Party at Portland State

I was on a late-night canning run through Portland State University, or at least that's the only reason I can think of for being there, even though I wasn't carrying anything to put bottles and cans into. It was one of those warm summer nights — I was only wearing a t-shirt — and either the moon had set or it was overcast because it was dark.

I was being spooky, keeping to walkways obscured by shadows, lamps few and far in between, because I was avoiding the campus public safety who had excluded me from the university property some time ago for trespassing on university property; I was canning then, too. As I approached a set of stairs leading up from Stott Field to the old core campus housing buildings and Milar Library, I heard someone approaching to descend them. I immediately ducked into an open utility shed of some sort that I noticed on my way there in the hopes of going unnoticed and hopefully not getting locked in. To my relief it was an obviously homeless person shambling downstairs in a hulking, grunting spectacle of public intoxication, so as soon as he staggered into a belly flop and passed out next to the shed I leaped out to ascend the stairs he came from. What in hell was he doing here?

When I made to the top I beheld an expanse of flotsam from what appeared to be left over from an enormous outdoor frat party: benches and tables sat strewn haphazardly all the way to the Stott Center, covered — as was the lawn between them — in paper plates dripping globules and chunks of half-eaten food and cans of soda (and the occasional beer), and everywhere there were people, most of them already passed out while some were stumbling around or murmuring incomprehensibly like ghouls, visibly drunk; even the odd couple here and there shamelessly fucking. What the hell's going on? I decided for some reason to head toward the pay phone ahead of me, lean against the wall and smoke a cigarette to gather in more of the scene and maybe chat with one of the more lucid among the still-ambulatory revelers to find out what the occasion was, when tow public safety officers arrived. They started writing tickets to the obvious homeless people among the students, so I turned around pretending to fumble for change and make a phone call. One of them, a guy who should have recognized me, asked to see my ID; I turned around quickly, feigning glassy-eyed inebriation, and shrugged, muttering "Sorry, I usually leave mine at home" and resumed my charade, whereupon he decided to leave me alone.

After polishing off pretense with an obligatory invective ("Damn it!"), so that it be known to all my ire at having forgotten to carry change on me, I turn around and walk away just in time for the public safety officer I encountered to be joined by his partner and the two of them to head back my way. God damn it! I grit my teeth and force myself to remain insouciant and head toward a parking lot nearby that's off campus property and observe with relieve out the corner of my eye that they're still hassling the bums behind me. When I encounter a sandy stretch I glance down and notice with dismay that somehow the loafer on my left foot had somehow been replaced with an old white tennis shoe, so I backtrack in search of my missing shoe, only to be laughed at by some Vikings football players. Huh? Scowling at being the brunt of a bizarre joke I look down again and now I'm standing in my socks! "Fuck, I have to go to work in a few hours!" at a temp agency I just signed on with, and already it's growing light with dawn! I start despairing of being able to do that, or even walk around town — to get home, at least — when I remember I have a pair of boots at home.

At this point I remember with alarm that I was supposed to be dodging Campus Spam, so I glance furtively back in the direction I came from, to see the two public safety officers had just turned to head toward Stott Field. Grinning with relief, as if I’d somehow outsmarted them, I spun back around to head home when a small group of students accost me gregariously and pass a nefarious bit of surgical tubing toward me, urging me to help them finish their last keg. After a moment’s hesitation I smile and say “What the hell” and take the proffered Barleycorn in hand, introducing myself to my new "friends". So much for work.

Tendrils of the Overmind

It was sometime in the future, perhaps seventy-five to a hundred years. The world was writhing in the ruins of environmental devastation and global warming, human overpopulation and reckless squandering of resources bled the world dry of even arable land and potable water, famines and plagues and warfare have cat like a scythe through the population leaving scars of toxic wastelands, and the life of all inhabitants remaining — human included — teetered precariously on the edge of the precipice of extinction.

In desperation the remaining powers pooled their resources, ingenuity, and knowledge to send drones to the asteroid belt to farm them of resources, organic and inorganic, to begin the slow process of salvaging what remained of the earth and in preparation for extraplanetary colonization. One drone returned with curious data that turned out to be of an artifact of some kind, which a manned space mission discovered after a short time to be a node of an extraterrestrial intelligence, possibly a combination sentinel and communication link. The node quickly engaged in a dialog with the human race, providing it with valuable technology to assist the human race in recovering their lost world.

It turned out to be a great boon, for the node taught humans how to convert mined inorganic compounds into synthetic food and even how to eliminate many diseases and to efficiently clean up nuclear and chemical waste ... even how to create treatments to extend human life and improve cellular repair and regeneration, also providing humans with much-needed blueprints for orbital fusion reactors to restore power to a world once again hungry for energy. Through the knowledge gained from the node people were living longer, healthier lives, wars diminished to terrorist acts by those mistrustful of the governments cooperating with the alien intelligence, and the environment was rapidly being cleaned up and restored, even lost species returned to life.

One group of scientists, under a fierce and charismatic quantum physicist, and supported by an enormous Pangaian (formerly the UN) budget decided to take it one step further and began working with the node to create a gateway between the solar system and one of the node's core home systems, which as it turned out was a few hundred light years near the galactic core; the idea being to transfer physical objects like ships and people or machines back and forth to initiate trade and accelerate knowledge and technology growth. Unfortunately, the scientists were working on their own agenda, or one they shared with the node's, for they ignited Jupiter into a small sun and set up a small rogue nation orbiting around it on the Jovian moons. (Sorry, Arthur C. Clarke! I know I ripped you off.)

After a failed military intervention by a coalition of terrestrial governments the earth reluctantly accepted the position of the rogue nation, realizing that they also controlled much of the asteroid belt and were despite hostilities willing to continue aid in reconstruction if recognized and left in peace. Meanwhile, their ranks swelled because of long-lived humans who were ostracized or harassed by shorter-lived humans who distrusted the bioengineering procedures imparted to them by the alien; it seems that certain aberrations in personality manifested themselves as a person underwent repeated treatments, which aroused suspicion around the world regarding the alien's motives.

Using the new sun as a power source and bolstered by an influx of brilliant and eager immigrants and armies of artificial intelligences and their drones born out of the asteroid belt, a massive gateway the size of the Jovian moon Titan was being constructed to serve as a conduit of exchange between the solar system and what was increasingly being suspected of being some sort of alien empire of a single mind, and omni-mind of sorts that absorbed all mind and matter and energy it encountered to expand a sphere of order throughout the galaxy. (Derisively called Omnius of Camazotz, the latter a reference to Madeline l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.) Such was the belief of the increasing numbers of privateers and terrorists on earth and lunar and martian colonies.

While technically at peace with earth the Jovian nation became under siege by constant infiltrations, acts of piracy, suicide attacks, and sabotage. In the end, just as the gate was about to begin its first major trial run, a major war broke out at the very control satellite of the gateway itself while all across the middle solar system violence erupted. In the dream the lead scientist and her core research team were holding out against Martian war mecha and hordes of suicide troopers, who were closing in rapidly just as she began the procedure to power on the gateway...

23rd Century Jailbreak

Centuries of immersion in a lifestyle of sensuality, immediate gratification, and increased reliance on machines for memory and even basic cognition resulted in the gradual degeneration of intelligence among the sighted, made even worse by the increased genetic damage wrought on the human race by widespread chemical and radiation poisoning brought about by environmental devastation, nuclear and biological warfare, and increased reliance on altered and synthetic food. The blind, on the other hand, not only retained their mental faculties because of their need to use various centers of their brain to supplement or replace their inability to visually sense and navigate their world, but also because when the sighted world became aware of the distinction between the two sub-species they began to ostracize them or seek to exploit their superior intellectual capacities, resulting in a widening schism between the two peoples. The Degenerates sank into a soulless world of statism and militarism, while the Aural fortified themselves in communities where the old humanity was refined and flourished in an atmosphere of artistic and intellectual prowess and freedom. A constant state of siege of the few by the many soon ensued.

I'd been imprisoned in a Degenerate work complex for longer than I care to say, enslaved by those subhuman germs to be their brains for them, solve the problems those fools created for themselves and to devise weapons of war to be used against my brothers and sisters, and to expand their gluttonous amœba of a nation — one of myriad miserable petty duchies and satraps choking under the miasma of a vengeful heaven and led by a cadre of delusional megalomaniacal buffoons. Let today be their curse, for deliverance is at hand; even now I and my associates are wheeling the massive datacube into the small container secured in a transport autobot that will smuggle us out of the compound with all the wealth of knowledge we'd been prodded like cattle into devising for them.

Still, though they may be fools, they possess and animal cunning that's not to be underestimated. The first sign of trouble came when the Lorrie carrying us, twelve in all with our treasure box, lurched suddenly to a stop. Our escort slid open our door and notified us that sentrybots were en route. He was a muscular man of average height and indistinct features, save for his eyes being two glistening black orbs swirling with subtle, dull ruddy whirls that looked like infrared ink undulating in the darkest corner of the night; an ultima- or bioweapon, he could see more than any Degenerate or Urman could, well into the infrared and even radio frequencies and up past the ultraviolet just shy of the spectrum of cosmic background radiation. He pulled out his auto-tracking submachine gun and vaporized a dozen sentrybots just as a few bullets hit the front of the Lorrie and before we'd all even turned our heads to track his movement. Without a word he slid the container door back shut and we felt ourselves lurch forward again and shortly the faint echo discernible informed us we were in the underground hangars on the perimeter of the compound.

