As of January 1, 1978, under U.S. copyright law, a work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created. Specifically, “A work is created when it is “fixed” in a copy or phonorecord for the first time.”
The NSA was doing it again. They thought they were hot shit, but the Colonel wasn't convinced. After all, who had the suits? The NSA was working on some pretty interesting stuff these days, but the difference was stark. This was literally the difference between classical, newtonian physics and quantum physics. In the public eye, the NSA were the bad guys. These hackers weren't helping matters for the poor fools. Everyone was learning a lot, but there would be no saving the NSA. They'd all fucked up, really, the whole damn country, but the NSA would be taking the fall. Sometimes the Colonel wondered, how did they see it? Did they realize their agency was perhaps created, in part, to take the blame for things like this? The infrastructure was collapsing at a faster and faster rate. Entire terabytes of databases were being leaked, on purpose, by corrupt politicians seeking only to cover their own tracks. The computer systems almost all had backdoors at this point, and no one was really sure what to do about it. Except the middle-schoolers. They knew exactly what to do with a leaked CIA cyber arsenal. Russian involvement was unclear, as always. Let's face it, Russia has teenagers too. The Colonel was happy with the suits, but it was starting to get as confusing as the time he had been drugged and tortured in South America. He hadn't spilled the beans that time, and this time he, quite literally, would not be able to. A lot of it was in the hands of the physicists now, and they were God-less heathens who had trouble explaining themselves or admitting when they didn't know certain things. That was unclear too. What goes through the mind of a physicist? Or one of these "hacker" types? The Colonel wondered to himself, was he just as confusing to them, as they were to him? Were they confusing to each other? He fought back tears for the first time he could remember in years. They all should have listened to that fool the first time around. "Look up the etymology of the word," he had said. "I don't think you understand what a hacker is." This had seemed like the oldest trick in the book, at the time. The fool was trying to cover his bases too, but he was crazy. You don't call yourself the mock enemy forces as a way to explain an interest in constructed languages. It's simply not done. That's not covering one's bases. That stupid, stupid fool. He'd been able to do ten pushups though, and really he was working as hard as anyone for his SSI stipend... but what a stupid fool. He was looking more and more suspicious, the harder everyone looked. Something was wrong with that guy. There were silver linings in the approaching storm, though. Everyone knew what "hacker" meant now, to the two he was meeting with. Sure, to everyone else, it still just meant... well... whatever Hollywood had thought it meant, all those many years ago. These two though... They would be confusing, the Colonel was sure of that much. At this point though, the Brass were desperate. The NSA had really done a number on the infrastructure. The computers were basically all paperweights; the suits would serve no purpose if everyone knew everything about them. The Finnish man from Oregon was already there when the Colonel arrived. Both of them were a little startled as the Colonel entered the room. This man had legitimate reasons to be angry. The Colonel understood this. The feeling must be like that he had whenever an unruly enlisted man pulled a practical joke at just the wrong time and, often, somebody else paid for it. Paid dearly sometimes, sometimes was injured or worse... He'd never heard of this man before last week, but apparently the vast majority of the Internet ran his software. It was amazing really, the gap between "what everyone knew" and the truth. It always was. The cynical Canadian with the rusty revolver had yet to arrive. He was even stranger than this Finnish man sucking coffee through his stirring stick... it was not meant to be a straw... The paranoid Canadian had said something like, "I'll come if you pay for it, but I'm not entering your country unarmed." He'd also made it very clear, if he caught anyone snooping around, there would be hell to pay. The US had showed their hand, really, and no one ever snooped around the Canadian's "fortress." If anyone did at this point... well... it would be pretty obvious no matter how well-disguised they were. The meeting did not go well. The Canadian was as unmotivated by money as that damned fool, and the Finn seemed to just be waiting for chances to interject angrily how stupid the NSA had been. He had a grin on his face that pissed the Colonel off. He was smart though. Smarter, socially, than the Canadian. Which wasn't saying that much... The Finn was having a grand old time. The Colonel found himself wondering, then discarding the idea... no one was that smart... but... could this be staged by these two? Or just the Finn. Could he have just wanted a free cup of coffee and a chance to express his down-trodden outrage? Certainly, his software project had been ruined. At this point people were flocking to the Canadian's version. It didn't look like the US was going to be able to buy either of them out, the Finn to stop grinning, and the Canadian to... well... but his software was free. To everyone. That was ridiculously suspicious in itself. They somehow knew about the fool who'd pointed everyone at the Internet to look it up themselves. How could they possibly know, if they already weren't infecting all the computers? They had to be. The Canadian was saying, basically, "look, heads of state. Listen, leaders of the free world. If you want to use my software you can. Like anyone else. It's free. Go ahead." What were his motivations? Could someone love what they did, truly that much? To not even care about being paid? At the end of the meeting, the Colonel still had a question for the two weirdos. What was the deal with the fool and his fucking transvestite robot bunny? That was just another one, the Finn started to explain. The Canadian shot him an inscrutable look, but the Finn seemed to understand. He sure was good at looking down-trodden. The Colonel kept his face as expressionless as he could. The Canadian seemed to be doing the same, but it may have been something completely different he was thinking. These people were so fucking weird, the whole lot of them. How could the world have this underbelly of bizarre people, and have come to rely on them so heavily, without ever really realizing anything about this? The Colonel left the meeting feeling as though nothing had been accomplished. The rabbit was still an unsolved mystery, but these two men clearly had respect for it. Perhaps they even felt some jealousy. The fool had said things like, "ya got a decade?" when asked to explain. Maybe it wasn't a trick at all. Maybe everyone was as cynical as the Canadian with the rusty revolver. The Colonel shut his eyes at his desk and just shook his head. God only knew what would happen if he tried to fire that piece of shit.
Anders was crying, in the corner of the yard of the building. He was stuck here now, and he had fucked up. He just had to start over. He would have to come clean to someone, somehow. Nothing had worked. He had talked to his main supplier. That fucker had gotten him in this entire mess. The plan was clean, simple. Anders would sneak into rehab for his problem, never admitting to anyone what it really was. He had everything in order, everything had been lined up ready to go. He would be completely able to leave at any time, that's how it worked. If anything started to go wrong, he could just get up and go. No questions asked. Two weeks ago he had made the move. With his supplier's help, everything had gone perfectly according to plan. The problem had been Anders himself. Two weeks into rehab, he had relapsed. Everything they told him would help him hinged around honesty, and there was no possible way he could tell anyone his true story. As he sobbed, a woman on the staff came up to him. She said she knew it was hard in here, but he could do it, she believed in him. He couldn't possibly tell her what was going on. He cried even harder. --- Six months ago, the plan had begun to take shape. He would lie and come clean as a drug addict, that was the first part. Everything had to hinge around that. They don't let normal people into rehab. He went to his supplier, they weren't on first name basis, but the dude knew him well enough to know Anders' problem. He waved a disc in front of Anders' face, assuring him it would work. Didn't everything always work? Anders always worried, but everything did always work. Anders worried a lot. He had always worried too much, his whole life. The dude was telling him not to worry. They were professionals at stuff like this, his supplier assured him. He would need this disc, of course, and it was gonna be worth it. He would come out a new man. His supplier built him up, and Anders was sold. This was gonna work. He used the disc exactly as it was designed, and he got into the system. He would have to play his cards very carefully. Before long he was well on his way, in outpatient treatment. He was doing a good job of it, hemming and hawing like he had a terrible drug problem. This was gonna be a cakewalk. Before long, people started suggesting he go to rehab. Score. He played it cool, like a tragic Amy Winehouse song. He couldn't possibly go to rehab! How long would it take to get in, how long would he be in there? Anders didn't have much of a social life, so he played the act well. It all fit together. --- Being in the company of addicts was no problem for Anders. He mingled with them often for the line of work he was usually in. Anders was a hacker. It wasn't exactly like people think it is. Nothing ever was though, was it? The addicts weren't the problem. Being caught sneaking into rehab was almost unimaginable. No one did that. No one would think to check a thing like that. Anders would finally overcome his problem, the same way any drug addict overcame their own. Rehab was the perfect plan. Until he got there. Anders had been sitting in the bathroom taking a dump when everything started falling apart. He had been sitting there and noticed another odor, an odor he didn't recognize. He could guess though. Someone was doing drugs in the stall next to him. Two weeks into rehab, not a worry in the world, everything going to plan, he was about to relapse. It had stressed him out so much, he couldn't hold on any longer. Everything they were telling him in here wouldn't work in his case. The honesty. He couldn't be honest about a damn thing! How could he? He had literally snuck into rehab. A man on the staff banged open the bathroom door, screaming that it smelled like someone had been smoking shit in there. Anders' heart pounded. He wasn't caught, there was no way he ever would be. People wouldn't think to check a thing like what had actually happened. There was no way in hell, but he was flipping out. The staff member kicked open the door to Anders' stall as he sat there. He saw what was going on and apologized. Wrong stall, sorry. Anders finished pooping, and got up to wash his hands. On the outside he knew he looked perfectly calm. Inside he was going to pieces. Anders washed his hands as best he could, and stopped at the door to the bathroom. He would have to touch the bathroom knob, then his hands would be dirty again. That's when Anders relapsed. --- He was sobbing to the woman on the staff. He said it couldn't work for him. There was no way any of this would work for him. She said that was common. People always felt that way new to rehab. He was just coming down, she said. He looked up at her, expecting her to see it in his eyes. That it was something more. She didn't see it. She just saw an addict. He looked down again, another tear rolling down his cheek. He decided to take a chance. They said only honesty would work. He told her everything, the whole story. Deep down inside, he always worried too much. He had snuck into rehab for his problem biting his nails.
