Facebook Status Updates Nov - Dec 2016

Nov 2016

“You stole data: you need to sift through it, hold what you can. Find out what we can make use of. Focus.”

“I don’t know what I do. I don’t know how to do it,” Loqi protested.

“I know.” Loqi let out a whimper as pain shot through his left hand. “So I am going to break one of your fingers every time you lose focus.”

Loqi opened his eyes. The world swam with data that wasn’t his. Facts, memories, meetings people had stored in their personal clouds. He focused on the real world, stared at Niles. “You said you had a way to help me use this – whatever it is.”

“I do. I just explained it. If I think I need to again, I will break another finger. I think you do not want me to go beyond fingers, yes?”

“They didn’t kill us: that means they need us.”

‘It might not,’ Jo signed. ‘It really might not at all.’

“Shut up and give me a moment. We need one,” Miri said, and started walking to what looked to be a stable building. They weren’t dead.That had to a plus side to their situation, even if she had no idea how it was one right now.

“Loqi isn’t my real name,” Loqi said. “It’s a use-name I adopted during the war and I’ve stuck with it ever since.”

“Well, it is a stupid name,” Miri said.

He nodded. “I know. But I thought cruxymox wasn’t the kind of name anyone would take seriously.”

Not that Miri didn’t know anyone who was old, but few people ever looked it. Mr. Josef was old, pale and wrinkled with ears, his movements slow and unhurried as he stilled or turned off feeds and faced the both of them.

… Ears. Years. Wrinkled with ears would be nicely creepy to keep though :p

His parents had moved cities. That alone would have warranted a call, or at least a message. But there had been only silence. Silence, and no help. Not that he wanted it. No. Not that simple. He didn’t know what he wanted. Jo could admit that in the privacy of his own head. He gained nothing from being mute in a world where speech was important. Getting apps to work without it was a pain at best. Public spaces warranted stares from those not zoned one somewhere in the data fields. Not having those issues would be nice, but he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to be a different him. If he’d change. If silence was some kind of protection.

If people were only friends with him because he was different.

‘Miri?’ No response, so Jo dropped his hands, studying them. Would she have come, if he hadn’t needed someone to? He had no idea. He wouldn’t be himself if he could talk. He’d have been a different Jo, maybe a bit the same – he didn’t know. It could be his parents were trying to spare him all this, this thisness that circled through him without answer or end. Be healed, and he no more. But it wasn’t that simple. Or it was, and he didn’t want it to be.

Jo gnawed on his lower lip, staring out at automated farming-factories. If they could fix his voice and whatever was wrong with his brain, he had no idea what he’d say. Anyone else would say yes, from the outside. But not being normal had a power. No. It was addictive. If he had to be honest, there was something to it that felt like that.

If it was being honest –.

“I never wanted to think my son had actually been part of the war.”

“I doubt he was, except at the fringes. The people who planned the war were the ones who are afraid – it’s always that way. Oh, there are always things to be gained – land, people, wealth, power – but the core of it all is fear. Get people scared enough and you can get them to do anything. And there is almost nothing as scary as the future.”

“You make it sound like the war was simple.”

“I’ve been around. People are a lot more simple than they like to think,” Niles said quietly. “You can move most anyone with the right lever. Tribes are the easy one. We had humans, and we had the future and there was no room for humans in that.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Harold said.

“Imagine knowing your granchildren would be immortal, Harold. Literally knowing this. There were children being born in the world who might never die, and that knowledge engendered hatred on a level those who looked to the future couldn’t even begin to understand. The war was for many things; it was about others, at the start. Humans who were scared to be anything other than human, and wouldn’t let anyone else take that step if they could avoid it.”

“Were you involved in the war?” Niles hadn’t meant to ask it, not that bluntly. He was tired; he hadn’t consciously realized how tired until the words slipped out.

Loqi stiffened, tried to hide that. “Who wasn’t?”

Niles smiled. “A point. It’s not as if you have to answer.”

