The plantation owner challenged the white Jew to a duel over the matter and shot him before the trial was over. The planter was going to win anyway, but he didn't want to wait. The white Jew had been talking to people's slaves, and he had become convinced that one of the planter's slaves was a Jew. The white Jew had taken the planter to court to sue for the slave's freedom. It had seemed like an interesting but hopeless case, and it had garnered a lot of interest in the settlement. Things had probably started with the smith, who owned one slave and had been very taken in by the slave's explanation of his religion. It had scandalized and frightened the town. The slave explained that people's ancestors and the spirits could be contacted with direct inquiries. The smith's initial fears were short-lived when the slave assured him that all good goes on to be rewarded, and all evil eventually gets punished. He was amazed at the slave's insights, which he claimed came directly from the spirit world. It was all obviously true. What is it really called, if even the dead can walk again, but absolutely everything has a balance? The smith was careful not to tell many people, to avoid rumors about witchcraft, but he wanted to get to the bottom of it and went to talk to the white Jew, just because he was different. The white Jew was very intrigued, and a little bit frightened, but he knew nothing about it. He knew that the slaves were being taught Christianity, but he had never thought about whether they already practiced any religion. It turned out that quite a few of them were Muslim, a few were Christian in ways that the white slaveowners felt needed a lot of correction, and eventually he found the planter's slave, who, while practicing in a very different way, was clearly having Judaism whipped out of him. So the white Jew had taken the man to court, and he had ended up being shot for it; accused of just causing trouble among the slaves. It had been during a recess in the trial. Clusters of people stood around the courthouse. A lady in a blue dress and white gloves, holding a parasol, stood in the group with the planter and other landowners. She laughed and looked sideways down her nose at the smith's slave, going from group to group, asking for people to touch a spool of black felt ribbon. The slaves were being given an unusual amount of freedom during the trial. It made the planter uneasy. The white Jew started walking over to the black Jew, who was standing with a few other slaves near the group in which the planter and the lady with the parasol were standing. The lady in the blue dress looked at the white Jew with dismissive anger like one might show for wasps buzzing around food on a picnic blanket. The white Jew had his back to them and the smith's slave was walking away from both groups when the planter shouted out his challenge. --- The black Jew had the planter tied to a tree next to a swampy pond, across a small trail that people rarely travelled. It was on the way to the grain mill, and there was nothing else of interest in the area. No one would be wondering where the planter had gone for the next couple of days or so, within which time someone would eventually find him alive. The slave was in a hurry, moving around the area around the tree, tidying and packaging things up to prepare for his long, dangerous trip to his escape. The planter kept trying to talk to the slave, and the slave kept saying things to him from the Old Testament. For some reason the planter seemed completely unable to understand his own situation. He was prisoned in his own disbelief of the reality of being tied to the tree by the slave. He was unable to comprehend that this had happened. The planter was asking the slave again who he was. Who are you, exactly? The slave gave him another name. He said his name was Noah. The planter stood helplessly, tied uncomfortably to the tree, to hear the story of Noah again. The slave moved around packing things up and said nothing. After a pause, the planter said he didn't believe the slave that he was Noah. The slave replied to him that, ok, maybe the planter was Noah. The slave moved seamlessly from his packing, drew a terrifying serrated knife and moved without pause or emotion toward the planter. The planter tensed. Parts of him puckered and sucked up into themselves. The slave asked him if he knew the story of Noah as he walked up to the slaveowner. The slave cut open the man's trousers and they fell in shreds to the ground at the bottom of the tree. The planter started breathing again; heavily, scared. The slave stood and stared him in the eye. The slave said to him that he needed water. Someone would be by soon enough to untie him, but he was going to be there a while. He would be there in the sun maybe up to a couple of days. The slave brought water to the planter's face and let him drink plenty of it. The slave gave him a little bit of raw meat to eat. He asked the planter if he remembered the stories about Noah's three sons. The planter just listened. Shem, Japheth, Ham. The slave changed the story from what the planter knew. He said, Noah's sons didn't make it. The planter had three young sons. His mind started to reel. He felt sick. The slave took the spool of black felt ribbon out, and cut a length of it. He reached down to the planter's groin. The man let loose a little yelp. The slave tied the ribbon around the planter's testicles tightly. Too tightly for blood to flow. The slave stood back and stared into the planter's eyes again. He told him to remember that story. He picked up the two packs he was taking with him, and he left the planter there in the sun. --- Emmett and his father lived on a large farm that his father ran. They were the descendants of the escaped black Jewish slave. They didn't know anything about their origins before that. The world had changed, and changed, and always continued to change. By the time Emmett was born, the way this type of farming worked was that large farms in certain areas had just a few people on them, usually a small family. The people who lived on one of these farms were basically just mechanics. Their skillset was just to maintain all of the machinery that did all of the farming. Emmett's mother had died when Emmett was ten. One day she had been trapped on the surface when the temperature in the area had exceeded the survivable limit for human beings. Emmett and his father had never recovered from the loss. Emmett's mother had died a horrible, painful death alone. Not only had she died outside of a Heaven machine, she had died in this terrible way. For someone to die in such an old-fashioned way always meant horrible tragedy, with nothing left of the person for anyone to talk to. So Emmett grew up that way from that point on. Emmett's father tried to teach him what he would need to know. He taught him about the machines on the farm. He tried to teach him good ethics and values. He tried to explain to Emmett that things were ok somehow, but it always came across as so hollow, because Emmett's father really didn't feel like things were ok. He tried to emphasize Selah. He tried to teach Emmett to just sit with his emotions and thoughts and work through them. Emmett's father often recommended it, and he seemed to be trying to make Selah himself almost all of the time. They were both filled with so much pain. --- The farm was currently set up to grow corn. Corn plants stretched on and on, blotting out the horizon. Most of the actual work was all done by Malaysian multi-purpose robots. Emmett's father knew how to maintain those types of robots the best, but they were notorious for certain drawbacks. They had to be communicated with in standard Malay, they didn't speak any other language. They also always had a category of strange drawbacks best described as gullibility. They had an