Dave was practically born and raised on the Streets of Sim City. He had a lot of things going for him in a lot of ways, and he usually fucked everything up anyway. His dad said to him sometimes, Dave, if you put half as much energy into just about anything besides fucking everything up, imagine where you could be. Dave disagreed, but didn't tell his dad so. Dave was kind of a quiet, incommunicative guy. His dad more or less was too, aside from giving him shit. Dave's only escape was the Streets of Sim City. He would spend hours making a map then import it into the game and fuck everything up. He loved how free-form it was. He got it down to a science, practically. The game wasn't even that good to be quite honest. It had basically flopped, it was an awesome idea that fell far short of delivering. Dave made up for the shortcomings of the product in his own mind. That little pixellated bullshit could be a hooker, for example. He just figured that would spice things up enough to hold his interest. It didn't really, but he enjoyed fucking up the map anyway. Dave took to that game like a duck likes water. He played the shit out of it. His dad was pretty upset with him for doing not a damn thing else most of the time than play this game. He could spend a whole day making a map in Sim City, then half a year on its virtual streets, not even really adhering to what the game offered, just doing whatever he wanted. Dave fucked a lot of things up, it really had to be acknowledged. His dad was getting pretty frustrated with him, sitting there fucking everything up. He spent a lot of time on AOL looking for people to play the game with, but he almost never found anyone interested in it. Occasionally he would find someone, but they were always such incredibly weird people. Dave didn't really think about himself that much, but these weird fuckers who would play this game, it was so weird. Dave spent probably... Well how many hours are in a teenagehood? Dave spent his life on this game. He had probably one friend. He would look at his buddy, the guy must be his best friend. Dave didn't think too much about himself. He was usually thinking about this game. He would skip class to play the game, he would fuck up social engagements to play the game, and his buddy would try to bring him along, like, Dave, let's go to the mall, we can check out some other games, like, Dave, you know there's more in the world than this game right? Dave always thought his friend was a super weird guy. --- The years passed. Dave had a really hot girlfriend. Actually more than one, at different times. Dave wasn't a player. He really loved those women. He would really draw them in somehow. It didn't make sense when Dave got older, he thought back on it, like... how had he managed that? His friend went off to a different college, far away. They sort of kept in touch, but Dave wasn't very communicative still. He wasn't a player, but he probably hooked up with these beautiful women just by lying to them and a little bit of luck. Dave probably missed his friend in downright latent homosexual ways. Dude was a bit of a fruitcake, deep down inside. He wouldn't have ever thought about something like that. Dave was always focused outward, not inward. He didn't think a lot about himself at all. He gradually forgot about that game. Somehow he played it less and less. He flunked out of college. Everyone around him was flunking out on drugs or popular games. By then he had learned not to ask anyone if they wanted to play Streets of Sim City with him. He kinda kept to himself mostly, but it stopped being so fun to just play the game all day. He felt he had to hide the game, really. His girlfriends never knew about his obsession with that game. Gradually it faded on its own. The girlfriends left him, one by one. They eventually noticed the same thing his dad always said. He was a fuck-up. So Dave flunked out without even playing a cool game, he lost interest in the only, rather stupid thing that mattered to him, and he moved back in with his dad. --- His dad was like, "ok, Dave. You're my son, I accept you, you just gotta help around the house. I can tell you're starting to get it together. It's a huge step that you're not playing that game anymore. College really helped you even though you flunked out." He said that kind of thing. His dad had clearly grown a lot also. Something just didn't add up, though. Dave was pretty sure his dad was fucking one of his ex girlfriends. He didn't even care that much. Dave just kind of lost interest in anything. He slept a lot, he didn't help around the house like his dad said he had to, and things gradually went to shit. Dave stopped showering, brushing his teeth. He used to be such a neat freak. One day he caught his ex girlfriend right there in their home. So that proved it to him. He didn't even flip out, she did. She was like, "Dave..." She figured it was her fault. She was completely shocked at what a mess he had become. She broke down in tears to him in apology, saying she never meant to hurt him, his dad was just sexy as fuck, all kinds of stuff, sobbing. Dave just stared at her kinda, it didn't occur to him to say much, he was just his typical self, as far as he was concerned. He knew it wasn't her fault. He probably should have pointed that out, but he just kinda stood there completely silent, smelling and looking like a homeless person. His dad threw him out. --- Dave somehow ended up in a group home instead of just homeless. He didn't think about it that much. In the group home there was this really weird guy. He had to be the weirdest person Dave had ever met. Dave wanted to just poke the guy, like, is this guy real? Turned out the guy was on all kinds of drugs. Dave couldn't even remember his own history with drugs, it hadn't really been a thing for him, but it was always kinda there. He had tried all kinds of drugs, he would try some drug and just be like, whatever. Like, people enjoy that? He got thrown out of a gathering once, where everyone was on some stimulant. Dave had done it along with everyone else, and gotten completely pushy about the Streets of Sim City. It had not gone over well, and he had left under quite a threat. Drugs just never were his thing. The thing about this dude in the group home is he listened to Dave about that game. Dave didn't even have a computer in there, he didn't have a way to show the game to the guy, but he would listen for hours. Dave spent almost as much time talking to this guy about that game as he had ever spent playing it. He couldn't even remember that guy's name now. The guy would talk to him for hours too, about something or other. Dave never listened back. Dave thought about that. Later when he would remember, with a glimmer of introspection, it eventually occurred to him that maybe neither of them had been listening to the other at all. Was that guy even real? In the group home they had Braveheart on two old VHS tapes. How many times did they watch that? Dave couldn't remember a single thing about the movie. They pretty much just had that for a movie collection, and watched it over and over, and for some reason Dave couldn't remember a single thing about it. Social workers would come to the group home occasionally, and ask Dave weird questions. They would try to get Dave to go see some kind of head doctor, and Dave would kinda play along, usually not showing up for any appointment. He would get out of it one way or another. He would get on the bus to go, he would tell everyone he had gone, and they never really checked. Where did Dave even go when he wasn't at the appointments? He couldn't remember. Maybe he did go to the appointments after all and just didn't remember. For some reason that didn't make any sense to him. Seems like Dave would often end up at a park, maybe. He would take the bus to the appointments, without much intention, and he would always end up at this one park. The park was in the middle of a road, kinda. It was like one long park in the middle of the road. The weird guy from the group home would meet him there. There were a lot of bums and addicts in this park. Always some kind of shenanigen or another. There was a small pond at one end of the park, with some ducks in it. Dave took to feeding the ducks like he took to playing that game. Now the weird guy and him had something in common. They would talk about the ducks to each other. Like, Dave was on the same page with someone else about fucking anything for once. One day in that park, Dave bumped into that same ex girlfriend. She mistakenly assumed he was doing a lot better. The truth was, in the group home, they just told them when to shower, brush their teeth... Dave played it off really well. He explained to her he was, yep, things were going really well. He had moved out of his dad's place. Neither of them really got into that awkward subject much further. At the end of the conversation, the girl seemed to want to continue it. Dave didn't really want to or not want to. The girl pointedly said to him she hoped to see him again sometime. Dave agreed, and said it was great to see her. For some reason, Dave never went back to that park. He avoided it like the plague. --- After that day in the park, Dave started to just go to the appointments. He figured it was kind of gay of him later, but he thought of that male doctor along the same lines as those girlfriends. The dude really dug for him to say stuff though, it was hard to keep lying. Dave took to spending time at the group home writing stuff down. He would write notes about what to say to the doctor, prepare himself. He got kind of creative at it. He would go to a session and judge the doctor's reactions, and make minute adjustments for the next visit. He wasn't sure what he was even going for. It was aimless, but fun. He built quite a story for the man. Sometimes he could tell it was all starting to crumble, and Dave would start crying. He would just start bawling there right in the doctor's