteen forties. And the old public key systems were slowly going the way of the dinosaur.

The classic game consoles have become the latest dinosaurs, with each latest generation having their maximum development expectancy set around five years at the most, aside from the few home brew developers. I had given up game development a long time ago, prefering the flow of text on the page. And yet sometimes I miss the old days of loading the makers, and churning out demos of games in my development bucket list. But now, his own bucket list is to exist. And his thoughts display on quantum holographic networks displaying the words "to be or not to me, that is the question."

His drifting in the world of darkness, as if he was already dead.

ášⲞᑋⲰᑈⲤá‘â€Ã¢Â²Â¡Ã¡â€˜Å'â²®á‘Ââ² ᑋⳂá‘â€

He thought I heard a voice, in what seemed like a digitized version of an ancient language far older than the age of Egypt and Sumeria. The group of underground nomads had been walking through the tunnels for some time, when they found a previously undiscovered room. The others thought of it as a get rich quick scheme, finding spare parts to sell on the black market. Yet for me, I was preoccupied by the statue that stood before us by the flat screen computer monitors. It had a vague semblance of Roman and Egyptian statues, except that the garb looked to him from a previously unknown star faring civilization, indicated by the appearance what seemed to be some ancient space helmet.

The computer rooms were built on top of ancient Native American temple, from a culture that was as old, if not older, than the Inca.

-- Get a load of this lady.

-- Ain't she a beauty?

-- I wonder how much this stature would be worth? And look, not a single crack on it. While the others were thinking of how much they could sell it for, there was something about that gave off a sinister presence.

Vincent split from the others into a separate room. Just in time, as when one of them tried to steal the monitors, a false door opened up a portal that unleashed men with space helmets attacking them with laser beams. His friends told him to break for it, so he took his futon and left the scene trusting their judgment, and his instincts to survive. Suddenly the room grew quieter, and slowly quieter. It then became silent. One of the men came out alive, but said that they were all surrounded by armed guards from a different galaxy, and that they let him live long enough to reveal to me a message.

-- Don't go to far down here, there are things which we were not meant to see.

You might think that he almost died, but as best as Vincent could, he nursed his friend back to health. However his right arm continued to be bruised for the next few days after. He called his sister.

-- Can you do me and a friend a favor?

-- What do you need?

-- Medical attention.

It was the following morning me and my friend woke up in the hospital. He spent the entire morning watching television mindlessly, while trying to think of what happened in those tunnels in the darkness. He was left craving going back down to find out what the meaning of the symbols were, and the meaning of that statue. Since he wasn't injured, he left my friend to the care of his sister as he made his way back toward the tunnels, leaving my futon at the hospital. She said she would roll it up, and his friend could sleep at her place tonight.

As much as you get used to wandering the darkness, there isn't anything like wandering it alone. Vincent walked through the tunnels, slashing and thrusting giant rodents, and eventually came upon the room in which we had left. Already, the room had been cleaned up, despite having no natural reason for the corpses absence. He stared at the portal in which the monstrosities had exited.

He touched my hands along the wall

He found the room began to swirl around, and he warped into what seemed like a laboratory in hell, with various abominations, craving to eat his flesh. Vincent made sure to only stay inside of the lab. He heard a voice in the darkness. It was a young woman in her early twenties, who said that he should not have arrived there, that it was a top secret government facility.

Moments later she asked how he had found the place. Vincent noted that him and his friends had been living in the tunnels for some time, and that it was only recently that a friend of his had been kind enough to let them stay with her. But the lady, other than this question, remained largely elusive about what was beyond the tunnels.

He was knocked out by cyborg guards, woke up at Ravina's place.

-- And just where have you been? She asks.

-- Where am I?

-- At my place, you will always sleep here. -- She adjusted the blankets for me, while I situated on the futon.

-- I found you outside in the cold at midnight. Don't leave me like that again, and your friend, he needs you.

I had nothing else to say then. I was left thinking of the tunnels.

It was a year later he met Ladybug.

A new search engine: it replaced its logo with GNU Search Engine to replace the old Google, animated its background above the Earth's atmosphere; type in a search, and it takes you to a real time street view of everywhere on the globe.

It's primary function to connect to various street lamp and satellite images in real time. Even the hardiest of anarchists could not go into space, and knock out the power systems of the globalist elite. One could get specific time stamps of real life meta-data, from the color of people's houses, and the inside of people's kitchens. None of the spices that we use to cook with would be kept secret for very long, provided one lived in an Urban district, where people are constantly under surveillance from microphones and micro-cams hidden inside of the lenses. Even more overtly, you can't find a grocery store without some form of security camera. Most of the meta-data is collected by various micro-cams in public places, although new laws have been proposed to allow for spying inside of people's home. The most paranoid of outcasts, have had to adapt to living inside of RVs and portable tiny homes, in order to avoid the restrictions that come with renting a studio apartment. They say the footage is to prevent shop lifting, but the only thieves they ever apprehend are various minority groups.

Angela, who works as a museum curator, had just turned fifty five. For a vampiress, that would make her around fifteen, perhaps twenty at the oldest. Unlike her father, she chose not to have other cybernetic prosthesis to extend her lifespan, so she ages like the standard undead. In the public life, she displays to people various mock up severed heads of different vampire types produced after the third world war. At night, she goes around hunting other vampires, kidnapping women whom she charms with her youthful appearance, and then takes her to her home, where they are guillotined. The walls around her basement are sound proofed, and the only sound people outside will ever hear are faint sounds of whispers in the dark.

Angela has kept this double life for close to ten years. It helped that generally the non undead police division was reluctant to even admit to the existence of the undead. And the undead forces would rather let a murderer go free, than clue into the fact that vampires exist. It was a very unique time after the fall of the United States, when various states went onto to become their own independent nations, most notably in the South, that has a degree of bitterness about their plight since the end of the first Civil War. Within this environment, it wasn't until her girlfriend Dianette, whom she had grown up with since middle school, eventually discovered her basement one evening, and found out the truth of why Angela was able to find so may types of vampire heads, within this large basement, she met a conspirator that had connections to World Oasis, before splintering off, and aided Angela in making the humans she seduced look like they committed suicide.

It was simply a matter of making them bit onto the rope that held the blade up. All she had to do was paddle them, and eventually the pain with making them open their mouths. They carefully made sure there was not any hidden security cameras, and in this way, Angela had a steady supply of vampire heads, that she decorated with native American face paint, claiming that vampires had existed in the US long before the American empire. It helped that this was largely true, except that native Americans were never recorded as having been Francophone and blond.

One night, Danette sneaked behind Angela. She took out her blowgun, and aimed true. She aimed it into her pressure point. The blowguns were able to make less noise than AR-15s, meaning she could slink away at light speed, and make her girlfriend's death look like a suicide. The leader of World Oasis, Angela's father, wanted Ladybug and Vincent to locate the whereabouts of Danette, so they could squelch the threat to their family's livelihood.

Even if it meant cracking some eggs.

Suppose one lived in a duplex, one connected by a autocratic patriarch, the other ruled by Libertarian Social Democracy; on one side, the Left Libertarians run their household purely on green energy, and the flow gravity and water. The other side runs by standard fossil fuels. If the water flowed inside the house, the water could accidentally flood the house of the patriarch. The family of green as a group decided, they would dig a whole that leads the underground river, so that the water would not flow into the patriarch's side of the duplex. This was a family of group decisions, while the other was based on the decision of one. Culturally, this was to be expected; the patriarch came from the deepest of the Southern part of the United States. The ones that liked green energy had been lived for many years in the California Republic, only visiting Tennessee in order to visit with family.

The green family had one daughter, who slept on a hammock; she wore a green tee shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of green wooden clog slippers to bed. She would at times complain about how their living room smelled like fish. This was because there was a deep pit, surrounded by glass walls to keep the flowing water out, in the middle of the room. But for the most part, she benefited from the constant supply of electricity that she came to take for granted. Her neighbor, around her age, lived largely with the opposite situation. He would constantly lock his door to protect himself from his dictatorial father, and there would be constant power outages do to the overbearing government regulations on energy usage. This meant, at times, the patriarchs family having to rely on cold cereal for dinner, instead of pancakes and bacon.

The boy slept on the floor, largely because his parents could not afford a bed. But he had his own methods of communication under the nose of his parents. La Belle de l'Verte famille would sometimes talk to him by Styrofoam cups, connected by a line that reached a same cup on the other end. She spoke of how back in the North West, she had known a friend whose family had came from Indiana. When she would ride the air-rail bus with her friend, her friend noted how sometimes, it seemed like the bus would time a brief dip in the Indiana shopping mall district, an urban sprawl composed largely of millions of micro shopping malls; soon the entire state would be a giant shopping mall. For Belle, she would note how the scenery would melt into the visuals of this shopping mall.

Then when they finally reached the shop, suddenly the scenery would revert back to Los Angeles. And how they didn't quite have the same kind of technology here. The boy on the other end, would always be fascinated by such stories, and wondering why there indeed wasn't such technology here. Instead, he mainly kept a laptop, as a gift from his parents. Here, because of his parents restrictive demands against using the network, made from himself a sneaker network composed of groups of different thumb drives, exchanging messages at school. He didn't have worry about social steganography while on the wire, because the only social network was a homemade one, composed of the urban underground within Chattanooga.

His friends nicknamed him Sputnik, because of his love for Russian media, instead of the state run media. Exchanging thumb drives with his girlfriend neighbor would seem a little off to his overbearing parents, so he worked around the problem by telling her by cups, what the name of the video was on RT, and Belle would browse to this page on her home network that her parents did not restrict. In this respect, there was a certain level of unspoken equality between the two, despite the two family's large political differences.

Although Sputnik himself was just as green as Belle, although for sake of his own privileges, until he ran away from home, would not speak of his views, because he wondered whether his parents had eyes in the walls. Sputnik wanted to eventually move in with Belle, but she was unsure how her parents would feel, despite them being generally freer about sexuality; but they were more concerned about what would happen to Sputnik, and they certainly did not want harassment by Sputnik's father in chief. At night, Belle and Sputnik would exchange information about current news in the quietest corner of the cafeteria, and they would mask their words using null ciphers in order to conceal the information from the security guards that patrolled the area for those plotting any sort of disobedience. This was where the term Belle Ciphering came from.