“I don’t, no.” The kid looked almost uncomfortable at that, but hadn’t yet pulled up a privacy field to screen his appearance. “Were you?”

“On the fringes. No one understood what had happened until it was all over, at least not anyone I worked for. You can’t win a war when your enemy is everyone.”

She considered poking into Jo’s health and family files, but breaching his sister would be more than an insult to their friendship.

… sister. System. Heh. I think I will need to catch a bit of sleep now :)

“If any of this works, we’re going to have an army. I’m twelve: I didn’t expect to have my own army until I was at least fifteen.”

“The worst part of that is that I don’t even know if you’re joking.”

Miri handed Loqi back the water. “I might have been.”

It had been thirty four years since any member of the Peace Force had felt the need to use a weapon. The clue, as they told often baffled planetary representatives from other worlds, was in the name. Hasfa swore softly as she yanked a pulse disruptor out of storage en route to the old museum. She did not want to be the one to break the current record, but dying just to preserve it would be even more foolish.

“The engine felt off too,” I say.

“Like it was yawning?” Wilbur says.

“It could be my imagination.” I don’t add that it should be. A contagious case of yawning can’t affect cars. I hope.

We take turns trying to call anyone in Rivercomb but still get no answer. An entire town asleep and the only solution being to drive elsewhere and hope for a cure. It would feel like a movie, only there is no movie that would put us into the cast. That cheers me up a little.

The lies you have to tell yourself to sleep better at night are your own.

Just don’t expect anyone else to fall for them.

Some days it is hard to be a secret you want the whole world to discover.

I did a post in secret only for you.

(I wish this was that post.)

It hurts the most when you paint me in red. I adore the other colours, even when I am none and stripped back to the semblance of emptiness. But red is your fingers harsher than brushes, thrusts that dig into my skins and your anger is your hate and I do not deserve to be a receptacle for hate but each time you go with red violent in your movements. And all I can do is hope the outcome hurts you less than I. All I do is wait for you to put down brushes, sobbing, to stare at the canvas and see the painting as more than just broken strokes. And to see the canvas hurts too as I wait also to be whole.

It didn’t occur to any of us to wonder what kind of trap a magician could set with their dying, not until it was far too late.

Even by the standards of door-to-door salesmen, Jacob Grumsley entered the rank of legend when he managed to sell a well to the cacti and he was judged to be a trickster when he convinced them it was also a wishing well that could remove their unsightly spines.

“The myth of families is that they are forever: that’s the lie people sell each other, the one their kids absorb. And when it’s found out to be just a myth, everyone deals with it differently.

“I don’t think we really recover from that, even if we pretend we do.”

I’m not good enough at talking to others. Everyone else just talks as if it’s easy and maybe it is. Breathing is easy, but some people don’t breathe as easily as others. Maybe it’s like that: that everyone has a limited amount of easy to put into things everyone considers to be easy. I don’t know.

“Stairs are society trying to force cardio on everyone. There is a reason we invented elevators.”

“We are friends. Friends stand up for each other, even if it is against homicidal suicide cults.”

I used to be scared. But everything changed once the monsters scarred me.

“Dave. I know you’re trying to be meta, but you cannot get Straight White Male as your superpower in our superhero campaign.”

“But look, he’ll have atheist as a character flaw!”

“No.”

I wanted to be a love letter but could not pay the price the ink demanded.

If you want to fly, you must give up the wings that weigh you down.

The problem with magicians is that they were terrifying. John Adams had taken the four of us down without trying, never mind everything Noah had tried to do to stop him. He’d spoken words we had to obey, looked right into us the way only God should look into anyone. At least some of the hate I feel for him disappears as I drive back to Rivercomb. All that power, and the only thing he thought he could do with it was die. It would have been tragic if it didn’t feel so terribly, achingly stupid.

The monster has one terrible gift. It could bring back the lost for one day only: family, friends, lovers, pets. You would get one more day if you paid the price it asked and it fed deeply on what was left behind after the gift had ended.

