Posts Tagged humans

[partim] The day I first travelled in time.

Oct 27

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The finished version of this has already been posted on FA, but I’m still posting it in pieces here too.

“Yeah,” he said. “Your future selves figured it’d be best for me to meet you here. This is the first time, right?”

Ralph nodded.

“C’mon, get out of the car—I have a lot to tell you, now that you’re officially time travellers.”

Ralph’s old room in his parents’ house was barren now, save for the bed and a couple of chairs. This time of day, Ralph’s ma and the Chief would probably still be out on the town.

“Now, why aren’t we meeting ourselves?” I said.

“Information management. You wanted to give yourself a huge infodump, but you couldn’t figure out how much to tell. You kept putting it off because you always had more to tell, till a certain point you started thinking it might be too much to tell. So you asked me to do it; I don’t know enough to spoil you guys.”

“So what are you going to tell us?”

“Just a few things about the nature of time, where it differs from the movies. Also to give you some new movies, and some other things.”

“A better computer?”

“A couple, actually—one for each of you.” He reached into the satchel he had with him and pulled out a pair of small palm-sized tablets.

“What’s this?” I said, noticing the Apple logo on the back. “Did they start making Newtons again?”

“It’s a cell phone. We worked out that with a microphone the enhancer can handle speech as well. So you won’t have to mess with typing.”

“That’s a relief,” Ralph said.

“You can get Internet on them, too,” Steve said. “There’s all sorts of things; I’ll show you later.”

“Expensive?” I said.

“Nah, on me. I sell these things now. Some abilities, the enhancer can send them over the phone network. Magic on demand—there’s a huge market for it.”

“Anybody can buy one of these things?” Ralph said.

“Today they can. In the past it’ll be less functional. In the future it’ll be obsolete, like this old monster.” He picked up the laptop we’d brought with us and set it in his satchel.

“You’ve been to the future?” I said.

“No,” he said, “But I know the singularity is coming, and that makes everything obsolete.”

“The singularity?”

“The point beyond which our exponential progress makes it impossible to imagine what civilization will be like. More or less. You can read up on it, if you like,” he said, pointing to the phones. “About just about everything, really. Did they have Wikipedia in 2000?”

“What-apedia?”

“Massive encyclopedia, constantly updated by anyone who feels like it. Like the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, but more volatile.”

“What, really?” I said. “And flying cars, too?”

“No… those became much more unlikely after 9/11.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “Look it up.”

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[partim] The day I first travelled in time.

Jun 29

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November 7, 2000

Ralph’s movie marathon lasted till well into the morning.  He’s beautiful when he’s fixated on something.  But I still wasn’t all that keen on the idea of time travel—actually, I might have been worse off, given how so many of the plots focused on how badly time travel can mess things up.

“I’m less than encouraged,” I said.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Ralph said.  “We know to be careful.”

“We?”

“What, what, you think you’re going out there without me?  No wonder you’re scared…  You and me are traveling together, of course.  Wild dogs couldn’t keep me away.”

“But bringing you with me… I don’t even know how I can make that work,” I said.  “Actually, I haven’t learned to do anything yet.”

“We could try setting up a time machine,” Ralph said, totally ignoring my concern.  “Dude!  We totally have to use the DeLorean!”

So of course me and Ralph ended up at his parents’, where their old DeLorean sat on blocks between a rusty pickup truck and the barbed-wire fence surrounding the property.

“This is gonna rock so hard,” he said.

“Aren’t we gonna want tires?”

“Well, probably,” he said. “But we’re not going to do much travelling till you get practice and we know what we’re doing.”

“Restraint!  I like that.”

“Besides,” he said, hefting the laptop, “the battery in this thing wouldn’t let us get far, anyway.”

“Bah, now you’ve got me worried.  What if we get stuck?”

“We’ll play it safe… first trip will be to fetch a better computer.”

“I can get behind that,” I said. “So, five years?”

“Fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“Okay, okay, deal.”

We got in the car, me at the wheel.  “Now, to get this straight, I’m not actually driving anywhere, no eighty-eight miles per hour, nothing—this is just a container?”