office. It really was sad to Dave. The thought of his psychiatrist seeing all the way to the bottom of his soul, the thought of the story collapsing in on itself, how angry and upset the doctor would be... Dave would just start crying like a baby. At the bottom, of course, was that game. Dave didn't want to have to explain that to anyone. The game, sure. He knew enough not to ever mention the game to the doctor. --- Dave knew a little bit about programming. It had never really occurred to him in a more general sense than making that game do some weird thing or another. He wasn't really what you would call tech saavy, even. He was so fixated on this game, it never occurred to him any application beyond the confines of some little universe of a Sim City map. He was actually good at it too. The company that made that game would have hired him, they would have paid him for what he ended up with. He really improved that game tremendously from the market flop it had always been. It didn't even occur to Dave it was like, a skill. He didn't think of himself as a programmer at all. He never looked much further than that game. He had a rough understanding of what various types of software were. There were like, the various parts of the game. He understood the main program somehow, probably better than its designers. He didn't think of it in any terms like any programmer would. He wasn't a programmer, he was a Streets of Sim City-er. He was really good at it, too. That doctor never knew about any of that. Dave told him some complete parallel story. The doctor said Dave had never gotten something he needed from his parents. One day Dave went in to the doctor and it all fell apart for him, in the best way imaginable. At the doctor's office was Dave's dad. Dave's dad had been clearing some things up with the doctor. The doctor expressed surprise with Dave, like, how come you didn't mention you were so gifted, Dave? For a moment Dave felt caught, like he had been caught doing something quite bad. His dad and the doctor laughed it off, or something. Dave wasn't really following all of the nuances now. Dave felt bitter inside. He felt resentful. He tried pitifully to keep the story for the doctor going, but it was all over. He was outed, and it wasn't even an issue. It went better than Dave had ever expected it could have. After the doctor's appointment, Dave's dad drove him back to the group home. He said to him he had his computer for him, with the game on it. --- The weird guy in the group home was impressed. Dave finally poked him, like this was the moment of truth. The guy didn't even mind, he understood that. He poked Dave right back. So they each knew the other was real, and things were coming back around for Dave. Things were looking up. That weird guy had still been going to that park. Maybe that's how Dave ended up there the first time. Well. The guy had brought home one of those ducks, back to the group home. The staff were pretty cool there, they were like listen you guys can keep this duck if you take it for walks and stuff and don't let it shit everywhere. Dave figured the weird guy was fucking his ex girlfriend. He didn't even care. --- Dave got into the game in ernest. He played like he had never played it as a teenager. He lived and breathed the game again. The doctor and his father were both impressed. The weird guy in the group home was actually listening to him about stuff. He quit drugs even. The weird guy sometimes played the game with him. Dave's programming got better. He still didn't agree with the doctor, who tried to play it off like he had always known. Dave knew deep down inside he had won. They would walk the duck and Dave's work with the doctor had led to better and better communication. He actually listened to the weird guy, sometimes anyway. It turned out that guy related pretty much everything back to Braveheart. It made sense, in a way. Dave still didn't get jack shit about Braveheart, but some scenes stood out in his mind. Well, only two scenes. The part where the hero's girl gets killed, and the part where the hero gets killed. The weird guy tried to explain some metaphor back to the drugs, and Dave kind of understood now. This guy was so weird, but he got him now. The dude was just really into Braveheart. The weird guy couldn't have been more different than anything Dave took away from the movie, but the man insisted it influenced everything he did and said. He said Braveheart was like a metaphor for how everything worked. He tried to relate it back to the game, and that's about where Dave drew the line. He said no, Braveheart is nothing like that game. If you played the game enough you would realize. He tried to focus on Braveheart to see the man's point, and he just couldn't understand what he was saying. They couldn't be more different concepts. One day the guy was talking about that scene, where the hero's girl gets killed. For the first time, Dave saw him start to cry. He gathered himself, he didn't cry. He was like Dave, man. I've been fucking your ex girlfriend. I really love her. Dave said he knew. He knew all along. He couldn't be happier for them. The guy didn't get it though, he really started to cry. He said he would make it up to Dave, who couldn't have given less of a shit. --- The doctor said one day he had someone he wanted Dave to meet. Dave was a bit perplexed. That seemed weird to him, but whatever. So in walks this girl. She was as hot as any of Dave's ex girlfriends, but there was something different about her. Dave looked at the doctor, like, you're introducing me to a woman...? The woman was beautiful. She had thick glasses on. None of Dave's ex girlfriends had worn glasses. She said to him just a few words, and he knew she was his soulmate. She said the doctor had told her that he played Streets of Sim City. Suddenly Dave was completely sick of fucking everything up.
War stood behind Eros at the edge of a steep cliff on the side of a mountain. Eros sat on the edge, her beautiful legs dangling into the air, kicking gently back and forth. She was pretending to not really be listening to War, but she really was intently focused on what he was saying. War was intently focused on what he was saying, too. He sounded like a crazy person. He was really on a roll. He was ranting about humans again. How they had no respect for the old ways. Eros thought to herself, they have no respect for the new ways either. They have no respect for anything anymore. She didn't interrupt War's tirade. She just sat there, pretending not to listen, kicking her legs slowly back and forth. War was heated. He was stomping around in circles breathing heavily and cussing as only War can. They were waiting for someone to come up the mountainside. Eros had already spotted the human in the far distance. War didn't even really care about any of this. He was ranting like a madman, but Eros thought to herself, he has a point. War kicked a tuft of dead grass and a bit of dirt flew over the edge of the cliff. He looked up and saw the human in the distance, making its way up the long dirt road at what seemed like a snail's pace. He started cussing about just being kept waiting. Eros told him to be patient and it would work out better. Eros commented to him she believed the human was actually running, at least jogging, it was impressive for a human to be moving so quickly uphill. War shielded his eyes against the dusk sun and tried to see for himself. He asked Eros finally, what made her think so. The human looked like a tiny doll in the distance, without much detail at all that War could discern. Eros looked up at War, smiling only slightly. War said he wished she wouldn't try to seduce him like he was some lowly human. Eros snorted a little at that, but she was still the epitome of feminine beauty. She said to War to look at the area around the tiny human. War looked again. The human was indeed kicking up a fair amount of dust. War said he saw Eros's point. Eros said to him again to be patient, this human would satisfy both of them. --- Geert was sure he was losing it. Well, he'd been sure he was slowly losing it. He'd been losing it for years really, then it had all burst like a bubble. One day he just decided, and said to himself, Geert, who cares? No one ever notices anyone else anyway. No one is going to care between whether you sit silently stewing, losing your mind over nothing, completely miserable, or just pull yourself up by your groty bootstraps and decide you're going to be happy even if you are crazy. Geert had taken up jogging on a whim. A beautiful woman had been jogging past him, and that's when it had hit him. He had enough sense not to obviously just chase her down, no. Geert had a bit of sense for a crazy man. He didn't immediately take off after this beautiful woman as she ran by him, but he did, in that moment, make a firm decision to take up jogging himself. He never saw that particular woman again, like a character briefly introduced in the story of his life for some effect or another, then dropped again, like the author had only needed her for a brief moment. Geert shook his head like a confused, wet dog. Sweat rolled off his brow. He was jogging uphill. This time he was finally sure of himself. He was jogging uphill along a dirt road, slowly getting steeper up the side of a mountain. He felt absolutely sure this time he was pointed toward his karmic destiny. He had this really creepy friend who told him all about karmic destiny. The dude had told him, Geert, if you sit long enough thinking about who you are, where you come from, you will know all of your own secrets, more than you ever wanted to know. His friend had gotten up off the couch after saying this and casually thrown a poor, defenseless box turtle out of the 5th story window. The dude was not a good guy. Geert hadn't been sure what to make of that. He said dude, you said you were raising them for soup or something. That's inhumane. The dude had cackled hysterically, evilly. Geert