::: Brief Glimpses of Somewhere Else :::

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

:::[The next two weeks...]:::

On Friday I will be departing for my wedding and honeymoon! I'm very excited, but I'm not sure what my posting schedule will be like during the next two and a half weeks. If possible, I will try to dust off an older story that I think you might enjoy and post that. Cheers!

posted by D @ 6:42 PM |

:::[About The Man of Adventure]:::

This is an older piece that I thought I would share with you. I wrote this about six months after I had returned from a study abroad trip to China. It's really intended to be an introduction into either a longer piece or a series of stories. Perhaps I will post more of Timothy's adventures in the future, if you are interested.

posted by D @ 6:33 PM |

:::The Man of Adventure:::

Timothy Heathcliff Edwards stared forward through the grey morning air of Beijing. He felt that he was on the verge of some truly monumental and important realization. This was not a new feeling for Tim by any means, but always in the past, moments like this had been interrupted by...no, he did not want to think about that. Surely things would be different here. He must concentrate on the moment. He tried to relax and let his thoughts free flow back toward that moment of realization. He could feel something important lying there just under the surface of his conscious thoughts. Relax. Let it come. Almost there...
BANG. Someone walked headlong into him with enough force that it sent him sprawling forward onto the carpeted floor of the airport.
"Oh, I’m terribly sorry. We didn’t see you there."
Lying on the floor with his face pressed into the carpet listening to the small thunder of rolling luggage and smelling the overpowering scent of rug shampoo, he did at last have a realization: things were not going to be different.
Timothy, like so many people before him, was a victim of bell curves. It is a popularly held misconception that the shorter you are the more likely it is that someone will accidentally bump into you. New research, however, has discovered that the underlying equation is in fact a bell-shaped probability curve leaving extremely short people along with extremely tall people among the most noticed persons on the planet.
Timothy was neither very tall nor very short. In fact, Timothy was one of those unfortunate persons whose height was exactly at the center point of the curve. These people most often lead anxious, bruised lives, and Timothy was no exception.
Slowly he lifted his head up from the floor and looked to see who it was that had blundered into his personal space this time. He opened his eyes and saw a skateboard hurtling directly towards him.
Several things then happened at once. His eyes froze in shock for a microsecond before sending a frantic message to the brain which responded a microsecond later with something to the effect of: "What the hell are you talking about? There can’t possibly be a skateboard coming towards us." The eyes replied that there bloody well was a skateboard out there, and something better be done about it. The brain told the eyes that if they were so concerned about it why didn’t they do something to help the situation instead of just complaining all the time. At this point the eyes did the only thing they knew how to do in a danger situation - that is to say - they shut themselves as fast as they could.
"Um...are you all right?"
Tim opened his eyes again. The skateboard was stopped two inches from his face. Standing with one foot on the skateboard and one foot planted firmly on the floor was a Japanese girl of about his own age. He knew that she was Japanese because of the child-sized black T-shirt she was wearing that read "100% Nihonjin" and, in slightly smaller letters, "That’s Japanese, Baby!" across it in glitter. Her hair was long and black except for the tips, which had been dyed red in an inch-long band all the way around. She had a petite frame and a huge smile that stretched from ear to ear.
What happened next was a process so complex that many scientists believe it to be impossible to describe using purely scientific terms. All we can really say is that there was a massive firing of neurons within Timothy’s brain at the same time that his heart began to pound with a slow intensity it normally reserved for near-death experiences and performances by his favorite band, Slippery Nomenclature.
[It is interesting to note that at this exact moment an astronomer in New Mexico named Jonathan Winters reported that he actually saw two stars cross themselves and mouth the words "God help us," before returning to their normal activities as the centers of solar systems. Not surprisingly, this observation failed to make international news, and this was due both to the unbelievable nature of the report itself and to the fact that its originator was known by many as Johnny "Pour Me Another One" Winters.]
All Timothy knew was that the noise of the rolling luggage and the smell of carpet fumes had disappeared along with every thing in sight except her smile...which slowly turned into a look of puzzlement as he continued to stare at her with is mouth hanging open.
"Um, hello? Konnichi wa? Ni hao? Bon Jour?"
"Oh, uh, hello," he said shaking his head to clear it. [No one is quite sure why we do this, or whether it began before or after the invention of the etch-a-sketch.]
"I saw that family knock you over with their luggage. They just walked right into you. It’s like they didn’t even see you. Are you okay?"
"Don’t worry, it happens to me all the time," he said.
"Well that’s a strange thing to say," she said, giving him an odd look.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, if that sort of thing happened to me all the time, I’d worry. Is it nice there on the floor?"
"Oh, uh, well its-"
"I only ask," she continued, "because you’ve been there for a fairly long time, and I think the security people are starting to get nervous." He followed her glance a little way off where two bulky looking Chinese men in green and red military uniforms were carefully watching him. He grinned weakly at them, but their expressions only grew more stern.
Dropping his gaze, he rolled slowly upward to a standing position. It was a coolly graceful move that hinted at a hidden physical prowess, or so he hoped. In fact, Timothy looked less like a deadly Kung Fu master and more like someone with lower back problems.
"I can fix that for you - I studied Shiatsu massage once."
"What?" he said.
"Oh, never mind. So where are you headed?" she asked, popping her skateboard up into her hand with a practiced foot movement.
"I’m going to Beijing Foreign Language School to study Chinese."
"Really?" she said, devastating Timothy with another one of her smiles. "That’s where I’m headed as well! My name is Keiko. Nice to meet you."
"Watashi no namae wa Timothy desu." My name is Timothy, he said in Japanese.
"Impressive, who else can you do?"
"Uh...did you mean to say ‘what’ or what?"
"What?"
"That’s what I thought. Well, I can say hello in over twenty languages, but I can only really get around in about three," he said, and, for the first time, a look of easy confidence settled on his face. Keiko’s smile grew warmer.
At that moment, the parts of Timothy’s mind not occupied with staring at Keiko (a fraction so small, it might as well be zero) heard a sound that called up images of stampedes in old John Wayne movies.
"Hello? Are you with S.E.I.?" called a voice. Approaching from the direction they were headed, was a tiny Chinese woman waving a big protest era sign that read, "Student Exchange International!" Behind her marched another woman with a clipboard and a snaking line of tired students pulling a great chain of precariously balanced rolling luggage.
"Yes, we both are," shouted back Keiko. The woman’s face lit up with relief. She stopped suddenly and spun around to speak with her assistant. Stylish black hair bobbed up and down, as the two conferred. The assistant pulled out two sheets of paper with photos attached to them from a stack on her clipboard. Behind her, many of the students had already turned their luggage into makeshift recliners. She glanced at them, then turned around anxiously.
"Please hurry, we are all very tired."
Keiko and Timothy each signed a sheet on the clipboard, picked up an information packet, and joined the chain of sleeping students and stampeding luggage.
"You two were the last on our list. We feared you might be lost," said the assistant, a slightly younger looking Chinese woman. She wore thick glasses that made her eyes appear much larger than they were. At least, that is what Timothy hoped he was seeing. In a sudden and entirely incorrect flash of intuition, Timothy imagined a tragic story of a young woman with eyes that didn’t work, desperately hoping for a transplant, but because of her low social status, left waiting endlessly until one day, Igor Lee, a giant man who was the son of a Chinese mother and a Transylvania immigrant died with the organ donor box checked on his license. Did they have organ donors here in China? Timothy didn’t know, but he felt an instant sympathy for this young assistant who had obviously suffered so much for the mere gift of sight.
"My name is Teacher Lee, and this is Teacher Xiang. Please, take your place here at the head of the student body," said the woman in charge, and this last comment was enough to jar Timothy back into a state of confused immobility. Had they been nominated for some sort of organizational office? Perhaps this was how student government worked in China. Considering the government’s habit of making a quick end of anyone that had the effrontery to imply that another authority might exist besides its own, there probably wouldn’t be people lining up for the position. Was this some sort of subtle threat from their teachers? Don’t be late to classes, or you might get elected! Timothy’s stomach let out an uneasy rumble, and his face became a worried frown.
"Are you alright?" asked Keiko.
"I’ll be fine," said Timothy. "Tell me, what exactly did she mean by ‘head of the student body?’"
Keiko looked behind them at the line of other students rolling along, two abreast.
"I think it’s a weird literal translation. We’re like one of those parades at Chinese new year, when they make a big dragon with some red cloth and a lot of people. They’re the body and we’re the head."
"Oh!" said Timothy with relief. The knot in his stomach stopped tightening and settled into its more normal state of moderate discomfort. He glanced back behind them. "We don’t look much like a dragon in my opinion. More like a felled tree. Everyone is asleep, and they’re just following the feet of the person in front of them."
"You’re right," said Keiko. A devilish grin crept across her face. "Let’s see if we can wake this dragon." Reaching out, she took Timothy’s hand in her own and turned them both at a slight angle toward the wall. Four steps later, just as they were about to run into it, she turned back at a diagonal angle towards the other wall, still moving more or less in the direction that the teachers were leading them. Behind them, the students were dazedly following their exact footsteps, creating a bend in the line. Keiko continued her pattern, speeding up her steps as well to keep from falling behind their teachers. The effect was that the students now found themselves walking in a sort of undulating snake-like parade through the hallway. Some of them had even started to wake up and were grinning as they swerved from wall to wall. Around them, people were staring. Wives tapped their husbands on the shoulder and pointed at the line of foreigners moving snake-like through the airport.
"See how they stare at us, Teacher Xiang?" said Teacher Lee. "People far and wide have heard of the honor and pride of the Beijing Foreign Language School. Our diligence and sacrifice are finally bringing us the respect we deserve!" The two teachers hoisted their school banners a little higher as they walked out through the automatic doors and into daylight.