“The most appropriate container available,” he said.  “Come on, let’s do this.”

I slapped his gut teasingly.  “You’re still ten years old inside that pork barrel, ain’tcha?”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, handing me the computer.

I opened it up.  “How do I start?” I typed.

“I don’t have a way to interface with the car; you’ll have to charge it yourself.  But just give me a date or time and I’ll modulate the energy accordingly.”

“It’s talking like a person again,” I said.

Ralph looked over my shoulder.  “I hate you.”

“Sure you do,” I said, and typed in “Nov 7, 2010.”

“OK.”

And I felt the charge.  I won’t say it was electric, though there was some of that—a  feeling in the fur like it was full of static—but mostly it was a kind of intensity.  I was eager to move, and felt like I could run and just keep running, or jump over a house, or punch through a wall.

But I didn’t know how to let it out.

“Your fur’s turning purple, tiger,” Ralph said.  I looked down and saw the charge crawling up my arms.

“I don’t know what to— how to—”

Ralph grabbed my hand and slammed it down on the dash.  There was a bright flash.  “Push hard,” he said.

“Push how?”

“Your hand,” he said. “Press down hard.  That’s all.  Just push against it.”

I pushed hard on the dash, feeling that intensity focus itself and leave me.  I watched my fur go back to its original colors, the white light pulling at intervals around my hand.

Then it was all gone, the whole car flashed white for a moment, and then—I felt a different kind of surge, as though I’d been plunged into warm water.  My eyes shut reflexively.  When I opened them again, I saw it did indeed look kind of like water—full of blue and purple light refracted in the fluctuations of what I could only call the timestream.

I heard Ralph’s voice, almost unreal sounding:  Beautiful.

I felt a pleasurable sort of sensation wash over me and for a second felt as though my whole body were about to dissolve into Time—and then all my senses blanked out.

November 7, 2010

The next thing I knew, we were back in normal time and Ralph was already talking.  “I know, right?”

“What?” I said.

“You were shouting ‘Fuck, fuck yeah!’”

“I was?  Reflex, I guess,” I said, checking myself over.  “It did feel pretty good.”  In fact there was a damp spot in my shorts.  It hadn’t felt that good had it?

A bearded man knocked on Ralph’s window.  Ralph rolled it down.

“Welcome—to the world of tomorrow!” he said, in full drama.

“What,” Ralph said.  “Steve, is that you?”

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[partim] The day I first travelled in time.

Jun 27

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November 6, 2000

I woke in the dark to banging on my door.  I rolled over to look at the clock:  4:30 AM.  Must be Ralph, then. All the sane people are still in bed. I got up to open the door, still mostly asleep—fur ruffed, eyes half shut, wearing nothing but an old pair of blue-and-white-striped boxers.

“Beautiful tiger,” Ralph said, “Time to face destiny.”

“Ralph, I’m sleeping,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, you can keep sleeping, sweetheart.  Don’t worry about it.  Just sleep.  Would you like to go for a piggyback ride?”

I’m half sure I had fallen asleep on my feet and was dreaming at that point, because there’s no way that should have worked, but I found myself climbing on Ralph’s back and being carried through the dorm out to Ralph’s truck, still in just my boxers and sporting a serious case of bed fur.

He heaved me into the bed of the truck and I fell asleep immediately, into a dream replaying the events of Saturday evening.

“That’s actually a pretty dangerous one,” Steve said.  “I’d wait till we figure out what specifically it is you can do before you try anything.  I can run a few more tests, but it’ll take a couple of days.”

He took a couple more measurements­­—photos of my face and feet—and all the while Ralph was unable to sit still, talking excitedly about time travel, freezing time, and all the other possibilities Steve said might fall under the heading of ‘temporal manipulation’.

“There’s no use in speculating, buddy,” I said.  “We’ll know by—”

“By Monday,” Steve said.

“That’s the best part, though,” Ralph said.  “We might not even have to wait till then.  You could come back from the future and tell us!”