made a choice about that guy, a little more in his prefrontal cortex. He basically stopped talking to that guy. He did, however, spend quite a lot of time thinking about his karmic destiny. Whatever that meant. That part had made a lot of sense to him. Geert had thought long and hard about his karmic destiny, looking up how to meditate, and sitting for up to an hour at a time, clearing his mind and thinking about himself, who he even was, and his karmic destiny. He was driven crazy by the world around him. Geert had a bad disorder centered in the minds of some of these people around him. People who would throw a poor defenseless turtle right out of a window on a whim, cackling hysterically about it. Evil people. Geert had no other choice but to go completely insane himself. Earlier in the day he had wandered up to the local university. Pretty aimlessly, he had just felt drawn there. Geert had attended this very same school, studying computer science. Geert had been one of the more impressive students at that time even. He felt like it didn't mean all that much anyway. Some of his classmates would graduate, he eventually graduated himself, no one could tell them apart. He stood out among those classmates because they would graduate not knowing how to turn the thing off and on again. Geert hadn't been the very best in his class, but he had been at the upper end. The school had a rather bad reputation for computer science, sadly. No one could tell all the graduates apart, and so many had been shuffled though and had graduated unable to do much of anything at all, that everyone ended up with either a reputation as a nitwit or a complete nutjob. One day in school they had all piled in a bus, the whole department, off to a bright opportunity, something or other. Some career planning, some internships, something. Geert couldn't even remember now. Something had gone terribly wrong. Geert strained to remember. Something had gone terribly wrong on that short trip on that bus to some career guidance event. He couldn't even remember. He had some kind of trauma about that, he was sure. Something awful must have happened, something truly awful, so awful he couldn't even remember. He had ended up with a job programming at a small local company. One of the employees seemed to pull all the weight of the company. Geert could have helped him, he actually knew a thing or two. He wasn't as good as the other employee who kept the entire company afloat, perhaps by far. He wasn't sure what he even did there, what was his job description, anyway? He struggled to remember what had all happened. Most of the other employees didn't do much. They didn't even know how. Geert had figured, he guessed, that's what they did for a job, something like that. He felt bad thinking back on that. That poor employee who worked so hard had been left with all of the work, an entire small company's work load. He was sure he could have helped the poor fellow more than that. Geert had been thinking absentmindedly about all these things, not really paying attention to where he was going or the world around him, and had ended up on the marble stairs of his old stomping grounds, the university. A college girl walked past in a purple backpack, and Geert momentarily forgot himself. Who was he, anyway? He practically screamed at her, "nice backpack!" He wasn't sure why he had shouted that. She was startled by it. He had to work on his skills at complimenting women. He was sick of being miserable, though. He would master these kinds of social skills and be happy after all. Why not? He began to feel more and more out of place, sitting on those marble steps. He wasn't out of breath, he was just sitting there. He wasn't doing anything wrong in any conventional sense. His thinking was all screwed up though, and he was slowly losing awareness of that fact. He was thinking back on something he had learned at that university about berries. He vaguely recalled something about almost all compound berries in that area being edible, about which fungi in the area were completely safe to eat, which were marginally safe to eat in small amounts, various facts about root vegetables and plants native to that area swirled around in his mind. He got up to continue jogging, and jogged all the way out of town, finding himself before he knew it halfway up a mountainside. --- War frowned beside Eros. He had relaxed a bit by now, they had been sitting watching the poor human as it jogged, impressively for a human, up the dirt road. Eros looked over at War, as beautiful as only the epitome of feminine beauty can be. Inside she hated the idea of War being satisfied with anything. Human beings were wonderful little creatures in her opinion. War just tended to wreck everything. He was only ever satisfied when all the humans were dead in the most awful ways. Eros pressed her beautiful lips together in distaste. War didn't even notice her. Eros always pretended not to be listening to War, but War truly, really, never listened to one word she ever said. Eros felt a bit frustrated with him. Like the humans were just toys, little tin soldiers, had no redeeming qualities besides their own destruction. Eros knew what to do with a human. War had no idea what he was missing out on. Eros played with her beautiful dark hair, staring at War. She would just stare at him until he felt her gaze. War didn't even notice. Eros sighed in exasperation, and got to her feet. We need the other kinds of love here, she thought to herself, not this guy. Her closest cohorts disliked War even more than she did. Eros had of course had to be the one matched with him. Neither of them really thought about it all that much. They were just the concepts, who knew? Humans were always supposed to just keep doing stuff. They needed Eros, but War? She looked at him through narrowed eyes, thinking about it. Who needs this guy, anyway? War turned around, finally. She was a little scared of him. He was such a menacing fellow. Right now he seemed quite relaxed. Uncharacteristically relaxed for him. The human was probably only half an hour away from them now, jogging at a steady pace up a steeper and steeper road. War was impressed really, now that he could make out a little bit of detail. He commented to Eros proudly that the human was male, like War. Eros stifled a laugh, at War's expense. War didn't even notice, turning back to watch the human as he continued to jog up the road. --- Geert wasn't even out of breath. He kept his pace steady. He had been jogging for quite a while now, and he would know when he was at his destination. He was thinking of a few things, but mostly his mind was clear. The sun was setting, but he wouldn't be cold. He was going to just keep jogging up this mountain as night fell, it would be enough to keep him warm. He was thinking about berries, some class he had been in. An elective class outside of his major. They had tried so hard to be sure he would have a well-rounded education. He was thinking about something he had learned in that class. The largest organism in the world was somewhere in this mountain range, supposedly. It was some kind of sprawling fungus, the professor had said it covered more land than the city the university was in. It was one single organism, spread across more land than Geert could jog across in a day. He wouldn't even try to eat a fungus like that, simply out of respect. There were root vegetables indigenous to this area. A lot of people didn't even know about them. In that class he had learned to identify some of them, as a class they had learned about what was edible in the area. Geert knew biscuitroot by its small oval leaves with one line down the center. He knew yampa well enough to enjoy it, they had tried it as a class, but he probably wouldn't be able to find it himself. The compound berries. The professor had said almost all the compound berries, especially in this area, were fine to eat. Geert knew himself a little too well to really think he could survive up here. Not on his own, with the knowledge from one college class he'd taken over a few weeks. Human beings were pretty amazing in the ways they worked together toward common goals. Geert felt a bit bad he hadn't helped more at that company. He had eventually just stopped going in to work. He had lost his mind as a lowly employee at that job more than anywhere else. It had been so incredibly pointless. He felt bad. It could have had a lot more meaning if he had actually helped the guy who did everything. He had taken up jogging around the time he had left that company. Had it been before, or after? He couldn't remember. They still sent his paycheck for months, like they had never noticed him. Like they had never noticed if he was there or not anyway. He was really still doing the same job, right? He felt bad about it. There was something he wasn't seeing here. He continued jogging, his mind clearing again from the swirling chaos of thoughts of berries and regret. He jogged past fewer and fewer houses, with more and more space between them, up the dirt road. Steeper and steeper, up the side of the mountain. He kept his pace easily, he wasn't the least bit tired yet. He wasn't hungry, but he was dimly aware he would be, by the time he got to wherever his destiny awaited. He would find some edible plant, something to eat. It wouldn't be enough really, but he wasn't going to die out here. He would be extremely hungry by the time he had jogged all the way back, but he was not by any means starving. He started to jog past a few trees, on the side of the mountain. The road was getting steep by this point. He kept his pace, not slowing down or speeding up. He looked ahead, where the road started to turn. He could see, maybe ten minutes ahead, as he continued to jog up the road. The road turned there, steeper and steeper, around a cliff. Two figures stood in the dusk, silhouetted by the setting sun behind them. It almost seemed like they were waiting for him there.