posted by D @ 6:28 PM |

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

:::[About Reality Hackers]:::

The contemporary fantasy or urban fantasy genre is one that I greatly enjoy reading. In most of these stories, magic is something that has always existed in secret alongside society or (as in some RPGs) has recently returned after being gone from the world. I wanted to play with the idea of magic that is not old but new. Instead of finding power in ancient secrets, what if magic became possible through technological and scientific discoveries. Who would be the people on the cutting edge? What would we turn to in order to provide meaning and identity for the people who develop this new magic? If there are no true ancient magical societies, would we turn to our speculative fiction for guidance? How would the government react?
Obviously, I did not find a spot to develop all of these ideas inside "Reality Hackers," so I am hoping to find a chance to bring more of them out in future stories. I've definitely got a few characters in my head that I wouldn't mind sharing with you.

Until then...

posted by D @ 7:52 AM |

Sunday, May 15, 2005

:::Reality Hackers:::

A screen focuses on a smiling young newswoman.

"As the year comes to an end, we have a report of one group of scientists who will not be watching the ball drop at Times Square tonight. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team of graduate students representing five countries and a diversity of academic fields including artificial intelligence, linguistics, mythology, music, and physics are preparing an experiment to test the bizarre theory that an object can be indirectly manipulated by use of a symbolic representation."

"Whoa, Janet, I think you lost me," says another reporter.

"I think I’ve even lost myself, Ken. Let’s see if the interview done earlier today with Professor Jenkins can make this any clearer."

The screen cuts to the image of a man in his late thirties with short brown hair and a neatly trimmed brown goatee.

"The use of a symbolic language to represent an object has been going on for thousands of years - first in spoken and written languages, and then in music and math, and more recently, in computer programming. In those cases the link between the symbol and the object is one of meaning. You say the word ‘chair’ and the person listening understands that what you mean is a piece of furniture that people sit on. What’s new is that we think it is possible to establish a second link that is one of form instead of meaning. In such a system, any change that was made to the symbol would be reflected in the object itself as well. For example, let’s say that I could describe a chair with an equation. Then I add some number to the equation. Would the actual chair get bigger? If our theory proves correct, the answer would be yes."

The screen cuts back to a shot of the two news anchors looking at each other with bemused expressions on their faces.

"Maybe they can add a few numbers to my salary while they’re at it!" said Ken.

"That sounds like Voodoo economics to me," replied Janet.

Both of the anchors laugh for a second then the screen closes in on Janet’s face as it returns to an expression of cheerful professionalism.

"Now let’s check in on our colleague on the ground in Las Vegas where the celebration is just about to get under way..."

The screen cuts to a shot of a man with a microphone standing in front of a crowd.

"Hi Janet! This is Tom Aguilar reporting to you live from the strip in Las Vegas where things just keep heating up. The party scene behind me, one of many in this part of the city tonight, has gone from excited mingling to boisterous celebration as the hour of midnight and the new year have approached. We've even seen a few celeb-"

He is cut off as the screen jerks back to the newsroom where a tense looking Janet has one hand to her ear piece.

"Ladies and gentlemen this is a special report from News Seven. I have just been informed that some sort of explosion has occurred at the location of our last story, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. The blast occurred just moments ago at approximately 11:50pm eastern time. We do not yet know whether or not this was a terrorist event. I repeat, an explosion took place on the MIT campus just moments ago. We do not know what may have caused this explosion. We have a report that emergency vehicles are just now arriving on the scene. We also do not know at this time how many people may have been hurt. Certainly, we can hope that few people remained on the campus at this hour on New Year's Eve."

She pauses for half a second with her hand on her ear piece again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, a News Seven camera crew that was still in the area has arrived on the scene, and we are now going to go to them live."

The screen jumps to an image of a brick building with large sections of the outer wall completely missing. From inside the wrecked building, a group of figures becomes visible, coughing and picking their way through debris as they move towards the camera. One of them, a young woman in a white lab coat hurries towards the camera.

"Miss," says a News Seven reporter, "are you all alright? What can you tell us about what just happened here?"

"We did it," she says, then bends at the waist and coughs.

"Can you repeat that Miss? What did you do?"

"We made the chair bigger. We linked the actual chair directly to a symbolic
representation!"

"Can you tell us, did the experiment cause the explosion, Miss?"

"I'm not sure. Something went wrong. I...I saw the light bending and then the chair increased its mass right in front of us - it was so amazing - and then...and then the blast just came out of nowhere."

The camera zooms out to take in more of the ruined building. A heavy load of dust still hangs in the air all around.