And Vincent used them liberally.

As liberally as a green.

A Rogue Boy

There were two tents, two tenths of the desert village as two boys moved with the wind. Ben holds a backpack and walks home from school with determination, a young sprite.

Bob pants with tiredness while walking behind him to catch up with him. He had anger and frustration, and felt like an aged cow.

"Hey wait a minute." Bob said. He was panting boy who breathed heavily in and out, heaving heavily with exhaustion. He had fading vision. But then Ben brushed off.

"Last one to get to the ruins is a rotten egg." Ben said. He knew it was a hard thing for Bob to run. Ben was mischievous boy who ate a lot yet manages to stay skinny.

"Come on Ben, you know I..." Bob began to say. But then he saw Ben turn around to look at the ruins in the horizon. "I'm to tired to go..."

"I want to look around over there today." Ben said. He knew Bob always wanted to make sure he never got into trouble. "Everything is fine. We just need to ask our parents."

Ben was in his living room, and his mother was watching television. Ben walked up to his mother, who stared at him without any real interest.

"Mom, can I go outside and play with Bob?" Ben asked. He wasn't sure whether his mother would say hello. Finally she leaned forward to touch the remote.

"Sure, but be home by nine." The woman asked. She reclined back into her seat, and turned the television back. They were old reruns of a stupid reality show.

Ben walked through the town, making sure he would not attract the attention of the school bullies. It was a small town, and the rest of the class hated them.

Yet Ben envied the boys devotion, something he wished out of Bob. He waited at the gate for Ben to catch up with him, but by five o'clock Ben was ready to leave.

Ben is digging through the dirt, when Bob arrived at the entrance of the ruins gate. Bob was heaving in and out once again, it wasn't something he could help.

"Bob, how do you think your going to help me dig this dirt, if your to tired to walk away from home?" Ben said. Bob looked at him with a furrowed brow.

Ben slapped bob in the back.

"Chill out man and have a sense of humor," Ben said. He knew he was being insensitive, but didn't care. "No go over there and dig up some of this charred dirt."

"But I don't have a.." Bob began to say. But he was interrupted by Ben.

"Then dig it up with your fingers." Ben said. He resisted the temptation to snicker, picturing bob breaking his finger nails while he poked his fingers through the dirt.

Then Ben screamed.

"Ben, my fingers are hurting." Bob said. He was crouched down on his knees, and he resisted the temptation to wine. He knew it would not make Ben proud. Ben turned around to look at Bob.

He facepalmed when he tried to sleep in the dirt.

Ben and Bob are getting ready to go home for dinner, when Ben started walking toward the inner cave up of the ruins.

"Ben, we need to get home. It's getting late." Bob said.

"Oh don't worry. This is just going to take a minute." Ben said.

Ben and Bob are at a metallic door. Ben noticed that there is a an mirror with the color of black. It had an odd device that pressed down.

"Hey look, lets play with these." Ben said.

"Hey wait Ben," Bob said. He was chewing on his finger nails. "Are you sure we want to do that. It might cause that door to open, and scary things will come out."

Ben slapped Bob in the back of the head.

"Relax man, this is going to be fun." Ben said. Although he was curious to see if it would open. "The door is probably so old and rusted, it could not possible open."

Then the door slowly opened.

Ben and Bob looked down a dark hallway, where odd creature sounds were heard from inside the complex. And there were wires hanging from the roof. The room was also covered in thick dirt, that seemed to build up over time.

Ben went into the lonely hall that looked more like manufactured cavern. He took out his large machete, and walked further into the ruins. Bob followed, but was becoming tired.

Ben and Bob arrived in a large group of hallways, metallic in texture. Some of the tiles had runic inscriptions on them, and Ben tried to read them. However he could not understand what they were saying.

Ben and Bob are attack by large rats in the old hallways. They didn't know they were a product of bio-engineering in the early 2000's.

And then they arrived in a camera room. The camera room was dark, and they struggled to make out anything in the room. However Bob instictively flipped a device beside the metallic door. He didn't know that was actually a switch. And then a room light came on.

Ben and Bob shake about, wondering what stupid thing Bob just did. Ben wondered if he upset a monster, but in the room not creature could be found.

Ben noticed some old propaganda videos in one of the cardboard boxes in the room. He took out a black roll of tape, and placed it into the machine slot. He noticed a light from it projecting into another room.

Ben and Bob walked through the hallway to try to find something to crack open the door. But instead they decided to watch through the the device room.

It was this decision that would change Ben forever.

"Hey, whats going on that screen?" Bob asked.

"Shut up Bob," Ben said while adjusting to a more comfortable position. "There are people trapped in that wall over there, and we need to let them out."

"But how did they."

"I don't know, there is some magic going on here that is trapping them." Ben said. Ben boticed that the peoples world was a nicer place. "Hey, why doesn't our world look like that?"

"Like what?"

"The place these people live is greener. Oh look, and they are eating real turkey!"

"Come on Ben, let me see."

"There isn't a point, we need to let these people out." Ben said. He carefully climbed off the table. "What the hell?"

"What wrong?"

"The world, it looks like our now. But there are flames. People are casting fire on each other. People are turning into dust Bobby!" Ben said.

Bob was shocked. He had not called him Bobby since he was eleven, when he relied on him to save him from a ghost soldier in the ruins.

"It's to late Bob," Ben said. "I've failed them."

"What do you mean?" Bob asked.

"Let's go home."

Ben had a fight with his mother.

Ben was locked in his room, after being spanked with a hairbrush by his mother once he got home because he was late for dinner.

I need to find a way out of here, Ben thought. Ben was tired of living at home with his aggressive mother. So he quickly went to bed as if to go to school the next morning.

Ben woke up as soon as his mother layed down on her bed in the next room. He carefully made sure he didn't make any noise. He walked to the door.

However the door was still locked.

Ben slowly opened his window, and quietly climbed out. He didn't bother to take any stuff, since he had nothing except his machete to take with him.

Ben arrived at the gate. As he tried to leave, a holding hand on his shoulder kept him from leaving. He turned around prepared to swing his machete. However it was Bob.

"Bob, what are you doing up this late?" Ben asked.

"I could ask the same of you." Bob said.

"I'm leaving town, I have something I need to do."

"Bob don't leave, I need you here to."

"To protect you from the bullies right? Its about time you grew up to become a man Bob."

"Can I at least come with you?"

"Your mother would miss you. Mine would not."

Ben pushed Bob to the ground and left the village. Bob tried to come get him, however he lost track of Ben.

Ben walked through the desert, and arrived at mountain pass between this village and the next. He was getting hungry, but at first he could not make himself eat a rat.

However in the last part of the trip before he passed out near the village, he killed a giant rat and skinned it so he could eat it.

Ben felt a little better.

Ben woke up sleeping in a bed. It was a bed at the inn. He quickly climbed out. However he was stopped by a village girl who greeted him at the door.

"Where do you think your going?"

"I was going to get up."

"Your still hurt," The girl said. "You need your rest."

"And your name?"

Ben walked past the girl when she tried to tell him who she was, and walked into town to do some chores. Ben wanted to do something great long after he got done getting a message from the earth god.

Everyone looked at him strangely.

Ben tried going to the shop to buy some items, but the only things he could buy were healing items, and they were prohibitively expensive.

At the sword shop he asked the clerk, "Why can't I buy anything?"

"Normally I would sell you, but your a stranger here. You need to earn up a good rep before I can give you anything. You should ask the mayor to give you citizenship."

Ben arranged an appointment with the mayor in private to have a chat about why he could not buy a weapon.

"Are you kidding? Your look to young to have a weapon." The mayor said.

"The mayor didn't seem to think so." ben said.

"I tell you what, I can loan yoy some money and you can buy yourself a nice wooden sword."

Ben cringed at the mayors obviously condescending attitude. But he quickly left, because trying to talk him into it was a waste of time. Ben decided he would steal a sword, after the shop owner went to sleep.

Ben was woken up by the village being invaded by demons from the depths of the cave of the fire god. He quickly exited the hotel, where was on fire. And then he got back into contact with the girl who rescued him from earlier.

"What's happening, whats going on?" The girl asked.

Ben quickly went to the mayors office, and he was running around the room panicking like everyone else. He ran around like his pants was on fire.

Ben went into the cave.

Ben fought mechanical mutated dogs, rats, and rolling gun drones through the cave. The girl from earlier caught back up with him to fight the save their burning village.

And then they arrived at the entrance of the fire god, and turned off the switch that cause the machine to continuously build new rolling guns.

They traced back their steps to the settlement, which was now barely surviving. Villagers are pouring water on their tents to save the last bit of it. The mayor awarded him citizenship for defeating the fire god. This allowed him to purchase a shiny new sword.

The two boys, Ben and Bob, stayed in the temporary night settlement with the harrowing beds of night, as they tried to comfortably sleep the darkness away.

Early in the morning, a shadow arrives at the small settlement, and formally announces herself by Ben's campfire in the cold morning. The really angry mother tried to re-victimize the boy, but Ben sliced open her arm that tried to hit him.

He pushed her to the ground as she screamed, and she held her hand over her wound.

Ben points his blade toward his her neck.

"Mother, why have you come. You don't love me, leave me be." Ben said.

"Why don't you come back home, where you have hot food." The mother said.

"I have a mission from God mother."

Never before had mother thought she had met anyone crazier than her son, at that moment.

In a fit, she tried to leave, but he advised his men to capture her, and give her medical attention.

He would let her live.

But this time, he would make sure it was her who followed his rules.

Inglorious light shined in the morning clear sky, and nearing completion of packing their bags, the village prepared for another walk through the desert.

Ben and Bob were offered water by the girls mother, the girl who helped them fight against the fire god, however Ben, a generous spirit, offered to split his bottle two ways.

Enjoying the moment, she took the offer, but let him have most of the drink, as he would be the one fighting whatever beasts they come across.

"So what is your name, girl?" Ben asked.