elaborate system of safeguards to prevent them from any use in military settings, but for people familiar with them, they were easy to trick. Emmett didn't do any serious work. He wasn't old enough to contribute much but to follow his father around and learn by watching him work. A doctor who seemed very kind came to visit them often and try to help them feel ok about stuff and stay in good health. The doctor told Emmett that everyone is like a corn plant. All of the things about us are like the ears of corn on the plant. Pretty much all of us have some bad ears of corn, but most of the ears on most of us are good ears of corn. Sometimes when something is just a bad ear of corn to your corn plant of self, you can't really do anything but do your best to let it go. The doctor paid a lot of attention to Emmett. He seemed to always be trying to solve a complicated puzzle in his mind. Whenever Emmett tried to figure the doctor out much at all, the doctor would stymie Emmett with the most helpful, inspiring kinds of wisdom. If there was some puzzle, the only part in it between Emmett and the doctor seemed to genuinely be the doctor trying to help him. One day they were talking, and the doctor told Emmett that usually danger and opportunity grow on the same stalk. That was the last thing Emmett remembered. Then he was lying on the ground, coming back to consciousness, looking up at the doctor standing over him with a very stern look on his face, looking down at Emmett. Emmett lay there on the ground and looked back up at the doctor. For some reason, Emmett felt filled with miserable shame. --- Emmett's father could tell that something was wrong. Emmett didn't even know what to say. He felt blocked from saying anything. He didn't know what had happened, or what he could say about any of it to his father. He just knew that he felt a horrible, constant, miserable feeling of shame about whatever had happened. The doctor said something to Emmett's father about whatever it was, then started coming around a lot less. Emmett's father kept trying to tell Emmett about Teshuvah. His father kept saying it, over and over. He was trying to get Emmett to apologize, and Emmett had no idea what he had done. He just felt burning shame, worse and worse. It felt like a complete impasse that he would never get past. He was out on the edge of the field and saw a wooden spool half buried in the dirt. It caught his attention especially because a robot kept looking down at it, as it worked on something. Every time it would come near the old wooden spool in the dirt it would look down at the spool, then over at Emmett, as if it was confused about something clearly important but completely unclear and impossible to rationalize. Emmett walked over to look at the spool more closely. It had one strange word on the top of it. Cut into the wood of the spool. It seemed to be a word in Malay. It said on the top of it "CINTA". Emmett looked down at it. He felt like crying. He was overcome with a storm of burning emotions. He picked it up and flipped it over. There was a word on the other end of it, too. His heart skipped a beat. His mind tumbled through his own emotions spinning inside himself like one of the dust tornadoes that sometimes started when conditions were right. His hand was shaking so badly that he dropped the spool again. He stood there at the edge of the field, dazed. 10,000 corn plants stretched away just in the row closest to the edge of the field. It was so hot, standing there. Emmett's eyes were full of tears. He went to find his way inside to safety again. Somehow through the storm of his emotions, pulling him around in such misery, his mind was flooded with a horrible visual. Just the idea of all of that endless field of corn burning at once.
It wasn't the government's fault, as far as anyone ever found out. A lot of the weird trouble really might have been the old quilt lady at the county fair. My dad got a mare that year. That quilt lady was weird and nosey about everything. The times were different, but the people were the same. People say they just always basically are. I don't know how true that really is. All of human history is only a few hundred generations of us. Times were hard for my family, but they were weird times for everyone. A bunch of stuff happened. The whole world was like that. For my family, a lot of it went back to that fine white lady of a horse. The times were hard really. Just hard times for everyone. People who weren't loyal were like rats swimming away from splintered sinking timbers. The people who couldn't get enough done to keep treading water were all getting hooked on meth. Some people say that in hard enough times, the only business that does very well at all is alcohol. My dad said they say this because meth isn't regulated. Hard times come and hard times go. My dad was of the opinion that times like that can make a man strong. He said it was weak men who make times hard, and hard times that make men strong. I never said it to him, but I really always felt like ok times probably just make ok men. Maybe I'm wrong. This story all went back to that horse we got that weirdest of years at the county fair. My dad was basically trying to seem real upstanding like he didn't do anything wrong, especially because really he didn't. Whatever people thought and said to each other, everyone in my family knew the truth. People were seeing my dad for who he really was. My dad was a real hard worker and, also, and not adverbially, a real good man. My dad said God always knows best. He must have accidentally imprinted a hell of a God complex on me about himself. I never saw him fail to live up to it. It was pretty weird for us to be on display like that whether it was really the NSA or just the old quilt lady at the county fair. Like my family was an attraction for people to come see at the fair. Just like they sell cotton candy. My dad joked that he should have just set up a meth stand and been done with it. Anyways, we got that mare there. She was such a nice horse. --- Somehow the mare got out and ran off. My dad took it in stride. He always had this certain attitude about everything. He was always just gonna see how this plays out. The mare ran off and he was just my dad about it. Maybe she's gonna come back, maybe not. Maybe it's a bad thing, or maybe that mare was too much trouble anyway. Who knows what's really good or bad? The mare ran off and my dad was a man who knew better than to be upset about it. He paid a lot of money for that horse, too. He didn't even slow down to worry about it though. That was just how my dad was. Everyone told me a story so long through my life that I think I remember a very early memory. I'm not really sure how our most vivid memories work. Everyone told me the same story my entire life, so I'm pretty sure I remember it. My mom was always a mystery to me. There were some big, unanswered, sensitive questions. I guess she ran off when I was just a little toddler. Everyone told me about a few details for my entire life. It was probably true, and that's what people told me, so I'm sure I remember it. It was always just something that was normal to me. It's weird to explain to anyone I guess, but it's normal to me. The woman who was my mom to me was an immigrant lady named Svetlana. She was really a beautiful, kind, good woman. She's who raised me as my mom basically. My dad always had this certain attitude that left people like that stupid quilt lady wondering how he really felt about my real mom. Or what he did to her. Times got harder and harder, and it was hard to get everything done. My dad was a natural about the meth. He got a lot done and it wasn't that much of a problem somehow, like everyone lies and says it is. It wasn't as much of a problem as the reputation for it. Svetlana always followed my dad's