"Ladies and gentlemen if you've just joined us, we are reporting to you live from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where some sort of explosion has only just occurred about five minutes ago."

The picture is marred for a moment by a ripple of interference that runs across it.

"The police and emergency vehicles are-"

"AAAH!"

The screen cuts to a view of both reporters. Ken is holding his head in his hands, rocking back and forth.

"Ken, are you okay?"

"AAAAAAH!" he yells, raising his head towards the ceiling.

"Oh - oh my god!"

Ken's face begins to change, his skin darkening to grey, his features becoming sunken, his eyes turning a bright yellow. He opens his mouth to scream again, and his tongue is black.

"AAAAAAAAAAAH!" he yells, and suddenly the image disappears. A News Seven studio logo appears over a blue screen, and a recorded voice begins speaking.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the News Seven studios are experiencing temporary technical difficulties. We apologize for this inconvenience. Please stand by..."

Two years later to the day...

A dark haired man in an old brown leather coat over black pants and a black shirt sat at the bar, drinking a beer and reading a newspaper. He turned the page carefully, struggling for a precision of feeling with fingers incased in leather work gloves. His left hand started to lift his glass for another drink, and stopped an inch from his mouth. He frowned, his forehead creasing along deep, familiar lines.

"What's in the paper?" asked the bartender, a young woman with a long red ponytail wearing a green t-shirt and jeans. Mark looked up and saw her watching him while she polished glasses.

"There's a retrospective piece about the Jenkins trial," he said.

"Oh yeah," she said, "I should have guessed. It's hard to believe that it's been two years."

"Yeah, it feels more like forever," he said and took a long drink. She raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything. A customer walked in, and she went to take his order while Mark got back to reading the article. After a while, she came back over.

"Did you see anyone change?" she asked. "...on New Year's Eve, I mean."

He looked up, his eyes narrowed as he studied her expression.

"Yeah, I saw someone."

"What happened?" she asked.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he tapped his finger on the article.

"It says it all right here. In that experiment at MIT they wanted to change a physical object by linking it directly to symbolic language. The experiment worked - that damned chair doubled in size, but it set off some kind of chain reaction. Random connections between meaning and form started occurring. A small number of people scattered around the world began to change physically. If they wanted to help others, maybe they started to glow with a soft light, or their features became more sculpted and pristine, but if they liked hurting people, their bodies became harder, stronger, sharper, more capable of dealing with others they way they really wanted to. The mathematicians said the only way to explain who changed and who didn't had something to do with chaos theory. It was only a small percentage of the population, but for those that did, whatever sort of meaning they had found in life became written in their flesh." He stared at the beer in his glass, watching it distort the dim light.

"That was Jenkin's version of what happened," said the girl. "If you believe the military, Jenkins was a terrorist that unleashed a new kind of bomb - one designed to rearrange things on a quantum level."

"Yeah, and if you believe the Church, he's a witch, what he did to that chair amounts to black magic, and his coming heralds the end of days," he said.

"Is that what you believe, Father?" she asked. His right hand jerked up to the empty place where his white collar used to be. He turned his head slowly in her direction. She was about five feet, six inches tall, the red in her hair looked creative rather than natural, and her left eyebrow had a thin gold loop through it. The green t-shirt she was wearing had a cartoon picture of a man with two heads and the words "Zaphod for President" printed on it. Her expression was open and curious, but not hostile.

"I'm not a priest anymore," he said and kicked back the rest of his beer in one gulp.

"I guess not," she said. "Want another one?"

"No thanks." He slid the empty glass forward, then turned and headed for the door.

Outside, the cold air moved in short gusts of wind that pushed against Mark first one way and then another, as if the city itself was breathing around him. He cut through the alley between the bar and the building next to it, heading for the bus stop on the opposite side of the block. There was a time when he would have avoided alleys, but now he just couldn't bring himself to care.

He had only a moment to recognize the sound of running steps behind him, and then someone slammed into his right shoulder, sending him sprawling into the dirty snow at his feet. He looked up and saw the back of man with dark curly hair running toward the street.

I shape appeared at the end of the alley, a giant, gorilla like shape, and the man slid to a halt and turned back towards Mark. He tried to start running again, but the huge thing was faster than him. It took two leaping strides into the alley and slammed a meaty fist into the man's back, sending him flying at an angle towards the wall. His body slammed against it, bounced off, and fell down into the snow behind Mark.

Mark stared at the creature. It looked sort of like a huge man, but its arms were too long for its body, like a gorilla's.

From behind him, Mark heard the man say a prayer in Arabic. The creature heard it too, and it grinned nastily, wetting its lips with its tongue. Mark shuttered in revulsion.

The creature took another step forward, and Mark pushed himself up, standing between it and the fallen man. The creature's gaze shifted to him, and it sniffed, breathing in his scent.

"Don't interrupt the fun," it said.

"I know what you are," said Mark. "You're a Bully. There were a lot of you hit by the change. Your kind has always loved picking on people smaller than you. I bet that the only thing that's ever had any meaning for you is that the strong pick on the weak. When the change hit you and made you like this, it must have been like a dream come true, right? Now everyone is smaller than you. I bet you revel in the fear that you see in other people's expressions."

"Out of the way, little man," it said, and pushed him hard to the side. Mark fell to the ground, and the Bully walked right past him. It picked up the man with the curly hair with one hand on the upper part of each arm.

Then it began to pull.

The man screamed. Mark stood up, and faced the Bully's back. He looked down at his hands for a second, and then he grabbed the ends of both gloves with his teeth and yanked them off. Underneath, hard, green scales covered his arms all the way down to fingers that ended in sharp talons. Throwing himself foward, Mark plunged his fingers down into the Bully's back. It threw its head back and roared in suprize and pain. Mark pulled his legs up, letting all of his weight sit for a moment in his fingers as if he was hanging from a ledge. The Bully dropped the other man, and then reached back and grabbed Mark with both hands. It yanked him upward twice. The first time, Mark kept his grip in its back, and it yelled with the pain. On the second yank, Mark's fingers came free, and with a great grunt of effort, the Bully hoisted Mark over its head and threw him through the air.

There was a moment, when Mark was flying through the alley, that seemed to stretch out longer than it should have. He saw in his mind's eye the Bully behind him, roaring its anger. He saw the man on the ground, head bowed in prayer. And he saw himself, falling through empty space, green arms outstretched.

Those scaly, clawed arms were his shame. They showed the world the bit of monster inside of him. They had made it clear both to his parishioners and to himself how a part of him wanted to make the questions stop. The problem was not that Mark hadn't understood what the Church's official answers were. It was that deep down he knew that he didn't agree with them, and it was his parishioner's questions that pushed him to confront all of the lies that he had been telling to himself for years. He hated that feeling of self doubt - hated it so much that a part of him had wanted to grab them and make the questions stop.

When the change found him, that had been the part that it had brought out - that simmering anger that was really just despair in disguise.

The moment ended, and Mark was falling through the air again. He thought for an instant that he saw the bartender running into the alley from the direction he had come. Then he hit the ground, rolled, and blacked out.