Again, we lurched to a stop, and this time I opened the door unbidden and was horrified to see us surrounded by muciphage sentinels, already shooting their slimy, adhesive tendrils toward us from their writhing, jaundice-colored forms blasphemous to all macroscopic biology — only the worst torture could have ever caused an Aural to develop such a monstrosity, and we were all filled with terror. Our escort let a sneer mar his stony face and this time pulled out a weapon I'd never seen before, something that was vaguely reminiscent of a shotgun wrapped in distillation coils the color of St. Elmo's fire. It sounded like a hiss from a giant serpent when it fired, and wherever its shots struck a cold blue flame the color of arctic ice exploded in a ball the size of a man, and when that explosion dissipated a rapidly-widening hole could be seen opening in the muciphage and rapidly devouring it, leaving it in moments a mere puddle of smoking ichor. We were saved! With the help of our cutting torches we removed the last of the hardened severed muciphage tendrils and in a few minutes were back inside the container and on our way out of the tunnels, when again we lurched to a stop. "Ready the detonator," we were commanded, meaning serious trouble indeed. I opened the container door while my associate primed the small micronuke explosive that ensured that even if we failed to reclaim our freedom those accursed Degenerates would be deprived of the fruit of our labors and of their chief laborers, gritting my teeth as I saw at the very gateway to freedom an array of guardbots bristling with armaments waiting for us.

After a minute of the two groups staring at each other in silence I heard a strange crackling rushing from the left of us, like a pile of leaves the size of a house being driven ahead of a stiff gale. I turned my head and beheld a pack of raidens rushing toward the guardbots, ephemeral tigers each the size of our Lorrie, glowing a subdued blue-white, shimmering in the air in phase to a quantum heartbeat, a single eye in each head glowing the color of burning phosphorous. I glanced at our savior and was met with a grin. "Better get back inside, and get ready to roll," he beamed with boyish glee. As we scrambled inside I saw the guardbots opening fire on the raidens, crimson and emerald beams passing ineffectually through the furious beasts as they let loose with their own fury, beams white enough to blind the eyes when looked at directly cutting through the formerly terrifying machines as if they were made of butter. "Don't worry about the door, enjoy the show!," our escort screamed as he started up the Lorrie's engine and we lurched forward, "But, for God's sake disarm that detonator!". I saw one of the raidens explode into five blue orbs, each of them hurtling toward the gate and the ruined towers surrounding it, exploding in perfect spheres of a blue-white incandescence that faded away to reveal nothing, everything within having been perfectly devoured. As we passed through I saw the remaining raidens leap into the sky and elongate and narrow into the shape of serpents or old Chinese dragons and circle around the complex lancing the guard towers, walls, and control tower with those terrible beams of lightning, eventually lost in a confusion of the prison defense's feeble ineffectual laser fire and explosions from their missile batteries.

We let loose a cheer and embraced each other and slapped each other's shoulders and backs, some of us shedding tears of joy; freedom! And vengeance.

How to Fail at Love

I was on a date with a girl who my mind told me was a recent ex but who had the long and straight reddish-brown hair of a girl I dated over fifteen years ago up in Washington. We had pulled into a dirt lot in front of what looked like some ramshackle Bayou swamp cabin and proeceded inside where Mudhoney was performing. I lost my nerve in the crowd and noise and was thoroughly miserable, to the point where my date and I started bickering; she made it clear that she had decided to cast off her mantle of bleak, lonely misanthropy and to start cutting loose a little bit and enjoy at least occasional respites from her sorrow- and pain-laden solitary life. I started getting jealous when some kind-voiced, handsome interloper appeared to be putting the moves on her, being awfully touchy-feely with her even as he had the gall to interrupt our argument, and in turn she was pointedly ignoring my entreaties for her to understand my fear and discomfort with an unaccustomed coldness. She even suggested that tonight be our last night together and I pack up tomorrow so she can return me to whence I came, which broke my heart and sent tears into my eyes (though at least I had the dignity not to let them fall). I was ashamed of my anxiety and cursing my social ineptitude, not to mention subdued somewhat by the cold wind of rejection whipping through my tattered sails, that after a failed attempt to get up and "loosen up" by trying to start a pogo mosh (which was met with strange looks and some suppressed mirth at my expense by others in the audience), I snarled in disgust and walked out the door not saying so much as a parting word to the girl I loved but couldn't please...

...Years later, I was unmooring my sailboat from a dock on a lonely San Juan island north of Seattle. It was a lovely overcast morning, the sky and the sea contrasting grays and the wind light and steady, tendrils of ghost-white mist covering the ocean unevenly like a tattered, liquid shroud clinging to the surface of an incoming tide; blissfully serene, with none of the choking dust and rotting timbers of that dilapidated swamp shack that had become a canker sore in my memory, not to mention the raucous cacophony or disquieting piercing of a suffocating sweltering darkness by a flickering barrage of gaudy colored lights. I was taking my time, leaning against the motor sipping my coffee, when the girl came back into my life, and with that accursed interloper from years before, both stepping out of their nice blue European car he'd driven up to the lure and reel shop that also served as an information booth for all maritime matters; I'd seen it dozens of times before, tourists who missed a turn a few miles up the road hoping to buy passage on the ferry that boards at the whey a few miles around the bend of the island where the town is. She recognized me immediately and walked up to me and almost blurted out my name while her beau met his disappointment at the shack and got directions to town. I shook my head and averted her gaze, mumbling something about the wrong guy, and kicked the boat away from the dock and started the motor. The slow puttering of my feeble outboard motor away from the dock was less painful than feeling her gaze boring into me as she stood there staring at me looking crestfallen; her partner walked slowly up to her and placed his arm around her shoulders, looking at her then at me.

I kicked the cabin roof and called out to my dog that it's too damn balmy a morning for him to be loafing about inside, tears streaming down my face as I drifted once again out of the life of a love that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my days.

Infernal Bromine

“Who’s that guy,” the grizzled, steely-eyed mayor of Effer Vesicant¹. jerked his thumb at me, standing back from the table he and my partner were sitting at in the Sphincter, probably the dingiest, most squalid, and most menacing speakeasy I’ve seen in my life. I felt myself skewered on the daggers of the eyes of loiterers in the stairwell leading down from the street as we descended to its entrance lit by dim, flickering red neon sign, and I’m pretty sure one of them tried to lift my wallet from me. “He’s my friend and my partner. We do business with him or we do none at all,” my partner coolly replied and after a few seconds of sizing me up with a cold glare the mayor grunted and jerked his head slightly, inviting me to take a seat with the social grace typical of an Ionian. Without any preamble he slid a worn Jimmy² across the battered, grease-smeared gunmetal gray table, its iridium-titanium rectangle glowing softly sylvan like a stray moonbeam falling onto the wreckage of an ancient destroyer. My partner attached it to the input-output panel of his pom³ and the three of us soberly watched images and text the color of St. Elmo’s fire flicker into being above the middle of the table as room darkened suddenly as a scramble field blossomed around us.

I leaned back and stared at the mayor and blurted out incredulously “Earth?”. My partner restrained me with a hand on my forearm and I stood up shaking my head and headed over to the bar, carefully avoiding the eyes of a couple lanky n’er do wells casually slumped over its much-abused metal surface. Nice décor, I had to keep myself from wrinkling my nose in disgust as I ordered a New Amsterdam. After a few minutes the mayor and my partner came up to me and after the mayor shook my hand brusquely, grinning sardonically, he strode out of the speakeasy and my partner sidled up to me and said “It’s a lot of money and you know we need it” while mopping large beads of sweat from his brow with a tattered and stained blue bandana. I nodded silently and finished my drink. We left quietly, and again felt the brush of mischievous fingers on my pants during the ascent up the stairs — good thing my pants were magnetically sealed and encoded to my fingertips’ electromagnetic resonance and heat-signature patterns. |[call it "hot-boxed!!! :D ]|

(After their footsteps receded into silence a dark corner of the speakeasy ripples like plastic wrap caught in the light of a large blue neon sign, out of which a shadowy figure steps away from a table and leaves quietly in pursuit. No one, not even the enormous bartender, so much as glances out the corners of their eyes at the silent stranger.)

It took us over a newstandard month⁴ to get there, even with the advanced navigational AI⁵ and military-grade sensor array: flying through the radioactive wreckage of all the interplanetary wars of the past that fill the middle of the solar system is so dangerous that for a hundred years only salvage bots have braved the peril, and only seldom because few cities can afford the Pyrrhic economics of the business. Gingerly picking our way through the dense cislunar⁶ debris field, my partner was grumbling about the task that lay before us; so much for needing the money, I couldn't help but chuckle softly. My initial unease welled up again for the umpteenth time as we dipped below an impressively massive hulk of a still mostly-intact carrier and hurtled out of its shadow on our approach to the assigned search sector, my partner confirming coordinates and vectors as I readied the ion cannons. We were to strafe a sector of the desolation until we blew away a false rockery that sealed an access tunnel leading to a vault that stored the object we'd been tasked to retrieve, an object we knew almost nothing about but were to be paid handsomely, likely in part to ensure we remained incurious about it. A special Jimmy²-rigged thermal-signature algorithm was piggy-backed onto our sensor AI for the purpose of locating it.

