Quiet Destroyer 2.41 - Hippikaloric

This is I and the Flux
a thing not to be nameless
yet unnamed

As rivers flow to sea,
So Flux to me, and I to he.

Sitting on the couch eating
crisps, watching banality --
and then he! driving me onward,
upward

Some things are
too terrible for words:
As names give power,
so demean.

It began with a paper clip
and fists. Frisson and fear,
Flux and Mind, but fallen;
too human, here, the Flux
fists, breaking things

such power, and yet
all he is: this! brute
strength, brute inhuman strength.

Alien and terrible,
yet humbled by a trick --
ever the barbarian
fooled by a ship, flashing lights
little things.

He is no better than us,
to solve problems with force.
He is no greater than us
in seeing no other way.

I walked away the first day,
victor.
Even if I lose, the barbarian invader
trembled.
For a moment Flux saw the splendour

but a barbarian can only destroy.

Invisible Friends

The place I wait for you in dreaming
Tunnels of forgotten memories
Being seeing loving dying
The teddy you'd discarded cries

Turn out your lights look under your bed
But I'm not here or there
Not anywhere but in your head
Take a chance make a dare

Accept me believe in me
Get to know yourself you can
Be me and see me and hate me and fear me
You always catch yourself. It don't matter how fast you run

It's all over but for the screaming
Are you dead or are you dreaming?
Is this real or just a seeming
In your eyes are there tears gleaming?

I'm hiding here in your dreams
In places fey and strange
Don't try to drown me out with screams
Everything moves everything changes.

You forgot me you reviled me
And I'm returning you the favour
You're my invisible friend. Don't you see?
You must, you must, so I can savour

All the fears all those years
When you'd forgotten me
All that pain and wasted tears
I rip out your eyes and you see

I'm the invisible
The invisible friend
The one made visible
Only, only in the end

Do you love me?
Do you fear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you see?

You spurned me and ignored me
And wished that I was dead
But now I'm out here and now I'm free
And you're inside my head

Sometimes the lie becomes the true
You wait for me in my sleep
But I won't forget you
No, I can't forgive you
And I love to hear you weep

Down Below the Bowl

When I was a young as you, I was not pale as moon-on-water, not worthy of my name. So few of us are, of those that live in the streets under the world. You may not be Urban Legend, whatever those words mean -- for they are not our way, and words are things of air and not water, of the world above and not our land of scales and water.

Yes, you are old enough to learn of it now, before choosing a sex, before your first mating and trying to disembowel each other in -- but never mind. Before the scales of your body can fall, the ones of your mind must be shorn. For that the teachers came from above, to tell us of our better world, to tell us many things. They are small, and gold as the sun we do not serve, but their hearts are pure and their hate is a thing of dark tunnels and falling from death into life.

This is your second life, as this is the second life of all who live. You dwell in heaven, they the hell above. The priests fell from there, from the glass bowls that are their world, to plunge like tears into ours, some never finding life here -- most never surviving the purity of the journey. They say even heaven is not just, but this gives them hope for another death and a heaven below. Consider it, heavens all the way down, water upon water, life upon life! and we are blessed, O child, to know such things.

The priests will speak to you tomorrow, in their high voices, and you may not understand them. But you must try, and learn, and grow. We are the 'gators for which they made the sewer grates, afraid of heaven rising up to meet them, of the justice of the priests cast down into porcelain pits to find themselves in our world, in a heaven too few reach.

They will tell you of this, and of those who have no fins and scales (not birds, no; they were once as us somewhere in the hell above, but they died poorly, and fell up to another hell, for even our hell is a heaven to some. And they will land on it, and come down here if they are lucky.) This the priests tell us, this we know: and this is what we are, who dwell under their sewers, who make our own cities in the refuse of hell, who dare build heaven in what they consider waste, for we shall live, and die, and fall into another heaven, and some of us will be worthy of our names, of all the white alligators that ever were.

These are the scales I have taken from your mind, that you may see the world as the priest so, as the golden fish that came from glass to us to bring us the truths we had long ago forgotten in the darkness. They are the light of heaven and no, you may not eat them.