During the walk, they encountered various creatures along the way, but the villagers soldiers, along with the Talent Ben and Bob already had made the effort significantly easier.

After they helped the villagers pitch their tents, they enjoyed snaked barbecued by the local chefs, and then quickly headed for bed.

The group that walked across the desert, arrived at another small village, in the mountains of the desert continent. Ben and Bob hiked through the trail, and eventually arrived at the gate of the village, which was guarded by desert guards.

Slowly they walked through the gate, and arrived at the town center enjoying the moment of rest, however they needed to find a cold room to rest for the night.

No beds, because this time they could not even purchase a hotel room, because you have to be a citizen in order to buy one, as there was still a trust issue with foreigners.

In the tent outside the village, they waited for Ben to make an appointment with the mayor.

She Was The Wolf, And I Was The Sheep

The short story Uploaded Fairy was based on.

Author note: In an alternative continuity that exists in The Gambits, Nadine was once called Richard, and lived as a man. The person would go onto become a military scientist for a Robots on a Space Elevator. He was help the cyborgs Adam and Eve terraform and colonize a tidally locked planet outside our galaxy, becoming the chief scientist for Eve, and eventually Silhouette Man.

Richard stared at the teacher, an inhuman mass of electronic pixels.

He reclined back into my seat, dreaming good dreams, of completing his home project when he got home. It was a robotic dog, he had been working over the past week. He could not afford a real pet at the time. The machine printed letters across the screen, and took role call. It came around to him, and his mind was a little dim, so a female student woke him up. He was a fuck up, who stayed under.

“Wake up, you don’t want to miss the anthem.” She said, with a smile fake enough to break glass.

He was, unresponsive, and was jolted out of his seat, by a sudden beep. It beeped out of control.

Disoriented and shaken up, and he stared at the screen. The monitor was playing a music video,of the new national anthem.

After the other students got back into their seats, Math class began its session. The electronic teacher printed out math worksheets. He stared into space, a wonderful place, while working on...boring pre algebra.

He drifted off into a daydream, and imagined himself with his new pet, once completed, when Juline was gone for work.

End of class, a ringing bell, the students rushed out of the classroom. He walked out of the door, but his arm was grabbed by his childhood friend.

“Hey wait.” She said.

“Brit, I’m busy. I need to get to class.” He said.

A sweet girl, a (mostly) innocent girl, but she was dumb. Richard had to keep an eye on her at lunch, to keep others from stealing her food. But eventually he realized, she could not be helped So he broke up with her.

“You never talk to me.” She said. Richard, a nerd boy, brushed her off with a cold shoulder, and rushed to class.

“Hey! Wait up!” Brittney said.

Her echo going in one ear, and out the other, was muffled by other students talking in the hall. He arrived to class four minutes, before the bell.

Richard was already seated, when she arrived to class. The monitor printed off letters

onto the screen:

“Tardy two.” The social studies monitor said. There was no use making excuses to pixel-ed glass.

“Don’t worry Britt.” Richard said. “The computers that printed off paddling permission slips are not in commission.”

“Sometimes I’d rather take the paddling, takes less time.” She said.

“Believe me, you don’t. Unless you don’t mind not sitting a day.” He said.

Richard was riding a school Bus, which was silver and sleek, at a comfortable speed in a lulling motion that puts you to sleep. It had a leather seated interior, with bright windows shining. He was sitting in his seat listening to rock music, while reading Hamlet.

Hamlet, a play written by Shakespeare, it was a trite mess that lulled him to sleep. He almost nodded off and began to do so. It was a dusty book that was wrinkled, which caused him to choke and cough. An old book written by an author before the invention of prose.

A boy sitting beside Richard, who wore big thick black glasses, had a fairly new book about ghosts. He had long trimmed platinum blond hair, and blue eyes Richard could stared deeply into. A young boy from a high grade tried to bully his friend, but Richard got up and smacked him in the balls with his left shoe.

“Come on comrade, that’s not how you treat brothers.” Richard said. He could see the bus driver staring through the rear view mirror.

“What’s going on back there.” The driver asked. He had a stern look that could stare into your soul.

The mixed words between both students jumbling into a jargon mess confused the driver. So he hovered above the city sidewalk, and pushed both of them out of the bus. Richard tried to get a word in, but he closed the door.

The bus flew into the sky once more.

Richard had to walk home, and he worried that he would not be home in time for curfew. And then he would earn another lecture from mom. He arrived at the door of his apartment flat, and pressed the code to open the door.

He slammed the backpack on the table, and then walked into the kitchen to grab some mushroom soup. He then tossed it into the microwave, and then sat at the table to do his homework he did not finish in class.

His mind drifted as the wrote down pre algebraic notation.

His cell phone, and he opened it to see who was calling. Brittney was the one on the other end.

“I thought I told you to not call me anymore?” Richard said.

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to let you know, I decided to see if I could bribe a teacher to see if I can get swats instead of a detention on detention day.”

“Pffft, and how did that go?”

“I don’t know yet, I haven’t gotten an answer.”

“And this is what you wanted to call me about?”

“Uh yes?”

“Don’t call me again.” Richard pressed the button to hang up his phone.

Richard placed his cell phone back into his pocket, and then received another phone call. “God damn it Brit.”

He picked up his phone, getting ready to yell. But it was a sweet voice he recognized that was not Brittney. It was his mother.

“Hey Richard, I’m not going to be home till late tonight.”

“Oh ok.”

“I have a thing I need to work on with a patient.” Juline said. She worked as a nurse for a local private hospital. “I’ll see you at nine. Unless you decided to stay at a friends house without me knowing.”

“I’m home mom.” Richard said, resisting a chuckle.

“Take care sweety.”

“Bye mom.” Richard said, a hung up the phone. Richard finished up his soup and his homework, and headed to his room to watch the hologram television. He turned it on, but nothing by junk was on television.

His thoughts turned off the television.

Richard pulled out his seat of his wooden desk, which was not really wood but rather an industrial plastic wood purchased cheap by his mother. He took out his tool set and what was the beginning of his robot dog.

Richard tinkered with his toy.

Juline did not come home that night, which caused Richard to worry a little bit. Richard took out his cell phone to call her, but there was no answer. Richard had a sinking feeling in his gut that something happened.

He put up his toy and went to bed.

The next morning at the bus station, he tried to push by the crowd and get on. But the driver said he was not allowed to fly that morning. Richard looked glum and irritated, and walked to school that morning, arriving three hours later than he would have otherwise if Juline could have drove him.

Richard was in third period late morning, when the intercom called him into the office. It was the same old thing, children going ooooh when someone was in trouble. He walked through the hall, and wondered if it was about what went on with the bully yesterday.

Instead it was something different. Richard was sitting at the desk in the office of the principle, another monitor with a monotone voice. Two officers were standing beside the screen, looking sternly.

“We saw the threat you made against the bully.”

“Now I can explain.”

“Don’t bother. Your going to boarding school for another reason.” The computer flickered in and out. “As you may have noticed, you mom did not return to your home last night.”

“How did...”

“We have ways of spying on you Richard.” The computer flickered. “We know all about you on a registry. Your mom died last night in a hospital robbery. Enjoy the rest of the day, then pack your bags.”

The rest if his day was quiet.

Richard rode in a prison van along with the bully from school, with darkly lit lights other than the windows that passed by the city. He was going to a private school in Hudson, NY. This was the first time he would be going to a different school.

He had no idea whether he would make new friends, or what would happen. But there was one thing certain. It would not be anything like he has ever known. No more family, no more parents who he knew loved him.

Richard and the bully went through an admissions officer to get into the school, and they packed up their stuff in their dormitories to stay for the school year.

For first time in his life, Richard was scared. He was scared this his father would try to kill him, or worse take him back to his boarding school. There he would be placed back in solitary confinement until he turned eighteen.

Along the ledge of the road, he could see rows and rows of roads in the city highway, and at the bottom, a large dead tree with its branches broken off. They were sharp enough to puncture your skin.

Like someone pushing him off the ledge, his foot slipped and he clang to the edge of the road. His father tried to rescue him, but instead his hand was to weak from running to hold on any longer. The boy slipped.

A long ways down Richard came falling down.

It was like falling into a black hole of death, and at the bottom, a spiky pit. In a sudden stop, Richard blacked out from a sudden puncture of pain. In his remaining waking moment, he was bleeding.

He was dying.

Good fathers don’t let their kids die, and Edward wanted to shoot himself, but he was prevented from doing so by other S.W.A.T police.

Power drills with blindingly shiny metal are spinning many times per second, a loud noise whining with a boring-tool, which was going into the boys flesh, the melding between metal and meat on the amputee, who is screaming loudly with its puncture motion.

“Ah Ahhhh!” Richard screamed. The pain was intolerable. “Arrrgggh!”

He became man and machine, a partial boy made whole again standing up from the surgery table. he had major pain walking. He was a hunk of metal and flesh. Lonely hallways with lights buzzing in a rundown hospital. There was a human odor of a highly pungent smell of death. It reeked up from its tomb of pillows and used scalp-els, with the imprint of lost souls left behind that stinks.

A muted colored sky raining above endless rows of roads, cars are flying at lightning speed among neon lights. Malcolm held Richard up by his back, as he almost stumbled. Like a good friend, he would make him return the favor. A cool breeze blowing in the sky, a smell of dumpsters and dead rats.

Dead Rats, a health hazard, inedible and diseased, a symbol of starvation, and.death. it was a sickening sight, and he was hungry, cold, and wet. He avoided the dead litter on the ground to keep from being infected. They were rotting, ravaging, and unclean. The Grim Reaper took what it wanted, an insignificant speck of dust.

Of the time of his first accidental visit here, he could hardly breath. Like someone with a brain injury, his speech was mumbled. Malcolm paused to listen to him, but could not understand a word he was saying.

--- How did things come to this?

All I could remember up to that point was being on a ledge, and the moment of an abrupt fall. It’s not the fall that gets you, but rather the sudden stop. I went pop onto the concrete, and at that moment I felt complete. My vision at that time began to completely fade, and everything as I hoped would soon come to an end.

This is my song of lost youth.