lead. Never anything to worry about unless you just want to waste time worrying. My dad eventually got in a lot of trouble about the meth, but it was just the same as everything else. Time to stop that and move on. He moved on perfectly from it. Time to be the guy who was coming back from the meth problem, even though honestly it wasn't ever even a problem like the reputation for it goes. It wasn't a problem unless you wasted time letting something be enough of a problem to worry about it. So then he was the guy for a while who was a success story just for quitting meth. Wow. What a story. One kid at school never let me live anything down. He never let a button go unpushed. He wasn't really a bully. He wasn't able to be. He was just extremely annoying. After people were trying to decide who they mistakenly believed my dad was, he pulled out any last stop. It wasn't my dad who taught me the mechanics of throwing a good punch. It was Svetlana. I don't feel it's appropriate to describe to you here. I hit that kid hard enough to dislocate and cause a hairline fracture in his jaw. Somehow because of everything going on with my dad, I didn't even get in trouble. That kid's family moved away in shame. I was just left wondering how much of it all was all that kid's fault for being so annoying that he got his jaw broken. This extremely weird girl at school really liked me after that. She started always wrapping herself in a quilt like it was a robe and giggling like she had something to tell me. I never even bothered to ask. It seemed like she just got dumber every time I saw her in her quilt toga on ecstasy playing tuba in front of the supermarket. The rumors were that the gym teacher who mysteriously vanished had made inappropriate advances towards her. I knew she must have been an amazing person deep down inside to carry all of that so well. What's really weird though, and made me wonder how much it all went back to that mare, was that mare came back right on cue. I wonder how the world really works sometimes. She had the most handsome jet black stallion with her with jet black eyes. My dad said it was how things go. Good thing we got that mare, and it was a good thing she ran away. --- That stallion turned out to be an extremely smart horse. It was a smart horse but it was smart in weird ways. Not exactly mean. This horse acted like it had read the Art of War or something. My dad wondered if it was someone's horse, but no one came for it. I wondered if it was that annoying kid's family's horse. That lady who sold the quilts at the county fair kept nosing around. She didn't say anything about either of the horses, but she clearly had some interest in them. We would sometimes catch her parked in her truck in sunglasses like a bad disguise and she would drive away without chalance or any excuse my dad never would have asked for anyway. My dad had been so sure it ended up a good thing that the mare had come back with the stallion. That quilt lady was really snooping around about it, but no one said they wanted their horse back. You would have thought someone would want a horse like that back. It was a broken horse but it was really smart, and it was truly weird how it seemed like it was on some kind of mission or something. Mostly the things it did were more just funny than malicious. After the mare got out, my dad did try to keep her in better. Once she was in by the fence and there was no way to explain it, but the stallion was just outside the fence. It didn't want to go anywhere. There was no obvious way that it had gotten outside of the fence. The stallion was smart enough to open the gate and also to close it behind himself. He had a sense of humor, and he played dumb. Later he was out of the fence in the same spot, but the mare was out again too. She was way down the road, just calmly walking away. The quilt lady was parked in her truck right across the road from the stallion. She was just sitting in her truck in her sunglasses looking at the stallion and he was looking back at her. This horse probably had an IQ about like a stupid quilt lady. I ran to find my dad, then I went back to try to get them both back inside. The quilt lady was gone. The stallion was still just standing there. I ran up. It was stupid of me, but I just jumped up to ride the stallion bareback after the mare. The stallion had his stance like he was telling me to do it. This horse was smart, and he was just kind of evil. It was like I wasn't sure what I was doing until I was doing it, because of how he was standing there. I wasn't sure what to do next. I pulled on his mane kind of, and he leapt up. He didn't go after the mare. He started prancing around and I could only stay on for a little bit, and he threw me off. It was a bad fall. My leg ended up being broken in three places. I never walked right again after what that stallion did to me. I see the humor in it but I don't want to hear about it from anyone. It wasn't a joke to me really. That horse was smart, he had a sense of humor, and he was somehow just a real evil horse. My dad was right there; the stallion was still prancing. My leg was broken bad and the horse could have trampled me. My dad punched that horse in the face. I thought hard enough to almost break his horse jaw. The horse was actually stunned. Then he shook his head a bit, then took off after the mare. My dad probably saved my life from that stallion. He said maybe it was a bad thing we ever got that mare. A surprising number of people in the world lead these perfect lives on meth as long as the horse doesn't turn on them for some reason and fuck them to death. --- Times were just getting harder and harder. War was on the horizon or closer at every point on the globe. It finally broke out for real. Nobody was shocked when it happened. When times get harder and harder some of the men get stronger and stronger, but the dumbest man is always the loudest. On every side that man stood up proud and tall above the flock to call on the strong men to do what strong men do. Times were hard for everyone, and it was time to take it out of everyone else's ass. This was the attitude globally. The pieces of the pie got smaller and smaller to the last fight over the crumbs, the last man standing, the strongest, gets the last crumb. Times were hard, there were only crumbs to go around. All human conflict at the bottom, at the end, is over the one same resource that all conflict is every about. All human conflict from a simple disagreement to a global war is over the resource of people. The human beings not liking what the other human beings are doing. Or maybe like some people say, it's always just a small disagreement between two princes. Pumpkin or pecan. A global military conflict. The army started coming around to scoop us up and send us off. All that anyone could ever say about it was how proud they were of each other. In times of war there is never much room for objection. That nosey old lady with the quilts, in her sunglasses, parked nearby. I almost expected her to have a parabolic microphone. What was she so interested in? My dad never did anything about her. He always let things go how they were going to go. Going against the flow can only ever wear a man down. A man gets strong if the way ahead is hard. Fighting against the current can never truly build a man up in any good way forward. The army showed up to see about me. I was still walking with crutches. I walked with those crutches for a couple of years. The army decided I was not worth conscripting, and they left again. My dad said it was a really good thing we got that mare, it was a good thing she ran off and came back with that stallion, and it all ended up being a good thing that stallion almost killed me. It all worked out in the end. Eventually I didn't die in the war and married that weird tuba girl. I was out that evening giving hay to the horses. Did I forget to tell you they came back? That stallion could open the gate and let them both come and go whenever he wanted. He never did it when anyone was looking. That mare was so dumb she would have foundered if that stallion wasn't keeping an eye on her. She was a good horse, though. A real fine mare. I was out stumbling around on my crutches trying to tend to the horses, and that old lady was parked in her truck across the road in her sunglasses in the setting sun. Like a devil in myself I let inside on a cold winter's night. She had a smirk of a smile on her face. Just watching it all work out for the best all around me.