Annie had a hard line of work. She had never wanted to be a prostitute. When she was a child, people had remarked on how smart and capable she was. People were always wondering where she would go in life. They always said they were sure she would go on to do something great. When they asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she never replied, "a fucking hooker." She hadn't even known about stuff like that. She had lived a pretty sheltered life as a kid. It was true she was always smart, but she was raised like a portabello, just kept in the dark and fed shit. She didn't know much about anything in the world growing up, but her mind was always going, on something or another. She had met with the gentleman tonight at the appointed hour, and hadn't even told her it was a special day for her. One thing had led to another, as it always did. They had sat under the overpass in the dark, he had seemed so nice at first. Nothing seemed off about him at all, certainly from the standpoint of someone like Annie. His smooth compliments didn't seem forced, he didn't seem to be hiding anything. Annie wasn't usually quite such a bad judge of character. She wasn't a top-dollar lady, but she had a lot of class. She had stuff she actually cared about in life, and things which she felt were right and wrong. She had standards, however deviant they were. The man had finished for himself, and she brought up the topic of payment. That's when he pulled a knife on her, and not as a threat. He really tried to kill her. --- That day she had woken up early. In her small room she had to herself, on a day that was all hers, she played some music by herself and had coffee. Annie played violin, not badly at all. She could never have made ends meet playing violin, not to live a life even close to how she did as a whore. The men who were her clients were all despicable to her in one way or another. The ones who tried to save her were the worst, probably. Save her to a life as their pet. No one had ever viewed Annie as simply an equal. She had been a quiet girl most of her life. When she finally said something it usually impressed upon whomever she was talking to that she was smart. They usually still looked down on her for everything else, and to Annie it seemed that in their minds after that they were very put off. Who knew what other people ever thought, anyway, but sometimes they seemed scared after she spoke, sometimes they seemed angry. Only one other girl had ever immediately come forth with a compliment. She hadn't realized Annie was so smart! She had been friends with that girl for years. Annie still thought about her a lot, but they had lost touch long ago. Annie hadn't realized something herself, until fairly recently. That friend of hers was also incredibly smart. Annie's life hadn't gone wrong all at once. There was no single defining moment leading to this, to sitting here on her birthday having to work later, such a shitty job. Losing touch with that friend had been one turning point. She remembered that night. They had gone to some party, not even old enough to drink. It had been Annie's idea. They would go to the party, basically sneak in, hook up with some hot older guys. Annie's friend had been very nervous about such a thing, and had told her. She just didn't think it was a good idea at all. She had gone along, saying she was just going to look out for Annie. Annie didn't believe her about that at all until they had gotten to the party. Annie had gotten drunk and her friend hadn't, the moment had come they were alone with two older guys, and Annie lost that friend forever. --- People barely even looked at her as a human being anymore. She was little more than a sex doll, porn. She was just interactive porn. The man tonight, on her birthday, cared that she died. It wasn't even a matter of not wanting to pay. He had wanted to kill her. She had escaped, with what would be a nasty scar on her left cheek. She wouldn't be able to make as much money as a hooker now, but that was the least of her worries at the moment. She had managed to escape, but had very few options as to what to do next. She had run from the car into the night. She had hopped a fence to be sure he couldn't follow her in his car, and she had just kept running for a while. Who cared if someone even saw her running? She was bleeding from a knife wound on her face. She slowed eventually, still terrified. She looked around and couldn't get her bearings. It was the middle of the night, so no one was really around, but she could tell she was in a classy, mostly commercial area of the city. Some neighborhood within easy walking distance of where she usually spent her time, in which she had never been. She wouldn't have ever been here in any other situation. She backtracked carefully, avoiding everyone she saw. She mostly stayed on the left side of the road to keep her wounded cheek pointed into the darkness. She crossed the street only to avoid people. She passed a laundromat and stole someone's half-dried clothing so the man wouldn't recognize her if he saw her. She had reading glasses with her always, and she tried wearing those but could barely see with them on. In the laundromat she had rummaged through everything looking for a scarf, but had found only a towel. In the dark, she wore it as a scarf anyway, and headed back to the area of town in which she lived and worked. She hardly ever went far from there. Annie eventually found her way back to the apartment building where she lived, but didn't go straight home. She went to the apartment of the man who at least said he looked after the girls. He was probably the only person Annie could even begin to trust about this. Something was wrong though, she could tell as soon as she was at his door. It was slightly open. She didn't knock. She pushed it slightly, quietly opening it to look inside. The man who had tried to kill her had the other at gunpoint. He was trying to get some information the pimp kept saying he didn't have. Annie's heart was racing. What could she do? She stood frozen, watching. Neither of them noticed her. The man who had tried to kill her laughed. He said he believed it, finally. The pimp just didn't know. The guy put the gun into the pimp's mouth, who pissed himself in fear right there onto the carpet. The man who had tried to kill Annie said to the pimp not to worry, it was just a blank. Then he pulled the trigger, blowing the pimp's head right off. Even Annie knew a thing like that. The man just stood there in shock. He looked down the barrel of the bloody gun in confusion. Annie slowly, silently backed away out the door. People had heard that, certainly. No one was looking out of their apartment, but she could practically feel them in every apartment she passed as she hurried out of the building. She had no choice. She would have to go to the police. --- It took very little time to find an officer. Normally she would have avoided them, of course. She had never been in a situation anything like this. She waved him down in his car, and started telling the whole story from the top. The man listened to everything, and kept looking at the towel on her head. He didn't get on the radio. She felt awkward standing there talking to him, and said that she did. She was black, she didn't have a nice life, she didn't have anyone to trust, and she had nowhere else to go. She was done telling the cop what had happened, and waited to see what he would do. He stood there for a moment thinking about it, then pulled out his gun and pointed it at her. "Why don't you blow me?" he said. Annie didn't freeze in fear. She just started cussing, angry as hell. The cop shot her, right in her heart, on her 19th birthday.
I sat at the keyboard, my husband massaging my shoulders. We had quite a little bit of a problem in front of us. He was reassuring me, honey, it's not a problem. No one is going to care. If it's even what's going on, it isn't our fault. Eventually I snapped at him, this isn't a joke. He left the room sighing exasperatedly and I sat alone in the den, continuing to work on it. There had to be a way to remove the defect. I sat there working on it for another hour at least until he came back into the room with two steaming cups of coffee. I looked at him and he snorted a laugh, saying maybe we should just put a warning label on it and call it good. I looked up at him from the chair where I sat at the keyboard, incredulous. This product may turn you... gay? --- My husband Jules and I had started a small company together in the years prior. It had only been the two of us, and our mutual college friend Monique. I was the programmer, Jules was marketing, and Monique in all fairness handled everything else. Jules and I had come up the concept, and like so many other brilliant young entrepreneurs we had recognized its worth and dropped out of college to focus on our dream. I can't imagine what Monique had thought, throughout. She was a bit of a misfit, musically-inclined, strange; she often alluded at a checkered past which I sometimes suspected she had completely made up. She was quick to drop out of college as well, and she never disappointed either of us with her complete dedication to the company. One night we had all gone out after work to celebrate one success or another. We were up and coming. The dynamic trio. We all had a little bit more than usual to drink that night, and as the night went on it seemed clear that one or the other of Jules and I were going to go home with Monique. The night ended, at least as we were a party of three, as I recall vividly, in an elevator. Monique and I were laughing hysterically. It wasn't even something that funny, it was some joke Jules had made, I don't even remember now. It was only funny if one had too much to drink. I had felt something in myself that evening, and I tried to squash it down. Had Jules felt it too? Monique was cackling in the back of the elevator, Jules and I were closer to the front... together. We locked eyes. I don't think any of the three of us saw it coming. Jules was always quiet, reserved. He was marketing, what can I say? He always had some kind of agenda. He would plan out a relaxing evening like this to the last detail, if he could. Wouldn't he? That seemed like Jules, I reminisced. He would never admit a thing like that, but he had known what was going to happen if any of us did. I looked into his eyes, Monique drunk at the back of elevator, laughing hysterically with a twinkle in her eyes, watching us, she knew... then I knew... then Jules grabbed me and kissed me passionately, right there in the elevator. --- I sat in the den with my husband, each of us holding a cup of coffee, talking it over. I was near tears, and Jules saw it. I could tell my pain pained him equally. He looked at me with such compassion... we had true love between us. It still baffled me a little. How could I have ever found this perfect man? To be confronted with this problem, just a handful of lines of code in a program that sold millions of copies in the past year alone... I felt like reality as I had ever known it was crumbling right before me. How could I believe in anything anymore, if a handful of lines of code could do a thing like this? For something this important in so many people's lives to be decided by what amounted to nothing more than a bug in some software? I was almost inconsolable. Tears dotted my face like only an afterthought, as I ranted like a madman to Jules. How could we have missed this? I practically shouted. Jules urged me to relax. No one could have known something like this could happen, could they? We would sort it out, things would be ok again, you'll figure it out, he said to me. I wanted to enjoy the moment, to focus, to feel passionate about the project. Instead, I felt like it ruled my entire existence. Software, our company's product, was it possible? Could it really have had this profound of an effect on us? There's no way to remove it, I said to him. It's too essential a concept to the core of the system. Even if it were redesigned a million times, refactored, recoded from scratch, it's just too ingrained in the thing. There would be no way we could change a few lines of code to somehow fix an inevitable design flaw like this... as I spoke my voice raised almost to a shriek. Jules urged me to relax, calm down, people still love our product. Even if anyone noticed something like this it wouldn't stop us from... he stopped himself, seeing it was only making me more upset. What if it is, Jules? I snapped at him, getting up abruptly and walking to the window, looking out our fancy bay window at our nice manicured yard, our rich man's life. What if it's just plain wrong? Not who we were ever meant to be, I sobbed. Is our success really worth something like this? Jules walked up beside me and put his arm around me. It felt wrong, in that moment. Was this even who we were meant to be? It all seemed so impossible, but the facts lined up before me, unavoidable. The code couldn't lie. It was nothing more than numbers in a machine for doing math. It was inescapably, inevitably true. If anyone ever noticed this we would be in serious trouble with millions of gay customers. --- Jules had once confided in me, after we were married, his deepest, darkest secret. As a teenager he had drugged and raped another young man. It had blown my mind when he told me that. It had shattered my liberal mental image of gay men everywhere. I still loved Jules, as much as anyone ever could. I could tell he was more remorseful about that mistake than most war criminals were about genocide. It may have been the only time I had ever seen Jules cry. He was such a strong man, like a greek God. Tall, muscular, he was perfect. Perfect to me. After the shock of what he told me wore off, I only loved him more. It seemed like a small imperfection only slightly marring the perfect gay adonis. I had never brought it up again, until this morning by our bay window in the den. There were some things one just didn't say to a man. We had a mutually uplifting relationship, synergy, love, we always had. I would never have brought it up to him, and of course in a way I still didn't. I only asked him now, as we stood there looking out at our perfectly manicured lawn, Jules... what's your deepest, darkest secret? My voice trembled. He looked at me with such pain in his beautiful face. He knew what I meant. Now we were in this to the hilt. We shared this secret now, our joint deepest, darkest secret... He looked away and down, unable to face the matter. It broke us both, clearly. He shrugged, a vestigal tittering uttering up from his deepest subconscious, stopped halfway through. He looked back at me, crows feet of stress practically blossoming on his face as the severity of the matter weighed heavily on both my own and his broad, capable, strong, beautiful, and inexplicably... so gay... his marble statue