I felt like a ghost drifting back into a forgotten past as we slowly fell down the remarkably unscathed shaft, guidelines glowing a blue reminiscent of depictions of the undersea lights of the fabled Devil’s Triangle illuminating our passage and crisscrossing the walls of a spherical vault in which assorted objects were tethered to its edge by lines of force of the same color. Who’d have imagined such a pocket of now-legendary marvels of prosperity and power could still exist on a world that had had its oceans and air lanced away in the last war waged by almost-forgotten gods hundreds of years ago? Thanks to the sensor modification it took us surprisingly little time to locate our treasure, a small cylindrical metal canister that we retrieved with our tractor beam after we gingerly yawed around a central column to avoid rear-ending a couple of the larger objects suspended near the entrance. After we drew it into the hold and slipped furtively out of that eerie sepulcher my partner turned to me and grinned, his face covered in sweat, and sardonically remarked “Now the fun part again. Let’s hope the money’s waiting, and good.” God, no kidding! The AI⁵ reported it could only detect indeterminable quantities of boron, barium, and copper in all its scans of the cylinder’s interior; I shrugged.

We arrived back home without mishap and it was a great relief for me to sight the comforting beige cracked cue-ball of Europa filling the viewscreen and the pearl blisters of Minos’⁶ boroughs blinking their green landing lights in friendly welcome to us. We both joked about how we’d forbear on showering at home, instead reserving a week at the Phoenician Princess and lounging first thing in the luxurious baths there that once saw patronage by the mighty princes of Earth’s colonial empires. Our pom³ reported a balance transfer of half the sum into our business account after we reported the sought object’s retrieval and our arrival into Minos’⁶ space was confirmed, eliciting a gleeful furor of grins, laughter, and congratulatory back-slapping from both of us. As we descended toward the almost-dry canal that ran through the slums of Epsilon Borough⁷ and that passed conveniently close to our office and which we often used as an illicit shortcut, our maglev hover unit started losing power. After a sudden exchange of terrified glances I said I’d go to the hold to retrieve the object while my partner fought with the controls to make an emergency landing, to which he nodded. I thought I broke my ankle as the stern of the car suddenly dropped, sending me tumbling into the hold, but I was thankful not have heard the crash of impact; he must have managed to divert power from the directional auxiliaries. I grabbed the cylinder roughly and opened it to reveal a small canister containing what looked like sodium crystals suspended in a ruddy mist and hobbled painfully up the incline of the resting car to fall ingloriously out the front driver side onto the ground.

We sat at the top of a concrete embankment in front of a chain-link fence puzzling over the object for a bit while my buddy took off one of his boots and gently rubbed his ankles. It was everything he could have done to have landed as he did; he was lucky not to have suffered worse injuries. Someone sabotaged our car! That couldn’t have been a mere mechanical failure, not considering the unheard-of odyssey we underwent and the amount of money just transferred to us. We had to get out of here, and fast, because no doubt a welcoming committee would be on its way soon, and not only that but we landed next to a bramble and the vespers get extremely aggressive during the summer mating season — already they’re starting to swarm over the car! I helped my partner onto his feet, took the strange container and tossed it into my satchel, then boosted him up the side of the fence and watched him shimmy slowly down a thin birch tree and lope down the side-alley between a couple shanties and the security wall of our apartment complex. I was swatting at the vespers, now in a thick cloud around me and stabbing an anti-venom ampule into my leg — suppressing a scream of pain from the fire shooting through my body — when I saw a rusty groundcar approaching in the distance on the road opposite the fence. I immediately forgot about the vespers and slid down the embankment and ran through the brackish water up and scrambled up the other side to an abandoned warehouse where I slid hastily beneath a mostly-dilapidated loading dock that reeked of urine, concealing myself behind rubble and garbage.

A smartly-dressed young woman with shoulder-length auburn hair stepped out of the car stopped at the end of the road on the other side of the canal and peered in my direction with her hand held up to shade her eyes, then shrugged and called out “Well, I see that I missed you — a pity. I propose we reschedule our appointment for next week and I trust you’ll keep our procurement secure and bring it with you when next we meet,” and walked casually back to the car, reversed it, and drove off in the direction she came from. I was terrified: she had the confident, genteel insouciance of a professional killer. I was way out of my league. After a few minutes I crawled out of my hiding spot and dusted myself off, almost retching from the stench wafting up from my clothing; no shower at the Phoenician. My partner was in the office kitchenette when I arrived, his leg up on the table, swollen ankle beneath a bag of ice wrapped in a towel. “I bet I lost that boot, didn’t I?” he asked, to which I only nodded in reply; the squatters camped nearby would have it long before we returned to our landing spot, though the car’s security system would keep it safe enough. I related to him what happened and his face grew grave; we had to get a hold of the mayor of Effer Viscerant¹ somehow and get that damned thing off our backs, and soon.

It took a couple days for Sergei, our mechanic and underworld liason, to fix our car, days we spent at a nearby safehouse and during which we spent no other money than the cost of repairs because we knew from experience in the business that our transactions were being monitored by whoever had subverted our car’s hover units. We also knew that if we remained where we were hiding out for much longer that our luck would run out, and my partner knew that by being injured he’d managed to make matters worse; it was no one’s fault, of course, but I was effectively a lone operator now and saddled with the added worry of him as a potential liability, at the worst possible time. We had to part ways, but I knew he wouldn’t allow that and would endanger himself because of his loyalty to our friendship. Worse yet was when we received news of the mayor’s death, delivered by an ashen-faced partner when he returned from Sergei’s one afternoon; I’d never seen him look so defeated, like he’d sunk into himself and was propped up only by some mindless, autonomic survival function. The mayor had died in an “accident” and when my partner pressed city security for information they coldly informed him to expect a summons to a criminal investigation, though as yet he wasn’t considered a suspect.

We both knew that that meant: it was over for us — we were trapped. I sighed, grabbed a bottle of Sarpedonian⁸ vodka from a shelf, and we sauntered desolately down a long-abandoned set of railroad tracks in an ancient, crumbling, mostly-abandoned industrial district that was floundering in an increasing tide of ramshackle flophouses and shanty communities. We were soon joined by a shirtless middle-aged scavenger with wild hair and a long beard who offered to help me find a replacement boot for my partner if we shared some of our booze. I shrugged and passed him the bottle as we walked told him our tale of how we came to be there while he rummaged through piles of refuse. “Ah! Maybe you found the legendary bromine!” he exclaimed. When we asked him what he meant by that he shrugged his shoulders and explained that it’s an ancient word that meant some kind of medicinal elixir, but it could also have been an acronym of some kind; it was something a forgotten, ancient Terrestrial power was rumored to have been researching, something which could have been a fantastic weapon or drug, or anything — no one knew, because it was never used, had never even turned up, and so became one of the many fables that sprang out of the ruin of Earth, like the one of the artificial world in orbit near Venus or the one about the ephemeral Transcendents⁹ who fled the solar system in gossamer ships of light. We were joined later that evening by a teenage girl who shared with us half-rotten potatoes she’d found, and only then did the reality sink in that we were fugitives, probably for life.

---

1. Effer Vesicant: a city-state on the Jovian moon Io.
2. Jimmy: a slim metal or plastic data strip, like a disk or flash drive.
3. Pom: short for "personal intermediary", a sort of personal computer.
4. Newstandard Month: the rotational period of the Jovian moon Europa, rounded up to 36 days.
5. AI: artificial intelligence, an advanced computer.
6. Cislunar: the space inside the orbit of Earth's moon.
7. Minos: one of three city-states on the Jovian moon Europa.
8. Epsilon Borough: One of Minos' six habitat modules.
9. Sarpedonia: another of Europa's three city-states.
10. Transcendant: a human who has transcended biology.

World War Two Skirmish

I was losing my nerves and on the verge of going AWOL, jumping off the train in enemy territory and fending for myself in winter with nothing but the clothes on my back and in my rucksack, a Walther P-38, some K-rats, and a half-empty bottle of Cognac. The rocking of the train we sneaked onto didn't help to assuage a fear that was veering into terror, nor did the fact that it was black as Hitler’s soul in our ass-numbing and kidney-tenderizing box car, a palpable darkness illuminated only when the ruddy glow of a cigarette flared up to reveal the floating head of a devil staring vacuously into perdition whenever one of us took a drag. My platoon was heading into Axis-held territory, given the task of halting the retreat of local Nazi command and its escort forces; we were part of a brigade advancing up Italy that met with unexpectedly fierce resistance as we approached Tyrol. We haven’t had any leave time since that weekend we spent pillaging and fornicating in the Eternal City nearly six weeks ago and as a result our morale was straddling the edge of a bayonet, mine especially because the mantle of command had just recently fallen on me and I was reeling under the burden of responsibility. Bedraggled and bleary-eyed we stared at each other, faces sunken into hapless ghouls radiating sullen resignation, smoking cigarettes and sipping on flasks and bottles. I was sharing my sergeant's flask of whiskey, my psyche gritting its teeth while with eyes the color of dragons’ scales I tacitly made a pact with him that I'll somehow keep it together long enough for us to piss away our filthy lucre on whores in Venice. Or long enough to die.