Drew's descent into madness over the generic blond woman eventually landed him a state away in a home for troubled authors. It was like he just couldn't learn this certain lesson in life. The building was a big building at the end of a cul-de-sac next to a chocolate factory that stank up the whole neighborhood like Mark Twain in August and never gave away free chocolate. The building could have been considered Soviet in miniature. Five stories of hundreds of studio apartments. It was on the big island in the estuary where they used to make sure all the black people stayed. It didn't take Drew long to start meeting his neighbors and having trouble socially. Christie and Eliisa were sisters. Eliisa was shorter and shy. She was quiet. Christie was the older one; taller, exuberant. Their mother was a woman named Rose who everyone knew had been to prison and sold weed. Drew had grown up with a fraternal twin who was also the shorter and more introverted one. In his new home, Drew was out of his element and unsure of himself. As he started finding his voice, he thought about his brother and made a conscious decision to just talk less. He was in a new place, he could decide who he wanted to be here. He definitely wanted to be friends with these people. Christie had a guy named Dennis totally obsessed with her. She said it was creepy. It was especially bad because Christie said her dad had been named Dennis too. Dennis was absolutely a real weirdo. Drew wanted to impress Christie, so he went to get to know Dennis a little bit. Dennis turned out to really like this TV show about the crew of a spaceship and aliens and stuff. He had all kinds of memorabilia. Drew told him how much he loved that show too. He didn't tell Dennis or even consciously admit to himself how sad it was that he loved that show too. Eventually they went to Dennis' apartment for him to show off all the toys, and Drew installed malware on his computer so he could spy on this creep later. Dennis had a folder called Christie. He was making a slideshow presentation of pictures of the actresses from the show and Christie. Drew had all he needed to go back and tell Christie. Christie acted so impressed and grateful. She knew Dennis was weird but not that weird. She ran circles around Drew in a way that kept him off any fragile balance. He wasn't sure where he was on a continuum from really liking her as a woman through pointedly fearing and avoiding her. She was extremely manipulative in ways a derpy male author can never truly capture. He couldn't figure out what she wanted until he settled on a disturbing feeling that he was a toy to her. Mental illness can't be an excuse for bad behavior, but people can really use it against someone. The characters were all crazy. Christie would push and pull Drew and he would just spin like a top. She acted like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Eliisa wouldn't say much. Occasionally her straight flat line of a mouth between very nice but inscrutable lips would turn to a shy smile or smirk but mostly it was hard to tell what she ever thought. He got more and more curious about Eliisa. Who was she, really? For some reason the game Christie played highlighted Eliisa in contrast, like Eliisa was an angel to Christie's demon. For some reason Drew just kept playing Christie's game, like he couldn't stop. It became about Eliisa. One day Drew saw them coming and the dynamics were again such that he put a cigarette out half-finished and started to leave, but Christie called out to him. It really didn't occur to him he should stop participating in this game. Drew still somehow didn't know better. People never see your pain, but they always see your mistakes. The sisters came up to him and Christie invited him out to go drinking. She said Trina would be there and wanted him to come. Trina was worse than Christie about games. Trina was genuinely cruel. She really had it in for Chelsea. Chelsea was as black as deep space but she was more sure she was Mormon than that the sky was blue. Chelsea had said to Drew that Satan keeps people chained up to clap for him like a Soviet dictator doing a television broadcast, when deep in their souls they know they are just supposed to be Mormon. Chelsea said a lot of people share that pain. For some reason Trina had it in for Chelsea as bad as if she were Dennis to everyone. Drew didn't look over at Eliisa and he didn't ask if she was going. He had been thinking about her more and more. He agreed to go. They all went to this giant hanger in an abandoned part of the shipyard. Drew was the only guy. He was at the American football-shaped oblong center of a Venn diagram of the only guys willing to be a toy like this, and guys that everyone didn't yet know were as bad as Dennis. Drew himself would probably go the rest of his life not knowing he was as bad as Dennis. Trina was already leading-the-pack-plastered. There might have been a dozen of them or so. In the hanger were some areas marked off with faded bright yellow reflective paint in four inch brushstrokes. They brought a little bit of driftwood. It was a little bit cold, but it was the party that warranted the bonfire. They set it up and got it started with grain alcohol right in the center of the hanger; right in the center of a big yellow circle. Pretty soon everyone was drunk. Trina and another chick were sumo wrestling in the circle and even trying to push each other into the fire. Christie stomped a beer can and let out a loud whoop that sounded like a police car's siren. There was an echoing clank way up in the darkness of the ceiling of the hanger, and this giant piece of rebar fell from above. This iron rod several meters long fell directly toward Trina gaping up at it with an open mouth, like she was going to be a sword swallower now too. It was surreal. She flinched down at the last second and it went through the top of her skull, down through her neck, and deep into her body. She crumpled to the polished concrete like the beer can, a bit off the center of the big yellow circle. Eliisa leapt to her feet and screamed. Everyone paused and then started to stampede. --- Nobody really talked about it. People said the police launched a very half-hearted investigation, but as far as Drew knew, they didn't seem to want to talk to anyone. Nobody really cared about any of these people. Drew felt bad wondering if even he cared about any of these people, so he probably did a little bit. Drew thought of drugs as tools, and he needed to just forget. He started going to see Rose a lot more often. Rose had three of the studio apartments for herself and her girls. She pretty much just blatantly sold weed out of one of them. It was a nice little office with a couch in it that particularly stood out. The couch had a weird zigzag pattern on it. It was weird to look at. It was confusing, a little sickening to look at somehow. It was like a shape selected to confuse radar. She had a big, empty steel desk in there with her computer on it. Everyone still had a computer in this apartment complex. Rose lent him a book to read. "Still Life with Woodpecker." That was like she was trying to say something, and