*****

When he came to, he was propped up in a chair in the bar. The bartender was leaning over him, pressing a damp cloth against his forehead.

"What happened?"

"You saved that man's life is what happened. Don't you remember?"

"The Bully didn't get him?"

"Nope. Bullys don't like it when you stand up to them. You wounded him enough that he ran off."

"Ouch," he said, as she touched a spot on his left temple.

"Yeah, you've got a bit a bruise there."

He reached up to probe it with his fingers, and then jerked himself upright in panic.

"My gloves? Where are my gloves?"

"Calm down. They're right here," she said, pulling them from her back pocket.

He snatched them from her and tried to tug them on, but his hands were shaking, and he kept getting his talons caught on the glove's leather. His eyes started to tear up. He stared at a point in the distance, willing himself to calm down while he got the gloves the rest of the way on.

"You know, you should consider yourself a hero."

"Ha!" he said, and the pressure behind his eyes started building again.

"I'm serious. What else would you call it when someone selflessly risks their life for a stranger?"

"I just wound up in the middle of it. That's all." Mark glanced around the empty bar. "What happened to that guy?"

She glanced towards the bar.

"His name is Falim. He's hiding in the back."

"Did you call the police?"

"I offered to, but Falim said that last time the cops wouldn't help him."

"'Last time?' Does that mean he's been attacked like this before?"

"According to him, that was the third time."

"Why does that Bully want to kill him so bad?"

"It's not just that Bully. He said the first attacker looked like a wolf, and the second was a girl with some kind of tentacles."

Mark's eyes widened.

"How did he get away from them?"

"He made it onto a bus when the wolf was chasing him. He ran from the girl with the tentacles to a police station, but they gave him the third degree. Apparently, he has the same last name as someone on the terrorist watch list. The cops almost didn't let him leave."

"That's three changed that have tried to attack him in the last two days. Does he know why?"

"I don't think so."

Outside, someone tried to open the door.

"Don't worry, I locked it. The owner will be pissed, but maybe we can open up later and still catch some of the New Year's Eve crowds.

It occurred to Mark then that he did not even know her name.

"My name is Mark."

She smiled at him.

"I'm Estrella."

"Doesn't that mean star in Spanish?"

"Yeah, my parents were linguists."

"Did they -

THUMP.

Something hit the door hard. They looked at each other, and then they both stood facing the door.

"Three changed attacks since yesterday?" she said, raising her eyebrow.

"Monsters - call them monsters. That's what they are," he said, looking at his gloved hands for the millionth time.

THUMP.

"And I think we're about to meet number four," he said. "What should we do?"

"What would Buffy do?" she said, and reached over the bar, coming back up with a baseball bat.

BLAM!

The wood around the handle broke, and the door burst open. It was getting dark
outside, and they couldn't see anything for a second. Then three figures, two men and one woman, all in suits, came walking in. Their skin was grey - the color of ash, but their eyes were yellow like egg yoke. They were thin - gaunt even. The one in the front, a man who must have been in his late forties when the change hit him, closed his eyes and sniffed the air.

"The back," it said in a sigh. "He's in the back."

All three of them started walking forward.

Estrella ran up to the one in the lead, and swung the bat right into the side of its head. It spun completely around with the force of the blow, and then it turned towards her and snarled. She leaped back the few feet that she had run across to where Mark was still standing uncertainly, his hands in fists in front of him.

"Shit," she said. "This isn't going to work. I'm not really a Buffy anyway." She dropped the bat. "I'm more like Willow." Mark blinked at her. Although he'd never seen the show, he had gotten the first reference, but the second -

Suddenly there was a humming sound from Estrella like an amplifier being switched on. Then she started speaking fast - really fast. She was eating up words like a dragster eats up road, and with each phrase, her body jerked a little from side to side. Mark heard bits of Latin, something that sounded tonal like Vietnamese, and something Germanic. He even caught some math phrases like "X to the power of Y" and "root theta."

The monsters were halfway to the back now, walking at an angle past the two of them. She lifted her arm and pointed at each of them in turn. When the one in front took his next step, his feet slipped out from under him. He fell backwards into the other two, and all three of them went down. They tried to get back up, but it was like they had fallen on ice. Their hands and feet just slid out from under them as soon as they touched the floor.

"Come on," Estrella yelled, grabbing Mark's hand and racing for the door to the back room. Mark followed with his mouth hanging open, confused about what he had just witnessed. Estrella flung open the door in the back corner and pulled them through. Inside was a room that served as kitchen, storage and office all in one. Falim was standing in the middle, eyes with deep circles under them regarding them with worry. He held an empty wine bottle by the neck like a club in his right hand.

"More?" he asked, a thick accent on the word.

"Yep!" said Estrella, bolting the door behind her. "We've got about half a minute before that spell wears off."

"Spell?" said Mark. "What do you mean? What happened out there?"

"I'll explain in a minute. First help me move these."

She jogged to the back wall, and started shoving boxes of alcohol out of the way. Mark and Falim hurried over to help. When the boxes were moved all that was revealed was an area of plain red brick - no secret door, as Mark had hoped. He was about to ask what they were going to do next, when Estrella pulled a piece of chalk from her pocket, and started writing on the wall.

It looked almost like computer code, Mark realized after she had written a few lines - except she jumped between alphabets with each symbol that she drew. It took her about twenty seconds to finish, and the whole time they could hear hisses and snarls coming from the other side of the door. When she lifted her chalk for the last time, there was another one of those humming noises filling the air.

"Close your eyes," she said.

THUMP. The monsters were at the door again.

Mark closed his eyes and felt her shove him hard towards the wall. He raised his arms up to protect his face from the impact, but he never felt it. Instead of being stopped by the wall, he kept going. He had a second to register the cold outside air and the sound of the traffic before he slipped and fell into dirty snow for the third time that day.

He opened his eyes and saw that he was on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the building from where the fight with the Bully had taken place. A moment later, Falim fell through the wall with his eyes closed, tripped over Mark's legs, and toppled down on top of him. By the time they got themselves separated, Estrella was standing outside with them. She looked around, her brow wrinkled and her eyes narrowed, but there was no one else on the street.

"Come on, we have to find a cab." She helped them up, and then set off at a near run across the street.

*****

The cab let them off at the edge of the club district. The streets had been closed off from car traffic to give the New Year's Eve crowd space to spill into from the doors of the over-crowded bars and clubs. Estrella grabbed their hands and then pulled them along through the drunken throng. It was slow going, but they only had to make it about a block before Estrella pointed at a cafe built inside of an old warehouse right next to the train tracks that were no longer in use. Inside, the music was pouring out through the cafe speakers at maximum levels in order to drown out the party noise. It was something down tempo with a female lead that had a dark quality to her voice - Mark didn't recognize it. They walked towards the back, through a narrow hallway that passed the kitchen. Estrella made no attempt to sneak past the staff, and they responded by pointedly looking at other things. The hallway ended at a back door, but just before that was an alcove with a payphone and a curtain that could be drawn across it from floor to ceiling. Estrella looked back the way they had come, then shoved them both inside and drew the curtain shut.

"Where are we?" asked Mark.

