I love it here

Once there was an artist, who many said was the best artist in the land. The emperor, hearing this, sent a message to the artist to draw a picture of a bird.

And the artist, who believed in the emperor, told the messengers that he would make as the emperor commanded, and it would be the finest drawing of a bird he could make; it would be his life's work, for such was his pleasure to serve the emperor. And he told them the drawing would take him thirty years to complete.

And he worked for thirty years, his sustenance provided by his village, as decreed by the emperor. He lived, and worked, alone in a small house next to the sea, and every day the villagers would bring him food, each in turn. As the years passed, the artist became ever more consumed by the drawing, and often the villager who brought him his food would lead him away from his drawing board, and help him to feed.

One of the village girls in particular took good care of him, whenever it was her turn to visit him. She talked to the artist, often for hours, until he woke from his trance and responded to her. Then she would massage his drawing hand, which was always stiff and claw-like, and implore him to try and take better care of himself, for if he crippled his hand, then how would the drawing be completed?

The artist would then smile, thankful for the girl's help, and his mind would soon return to the drawing. For as much and as deeply as she loved him, he never noticed.

And after thirty years the emperor's messengers returned, to claim the drawing, but the artist told them it was not yet complete, and he needed more time. He had given his word to make the best drawing he could, and he would.

The messengers said, he had also given his word that it would be done in thirty years, and the emperor would be displeased.

And the artist said, so be it, for the emperor will be displeased one way or another. And the messengers left, and the next day the emperor's executioners came, and decimated the villagers, while forcing the artist to watch.

And the artist returned to his drawing with even greater ferocity, working night and day, until he collapsed, and the girl who loved him nursed him back to health, for she still loved him, though her brother and her father had been decimated. Maybe the artist knew she loved him, for he returned to his drawing with resolute determination, as if once it was completed the girl's family would come back to life. Or maybe he reasoned that if he did not get it done in ten years, the girl might be decimated the next time.

And ten years passed, and the artist never noticed the lines growing in his face, nor the shifting of the seasons, nor the looks the villagers gave him when they saw him. And when the ten years had passed, the emperor visited the artist in person, demanding his drawing. But the artist, noticing with some small surprise how the emperor had not aged a day, said it was not done, and he needed ten more years.

So be it, said the emperor, and the artist shivered in fear. But if he was afraid of what the emperor would do, or of being forced to leave the drawing undone, he could not say.

The guards who accompanied the emperor proceeded to cut down one half of the villagers.

The remaining half turned their backs to the artist, declaring that his life and his work was his own business, and no more of them would die for him. All but the one girl, who still loved the artist, though all her family was now dead.

She moved into his house. He did not seem to object. In her constant care, he was able to work ceaselessly from sunrise to sunset, and if it made the girl happy to share his bed, he had no complaints. These ten years, he would later remember, were maybe the happiest in his life. He felt that he had nothing more to lose, and he was confident that he could complete the drawing in time.

And when the ten years had passed, the emperor returned, with a single guard, and the artist nearly wept when he said the drawing was not yet done. Without a word, the guard cut the throat of the girl, who stood next to the artist. He helped her to lie down, and closed her eyes, and turned to the emperor and said, it seems I have no choice.

No, said the emperor, you do not. You will come to the palace, and if the drawing is not done tomorrow you will die.

And the artist did as the emperor commanded, and went with him to the palace. In the palace's courtroom that evening, the artist stood before an audience composed of the emperor himself and several ministers and a cloaked executioner. As they watched, he produced a paper and a pen, and in three quick strokes drew a bird of such exquisite art and beauty the emperor himself were heard to gasp for breath.

The artist said, to himself, if I had only had ten more years it would have been perfect, and fell down dead.

Current Location: Ancient Japan
Current Mood: creative

This story begins roughly two thousand years ago, 1987 AD. Or, actually a week before that in the middle ages. Um, maybe I should clear up this time travelling thing. I was in the Middle Ages, right, and fought some human-dinosaur hybrids. There were knights on my side. Business as usual. I think I was in an especially hot period of heroics around that time. A week later I was back in what I like to call the present. A place – or a timeline, if you will – I call home. And I've lived some two thousand years after the events I'm about to relay, years spent mostly in what I'm now for the sake of simplicity going to call various timelines. So only twenty years have passed in the base timeline I mentioned, which is here and now.

So I was back home, two thousand eight hundred and twenty years old – if I remember right – and found myself pregnant. One of the aforementioned knights. It's funny what you remember (she said, having only seconds earlier confessed she's getting senile in her old age, hur hur), I don't remember his name or what he looked like but I remember he was very gentle, very strong, and sad because I'd told him I would probably leave soon and never come back. And I remember – at least I think I remember – the exact shape of his penis.

Anyway, I couldn't have picked a better time to get knocked up, being home and all. It's a kind of special place, there's this funny old giant underground laboratory facility/military base/Dr Evil lair that's full of sciency stuff. It's made to study me, and a few others like me. We call it the Post-Human Research Project. Dr Andersson is the one who came up with it all, the one who lords over the place like a mad scientist overlord, and the one who comes up with, well, pretty much the entire post-human branch of science. He told me he even came up with the word post-human.

I'm kidding about the mad scientist part, by the way. He's the cleverest person I've ever known – and that's counting Albert Einstein and an extraterrestrial superintelligence or two – and one of the most compassionate. Though he does his best to play the mad scientist stereotype: No one knows what his first name is or what he's doctor of, and he likes to stalk the concrete hallways of his lab day and night, white lab coat flapping around his legs, white hair standing in all directions. And he has a creepy way of knowing everything about everything. He knows all there is to know about obstetrics and gynecology for example, so he got to look at all my juicy bits. It was just a little uncomfortable.

It was an uneventful pregnancy. As strong as I am, physically, the only real concern was if the baby would be strong enough to survive being inside me. This being my second baby, I found it quite easy to be careful. And we found early on the baby was superhumanly strong too. How nice, I thought, for the baby to inherit my awesome strength. I guess it's part of the usual parental pride.

Being stronger than everyone else certainly didn't help me when I was growing up. But things were different here, I reasoned, my baby would be far from alone, it would never be teased for being different, it would benefit from my experience and understanding of its uniqueness. Not to mention an equally special set of aunts and uncles.

Did I mention the other post-humans who lived there on the base? There's Leon Farber, who remakes reality with his bare hands, and Lucia Sommer, who flies and survives anything. My best friends. They're both very young compared to me. Well, so are just about everyone, but I'm pointing out that I'm alone in the dimension-hopping business, and both of them became post-human pretty recently. I think Leon had been at the facility only three years back then, and Lucia about ten. Neither of us age. If we were a superhero team – which we sometimes are – we'd be called The Immortals.

As a group, we're pretty inseparable. You might say the three of us are a couple. ("Friends" reference, haha.) We tend to take turns sleeping together since none of us likes to sleep alone. Except Leon sometimes. But anyway.

My predictions pretty much came true. Jerika and I bonded as I had never managed to do with Terra, my first born. I was only seven hundred years then, I'd tell Jerika, I was far too young to have a baby. But I'm getting ahead of myself, we didn't have such conversations until she was older.

Not that I have much to tell you about the years in between. We were happy. I moved to a little house outside of the base where Jerika could see the sky, make friends and all that. Though, like me, she didn't have a lot of friends. She was seven, I recall, when she first discovered the martial arts. I trained her myself, a little, some basic punching and kicking and grappling, made sure that she wouldn't knock anyone's head off. She had better self control than I did at her age, though I could never seem to properly explain to her that it would be unfair for her to compete with normal humans.