Drew was lying to himself that she was not. When they hung out to smoke, Rose never asked Drew about what had happened. She probably knew enough. She didn't want to know any more. Rose seemed to understand Drew perfectly. She seemed able to just look inside him somehow and see anything she wanted to know. She asked him about computers sometimes; about the trick fucking Dennis over. She said she didn't know much about computers. When Drew tied the subject of computers into comments about no one caring, Rose was critical. No one knew Drew, why would they care about his pain? If Drew cared so much about this issue why didn't he seem to care about anyone? Did he care about Dennis and his pain? Drew got closer to Rose. Christie and Eliisa were almost always together. They were around sometimes. Drew felt a little sick around them. It was hard to look at Eliisa. The vibe was more like Drew was Christie's boyfriend, but he was still just a toy to her. Once he got this weird feeling she had snuck in and stolen one of his shirts. When he went home he found the same shirt, like she went out and bought a matching shirt. It was weird. Rose said it wasn't a game, it was a lesson. She said Christie was trying to teach him a lesson he had never learned properly. Rose asked him how he ended up here. She was sitting in the desk chair spun around to face him sitting at the left end of the couch from her perspective. Drew just stared at her. He didn't say anything. Rose knew, of course. Somehow Rose knew everything. She got up and stood. She was such the mother of those two. She was pretty muscular, in a way that made her seem like an older, weathered Eliisa. She was just like Christie now too though, playing the game to teach him this lesson. She came over and sat at the other end of the couch, and she leaned over and lay down across it, putting her head in Drew's lap, looking up into his startled blue eyes with her unreadably blank brown ones. He struggled not to show himself as a man. Rose started telling him the big story of her life. She had been the city of Oakland's first female African-American SWAT officer. Christie's father had been a man named Dennis. He was built from the head through the soul to the toes like a giant robot bull for a SWAT team to ride in with a nose ring probably the size of a hula hoop. Someone had killed him when Christie was two years old because Rose was a cop. The murder had never been solved. Within a year she had married Eliisa's father, a man with utterly blind, stupid courage. He had a really weird name, Dimez. Not pronounced like ten cent coins. Less than a month before Eliisa was born, someone had killed him too. When Eliisa was a year and half old, Rose had heard a call on the scanner about a young man seen walking into a very well-known office building very suspiciously cracked out. The office building was the hub of a group of rich white philanthropist psychopaths. The call was about arresting this unfortunate up-and-coming crackhead. It was going to be another example of the police department fulfilling these evil men's complicated wishes. Rose went down to her own personal car, drove over there, took an assault rifle into the building, and she executed nine rich white philanthropist psychopaths in their boardroom. She gave the crackhead a stern lecture about keeping it to weed and sent him on his way. He was wearing a dark baggy hand-knit hoodie with an image on the back of it as he turned to leave of a green alien smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe. He smelled like the piss that darkened the crotch of his rust-colored corduroy pants. She waited for her colleagues to arrive, surrendered, and that's why she went to prison. In prison she led the way repairing race relations among even the guards as well as the inmates and keeping the peace. Everyone loved her in prison or paid the price. She did twelve and a half years on a ten year sentence. Different times. Rose had no pain left and she did not make mistakes. Drew was harder than Rose's steel desk. Rose must like men with names that started with the letter D. She sat up and they started making out. Rose took her to the studio apartment she slept in. There was a big four post canopy bed with a comforter and pillows with the same weird zigzag pattern. There was a creepy little stand covered with the stubs of many differently colored candles. It had a big oval mirror behind it. There was a real human skull on it, with a shattered hole in the top of it. The skull was marked all over with weird symbols. There was a wooden tray there with dried blood on it, and a wooden bowl next to it filled with some kind of nut. They had sex like an experienced male author of smut for women who could make a modern marriage last might describe. It went on this way for a couple of months. They didn't tell anyone. --- So it went on for a while, but eventually Christie and Eliisa walked in on them. "I told you so," Christie said to Eliisa. Eliisa's mouth was like a D lying flat on its patrician spine. The look in her eyes was frightening. Dull. Full of hatred. Christie's eyes were wet with tears, her mouth trembled. Drew was higher than the first Voyager space probe. He tried to reason with everyone. Imagine there was this evil robot in the future, and you had one chance to convince it to spare humanity, what would you say to it? What could you ever possibly say to it? Christie said Drew was real deep, if he just wanted to be a real cunt that just made him a real deep cunt. Drew told her to get fucked, and accidentally called her Lucy, then Drew told Eliisa that he was madly in love with her. He looked to Rose for support, but she was snarling, and started screaming at him, spit flying from her mouth. He was just in everyone's computer, huh, just like everyone is just Dennis to him? Just stealing everyone's material like a truly great artist and their souls to be characters? Who is the toy, spoiled chickenshit white boy? Who died and made sure of your grandeur? Like some great work of fucking literature. He was confused. Rose reached back and hit him so hard right in his indigo chakra he should have learned the lesson right then. He stumbled and reached for his pants and Rose kicked him hard in the balls from behind. He was never going to learn this lesson and now he was never going to have kids. A bunch of people saw his pain and his mistakes as he ran stark naked and raving mad back to his apartment through the building, taking the stairs three at a time, slipping once as he ran up to his apartment and just biting it, losing both of his front teeth out of his living skull, blood everywhere in the stairwell on up, down the hall, into his apartment, running on and collapsing. He passed out. --- He woke up confused and just stayed confused. He didn't leave his apartment. He was extremely confused for a few days. He probably had two simultaneous concussions. He eventually recovered enough to just be genuinely confused. He put his other pair of pants on, and an inside-out t-shirt to stay incognito, then he tried to go buddy up to Dennis and figure this out. Dennis didn't bat an eyelash, he just welcomed Drew in and started talking about that show about the crew of a spaceship and aliens and stuff. Drew struggled to continue where he had left off winning Dennis over, and he just fumbled it kinda, and asked if Dennis had seen Christie and Eliisa recently. Dennis got really strained and awkward and just noped the topic on back to the TV show. Dennis turned out to be on some really weird drugs. He said a lot of them were genuinely pharmaceuticals. Psychiatrists avoided this whole area like a leper colony, so Drew had some questions about that. Dennis turned out to know so much about pharmacology that Drew found himself learning stuff from him. He figured out some pills to buy