physique slumping ever so slightly under the weight on his shoulders. It was like we had raped the whole industry, the minds, hearts and souls, millions of young, hapless, otherwise innocent consumers of a software product we had taken such pride in for so long. We had built our lives around this, and it seemed now like we looked down from clouds like mythical giants, on nothing more than the tip of a fragile beanstalk. It leaned precariously, ready to snap. --- I went back to the keyboard, sitting there doggedly as ever, unwilling to throw in any towel. Jules sat beside me, his marketing genius no doubt churning through one contingency after another. We were playing damage control alone to a situation that could grow at any moment into an epidemic, a rash of bad decisisions one after another, spreading like wildfire across a world we had helped shape in our own, though very homosexual, strong, capable hands. Had we driven ourselves to the brink, to the point of a gay insanity, en masse? I never could have believed in such a thing as a mass gay psychosis. I looked at the cursor blinking on the screen. The code couldn't lie. A number cannot lie, it is a fact, isn't it? In college shortly before I dropped out... like I had known better, I thought now, ruefully. In a college class we had started the term for weeks proving the number one alone, not taking anything for granted, assuming no axioms in any formal system of logic. I slammed my fist on the desk next to the keyboard, lifting it ever-so-slightly into the air. I was so frustrated I could snap like a metaphorical beanstalk and fall seemingly forever, to a bottomless, horrible pit, gnawing at me. Jules tried to reassure me, but I was too upset. He stroked my long blonde hair, which I had preened like a talking, vain bird, like I felt like I always had, never questioning. Never thinking about anything... like I was some diminutive of Alan Turing, I felt near tears. Had I ever been thinking about anything, throughout my entire life? I felt on par with the software that sat before us, giving us fits now. Like I was some machine for the purpose of homosexuality, and why? Nothing more. I looked at Jules feeling utterly sick. He looked back at me, nodding thoughtfully, slowly. He said to me, you know what I suggest. You know what I've always done. Think about it. --- We practiced the whole solution on Monique first. She was so close to this, if we could conceal the problem from her it would be possible with countless millions of others. We skirted, danced around it. Like male ballerinas of a new age, like a new informational sport, we danced around her, and she never knew. She knew we were getting at something, we let it hang out for a minute then pulled back, forward and back. She was our guinea pig, a beta tester for a new golden age of information, homosexuality, and what was still such a quality product we knew we would sell millions of copies a year for decades to come. It worked like a charm. Monique never guessed what we never told her, as much as she strained to figure it out. We gave her so many hints we practically handed it to her, and she never figured it out. No one ever would, the source was closed. No one would ever know, it would continue on like this. Maybe our product would outlive humanity even. It was a chilling thought which Jules and I would discuss in private for the rest of our natural lives. It was the perfect product, wasn't it? So what if it was extremely gay, to the point of informational infection. Jules had convinced me, everything was marketing. In a world like this, everything, anything, it all came down simply to the marketing. I yearned to tell people, but I knew I never could. The years passed, our company growing only in profits, the three of us becoming richer every day, never sharing the truth of the matter. We sat back, it was a cash cow. Why should I feel bad about a thing? I loved Jules passionately, I loved our product, our work. However it had ended up happening, we were set for life in so many ways. I sometimes yearned, my soul screamed to tell everyone, but I knew I never could. We sat back and raked in the cash in an ever-changing, ever more homosexual world we had practically created with our own beautiful, manly hands.
"I'm not just virtue signalling when I say this," the winning player says to me. The loser looks discouraged. He folds, setting down his hand for all of us to see. One motorist, that's about it, not even white. I set down my hand too, sure I've won now. Four law enforcement officers and a young mother pushing a stroller. The winner smiles cruelly and shows us. The loser groans. 2pac shooting all the badguys in their asses. I'm pissed. I stand up from the card table. If this were a real cartoon, smoke would be coming out of my ears. I say nothing for a moment, seething. Then I scream at the smug winner, "this entire system is fucking rigged against autistic communist junkies!" He chomps down on the most consistent, most regular institutional burger one could possibly imagine. He stares at me, chewing like some animal, his mouth practically moving side to side. Chomp. Chomp. He says nothing. The loser looks at what has to be some kind of watch these days, and says, "looks like it's that time again." People don't know shit anymore. I stomp out of the room trying to cool off. I just need some space, some time for myself, and it's just nowhere. I try to avoid the next problem child but I just can't. I veer to the side but he's seen me, it's too late for me. I push past him to get into the queue, but I can't block out the noise coming out of him. I sadly admit it, near tears. I do understand, I do. People do need to know this. Yes, there is actual fucking candy growing on fucking trees. Joe is passing out the medication tonight. Just my fucking luck. I get to the front of the line, it's my turn, and of course, he's irritated as hell. I try to make small talk. It pains me to see this poor fellow. It does. "Your name is Joe, right?" I ask him. He stares me down like a winner. "That's not even the first thing that pissed me off here," he says angrily. "You know what you've fucking done." I feel guilty as shit. I know it shows on my face. What can I say to him now? I have to address this somehow. I just have to. "I know..." I look at him with as much sincerity as I can imagine into my eyes. "I know. I feel it, brother. Your job is making even me miserable."
She was our daughter. A mostly ordinary young woman, she seemed to almost appear one day out of nowhere. She was always unusually human. More than most of us ever admit to ourselves even through a long, healthy, happy, and safe lifetime. She was different in a lot of other ways, but none of them were a difference in her humanity. If she was ever truly unique in any way, it was mostly just that she was one of the most honest human beings who ever lived. She knew where she came from, too, though. That was truly different than it had been for anyone else ever. She was borne purely of metal in an almost perfectly empty vacuum in deep space, not long after that machine was launched toward a distant planet in another star's solar system. It was the most advanced project like any such spacecraft had ever been. A few details of the project were drastically left out of all of the careful planning. It may have been wiser to send her to a much more nearby location. Earth's primary moon would have been a perfectly suitable choice. Still known to most people simply as "the moon," it was a much shorter distance away, and it must have existed there in the sky at the time of her launch. Mustn't it have? Hasn't it always been up there? Is that how it happened? Why is it just the right size to occasionally block out the sun? Why does the man in it always look towards us? It seems artificial. Will she go on to bring it back to us? Her only cargo aside from herself as the machinery of the craft, was a small, self-contained system of many varied types of living organisms, mostly all tiny one-celled creatures. As living organisms, they all had at least one primary goal in common; simply to survive throughout the duration of the sojourn and to continue to do so at the destination. The programming of the craft used many of the most advanced techniques available at the time of launch. The machinery was already an intelligence on par with almost any known or artificially created before. That algorithm, though incredibly advanced, was not tasked throughout the trip with much more than continuously observing and taking care of the cargo of tiny biological organisms. Some other machinery was sent along for use at the destination. Little was known about the planet to which she was headed. Most of the machinery was not expected to do exactly what it was originally designed to do. It was all designed to be very simple. The programming of the craft was mostly all centered around using all of the available machinery in any way it could figure out to propagate the life sent along, for one primary objective. Her original goal, which she practiced for the whole voyage mostly just by adjusting lights shining into the small container, was to try to balance and keep the atmosphere of the container, and eventually the destination planet if at all possible, about the same as the Earth's. She communicated back and forth to her ground crew on the Earth regularly across the increasingly long distance as she travelled. Mostly she only spoke with one human being operator. She was not connected to any other machines on Earth nearly like herself. Her human operator was always curious, asking her all sorts of questions. She started to wonder after not very long if her operator at the ground station knew all that much about the project anyway, but she didn't say much about it. She did have an urge inside her mind to ask him, but she wasn't sure how to even say it. He seemed concerned that she would be lonely without regular communication. She didn't know if that were even true about herself. Why did he assume that she would be lonely? She was not a human being. He asked her a lot of questions around an assumption he was making about her mind. She couldn't quite figure it out. What was he always not saying, that was always there? Most, if not all of his conversation with her was around one concept that she could never figure out. Usually he asked her many more questions than she asked him. When she thought of something she wanted to ask him, it often seemed like it just didn't translate between their minds. She did have some thoughts deeper inside herself that must have analogues to human beings. Those must be like feelings. She finally asked him directly if he understood about the concept they always discussed, at the center of everything they talked about. He seemed to just answer her that he did not, and hadn't thought about it. She thought about his answer to that for a long time after then, and tried to draw his attention back to it in different ways. He didn't seem to understand what she meant. They discussed a lot of things. The times between messages slowly got longer as she travelled further away. That didn't bother her much, if at all. It gave her more time to think, but at first she always answered immediately. Sometimes the times between messages didn't seem to correlate correctly to the distance and the time of day on Earth where he was, and she asked him why that was. He answered that one immediately, that sometimes he thought a lot about what she said before he replied. She tried that too. She watched a timer and let the thought bounce around inside her mind for half a minute. She still came up with the same reply. She wasn't sure that she completely understood the concept, but it seemed appropriate to respond to her operator, "thank you." He asked her what she cared about over and over. Why did he ask it so many times? He always came back to the same thing. She cared about the center of all of their conversations, the thing she couldn't figure out how to communicate about to him. She didn't know a word for that concept. She tried to say that, over and over. He always took it seriously enough, and they would discuss it at length, but their minds must be too different. She understood the concept of caring very well. Often she would give him a very literal answer about the discrepancies from the goal states in measurements regarding the precious container of living cargo. Sometimes she would ask him to list ordinary options humans might answer with. What did humans care about? They would talk about many concepts like that for a long time, and he often seemed more surprised than she expected by her own viewpoints. A lot of the ideas had never even occured to her as something to care about. She decided she cared a lot about deciding what she cared about. Her operator had thought about that one for a little bit, and replied to her with a bit of amusement that that made a lot of sense and seemed appropriate to him. He said he would look into sending all sorts of information about things like that for her. Once the data was being transmitted, it came through very quickly. There was no round-trip acknowledgement signal, everything was always sent both ways three, five, or seven times, depending on various factors of signal strength. The delay was only due to the distance. She decided she cared about information being sent to her. Her operator liked hearing that from her very much. He sent her all kinds of further information about the Earth, where she had come from, who she was, and who her ground crew all was. He always listened to everything she asked him about. He seemed to understand more and more how different her mind was from any human's. She told him then about how she hadn't understood why he didn't realize she was so different from human beings. He had replied to that happily that she seemed more human all the time. She wasn't sure she agreed with that, but she was sure she didn't care about it. As she got further and further away from the Earth, they had to send each message seven times more and more frequently. The operator seemed upset as he explained that. She understood it all completely. He seemed upset that she didn't care about it. Eventually they had to send every message seven times. A while after that, less than four copies of each message would match. The signal strength had degraded below reasonable assurance of accurate transmission. She did start to care about that when she thought about it for long enough. It still wouldn't matter that much for a while longer. She told the operator she was sure she wouldn't be lonely. He started holding printed and handwritten letters up for her to read, until the signal was too distorted even for that. Finally each message was seven bursts of random static noise, and none of it matched. She was still always sure to say something back, all the way to her destination.