She got in a junior Judo class, and naturally, excelled. By the time she was nine she was hitting people in taekwondo and kendo, always careful not to hurt anyone, never in the slightest risk of losing. It was on her twelfth birthday she first found the words to explain to me what she was doing, why it didn't matter to her to fight unfairly. She had a plan, or more of a dream, to fight the best in the world. Shaolin monks. Mike Tyson. Sumo wrestlers. People of borderline superhuman skill, who could give her a good fight. The way to do that was winning a lot. The only people who could match her would never meet her unless she became world famous as a prodigious fighter. Only when the world would listen to her as she proclaimed herself utterly invincible would the real challengers come.

You might be wondering why she had to fight at all, and why I didn't talk her out of that massive ego trip. But she didn't think like that. She didn't want to beat the best, she didn't want to prove herself better than everyone. You have to understand, there would be nothing worth proving there. She fought only for the sake of fighting itself. I understood that much long before she could put it in words.

Sure enough, she only had to win everything she could win for nine years until the world recognized her remarkable talent. She fought something like three thousand bouts in every sport she could think of and won every single one. I know, it's not much to be proud of, but I can't help boasting a little. And I'll say this for my girl, she never for a moment thought she earned any of those victories. She would sometimes get desperately frustrated, impatient, and regret putting down all those people who for all their skill were no match to her. She'd shout to the audience after winning, obscenities, insults, challenges, sometimes inarticulate screams of rage that scared me when I saw her.

And I would hold her, soothe her, talk to her throughout the night, teach her patience; be her mother. Somewhere in the middle of that we became friends. All four of us, actually. Jerika and Leon had a relationship they kept secret for months until I walked in on them. Much embarrassment ensued – Leon and I didn't have sex for years after that. But it never became painful, as it did with Terra. Looking back on it now, it seems like we were always happy.

Especially when Jerika went on to face the greatest fighters alive in a series of friendly matches televised all over the world. It was an event bigger than the Olympics and the Nobel Prize awards and Baywatch put together. Billions of people watched with bated breath as the fighters spiralled through hitherto unexplored heights of martial skills. And as sumo wrestlers flew like torpedoes out of the rings at the hands of a teenage girl. Well, she won those silly fights, but in the beautiful ones no judge even bothered to score, and no fighter was knocked out, so no winners were announced.

She was on fire, as the saying goes. Every day it seemed like she was alive for the first time. She told me of post-fight locker room encounters of such forceful release she made it seem like they reinvented sex as much as they did fighting.

And then she disappeared.

She had been gone for two days without me knowing it – she was abroad, and I was home – and on the day I expected her back I got a DVD in my mail. I think I had a bad feeling as I popped it in the player. It showed a video with a man I didn't recognize. He told me that my friends in high places had enemies in high places, and therefore I should suffer. I watched with rising sickness and despair as the man talked to Jerika, bound on a rack, and explained to her that the only reason he would torture and kill her as painfully as possible was to hurt me.

I watched her struggle to break her chains, with some hope. You see, no mundane bonds can hold my kind in the fullness of our rage. And she raged, as she had never done, as I myself have done only a handful of times. But as you can imagine, the bonds didn't break. The man smugly told us – he addressed both Jerika and the camera – the agents he represented knew all about me and had done their homework; chains forged with weight of mountains, breath of fish, joy of sin and that sort of stuff.

I really don't feel like telling in minute detail the nature of Jerika's torture. It would be enough to say that even now, after countless hours of mourning and therapy and company of friends and catharsis, it makes me sick to remember it; and even now, after four thousand eight hundred and fifty years of adventures and battles with the forces of darkness, I have never seen anything more wicked.

But for the sake of her memory I'll try. The rack she was on had a weighted system that added a small weight to the strain every thirty minutes. Suspended above her midsection was a huge, white hot blade that would fall and kill her only when she said she wanted it. After ten hours with random beatings and insults she was naked, bleeding and writhing in pain.

He told her about me, things I wouldn't have wanted her to know, things I didn't understand how anyone could know. How I'd crippled a boy when I was little. How I'd sold my body, so cheaply, so many times. How I'd lost control, those few times, and killed so many. The secret sadistic pleasure I've taken in castrating rapists. The times I've failed, the times I've been beaten. How alone I've always felt, and would feel again when I learned she was dead. How, like a coward, I would not avenge her.

She screamed until her voice gave out, and then she wept. Eventually her shoulder dislocated and she screamed again. I knew from the look in her eyes that instant she gave up, and I watched as she begged to be killed. I watched, what else could I do?

The blade severed her so neatly she did not die right away. And with the strain on her broken shoulder gone she seemed for a moment relieved. Then he shoved her lower body in her face and raped it while it twitched. She died at the moment he ejaculated. From the look on her face I think she was so shocked she did not know what was happening. I hope.

And there I was sitting on the couch, filled with guilt and disgust and horror and grief and loneliness and pain and probably a few more emotions we don't have names for. But, I realized with a distant clarity, amazingly, no anger. Anger always came to me most easily, but now it seemed, I was robbed of it at the time I needed it more than ever before.

I sat there throughout the night, frozen in the moment, hating my inability to lie more than ever before. All I wanted was to say "No", but I couldn't, because it would be lying. I could not deny what I had seen. I was afraid to move because I thought my heart would break. I could feel it crack a little with every beat. I was probably quite insane in the morning, when Lucia came to visit.

When she saw me she asked what was wrong. I wasn't surprised she could tell. I didn't have the strength to answer, so I asked her to call the base and get Leon and Andersson here. It was very close, did I mention that?

So she called, and then she sat down next to me, hugged me gently, and waited. After a while I said Jerika was dead. She held me tighter. I still didn't move. When the boys came in I said to play the disc and I watched it again, with them. It was a little easier to bear just with my friends sitting next to me, holding my hands. We cried as we watched, the three of us. Doctor Andersson didn't. Heh, it's like that Japanese saying, no one has ever seen him bleed or cry. But I felt his hand on my shoulder, and it shivered sometimes.

Two days later the intelligence department had figured out from the cave walls where the video had been made and I'd gotten over the most violent sorrow. I went into the forest, alone, where I could scream and break stuff without worrying about hurting someone. It's weird, I didn't actually feel the urge to break stuff and all that, but you assume you have to go through the motions you've learned from movies and when you do it actually feels a little better. I couldn't risk bottling it up, anyway. Me flipping out unexpectedly is a risk we can't take. I guess that's good. Gives me an excuse to act out my emotions. Emotions I now assumed I had even if I couldn't feel them.

I saw Terra as well, in the forest. Not my daughter but the Earth goddess I named her after. (Unimaginative me.) She's my mother substitute, basically, and she was very comforting to me in my grief. And she told me who was behind the attack on her subject, that is to say me. It was Mars, the planet, whose main driving principles are war, fire and fury. Without much to go to war against but Earth, it was inevitable he would go after Terra sometime or another. He had made a human his weapon on earth, much like I was - and am - her.

This man was Jerika's killer, she said, and lacking the resources to make war on Mars himself it was this man we had to fight. Once dead, she assured me, he could not be brought back to life on Earth like myself, as long as she knew to look out for it.

For all her otherworldly knowledge, Terra couldn't say where Soon to be dead guy was. But then intelligence took care of that, like I said. I went on an airplane with Lucia and Leon and a platoon of soldiers; we were attacking a military installation in another country, was the talk. Walking corpse guy was a colonel in charge of this airbase that he had apparently turned into a staging point for an invasion of his own country in the name of Mars. The guy was nuts, they thought, and his country had agreed to let us take him out as a favor to them. Or something. Weird, I can't remember his name. I have a feeling it was something stupidly ironic like Ferrus.

I just wanted to kill him slowly.