"We are going to someplace safe," answered Estrella. "Look, I know I haven't explained anything yet. Just hang in there. Things are about to become blatantly obvious." For the third time tonight, Mark heard that hum like an amplifier being switched on. Estrella said a few short sentences in that weird mix of languages, and then she took both of their arms and stepped forward through the wall.

This time, Mark was a little more prepared. He didn't stumble when he found himself on an iron stairwell high up inside of a vast room. It was a minor victory for him and Falim considering how weak-kneed they both felt afterwards.

"Remember that experiment that they were doing at MIT that caused the change?" Estrella said to them. "We've been continuing on with the research a bit."

Two or three dozen people stared up at them from tables, sofas, and boxes scattered about. Above their heads, suspended in the air was a twisting, bending, multicolored glob of glowing liquid. It pulsed with the beats of the music that played almost as loudly as it had in the cafe - only here it was hard rock with some electronic influences. Mark stared at it. Beside him, he heard Falim say something softly in Arabic. He glanced at the man whose life had been turned inside out in the last two days. Falim rubbed at his tired eyes with both hands, then looked again, his mouth hanging about halfway open.

"Come on," said Estrella.

The three of them walked slowly down the iron stairwell and started winding their way through to the other end of the room. Even without the huge, floating ball of liquid overhead Mark would still have been staring. They passed two pale, freckled guys that looked like brothers working on laptops while sitting on a carpet that was floating two feet above the floor. They looked up from their typing long enough to glare at Mark and Falim for a couple of seconds. A young black woman with her hair in little spikes, was working with a large sketch pad in her lap. She lifted her hand from the paper, and Mark saw that the tip of each finger was glowing a different color. He glanced to his right and saw an Asian guy with long hair watching them. He stuck a cigarette between his lips and inhaled while he typed something on his laptop, and then he took the cigarette back out with his right hand and exhaled out of his nose. The smoke arranged itself in the air in front of him, forming the letters "WTF U LOOKING @?" Estrella chuckled when she saw it. All the while the music pulsed and the colored liquid twisted and turned in the air overhead.

"Don't be offended by them," Estrella said. "They're naturally suspicious of strangers."

"Who are they?" asked Mark.

"Well, the name's kind of still in dispute. There's a fairly large minority voting for 'Uber Magi,' and for a while there was some posting online about 'Neo Jedi,' but I also read that someone in Washington has coined the term 'Reality Hackers' for anyone messing with Jenkins's research. Basically, we're just people with a strong sense of curiosity. As a group, we're pretty much fascinated by figuring out how to do something - especially things no one else knows how to do. Before Jenkins and his team conducted the MIT experiment one of his grad students posted notes about the theory they were working on onto her personal blog on the internet. Afterwards, the government came in and confiscated everything to do with the project, but the hosting server had backups of everyone's blogs on a separate hard drive. Someone found it, and we've been studying it ever since."

Ahead of them was an old couch covered with paint stains and a coffee table made out of plywood set atop two wooden crates. Estrella motioned to it, and they sat down.

"Can you do anything, then?" asked Mark.

"Hah! No, it takes a lot of time to work out how to do even the most basic stuff. You have to have a good ear for languages and a pretty high level math background to make sense of the symbolic language that's being used." Estrella tugged on her pony tail and frowned in thought. "I don't think that you could ever affect someone's soul, but other than that...in theory, anything physical, any form, can be changed."

Falim held up his pointer finger.

"'Form dissolves, but wisdom remains.' That's from Rumi."

"Are you Persian?" Mark asked.

"No, I just like Rumi." The corners of his eyes wrinkled in what was the closest expression to a smile that he had made all day.

"We'll be safe here, for a while. There is literally no door into this room. You have to know the hack to be able to get in." Estrella leaned back into the corner of the couch and propped her feet up on the table.

"Falim, those things in the bar were the fourth attack on you in two days. I don't know why the changed are after you-"

Mark saw her eyes shift to him for a second. He felt his face heat up, and then he cursed himself for reacting as if he was guilty as well. But you are, he thought. You're guilt is written in your flesh.

" -but it doesn't look like they've given up yet. Can you tell us anything else about why they might be attacking you."

Falim looked away from them.

"It's because of my name," he said. Then he turned and looked at them. There was anger in his eyes at first and then frustration and finally just sadness.

"Three days ago, I was walking to work when a maroon van pulled up beside me. Two men came out of nowhere from the other direction and shoved me into it. There was a man inside. He said that I must tell him all that I knew about the terrorists. I said that I did not know any terrorists. He pointed to a paper with a picture of an Arab and a name. 'This is your last name,' he said. I told him that it was a mistake. It is not the same family. He did not listen. He took out a woman's perfume bottle, and sprayed me with it. 'When you get tired of running, call the FBI or the police and tell them where your friends are hiding. But hurry, before someone gets hurt,' he said. Then they pushed me out of the van onto the street. I didn't know what to think. I mean, I live and work here. I am not a terrorist. Why would I be running from anything?" He leaned forward with his head in his hands and his elbows propped on his knees.

"Now I understand what they meant," he said.

"This is good," said Estrella.

They stared at her.

"I mean no, that really sucks, but it's good that you told us this. We can work with this."

"What do you mean?" asked Mark.

"They sprayed him with something in that van. Mark, do you remember what those monsters did when they first walked into the bar?"

"They sniffed the air!"

"Exactly!"

"When we were in the alley, I'm pretty sure the Bully sniffed the air as well," he said.

"Pheromones! They must have developed a pheromone that attracts the changed to you as if you were prey."

"But," Mark began, "why can't...I mean I should, uh, be able to smell him, but I can't." He folded his gloved hands in his lap and frowned at a point over their shoulders. Estrella placed a hand on top of his, and he flinched.

"Because you didn't change completely. I read once that there's a structure in the nose that mice have that allows certain scents to act on their brains like a hormone, but that same structure is dormant in the human nose because it lost its nerve connection to our brains at some point in the past. Maybe those who changed completely reconnected those nerves, but that couldn't have happened to you because only your hands were affected."

Estrella leaned closer to him. The light glinted off of the gold ring in her eyebrow.

"Your past only describes you at that point in time. What makes you who you are in the present are your choices right now. Take today, for example. This afternoon you jumped on the back of a monster three times your size in order to save a man you had never met."

She squeezed his hand, then leaned back into the couch cushions again.

"Now about that van..."

*****

They found it less than two blocks away from the crowded party district. It was parked, but its windshield was defrosted and the light layer of snow on the hoods of the other parked cars was absent from this one. Mark and Estrella peered at it from their hiding place on top of the roof of a nearby building. They had left Falim behind, until the Reality Hackers could work out a way to counteract whatever he had been sprayed with. Estrella consulted a map in front of her with a tiny glowing red light on it.

"This is it. We're lucky that the guy is still in there or the spell wouldn't have been able to find the right van." They crouched down low enough to be out of site from the van.

"Okay, here's the deal. I've never actually done what I'm going to try before. It's going to take me longer and I'm going to have to concentrate a lot on it. If I screw it up or stop in the middle, things could go really wrong."

"How wrong?" he asked.

"Like MIT two years ago."

"Whoa. Are you sure we should do this?"

