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Ancient Device From Two Centuries Prior

PAGE FOUR

Ana-Lina The Unluckiest

Saucepans, Apple Jars, Candle Wax. In morning one dines upon the flax. The girl asked of her current dating life, says to her brother: “Hey! It’s non of your bees wax.”

The brother tosses o’er the table, the girl flees to the horses stable. And into the barn she hides beyond the door.

As the brother seeks to find her, he trips upon the muddy slick floor. His head is kicked in by the horses onto the floor. Here lies the little brother, who should have known better than to ask about a girl’s dating habits. Instead he is asleep on the floor. But this story is not about her little brother. But the little girl, who hated started taking classes along with the boys. By the nature of her hair cut, the boys can stare at her but.

They are able to, yet choose to not. As she can carry the weight of three of them, and can just manage to dozen. She had once tossed one back onto the bridge to save him from drowning, and despite the initial broken leg, could not make himself hate her as otherwise he would have been a goner.

There were visitors to their barn, and she went out to see us careful not to slip in her two little sabots, after ripping open her cotton cap. A little cop cap she had inheritor from her mother, whose head had rolled into a basket just a few month previously. Her mother said she acquired many things from her, and she hoped that having her neck cut through and her bleed out would not be a fate shared by her. Even if she had plans of her own.

Yet her name was Ana-Lina. Ana-Lina the unluckiest.

After the fight with her brother, she was taken to live with her aunt for a little while. Here she can continue her basic education here. Her brother, though never one to be birched or paddled, would have preferred being spanked instead of the extra days of hard labor on the farm. But the little Ana-Lina, that could carry twelve, had just reached this very age. And she saw the world with a kind of glow, inconsistent with her upbringing.

If you were to put her on a boat, although the sailors would otherwise toss one in a barrel into the sea, she would be spared and sent back home on a bi-plane instead, and if the planed crashed her charisma could win the hearts of cannibalistic mermen before their sea race melts into a pile of foam. Though she could easily have these adventure in her head, as ones head could contain an entire universe to behold.

So the first few nights were not hard to stay quite, and as long she only quietly ate snacks at night being in a kind of half way awake and sleep state. At night outside of the window she would be greeted by the scare crows and other gothic farm animals, who had a particular penchant for her blood.

So here she found home.

Here she stood.

One night, she went outside to feel the breeze, despite it being much past her bedtime. In the horizon she would see the edge of the next century where cyborgs soldiers and binary hologram skies glow in the night across Time Mountain. She wanted to visit the city on the edge of the next century, where she had some slight hope of a promise of a better life.

She had not met Nadine, Vella, and Mr. Clocktime. And so she had no idea of this being merely some sort of false promise. She only wanted to see a new world. Some world where mothers would not lose their heads to blades of cruelty, and people her age would not be birched by their care givers.

So she packed her backs, left her worn dress in the cabinet, and wore her two little sabots into the new world. There was no point in staying here, as the boys and girls shad had had feelings for had probably already forgotten her existence.

Ana-Lina was unsure of where she wanted to go in life, and hoped that she could make a future illustrating in charcoal. Though one could not make much money doing art. She would sell to those girls her age, and the vampire old farts that still somehow managed to look fifteen despite their centuries of age. One of which she met acquaintance with on the morrow.

She the vampire girl, though dressed similar in time period, could juggle with the skill and finesse as if she had practiced this long before the time of the Revolutions. And the only other revolutions were the circular motions her colored balls made that were dyed with imported coloring from across Time Mountain. For Time Mountain held many secrets, one only the few could brave to cross. So many give up their journey, give into their life in the previous century. And are guillotined on the morrow after eating the French precursor to pizza as their last meal while cooking in a French kitchen for Bourgeoisie. But Ana-Lina had not intention for this to be her fate, despite her years of trauma from her past.

Je Attraper Un Papillon, then it flew away. She tried to follow the butterfly into the next world.