The soldiers on the plane knew who we were and what we could do. We'd had a few exercises in post-human combat, enough that they wouldn't freak out when we started flying and stuff, and the plan was for them to stay out of the way while we killed the colonel guy and disabled everyone else. If we could. I didn't want to kill any poor schmucks who just followed orders if I could help it, but I was in a killing mood I suspected wouldn't be over with just one body.

I had a little talk with the friends, them being concerned about me taking killing so easily. I can't help it, I don't even know how many million people-stroke-sentient creatures I've killed over the years. It's changed my perspective, I guess. How couldn't it?

Still, Leon said, you talk about killing this fucker like it's the most obvious thing in the world. I understand you want to, and it's the right thing and all, but it creeps me out you take it so casually.

I guess I have other things on my mind, I said. But yeah, killing is horrible. Sometimes I think about what I've done and I don't understand how you can even stand to look at me.

And then we hugged. There was lots of hugging, those days. And we landed and Lucia and I zoomed out in different directions to punch out the nearest guards while Leon shot at the furthest with some stun gun he'd whipped up. Running as fast as I can there's few people who can point a gun at me, so I zigzagged between them breaking their hands without much risk. There was quite a lot of guards. Not to imply it was a challenge or anything. Leon had a force shield or something around him and waded through the bullets without slowing, Lucia got shot down and bounced back up again, and my soulsteel whipped out to deflect any bullets that came my way without me even thinking about it. I figure I was wired tightly that day.

And then came the boss man. The colonel. Maybe his name was Fernando? I should try to remember these things. He had some kind of gadget much like mine, flowed out of his skin and coated his body in thick, reddish iron plates with little spikes. Lucia and Leon stepped away, leaving him just for me. He moved like a train, fast and straight ahead, and when I met him I tried to focus to make a blade thin enough to cut through the armor while he shot a four foot iron nail out of his hand and into my neck.

I spun and fell to my knees, gushing blood everywhere, grasping my throat with one hand and waving defensively with the other. A feeble defense, I suppose, as he closed in to finish me. But the sadistic jerk wanted to draw it out and closed his big hand around my neck and lifted me up and pulled me close enough to see the whites of his eyes through the armor. So I stuck two fingers with soulsteel spikes on them in his eyes, deep into his head where I made them long and thin and whipped them around until his brain poured out of his eye sockets like milkshake.

The soulsteel stitched together my jugular at the same time, too. I had to get a transfusion and lie down most of the way home but that was it. Back home we built a pyre on the edge of the forest outside the base and I burned Jerika's body. And that was that.

Until four years later, which brings us to the point of this story. About a month ago now I had a, why is there no word for it? I want to call it a grief flashback. "At times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow in the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on." You know. Lucia and Leon and me had a little reminiscing, and in the conversations it occurred to me it could happen again. I found that I would do anything to stop that; to avoid someone getting hurt by Mars seeking to hurt me.

So I went into the forest; inside of the forest, where Terra is, to talk to her. My friends came too. Terra managed to get the three of us to Mars, to talk to him. He appeared as a humanoid shape of solid light, much like Terra except angry red instead of warm green. He was surprisingly polite. I surprised myself by being civil. He very much regretted his actions when I told him what he had done to me. It would be good, he said, if he could manage to avoid such atrocities in the future.

I said I was there to make sure he would never again hurt those I loved one way or another. He said he would have no desire to make war on Earth if I would do him a favor. Being prepared to die forever I was rather surprised, but I said I had promised to do whatever it took. Of course, what he wanted was to have sex with me. Never ignore the obvious.

I could give you the long rant about why whoring isn't a big deal to me, but let's just say it isn't. And as I said, I was prepared to pay any price. And you know, I was a little curious. So we dropped to the ground and did it, right on the spot. It was fascinating, and enormously pleasurable.

He sort of solidified, gained contours, became more like a person. Still bright, angry red, still composed of tangible light. Lind of like liquid rubies or fire. And, this is a little weird, but you have to understand the gods influence the world around them, they deform it with their presence. So when I say the cold rage, the hunger and madness that make us do the worst we can to each other and call it war; when this sensation overwhelmed me, I want you to understand that it came from him. And it was beyond anything I have ever felt. The infinite anger of the dragon was nothing compared to this.

It aroused ambition in me, a forceful will I had not felt in years, I thought I had forgotten. We fought as we copulated, struggling to get on top, to take pleasure, to dominate. I was very much lost in the moment. My poor friends, who were transfixed by the display before they could turn away, said later they could not recognize me at all.

And when he came, it burned within me like no heat I've ever felt. Maybe it would have killed anyone less capable of dealing with heat than me, maybe that's why he wanted me.

But I don't think so. I think my gods planned the whole thing together in polite diplomatic fashion. I'm sure Mars knew my time of the century was just right, and he impregnated me so that, with his heir living on Earth, he would have a reason not to attack it. The gods are sneaky like that.

I don't mind, though. Maybe he also wanted to repay that which he took from me. And I'm going to have a baby. It happens so rarely to me I tend to live for such occasions. Though what kind of creature it will be, three quarters nonhuman, I'm a little worried.

In closing, here's a related picture I drew that doesn't suck completely.

Current Location: Classified
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Tracy Chapman - If you wait for me

I call this one, Half full



On December 22 2012 the world ended. Through a series of internal philosophical arguments, linking together with flawless mathematical precision, a young man called San Kung achieved enlightment and elevated his consciousness above the constraints of the mundane world. He demonstrated the power of mind over matter by turning himself into a superman, disintegrating many of the weapons in the world and having sex with a thousand women at the same time. Then he seared through the veils of every single person in the world and exposed them to the light he had seen.

We were all then capable of doing everything we could imagine; indeed incapable of not doing everything we could imagine. The physical world was destroyed almost instantly, torn apart by warring opinions and wills, and abandoned for a realm of pure energy. We fought then, ego against ego, self against not-self. It was a battlefield of imagination and strength of purpose, raging through space and time without end.

Two sides formed, because our perception was still – is still – ruled by duality. It was yin and yang, freedom and control, light and dark, white and black, chaos and order, individuality and unity, courage and compassion, war and peace, life and death, red and blue, anarchy and hierarchy, adventure and stability and every other dualism we could think of. The forces of evil employed tactics, operating with cold logic and merciless clockwork warfare, while the good guys fought with passion, desperation, righteousness and rage. God have mercy on them, they really believed in their cause.

And good triumphed, and covered the entire creation with a perverse, terrible brightness. Wild, joyful laughter echoed through the endless empty potential space. The surviving god-men began to busy themselves with creating an approximation of the world they knew, with planets governed by universal laws like gravity, although the law-making was not in their temperament, and the laws were more like guidelines, or jokes, or playful experiments.

We made a shadow for ourselves, unseen by the light, and found a little bit of peace in the riotous, vibrant world. The teachings of the Outer Church spread over time, and the great white space came to be marred with spots of darkness; small and fragile and surrounded and brave, and constantly fought by the bright emptiness, the forces of good seeking to ultimately eradicate all imperfections.

Out of all the possible realities, of the endless fractal growth of possible moves, I pick one without hesitation, without doubt, without looking back or even thinking about it. That is my skill. I am Colonel Saw, chosen for this rank because of my skill. The enemy close in at us, raw energy moving at relativistic speed, and instantly I choose a move. I haven't told anyone that when I see the innumerable possibilities unfold, I make that choice immediately because they scare the crap out of me and I don't want to look at them. So the enemy close in and I give us all physical form, I make us human like in the old days when time existed.