"Don't worry. We take this risk every time we try out a brand new hack, and we haven't had another MIT yet!"

Mark frowned, but didn't say anything. Estrella sat right up next to the edge of the building so that she could see the van. She consulted a notebook for half a minute, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Mark heard that electric humming noise start up in the air around him. Then she started speaking - quietly and much slower than she had at the bar. Mark peaked at the van below, but there was no sign of movement.

Suddenly, their hiding place was illuminated by a circle of bright light. Mark spun and saw a man with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other aiming both at them.

"Put your hands out in front of you and stand up slowly!"

Mark held his hands out and stood up. Beside him, Estrella remained seated, staring at the van and talking slowly.

"I said, hands out and stand up, now!"

"She can't stop talking," Mark said.

"You, shut up. Your lady friend has three seconds to do what I said, or I'm gonna put a hole right through the back of her head."

"No, you don't understand-"

"One."

"If she stops it could cause an explosion, it-"

"Two."

"Look, just give her a minute. We won't move from here. We'll-"

"Three!"

"NO!"

Mark dove towards him. The muzzle of the gun flashed. The sound was like a giant hammer pounding the world. Mark felt something slam into his left hand, and the impact spun him around like a tether ball. Behind him, Estrella screamed the last word in a voice that went higher and higher in pitch, until the only way that Mark could tell she had stopped was the sudden lessening of the pain in his ears. The windows of the van shattered, and inside the vehicle a man screamed as the perfume sprayer exploded drenching him in its liquid contents. The light that had illuminated them went out as the flashlight bulb exploded as well. Estrella spun around and lifted a hand towards the man with the gun. She started speaking again but this time much faster. The man dropped the broken flashlight and took aim at her silhouette. Suddenly, the roof beneath him became wispy and insubstantial. He fired his pistol, but the shot went wild as he dropped straight down into the building below.

Estrella leapt to Mark's side.

"Mark! Can you hear me?"

He opened his eyes and saw Estrella's stricken face above him. Then it seemed to shrink like he was falling down a hole until finally everything was dark.

*****

A few days later, Mark walked into the bar. It was a lot busier than before, and he had to squeeze into the last open seat, trying carefully not to move the arm that was strapped across his middle. Estrella smiled when she saw him. She was in the middle of delivering a round of drinks to a table, but as soon as she had finished, she came over and gave him a kiss on the cheek, for which he drew envious stares from the other guys at the bar.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Pretty good. The doctor had to reset my shoulder after the dislocation, but the good thing was the, uh," he glanced around, "special, extra hard conditioning I had on my arms and hands deflected the shot. It burned a hell of a line along my palm, though."

"You did a good thing, Mark."

"I was just, you know, in the middle of things at the right time," he said.

"No. You made a choice and took a big risk for me and everyone else. I owe you, and I got a little something as a down payment on that." She reached under the bar and pulled out a silver and black gift bag stuffed with tissue paper. Mark reached inside of it and pulled out a boxed set of DVDs.

"It's the first season of a show called Angel. It's about a guy who used to be evil that takes up fighting monsters and protecting others as a path to redemption. I think you'll like it!"

"Thanks. I'll check it out. Can I get a beer?"

"Don't they have you on some kind of pain medication?"

"Oh yeah." He grinned and she smiled back.

"Hit the road, pal. Go home and watch the pilot episode. When you're feeling better, come back by. Maybe we'll slay something evil." The guy on Mark's right side raised an eyebrow at them.

"We'll do that."

Mark stood back up slowly, grabbed the gift bag with his good hand, and headed for the door.

"Hey Mark!" Estella shouted at him just as he was about to leave.

He turned back to face her.

"I know!" he shouted back before she could say anything else. "It's the choices you make in the present!"

She gave him a thumbs up sign, and he turned and walked out into the snowy, dirty, monster-infested, and secretly magical city.

posted by D @ 11:41 PM |

Sunday, May 01, 2005

:::The Spirit's Dream:::

From the crow's vantage point the traffic hardly seems to move at all. It circles and then sits on the bridge cables, watching for the one who would come. From the other end of the bay, where the road emerges from the trees to span out across the water, movement catches the crow's eye. It leaves the cables and swoops down over the cars, heading for a closer look. It narrows the distance quickly, the roofs of idling vehicles gliding past underneath it. There, between the cars, a man is coming up fast on a motorcycle. For an instant the man and the crow are on a straight line course for each other. Their eyes meet, and then the crow makes a tiny alteration in its course, so that it shoots past the left shoulder of the man - He Who Would Come. The crow wheels about, flapping its wings hard for more altitude and heads into the city to tell its employer. It was not an evil crow, but its services could be bought. And in this world, crows were given much more credit for their intelligence than they ever received in that other world - the world the motorcycle rider could not help but think of as the real one, no matter how hard he tried.

The motorcycle left the bridge and sped into the growing shadows of downtown. A shiver passed through Billy Wu, and he slowed the bike a little, watching the side streets and alleys - especially the alleys. They were the places that few knew well, and so they changed the most. Billy remembered what he had been told on the first night he had come here.

*****

He had been wondering around with a confused look on his face, knowing that he was dreaming but amazed by the clarity of his self awareness and the sharpness of his senses. A bag lady had crossed the street in front of him. Her hair was a curly grey mass like a hedge that had grown wild, and her clothes were a layering of faded colors. She was pushing a shopping cart that had been painted purple and was full of what looked like golden treasure. He had a fleeting view of gold coins, goblets, and even crowns, but when he looked again, there was only trash. The bag lady gave a mad shriek and leaned down to stare at the trash in concentration. A second later the cart was full of gold again. Then she had turned to face him, an angry look carved into the worn lines of her face.

"It's not polite to change other people's things!"

"What? I...I didn't mean anything. I mean, I wasn't trying to change your things...uh..." he trailed off. Her mouth relaxed its frown a little and her eyes narrowed.

"You're new here, huh?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Hmm...Call me Yvonne."

"Nice to meet you. My name's Billy Wu."

"Chinese?" she asked, raising her left eyebrow and tugging at her right one with slender fingers.

"Taiwanese," he said. "My parents moved here when I was seven." Her right hand stopped its tugging.

"Do you know where ‘here' is, Billy Wu?" she asked.

"Well, I'm pretty sure this is just a dream, Miss Yvonne," he said.

"Ms. Yvonne," she corrected him. "And you obviously know very little. Don't worry. You're new - it's not your fault. I will explain it to you." She pressed her hands together in front of her face and closed her eyes. A long moment of silence stretched out, and then she opened her eyes and began to talk, peering at him over the top of her hands. As she spoke, her words became clearer and took on a different tone, as if in order to remember the words, she had to say them the exact way that she had heard them.

"It's all a dream, Billy Wu, and I mean literally. But it's not just your dream here, it's everyone's. This is the way it was explained to me by Martin. He did his thesis on lucid dreaming, and he's been coming here for a number of years now." She paused for a second, her eyes unfocused and staring at her cart.

"Do you know what electromagnetic radiation is?" she asked, looking up.

"Yes ma'am." Billy had studied electrical engineering in school. It was what his family, especially his extended family, had expected. He had done well enough, despite having only a slight interest in the subject. But sometimes, in those moments when he was willing to be honest with himself, he could feel a deep despair like a load of bricks in his stomach because of the choices that he had not made.