“I didn’t yawn,” Anya says, “though writing about characters yawning is making the author yawn. Which isn’t something this particular plot thread was intended to cause.”

We have questions for the magician of Rivercomb, and I’m sure Mr. Pickles has questions for us, but for the first time in days it feels like it’s all right if they wait for a while.

The future waits for us. But somehow it doesn’t scare me as much as it used to.

“I am sorry, but no.” She turned away from him.

“But mistress! I wish to be like you, undead and eternal -.”

“Yes, yes. I know. But no self-respecting vampire can drink the blood of a vegan.”

Dec 2016

Once upon a time there was a goddess who learned how to turn men into pigs. The other gods gently mocked her power, certain that such an act required no magic at all.

Everyone made fun of Heather for having two mommies.

Until she brought them to school and they realized she had two mummies.

The resulting curses did more to curb insults than any anti-bullying policy the school ever tried to adopt.

We don’t talk about it to outsiders. People who do never have a moment of peace. But the day the aliens landed in our back garden, they asked what made us human. We were having a party a few weeks before Christmas and no one wanted to attempt to explain that holiday to aliens. It was Mabel with her small fork at the ready and Cho with his stuffed face who came up with fondue.

“Chocolate and fire,” I said. “Those are what make us human.” And we gave them fondue and they left. I have no idea what may have happened after that. But the world is still here, so maybe we saved it?

“I like a challenge.”

“So do I; that’s why we’re friends.”

Once upon a time, there was a Hydra who was tired of being hated and so formed a boy band with all of his five heads.

I never ran out of truths, just out of ways to spin them into pleasing stories.

She cared just enough to pretend that she had never cared at all.

The problem with being a monster was that everyone knows you are monstrous. No act of kindness is ever worth it for everyone sees hidden evils and dark motives under everything you do.

I guess what I am saying is that I shouldn’t have let that child live even if I was full after after eating her entire family.

“This was going to be a poem.” She sighed. “But I forgot where to put the line

breaks and you

see my problem since it makes

no sense at all?”

You tried to tell me you loved me, but kept blowing your nose each time.

Six words to make seven wounds.

“But I want to be your friend,” the monster said. And how it smiled, trying not to show any teeth at all.

“I thought monsters didn’t have friends,” Kelsa said, suspicious in a way close to wisdom.

“It depend of what we hunger for, and why.”

Sometimes the only way to understand a truth is to make it a fiction.

The family prepared for Christmas the way survivalists prepped for the apocalypse. Only, they hoped, with less chance of zombies.

I don’t have poems in me for you. I know I promised you one for the holidays but I am only seeing days in them: nothing holy and only holly brambles ensnaring every attempt to get beyond the world. Sometimes the past is chains. Sometimes, too, the present is as well.

I am sorry.

Some people planned for their futures as it happened. Merry planned her eventual dictatorship over the whole of the Earth at the age of five in order to ensure that no one would ever say Merry Christmas to someone named Merry and find it funny at all.

And to abolish Christmas as a last name for anyone named Merry, on penalty of a week-long lecture by her that would involve implements of torture.

It took effort to learn to be proud of silence.

“But I know who will kill me.”

“That’s not what I asked.Who killed you?”

The ghost smiled sadly at the exorcist. “You did. You will, the moment you perform the exorcism and banish me from this place.”

Dear Santa,

Does Boxing Day really mean that Daddy has to hit Mommy?

The bus named streets as the driver drove, the automated voice stuttering each time it passed Crabapple Lane, but no one thought it meant anything at all. Not until after it was far too late for things to mean anything at all.

Do our omens fail us or do we fail them?

I keep forgetting that the stars have other names than yours.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who found no man worthy of her hand in marriage and the rumours that began about her had no kindness to them at all.

“But I don’t deserve to be happy in 2017,” I explained. “None of us do.”

“Wait, what?”

“What if 2016 hears all this? What if it gets jealous? What if it wants to get revenge?”

“That’s ….not how it works.”

“It’s 2016. I wouldn’t put that past it.”