Clad in flesh, we advance on Dane and his cell. They're guys and we're girls, so we can tell each other apart. They strain to unmake my weaving and lose the substance I have given them but I strain back and we're locked. They turn the ground into a desert of broken glass. It reflects the light of the sky and burns under my feet even though we make boots to step on the glass. We open fire in perfect unison and take out half the cell and scare the other half but they make their guns bigger and nearly blast the ground away from under us. Private Rom and Ram shield us from the worst but Major Sears fall, screaming. Sergeant Tank turns herself into a giant-sized cannon and makes a crater out of Dane and his boys so that's that.

I kneel and cut my knees on the ground to check Sears. She is still with us, but there's blood gushing from her mouth when she tries to talk and she convulses and goes limp before anyone can work a healing, and long before I think of undoing the flesh trap. I look at her dead eyes and try to imagine her going somewhere nice, but I know it's too late. Ego dissipation. Death. I'm not prepared for the flesh interface and I can't help it when the hormones go off and make me cry. I'm in command, damn it.

I have to work to stand up and give the orders. Rom and Ram is already raping the remains of our enemy and Captain Call is watching, laughing. I smile encouragement at them and tell the rest to make it dark. We stand in a circle and shoot a ray of darkness over the sky, negating all light within a cubic parsec or so. It's the job, it's what we're chosen to do, and it has to be done. So much light out there, I don't know how the bastards can stand it.

I don't like desecrating the corpses, really. That's my secret. We should do everything to lower their morale, the meaner and crueller and wickeder the better, we have to make them know we're bad, so bad they can't ever stop us, but I just don't like it. There has to be a better way to do bad. I'm going to think of something soon.

I think my face is showing disgust, Lieutenant Core is looking at me and asking, so I let our bodies melt away and tell Core I'm thinking about Sears, a little vaguely. We have no eyes anymore but I can see Core is sorry.

I give the order to get back and we bob through whitespace back towards the home grids, a little melancholy, a little closely. We can take it easy, we won one after all, and the rich, soothing darkness behind us make me feel damn proud.

But then Call picks up a wave of approaching enemies. It is several cells and none we have classified. Call sends out shock and worry – I can almost see her face from back there when we had bodies twisting in fear – it looks like Red is with them. Goddamn Red, I think, trying to remember how many that bastard has wiped out. And how easily. I shrink the space ahead of us, and then stretch it behind us, putting as much distance I can between us and them. I can feel them tugging back; they eat up the distance faster than we can produce it, even with all of us together.

I've never met a light who could match any of our concerted efforts. Are they learning to work together? Or is Red just that good? Fucking Red. We can't win. If we take them back to base with us maybe they'll take the whole base. That should be more important but damnit, I don't want to get killed. Not by Red.

I clone us a couple of hundred times over, simple copies that don't break the ego laws but hopefully enough to fool Red and the gang. From a distance. Then I tell everyone to split up. We set off in seven hundred directions, a clone of me heading straight to them, Core heads home. I'm not sure if I wanted that. No time to think.

I make speed as fast as I can, pushing asteroids and planetoids behind me to block the way. I'm alone for the first time in my life, and three lights are on my tail, and there's infinite whitespace ahead. I think about how hard it is to kill anyone in the energy state, how unpredictable things get if you try. Should I slow down and fight? I reach back with a mind probe, but they nuke me before I can catch anything.

I pray to the dark for inspiration and then it hits me; I become a black hole. The infinite mass slows my speed so fast I can hardly think before I see them struggling, already caught in the gravity well and trying to think up a way out. I pull, awkwardly with unfamiliar limbs, and one of them gets sucked into me. The light fades, screaming a high-pitched radio wave, panicking and taking some sort of ectoplasm form that can't do shit before its component atoms are torn to shreds.

I catch one of the two remaining lights trying to move backwards and remake the last event sequence. There's a smell of tachyons and shit whenever someone does that, you learn to recognize it, and I reach out with my mind and sort of smack the time vortex thingy into itself so the light becomes inside out time and breaks in 196 833 shards that shatter all over creation. Of all the things we can do to each other I don't know anything that more definitely kills someone. Permanently ends their being, like.

The last light is completely stunned so I turn us into flesh and zap down to the nearest planet. It's an artist planet, something made by someone with great attention to detail. We're standing in a jungle with chirping birds and smell and sound of sea nearby. The coarse earth is warm under my feet and teeming with plant life. Oh, I do love being flesh. I hold him still, he struggles a little but I've got his motive power completely overwhelmed. Probably a newbie. He stops trying to move and looks at me. In his eyes I can see his mind working to find another angle, some way to hit me that I won't expect. I think the look on my face tells him I'm confident I can handle him, because he gets scared and totally loses his concentration.

I tell him if he tries anything I'll hurt him more than he can imagine, and I think he buys it. I ask if we can talk. I tell him I'm Colonel Saw, and then he gets so scared I can smell it in his sweat. His eyes almost fall out of his face. Apparently I'm some kind of celebrity. I ask if there's any one of us he's more scared of, and he says there are a few, but he hasn't heard any definite stuff about them, there's just this vague fear of the leaders of the dark. Hell, I don't know the highest leaders myself. But it seems I'm almost as scary to them as Red is to us.

I tell him about the Outer Church, because I don't know what else I'm going to do. If I finish him off I'll have to fight more. Maybe against Red. So I stall. The light – Daryl – is pretty fascinated. Maybe he's capable of learning to love the dark, or maybe he's stalling to so he gets to live longer. He doesn't get what's so bad about the light that we have to destroy it. I'm starting to figure that we can't win. We can't cover the universe in dark any more than they can wipe it out. In the beginning, I say to Daryl, there was nothing but light, but the dark appeared anyway.

At about this point I let go of the holds. Daryl, free to move, kisses me on the mouth. Flesh has its own appetites. We surrender to them, lose ourselves to each other, and taste the pleasures of the mundane body. It feels good.

We talk, with our mouths. About rejoining the battle. About joining sides. About switching sides. Asking why there has to be war.

We make a mixed dark and light shine around the world; a greyish shade that will avoid the attentions of both sides. Or maybe attract them both. It's a gamble.

The dull light of our sky is bearable for us both. We are in balance. At peace.

Current Location: Blackspace
Current Mood: accomplished

For years man have tried to think of somewhere to put the incredibly dangerous radioactive left-overs of nuclear plant fuel, somewhere out of the way for the next 25 000 or so years.

(It's got a half-life of 25 000 years, or so I heard, which brings up another problem, namely that in twenty-five thousand freaking years the stuff is still HALF as radioactive as today. Maybe it's more like a hundred thousand years before it's safe.)

Anyway, I know where to put it. In two words, cold storage. Super-cold storage, say 25-50° Kelvin or so. It'll slow down the atom movement inside the hot stuff and - I know it in my gut - speed up the decay of the unstable atoms remarkably. It's mostly a matter of how close to absolute zero you can get cheaply; at absolute zero the atoms fall apart immediately and maybe start a chain reaction that disintegrates the Earth. Which is why the absolute zero can never be reached, any more than you can go back in time. But get close enough and we might turn hot plutonium into skin lotion and lawn fertilizer inside months or years instead of millenia.

Sounds swell, doesn't it? Maybe it is. But as far as I know we'd have to either build more nuclear plants to produce the power for these super-cold storages, or shoot the stuff into space which is, after all, an infinitely large and infinitely cold storage room. Maybe aim it into the sun and cut the process short. (No, we can't damage the sun. If pre-crisis Superman punched the entire planet into the sun it might have a small temporary effect.)

Soo that kind of sucks. Maybe we should just stop abusing electric power instead. Yeah, building more nuclear plants isn't the only solution to energy shortage you know.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Ronja

Yesterday I realized what a deeply weird concept it is to plan having kids. Nothing wrong with having them, I guess, I'm guilty of that myself, but planning to have them is something else entirely.