Dawn didn't so much break as it desultorily slunk over the Alps, creeping through a thick slate-colored mist that congealed in white pools on the ground — and froze our asses off. It wasn’t even the end of the year and already it felt like February: to stave off frostbite I commanded the platoon to do jumping jacks for five minutes at the top of every other hour. We deboarded the train last night in the inglorious manner of tramps and marched overnight to set up an ambush at a sprawling country estate adjacent to one of the roads the Nazis were expected to retreat along when our parent battalion attacked Verona to the south. The world was a forlorn shade: white with frost and mist, bleak, cheerless, and still and cold as death itself. But things were going to heat up and liven up soon enough and I wasn’t going to live long, let along make first lieutenant, by staring idiotically at impromptu German military parades: weapons and ammo had to be distributed and squads concealed in tactically advantageous positions. The tactical bit was a frustration because our intelligence was nigh useless: two hour's of a gaggle of brass in starched uniforms and smelling of Old Spice® delivering in crisp militarese in front of maps something to the effect of "You're fighting Germans! Somewhere! Who have guns, and maybe other stuff!". My mind’s horizons were darkened by images of us getting run down by a mechanized infantry troop. To make matters worse, we were running low on rifles and ammunition and only had two bazookas with five rockets between them, so even two tanks — or just one Panther — could roll over us and chew us back into primordial soup with their machine guns. But, no time for morbid ruminations, especially since the Krauts would certainly oblige me. I sent alpha squad to a position behind two abandoned trucks and a low stone fence in front of the manor, armed with a Beretta, a Tommy gun, and one of the bazookas with two rockets; command squad bravo lay in wait closer to the road in a small stone building, wherein I was armed with my Walther P-38 while the other two each had a Beretta sub-machine gun; in an old stable on a low rise farther out from the road squad charlie lurked in an old stable with the last of our Garands and a bazooka with three rockets.

After we finished our preparations — clearing fields of fire and setting up obstacles in the road to slow the enemy down — we sat down for a break to eat some rations and have a smoke, when a bird call signaled us approaching enemy forces. One: good, just infantry. Those Krauts were no fools, though: a small platoon of them flitted like riled hornets from cover to cover in twos, wisely operating under the assumption of a trap. Despite their vulpine tactics it was just a protracted skirmish and we prevailed without suffering any casualties. At its conclusion I assembled squad leaders around me, about to assign men to strip the bodies of weapons and ammunition, when I heard two bird calls just as I made out the telltale rumbling and squeaking of tanks. We wasted no time in returning to our positions, and just in time: as soon as my squad settled into our firing positions the dark silhouette of a tank became visible in the mist not more than fifty yards ahead. A moment later a jet of smoke lanced out from alpha’s position followed by a thud and an explosion, igniting a chattering furor of small arms fire and sending soldiers scurrying into my line of sight. We shot them down as soon as they rounded the burning Panzer IV. My elation drained down into my boots, however, the instant I saw a Panther bypass the wreck and head in our direction while firing its machine guns at alpha’s position. I had to keep my squad mates from fleeing, knowing full well they’d get cut down before they made it halfway to any cover: “Wait, damn it!” I screamed at them as I hastily tied a couple grenades together and slathered mud on them. I instructed the them to circle the building opposite the Panther as soon as it was about to pass our position, to attack the inevitable soldiers advancing behind the rolling cover. After they left I leaped and ran up to the Panther — pissing myself as I saw a machine gun swivel toward me — pulled the pin out of one of the grenades and shoved the bundle into a space between one of the rollers and the tracks, then leaped immediately back to follow my squad mates just as a burst of machine gun fire struck the ground where I stood just a second ago. Time froze and a wall of sound struck me numb as I almost tripped over one of my squad mates holding his leg with one arm and trying to raise himself up on the other, teeth chattering and eyes already glazed over like a marble head stone, thrashing his other leg in vain to gain purchase on a ground made slick by a steaming pool of blood; beside myself with fury I roughly shoved the surviving squad mate aside and emptied a clip into two Germans directly in front of me, my heart beating in time to the flashes erupting out of the muzzle of my gun. I glanced back at the Panther and saw smoke explode out of its cannon just as a bazooka from squad C's position slammed into it; my adrenaline dove from fight to flight like an attacking Thunderbolt when I saw the stable collapse into a smoldering heap at the same time as a wall of flame blossomed up the front of the Panther. Just as I was about to break into a run I saw another arc of smoke crawl out from the rubble of charlie's position and slam into the Panther. Secondary explosions in the Panther hurled the main turret into the air like a crumpled paper cup toward the road and opened up a chasm of towering flames wreathed in diesel smoke, flinging me into the stone building behind me; “Someone survived!” I thought giddily as I blacked out.

I came to feeling arms hoisting me up onto my feet and turning me around to a corporal’s beaming visage. Men were pouring out of the manor and from the now-burning stable; I counted, only one casualty! And we took out a Panther! Looks like we’ll be drinking up my Cognac tonight. We sat down and slapped each other on the back as we opened up our rations and passed around cigarettes, white as sheet rock, covered in grime and soot, but grinning like kids at a baseball game. As the ringing in my ears subsided and the blood started returning to our faces I was about to review the tactical situation and resume our interrupted corpse-pilfering, for though the sun was already westering (where had all the time gone?) there was at least two hours of daylight left — the day was by no means over — when out of the corner of my eye I detected movement. Without thinking I crouched behind the burning Panther to fire on ... oh, my God! What have I done? There was four of them, perhaps the owners of the commandeered estate stealing away the moment they deemed it safe to; a young man in a black coat crumpled at once to the ground, causing the rest of the family to run across the road toward the field, the keening despair of a woman splitting the air like a knife tearing through a burlap sack while I stood dumb with incredulity and rapidly escalating remorse, my arm still outstretched holding my smoking Walther P-38. A hand fell on my shoulder and when I slowly turned and saw the mournful expression on my sergeant’s face the dam of self-reproach broke, its waters pulling my body down onto a bale of hay as they flowed in rivers out of my eyes, wracking my body with sobs as I dropped my gun and covered my face. Sweet Jesus, I shot a child! More refugees filed past us down the road, most of them on foot but a few piled onto horse-drawn carts, not even noticing us. When I pulled myself together enough to look up I could see columns of smoke in the distance where our battalion was advancing. Suddenly, among the refugees I spotted a silver Mercedes laboring through the muddy ruts followed by a couple SS officers on motorcycles, whereupon I immediately picked up my Walther P-38 and turned to fire on them. As did my entire platoon; this is what we came here for.

Stranded in Detroit

I'd met a girl online who lived in the Detroit area and had traveled to see her, but something went horribly awry and I ended up not only all alone in an unfamiliar place but under menacing circumstances, with nothing to my name except the clothes on my back and a few dollars in change in my pockets — and no ID!

After having barely escaped a perilous situation I found myself aimlessly wandering down streets lined with houses in an old peripheral suburb of one of Detroit's satellite cities, hoping to find an arterial before night waxed morning. After nearly an hour of walking I came across what I sought running along the depression of a small valley below me and lined with the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls ubiquitous to the soulless and uniform materialistic American culture that always strikes me as bleakly alternate-universe Soviet. As I descended toward the busy avenue I saw a crowded bus stop on the other side of the intersection and decided to see if it would take me downtown, hopefully to where I could inquire about shelter for the night, a meal maybe, and certainly at least a blanket since I would most likely be spending the night outside. After we shuffled aboard and sat down a diminutive, stern-looking young black lady stood in the aisle near the front and prattled away in a martial tone about rules, privileges, and expectations of what I soon realized was a residential reintegration program for street people. "Very nice," I thought, "but I want to return home, not settle in this benighted burg."

I deboarded with the other passengers, partly out of curiosity and partly to try to bum a few drags off someone's cigarette, in a large parking lot surrounded by low cinder-block buildings that may have been barracks or an elementary school. Suddenly I found myself back on a bus, squinting through brilliant morning daylight occasionally occluded by freeway ramps threading their way above an industrial sprawl lining the river we traveled adjacent to, making out as my eyes adapted to the glare a massive conglomeration of skyscrapers I took to be downtown Detroit beyond the icy blue water. White clouds raced alongside us in a dark azure sky; a brisk but pleasant spring day seemed to be foretold. I was almost out of money and had gotten nowhere in search of meals, blankets, or even puffs of smoke and my eyes felt gritty like they do when sleep deprivation and undernourishment set in — to be honest, I hadn't tried very hard: the coldness and barely-bridled animosity in this city and its people scared the shit out of me and I avoided speaking to people for fear of advertising the presence of a flailing quail to hungry foxes lurking in the vicinity.