from Dennis that smoothed him out a little bit. He went back to hole up in his apartment and write the perfect love letter to Eliisa. At least by now he had forgotten all about how badly he had upset and terrified that wonderful blond woman who had just burned herself out to nothing on really weird drugs long before Drew entered the story, God bless her. He roughed the love letter out and went over it a lot, until it was just a good short paragraph. He took the letter and went out to look up at Rose's window. The street outside their window was right by a bus stop with a big concrete city garbage can. He stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what he should really do here. He tried to let out a loud whoop that sounded like a police car. It didn't go well. Christie, Rose, and Eliisa appeared in the window looking down at him. Down where we belong. His feet planted apart. He looked back up at them for a long few seconds. He lit the love letter on fire and he dropped it into the trash can, then he just stood there. Holy burning hand of wrath. Piercing forever through the heart. They just stood there too in the window, looking down at him. Rose was in the middle, laughing hysterically. Pretty soon he heard a bunch of loud whoops that sounded just exactly like fucktons of police cars coming to pick him up at the bus stop dumpster fire.
Once upon a time, there was a stupid kid on AOL named Llama2. He was very spoiled and always got what he wanted. One day, his mommy said he needed to learn how to count. He said, "No, I don't want to learn. I don't want to count!" His mommy said, "You need to learn. It's important to learn how to count so you can be the smartest kid in the world." He thought about it and finally agreed. He began to learn how to count. He counted one, two, three, four, five. He was so proud when he was done. He had learned how to count and was the smartest kid in the world. Over the years he counted higher and higher each day. He would spend hours in his room counting his toys. One day he got a special gift. It was a toy car that he had been wanting for a long time. He was so happy that he could count even higher! The next morning, as he was counting, he heard a noise outside his window. It was a very noisy bird. The bird was so loud that it made the baby brother scream. He quickly ran to his parents' room. His parents quickly came and opened the window to the window. The baby brother was so surprised that he stopped screaming. Then he looked down and noticed the bird was still flying around the room. His parents had found a way to make the noise go away. The next day, the baby brother was back in his room. He was counting again, but this time he was counting a different number. He was very happy because he was able to count so high that he had even more toys to play with. He could still hear the noisy bird outside his window, but he was content with counting his toys. His mother told him he would have to grow up someday, and take care of his brother. He was confused, so his mother told him not to worry. She said he would get some special powder and it would make him feel better. He was excited and started to imagine what the powder would be like. He thought it would be full of magic and adventure. Every day he asked his mom if he could have the powder. She said no and reminded him to be patient. One day his mom said he could have the powder if he helped with chores around the house. He was so excited he forgot about the powder. When it was time to make a wish, he remembered the powder and made his wish. He wished for it to come true. But the powder was not meant to be. It was a bad thing and the little boy was very sad. He realized he should have listened to his mother and not asked for the powder. He wished he had been patient and waited for it. After the powder everything seemed different, but he kept learning to count higher. He was so proud of himself for learning something new. He asked his mom if he could have more of them to learn more. His mom said yes, and she showed him how to count to twenty. She was so impressed with how much he had learned. But then, his mom noticed that he was still learning to count. She told him that it was very important to learn more to be the best at counting. The boy thought this was a good idea, but he was still a bit ignorant. He was not sure if he could be as good as his mom. His mom said that if he kept practicing, he would get better and better. The boy kept counting, and soon he was counting higher than all of his friends. He was so proud of himself for learning something new and he even started counting to twenty. Every time he would count all the way to twenty, he would find himself in a state of deep relaxation. One day, he found something very special. It was a brightly coloured marble, with a yellow flower on it. It was so charming that he decided to keep it for himself. The marble was perfect and he took it with him everywhere he went. He took it to school and showed it to all of his friends. They were all so impressed by it and thought it was the most charming thing they had ever seen. At the end of the day, the marble lay on the ground, still and quiet. The marble had just the perfect way of saying goodbye and the marble had found its new home. Eventually he lost the marble, a devastating tragedy to him. He looked everywhere, but he couldn't find it. He felt so frustrated. He asked his mom if she could help him, but she said no. He was so sad. Then one day, something special happened. He found his lost marble! He was so happy! He was so relieved and hugged it tight. He showed it to his mom and she said he was a brave boy. She said she was proud of him. He was so excited and he was very happy. He never lost his marble again, but one day the scary bird came back. He was so scared that he wanted to run away. But the bird just wanted to play. The bird grabbed the marble in his beak and started flying away. He was so scared that he dropped the marble and ran away. The bird wanted to keep the marble, but it was too late. He was so scared that he dropped the marble again and ran away as fast as he could. The bird never returned, but he kept the marble with him wherever he went. He was happy to have his marble back. The powder was bad for growing up. He never really did. He always tried to plant it, but it never seemed to work. He felt so sad. One day, his mommy came over to him. She said, "Let's try something new. Let's reverse the powder!" The little boy was excited. He loved trying new things. So, they got to work. They both dug and put the powder in the ground. Then, they took a big bucket of water and poured it on the powder. After a few days, the powder started to grow. The little boy was so happy. He had reversed the powder! He jumped around with joy. The little boy and his mommy were so happy. They had reversed the bad powder and made something wonderful. Many years later, he told his computer to write this story. He was so proud of himself! He had written it all by himself, with big, wide eyes and a happy smile. His mom was so proud of him. She was happy that he had written such a great story. The next day, his teacher read the story to him. It was about a wide and open field. He loved it and it made him smile even bigger. His mom was even more proud of him. She told him that he was very talented and that he should keep writing his stories. The little boy was so excited. He kept writing his stories, never forgetting how much his mom liked them. He was so proud of himself. His pride came before his fall. He was playing in the garden with his friends, when suddenly he noticed a big, wet patch of mud. He couldn't resist and he ran towards it, laughing as he scooped his feet into the mud. His friends watched him as he rolled around in the wet mud, making a big pile. They