She fell asleep. Then woke up in the next century. Unlike her own time period, it was almost night. There were no Gothic animal kin to come out tonight. There was only the tune of slow orated Folk Jazz beyond the rows of city-lights. No more night terrors, only the dreams of a better future. Only the hope that perhaps someday she could find a new family.

Instead things turned out differently. The Barbershops saw a new girl to rob, and they left for her only the clothes on her back and the clogs on her feet. And her sketch pad and charcoal, because at the time they did not consider her drawings with selling. But she was just glade to be alive. She hung out by the city dump can, and then realized she had no money.

She tried to take an apple.

A dream-scanner found her, and shot her in the back of the neck with a Guillotine Gun.

Now Ana-Lina the unluckiest.

She carries her head into Purgatory Road, longing for some doctor to treat her. She finds out about a service that can regrow heads on the vat. And she she purrs like a cat, cleans herself.

And sleeps during the night.

She rolls over on her belly fat.

“The poor girl is lucky to be alive, well I can see what I can do. But I can promise a full recovery. But I can find a family for her, after she gets a new body.” the voice said.

An anonymous doctor.

“Je apport l’eau.” she said, the only one in the bar unable to drink l’alcool. Despite all the effort of reaching across the moment, she was still to young to drink. The drinking age, though considerably lower than in the US, was still quite large for Ana-Lina. She had gotten a habit of drink specialized wine coolers, geared in such as way as to not fry the circuitry for cyborgs, those rebuilt from significant injuries.

For Ana-Lina, she was more machine than girl. She at times still wished she had her original body. But the time had gone that machines could not reproduce, although if that were the only reason one enjoyed them self that would be a sad life indeed. She missed her noble steed she kept in the barn, and here she was now in the future where the only horses were reconstructions in crap Westerns made in the style of the French instead of the Italians. As well as a minor taste for the Irish-American.

You couldn’t walk far before someone shoots you in the back of the neck, and your head used for village gate furnishing spiked on top of a spear. This happened to one of her favorite characters, who had been known to collect girls just her age. And for herself, she loved when the bad guys got caught. It was later half of the entire circumstance that wasn’t her favorite. It reminded her to much of how she herself had almost died being shot in the back of the neck. And how the only chance for dating was in the world of cyberspace.

Yet cyberspace had taken a particularly subtle turn, being quite unlike the world of hard electronics and machine level language of yesteryear. You could wake up and fall back to sleep, and the level of the dream world was such that each aspect seemed like it’s own level of existing reality. You could collapse onto the floor in a failed basketball match, and only feel a slight vibration in the back of the skull.

But her desires for other things.

She wanted to fly again in a bi-plane, even though for her there was no chance she would ever go back home. She wanted how she had not been reported as dead. And yet the trip to the future was like a permanent means of escape by outlaws, with the drawback of never being able to go back to where you came from.

You could eventually used to the more complicated world of the twenty first century, but there was nothing like home.

Nothing like the home of being birched in the bottom, and getting you head decapitated in a guillotine. The only difference now was that the guillotines had achieved a kind of mobile cell phone like portability. Here lies that childhood that could have been, here lies the childhood that could have rotted and turned to dust. Here lies the chance for a normal youth.

One that should have ended at the firing of a Guillotine Gun blade. Previously invented after the start of the fourth world war, its used had been expanded again to lesser crimes beyond murder, at first to conspiracy to

commit murder. But eventually this further expanded to the crime of stealing food.

She stumbled upon a new era.

The era of corporate decapitation.

“Vou bavarder to much.” she said, a friend that was unsure where she went. She wanted to show her her new juggling trick, from apples she stole from the local food markets behind the back of a shop keeper she had earned the trust from. Ana-Lina feared her friend would be the next one to go. To the beat of a tin drum. The beat of marching boot steps of militarized police. To the surveillance of dream-scanners. For Ana-Lisa, she merely wanted to be home.

Yet home was so far away.