"Good," she said, unaware of the turn his thoughts had taken. "You see, there's an energy field created by all life. When you dream, there's a part of your brain that's feeling this energy field. Whatever impressions you've accumulated about the world around you imprint themselves onto this energy field the way a radio broadcast gets added to a carrier wave, and all of the impressions left by every person who dreams give shape to places like this - places that some of us can find our way to."

"How?" Billy asked.

"It takes a bit of talent. For most people, the information carried in the energy that runs between us has only a weak influence on their dreams. Only an occasional image or idea will creep in. But people like us can read the underlying shape left by the memories and conceived notions of everyone that is asleep, and our minds use that information to build this dream around us. We share the same...frequency, for lack of a better word. That is why you and I can see each other."

"So you're saying that you're asleep somewhere right now, just like me?"

"Good boy, you've been listening," she replied. Then, with no warning, she began to push the cart down the street once more. He watched her take a few steps, then she stopped and turned back to face him.

"Make a choice Billy Wu. Are you coming or not?" The words were rough, but her expression was open and calm. He looked around for a second at the empty street, then jogged a few steps to catch up with her.

They walked through the city, turning down streets at random, and she talked about things she had seen and people she had spoken with while in the dream. There were the High Rollers who lived for the wild, lascivious bashes that took place every night. There were the Sundays, who got their nickname for spending every dream barbequing in a park or picnicking at the beach. There were the Cordless Bungee Jumpers (CBJs for short), adrenalin junkies that no longer needed safety gear. There were the Philosophers, like Martin, who gathered to discuss the nature of dreams and reality. Then there were the Spirit Guides.

"They think that the dream is a gateway between our world and a world of spirits. Mostly they seem to avoid people. I've only ever seen them alone or with the animals."

"The animals?" Billy asked.

"Crows, owls, coyotes, foxes... Martin has a theory that the reason some animals appear in our myths more often than others is because they're the ones that have the strongest presence in the dream. Perhaps, they leave an impression that makes its way into our subconscious."

*****

Billy rolled the motorcycle to a stop at a light. There were plenty of cars around on this street, but most of them were Empties - cars that appeared only to fill the impressions that dreamers had of the roads being full of vehicles. If you looked closely at the drivers you saw only a hazy image of a person. It was just enough to match the idea of traffic. There was a sound like the ruffling of feathers overhead, and then a crow landed on top of the streetlight. They watched each other for a second, the bird turning its head from side to side.

"He waits for you," the bird said, sounding a bit like a Halloween witch doing a bird impression.

Billy raised his eyebrow at it, then throttled the bike up, letting it leap forward through the intersection.

*****

"I have a question," Billy said. It was the second night in a row that they had walked together.

"I know," she said without looking at him.

"You already know what I want to ask?"

She turned towards him, the lines on her face becoming harder, more defined.

"You want to ask about me." He nodded. Her eyes became unfocused for a second. "Life has been...easier for me since I found my way here. There are problems that I have when I am awake. I - I don't always remember...Sometimes it is hard to think when I am awake." Her right hand rose up to tug at her eyebrow. Then suddenly she turned and began pushing her cart of treasure in front of her again.

"Come along, Billy Wu. There are many things to see tonight."

The next morning, Billy Wu took his bike to work as usual. It was a black Yamaha XJ600 - a lightweight street bike that he had purchased with his bonus last year. His family didn't know about the bike. It wasn't that they would strongly disapprove; it was just that the idea of having something in his life that they didn't know about had appealed to him.

He drove across the bridge, heading towards the building where he worked - one of many tall office complexes on the east side of downtown. He was still several blocks short of his destination when traffic slowed to a standstill. He could see some sort of accident blocking the street, so he decided to cut through the alley to try to get around it.

Up ahead, a familiar purple shopping cart was stopped against the back of a brick building. He slowed to a stop.

"Yvonne?" he called. There was no response. He throttled the bike forward, and when he passed the cart, he saw Yvonne sprawled out on a bed of cardboard. Her eyes were open, watching him, but the rest of her was still.

Billy parked the bike and got off, kneeling down in front of her. She looked exactly like she did in the dream except for an old, ugly white scar on the right side of her forehead where her eyebrow should be.

"Yvonne?" he asked again. Her lips moved a little, but there was no sound. He reached out and lifted her hand. Her arm was completely limp. When he looked back at her eyes he could see tears welling up in them.

A sudden fear swept over him, giving his gut that sinking feeling like the first big drop on a roller coaster. He thought back to a conversation that they'd had on his first night in the dream.

"Most of the well known places are stable because everyone has such strong memories of how they should be. But the secret places, the ones that few remember well, those are the places that can change with a thought. Alleys, backstreets, abandoned buildings - you have to be careful in those places."

"Why? What can happen?"

"Anything. If you get caught there by someone who means you ill, then all sorts of bad things could happen to you."

"But even if something bad happened, none of it would matter once I woke up, right?"

She squinted and her right hand went up to tug at her eyebrow again.

"Why don't your arms and legs move in bed while you are dreaming?" she asked.

"Uh, I'm not sure," he said, confused by the sudden change in direction.

"It's because a part of your brain tells certain neurons to fire and others to stop firing because you are dreaming, and your muscles go limp. What would happen if your mind woke up, but your body still thought that you were dreaming?"

Billy made an "ugh" face, imagining the helplessness of waking up paralyzed.

"That's horrible. Can someone do that to you here?"

Yvonne didn't reply at first. She stood there for a few seconds, staring at a spot on the ground.

"It happened to a friend of mine - James Peyroux. He went off by himself one night and never came back. A few days later, there was a story about him in the paper. He'd been found paralyzed in his bed. He'd gotten so dehydrated that he'd had a brain seizure. Now, he's a like a zombie. His body is still alive, but his mind is gone."

It seemed to Billy like it took forever for the ambulance to get there. When it left, he followed it on his bike to the emergency room. He wasn't family, so they made him sit in the waiting area. The doctor came out once to say that they were going to run some tests, but so far they hadn't discovered the cause of her paralysis. Billy kept waiting. Eventually, he fell asleep in the chair.

As soon as he realized that he had found the dream again, Billy set out to find Martin. He didn't travel on foot the way he had with Yvonne. Instead, he visualized his motorcycle, telling himself that it belonged here with him. Between one instant and the next the bike appeared, just like the trash in Yvonne's cart. Yvonne had said that an experienced dreamer could travel almost instantly between places that he or she knew well, although Billy had yet to try it. But since he expected that almost everywhere he went would be new to him, tonight, he would be better off sticking to the bike.

Finding Martin wasn't hard. Billy just kept asking where the Philosophers were until he found them, seated in a café, drinking tea, and talking. Martin was in the middle of the group, a thin man in his thirties with hair so short he must shave it. Billy told him everything about Yvonne and about how he suspected that whatever had happened to James Peyroux was happening to her as well.

Martin frowned and rubbed his hand across the stubble on his head. He raised an eyebrow at the woman seated across from him, a tanned brunette with a green scarf around her neck. She gave a little shrug, and then nodded.