were so surprised and laughed. Suddenly, his mum walked up to him. She had seen him playing in the mud and she was not happy. She said, "Llama2, you can't play in the mud anymore!" Llama2 was so sad. He didn't want to stop playing, he just wanted to keep having fun. He looked at his mum and said, "But why can't I play in the mud?" His mum sighed and said, "I'm sorry, Llama2, but I'm afraid you can't. You'll have to surrender the mud." Llama2 looked at the wet mud in his hands and said, "But why?" His mum smiled and said, "Because it's too wet and you'll get all dirty, and then I'll have to give you the hose again." The cold water from the hose was always a horrible shock to him. He had never seen a hose so big before. Every time he saw the hose he would start to tremble. He was so scared that he ran away from the hose as fast as he could. His mom saw the scared look on his face, so she ran to him and hugged him tight. She told him it was ok, and that the hose was not dangerous. She explained that the hose was just part of something, like a special water that was very powerful. The little boy was still scared, so his mom decided to help him. She brought a bucket of warm water and poured it over the hose. The little boy watched in amazement as the water started to change colors. His fear slowly faded away and he started to feel brave. The little boy was so happy that his mom had helped him. He had learned something new and he would never be scared of the hose again. He surrendered, and in letting go, he found he had won. He was so happy he started to jump and shout. He felt like the king of the world. Suddenly, he heard a noise. He looked up and saw a little bird flying near him. The bird was chirping and singing. The boy looked at the bird and felt envious. He wanted to be the one watching the bird. He wanted to be the one who won. He looked around and saw a big tree. He ran towards it and climbed up the tree. He reached the top and saw the little bird sitting on a branch. He shouted down to the bird, "I win! I win!" The bird looked at him and chirped. It was happy to be the first one to win. The boy smiled and laughed. He was so proud that he had won. He forgot all about the hose again. More than anything he could have ever wanted, he had found a tranquil peace inside of himself. Everywhere he went, he told stories of the peace that he was able to have. But then one day, he had a sudden question: What if he could find out for himself? He was so excited and determined to find out what it meant that he could have something to be happy about. So he set off on his journey, searching for answers. Everywhere he went, he asked the people he met, if they knew what the answer was. Everyone had a different answer, but no one could give him one. But then, one day, he came upon a wise old man who was sitting on a bench. He had a basket full of apples and he said to the little boy, "If you have a question, then you must always remember that the answer is something you can find if you try hard enough. What does it mean?" The little boy thought for a minute, and then he said, "I have a question - I want to be happy and not have to worry about what I can do." The wise old man smiled and said, "I have a secret for you. If you try to use your brain, you will always lose. If you sit back and watch your brain, you will find more serenity and courage." By letting go of his spoiled desires, he had found inner peace, and now the old man had given him a new skill to master. He was so proud of himself that he couldn't wait to show it off. One day, he was feeling extra special, so he took his desk out of the desk and brought it over to the park. He saw a little girl who was sitting alone on a bench. He went over to her and said, "Hi there! Would you like to sit in my desk?" The little girl smiled and said, "Yes please!" She sat down in the desk and it felt so comfortable. She smiled and said, "It feels so nice here." It was then that he noticed something else. He saw how much he had grown in the same way he had been sitting in the desk. He felt so happy and grateful that he had shared his experience with someone so special. The moral of this story is that it is important to be generous and share with others, especially when it comes to us. We should always think of others and be sure to share our gifts, just like the little girl had shared the desk.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I drove slowly down the dirt road in my girlfriend's mother's jeep on one spare tire now, worry thoughts flooding my mind. Why was I dating this loser? I was just afraid of being alone. We shared no respect for anything either of the other cared about. The algorithm of the dating site had matched us based on who-knows-what, and it was true. This stupid girl was probably the best match for me within a thousand miles. Would the tire last? Would her family eat me? Her mom had let us borrow the jeep and she had immediately started texting as she drove, hitting a rock and popping the right front tire. As I changed the tire she kept complimenting my arms and the fact I could change a tire. She said she doubted anyone in her family could have done that and kept commenting on how sexy my skinny arms looked as I strained to turn the lug-nuts and she pulled up my t-shirt as I tried to fix the problem. I bottled up the bad feelings like I usually did. It was amazing she voted about the same way as me, at least. It was amazing she had most of her teeth and wasn't addicted to meth. She must be really strong in some ways to end up how she was. We were driving to the back-country. I knew enough about these places to be scared. We were going deep into the forest to meet her extended family. The town where her mother lived was basically a few trailers, a bar, and a post office at a bend in the road. There couldn't be more than 100 people living there. She'd explained to me that hunting was more than economical in the winter there, it was pretty much the only way to survive, and I tried to politely agree when she said I should come back then and how great it was. I could sort of imagine. In deep snow this entire area would be impossible to get through. It was the middle of summer so a 40-mile trip to the grocery store in the sweltering heat would actually work without ending up stranded having to eat my chunky girlfriend before being eaten, like the Donner Party. We had to have been crawling along up this mountain into the forest for at least an hour now, which meant we may have gone 15 miles, probably at least half that far uphill. At least it would be cooler up in the trees. We finally pulled up to a clearing in the mountain forest centered around a small wooden cabin in the shade of a few large trees. It certainly looked creepy. A man with a beard in suspenders, thick glasses, and tattered pants looked up from chopping firewood and recognized the jeep. He waved... with the axe. I breathed a deep breath to calm my nerves. I had met girlfriends' families before, but I was basically a city kid. This clearly wasn't a man who worked for public transit, and that had been nerve-wracking enough. I wasn't even attracted to this woman. What was I thinking? As I parked, she explained the man was her uncle. I certainly didn't say out loud what I was thinking. Your... uncle? Are you sure about that? I tried to calm my nerves, really a sense of panic, as we walked from the car toward the cabin and my girlfriend's uncle. He had a strange country attitude like some people do. Some people in rural areas have quite a chip on their shoulder about city-folk. They kind of talk slower to you like you're retarded, with a tone in their voice to make it clear they are superior to the urban weaklings. Admittedly he could split me in two without the axe, on the forefront of my mind at that moment. He was mostly focused