For a moment my vision came back, and felt more pain than I ever had in my life before. The sound of buzzing and wining metal was absolutely obnoxious, it felt like a moment in hell. An eternal darkness, a low toned bell. And then staring into a clinical stare, my vision was eventually graced to the light of buzzing ceiling light. “We look who decided to wake up today.” An old man that looked about fifty, had a high hairline with long white hair. “Your little girlfriend will be happy to see, when your out of recovery.”

And then soon passed out as soon as the pain from my whole body was simply to much to bare. For many weeks I was somewhere in between the world of dreams, and the waking world. Demonic faces, many graces upon the flesh biting into me. Tearing into my flesh, and each moment I was reassured by the doctor of pain. I did not care much what his name was, I simply wanted the pain to be over. After the weeks went by where I felt ill, I was let go. And that’s how I came to live in what I would call purgatory home. ---

--- It was a lonely existence, and the first night I woke up upon the couch. The pain was only made more tolerable by the fact that I was longer into the period of pain. I had a craving for the powder, wanted to swallow that chowder. And consume whatever it was that was able to make the pain from the cuts and then growing of flesh. But there was no sway to get Bianca. At least at the moment. “You need to find yourself a job, like everyone else. ... I can ask Malcolm, to see if he can set you up.”

Maybe things will get better, I thought.

But it would become much worse.

It soon became apparent to Bianca that it was simply to difficult for me to move at all. Even if I wanted to find employment, if not to find another way to kill myself, then by finding some drug to completely kill my perception of mental anguish. So the meeting was set up like this: Malcolm sat on the chair facing in my direction. “So what are you willing to do to earn a little bit of extra money to help pay the rent?” Malcolm said. Bianca, who had already been on thin ice with him by now, simply glowered at him. “What? He’s gotta know the truth at some point.” But eventually he was guilt-ed into changing his tune. “I can set you up with clean up duty on the last day of your recover. As soon as your ready to go, I’ll show you what you will need to do.”

It was another week later, at that point I had just gotten done with healing and getting used to be new robotic arm. Because I was still not yet used to its motion, it continuously made the herky jerky motion while I tried to use the broom. But let me tell you, trying to control a foreign body your body is just as soon to reject with your brain wave -- well it’s lot easier to try to chew on sandpaper. Every single time it was struggle not to ram the stick into the wall. “God damn it, not that shit again.” But eventually I was able to get the hang of it. Oh this is only the beginning of it my friends. So eventually I was able to earn enough money to pretty much otherwise get a free ride. ---

--- After I had finally gotten used to using my robotic arm, me and Bianca started to get a little bit closer after she had finalized her break up with Malcolm. But we were still a little bit rough around the edges. I remembered one night in particular, that would ultimately spell the end of of my life as I knew it then, and lead up to the life I now know it as. It was on that night when I wanted to buy myself a new bottle of immune-suppressant pills. Bianca was on her cell-phone, possibly talking to her then ex boyfriend Malcolm who was away at work. He worked the graveyard shift always, set their relationship adrift. As she yammer-ed on the cell-phone, I tried to concentrate plugging into my forehead, after taking out my deck. My pink-screen came up, then I waved my fingers across the screen to get onto the network. “I want these, ... but they are to much.” Then pushed the window away, de-plugged from my forehead. One could hear the buzzing down of the system. At that particular moment, I could here what sounded like her speech at the table in the kitchen.

“Are you talking to me Richey?” said Bianca, my now ex. I was pretty sure that she was sitting at the table. Her action of hanging up was so quite that I could not even hear the beep. “I did not know you had a phone.” If she was watching me as often as she said she would, would she not know I did not have one?

“I don’t, I was --” Her tendency to interrupt was made easier, by my physical state. I felt like the couch. At that moment, which came sooner than I wanted, I felt a narrowing of my own inner thoughts. For the pain from my robotic arm, was to much to bare. I no longer wanted to think about her or anything else.

“Don’t talk to yourself Richey.” she jeer-ed. Up until that point she had not chosen to talk to be very much, so why in the hell she wanted to talk to be right then I had no clue. At that moment I would have rather have been spanked by her shoe, as it would have broken the silence that was between me and her over the particular week that would begin the story that I’m about to recall to you.

Walking into the lonely quite kitchen, where the only other person was me and Bianca, and the room was lit merely by the glow of the flickering L.E.D light, I walked over to the fridge in order to get a glass of water. I had to have something to quench my thirst, to distract from the true physical pain. “So Bianca, you’ve just now decided to talk to me? It’s been so quiet here, and with your boyfriend--” I began to say.

“That’s Ex to you.” Bianca said.

“Fine then fruit pie, Ex -- working the night shift, who is going to talk to me?” Though in retrospect now I feel a little bit funny about saying that, whether that would be the case if she not complained I’m not sure.

“I do want to talk about your pill --”

“But I need them for the pain fruit pie.”

“Would you stop call me fruit pie.” It was not the name fruit pie, that made her want me to die though that did not help her thinking of me like a bug and make me want to yelp by squashing me.

“Yes, but are you --” I said.

“I just don’t feel like talking this week.” Bianca just stared at me, with her gaze that was a mixture of loneliness and absolute complete disdain. Made me feel so profane, and wonder why it was she chose to call for an alarm, all those years ago. I felt like my soul was lost, in the fall.

“Just break the silence every once in a while, that’s all I’m asking for OK.” And then I walked back to my couch, and then said goodnight on my brain-jack deck, and played the slow melody of nature music: the sounds of deserts blowing, the sound of ocean torrents, and the call of the wind.

Bianca still tried to talk to me while she was in the kitchen. I tried to tune her out, but part of me still wanted to listen to her speech. “Malcolm is not going to be home till late, again. I tried telling him to leave that business, but he simply will not listen. ... I guess it’s his fault if he gets shot.”

I thought, lady I hope you rot. I had never seen her like that before, wondered if there was something she remembered. Something that she was not telling me. It always seemed like she was still more attached to him than me, even though she was -- apparently -- still dating me at that moment. So I bursted open the bedroom door, causing my robotic arm to jerk and twitch. Man that pain hurt like a bitch, still feel that to this day. Our bedroom we had together, that was there to share. A for many a week, there was no other care in the world. Everything seemed to fade away, at the sound of a goodnight kiss, and dimmed lamplight. There was no other gadgets, no consoles for people our age, no toys other little children got to play with. The song of lost youth. Only that rotted floor that I still wonder why one of us had not fallen through it.

When our parents died, there was nothing left for us. Nothing we had inherited. Nothing but the stained Earth. Walking up to the window, I saw the sky. A sunlight that never went through the thick grey clouds. I could hear her clog steps, and she walked beside me at the window. “Hey I’m sorry about that, I have just been a little bit stressed out lately. So what are you looking at?”

I pointed to the sky.

“What do you think it’s like?”

“Like where?”

“In the city, up there.”

“Dream on OK.” Bianca said, hugging me tightly. Which once again caused my robotic arm to twitch. She eased off as soon as she noticed she was hurting me, about a whole minute later. “That was years ago, I still have no idea where you came from. But this is your home now Broggie.” Covering up her face, she crouched on the floor.

I just stared into the sky. ---

--- “Are you ready to order?” I heard the waitress say, as gradually as the vision from inside my dream began to fade way. I could distinctly remember various advertisements playing over in my brain over and over again.

“Yea I’ll take a coffee.” I was not sure whether she would understand what I was saying being drowsy.

I ordered, ate, then exited.

Then after going through the sliding glass doors, tried to remember what it was that made me want to remember what those ads specifically were. Were they ads from when I was plugged into my deck? I got the impression that only worked, when plugged into the network. Bianca was outside to greet me, in the thick green fog that covered the city. I saw her take a powder, choking and snorting on it after accidently taking a breath into it. Fumes were tossed in the direction of my face, and I did not appreciate it very much. “Remember boy, ... you need me. Or you will die ... cold during the night.” she said, in that near calmness that would give just about anybody chills. Although I knew she was right, I needed something for my mental fight. Bianca’s generosity was the only reason I was even alive at all. ---

--- The next morning I was disturbed by Bianca’s cell-phone, and woke up as if rising from a fall. “How was your sleep dear wanderer?” she asked rhetorically. I think at eighteen, I’m a little bit to old to be called a run-away. Besides she’s not my mother. I was not sure what felt more like a sledgehammer. Her grating voice, that can cat through anyone like a sword, or because of my aching robotic arm and my suppressant withdrawals. That pain medication that I had started, to ease my recovery. “So let’s talk money for a minute.” I said to my dear fruit pie.

“Do you wish to grab my only bullets?” she said to me.

“I only wish to know how much, you think is reasonable to give me to take the medication that I need.” She knew good and well I was unemployed, and I may have to do what Malcolm was doing at the time in order to help pitch in.

“That you can carry it around with you,” she said, in that slightly sless grating voice that was still grating. “To buy more of that powdery pill stuff.” Though I knew what she was getting at, if she wanted to talk about drugs -- she needed to do something about her own addiction.

“Well I’m going out.” I stood up naked.

“Hey cover yourself up -- with this blanket.”

It was my friend’s Malcolm and Bianca who were hanging out at the diner just down the road from our little sham shackle. I was of course being the little un-attentive asshole that I was to the conversation, taking my pills to subdue the herky jerky from my robotic arm. “At some point man,” Malcolm said to me. Then he snickered un-amusedly, “you need to buy your own.” And then he raised one of his eyebrows at the waitress, who placed his hamburger plate down on the table.

“I will have a soda, make it a large.” Bianca said, choking on a powder. Causing Malcolm to growl at her, because she spewed powder on his shirt. She puckered her lips mockingly at her Ex boyfriend who smiled with a grimace. “Our Broggie ran away from home yesterday.” And then pushed Malcolm away grabbing the soda from the waitresses hands. “Thanks a bunch, now buzz off will you. Me and Malcolm are having a moment.”

A moment, right. “I can sense the false motherhood.”

“You guys just can’t get along can you?” said Malcolm.

Outside the diner, Ellen and Slephner walked inside through the sliding glass doors. To the table right behind us, they sat. Us three tried not to pay any particular attention to these mother fuckers. And everything was at first all going according to the plan. We will simply just eat quietly, and then leave quietly.