While I was trying to come up with a reason why that would be a bad idea, he went on: “Of course, Steve, you’ll still have to do the tests—the information will have to come from somewhere…”

“Just—hold on, hold on…” I said.  “Can I just say, I’m totally not comfortable with this?  I don’t want… doppelgängers popping in with oracular proclamations from the future!”

“Then let me do it,” Ralph said.  “I can switch places with you and—ho, crap, I can do what you can do!”  He hugged me so tight I was sure I heard bones crack.  “My chrono tigger!”

I tried to peel my crazed boar off me.  “We’ll wait for the tests,” I said, dragging him away.

I was just about to relive the more intimate portion of that night when Ralph shook me awake.  “We’re here.”

I recognized the place, or at least the area—a couple miles down Apison Pike.  Steve’s house was small and run-down, dingy white paint cracked and peeling, and no lights on.

“Are you sure he’s up already?” I said.  The sky was still dark; it was still a couple hours before sunrise.

“Yeah—yeah, I got his email.”

“Email?  Ralph, you don’t have a computer.”

“Dorm does.  Couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been checking the lobby computers every fifteen minutes or so.  I don’t know how he thinks he can live without a phone, but he does.”

Ralph didn’t knock; he just opened the door and went in.  He led me down to the basement, a windowless room whose entry was dimly lit by a small lamp covered in seashells. The walls were plywood and the carpet was a garish orange-brown.  The most distinctive feature of the room, though, was the one blacklighted wall entirely covered in electronics.

About half a dozen monitors of various sizes were laid out on a workbench; a couple were partially dismantled, three were running Matrix screensavers, and Steve was sitting at the last.

“Hey guys—you’re gonna love this.  Sit down.”

There were no other chairs in the place, so we sat on the floor.

“There’s good news, there’s bad news, and there’s good news.  The good news is, your skill is pretty much undifferentiated over the potential spectrum.  You have the capacity to do pretty much everything, temporally, that you can imagine.”  Beside me, Ralph was squealing with anticipation.  “The bad news is, to balance that, the strength of the effect is very weak—your natural range could be measured in picoseconds.  The other good news, though, is that I’ve been working on augmenting abilities with computers.”

“Isn’t that impossible?  I mean, you can’t just feed the energy into the machine…” I said.

“Lots of things are impossible… but heck, you saw me do it the other day—with the scanner?”

“Ah.”

“Charging a computer that way is—was—my brother’s knack.”  He pointed to a battered-looking Commodore 64 sitting on the counter.  “That’s the one he set up for me back then—it’s kind of old-school, but it still works just fine, and I can connect it to one of these babies if I really need heavy calculating.”

Ralph started snoring beside me.

“Wow,” Steve said. “60 to 0 in…”

I shushed him.  “He was up all night,” I whispered.  “Mind if I sleep too?  I’m not supposed to be up this early, and… who knows when I’ll get another chance, eh?”

“Go ahead,” he said.

I held Ralph and dozed off, wondering why being up all night never stopped him before.  I looked through my memory of Ralph’s mind, and realized he probably hadn’t slept since Saturday.

When I woke up, Steve was hooking a laptop up to the C64.  “I want to try and set this up so you can take it with you.  It’s no good if you can only work from this basement, or someplace with Internet access…”

“Instead, I’ll be working on about 45 minutes of battery power?”  I said.  “Wait—‘work’?”

“Well, even if you don’t go into the heroics business, you’ll still want to practice.”

“I’m not going into the heroics business.”

“Suit yourself.”  He fiddled with one of the wires between the computers.  “Damn… the connection’s not going to take.  I unplug this, and the power that works with it now—stops working.”

Ralph came up behind me, resting his chin on my shoulder.  “What’s going on?” he said.

“He’s trying to give me a computer with the same power as his,” I said.  “Isn’t working.”

He stepped around me and looked the setup over.  “You can get them working together, though?”

Steve nodded and hooked the cable back up.  Ralph stared at the command prompt that appeared, its cursor blinking slowly.

“How’s it work?”

“Just type in what you want to do.  It’s basically just extending your mind, so it can understand natural language—and it’ll let you know if you ask it to do anything it can’t.”

I’d never actually seen Ralph at a computer before.  He typed with one finger, hunting out each key, till at last he managed to produce: “BOOST MY POWER.”