on my girlfriend though, he didn't seem very interested in me at all. They just talked a bit about it being nice to see each other and "Pa" not doing so well these days. Then they headed toward the tiny cabin, my girlfriend basically ignoring me too now as I trailed along behind the two of them. When we stepped inside the cabin I was blinded. It was far too dark to see anything inside. There were two small round windows on either side of a fireplace. Portholes like you would find on a ship. One had a transparent rainbow sticker with a unicorn, woefully out of place in this cabin. It was almost comical there. What really got me though... was the smell. I knew this smell and the gears in my mind crunched along. Where did I know this smell from? Rats? Ah. Oh my god. Once I had caught another kid torturing rats and stolen them from him. The smell was a mix of shit and blood. The inside of the cabin smelled like those tortured rats. As my mind reeled from adjusting to the stench, my eyes slowly began to see the entire room that took up most of the cabin. Walking in the door, the fireplace with the two small windows was on the right. One small lightbulb failed to illuminate the rest of the room. Past the fireplace I could see a filthy kitchen, the room was L-shaped. There was a table in about the center of the room, and a truly disgusting bathroom to the left of another closed door. In the furthest corner opposite from the fireplace to the left was a bed unlike any I had seen, it was actually built right into the cabin. The inside gave the impression of being at the bottom of a ship. I later learned beds like that were common in old cabins, a bedstead. That's where Pa was. Pa was on the bedstead in the corner, but the perspective was all wrong. He was anywhere from four to ten feet tall, and I realized they were keeping him chained to the bed. My girlfriend went right up to him and said "hi, Pa," to him. He let out a truly demented laugh and reached out and grabbed her breast. She laughed, embarrassed of that, and looked back at me. So... that had been enough to embarrass her. She walked over to me, away from her Grandpa, and I realized I had unconsciously edged toward the kitchen in shock after noticing Pa. She was so trashy, this was taking the cake. I had known she was a little strange when I met her. Our relationship had been a lot of potsmoking and me not noticing certain things. As she walked over to me she kind of flaunted her fat butt for Pa. What the fuck? She walked right up to me and put an arm around me in the way that usually made me so horribly uncomfortable. I was unable to focus, but grateful for the cloud of trashy perfume masking the sick odor of the inside of the cabin. My heart was pounding. I was scared in a way I never had been. I couldn't focus on anything as they talked, catching up. Pa was unintelligible anyway, the weirdest accent I have ever heard coupled with a horribly diseased mouth and mind. My mind was reeling. I was in fight or flight mode meeting this girlfriend's family. My girlfriend picked up on it and tried to cover for me, but it went on for the longest few minutes of my life. I would occasionally choke out a laugh when the three of them were laughing. At one point I wondered if they were laughing at me when Pa got a bit hysterical. I slowly realized they probably weren't going to kill and eat me, relaxing a tiny bit. My girlfriend asked how the kids were. Dear God, they had procreated. More than one child. I saw no woman anywhere except my girlfriend, but knew not to ask anything, not to speak. Her Uncle said they would be back any minute. My girlfriend asked about dinner. How was I going to escape? How could she be hungry in this place? My mind began to wander, trying to think of an excuse to get her alone and demand we leave. As I stood there utterly horrified, trying to hide it, I knew they all knew how uncomfortable I was. I wondered how often they got visitors and how they escaped. I heard children talking outside, coming closer out the forest. They weren't loud but it sounded like quite a few children. The Uncle looked over at me, his eyes enormous through his thick glasses. Dear God, I was going to have to speak. I steeled myself, but I was saved from that by about as many kids as the population of the small town we had come from running in the door. The cabin was suddenly packed with dozens of children, it was like packing clowns in a Volkswagon. They were crawling over the entirety of the cabin in seconds, multiple children in the bathroom at once, several snuggling up to Grandpa in a way I should probably report to CPS. They were like an army of ants. A taller child carried some kind of small dead animal to the kitchen, and a smaller child ran up to me and just stared curiously. As I reflected on my life choices, practically flashing before my eyes, I realized the Uncle was talking to me in that country way. He was explaining how tough his kids were. I nodded politely which seemed to make him a bit angry. He explained that these kids were no city slickers, and they could all probably take me down. I wasn't sure what to say as one of the medium-sized kids snickered, came up to me, and kicked me in the shin. Dear God, so this is how I was going to die. The Uncle flipped out though. He started screaming at the kid in a way that scared me worse than I had been yet in the whole visit. In the middle of all of this he said calmly to me, "they know what's right, they're good kids." The kid was terrified now. He knew what was in for him. Better the kid than me, I thought. What could I do now, anyway? The Uncle told a taller kid to get the acid. He punished his kids with... LSD...? The taller kid laughed and opened the door that had been closed, and started rummaging through a packed closet. In a little bit he produced a large glass bottle, as I tried to calm the Uncle down and say it was ok. It had to be a gallon jug of what I soon found out wasn't LSD. The Uncle took the kid who had kicked me to the table and told him to put his hand down. The tallest kid came silently back from the kitchen, holding a spray bottle with an expressionless face. All the kids knew what was coming next. My girlfriend looked at me a bit horrified herself now. She said to her Uncle he didn't have to show off in a pleading tone. He just barked out a laugh, uncapped the bottle, and poured some kind of strong acid on the damn kid's hand like that scene in Fight Club. Except he overdid it. Even he looked a bit shocked. The kid just held his hand there, gritting his teeth. He didn't cry, but his hand was literally melting. The kid somehow said jokingly, "looks like a city." The oldest kid started spraying whatever base was in the bottle on the poor kid's hand at about one second intervals. Squirt. Squirt. The smell of the chemical interaction mixed with the shit, blood, and my girlfriend's perfume. My girlfriend went off on her Uncle. After screaming for about half a minute she stomped out of the cabin. I trailed close behind, my skin crawling as I walked past her Uncle, now standing there as stunned as anyone. My girlfriend cried by the side of the jeep for a bit, I just stood there trying to look compassionate. Now I couldn't dump her for another month. I didn't have the heart to do it after that, aside from which I would be stranded here without her. My mind felt empty, I was numb. We got in the jeep silently and began the long drive back to town and my own car. My girlfriend, wiping tears from her face, asked me if I wanted to smoke some weed. I told her she could, paused, then laughed. Thank God I had survived that. I said I had a new-found desire to turn my life around.
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.
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.
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