Slephner eye-balled my family with his grill, with a fake smile. But -- get this -- Malcolm did not really seem to notice or care. I don’t really understand how anyone could get used to it, with that tension that was boiling under the surface. I tried to pretend like I was not noticing Ellen. I then switched to looking at my menu. “Hey Richard, hurry and order will you.” said Malcolm, as quietly as he could muster talking to me.

“Ellen let’s get a to go box.” said Slephner.

“Right.” said Ellen. ---

--- Inside the barbershop I was watching Ellen collect tickets from to conspicuous looking peers, I did not recognize from before. Did Slephner recruit new men? I had no idea -- but there was something about them, that gave me bad vibes. The ones renting the place still had not payed rent for that month, evidenced by the light that was buzzing in and out in the overhead, and so I barely saw Ellen sitting in the bleachers.

At first I observed the dog fight through the dream-display, with my trodes plugged into the pink ocean-sea. I had a hard time not giggling -- I couldn't help it you know, it looked like dogs playing to me. A special breed of pooch, one would purchases on the black market in these parts. Modeled after the pit-bull and the wolf. I get the vibes that it must have had its share of blood, even before they have gotten to the ring. I didn't know that of course -- it was just that feeling you know.

It was at the moment, I started to feel a little bit of guilt.

Not only for how I treated Ellen, in the diner -- but also for those dogs in the ring. It’s strange how you grow up one way, get used to that. Then it’s abruptly switch up on you like a speeding train. And as much as you try to get used to the new life -- there is still something deep inside -- that still get’s to you. That feeling of being another dog in the ring.

So to take those thoughts away, I tried to look at Ellen whenever I could. But I could not push my thoughts away from that dream -- that dream I always wanted -- a piece of electronic paradise. Not just a momentary paradise, that illusion of ocean-sea. Something like eternity. Something -- that became very obvious was not here. I saw Slephner turn around to look at Ellen, while monitoring his Pit-wolf in the arena --- Malcolm’s pooch was on the other side of the dream-display.

Slephner gave a thumbs up sign, like a confident rat. Nothing could take away his confidence. This pooch, that belong to my best friend -- or was the closest to being one -- was like a hemp rope chopped through by sharp teeth.

Ellen reluctantly gave one back to him, with a toothy grin. Normally I wouldn't dig it, but you know what, whatever right? She was still pretty enough you know. I tried to focus as much as I could, through to the game.

They pit-wolves pounced.

Then swiftly clawed first strike --- The conspicuous peers that were not part of either of our groups, were sitting at a table as I un-plugged the trodes. It was the furthest place you could get from a normal audience seat. They stood at the back wall, waiting. Something about them scared me -- it unnerved me even more than Slephner himself. But what was it?

I looked at the circular stage, into the multi-window-pane dream display. I heard one of them make a statement to his friend to the side as he looked onward.

“So you want to place a bet?” he said. Though I could barely hear him.

“Oh boss, isn’t that--” his friend said. I could barely here them as well. It felt like one of those whisper you would here, from something in the dark.

“Oh relax, were already," the guy who appeared to be the main guy said. Then I at a brief moments glance, saw him place the pipe in his mouth. I could barely him the rest of his statement. “breaking the law anyway doing this. Technically.”

“... O I bet a fifty.” the other said.

“Raise you double.” the leader-like man said.

“Triple.”

“Your on, lets watch the match.”

We knew, even if their own dog lost one of it's ears, a brew for a another ear could in theory be generated from its gene code -- though it's not like we could have afforded it -- we were broke, inside and out. It was my friend Malcolm, who felt more attached to his pit-wolf -- since according to what he's told me -- he has grown up with it.

“Your not going anywhere.” I heard the man near the back say. I knew it, I fucking knew it you know?

And then Slephner’s dog jumped at the two cops.

The remaining dogs, owned by me and Bianca misunderstood the gesture. Then all scale bloodbath. The pit-wolves started attacking everyone. One even tried to bite my prosthetics, but I swatted it. ---

--- It was only me and Ellen who survived.

I was abruptly thrown from my memory, hugged by Ellen, who had her face in my chest. She was shaking, and getting my shirt wet.

“Let’s go somewhere far away, start a new life.” Ellen said.

I thought the dogs cry out, we pout with agony.

Like lonely sheep torn apart by wild dogs.

Me and Ellen, were on the run, hiding out in another sector of the metropolis. Beneath the floating city.

“So where are we going to go?” she said to me.

“Someplace, somewhere. Not here. Anywhere.” I said to her.

“How are your limbs?”

“Good enough, why?”

“I just wondered,” she said to me, I could feel her behind me. I was not sure what she was going to do me. The previous incident the night before has made me a little bit ancy. “I know you were walking funny.”

“I will be fine, thanks.”

Even if I did not trust Ellen, I still wished we had met Ellen in any other circumstance, other than this.

It was your atypical date, but something.

... She was the wolf, and I was the sheep. --

The Queen Under The World

She remembered how she would be led down the wrong alleyways looking for French folk music, sometimes running across things that were technically Cajun in sound. When she listened to some of these, it was somewhat understandable how some of these would be mostly forgotten; many of them sounded more annoying than charming. It was difficult for herself to find time to journal, do to the time she spent listening to Pedro Gene instead. Her favorite song was Camarao a Gosto, about the only context she would listen to the banjo. Instead she preferred listening to a mixture of La Meiso Japanaise et La Furamenko in most other contexts. She imagined robot girls with large flowers in their hair, letting them ride her like show ponies down the track of pillows on the bed. And in this bed, she dreamed of walking through abandoned city alleyways, with libraries whose windows let to different locations in each of their books.

One location was the New Mexico desert, and the other the Cathedrals of Alsace, blending rather than having a clear learn where one ended and the other suddenly stopped. She ate Filet Mignon with Soy Wine Coffee sauce, and disliked the halls of paintings that filled the restaurant the night before. But tomorrow would be loud music in the halls, thus she needed to go to bed soon. She went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Bonne nuit for silent nights.

She dreamed of rows of forest trees, swaying in the breeze; she dreamed of midnight elves wandering the stones. In the silence of the trees, one could hear others voices in the night, like an ultra realistic virtual reality headset. She wanted to make a bet with herself, how much longer till the drop; her life was not a one stop shop, or anything else: it was the flow of blood down the cheeks flowing down forever.

Tip toes in the darkness under the late sunset, corpses laying down upon the floor under the layers of snow. Raining down from the sky, the ash from the once magical volcano, piling like layers of blood on the floor. This is not the pages of a never ending story or a children’s fantasy novel, but the torn sheets of the book of life. Cutting through the dreams like a dulled utility knife; griswire nonchalantly tied together in knots. All the time in the hidden pit under the Earth filled with ancient circuitry; all the thousands of years under the ground she slept, and waiting for mankind to reemerge. And yet she feels as if but a distant memory under the forsaken Earth.

-- Mecirigato, comyatte eswa’cere?

-- Da rien.

Two differently languages flowing together like a distant cassette recording by technology that has since evolved into something well beyond after the couple of thousands of years under the ground. Dangling about like a cyborg puppet, hoping not to hang by her neck, fragile like porcelain. Yet even other dolls point the finger at her shame; shame for her appearance, shame for not revealing the hidden child that lay within. Yet the midnight wires brightened that very little bit of day the remained inside the deepest pit of he heart. She had once been a gamer, and yet had been reduced merely to a previously recorded JRPG session, played on a holodeck during the year of 2023. At the time they thought the Earth would no live past the year 2020, and yet somehow it hung on by a thread. But at time she wondered if this was perhaps for the best.

Yet now with her fangs sharper than blades that could cut through metal, she waits for the next robot to take apart in her ancient lab, reusing it part of herself, yet being careful to upload the consciousness into scanned brain of its formal innocuousness. She remembered the lines from an ancient poem back when the vague memory of the United States was still a thing:

Le beze dekimasu ka? Poniurto la fille amovo oirterru le beze. Eso le frere amovo oirterru le souer, dekimasu ka? Arimasu ka le beze poniurto nousil et nouselle, Dekimasu ka, arimasu ka?

Ponuirto quoni le beze eswa en le jean déchiré, Ponuirto quoni le beze eswa en la jupe déchiré, Poniurto quoni le beze eswa poniurto vous.

Le beze dekimasu ka? Poniurto la fille amovo oirterru le beze. Eso le frere amovo oirterru le souer, dekimasu ka?

Permanently secured by hashing rather than encryption, the only way to know the data being present was some long sense forgotten password, and its knowledge imprinted into her subconscious matrix. In the outside world is medieval peasant, yet under this Earth she rests waiting to come to the surface. She had once been called Hemato, yet not was merely an Ice Queen, scattered into dust, whose memories remained as some obscure illusion on secret networks once known only to different anarcho-espionage sectors of the intelligence world. Floating in a realm of binary streams, she falls off the edge into her own personal madness, hoping that she still had in her to find a way out.

Even if it was some vague hope.

At least it was better than dope.

My Life As An Adult Teenager At A Robot Science Fare

The skyline was paved with Smyrna roads, and pyramids double the size of the tallest Trump tower. Binary raining down from the sky in Neon Lime and Purple. Where the old Native America lands were, where I could repent for modernization, I could dump all my modern technology in my back yard, and run away from home and become part of my Cherokee tribe. This had always been my dream. Instead I’m left wondering why I live in this new city, now renamed merely a subdivision of NashChat.

I simply wanted a robot girlfriend.

Smyrna wasn’t quite the same suburban neighborhood, by the time my sister invented age reversion therapy. By the time I turned thirty two, I had completed complete gender transition, and considered getting a degree as a computer science engineer. When I was visit my old town, I’d note how much it had grown into something closer to a city over the last decade, leaving to wonder if I accidentally stepped into a time machine, and didn’t realize it. This was the story of an age reversion I thought was interesting at the time, and I suppose for the most part only left me reliving my high school years, in a much cheerier contextaroo.

I visited her one night, while she discussed some of the underlying issues of being able to make oneself look sixteen again.