Most nights are spent sleeping along the wall in silence. One can hear many things in the midnight’s silence. The little salted crackers one eats, is only a temporary filling for ones emptiness.

We all have stories to tell. Yet for some among the crowd, one questions whether others want to hear their story. I dread being around others, as–at least in my head–I perceive that others feel likewise. One eat the unleavened bread of saltines partially to feed myself, to pass the time. A merely reflect on the things that have happened before.

This isn’t a work of fiction or a work of fact, it is a recollection of things recounted for tact. Yet some things can only partially by tactfully said. The rhyme of life has unpredictable rhythmic structure, one eyes fall out of their skull and with a pencil they puncture the bulbs till they bleed. And then there is nothing left by the bloody mess that was once your eyes. For ones eyes can only see so little in their life; their life, their story. Their story of complete build up to despair.

Things trickle on wayward into a distant sea, into a distant Earth. Where only the fairies and elves of times gone remain in the memories through classic tomes of ages long past. For myself I question at times whether it is worth speaking of myself, and depending on places you hear of me you may find a multitude of different stories, yet for me I am only myself. I can only ever be me, and yet for the scribe of time sometimes society puts on you a greater burden than you desire. Your spirit, your whole existence.

Rather than to merely recollection, as I’ve done before, I want you as the reader to try to imagine yourself as somebody.

Don’t think about why you are there, don’t think about how society may perceives you as an individual. I want you to simply imagine yourself walking up a flight of stairs. Though the stairs are short, they travel seems long. Imagine a guard grabbing you by the wrist, and then trimming your hair. Then you are strapped to a board, and then your neck is placed in a lunette. You don’t know why you are here today, only that apparently you did a very very bad thing.

You then see a basket. Sensitive to noise, the drum beat startles you, causing you to yelp and cry. You see piles of other heads, and then your final descent unfolds.

The blade falls down.” the girl said, from the edges of Ana-Lina’s dreams.

Ana-Lina had not considered what it would be like for herself to be placed in a guillotine, and she only remembers feeling a sharp pain suddenly when she was shot in the back of the neck. Yet at nights she has dreams of the death of her mother, who was the only one that really loved her, others simply tolerated her, or treated as some piece of furniture on the stairs to simply place somewhere else. Or slightly better, a family dog to be kicked.

Perhaps cruelty was something that was passed down through the family line. Or, if one believed in a creator entity, something of divine order. But Ana-Lina felt something worse, and it was far subtler than the feeling of eternal damnation, the feeling of being abused by her brethren.

It was the totality of it all.

The feeling of lack of memory.

A speck of dust since her fall. This was her story, her life. Her complete feeling of lack of purpose.

Her lack of everything.

“And why should I care about some girl sent to her death, the guillotine is humane. They immediatly fall–” Ana-Lina felt a pit of nauseousness in her stomach, with memories of herself as she remembered the sharp pain in her own neck.

“It is only a thought mortal. Do with it as you will, for I’m not a preacher. I am simply a friend.”

Ana-Lina heard the knock on the door.

It was her other friend again. She walked to see who it was, and thought she saw the Romanie girl’s face.

As it was opened, she found out it wasn’t.

It was her head alright.

“You can have your friend head back now.” Then the militarized officer left.

That feeling was not merely a dream.

It was a revelation. Silent tears.

The midnight sky is decked out in black, sounds of rush hour traffic fill the night time air.

Sounds of the vomiting murder victim, poisoned by his lover. Among other sounds in a midnight not to unlike our own. It wasn’t every day you’d find yourself alone in a city among an alien crowd of malcontents, as someone who was more befitting of earlier centuries. Distant memories of an earlier time fill your mind, as some unreachable dream while one wanders endlessly in the dark searching for something to call home. The video games for people in your age group were fun starting out, but as one gets older the appeal of the virtual world conflicts with the inevitable homesickness from running from an earlier time. One looks back, and sees only their childhood. One they could have had but can no longer be.