You're creating a person, a small defenseless child that you'll inevitably - to quote The Invisibles - visit your emotional inadequacies on in the process of taking care of it while it grows up. Why are you doing that? Most people get children to give their life meaning or something like that, in essence creating another person for your own sake. I find that terribly presumptuous, arrogant and selfish.

Anything you do to someone else for your own benefit is questionable at best. And what could you do to someone that's more definietly, more un-undoable-y than give them life? To deliberately plan and carry out such a thing with anyone's best interests at heart but theirs is in my book a sin most grave.

Then again, once the kid is born, usually a parent's purpose in life becomes to look out for the kid's best interests. Maybe it's supposed to work the way it does. I just don't get how anyone can plan to have kids.

Current Location: Outside my child
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Johan Rothstein

I have talked to a guy who's developed an algorithm to discern the sound of human speech from everything else. The practical effect of this is that a computer may be made to neutralize, automatically, background noise let you speak on a phone in a noisy environment.

Yeah, you can neutralize sound. If you know exactly what the sound is you can design a counter-sound, a vibration of opposing frequency if you will, that mutes the sound before it reaches the ear. In the future, airplanes will neutralize the sound of their engines in the passenger cabin, so your ears will be happy. (Then they just have to deal with the intense pain of increasing pressure as you land.)

And you'll wear headphones to neutralize annoying and unwanted sounds as you go.

The funny thing is, this speech discerning algorithm works with every know language except Danish.

So as you walk down the street, you'll automatically filter out sound pollution including construction work, car engines, techno music and Danish people.

Well, on the deafult, unintentionally hilarious setting that is. If you think about it, you can filter out any specific sound. Real life will have an Ignore button. How cool is that?

Current Location: Home
Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: A CD with silence that mutes the neighbour's party

I was once sent a video where my daughter was tortured to death by people who wanted to hurt me. It was horrible and painful and guiltful. (Yes, that's a word. Now.) And deeply upsetting and unsettling, disorienting and. . . whatever the adjective is for things that make you angry. But it wasn't as sad as this, admittedly fake comic.

I would enhance the sadness by juxtaposing the strip with a particular song: "Sorgliga sånger" by Johan Rothstein. It's in Swedish, so we're pretty much screwed. All I can do is try to translate the lyrics:

A boy stands on the meadow
in socks and shoes
clean clothes and freshly washed hair
He looks up at the sky
and the sun is nicely warm
He closes his eyes in bliss

He runs home to mommy
to cookies and lemonade
He runs faster than his legs can carry him
It smells freshly baked
the best thing he knows
He closes his eyes in bliss

Yes, things were good, that was what they said
He was told it so many times
But if things were so good
as good as they could get
why do I sing such sorrowful songs?

He bikes down to the road
to meet his dad
He stands and waits
he has longed all day
Daddy arrives in time
he has brought a gift
The boy closes his eyes in bliss

Yes, things were good. . .

He is awake in the night
and scared as a little child
He can't go to sleep so he takes Lergigan
Because his body feels so calm then
and his thoughts run dry
and when he wakes the next morning
things go back to the way they were

Yes, things were good. . .

If I were to listen to that song and look at the Calvin-without-Hobbes strip at the same time I'm afraid my heart would fucking break. So what's to love about all this? The purest, most intense emotions one could hope to experience, that's what. And it's safe, because none of it is real. Funny, I can much more easily allow myself to feel what I'm feeling when a fiction inspires this feeling. When it's real, it gets too much to bear.

But it's good to feel. Makes you more alive.

Current Location: No
Current Mood: Grieving
Current Music: Johan Rothstein

I was out partying the other day. People were drinking, not me of course, I got two reasons not to now. I had a long and invigorating conversation, almost an argument, with a good friend who votes for the party who wants to kick out all the foreigners from the country.

I say there's more important things I care about than what to do with criminals - well, it's mainly criminal immigrants they want to banish - and it's a ridiculous issue to base your entire political platform on, cause I don't it's an issue the government should spend four percent of its resources to deal with and therefore a party dealing only with that issue has no place in the government.

(They don't get in the government either, not yet anyway. Need 4% of the votes to do that.)

For example, I said, I care more about my friend than what to do with criminals. It distresses me to see him base his entire convictions on principles of hate. And his friends who he discusses politics with aren't concerned about immigrants committing crime; they just don't like black people. I see his convictions as a problem that I should help him with, but he has made it clear that we remain friends only as long as we accept each others' opinions.

So I try to explain to him how reality is no more and no less than what you think it is, and he sees black criminals everywhere because it's what he thinks it's important. It didn't help that a black guy was running around waving a broken bottle and shouting angrily behind us at the time. And I didn't see that he was black.

My friend thinks he's accepting reality and fighting it, and I'm closing my eyes to it. I think I'm shaping the reality I want to experience, and that there are many conflicting realities. Now you could be asking, or telling yourself which of us is right, but if you think about it my view allows both of us to be right.

Everyone has conflicting realities. As time progresses - ever faster, it seems - we seem to withdraw further and further from each other to avoid that conflict. There must be a breaking point ahead, where either we become completely isolated and free to experience just what we want; to become, in essence, God, or the deviation between interfacing realities become so great something must be done about them.

We live in a period of transition, of revolution. Its confusing, unsettling, strugglesome and I love it.

Current Location: The City
Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Metallica - Better than you

I wipe the sweat off my face with a heavy hand, unconsciously rubbing my brow to wake up a little more. The curls of hair on my forehead are straight, soaked with sweat. The sheets are twisted into ropes that for an instant seem to bind me down when I sit up on the edge of the bed. I notice I'm in a hotel room. I don't remember where it is or how I got here. It's a worn-down old room with a tiny TV bolted down in front of the double sized bed and a few crumpled roaches on the window board and cracked wallpapers in nothing colors and a dripping faucet in the doorless bathroom and a rusty fan in the ceiling and nothing much else. The sun's coming in at a weird angle, barely leaving any light through the glassless window with its blinds hanging halfway off like a sad flag.

I take all this in in less than a second, and then notice my heavy breath and violent heartbeat. For some reason I'm afraid. Did I have a dream? I don't remember what happened but I guess it must have been a nightmare.

Am I still dreaming?

There's no sound in the entire building or outside. I pick up clothes from the floor, neatly folded like I wouldn't leave them, but it's a white t-shirt and bluejeans that fit me as if they were mine. The jeans are even worn in at the right places. So I'm dressed and walk out the door with a mission, a purpose. I'm going to find out where I am and what I'm doing here. Maybe also how I got here and from where. And where everyone has gone to.

The hotel building is abandoned, I can tell. There's no smell of any living thing, just creaking floors and narrow hallways and stairs leading me down to the street. Everything seems to be covered in a thin layer of filth, dust or dirt. My feet get dirty as I walk in a spiral out from the building, street after street with no sign of life. In one of a thousand dark windows I spy some movement, but I decide it's a hallucination caused by stress and wishful thinking.

There are no clouds in the sky, nor any sun. I stop at an intersection and look up and try to think, but there's some padded resistance in my mind and the thoughts slip away. I forget something and start walking again, feeling kinda absent. A thin whistle comes sneaking out of nowhere, growing in volume so slowly that once I hear it, it's like it's always been there in the background. It grows unbearably loud, a grating rumbling as if the air, or the sky itself, was tearing. There might be a distant siren too, but I can't really hear it over the noise.

I fall on my knees and cover my ears, pushing until I realize I might crush my skull with my hands. I think it's more of a shockwave than a soundwave by now. I feel something wet in my ear and realize I'm about to pass out.