-- So, are you telling me? In theory mom and dad could make me look like a high school junior again? I asked, if you heard it, I’m not sure that you would believe it either. At the time I thought even the idea of aliens landing on my backyard was closer to the truth. -- But what if people really think I’m actually sixteen?

-- You can tolerate a few swats right?

-- What do you mean by that?

-- Well your face would finally match your maturity, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind putting back in high school classes for the rest of the century.

Even as a teenager, I had dreamed of having immortality. Even if it wasn’t quite in this context. I especially didn’t want to go back to high school in my old suburban playground. Although it was matter than going back to being educated in Blackman High School. But the first few weeks after my therapy, my dream of secondary education was replaced with the genuine terror that I was legitimately being sent back to high school. While it wasn’t quite someone’s execution, in my mind it didn’t feel much different.

But this was better than being an artificial Toddler, learning the beginnings of Lojban and sign language. And the few first month past by as if the school didn’t really know my age. Technically you could say this was fraud, but I never had much of a voice in the family anyway. But at night I still listened to the flow of Japanese Flamenco, rendered from different Latin American countries. As my dreams faded to black.

The next morning, I was sent to the principles office, and all the staff was there to give me wild applause. I would have thought it was because I managed to fool them about my age.

-- We’ve been watching your grades rise over the school year. It’s all thanks to this science project you’ve been working on. Who knew that the formula for Artificial General Intelligence, was AGI = K^C. We’ve be producing robot high school girls in no time, at light speed.

I wasn’t quite sure why the Principle wanted to do that.

But sometimes life could be like that, flowing meaningless down Purgatory as if it were a river of flames. And ones old wish turned against you, as your mind give up some of your old desires. Only to be able to have your desires congratulated for you at the speed of an executioner’s ax. As she dreams of themselves climbing up at stair case, being tied to a board, lowered, and beheaded.

Instead I was back in my old body, and I called my sister up to ask why the age reversion therapy wore out.

-- Are you smoking pot again?

-- That’s not how pot works OK!

-- By the way, how’s your robot project going?

I looked at my desk, and upon is was my science fare reward, and on the side was my on non software programmed robot girl, with Chia Pet grown hair. -- It’s going, she’s right at my desk.

-- Cool I’d like to see.

I wasn’t sure if my mind was playing tricks on me, or if in fact I had already been back to high school, and it simply flowed so quickly, while I dreamed of girls with flowers in their hair, and soft guitar playing. While I could focus my life on my real desires again.

My cybernetic pixie dream girl.

Flowing like old tap dance.

Goodnight Auburn Hair

It was never easy for her to remember things.

On most days she was caught in the middle of so many conversations, it was almost like people were speaking in a completely different language; “Je amovo oirterru un baguette.” a customer set at the town square. It was so rare these days to hear the old language, as they had slowly began to use English again after all these decades of misery. If one could rewind the clock in the sky, it was easy to see how things got to that point. America had already begun to fragment, into miniature countries as numerous as sands on the coast, some merging into other micro-nations during the two civil wars. The language of the period having a permanent effect on English. Une nouselles es coupe en la guillotine gun en jupe terne. Her severed head flies into the city street. When she had originally seen such things for the first time, this tended to effect her much more, but it had become something of an every day occurrence when the militarized police came and cleaned up the mess; this wasn’t the old American government, but such mixture of privatized police and unofficial incorporated government; it was more like there was not a government, but agreed upon social contracts that kept people from shooting each other in the back of the neck with an angular blade. The girl whom bought a baguette, climbed the clock tower and would sometimes sit on the railing, letting her wooden shoes hang off the side, shaking her legs. The moonlight bathed her image like porcelain paintings, exposing her cleavage and small chest.

“You shouldn’t be up here” said a security guard. Reaching out his hand, he helped her climb down. “A young lady like you, she be working as an accountant somewhere. Life is to good to loose someone like you.”

“But you don’t know me.”

“More than you might realize.”

At home she would rest by the window on her couch, and let the alley cats that climbed the wooden alleyway walls climb into her window, whom would choose to sleep with her as she napped an extended nap. She would dream of the time when she would go to the grocery store with her pere, and how she had almost nabbed a alley cat noir, whom she had once met at the pet store, but managed to get away. The alley cat would sometimes visit her in her adulthood, usually at midnight. And walk around the pentagram painted on her floor boards. Tonight Elle dreamed of Death Valley deserts and moose skeletons, washed away by the tides of the sea. Elle, because her father never gave her a name. Elle, because it was Elle whom she always wanted to be, and not Elles. The midnight hallways echo quietly.

And the sounds of the old spirits that deck the hollies with misery, and occasionally morning biscuits and gravy, would screech about how sometimes they accidentally burn the biscuits. But when she would hear them she would always reassure them that such biscuits tasted just fan, with the omulettes that they also serve at sunrise.

Goodnight green eyes.

Goodnight light auburn hair.

At home Madomoazele would hoard all the children’s dolls that she was given when she was but a small lass, those made out of the finest of porcelain. At times she wondered what it would be like to be a doll. For me to be a doll, it seemed like there was no problems in the world, whether that was constantly being doted on by little sisters. She remembered her little sister, whom was the prettiest of all the dolls, with the finest of wooden shoes; she was not particularly beautiful, but had a cuteness that made it easy for her to find days, from her blond hair in contrast to the folds in her eyes, and the dimples in her smile. It was easy to see how she would often have opportunities to give blowjobs to guys she liked, although often they were busy doing guy things.

Madomoazele rarely got to see her sister when they were still in high school, but one night she simply never heard from her again. Until, one day she got a mail order at her door, and it was her little sister, in the form of a porcelain doll, that wore similar shaped wooden shoes, with it constantly locked into the smile she had when she would watch Japanese horror movies. -- Is that the face you sucked your boyfriends off with? The living sister asked.

-- That’s not a polite thing to ask. The doll said.

Madomoazele Elle would carefully keep her in the closet, liked some unused toy that no child would ever play would, but would take her out to read her bedtime stories. Whether it was The Brother’s Grim or Albert Camus. She found his views on capital punishment were what allowed her to sleep at night, because there was at least one Frenchman that was against the death penalty. And yet she had inherited difficulties sleeping from her parents; her sister seemed to have gotten only the good genes. While Madomoazele only inherited nouselles jean terns. For this, she would always be jealous by her sister’s smoking outfit, when she would go to the movies.

When she slept, she dreamed of falling from her apartment building, as a porcelain doll. And when she hit the ground she shattered. She woke up breathless, and found that she no longer saw her doll in the form of her little sister Adelinette. Whom had mysteriously moved into the kitchen, laying down on the floor, with her head snapped off of her body. To think that that was how such a doll would end up, simply that of a broken toy.

She dreamed of a guillotine, with her be escorted into the town square, with wooden clogs on her feet, and being instructed to kneel on her knees. The lock of the guillotine gun closing; the trigger pulled, and her severed head flying in slow motion, then it rolling around on the pavement. Until it reached the boots of the guard that she had met when she climbed the clock tower.

When she woke up, she found that everything weighed her down; she saw herself carrying around an anvil to Church, and every other thing that she needed to do during the day. And in the rest of her life was only silence. That evening, she met the black cat that would come visit her in the evening, that would always snuggle with her on the couch. And she snuggled it as tightly as she ever has in her life. Because she knew that she could get her little sister, the broken doll on the kitchen floor fixed.

She woke up the next morning on the vanity table, holding hands with her sister, and together they snuggled on there, and they would fly to the ceiling on their wires. Because they were no longer weighed down by life.

Le vie poniurto Madomoazele, the doll out of time.

The Gambits: We Are The Parasites

Samantha

Frequently mother would purchase a lot of pre-packaged pasta in bulk, in order to stock up for the war. My parents were swimming in debt as a result, for the price of food had gone up over the last months prior. They would bankrupt their credit cards, bought a new one to keep us fed, so we could have the clothes on our backs, and other things considered to be "bare basics".

At dinner time, mother would frequently make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. We would get tired of it as a result.

"Don't play with your pasta Jkovo." My father fussed, while mother was to busy sticky her nose in a romance novel to pay attention to the noodles being tossed across the table into our fine china cabinet. However father would frequently want to bring up other issues, to mothers dismay. Jkovo did not seem to care one way or the other.

"There have been three casualties in the war so far. Have you heard about this one guy that got awards in-" Father began to say before he was cut off by mother.

"Shut up, Harold." Mother said.

"Can it, this is important news."

"Maybe so but," mother began to say then put her book down, and gave father a scowling face., and then she added "but we don't need to gross out the children, they need to eat as much as they can so the can concentrate on schoolwork. You want Jkovo to college right? And what about Samantha, you want her to remain a star student right?"

"I'm 17 mom, I think I'll be fine." Jkovo chimed in.

"If your 17, act like it by not slinging meatballs at me." Father said.

"That's enough Harold. apparently he can't help himself." Mother said.

"Well that's true!" Father said.

"Fuck you dad!"

"No Fuck you!"

"Lets just all eat silently." I proposed, although everyone else just laughed it off.

"So Sammy, are you still having a hard time with Ruby?" Father asked, though he probably new what the answer would be. Every since the beginning of the school year, me and her kind of had issues. Though it had gotten worse.

"May I talk about it after dinner?" I requested.

"Sure, just know that if she is hurting you, I can beat her up for you." father said. I asked if I could be excused, and then I went to bed to make last minute correction on my math and science.

The next morning, my older brother poured a bucket of water over me to wake me up for school just like I asked.

"Thanks Jkovo!" I said, and gave him a hug of which he chuckled.

Over the past two weeks, I had the tendency to sleep in late and miss the bus. I had to rush to school. At least the school was only about a mile away, unlike a lot of the students that went to Saunacreek Elementary.

When I walked from class to class when the bell rang to go to sixth period, I hurried up to go to the restroom so that I can avoid Ruby, and get to class on time, of which my efforts were in vain. It was no uncommon for Ruby to be slightly mean, but these past two weeks had been the worst. The week before she picked me up, and threw me head first into the bathroom wall. I carefully tried to avoid her, but it was no use. I was pushed to the floor again, and then I was picked up, and thrown head first into the bathroom wall once again. Honestly I'm surprised my grades have not suffered much more than they had, you would think I would have gotten brain damage.