The bus stopped in a parking lot beneath a large freeway ramp and in front of a modern-looking square building in front of us. Most of us deboarded as it was clear this was a stop where drivers may take brief breaks in order to pollute their lungs or relieve their pothole-bludgeoned bladders and bowels. On looking at the building ahead of me I saw "Justice Center" spelled out in crisp brass letters above the glass double doors of its entrance and I cringed inwardly as I saw the miserable traffic in and out of that dismal and sinister institution. "No way in hell am I sleeping outside in this city!" I thought to myself as the patina of prevarication encasing me the past couple days cracked open and fell to the ground. "I'll sooner hazard the perils of the road before I let this awful place have its way with me." The driver returned and started up the engine and I made my way back to the bus with the other passengers.

First Day of Summer Vacation

It was the last day of school for the year and we were having a pot-luck party to celebrate the coming of summer vacation. Something about the atmosphere about it felt like high school but the classroom reminded me more of the Russian class I took at Portland Community college; the air was warm and the sunlight filtering through the pollen felt almost syrupy.

For some reason I slipped out of the room to go to the locker room to take a shower, perhaps because I'd gotten food spilled on me. It was just down the hall and consisted itself of a narrow hallway lined with lockers, the showers small cubicles the size of bathroom stalls branching out of it. it was cramped and there was no room for me to drape my clothing on the towel dispenser, it already being covered with another's clothing. The air was thick with steam and the smell of sweat; I made do somehow and took a quick shower in a tiny stall more suitable for being in a motor home than a school locker room. The football team, or some kind of group of burly ass-grabbers, was out in the locker room filling it with a merry cacophony of accusations of gayness and boasts of athletic and sexual prowess.

When I stepped back into the classroom, fresh from my ablutions, it had turned into a small cafeteria or a quick-service restaurant with a small buffet-like serving counter like in Subway. I was alone with my boss, who was a very attractive woman whose features I can't recall other than she was blond; I was even in a uniform that featured a red polo shirt. We were closing the place, she breaking down and cleaning the steam table as I was cleaning the dining area. People occasionally trickled in individually, causing her considerable consternation because we were already behind schedule yet it wasn't quite closing time and so they must be served. Contrary to my nature I was nonplussed and drifted blissfully and almost vacuously, like I was in a trance or still high from a bowl I'd smoked a couple hours ago.

Suddenly I was standing at a bus stop on the corner of SE Stark and 39th. It was still warm out but the sky was overcast and the wind had started to kick up into breezes that felt like the snorting of an excited horse. A couple guys in their forties or fifties — very white and blue-collar — walked down the street past me and crossed the intersection. The older-looking guy was holding eloquently forth on an amusingly irreverent description of the difference between Christmas and Easter, the particulars of which I can't recall; the younger was chuckling. Just as the older man stepped out onto the street he tossed his half-finished cigarette onto the sidewalk. I walked over and picked it up, still lit, to finish it and told him "Merry Christmas" and winked as he turned around briefly, grinning, then continued down the street with his companion.

The End of the World

I was standing outside my classroom working out the logistics of a drug deal with a chubby, dark-haired acquaintance of mine I'd been trying to find for some time; in this dream I was fifteen and back in school. Acquaintances of mine had all pitched in enough with me to score a bag, so considering how others’ money and expectations were riding on the successful completion of this transaction and how long it had already been taking I was impatient to get it over with. Just come over to her house near the Tigard Fred Meyer after school she said, she'd already bought the weed earlier; the directions she gave me were simple enough, I didn’t feel a need to write them down. That taken care of, I said I’d see her later and entered the classroom — I think it was a biology or chemistry class — to take a test. The room was medium-sized and lit feebly by a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling, reluctantly illuminating walls the color of tobacco-stained teeth. I breezed through the test with ease, having had enough time to triple-check my answers, after which I handed both the written exam and a cassette I recorded earlier to my instructor, whose wild sylvan disarray of a coif and the matching brown slacks and sweater reminded me of pictures of Albert Einstein, only there was no spark of life or brilliance to this inert, melancholic figure. Just as I started getting my things together to leave I panicked, thinking for some inexplicable reason that I’d forgotten the cassette; I rushed past my instructor, who was still standing in front of the rows of rapidly emptying desks, a vacuous expression on his face, to search the desk I knew he kept our submissions in. I was relieved to see that I had indeed just lost my mind and it was right there on top of my test, along with thirty-one dollars. That was exactly how much bus fare was, and I looked sidelong at the instructor to see if he’d woken out of his trance, having in mind to steal the money so I could use my fare for something else, though as yet no clear image of a specific desire had formed. Never mind; I closed the drawer, leaving the money behind as I walked away, realizing my instructor could easily misplace my exam or fail it if he suspected I’d stolen from him.

By the time I arrived at the designated Fred Meyer it was already completely dark out, one of those late November evenings I always like; not one of the vicious, chilly sideways deluges you have to hold onto your hat in, but one of the pleasantly cool — mercury just north of brisk — nights speckled with intermittent patches of light rain tossed casually on mild breezes. It was wet enough to soften the sounds and smells of the world, cool enough for me to wear my favorite heavy flannel. As I crossed the parking lot I suddenly stopped short in my second panic attack of the day: I'd completely forgotten the directions to my ad hoc friend-cum-dealer's house! Not only that, but I didn't have change for the pay phone and hadn’t even bothered to write down her number; did she even have a phone? Jesus Christ! I snarled at myself in contempt as I jerked back into brisk motion towards the store, waves of anger resonating at high frequency through my body and evaporating into steam off my clothing. I paced back and forth near the store entrance, wracking my brains trying to remember just one or two of the directions, knowing that once my feet started marching in the right direction my internal pigeon will faithfully guide me the rest of the way to my destination. No dice; my mind felt like gelatin that had started to set, squeezing out even the most elementary thought was like trying to suck molten glass up a ten-foot metal straw. Once my fury had subsided and I accepted the fact that I wasn’t getting any drugs tonight, I stood with my hands in my pocket staring blankly at the butt cans lurking in the corners of the entryway, halfheartedly hoping beyond reason that a dry cigarette would materialize out of those fetid, tar-colored pools. Shaking my head to wrest myself out of my imbecilic reverie, I slowly walked back to the bus stop; best just to give up on the already-failed endeavor and catch the next bus home before my transfer ran out of time and forced me to continue the journey by foot, an hours-long prospect that filled me with no joy and a not a little dread. Besides, I though pursing my lips downward, my acquaintances can deal with disappointment, just as I can deal with their histrionics. Don’t we all do that stuff all the time, anyway?

I must have loitered at Fred Meyer longer than I realized, because the bus arrived just a few minutes after I arrived at the stop. During the half-hour trip home I reflected on the abysmal state of the world I lived in, how civilization had declined so far the half of the dry part of the globe that was still inhabitable to some degree was enmired in a morass of desperation, terror, violence, and despair. We weren't taught much history in school, in fact it was actively encouraged to skirt the subject: school was a half-hearted attempt to keep in motion the creaking wheels of an ancient education, now watered down to reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of business- and agriculture-related subjects. Perhaps it was hoped ignorance could be used to buttress the sagging bulwarks of our species’ morale? Being inquisitive and stubborn, I wasn’t about to go along with that particular program and so did my own research and came up with a reasonably complete picture of what happened. The day of reckoning had been a long time coming for us, the brilliant masters of the earth who couldn’t seem to apply rational cooperative self-interest to our use of the world’s once resources or in living with together; wars fought with terrifying weapons blistered and scarred vast swathes of the surface, so much poison was poured onto the land and into the air and seas that much of the world was a noxiously lethal cesspool, rising temperatures and melting ice caps turned a benign planet into a ball of raging storms of water and ice and fire and dirt. Even the gene pool was scorched and warped: not only had we exterminated millions of plant and animal species, but we in turn have become mostly sterile — less than one birth for every twenty people, with an average life expectancy down to the late twenties, if the more optimistic estimations are anything to go by. Worst of all was the plague that struck out of nowhere, transforming billions of living human beings into the walking dead; or so we called them, but they weren't the zombies from the ancient flat-screen films, but were eerily similar in personality and nearly as intelligent as they were when they were alive, though over years they gradually decayed into mindlessly violent ghouls. Needless to say, these horrors only fanned the flames of war that had already engulfed our dying world, but it was a fool's campaign because the ghouls were smart enough to fight back and with every fallen opponent their ranks swelled by one. Eventually we learned, and now the living and the undead live together in peace for the most part, an uneasy one here in the western hemisphere and revered in the much of Confucian Maoist Asia. To our credit, despite American tendency towards boorishness we gave the ghouls the same constitutional privileges and protections we enjoy, though how much use that unwieldy tome full of contradictions and loopholes is against prejudice is questionable. Not that it mattered, I thought grimly as I stepped down into the small lake that was my stop for three months out of the year: there won’t be a living soul left in a hundred years. Sure, rumors flew about research labs working on a cure for the disease and our infertility, but whatever remained of advanced medical science was dispersed in myriad small drug manufacturing labs. I was living in the End of the World.