The computer responded: “OK.”

Ralph stood up and laid a hand on each computer.

“They’re not minds, exactly…” he said, “But they’ve got magic, which makes them more than just things.  With this boost I should be able to pull this off.”

“What’s he doing?” Steve asked me.

“Well it’s his knack to switch minds.  That’s actually how we sort of ended up as…such…close friends.”

A progress bar appeared on the new computer:  “Transferring…”  After about a minute, whatever was being copied was done, and Ralph sat down hard in Steve’s chair.  “All right, unplug it, see if it works.”

Steve separated the computers and asked the new one:  “All ok?”

“Functional,” it answered.

“All right, tiger,” Ralph said, “Let’s get out and have us some fun!”

We’d slept enough that by now it was already after noon, so we stopped at Taco Bell for lunch.  We sat down with a couple of trays piled high with burritos at a booth in the back.  Ralph pulled out the laptop with one hand while the other started stuffing his face.

“So excited,” he said, mouth full.  “What do you want to try first?”

“Ralph,” I said, “You’re pushing me.”

“What?”

“I’m not ready for this.  I know it’s something you’ve been looking forward to your whole life, but… I haven’t—I haven’t been dreaming about this like you have… I was used to being mundane.”

“But you’re not mundane, tiger,” he said.  “You have this totally amazing ability!”

“No,” I said.  “You heard what he said.  I can move picoseconds.  That’s, like, infinitesimal.  I mean, I don’t even know how small it is.  I don’t have an ability. What I have is a machine.  Let me get used to the idea?”

Ralph looked disappointed.  “Tiger…. Where’s your imagination?  Why don’t you have any dreams?”

I didn’t have an answer, and I didn’t want to keep fighting.  Neither of us said anything for the remainder of the meal.

After lunch, Ralph took me back to his place.

We sat on the couch.

I wanted him to say something.

“I love you,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

I leaned against him, and he put an arm around me.  I felt tears at my eyes, but I didn’t want to let myself cry over this…

“I don’t understand you, though,” he said. “I wish I did.”

And that just confused me.  “You don’t remember anything about me from the day you were me?”

 

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[partim] Scott the Alchemist 4.

May 10

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M/M (hyper) below cut… »

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[scrap] Shine.

Apr 6

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Another old scrap from an old notebook—

Thunder woke me up in the middle of the night, and Jan had already gone.  I rolled up my pack, figuring I’d get moving before the rain hit.  The donut shop at the edge of the park was open all night and usually quiet.

In fact there was nobody there but Jeff behind the counter.  He shaded his eyes as I came in—even though I was half asleep, my light was the brightest in the place.

“Hey Shine,” he said, reaching under the counter.  “The usual?”

“Yeah,” I said, taking my seat facing the wall.  He brought me a tray with a dozen jelly donuts.

It started raining.

“You know, tiger,” he said, sitting across from me.  “I’m sure you’d have a place of your own by now if you eased up on the food a bit.”

“Man,” I said, “I’ve told ya, you have no idea what it’s like when this light burns down.”

I tore into the donuts.

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[partim] Shine.

Mar 3

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I sat kind of awkwardly in the chair, and he scooted into the kitchen.  My light flickered a bit uncertainly as people started to stare.  Why would a place like this be so full of people this late at night?

I covered my face.  Nobody’d said anything, nobody’d gotten up—they were just watching.

After about a minute, the guy came back, carrying three plates of food on a tray—chicken, pork, tofu, rice…

“I don’t have any money,” I said.  When I’d spoken he looked at me like he just realized I hadn’t understood anything he’d said yet.  (Sure, as a tiger I’m technically Asian, but it just doesn’t work that way.)

He gestured for me to wait and went back into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a bored-looking teenage girl in dark makeup and a black dress.

He talked on for a bit, in Chinese.

“I can’t afford this,” I said to her.

“He says it’s on the house,” she said, after translating it back to him.  “I think he wants you to be a mascot.”

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Scrap – Aristophaneus

Jan 17

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This was something I sort of started throwing together during Sketch Night week before last.  So far it’s more of an exploration than a narrative.  Will have to see how it goes.