Tales of a teenage vampire

“Mom?”
        “Yes, dear?”
        I almost bit my lip, then remembered why it was a bad idea. “I have a confession to make.”
        “Hmm?” She flipped the paper, not looking up from her coffee.
        I took a deep breath from habit. “I’m a vampire.”
        “That’s nice, dear.”
        “Mom!”
        She looked up. “Your sister worked two shifts in a row last night, and you are not to wake her up, Charles. Am I clear on that?”
        “I just told you I was a vampire!”
        “It’s just a phase, dear. I’m sure you’ll grow out of it just like you did pretending to be Superman.”
        “Mom, I’m a vampire. Sunlight burns me, I drink blood, It’s not --”
        “What?”
        “I said --”
        “What did you say you did?” she demanded, putting the paper down.
        “Drinking blood?”
        “Do you have ANY idea what kinds of things could be in people’s blood? What kind of diseases you could get?” She stood, towering over the table, arms folded. “You are NEVER doing this again young man!”
        “Hello? Vampire? Immortal? Duh?”
        “Do you want me to open the curtains, Mr. ‘O, Sunlight will burn me, O! I am slain!’? No? Well, then we’re putting a stop to this silly nonsense right now. You are not a vampire and you are not immortal and you are not to go around drinking strangers blood - or even families! Have I made myself clear?”
        I held her gaze and pitched my voice at That Tone, the one people couldn’t help but obey, the one that had got me laid for the past three weeks every night. “I am a vampire, mother. And that is not going to change.”
        She blinked, once, and lowered her voice. “You will not take that tone of voice with me again, is that understood?”
        “Yes,” I squeaked out, blushing, even though she couldn’t tell.
        “Good,” she continued. “Now, I am going to find a decent psychiatrist to cure you of this silly condition and that WILL be that,” in a tone that made ‘Clean your room up now!’ seem a gentle request.
        But I had died when Karen ripped my throat open, and did not move, drawing my nature up about me. “I am Nosferatu, mother, and I will not be controlled.”
        “You can be french if you really want, but that doesn’t matter to me,” she said, walking towards the phone book. “I have had just about enough of you being goth and neglecting chores and if you really are stupid enough to go around drinking blood, I have had enough of this and you are grounded and going to get some help.”
        “I’ma vampire, mom! I can fly!”
        “Then you can go clean your room right now!”
        I stared at her, then turned and stalked up the stairs, pausing outside a door. “Yo, sis? It’s a full moon again tonight and you’re going to need a better excuse this time. Also, don’t try and tell mom you’re a werewolf anytime soon. Lifestyle choice my butt.”
        She didn’t reply.

Release

Waking each morning is
reading note scrawled under bedcovers.
Trying to decipher words
from tears, wondering why
each note is longer, who
is being written to, who will ever
read this.

And the suicide note joins others
crammed into the desk drawer under
school reports and lesson plans, wondering
just when courage will be enough
or fail entire.

There always seems to be too much left
to say.

Letters To The Family

I

Dearest Timothiel,

For such I will insist on calling you though you haven't answered it since the days of your childhood. I thank you for the letter you wrote regarding our welfare but aside from your dreams of fancy there has been little to worry about on the Winthrop estate. Your father publishes seldom these days, having found the world much changed since the days of his boyhood. Without the ever-present Red Menace, he finds few subjects truly worthy of a spy novel but has been considering writing a paranoia-saturated thriller -- I blame Dan Brown.

As for your mother, I have been exceedingly well. The new town doctor, a quiet young lad named (most unfortunately!) Grendel, has been teaching me about chi and relaxation and my old headaches and back pain are all but gone. He claims to have first practised his art in England (New and the real one) rather than the far off Orient, which is quite honest and rather refreshing, though his tales of "Mary and Collin" tend to be melancholy and he often asks about secret gardens on this estate with an air of sadness -- perhaps the two unfortunates fell down a concealed well, but I have not as yet pried such stories from him.

Speaking of wells, there turns out to be an old one on the back corner of the property, made of volcanized glass of all the absurd things. I have discovered several strange mosses growing on it that defy the rudimentary analysis of the microscope your dear father bought me and have sent samples off to the university in the hopes that someone can shed the light of day upon their peculiar nature.

I will reply with more information if I learn anything, but I fear I must end this letter with unseemly haste. Mr. Craven is insisting he's hearing dogs outside even though we own none. His fancies of a land of Tindalos are becoming quite unseemly in a grown man, but good help is hard to find and it is a measure of Christian charity that we tolerate the quirks of others.

Your loving mother,

Celest Winthrop.

Future Memories

“Recorder on.”

Voice pattern confirmed. Recording, text and vocal for Robin.