And then the bell rang. "See ya baby." Ruby said, in contradiction to how she treated me. I waited until Ruby left the restroom, and finally got the chance to use the restroom. On those two days I got a tardy slip because I was to afraid to come to class. I did not want to cause any more trouble, and I certainly did not want any cute boys to see me red.

So I pulled myself up by my bootstraps once I got off the toilet, and then walked to class. Once I arrived, I was met with a pleasant surprise.

"Samantha, this is the second time you been late. I shall ask you the question I was going to ask Ruby. What is the capital of Wisconsin?"

"Madison" Ruby's girlfriend said before I had the chance to answer, of which Ruby gave her a high five.

"Although correct, Samantha needs to answer." The teacher said, and then Ruby stuck her tongue out at me. And then the bell rang, most the students left. But my teacher asked me to stay behind to answer a question, of which I was hesitant to answer.

"Why have you been late to class Sammy? You use to be punctual all the time." The teacher asked.

"If I said, how would I know I would not get in trouble for ringing about the exchange students?"

"You don't have to curse Sammy, you can feel safe to tell me anything. I know something is wrong. Both the day before, and today you came in looking beat up."

"And you still asked me the question, even though I looked like this?"

"I'm sorry."

I gave her a slight disgruntled look, and then told her "Before class, I was molested by Ruby and her girlfriend."

"Oh,...I see." The teacher said, she went ahead and sent me home, and was nice enough not to give me a detention. How would I have known that though?

Once I got home, and opened the door into the living room, I could see my dad watching the evening news, and could smell my mother cooking the usual meal for us to eat tonight.

"Oh hello honey, how was school." Father asked.

"It was OK, I guess." I said darting my eyes back and forth.

"Are you sure, did something happen at school again?"

"I said I'm fine!" I yelled at him, and then went to my room and slammed the door. My father knocked on my door gently to ask if I was OK.

"Could I have a moment to myself please?" I asked.

"Sure." Father said, and then went back to watching the evening news.

The next day at school when I arrived in class, I found a letter directed to me in my desk. I had no idea who sent the letter to me, maybe a hot guy that was a little shy to tell me to my face. I knew I had to hide it, to I quickly put it in my backpack until lunch.

As I sat at the lunch table and began to eat my lunch, I packed for myself, I took my letter I had out of my backpack. I carefully tore it open, and read the contents:

Dear Samantha,

By the time you get this letter,

you only have twenty four hours till

I'm going to kill you, say your prayers.

Sincerely,

Ruby

I looked at the letter, and then wondered who wrote it. I then proceeded to finish my lunch, keeping a close eye on my surroundings. Once I got back into class, I asked the teacher if I could talk to her privately outside the classroom, because I was scared that who ever wrote the letter would hear me.

"What's wrong Sammy, you look pale, and you're crying."

"I think Ruby sent me a death threat. See, it matches her hand writing."

"Wait what? I'll take this up with the vice principal right away."

I thought:

Hook, line, and sinker.

Its gone perfectly, Rudy is going

to be gone in no time.

When I got home, I was able to finally relax with a feeling of accomplishment. Although dinner was the same as always, because of the mood I was in, it felt fresh and new. There was nothing like the smell of Victory and Tomato Sauce.

The next morning, I found that my father watching the morning news, and Jkovo was oddly intense.

"What is going on dad, and Jkovo, why did you not drive to school yet?" I asked.

"We are going to have to move to a different neighborhood. The school you guys use to go to was blown up by the northern army. We received a relocation notice in the mail" My father said.

"I wonder if my teacher is OK."

"I hate to have to tell you this Sammy, but I think she died in the explosion. When I drove by the school around 3:00 A.M, your teachers car was oddly enough still there. If she was still there, I think she died in the explosion." Father told me. I wondered why she would still be there, she normally left right after. I frequently have a substitute because of her health problems. I reflected back to when I first had my conversations with her. There was the conversation were I first told her what was going on:

"You don't have to curse at me Sammy, you can feel safe to tell me anything. I'm your friend."

"Your only paid to be my friend." Was my final words to her, and then I ran out of the classroom.

In another conversation, I reflected back to when I told her about the letter I received from Ruby.

"What's wrong Sammy, you look pale, and you're crying."

"I think Ruby sent me a rape threat. See, it matches her hand writing."

"Wait what? I'll take this up with the vice principal right away."

I wanted to use the leader as get out of school of the heat of school bus pass, so that Ruby, and her girlfriend would no longer beat me up, throw me to the wall.

But now I wonder if I did the right thing. After all the teacher was truly asking out of concern, I realize that now.

It was the next month after I lost my teacher in the explosion. For whatever reason, it took me a while to process that she was gone from my life forever. Had I gotten away with setting up my bully Ruby to go to an alternative school? The night felt more chilly. My parents had gotten a new air conditioning unit. All the months of hot weather being no different inside and in have suddenly come to an end. Something to celebrate.

Jkovo finally figured out to stop throwing meatballs at me at dinner, and I was no longer the most mature person in the house. But I was still the only one, quiet as a mouse. Yet another comfort, perhaps. "So how was school." my mother asked. I wasn't sure what answer to give her, the war was still going on even in the north.

I played with my spaghetti with my fork. "It was fine, a little boring. I met a new friend today." I smiled a smile I had not had in along time.

"Your not dating boys are you?" mother asked, well of course she would assume that. But that was not it at all. She gave me a cross looking, telling me I should eat my food. Of which I merely stared.

"Oh nah. A new friend of me and Susie, name's Rachel." Father looked me and my brother's mother, and tilted his glasses forward. "She played a flute at lunch today." A sound of music, I had not heard in months.

I'd soon come to find out, in other circumstances that her flute was broken by her head maid at the orphanage. And that was the last sound, of tender and soft music. I said that I could buy her flute, Rachel took the pressure off. But when Susie offered, at that point she couldn't refuse.

Next week, she got a new one. "My old one was a gift from my mother." she said, as if her mother were one of the victims in the war." Then placed it between her lips, "But I can remember her with this."

Then played the flute all afternoon.

Months came and went.

It is a cold midnight hour. Always midnight, the window glass shatters into the wind. The road, mostly abandoned, sang a song of a distant time, when cares along the intersections were still busy from rush hour traffic. The ghosts of another time wander the planet. Where is mommy? Where is Daddy? Or Jkovo? I wonder where Susie and Rachel have ran off to. It's so cold Mommy, those parasite men want to feel around along my bones.

I need a new dress. Two holes that form into eyes, remind me that you forgot to sew my dress. I wonder if Susie and Rachel are in a bomb shelter together. After Susie's dad was arrested by the dream-scanners, the regular cops said she and her little brother didn't have to live with him anymore since her mother died. And Rachel, she must be playing her new flute somewhere. I have an old story book, read to me when I was small. The story of the young shadow, along seen on the wall. At times I felt like the shadow on the wall, and other times not as noticeable. I remember the last time we fought together, and it was over spaghetti. Jkovo still never grew any manors, and now in my twentieth year, I wonder where he is.

I no longer see anyone I know.

Jkovo

I don't care what you think, I'll eat spaghetti however I want. Even if that means throwing them at Sammy at dinner after school. I suppose I am getting older, but it still brings back good times. When I first started dating, I never had the incentive to spaghetti fight.

However now the bombs are tossed at us like meatballs at a dinner table. And we are the ground chuck. Why did I have to listen to my mom this time? I never listened to her opinion before. The city lights in the arcade district only glow at just the right hours, then its closing time. Me and Liana had only dated briefly, and my previous girlfriend more brief than that. Although the previous date was not really a date, but a chance to conjoin and masturbate. Joining end to end, like user encryption, are bodies were tied together like four square ciphers. Rows of random letters disjointed, the flow of counting up to. Stop, and life starts all over again.

"Don't forget to brush your teeth." she said.

"Shut up bitch, you're not mother." I said.

"I suppose you're right."

The biggest mistake of my life, those exact words. Though I didn't realize that at the time. Now I gently close my sweet hearts eyes, trying not to cry. I never liked the idea of crying in public, though the current situation has given me no choice. For me girl who at the speed of bang, lost her voice. Lost her life, lost everything but the memory of her. And now I run out of time. I am running to out run the triangular craft from the Southern district, their pace matching their desire for revenge. They burn building, the skin they singe. And like monkeys we fall to dust. I carefully hide in the public library, and read the last message Samantha sent to me.

"Jkovo, where are you? Come home. Everyone is missing you."

But I didn't want to come home to anybody. I didn't want to come home with blood on my face. I purged the message from my USB drive, so in case I am ever captured by dream-scanners, they will not find anything of value. I had previously given administrator rights to Lian, yet now I have nobody besides family to converse to securely. The electro-magnetic biological bombs already struck the lower Northern Colonies, and now it was simply a matter of time before they would strike us. I've never been so terrified in my life, and yet I must face my masters. Yet I respect no masters, not even my own mother. Not even to save my life. I wish I didn't listen to my mother, I should have stayed home to be by Sammy's side. Perhaps my girlfriend's life would have been saved, as she never wanted to leave my side.

And yet now as she is buried in rubble, and my beard all a stubble, I long to be in unacknowledged paradise again. A paradise of milk and money, beyond the meadow of gold. A paradise where the war was over, and we can wear normal shoes again, and eat normal food. Yet these desires fade daily, the war ever growing longer. I had briefly thought of enlisted in the Southern army, though this was before we had moved up North. Yet now as I'm being fired at by Adam's forces, I regret the idea, and denying even ever entertained it.

I remembered the last few nights I spent with Lian, telling her that poetry was suppose to rhyme. Ever after, she began to not pay as much attention to her grades. Even less than I did. At one point I offered to help with her homework, but she said it was Algebraic equations, and said it was probably over my head.

"Look, sorry about the"

"Don't worry about it, want to the arcade?"

"Sure, what kind of pizza."

"Whatever you want."