NSFW (M, two-body) below cut…

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[partim] Shine.

Jul 28

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Luckily he didn’t seem to have anything sinister in mind and just led me back to this place.

It was dimly lit, in the way Chinese restaurants tend to be, and I tried to point out my light, worried my belly’d cause a disturbance—the dining room looked pretty full.

He shook his head and chattered at me a bit more as he led me to a seat in the corner overlooking the whole room.

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[final] Atligili.

Mar 9

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I looked at the costume in its box and tried to hold out against the temptation to wear it again. I didn’t want to wear it—it wanted me to wear it. It compelled me. But I didn’t want to wear it. I had only worn it three times since I’d gotten it, and each time….

The fear was exciting—addictive. I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want to think about it.

I knew if I thought about it, it would get into my mind again.

And if it got into my mind, I would wear the costume again.

And if I wore the costume, the monster that it was would get hungry again.

And I was already running out of stuff.

But I couldn’t stop looking. The fear was exciting—addictive. It compelled me.

It was a gorgeous alligator suit, the kind that inflates around you and makes you look like a big shiny pool toy when you’re wearing it. Just then, though, I thought it looked kind of sad, stuffed in its box all rumpled like it was. I never did put it away properly… after the last time, when the thing’s hunger had faded and I was in control again, I hadn’t taken any chances: I’d hid it away as quickly as I could.

It was a shame to mistreat something so valuable. I figured I ought to at least fold it up properly.

When I picked it up, though, I knew I was trapped again.

It was the smell of it that grabbed me, that pure smell of vinyl, or whatever it was that it—that he was really made of… it entered my nose, bypassed my brain, and took hold somewhere deep in my gut.

Before I had realized what was happening I had already torn my clothes off—and I mean I literally ripped them from my body. I didn’t know I had that kind of strength in me. The smell was so powerful! He shouldn’t have smelled so clean—I’d left him covered in the remains of what he’d eaten—crumbs and spills of food and drink and worse… the paint, I couldn’t convince him paint wasn’t for drinking, and he’d gone through five cans and it had been so sour in my stomach—and the blood, I’d forgotten… how the cat had struggled… but he was clean now, somehow, and…

…and those memories were fading away again now, now that he was controlling me again. I climbed into him through the opening in his chest. I closed up the airtight seal and pulled up the oversized costume zipper that covered it. And I turned on the built-in pump under his tail that would give him his shape.

He never spoke, but I could feel his satisfaction: I was his dependable slave, even though I was unwilling. I felt his hunger, too. I watched his reflection in my bedroom mirror as the air filled him fat and round—so beautiful, so majestic, were the thoughts in my head; whether they were his or mine I wasn’t sure—and as soon as he was full he stretched out, hopped on his big feet experimentally, and barreled purposefully out the door.

My house, as I mentioned, was already mostly empty. The beast sniffed at the air and, though I didn’t smell anything, he must have gotten wind of something. He bounded into the kitchen, the wobble of his body pushing hard against my skin. The kitchen cupboards were still empty; I hadn’t dared to refill them since last time and I’d been eating out.

He grabbed the trash can.

Please, no, I pleaded.

He opened his jaws wide, forcing mine open as well, much wider than should have been comfortable for me. He poured in the contents of the trash can, and I tasted Styrofoam, greasy fast-food wrappers, and a few day-old French fries.

I felt like I was going to be sick as the monster forced me to chew and swallow. But he wouldn’t get sick, so neither would I, no matter how much I wished it.

The gator moved a big paw down over his belly. I knew what he was thinking: Still empty…

He sniffed around again, but I could tell nothing left in my house interested him. He barged out my door and stepped into the street, and I trembled inwardly at the beast’s thoughts… a very clear picture of the meat we would have today.

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Shine.

Dec 14

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I’d only found out about it by accident—I’d been wandering across town again, when a muscular Chinese man with a scruffy beard came up to me and started chattering away in his language.

I’d looked around a bit worriedly to see if I was about to be swarmed or something—I really didn’t feel like being ganged up on again.

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