I walked up the river of mud our driveway always became during this time of year to find a group of kids on my front lawn, my little brother and his friends were gathered around a very bright young ghoul their age. Despite being wet and it still raining I decided to hang around for a little to see what they were up to; they were discussing their favorite subject, perhaps a favorite subject of pre-teens since the dawn of human history, which was the mystery of sex and birth. The ghoul was asking them all the questions, really, but none of her living peers knew any more about the matter than she did and so the conversation degenerated into outlandish conjecture and coarse humor. My curiosity satisfied I decided to go inside to change out of my wet clothing and relax. On my way down the stairs to my basement room I was met with the spectacle of another ghoul, this one a powerful heavyset man who was almost an idiot, battling one of the monsters that roamed the world, another legacy of our ancestors misguided application of their advanced sciences. In the wake of the relative peace that had descended on the world in the past few decades their numbers had been growing, which terrified us remnants because we long thought that they had been created sterile, ironic considering that their creators now are. He, who was in fact my grandfather, was skewering a large tentacle that had forced its way into the house through the garage set into the hillside with a makeshift spear fashioned from a fireplace poker lashed to a metal pole; I knew immediately it was the dreaded kraken, named after mythical sea monsters that resembled the recently become mythical giant ocean squid. His wife, another ghoul but this one a disembodied and rotting head perched on a thick mass of thin tentacles, was screaming hysterically about how we were all doomed. I knew I lacked the strength to engage in such combat, and honestly the selfish part of me figured that the undead were more fitting disposable front line troopers anyway, so I turned instead to my grandmother and tried as best as I could to console her by cradling her head in my arms.

After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to calm grandma's hysteria and realizing there would be no peace for me to have in my room for the better part of the evening I climbed back upstairs to grab a bite to eat and see if the TV had anything more entertaining than static to offer, the pangs of hunger beginning to settle desultorily in my stomach. On my way to the kitchen I glanced out the living room picture windows to see the undead girl bent over an oak barrel used as a flower pot, her pants down around her ankles and legs spread out while the living children excitedly stuck their fingers in her ass and vagina, pulling them in and out in a crude parody of the sex act, undoubtedly for her education and their morbid titillation. At one point she seemed to groan and a torrent of some kind of watery fluid gushed out of her ass onto the just withdrawn fingers of my leering little brother, whom I despised. Having been sufficiently repulsed and saddened by the scene to lose my appetite I instead headed out the back door to join my sister, who was desultorily swinging in the bamboo cage that was her playpen. She was a year younger than me, blond, and a perfect gothic Lolita counterpart to Alice Liddell of Through the Looking Glass renown. I had the deepest sympathy for her, for like her bright and colorful alternate self she was caught in a vicious and maddening current, only through a macabre negative of that other impossible world; we all were, but she seemed more powerless than anyone else I knew, and more innocent if such a thing existed or ever did. I always enjoyed reading about Alice's adventures in Wonderland, though much of it was vexingly incomprehensible to me. We talked quietly for a bit — she on the swing and I sitting a few feet in front of her on a wood chair — about things I don't remember. She was confined to that cage for her protection, though against what and how the cage protected her I didn't know and it seemed absurd and unjust, since none of the rest of us were. She was my only real friend in the whole world, and I loved her dearly.

Return to Switzerland

I was back in Switzerland, living there with my aunt and uncle in Wallbach, where we'd first lived before we moved to Brunegg. The how and why was never made clear to me.

In the beginning of the dream we were gathered outside around a patio set of two chairs and a small table, something smoking away in the black Coleman™ barbecue nearby. My aunt was sitting in a chair reading while my uncle was engaged in setting up some strange thing that jutted up into the sky that was being blown about by the wind and resembled the Pod (sculpture) on Burnside near Powell's Books but was probably a dream-distorted covering of some sort, because it was blustery and looked like it was going to rain even though we were in sunlight at the time. In fact, that was the strangest thing I immediately noticed about this dream: the initial environment consisted of us on a rectangular plot of green grass in a nondescript field of gray, and the sky was gray, too, and though where we were was in a brilliant wintry-seeming spot of sunlight, the sky was a nondescript roiling of darker gray. I saddled my large internal-frame mountaineering backpack on and asked my aunt for permission to roam around the village, leading me to conclude we must have just recently arrived, and she said that I would need to be back in one or two hours.

And so I set forth down a gloom-enshrouded street, apprehensive of who I would run into and wondering what my old friends and acquaintances would make of me and my return. I was heading toward a landing on the Rhein I used to go to in summer to wolf down fish and beer in some kind of recurring weekend river festival, meandering aimlessly and looking around. Somehow, at some point I ran into Grenacher, an acquaintance I knew when I lived in Brunegg; only it wasn't the towering poster child of the Third Reich I knew, who used to masturbate on train windows when we went to go drinking or to buy hash in Zürich, but a strange composite of people I can't immediately recognize the components of. I was also in school again, apparently, because I was working on a speech that had to be at least three hundred words long. It was assigned to me earlier in a classroom by a bombshell of a Spanish teacher I had in St. Mary's, and since the subject of the speech was of our choosing I selected to do one about the future of energy production. The speech was going to be the basis for an essay on the chosen subject. I was working on my speech in the car Grenacher was driving, from where and to what destination, neither were clear, but we ended up at what I assume was Grenacher's house.

It was still blustery and the sky was darker and lowering menacingly, as we sat on stone steps leading up from the sidewalk to the back porch on which was piled precariously an assortment of what looked like junk. We must have had somewhere to go, because Grenacher was telling me to hurry. I was starting to bog down toward the end of the essay, and for some inexplicable reason I we both lit up long, thing cigars that burned slowly and fragrantly, more like shisha (hookah tobacco), and I ended up trying to write the last few sentences with the tip of my cigar, which ended up scrawling thick smudgy lines similar to crayons but a bit oily and the text turned out to be illegible. When I bitched about how hard it is to hurry when you're writing with a cigar tip Grenacher found a pen for me, causing a summit of junk to cascade down to the wooden deck. I only had a couple more sentences to go, but time was approaching so we jumped into his car and sped off while I continued working on the speech, getting frustrated with the pressure of a deadline and starting to have a hard time articulating myself in German.

We arrived at the school, meaning our destination must have been there and I was cramming an assignment that was due that day, in fact in a few minutes. The classroom looked more like a dimly lit bridge of a ship, as if the crew of Star Trek's Enterprise had settled on a romantic ambiance for a change of scenery. In the room small groups were scattered around and they seemed to be quietly arguing of fighting, though it was quiet and there were no overt signs of agitation or violence; it was just a feeling in the air. Grenacher had taken off somewhere and I was walking around trying like hell to beat my head through the block that was keeping me from finishing what was so far an excellent speech, counting my words and also counting the people in the room for some reason connected to the words and almost as if they were words in the speech. Andrea, a girl I knew in Wallbach who was a classmate, was there and followed me around interrupting, and though I can't recall what she was saying I kept losing count and she was making it impossible for me to complete my last sentence to my satisfaction. I told her respectfully to please leave me alone until I finished my speech, which she did, and shortly afterward I jotted it down.

Stoner Charlie

Charlie Brown and Linus were leisurely scaling an upward path of rocks protruding out of a shallow pool in a brick-paved plaza towards the large boulder in the center under the bright mid-morning sun. Charlie explained to Linus that earlier he'd found a couple hand-rolled cigarettes in a depression near the top of the boulder, Linus accompanying him presumably because he'd expressed an interest in smoking when Charlie Brown had a pack of Marlboros, that were confiscated by Charlie's mom. They were still there, and when Linus examined one he sniffed it and commented on how funny it smelled, whereupon Charlie Brown lit his and Linus' and inhaled, agreeing that it also tasted a bit odd. Undeterred, the both smoked their cigarettes with much hacking and coughing. Shortly afterward they both started laughing and holding a strangely incoherent and disjointed conversation that wasn't really a conversation at all.

Their friends showed up and asked them what they were doing, but on receiving no reply that made any sense from the giggling and gibbering idiots Lucy asked Charlie what the hell was wrong with them. Anyway, it was time to go to Charlie's house and so Charlie and Linus stumbled down to join their friends in the plaza and off they went. Because Charlie and Linus kept uttering the queerest and nonsensical things and kept giggling and chuckling, Lucy repeatedly scowled at them and the rest exchanged puzzled glances. Upon arrival at Charlie's house everyone gathered into the kitchen, whereupon Linus froze and stared dumbly out into space while Charlie started slowly jerking his head around with his eyes glazed and after sniffing some Comet started tossing it up in shafts of sunlight streaming in from the windows and oohing and awing as the lime-colored clots of heavy dust fell to the floor, commenting on how cool it looked. After a time wherein this and similar such antics occurred Charlie's mother returned home to an apartment that was thoroughly trashed and in the midst of which stood a group of children looking both guilty and worried looks, except for the mute Linus and Comet-covered Charlie, who on noticing her walked up to her grinning and held up to her what looked like a PC tablet that had speakers and proceeded to play a dissonant Ween-like song relating how in 1984 the doggies will get their revenge, rise up and enslave us, the lyrics to which he'd obviously made while in his delirium scrolling down the screen.

"That's nice," his mom replied in a surprisingly offhand manner considering the condition of the apartment and her son, "Now clean this mess up immediately!" Whereat Charlie's friends leave without a word, leading the still-entranced Linus with them by the hand. Time shifts forward into evening and Charlie, appearing to be back to his senses, nervously walks up to his mother sitting on an easy chair and reading a paper and asks her what it means to be high. Not even taking the paper down she replies casually that it depends on the kind of drug you're on.