Just before I close my eyes the bomb lands right in front of me. I can see the blunt tip burrowing into the ground, the asphalt opening like thick licorice sauce. Everything's so slow, incredibly slow, more than any amount of adrenaline or synaptic manipulation could do. I can see the flash of light growing, like a spark, even though I should be blind before my eyes know what hit them. The heat blast hit me at fifteen hundred kilometers per second and should atomize my body long before my nerves can react, but still I feel it. It's warmer than anything I've felt in my whole life, and I can't decide if I'm happy or scared. But then I'm scared, cause I realize the sound is going to hit me next, sound loud enough to vaporize me, and my ears already hurt so bad. Why doesn't it come?

And I wake up, still feeling the echo of the pain. Or it hurts because I'm still pushing my hands against my ears. I open my eyes and see a ceiling. I'm in a double sized bed in a run-down hotel room and it feels disturbingly familiar.

Should be because I went to bed here last night, I tell myself and lie still and try to remember what dream it was that made me hurt myself. Ears are still sore. It was something about a bomb. The sky outside the window distracts me, it's heavy and white with something not quite snow clouds. I get up and have a look at the snow, big fluffy flakes drifting slowly through the air. It must be cold, there's not even any glass in the window, but then I can't really feel cold that easily. After a minute I realize it's ash, not snow. Is there a volcano having an eruption nearby? Nobody seems concerned. I can see people on the street walking around in unmistakable small town strides, greeting each other and taking it easy. The sounds in the building tell me the guests are feeling well and the staff's untroubled.

I put my clothes on with an exhibitionist's sigh of regret and walk to the door, vaguely noticing a weird resistance. When I open the door I suddenly have to hold onto it to keep from falling back; the room's leaning at least forty-five degrees. I climb over the threshold and stare down the vertical abyss of the corridor and suddenly I can't think of anything to do except stumble backwards and try to get a grip on the situation, but the room heaves in the middle of my step and throws me out into the black. I fall too fast, the light of the open door fade into a tiny blip and disappear and I see nothing more.

Fighting the panic, I let the soulsteel flow out of my arms and hips and shape glider wings, somewhere between a bat's and a dragonfly's. They break my fall and let me feel my way around for something to hang onto. If I can just find a wall I'd have some stable point to build on and I could take it from there and I'd feel great, even though it's harder to climb than it is to glide.

But the darkness seems to stretch infinitely in all directions and I feel very small and powerless. I scream and I don't hear an echo, and I scream in case someone can hear me, and I scream just to hear something, and then I scream in complete horror.

And I wake up with the scream in my throat and sit up in the bed with my heart pounding. For a moment, I remember everything but then I just remember the dark and the loneliness and I lie down and stare at the ceiling fan with my right arm across my forehead. My left hand wanders, stroking my body to make sure it's there and for the sake of cheap pleasure. Absently, I let the hand caress my crotch and one breast and then the other. I don't feel very enthusiastic - in fact, I seem unable to avoid smiling derisively over my own decadence - but my body answers readily enough.

But I tear myself away from the thrills of the flesh and thoughtfully rest my hand on my face instead. I stroke a finger along the scar, from the eye almost all the way down to the jaw, a crooked and uneven line over my cheek, and then up again.

I don't remember where I am or how I got there and I don't feel much like getting out of bed, but my belly comes to life with a hungry growl so I spring to action before I get incapacitated.

The hotel restaurant says breakfast is on the house, lucky me, I doubt I have any money, so I sit down at one of several empty tables with a plate full of toast, cold and hard, and damp slices of cheese sealed in plastic and - strangely enough - a big glass of nice fresh orange juice. It's been a long strange night, I think, vaguely glad it's over, when a cloud of insects pour out from the kitchen area. I know, with dreamlike clarity, the bugs are so poisonous even I can't handle them, and before I know it I'm running for the exit. There's a family sitting at one of the innermost tables. They fall down before they can stand up. The boy can't have been older than eight, I think, and his feeble cry ring in my ears while I run away. I'm so sorry, I whisper to him, I couldn't do anything.

Outside I run into a mist and for a second I'm afraid it's my own mist, the red mist, the dragon that can't be tamed. But it's normal mundane mist, white, so thick I can't see more than twenty meters. Far away, maybe half a kilometer, I hear some twisted sounds, a mixture of tormented screams and half intelligent grunts, like a flock of pigs was out hunting and signalling to each other. Thick groans from pigs the size of houses. Sighing slippery sloshes from giant squids climbing on house walls.

I bounce off a streetlight up to a roof without even thinking about it, trying to focus on moving in a straight direction as fast and as far as I can, because it seems like the most natural thing in the world to get away from here. Something is wrong, something that can't be fought, something not even I stand a chance against, and my guts tell me something's coming for me and I trust it.

I run in a straight line for what feels like half an hour, skipping from roof to roof, sometimes without seeing where I'm going. I'm not tired yet, but I stop to catch my breath and a creature staggers out of the mist towards me on four legs. I can see steaming hot blood squirting out of its joints with every step. It's got four human arms and no head, except an opening between the front shoulders that look like a mouth. It moans with a hint of lust and jumps for me and I analyze its skill without thinking. Warrior's habit, I guess. It possesses a great deal of aggression but no balance. The soulsteel flows out of my hand and shapes a blade that nearly cuts it in half. I feel a little laid-back as I sidestep and twist to avoid the gush. Whatever the thing is, it screams surprisingly loud and spurt out a foul-smelling substance that could hardly be blood all over the place.

I can feel the fear and uncertainty boiling away in the rush of combat. It feels great to be able to fight instead of going on thinking about questions I can't answer. So I set off in hopefully the same direction as before and smile. A while later I run into another monster, something birdlike about four meters tall with three thin arms with too many joints and huge claws instead of hands or paws or whatever it is birds have. It's slowly rocking back and forth like it's trying to hypnotize me. Or seduce me. It's got a beak in its face that opens and produces a coarse scream and I don't hesitate to attack it. I jump up to its chest height and shape a smooth, curved blade on my right arm from the elbow down past the fingertips and twist to the left to cut it and then impale it on my left elbow.

But I land on my side, hard, on the brick surface behind him. I'm disoriented and trying to figure out what happened. He doesn't seem to have any substance; I went through him without resistance. I'm trying to breathe and move when two claws come down on the sides of my head and tear me into the air. I grab the claws and try to break free though they cut to the bone of my hands. The tips dig into my temples and I start to worry about my health when I come eye to eye with the bird guy's expressionless face. I look at him and don't notice the third claw coming from above and cutting my head off.

I'm terribly, awfully awake and trying to scream but I don't have any lungs. I can hear my body hitting the ground with a loud thud. The feeling of being unable to move falls away along with everything else and the unconsciousness comes over me like mercy.

And I wake up and grab my throat desperately and stare up at the sky and convulse violently, once, and draw a shivering uncertain breath. I swallow and close my eyes and try not to cry and don't notice where I am at first.

Stifling a sob that wants to turn into a long wail, I open my eyes and find that I'm leaning on a concrete wall, on asphalt covered with litter and dirt, and I'm dressed. The sky, far above between the buildings, is clear and blue. The impressions on my skin tell me I've lain here all night, in a garbage heap. I remember parts of the last two dreams. I wonder I'm going mad and bite my lip to wake up and touch my throat again and shake through a silent sob.

Darkness sweeps across the sky in a few seconds and lights come on in the windows and I stand and stare, supporting myself against the wall, unable to muster the energy to move. I feel utterly lethargic. Then I hear a thick, scraping sound from behind and stagger away without looking back. I can think clearly now and formulate the hypothesis that this city, this weird small town that's big as a big city, that I've never been in before, has trapped me and torture me with unending nightmares. No matter if I'm awake or asleep, no matter if I can wake completely, or if there is such a thing, the only thing I have to do is get out of here. The only thing I can do. So I walk down the street with heavy steps, followed by sounds that may be my echo, though sometimes there's that scraping sound too.