I offered to listen to more of a poetry, gave some suggestions for improvement. I even mentioned different rhyme schemes. Some of which she seemed to wonder why bother even calling them rhymes at all. I told her about interior rhymes. She told me about different eastern poetry forms that didn't rhyme at all. We exchanged verses, exchanged thematic curses. We exchanged till closing time, all to disjointed rhyme.

Yet between us, there was only us.

Yet now as I wait for death, as I wait for paradise, I want to be reunited with Lian, who taught me how to not rhyme in verse. Me and her meeting was not a curse, it was a match I didn't deserve. For once I could admit, I got served. And in this USB disk I send an ciphered message, I send it to mom. A message I wasn't sure whether I really felt, but something I always felt an obligation to say. And if I die tonight, by bombs tossed like spaghetti and meatballs, I can smile for my girlfriend's sake.

I sent her the message: XICMLISM.

XI-CM-LI-SM. I hear footsteps behind me.

They are marching closer.

Silhouette Man

With all the world's death. With all the world's death new world begins. The death of stars burning bright tonight, the universe feels that much emptier. Yet for I wandering alone in the dark, I hunt the rats. I hunt the roaches, and comb out the lice from unkempt hair.

This is the countdown to another life. The tale of a tomb unfilled, the story of a corpse brought back from the dead. This isn't the story of teen romance, or the story of girls having their tap dance at pretentious weddings. The story of the invisible one, playing with cards like others do video games. At least until the Southern army invaded my homeland, hope becoming fainter, and life thinning out. I had been a sickly child, whose mother died of radiation poisoning. I barely knew my father, like others in my circles of trust. Yet now as I have no eyes to see, and no ears to hear, I feel only dust. The cave was dark and damp, this I knew quite well. I never liked caves growing up, yet now as I wander into the endless darkness it is almost like being home again.

See into the mind of my remote pathology.

The pathology of the dead.

With two antenna, I route the coordinates. Mental noise, colors of what I once knew as red, green, and blue. Perhaps these might be telling me the coordinates to avoid. I am told there is a community of others like myself. Yet this hope is something I choose not to acknowledge. In the cave of the spider, in the cave of artificial light. In the cave of creatures destroyed by man's might. The room of men brainwashed to cleanse them of their guilt for their seven sins. These sins, a product of maniacal religion. The product of men with power complexes. The men who lop off the heads of heretics in times of old, the same sin that taunts the young. And breaks the bones of the olden. As the world bows toward its King.

I sense another voice, a voice of someone familiar. Someone who seems to have kept her humanity intact. I wish I could see her, I wonder what the world looks like. The world feels wet, the sounds permanently silent. I feel around the cave floor in order to reach the outside world, a land of desert briefly Terra formed by the original colonists that seeded our ancestors, the original humans. The original humans who fled from Earth, at first in order to expand to the farthest reaches of the stars. I

live in a world where radioactive rain burns my skin, yet my ability to regenerate has increased manifold since the time that I have been alive.

The world of mutated wolves.

The world of malfunctioning air vaults. And artificial oceans gradually becoming more shallow every thousands of years, at least until the world was swept under us by the great virus.

The virus' effects were initially subtle, and nothing like what you might imagine in zombie-holocaust novels. Our intelligence remained, while our energy was drained little by little. Until eventually we developed a new kind of energy, for sake of comparison it is like comparing matter to anti-matter. Our energy a new kind of anti-energy, motivated by some unknown family bond that bound us together. And yet there I was in the darkness, with no eyes to see. I wasn't sure what I was wearing. I was unsure of whether I was still wearing my dress. Rather the sound of groaning in the darkness, there was the sound of buzzing, buzzing, and more buzzing. The sound could drive one mad, until one got used to the communication.

The Civil War has created US. A war that split apart the original familial bond between Adam and Eve, the original cyborgs first resurrected and their limbs automated for the false-flag alien invasion on Earth. The King and the Queen, the Popette and her mistress King Adam. Black triangles filled the air of the second Earth, and I remembered as Samantha, me, and Susie tried to save as many people as we could from the infection, yet it was no use.

It was a new kind of self-abuse.

One would gradually be eaten alive by the virus. But then eventually one began to control the virus, and turn into a new breed of underground humanity. The humans that could survive radioactive sickness, and travel in the darkness. No longer was it the time of Guillotine Guns and beheading women on the spot. Now it was the world of perpetual fermentation of the self.

I reached the world of the outside, having not been to the outside world in so long. Within this world of radioactive rain, I follow a sense of someone that I had once known before. She was the one that had purchased me a flute, back when I lived in the orphanage and my mistress snapped my inherited flute in half. I had played the flute too loudly on that particular night. While the mistress was not one for collective punishment, she jerked the flute out of my hand.

And now as I reach her, she wonders what has happened to me. She comes over and hugs me. We embrace. I sense a man beside her.

"Do you remember me?"

"Samantha, thank you for the flute."

"What happened to your face, you look like a bug."

And behold, I put my hands on my face. I had no eyes, my fingers had suction cups. I traveled by sonar.

I was a Parasite.

"Do you recognize this man? Samantha whispered into my antenna."

"I cannot see him, yet I can sense him. He has a sinister presence." I said.

"He is who you remember, and yet he cannot even remember his name. He doesn't remember anything at all."

It was then that it suddenly dawned on me. They were referring to I, who was the man who had become so tainted by greed, yet still had the softness�of sympathy for our Queen Eve, had been reduced to the mind of a child. The person with no memory of their past.

Who had undergone my own trial. The trial of the seven sins.

I was Silhouette Man.

Somewhere in the world of a more peaceful planet, there�are civilizations not like our own. They have managed to achieve a peaceful civilization. Yet between us, we have become a new kind of entity. Not quite dead, not quite alive. A different realm of experience altogether.

The parasites of Sauna-Creek. Let this be a warning to those who wish to venture off into the stars: that the world is not for humanity. For when you stare into the universe, sometimes the universe consumes you, and turns you into a shadow of your former self. The shadow of what was once humanity.

We are the parasites.

Samantha

The gas stations were mostly completely empty of goods. In this town, called Sauna Creek, at times I here noises in the night. The sound of men, women, and children under the Earth. In my Boston Clogs, I slip one off to feel the Earth. Yet the ground is much to hot for my foot to bare. I pick the rocks out of my foot, and then try to find someone here I can talk to. I was never one for dialogue, although that doesn't change the fact that dialogue would be nice about now. Yesterday I met a strange man, yet he has not yet come back for me. I could barely see who he was, all I knew was that he wore a black jump suit, and had the most red of eyes you would ever see. In my minds eyes, I see spaceships that fill the sky heading toward domes. During the war, there was a young woman named Eve the man in the black suit would always comment on, and how he was always concerned about her recovery.

Yet I have never seen this woman. She may not even exist, like Big Brother in classic dystopia novels written centuries previously. I am hungry, I am tired. And I want to cry, yet my eyes will not let me. I dream of grabbed pussies, and sexual harassment by my school bully ... and yet somehow I don't think she survived the electro-magnetic nuclear explosions. And severed heads that lined the street with gold. The life of the planet wide Civil War between north and south. The Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans populated the side of the sun. And the Europeans, including the French and the Dutch, populated the side of the American colonists. Yet nobody there is nobody left to talk to me. I am as invisible as I ever was.

I here somebody, a girl perhaps. She scratches and feels around the cave, which I have visited searching through abandoned laboratories, where super soldiers underwent the Trail Of The Seven Tears, a mind control experiment where the seven deadly sins are cleansed from their life. I here a banging in a cell room, a giant figure with a stitched mouth reaches his hand out for me. In my mind I dreams of unicorns and fairies in distant kingdoms.

A better life than here.

I am only dust. Silence has won.

I wake up in an abandoned house, not remembering how I got. There was the man again whom seem concerned about my well being. Does he not realize that I know who he is? He was the one that ordered the explosions of the electro-magnetic biological weapons. And yet now he seems so different. It's almost as if he no longer remembers my name. He wonders why I don't answer his question, "Have you seen this man. He is a security guard for MK 731."

MK 731 was a merger between Unit 731 and MK Ultra. As black as the black budget related to aliens from other star systems, was designed to mind control people along with infected people with retro-viruses that distributed LSD, their mind permanently altered from repeated forced ingestions. But it had other strange effects, yet I was immune from its destruction.

I am not a parasite.

I am human.

It's been a few months since he helped me learned to read. My fears about him have somewhat subsided, but there is still that burning feeling inside me, that somehow he is worse than the parasite men that surround me. I am on guard at all times around him, despite the love of him kissing my neck.

"Why don't you say anything?" he said.

I had no words for him, he killed many people. Any amount of sympathy I had for the man do to his amnesia, was mired by the all the deaths he was responsible during the war that caused me to have to move from my home town in the Southern Slipstream town along the tidally locked planet. Moving from one side of the desert world to the other side was bad enough dealing with moving away from old friends, some of which would never make it to move up North, but even in the new life I could not quite get used to the culture. Even with Susie and Rachel. And now as I wait nights until he comes home, it takes all the strength I have not murder him with an ax. And yet he seems different around those they play at innocence. I continue this game, partially to play with his heart. But also he's the only company I've got.

I communicate words from time to time in his secure Zero Liability Mail. I'm not exactly certain who he is worried about breaking in. It's not like anybody besides the parasite men will come in and watch us as he reads me story books, my favorite story group I had kept since the end of the war. While he was company for me, he was also a lethal general. With Eve the queen of the Colonists of the North, and Adam the King of the colonists to the South, the man ordered a purge of Southern Colonists that migrated to the new school district.

And now as I wait for sunlight, I sleep.

He caresses me and kisses me as I weep.

It was to hard to speak up for myself for my own good, and yet as he put in a magazine to load up his shotgun, as he fired the bullets the armor piercing rounds seemed to bounce off the parasite men. I was torn between him defending me, and me knowing the truth, that he was the alien, and now we.

I embrace the new colonist.

The man from the stars.

I went with him to visit the cave he was interested in, that I had visited earlier. And then I found out the truth, not only did Susie disappear into those ruins from years ago. She became just like those monster, the government Parasite Men.

Susie was home.