Her blue jeans were ripped, her tee shirt the latest in neon mens undershirts, and she wore the dyed sunglasses with inter web mirrors. Ana-Lina had got rid of her girls dress, but kept her bow and sabots. Better than the shoes sold on the mass market, simple rubber shoes that never seemed to last for more than a year. She wore the bow on the side instead of in the back, and tying her hair into a partially lop sided pony tail, exposing her long thin neck in silhouette as she travels the under city, the city that joins Purgatory road with the rest of humanity.

For those just coming in, Purgatory Road is a city for disillusioned cyberpunks. Those who come to end their lives.

Those who couldn’t make it as hackers, perhaps tried to earn a Euro through their art. But even then, it was as if their life went back to the start. You couldn’t earn much money simply by selling charcoal paintings, and the pulp fiction market went out in the earlier half of the twentieth century. Most books were now in the web, usually posted on blogs. Though they speak of new innovations in the world of genre fiction in Latin American, there is not a word spoken in other countries.

So it’s very easy for some already on the edge of society to find themselves selling their art in the street, and just barely avoiding dumpster diving to keep themselves fed. She developed a reputation as a non-smudge style artist, something unusual in the world of charcoal sketches. And though she always found enjoyment in sketching using certain techniques, she found it more a stretch than a suicidal pick pocket not executed in France, where it was always rather a cut throat affair, for someone to also find enjoyment in her art. But she had developed enough of a collection on the inter webs that she eventually put together a simple illustration book. Such illustration holds great power and potential.

She wanted to do something different.

She wanted to try indie propaganda posters. In the world where the internet had become something of a new layer of reality, not to unlike when she had walked over into the future, she found a some place to put some of her sketches, and began to neglect her own interest in Ruby programming for sake of art. She also wrote more poetry, and tried interspersing her art with her sketches, although she never could quite master sequential art.

She went back to the start.

She began to compartmentalize things, even though she wanted to eventually do graphic novels. But at home she thought of her dead friend, who died to young. And what stories she would have told if she were alive today.

Ana-Lina wanted to immortalize her friend.

So she could be with her again.

The music box in the dimly lit bedroom, gave sound to the otherwise uninhabited children’s play room by the coast. Beyond the window, there was an overlook of the sands in the house on the cliff. A young girl, perhaps no more then eight, dreams of elves and fairies. Her sister by contrast, things of nothing by their skulls paving the roads like grains of sand.

It had been many years since their mother died by decapitation, and their family had developed a negative reputation for being associated with the murderer of their grandfather, who had requested the end of his life if he were to ever go mentally downhill. A world where decapitation reservation is only for the few. And little blood droplets fill the air like the rain. Mme. Elizabet, the youngest, who had made for herself charcoal pencils, due to her father’s lack of money to by her have little dolls, would sketch pictures of shadow people who would come alive and take her to distant worlds. Her sister was always dismissive of such flights of fancy, thinking of herself perhaps the most rational of the two.

One evening Elizabet was visited by a skull-dragon ridden by a skull-fairy, whose hair was the color of moonlight platinum. She looked similar to her mother before she was executed in public, and she wondered if her mother came to visit her, perhaps because she was not dead after all. “Your mother is dead, I’m surprised you’re still walking. You’ve been ill since an early age.” The fairy grabbed her by the hand, and they went aloft into the air. There was only the feeling of falling in the air. And the waves on the coast became smaller and smaller, into the ocean felt like merely a dot in the cosmos.

They warped into a world of many three dimensional planes of human existence. Like her brother Mr. Clocktime, she had seen all points in time, but felt differently from him. Though she knew that his daughter Vella would not be as physical law abiding as he, the blond woman was on some level the same way herself. She knew that the girl would be dying in a month, and wanted to show her various worlds as a way of having a good time before she went.

She showed Elizabet the mountains.