After about ten minutes I find a bigger road and follow it towards something that feels like the city limit. Stars twinkle in the sky, did they used to be there? I think the horrors are over.

But where the road signs say there should be a highway there's just a hole in the ground. I can't see the bottom or the other side in the dark, and on the right and left sides there's wastelands that look somehow very uninviting, though it's only weed and rocks and a few car wrecks, crisscrossed with barbed wire fences to mark property limits. Without thinking I coil up - the scraping sounds very close now - and let the soulsteel flow into my legs and reinforce the muscle and bone and jump fifteen meters up and stretch out my wings and glide into the hole in front of me. I can land on the ground or on the wall, and climb up. I can handle a hole. I chalk up the uneasy feeling from one of the dreams where I was flying, but it seems unlikely the same nightmare would be repeated. If something happens I can flap my wings and work my way up in the air. I try not to think about the fact I can't do that for very long.

Far below there seems to be something, maybe lava, and I look at it until I nearly hit my head on the rock wall. I've never seen such an inviting piece of earth, and I lunge for it. But it seems to be closing too fast. Maybe I'm flying faster than I thought, I think. But I look behind me and feel lethargic again when I see the other wall closing in on me with incredible speed. I climb as fast as I can, but I don't have a chance. I think about digging a hole just when I'm crushed between the walls.

And I wake up sitting on a wooden bench, resting on a table. I fight down the hopelessness that threatens to drown me and look around what seems to be a small Italian restaurant. Behind me is a glass wall with a view of an empty street. The room is empty, but I can smell lingering scents of food, cigarette smoke and human. Feels nice.

Have I been here all along, I say out loud, cause that's how it feels. The dreams fade to distant memories and I'm sure that uneasy feeling is gone. Maybe, I think, the memory of that uneasy feeling is fake, maybe my emotional experience has been manipulated or maybe I've just gotten used to the constant surrealistic, slightly off sense, as if an alien intelligence had made a copy of reality that's indefinably wrong. None of these possibilities interest me, so I walk out into the sunshine and decide to go south.

On top of a very tall building I don't recall seeing before, I see the figure of a man, impossibly clear at this distance. He raises his arms and laughs, a thunderous joyless laugh that I shouldn't be able to hear so well and a layer of blood pour over the sky and turns it angry red. The sun shines through like the angry eye of a dragon that barely lights the day, and the city seems to come alive. I can see twenty or thirty movements in the corner of my eye, and think vaguely of psychological stamina, unconsciously moving in the direction that seems to have the least signs of life in it. In the dusk and shadows I can't really see the twisted things I'm up against, but they're many and they move purposefully, if pathetically wobbling on their crooked legs, and make sounds of equal parts rage and hunger and pity and pain. They gather in a large group in front of me, two of them bumping into each other, the bigger one putting something into the smaller one and pushing it down on the ground. The two of them spasm and twitch and make sounds of satisfaction and pain, respectively. I realize I'm watching a rape and try not to throw up and manage to turn away and run.

A vague fear keeps me from going up to rooftop height, and with no clear path to take I instinctively feel like hiding, so I break through a window and into a house. The sounds and motions outside suddenly seem far away and unimportant. I seem to be in a very ordinary home. Probably belonging to an old woman, judging by the very snug and covered in little decorations and keepsakes sitting room. There's no smell of anyone present.

In the kitchen, I find a fridge full of useful things. I eat a whole pack of butter, forcing it down while pinching my nose. It's so gross, but there's almost no better way to get a quick boost of energy. I take a mouthful of sugar and wash it down with milk and grab a bag of sausages to eat on the road. I make my way through rows of buildings, leaping from one window to the next, collecting about a dozen cuts on my forearms and noticing how every building seems closer than the last. Eventually I get to a building wall to wall with another, and open one window, kick in the next and step through.

I recognize this hallway. It's the hotel I slept in, or dreamt that I slept or whatever. It seems like a step backward but I can't think of anything to do except following the hall to the end.

I walk past several bricked up, boarded up or simply disappeared doors and go up some stairs. For a while the world seems to turn around and I fall up about twenty floors through the stairwell. I'm pretty sure the hotel had only three floors and I'm very sure I'm dreaming now, when I land in a skewed corridor like a dark tunnel with a little light shining at the end. Torn between the slough of despair and the survival instinct that tells me to keep moving, I walk towards the light.

It's a broken door leading into a room like many others in the hotel. It's a little better than mine, with a half-sized kitchen and a separate bedroom and a room with a lonely comfy chair in front of a television. I wonder what I'm doing and why I'm here while I look through the room, or of it's a suite, for maybe thirty seconds. When I come out of the bedroom I see the TV is on and showing quiet static; what we used to call and wars when I was a kid. I don't know why I bother but I try to make sense of it, when I notice the shape in the chair. A fat man with a bullet hole in his head. He's apparently shot himself, but there's no weapon. The blood's still running down the wall behind him.

I run away so maybe I don't have to think about how that could possibly happen, and for once it works. I can't seem to think coherently at all. I get the feeling my head is somehow locked. I run without wanting to, without being able to stop or decide my direction. In some underground back alley sort of thing I stop and wake up and hear a human voice. A crying girl. I spot her sitting in a corner with her legs drawn up and her arms crossed and her face hidden. I think about who would do this to a child and I'm overwhelmed with anger and compassion. I sit down in front of her, slowly, trying not to frighten her.

I ask her if she can help me and she gives me a curious look. She doesn't say anything so I tell her my name and what I remember and what I think is happening, because I think it might make her talk but then I realize it's mostly because I want to talk. She seems totally nonverbal. Shock, I assume, hugging her tenderly and patiently and feeding her a sausage. I tell her everything is going to be fine and I'm going to help her and even though she doesn't realize it, she's helping me. She takes my hand and we walk side by side up a stairway of steel to the ground level. Things seem calm, though the blood red sky is still there.

The girl runs amazingly fast into another alley, maybe to hide again, so I follow her. The idea of leaving her doesn't occur to me. I hesitate, afraid to scare her, and don't catch up with her until she hits a dead end. She turns around and looks me straight in the eye and her eyes are glowing red balls. She smiles kindly and walks towards me and grows with every step until she towers over me, enormous, and I throw myself out of the way just before her foot comes down on me. I tumble through a door into a garage, with room for maybe a hundred cars.

I don't have a plan, I don't have a thought in my head when I go out through the front door and resume walking down the street. The scraping sound behind me is back. Tears run down my cheeks. A stone cuts into my foot, that's weird, it never happens, and so I limp onward leaving a trail of blood. I shake and feel some biting sensation in my flesh and wonder if I'm cold.

In the middle of the road I stop, unable to move on. Something soft and invisible and impenetrable blocks the way. Another alley seems to call out to me, a narrow passage between two high-rise buildings with laundry hanging on lines between them. In the darkness there's Jerika standing, waiting for me. Jerika in her pretty blue dress with a dandelion in her hair and a smile of naked longing. Jerika who died at sixteen but now she's seven and whispers don't cry mommy and hugs me when I fall on my knees before her and quivering gasping weeping give up.

I say I'm sorry and close my eyes drive my hand through her ribcage. The soulsteel rests. You have to do these things with your own hands. When it's your children and your friends you have to kill them with your hands.

Mommy, says Jerika, like a question, a feeble little voice drowning in the bubbling bright blood pouring from her. I don't move, don't open my eyes, don't breathe. I try not to feel the wetness running over my arm and stomach and thighs, try not to feel the beating of the tiny heart weakening every second, the lungs squeezing my wrist like warm water balloons when she breathes, the torn flesh twitching in shock, the thin defenceless arms that won't let go but hold me even harder because she's scared and trusts her mother and wants to be comforted; try not to feel the final tremble when the little body goes still.