"There is a man you need to see," said Martin. "He's a Spirit Guide named Isaac. You'll find him downtown - across the bridge from here."

"Can he help Yvonne?" Billy asked.

"Possibly... A few hours ago, he sent word here that he would be waiting to help He Who Would Come. That wasn't very specific, but I'm guessing that he meant you."

"So he must know something about what is going on," Billy said.

The woman leaned towards him, watching his eyes as she spoke.

"Or he may be the cause of it..."

*****

Billy had only a moment to register that the animal had run out in front of him, before he hit the brakes. He hadn't been going very fast, but still he thought that he would slide into it. At the last moment, the animal leaped off to the side, and the bike slid past it before it came to a stop. Billy let out a shaky breath and turned back to look at the animal.

It was a coyote - an animal that until now Billy had only seen in pictures. The coyote watched him, dancing from side to side as if it wanted to be running.

"This way," it said in a raspy voice. Then it hopped off down a side street. Billy stared at where it had been for a second, then spun the bike around and rode after it. The coyote led him down progressively smaller and darker streets, a shifting blur of red, brown, and grey ahead of him, until at last they turned a corner into the open square of an empty parking lot. As soon as they where in sight of it, Billy felt something strange pass over him, like he'd just ridden through the curtain of a waterfall. He looked about, but he could not see the cause of the sensation. The light in this place was different. Everywhere else that he had been in the dream, the sun had seemed to be at twilight, but here it was night. There were stars overhead as well, despite that fact that they were not normally visible in the city.

In the center of the parking lot, there was a man standing beside a steel drum that had a fire burning in it. He was a taller than Billy, with a lithe build and dark black skin, and he was dressed in a leather hat with a brim and a leather jacket, both of which looked dark red in the firelight.

"You have come," he said, a slight accent that Billy couldn't place, coloring his words.

"What happened to Yvonne?" Billy asked, spooked out of his usual politeness. Isaac didn't seem to mind his abruptness.

"She came in contact with the spirits," he said. Then he turned and crouched down until his eyes were on a level with the coyote's.

"Thank you," he said to it, and it turned and ran off.

"What spirits?" Billy asked. Isaac stood and looked at him.

"They are not dead people, as you are thinking. They are only the intentions and memories left by people who made a strong connection with the dream." He held his hands up in front of him as if he was reading something written across his palms.

"The spirits are more like journals, left by those that once were here. They contain the stories of what happened to them in their lives."

"Why did they hurt Yvonne?" Billy asked.

"I do not think that they intended to. Sometimes a spirit has a message for someone still alive. They wander through the dream, seeking the person who will understand their message. If someone disturbs them who does not understand the message, the spirit will try harder and harder to make them understand." He looked Billy in the eyes.

"I fear that it was the energy of their efforts that inadvertently hurt your friend."

"How do we undo it?" Billy asked.

"That, I can help you with, but first you must do something for me."

"What?" asked Billy, his eyes narrowing.

"You must speak to the spirit who did this."

Billy's eyes widened.

"Why me?" he asked.

"Because you are the one that this spirit is searching for."

Billy let out a long slow breath, wondering if he should believe any of this.

"Why do you think that it is looking for me?"

"I listened to them. I am a Spirit Guide, and they can not hurt me simply by touching me the way that they did your friend."

"Why not?"

"For the same reason that I can help your friend. It is a gift that we possess - a talent for consciously using certain parts of our brains that normally are only a part of the subconscious."

"And you will help Yvonne recover the movement of her limbs if I agree to speak with these spirits?"

"Yes."

"How do I know that this is not a trap? Maybe you lured Yvonne and James Peyroux here with the same type of story. Maybe you prey on people this way because you are sick. How do I know that I can trust anything that you say?"

Isaac reached up and adjusted his hat brim, his movements slow and purposeful.

"You do not..." Once more, Billy followed the coyote, this time on foot. Isaac had said that the spirit was not far. In fact, it was less than a block away that the coyote suddenly stopped in front of a boarded up storefront.

"In there," it said. Then it leaped away and disappeared into the dark.

Billy tried to peer through the boards, but all that he could see was a bit of green light somewhere inside. He reached out and tried the door. It opened with a creak, and he stepped inside. It looked like the bottom floor used to be a bakery or cafe of some sort. There were dusty tables and chairs and a glass display counter against two of the walls. At first there was no sign of the green light, but he found that he could see well enough even in the dark.

Then suddenly it was there in front of him, a glowing, green bend in the air like a bubble in the dream. It moved before he could think, rushing into him. A pulse ran through his body like a concussion blast. And then suddenly everything was different.

He was standing in the same place, but the room was new instead of old, and the darkness had been replaced by bright sunlight. Menus in Chinese hung on the walls. Behind the counter, an elderly Asian man was rolling a dumpling. He looked up and smiled when he saw Billy.

"Great grandson," he said, and in his voice were a pride and an acceptance that Billy could feel in a way that he had never felt from his family before. That was the message. It didn't come through the meaning of words - it came in a feeling that filled Billy up from the inside. All of his life, his parents, his aunts and his uncles had each drilled into him how important it was to do well in school, get a good job, and make lots of money to make his ancestors proud. And now one of his ancestors had traveled through the dream across an ocean to show him that he was proud of him and he would always be proud of him - not for the job that he had but for the person that he was.

He looked at his great grandfather, smiling at him from behind the counter. Then there was another pulse that rocked through his body, and everything went black.

"Sir?"

Billy jumped awake, inhaling a huge gulp of air and falling completely out of the hospital chair onto the floor.

"I'm sorry to startle you sir, but the doctor wishes to speak with you."

Billy looked up at the nurse standing over him with an uncertain look on her face.

"Thank you," he managed, picking himself up off of the floor. He hurried across the room to where the doctor was scribbling something on a clipboard for another nurse.

"Doctor?"

"Hi. I have good news. Your friend has regained movement in all of her limbs."

"That's fantastic," Billy said, a smile broadening across his face. "What did you do?"

"Actually, we didn't do anything. She went to sleep, and when she woke up again, she could move..."

Billy Wu and Yvonne stood on the bridge, looking out at the dream twilight reflecting on the water. Yvonne's purple cart was beside them, gold treasures gleaming.

"So," Billy began, "Isaac kept his promise."

"It would seem so," she replied. "Did you understand the message?"

"Yes. I called my family and told them that I'm going back to school. They didn't understand why, but that's okay."

"Hmm... And what will you study?"

"I'm not sure. But I'm going to try things until I find something that feels right."

She turned and looked at him for a moment, her right hand tugging at her eyebrow. Then she turned back to the water.

"That's good, Billy Wu. That's real good... Come along, there's much to see tonight."

posted by D @ 7:41 PM |

:::[A New Look]:::

Thanks so much to Edana of Red Designs for the incredible new look! I really love it! I emailed Edana after I saw the great job she did for Sunshine Days and asked her about creating a unique look for my blog. She was great to work with, and she took a real interest in understanding what my blog was about. I give her my highest recommendation.
Now I just have to get busy and finish the last third of the story I am working on so that there will be new content to match the new look!

posted by D @ 10:04 AM |