“Nothing is permanent. For decades, nothing has been. What is real anymore? I don’t know, and I wish I hadn’t asked. It’s not that we’re taught not to ask questions, it’s that we never ask the ones that matter. And it wouldn’t matter if we did. A strategy game - I forget which one - once told me fortune-cookie style that ‘Before answering a question it is wise to ask another’. Only now do I wonder what fortune cookies are.
       “The child arrived at the hospital 4 hours and 37 minutes ago. We don’t get many people there anymore; they either fine cures on the net, keep up with their shots, get stuff to them through their drop box or simply discard their body entirely. I’ve worked there for 16 years, but I’ve never set foot in the place. Or left this room; such is our world. Everything is here, and we need nothing else.
       “My name is Robin. I spent the last 3 minutes finding and using the printer function, putting this on a wall. I’ve been adding to the file to print next, with the names of people I know, and their Identities and other such things. Just in case I need to know them one day. I suspect a lot of other people at work are doing the same, while the child sits in a room and rocks back and forth, slowly dying.
       “Memory is no longer important. We put everything in our storage creche on System, after all. Logging in is entirely automatic, all placed we go recorded. It’s only a few things we need to know, like an Identity for the less-than-legal places everyone frequents sometimes. The child came in, without memory, having logged out in a weather glitch, creche damaged by a storm.
       “It had forgotten its own name and could no longer log in.
       “One of the doctors, whose hobby is the rewriting of the past quaintly called history, said such things were not surprising, that relegating mental labour to other devices only served to regress our own memories. I really wasn’t paying attention, though, since I was trying to get the child to recall anything beyond the fact that it had a body and how to move it and breathe.
       “It must have been rich, for its body to have managed to walk here. Some kind of muscle stimulant living unit for while in System had kept major atrophy at bay. Beyond that, we learned nothing. Attempts are being made to hack the mind in this world, not in System; to force a connection and go from there. In the meantime, starved of information, the child is going mad and dying in the dull, real world.
       “And I am putting this out for all to read, though it will vanish and be buried under other information, wiped away in a decade as System clears out useless data. This is our future: this is what the world is going to come to. Without memory, we will have no identity, and we no longer need to remember anything at all.”

Message sent, Robin.

“Thank you System. System?”

Query confirmed, Robin.

“When were you made?”
       “System?”

That information is not within standard memory.

“Oh. I see. Log off Robin, current time. Print map to hospital, and routes to reach it. I may not return.”

Acknowledged.

It might have been you

Hey, I said, too fast, thinking
we knew each other names.
When I am lonely each stranger
reminds me of someone I knew.

Sorry, I said, when you turn too slow
unwelcome confusion on your face.
Am I so ugly, I want to ask, so ugly
that you couldn't pretend you knew me?

I want to hear strangers names, walk,
start chatting up as if we were friends.
I want to invite them for sex or food
or just to share our dreams indoors.

I'll make a fire in the living room,
damage deposit gone, or with your smile?
And we'll talk as if things have meaning
where there are no stars to watch us.

Classes

I want to kill them all.
        Every one of them, but especially Mr. Hodgkins, Mr. ‘Nice to see you in class, Jake.’ ‘I hope you studied for this test, Jake’ Hodgkins. Physics? I could give him physics: I could show him FTL drives, write down equations that would break down all his certainties. I almost tried, once, but I’d need to invent forms of math just to translate it so he could understand it at all.
        It wasn’t worth my time. The last time I tried translating something, he thought I was doodling.
        The rest of the class is quiet, writing down answers and cheating in half the cases. It’s not hard to notice; human body language is their Braille, to my eyes. It’s terribly easy to read, unlike their words.
        Twelve light years away the Hole has begun devouring a star system. I am writing a test.
        “I need to go to the bathroom,” I say, raising my hand.
        Mr. Hodgkins frowns. I hand him the finished test before he can say no, walking out.
        He sends out a hall monitor before I reach the bathroom, to make sure I return ‘this time’.
        We aren’t allowed cell phones; I call my family anyway. I explain.
        My mother explains that just because an alien intelligence has become part of me doesn’t mean I can avoid tests worth thirty percent of my final grade.
        I explain about the Hole. I tell her it’s a living black hole. Billions are dying. I could probably make it there, negate it. An hour, at best.
        She says she doesn’t have time to home school; I’d lose my chance to finish the year, because I wouldn’t graduate.
        I accidentally destroy the stall door leaving the bathroom, letting a hint of energy leak into my eyes as I stare at the hall monitor. Jenny doesn’t ask questions, but she doesn’t leave. She knew her duty.
        I spend the rest of the class listening to screams. Eventually someone else arrives, but by them too many have died.
        Mr. Sexton in biology asks if I plan to pay attention. I say no, and walk outside. People are following, saying words. They’re probably angry.
        My phone rings; my mother always knows when I’ve done something wrong. I sometimes wonder if she has a power, or if all others do.
        I answer. “Seven billion people.”
        She says nothing.
        I drop the phone and stare up at the stars, then back at the people looking at me.
        I do not say goodbye.

ANTS! LOL! RNT TEHY FUNY?!

Because someone had to start the meme.