Dognapping

Night had fallen an indeterminable amount of time ago and a light snow flurry was adding to the already almost ankle-deep sheet of snow covering the ground in a large slightly concave clearing in a forest, where I and around twenty others stood and sat in a large dispersed group around some picnic benches. We were waiting for food; all of us were homeless and it was meal time. When the grub finally arrived there was the usual murmur of complaint at the meagerness of the portions, among which I recall were what appeared to be burger shots. The dogs, however, that my less responsible peers insist on having for security and as panhandling props, didn't complain, though they certainly did beg.

At one point, and this is a section where my recollection of the dream is hazy, a couple dogs got into a rather mild tussle, and in the process one got loose and ran off somewhere. We all felt bad, or acted like we did, but meal time was over by then and it wasn't getting any warmer or earlier and individually and in small groups we dispersed to our respective camps and squats. For some reason I ran a ways, perhaps out of fear for my belongings or because I didn't want anyone to see where I was camping, through another clearing nearby, passing out of view of most of the group behind me and catching up with a solitary figure some score or two yards ahead of me. At some point I ended up eavesdropping on a small camp of about four traveling punk rock kids, which was probably near my camp, and they had the runaway dog there and were discussing eating it — though to their credit the discussion lacked enthusiasm.

The fun part: my awareness existing in two places simultaneously. I could see the owner of the dog, an old bearded man, looking for his dog with three charitable peers near the clearing where dinner was served, looking rather forlorn. The wind had picked up a little and the snowfall was picking up in intensity, promising a rough night for those who don't bed down early enough. He called the dog a couple times, but his voice was feeble, and one man put his hand on his shoulder and recommended that he save his strength and worry about bedding down for the night, on account of the weather. Meanwhile, I walked into the kids' camp and patted my legs and called to the dog by its name (an advantage to not being restricted to just a single point in space-time!), and the dog followed me, surprising the kids but eliciting no overt hostility from them. I jogged ahead of the dog, calling its name repeatedly and it gleefully loped after me; it was one of the most beautiful Malamutes I've seen and I'd fallen in love with it immediately. We ran into the search party on the other side of the clearing we were in, as they were morosely trudging back to the dinner clearing and presumably from their to their camps.

The dog ran up to the old man and licked his hand, wagging its tail slightly and he was overjoyed and thanked me. At that moment in the story a shift in time occurred and a small group of us homeless were sitting near a roaring fire, the man sitting with his dog and I all by myself near one of the punk rock kids, a girl I recall as being the one who expressed the most vehement reluctance to kidnapping the dog and eating it, and who looked miserable with both hunger and guilt. I though of consoling her, suggesting that she take and eat another similar, and apparently masterless dog (where did that one come from?) sitting nearby. I'm not sure if I was serious or if it was a cruel jest on my part, to rub some salt into the wounds in her conscience, but either way I thought better of it.

Deer and Homeless Invasion

It started with a dream inside a dream: I was standing on a hillock in what looked like a windswept moor out of An American Werewolf in London, in a surreal kind of pitch darkness that you can still make things out in like a scene I only vaguely remember seeing once in Our Gang (The Little Rascals). I could barely make out a fawn not too far away and when I moved it made a strange, menacing, rumbling sort of noise, and when I backed up slowly I noticed a large buck standing not too far to my right of the fawn, just looking at me with great brown liquid eyes I could somehow discern clearly in the gloom. It was rather frightening, not only because of the unnatural sense of menace I felt from the deer but due to the darkness of the environment and the eerie silence and loneliness of the place. A large barn-like house also loomed behind me and I recall there being a gravel driveway with what appeared to be a derelict old car in it, which in this aspect also reminds me of The Wizard of Oz, when the tornado was menacing Dorothy's house.

I awoke from that dream into the encapsulating real life dream feeling my fingers being nudged and something pressing down on one side of my bed. It was a fawn, nibbling on my fingertips and trying to climb onto my bed! My bed? I had one of those, apparently, and as such can only conclude I lived in an apartment or house, which I concluded later to be an apartment. I push the fawn off and find myself in a dark room with three or four deer rummaging through it, the fawns trying to almost eat my fingers, and displaying no fear for me whatsoever and acting so domestic as to even allow me to pet pat them like they were big dogs. But, they had to go, and so eventually I led them down the main hall and to do the front door, holding it open as they filed out. As it turns out, the apartment I lived in was laid out in almost the exact same way as a combination of a couple in Southeast Portland I'd lived in before.

I went back to sleep, wondering how in hell deer got into my apartment, when later in the early hours of the morning they came back! This time there certainly was four of them, a doe and a buck and their two fawns with their obnoxious desire to eat my fingertips. Really, I don't know what traumatized a couple healthy-looking fawns with both parents into wanting to eat my fingertips, but it kind of hurt and was getting rather annoying. Ergo, time for you bastards to go again, as cute and playfully dog-like as you are in your behavior, and so as I was leading back down the hallway to escort them out I hear the front door slam and in comes my uncle, who helps get rid of the deer though doesn't seem terribly surprised at their being there. Then again, my surprise was rather understated, too. My uncle was a little out of breath and was dressed as though he'd come back from a long trip. Day was breaking as he put his stuff away and I noticed that the apartment looked like it had been demolished, or like we were moving out. And it looked like my uncle and I were going to go to a store and he said that he was going to be gone for three days and asked me if going to Fry's would be okay and apologized for not being able to give me a ride back home, which I said was fine because I don't mind taking the bus.

I don't recall getting into a car with my uncle, being in the store and what I bought or what was bought for me, or even the bus trip back...but when I returned home it was a sunny early afternoon, my aunt and my little brother were there, and I had a computer on me that was a little larger than a Voyage 200 calculator. And I had a cat! Two of them? My aunt was pissed at Mitzie, a darling little girl kitty, for having been "bad", which since I knew that could mean anything to my aunt I stood up for her and told her that she's just freaked out and she needs to just pay some attention to it, comfort it, which she sneered at and left me to do. Which I did, soothing and petting her until she was purring on my shoulder as I reclined in a chair. I asked her if she was okay and would try to behave and she said "Yes", after which another cat came up and snuggled with me because it was jealous and so I had both cats to give the kitty-lovings to, for a while at least. Until things got interesting, and very muddled again.

Sometime after I attended to my felines' emotional needs I was bringing something out into the garage – meaning suddenly the apartment was a house? – where I stood and watched a homeless couple have a loud, drunken, and rather embarrassing domestic dispute. The woman involved in the dispute stormed off swearing, after having thrown something at the guy, who after swaying for a bit shuffled into my garage and practically collapsed into my aunt and asked her if he could lay down for a bit who by then had appeared in the doorway. he collapsed on a couch in the garage and I returned inside the house to find my little brother spanking Mitzie, my kitty! I broke down into tears as I grabbed her from him and petted her while my aunt went off into an incomprehensible rant about how "bad" the cat had been again.

After putting Mitzie into a room and locking it, to ensure further abuse on my beloved, I wandered into the kitchen, where I saw two homeless-looking men casually eyeballing the stacks of canned and boxed food we had in there, and still being distraught over Mitzie's "spanking" I screamed at them, asking them what the fuck they were doing there, who they were, and telling them they'd better get the fuck out before I started smashing things into them; I was infuriated. The apartment manager showed up in a confusing scene that followed, which involved the strangers leaving, my computer catching fire and me putting it out somehow, and another stranger showing up while I was screaming about who in hell set my computer on fire and trying to power it up to see if it still worked. He was helpful and calm at least, and seemed sympathetic to my plight, by offering me tools to use to dismantle the device in order for me to dry it out piecemeal. He spoke to me, too, and almost seemed familiar, but I don't know who he was or what he said. Or how my computer had caught fire, got soaking wet, or could power on after all that abuse.

Flight from Suburbia to Outer Space

It was late one morning, I think a weekend one, and I was in my bedroom in a rambler my aunt and uncle and I lived in, and I wanted to smoke some weed. I listened at my door to hear signs of whether my aunt and uncle were going to be getting up soon; at first I heard what sounded like sex and then an argument I don't remember the subject of, followed by a sullen silence I took to be my cue to sneak out while I can. I didn't want to be ripped and scab-eyed when it was time to sit down to brunch with my uncle, to be sure! It was a sort of overcast day and I was drifting more than walking down streets in my neighborhood that remind me a bit of the depiction of a suburb in Camazotz in the book A Wrinkle in Time. I felt like a ghost almost and my thoughts were very sporadic and incoherent, like the flickering of a flame in the wind or a radio signal from a distant AM station heard in the car through a shifting wall of static. It was overcast and not a single soul was out, nor was there any sign of life stirring inside the houses I drifted past...