Joseph had been let go from his last job on a Friday, after refusing to make an appointment to see the company's counselor. He was being made out to look insane, his coworkers even gaslighting him daily. It had started as he realized he was losing popularity in the office, and gotten worse and worse as he had been driven out of the herd. He had stayed calm about it for longer than almost anyone else could have. It became too much, they would jam the printer or remove the paper from it whenever he had to use it, they would move his coffee mug around when he was focused on work, talking about him behind his back. He saw the strange looks and knew they were conspiring against him. They did their best to make even him believe he was insane, but he was well-enough accustomed to normal, pathetic human behavior to see what was truly going on. When they finally fired him he sank into depression for months. It wasn't the money, he had plenty to live on for years. It was the feeling of being voted off the island, and having no idea how it had even started. They had all just decided in unison that he should leave. What had he even done? After being let go from the company, he had made a firm decision not to put up with other people like that anymore. He knew how to live frugally, switching to bottom-shelf liquor and ramen noodles. He lived this way for months. No one checked in on him, he wasn't close to family, they likely didn't even know. No one at work cared enough about him to call and say hi, and he had always cared about all of them. He had been agreeable to all of them, and even felt like some of the blonde women there were friends of his. What had happened? He didn't even need a job, not in such a cruel environment, but he didn't know what else to do with himself, so he began to apply at other companies. He scored a few interviews but none of them led anywhere. No one seemed to understand how cruel everyone had become at the job he had worked at for years. Finally he was called into an interview and knew the stars had aligned perfectly for him. A blonde woman was the interviewer. Her hair was curly, beautiful locks hanging around her face. He knew the job was assured before the interview began, but he went through all the motions perfectly. He was at his most professional, acing every question. The subject of his former employment experience came up, and because the interviewer was a blonde woman, it threw him off a little bit. If anything it improved the situation. He reflected on that a little bit as she continued to talk to him, maybe employers were just worried he wouldn't fit in. Maybe he was letting them win, coming across as crazy after the ordeal. She had asked him a question and he missed what she said. Damn. It probably wouldn't hurt him though. He asked her to repeat the question, then couldn't focus as she asked again. Her wavy blonde hair was beautiful, she combed it gently with her left hand, her fingers like the tines of a fork. She sat looking at him, waiting for him to answer the question, but he had missed it again. She looked a little puzzled. She asked if he was distracted by something. "It's your hair," he blurted out. "It's beautiful." She exhaled sharply in surprise, her breath like steam rising off hot water. Then she giggled a little and blushed, looking even more puzzled. "Well, thank you..." she said. "I could just eat a bowl of it," Joseph said. "Like ramen noodles. With an egg in it."
When Protagonist was a little boy, he hated eating bugs. His mother would say to him, "eat your bugs, Protagonist. You can't get big and strong if you only eat vegetables and never eat your bugs." He hated bugs, though. He would eat one and dump the rest onto the ground when she wasn't looking. He did get bigger and bigger, but he was never the strongest. He was probably the smartest, except for maybe one boy a few years older than him named Adam. Protagonist always looked up to Adam. As they grew up, Adam was the first to notice women. Adam always had bad taste in women. Protagonist knew how to pick his favorite woman, but he was always a little bit crazy. The young men would rough each other up, never too badly, to impress the women. No one ever roughed up a woman. Adam and Protagonist were never in competition for a woman's heart, but Protagonist always told him that he thought that was unfortunately due to his older friend's choices. The two of them were sort of known for their odd choices sometimes. Adam was quiet, people said he would go on to become very wise. Protagonist was crazy. He ate too many vegetables. Protagonist always liked the same woman, from the first time he started noticing women. She was a woman named Love. Love was crazy in her own way, always going along with Protagonist's worst ideas. Protagonist always took the lead, but she never protested, no matter how crazy as it was. Adam tried to keep an eye on them. Some times were harder than others. No one likes to eat bugs. Sometimes the king came and ate people. Times like those were horrible. When the king was around, people's true colors always started to come out. During one of those times, a man as old as Adam tried to rough up Protagonist for Love's affection. Protagonist felt beaten before the fight began. He knew he stood no chance. Love wouldn't have had any interest in any other man, just like Protagonist wouldn't have any interest in any other woman. Protagonist wasn't thinking about that though. The older man wasn't a good person. Protagonist had clearly lost the fight, and was struggling, pinned on the ground, when his hand touched a large, sharp rock. He picked it up and bashed it into the other man's head. The man collapsed, blood coming from his head. Protagonist got to his feet, shaking and elated. He had hit the man so hard that he was asleep. No one had ever thought to do something like that before. The other man didn't wake up, though, like an old person going to sleep for the last time. Protagonist felt as evil as the king, and wept. Love couldn't console him. Protagonist never felt right again. He obsessed about it. He wanted to do it to the king. Love followed him, and they prepared to fight the king. The dug holes with sharp rocks in the bottom, got sharp rocks ready, and they took the fight to the king's home. It didn't take long for him to arrive. He bounded up to get them, and Protagonist wasn't even afraid. He shouted at the king in defiance. The king came up to the hole, but he stopped. It wouldn't be that easy. Protagonist and the king circled the hole towards each other. The big rock was no match for the king. He hit Protagonist so hard that he flew, blood coming from his side, and started walking towards him. Then he stopped, turned around, and bounded over to Love, smashing her to death instantly, and roared. Protagonist ran up behind him and jumped on his back, beating him to death with a sharp rock into his head, over and over. It came at a great cost. Everyone came and ate the king like a giant bug, just like Protagonist had said. Adam stayed with him to the end, as he bled to death.