She showed Elizabet the earlier 19th century, and even a taste of the twenty first century just down the road from the coast in little bubble cities, where cyborg men shot up mobsters, and the method of execution was the kill switch, before the method was once again switched back to the Guillotine gun, the mobile cell phone of decapitation devices similar to a knife gun, light and compact. Disposable blades for disposable thieves.

For Elizabet, she saw the new world.

She saw the world her country would become, and the country her own would take o’er. She saw the nightmare future.

And then she died. Her drawings were displayed in a local museum and preserved. But the core essence of Elizabet remained in the world of the Purgatory life. A world where cyberpunks go to end their lives in a bullet shot, hang themselves by the neck, and go to a world where people wait for artificial heaven.

She wanted to be alive.

She wanted to the electronic girl.

Elizabet thought her sister and father, who she left behind. She hoped that someday she could see them again.

It was Ana-Lina’s sixteenth year. She longed for an earlier time when she could be with her family.

She longed for a simpler life.

The rural life; girls in wooden shoes feeding the pigs and petting the chickens, boys tending the farm and in most cases avoiding poisoning by their younger sister. Seemingly idyllic, more so than the urban life across Time Mountain. One can stick their toes in the lake, and take nude baths without being seen by prying boys. Little girls receive hand crafted wooden toys. Yet at night other things come out, not the creatures of the night; thieves who steal girls wooden shoes and their clothes.

Yet most of the time such thieves are quickly caught, in this time period people forgot. The little chickens slaughtered by the mother to form home cooked meals, and on some occasions they may eat veal to form into Shepard’s pies. Yet in this world of the idealistic lie, the thieves of the night are still beheaded by guillotine for crimes we in our time would not execute today, except in the far off future across time mountain.

Time Mountain, a zone of where time periods have merged since the Duality Of Centuries. The duality between the 19th and the 21st centuries; between the pillories and the Guillotine Gun, there is the modern world, left behind at the speed of a disposable blade beheading some anonymous thief girl, abused by her father who thought so little of her.

“But it was only a loaf of baguette Mme dream-scanner.” And that was all the widow wrote.

That is all most Cyberpunks wrote.

The meat space life.

There are two languages: Clifflang and Trenchlang. Clifflang, do to the nature of modern societies, is based more on French than Dutch. Trenchlang is based more on Dutch than French. So between similar languages the loan words make the two languages polar opposites.

Ana-Lina came from the Dutch world, and now she has made the modern French world her home. Yet for her, it never completely felt like home. It felt like she went South, like she was buried in some Trench far deeper than the 19th century. A Trench that falls down below the period of Clockpunk novels.

“Vous bavarder de votre dirty l’eau.” It was a simple joke, though Ana-Lina had grown accustomed to the fact that people hear had a very different sense of espirit than those in her own time period. Though she would like to think she has developed her own individually. Perhaps indeed it is the hipster in her, although around these people we call hipsters are only superficially anti-authoritarian and will quickly buckle under pressure from the dream-scanners. Because this was the new world, the world where dreams come to an end.

But Ana-Lina wasn’t Cyberpunk, she was herself; she could only be herself and nobody else. This was someone who drew in charcoal, and watched

The world where Guillotines are mass produced into projectile weapons; the modern cell phone to beheading devices. You could hunt anyone suspicious down, and behead them on the spot without a trial. You will not wait for death for a while, ce’est de sure. But death comes to quickly.

Ana-Lina wanted to bring earlier times with her, but she feared being marked as being conservative when there was perhaps something to be said for the world of Shepard’s pies. The world where the only life was capital punishment deterring crime. A world without the lies of consumerism. A world where one could still have night terrors about supernatural things.

Not the real world, the digital life.

The life of an alley cat ran o’er by a speeding eighteen wheeler, a young girl beheaded with portable devices. A world where the lie of capital punishment was maintained in mass produced form. The lie of toughness on crime that only became worse, when Ana-Lina wanted it to become better.

Ana-Lina realized her hopes were a lie.

The little Trenchlang girl that could climbed to the tallest building she could find.

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