...Then suddenly I found myself in what seemed to be a small resort in an undulating geography that resembled a miniaturization of the mountain you see in Chinese paintings, dotted with structures that blended into the terrain and connected by paths like a maze. Like a Japanese garden, only with furrows and ridges. It was night, and I was still wandering around trying to smoke my weed, trying to avoid people who always seemed to be following me or just coming around a corner as I was fingering the bag in my pocket, getting ready to bring it out. At one point I was in the lowest part of the place, where a stream ran through, and was seeking a small stick to use to facilitate loading the bowl of my small pipe, when again people appeared and I fled uphill on a steep path. On this path I heard a song I really liked playing over a loudspeaker and started singing along, and my voice was very strange: cracked, quivering, unsteady, and fading in and out like that radio signal metaphor earlier, only instead of static there was silence even when my mouth was moving to form the lyrics and I could feel the vibration of it in my throat. Eventually I can upon a restaurant at the top of a hill and sat down at a table rather dreamily until a waiter came up and prepared to take my order. I just laughed and shook my head and told him I was just sitting caught in a song and drifted out...

...On which my view shifted to a scene in outer space, where a military vessel similar in appearance to the Enterprise on Star Trek was escorting a peace delegation of two ships, each carrying a representative from the parties involved in whatever dispute was going on. One was shaped like a rock with crystals in it, vaguely round and flat and with a slight depression on top, and the other was a polyhedron that was blue in color and had the appearance of being an electrical thing or something made entirely of force fields. As we were approaching the planet on which we were to conduct the peace talks the polyhedral ship split apart and eight to a dozen small square-like white-blue shapes started homing in on the other ship, one hitting it in the declivity on top, while a larger portion of the original ship flew off. Red lights flashed and sirens wailed and we all ran to battle stations to intercept the attack, I apparently piloting a large ship that looked like a snake or a Chinese dragon and the others in more conventional-looking delta-winged fighters. I did a kick-ass job, I must say and shot quite a few of the strange energy projectiles down, and so we escorted the remaining ship to the surface safely.

Which consisted of a massive wall-like building that contained various docking bays for ships and probably also aerial craft. That was when I met the surviving delegate, in the landing bay of what I assumed to be a spaceport: she was a humanoid wearing a strange headdress and a pale blue-white gown, and no hair that I could recall seeing. And she was a bombshell, or so I thought at the time. I was with my ship's captain and another officer who was also of her race and was acting very sheepish around her, especially since she seemed to keep firing subtle barbs at him. We were congratulated, especially me, and invited to dinner at her quarters later, and after she departed and the other officer returned to the ship (He wasn't invited to dinner) the captain cautioned me to be very courteous toward her and to try not to attract her attention because though her kind looked like humans they were in fact borderline telepaths and their society was known to be a ruthless one; and she was powerful. Later at dinner she personally praised my piloting skills and thanked me for having helped save her and "suggested" that I fetch her a bowl or food item of some sort, which I immediately did with a the graciousness of a courtier, at which she flashed me a seemingly genuine and appraising sort of smile.

Shipwrecked in Finland

I was the captain of a small expeditionary vessel that had somehow been shipwrecked, grounded near a village that appeared to be Scandinavian. I recall nothing of the cause for us having been grounded, nor do I clearly recall anything of events that followed shortly thereafter, though there was a vague and fleeting impression of a trial or meeting having been conducted in the village regarding what to do with us survivors. By the look of the environment and our garb it seemed as though I was in the sixteenth century. Shortly after our inglorious landfall a scene materialized of me standing before our capsized vessel, with my almost a dozen crew members ringed around it on the opposite side, in a sparsely-wooded deciduous forest. It was very small in appearance, no larger than a dinghy or tender, and upside-down, and somehow had gotten well inland, since there was no beach in sight or even the distant sound of surf. I told my crew that they were all free to go wherever they wished and that I would remain behind to destroy the shit, as per agreement, on which they cheered and quickly dispersed. Agreement? I tried stomping on the hull to break the ship, but of course I bounced off it and did no damage...

...At that I scanned the area in search of large rocks to bash the hull apart with, but seeing none in the immediate vicinity I began to wander away from the village behind me and farther into the words. A little while later I came across a rather odd cemetery, very ancient, with large headstones in which runes were carved, seeming grouped together haphazardly and with large spaces in between groups. It was a beautiful sunny mid-fall afternoon, or so it seemed, and I was rapidly losing interest in my mission to destroy the ship in favor of enjoying the weather and the surroundings; I always did like cemeteries. After meandering a bit I noticed a very large, modern city in the near distance, past a wooded area I assumed lay on the opposite side of the cemetery to the village, and since only the upper part of the skyscrapers was visible I concluded that the city lay in a valley not far from the village and the cemetery. Rather odd, but it only seemed slightly out of place and I felt no real curiosity toward it. I turned around and headed back toward the village and on my way was greeted by an elderly lady in the native tongue, which I couldn't understand and in embarrassment lowered my head and muttered "Hello" in response. That's when I vowed to learn the local language, which few people to no one seemed to understand...

...And so I visited an old hardware store in the village, which was tended by an old man I assumed was the owner. I awkwardly, through gestures and with a picture, made my purpose clear to the gentleman, at which he sat down at a workbench to make a strange hand-held device for me to use; it had a revolving head connected to a handle, the head of which had a c-shaped protrusion that had at the end of it a hook and from which an awl-like conical extension protruded. And, it made absolutely no sense. After a bit of embarrassing rummaging in pockets in search of some means to pay the proprietor I finally settled on a dollar bill, which looked like it came from the late nineteenth century, and handed it to him, at which he grinned and beamed after a cursory examination. I briefly went back to the ship and halfheartedly tried to use the strange tool to score the hull, but it only made a scratch and I just shrugged and returned to where I was staying in the village. Which apparently was a two-story domicile of a single woman, who based on a vague and fleeting image of a schoolroom, was a teacher. She had a young boy living with her, and aside from those two I also apparently had a companion living with me in my room, a very large and blond person I took to be a fellow survivor. Where did he come from, or the others? They made no appearance in the dream earlier. It seemed that by then I was beginning to speak the language a little bit, and it also appeared that the kid that lived there and I got along quite well and that I played with him occasionally. Not so my companion, who was a sullen man who refused to have anything to do with the locals or to learn the language and clearly resented being stuck here. I lost my patience with him one day and chided him for his antisocial and ungrateful attitude and frightening the child, in response to which he started cursing me in Russian. I quickly silenced him, telling him that that's the worst possible language a man could speak among Finns. So apparently I was in Finland...

...Suddenly I found myself on a ship, or what looked like two ships fastened together, flying across a very calm river or harbor, with what looked like a dense jungle on both sides. It was sunny like the day in the cemetery but warmer, feeling like summer. I saw my surly roommate engaged in incredible aerial acrobatic feats among a complex network of ropes connecting the various masts of the two ships like a spider web, which was rather surprising to me because apparently I had no idea until then that he was capable of such athleticism. I had the impression that he was releasing all the stress that had been building up in him since we arrived. I on the other hand was seated in what looked like a blue love tunnel car or carriage with three beautiful women, laughing and having a great time, each of us dressed in what looked like our Edwardian Sunday best. One of them was the woman I lived with, the one immediately next to me and practically on my lap, though it was more a thing I knew more than recognized. Other than that I could see neither hide nor hair of anyone else and there was no indication of how the ships were propelled or steered, and indeed it wasn't even clear if my little carriage was on one of the ships or gliding along next to one of them. At one point I was trying to cut a rope with that strange tool the old man sold me, though I wasn't sure if it was to fell my acrobatic companion or for some other purpose. I do recall having said something to the ladies with me to the effect that though my fellow survivor had many faults he was certainly a graceful and powerful athlete.

Sad Bunny Dream

It took place in a large wooden house, similar to the one I lived in last winter that a couple housemates called the Groove House, only this one was a bit bigger and appeared to be still under construction, or perhaps in the process of renovation or remodeling. Like the Groove House it was also very cold and drafty, and just overall dingy. I had a couple housemates in the dream, a guy and a girl. I believe there may also have been a cat or two living there, though I don't recall having seen any in the dream; it was implied however, I remember. The weather outside was just like it was before this recent sunny stretch, wintry cold and oppressively overcast.

From the beginning I had a cute black and white bunny, colored more like a couple cats I've known than I would expect a bunny to be, and I assume was a male. At some point fairly early in the dream I came across an adorable brown bunny with I think small white spots on its forehead in a triangular pattern with the apex of it pointed up. It was a girl, and it could talk! I think she explained to me why she could, but I don't remember, nor do I recall how it was I came across her and she came to be mine. I went everywhere with her and pampered her quite a lot, and I recall we had a couple brief conversations the contents of which escape me. Eventually I felt like I'd been sorely neglecting my black and white bunny and visited him in his carpeted box, he sulking, and petting him until he cheered up...

...Shortly after I made it up to my black and white bunny the female housemate chided me and the other housemate for being slacker and admonished us to get busy cleaning up the house, which we reluctantly did, tossing what looked like pieces of trim that was strewn all over the place into what seemed vaguely to be a sort of dumpster. I remember at one point getting tangled up in some beams leaning at various angles against the walls of a narrow entryway at the bottom of some stairs from the main floor and at that time suddenly feeling almost panicky, worried that one or both of the bunnies would escape or already had. I hadn't seen my mysterious talking brown bunny since I'd hung out with the black and white one, and it was unsettling for me to not be around her, to not feel her or hear her voice...