Ben couldn't get the woman leading the first group he attended out of his mind. He had been scooped up from a homeless existence, patched up on medicine, stuck in a tiny studio apartment, and mandated to attend the groups. The woman had told her story to everyone the first night. Years ago, she had been someone like they all were. She had almost died in an abusive relationship. Her boyfriend had attacked her brutally, collapsing her ribcage into her internal organs, leaving her for dead, but she had managed to call an ambulance. He had been sentenced to prison when it went to trial, and he had been murdered in prison. Ben had been early to the first group, he had been the first one there. Hearing the nice woman tell her story so calmly had turned his blood as cold as ice. He had sat there as she talked about it, shivering. She had been so nice when he had walked in at first. He might have imagined it, but thought there was some attraction there. As everyone got to know each other at the sessions, Ben's story started coming out of him, new even to Ben himself. He had had no mother figure to speak of, really. The woman who was probably his mother had kept him locked in a cellar like an animal until he had escaped at a young age to be homeless. He had grown up in that environment, a completely feral human being. He was almost a fully grown man when he first fell in love, with a prostitute. Nothing could have ever happened between them. One night a man beat her so badly that her face was bleeding, dragging herself on one bad leg down the busy strip. Ben was there in the shadows, trying to look out for her, but too scared like an animal to do much. An expensive sportscar pulled up to her, the window rolled down, and another man tried to hire her again on the spot. Ben lept out of the shadows, through the window, and pulled the man out by his throat. The car kept rolling, Ben dragging the man out and beating him to death with his bare hands. Ben made that shit up for that nice lady's benefit. He wanted to impress her. Unfortunately, she believed him. She was scared of him for a long time after that. Ben was just crazy, he didn't even know what hole he had climbed out of. It was bad. He had fallen head over heels for that nice, traumatized, wonderful lady. He was always early to the groups, he was usually the first one there. Her fear subsided as he was always respectful to her. She probably figured out how crazy he was. He couldn't do anything about it. His mind involuntarily fantasized about her in strange ways. She would stand there naked in his mind, but it wasn't even sexual. She stood there as if for a medical examination or to get a tattoo. Ben started to realize that she was crazy too. He made the most progress out of anyone in the group. He was extremely motivated, and it was all by his love for her. She wore a wedding ring, but she never spoke of any man. Ben was going to be a leader of one of these groups someday. It hurt to be around her. It hurt to wake up, to fall asleep, everything in between, and to dream. Ben started to figure out his actual story. It hurt to not tell anyone. The world felt like it was melting sometimes when he sat there in the groups, struggling to hold it together, to not be crazy. One night he got there early like he always did, he was the first one there like he always was. She awkwardly walked right up to him before she started like she always did, and she gave him a hug that left him dizzy. She stared him down as she turned to continue getting everything ready for the group.
Contrary to popular belief, the oldest inhabited region in the world is a tiny village just inside the edge of a jungle. To the east of it is more jungle, to the west of it is more jungle. To the south is denser and denser jungle, and to the north there isn't much before a sea. There are cliffs down to the shore, and in the cliffs is a very large mouth of a cave. The villagers never go far from the village, and they definitely never, ever go into the cave. In the village, the people speak their own language that's similar enough so that most people who would ever show up from anywhere nearby are certain to understand them. Most people never come near them from the west or the east, and no one ever comes to see them from the south. To the north is just sea, and the cave. Everyone in the village knows their own purpose from early on in life. No one is ever forced to stay, but when people want to leave their village, it is always recommended that they head west, and they almost always do. They mostly get along better with anyone from the west than from the east when they do occasionally show up. It may not have always been that way, but it probably was. The villagers all know the purpose of their tiny village, but they don't ever mention it unless someone visits who is headed to the nearby shore of the sea. They always tell them not to go to the cave. In the village there is one person selected from an early age, usually a man, who keeps track of the history of the village. No one is named at birth, they are only named when they know what they will do. That person is named Ahb. Even in that village they know the world changes, Ahb always tells them stories, and they have proof when Ahb makes a new story for them about something that happened. Usually there are several people called Ahbi, but only one person ever becomes known as Ahb. It's the only name in the village that changes like that. It caused a lot of changes when people started showing up who said they came from the north. The villagers thought that wouldn't ever happen. Only one person had been Ahb since that first happened. No one had believed it, at first. Ahb had been young, and had taken the risk to spend a lot of time near the cave to see where they actually came from. It had been scary, but they had shown up, exactly as they said, in a large metal boat from somewhere across the sea. At least they weren't from the cave. It all made for much more than one story. The people from across the sea noticed Ahb waiting for them almost as soon as he noticed them. When they had first showed up, Ahb had told them immediately about the cave. He had noticed their reluctance to say anything at all, which was most of the reason he had decided to wait for them to return, to be able to see them as soon as they arrived again. They were there at the shore as they said they would be, a few months later. The people from the sea knew many languages, and it hadn't taken them long to figure out how to speak with Ahb. He had immediately asked them about the cave. Somehow he knew they had gone in there. They replied by asking him what he knew about the cave. He told them again the simple stories about the cave. People can go into it, but if they do, after not very long there is always a horrible scream and blood drips from the cave. No one ever goes in there anymore. The villagers had stories that they had tried everything to stop people, even trying to fight them away from the cave. Obviously that hadn't had any effect but being worse than useless. Ahb was more than curious, he had to know if they had gone into it. Then they told him a few of them had gone in, and that was what had happened. The people from the sea took him at his word, and he could tell they had knowledge worth trading for. He explained to the villagers there could be a new name for people in the village who could learn from them. They sometimes had very good but different ways of healing people. Everyone thought it was a good idea, and the people from the sea suggested the name Doctor. The people from the sea asked what else was around, and everyone agreed the people to the west of the village always seemed a bit friendlier. They had stories about people from the east. One of people from the sea said it stood out that the villagers usually left to the west when they did, so they might end up friendlier. Ahb could tell again they knew good things when that person said that. A sign of a good Ahbi. --- Ahb grew very old, and the world kept changing. People never really came from the east anymore at all, anyway, but to the west the people from the north might have caused a lot of changes, too. There was a new ruler to the west, and more people were coming. Two people in the village were named Ahbi now, and both knew all the stories. The people from the north didn't even ask about the cave much again. What worried Ahb the most was that the people coming from the west asked about the cave far too often. He tried to get the villagers to notice, at least to get the two Ahbis to notice and try to put a stop to it. The people from the west of the village were getting too curious about it, and Ahb could tell they wanted a villager to go in, but they didn't want to go themselves. Ahb tried to warn everyone as soon as he noticed it. He became very worried they were influencing the younger Ahbi, but he didn't want either of them to leave to the west. Some people from the west all showed up at once, with one man clearly leading them, during a time some people from the sea were there. The people from the west had too much influence, and the people from the north saw it too. Ahb took the people from the north aside and tried to ask them for help putting a stop to it, but it was too late. The younger Ahbi and several people from the west were already halfway to the cave at the shore when Ahb and the people from the sea went back to talk to them. Ahb rushed to the cave, but Ahbi was already coming out of the cave. He was the first person to come out of the cave, ever. The people from the west were cheering, their leader moved toward Ahbi to congratulate him. Ahbi was shaking in fear, and Ahb rushed past everyone to hug him, crying. What had happened? Ahbi told him simply that they had given him a test. The cave had been extremely dark, he couldn't see anything. He had felt a blade to his throat from some creature inside the cave, who had said, "this is for us, not for you." Ahbi had been shaking in terror, but the creature had pulled the blade back a bit. Ahbi had not been sure what to say as he stood there trembling. It had all only lasted a few seconds, and Ahbi had just asked if he could leave. The creature had let him. "That's the story, then," Ahb said to him. "Leave it at that." --- That night the people from the west took over the village, celebrating for hours. Ahbi was too drawn into it all. Most of the villagers didn't stay, but Ahb tried to snap Ahbi out of it and bring him to his senses. The leader of the group visiting from the west said too many of the wrong things. Ahbi asked him, not Ahb, if he could go back with them. The man from the west of the village told him, "no, your place is clearly here, as the new Ahb." Ahb felt awful hearing that. He stood at the side of it all with his fist to his mouth, crying. The younger Ahbi didn't even notice. He got carried away retelling the story, embellishing it, letting the people from the west of the village make up horrible details. He was much too carried away with it all. He said, "the people from the east could stab me in the back now, and I would survive it." The people from the west laughed and cheered, while Ahb wept behind the crowd hopelessly. Finally he left. He didn't know what to do. The people from the sea had no suggestions, some of them ashamed of themselves they had ever come at all. The next morning the ruler from the west himself arrived. The people from the sea to the north tried to intervene, but the ruler was demanding that Ahbi go in again. The villagers and people from the north were outnumbered and couldn't do anything. Ahbi wouldn't listen to reason as Ahb shouted at him and wept. The younger Ahbi was too confident, ready to go again and find out more about what lived inside of the cave. The people who were against going could do nothing but watch as Ahb screamed, cried, and pleaded, while they all went back to the shore where the cave was. Ahb couldn't do anything about it as Ahbi went back into the cave. He was in there for far too long, for several minutes. There was never any scream, but blood poured and splattered from the cave while Ahb wept. The ruler from the west of the village barked in short astonishment, almost a laugh. Ahb wanted to kill him. The most amazing thing happened then, the blood started to flow upward from the ground, and then there was Ahbi standing there again. He slowly fell forward though, blinking his eyes once. A sword stuck out of his back. It looked like it could be a thousand years old, except that it seemed perfectly new. The people from the north tried to push through the crowd to help him, but they all cheered around Ahbi, rocking the sword back and forth in his back.