I stand there on my knees for a while, breathing hard and trying not to have a nervous breakdown, until a fierce grip around my neck forces me up on my toes and then throws me down on my back. I don't resist, I've forgotten my rage and my strength and my soulsteel, I barely look at this new enemy. It's got a way too big head without a neck, a conical body with four muscular arms and two rudimentary legs. It's got an enormous eye and a wide mouth with hundreds of triangular piranha teeth and a long, thin tongue running in and out like a snake's. It drools copiously, drenching me, and tears off my clothes and grab my wrists and ankles and pin me down with its enormous weight as if I was resisting. It smells sour and rotten and washes my face with its tongue and pushes against my sex, probing.

A prehensile penis opens up my labia and slides in, greasy, thin and far too long. It's sharp and penetrates all the way to my heart. I've not even begun feeling humiliated or anything when I black out.

I wake up slowly, first of all aware of sunlight on my skin and birdsong in the air. Everything is bright and soft, thick expensive bed sheets making a pleasant scratchy sound when it brushes against my skin. I remember everything and understand it had to be a dream because I remember how I got here. I'm at Lucia's place, and everything that happened after last night must have been a dream.

I don't think it was a regular dream, though. I can still feel the fear and sorrow and despair and I cry, unwillingly, violently. Lucia, sleeping close to me, wakes up scared and asks what's wrong and strokes my cheek and turns my face against hers. I look into her eyes and see her sleepy, confused concern and realize I'm not sure if I'm still dreaming. I swear and pull away and try to make myself accept the possibility that this is real. I have to take that chance, I have to believe Lucia is my friend and want to help me. Or I'm never going to have a moment's peace again.

I tell her everything, sniffling and babbling, face buried in her chest. She holds me and I feel her body being racked and torn by compassion and I love her for caring about me. I rest my hand on the curve of her cheek and look her straight in the eye and tell her I don't know if she is real, and my voice cracks with fear.

Lucia doesn't look away and doesn't worry about my touching her even though she knows I could snap her neck like a twig. Yes, she says, indecisive, you know there is no way for me to prove to you that I'm not a dream. She gives me a sad smile and caresses my neck. You just have to trust me, she says. I can see my reflection in her eyes and see my face twist into a grimace of pain and hold her close and cry again. I weep like a little child. I cry my fucking heart out. I think it's mostly because I'm so glad it's over.

Then the bed sucks me in and Lucia disappears and I fall into a swirling cosmic abyss and wake up under the all too familiar rusty ceiling fan.

Current Location: Nightmare City
Current Music: Silent Hill soundtrack

So there I am wandering alone the city, late at night and accompanied by nothing but rain. The streets are deserted. I'm reminded of my childhood village where you could sneak out and run around naked and nobody would ever see you. It was thrilling, somehow. Knowing that I'm invisible, I feel a surge, a tingle between my legs. The hair on my arms and in the back of my neck stand up. If I wanted, i could tear off my clothes right here and now and run around in the rain, a child again. It'd be so liberating.

Mel Gibson's voice whisper in the back of my head telling me I'm too old for this shit, but I disagree. I'm just taking it easy, enjoying the feeling of the rain hitting my forehead, soaking in my hair and my clothes. I've got a white t-shirt on and it's taking on a slight dull grey shade as it's beginning to become see-through. Maybe that's erotic enough for me and I don't need to strip. Or I'm just in the mood to take it easy.

I imagine, as I've done a thousand times before, the rain as a lover, its hundred wet fingers slithering over my skin with the most gentle touch of the fingertips. I stop walking without really thinking about it and close my eyes and throw my head back as slow as I can, savoring every beat of my racing heart.

Then I snap out of it and spend a few minutes looking at an array of lava lamps in a display window. They remind me of another night just like this. That time I lost myself in the swirling colors and entered Nirvana, or something. This time I tear myself away and climb up the wall of the house without causing any property damage.

Up on the roof there's a completely deserted world. No one can see me, no one's going to pass by. I can't help myself; I peel off the shirt and my blue jeans and my still pretty much unsoaked panties and lie down. The tin plated roof is rough against my back, and so cold from the rain I can feel it through my skin, in my flesh. It's refreshing to feel things like that sometimes, I think.

I roll over on my belly, putting my elbows down so my nipples barely touch the metal, gasping involuntarily. It's even better than I thought, although that's usually the case with my nipples. I rub them against the smooth, cold, wet surface, struggling not to scream in ecstacy.

And then i glue my wet clothes back on, heart pounding, galvanized. I can feel every movement of the raindrops ten feet around me. My senses are sharpened to electric clarity. I'm utterly, cataclysmically, orgasmically alive; truly, madly, deeply alive. I run like the wind, leaping from roof to roof, bounding and rebounding like a pinball between chimneys and slanted rooftops, tumbling and rolling and ignoring the throbbing cry of need from between my legs.

Eventually, exhausted, I curl up against a wall that's kind of sheltered from the rain and slide a hand in my pants without looking and fill that need, and I fall asleep still convulsing, still weeping with pleasure, not very alone at all.

Current Mood: relaxed

Blackmore's night is one of those bands you're likely to have never heard of. But that doesn't mean it's like Dashboard confessional or Tyrannousar hyperdeath or any of those decidedly indie bands. There's no angst, no fear of being commercially aviable, no experiments in electronic sounds (that I know of anyway). Mostly they seem to make almost folk song-like songs. I can't tell really, I just listen to two songs of theirs, instrumentals called Lullaby and Ancient Sojourn.

The latter is what I'm listening to right now, while the night goes on just to my left. I opened my balcony door, cause the weather is so warm (in April, already) and it doesn't quite feel like any kind of night to stay inside anything. Opening the door blurs the line of inside and outside; I'm breathing outside air, and that doesn't just mean I can feel the pine scent of the wood down there. It's. . . hard to explain to city folks.

Concrete kids, we called them in the village, back when I lived in the village and everyone lived in the village and nobody lived anywhere else. Concrete as in made up of dead, grey, artificial slabs that never knew the magnificent desolation, the endless wilderness of the land outside of the big cities. There is, I kid you not, a dead look in the eye of someone who's never seen a real forest. I'm not saying that to feel superior, if anything I feel pity.

So anyway, this song seems to be about walking and adventure and romance in the big forest. Imagine some hundred million years ago, when the Black forest covered most of Asia, Africa and Europe. Listen to the song. You can almost hear the soft creak of leather straps as the packages grind against the bodies of the wanderers; the shuffling sound of feet stepping in deep moss layered with seasons worth of fallen leaves; the whispering of the wind in the trees above you; the call of the cuckoo from far away.

The cuckoo is a strange bird, as any fan of Sandman would tell you. But beside the parts about mind control and laying eggs in other's nests, it's got an almost mythical quality, a bond with the "forestness" of the forest. This is how the old people say: When you walk deep into the forest, you'll hear the cuckoo from even deeper in. And when you follow it you'll get ever deeper in, but you'll never see the bird. They say if you find the place where the cuckoo sings, you find the heart of the forest.

The distinctive song, as they call it, can be heard from so far away. . .

Of course, I myself have been closer to the heart of the forest than anyone else. But I haven't found any cuckoos there.

I'm taking in the night and waiting for the summer to get a firmer hold on this Northern land. When the sun seems never to set, or if it does it goes away for just a little bit, so you never forget it. And it never gets very dark. I'm waiting for the endless bright warm summer nights, when everything seems possible, and the adventures are sweet and kind.

Because there will be adventures, oh yes. There's always adventure.

I drew this picture the other day. Maybe it wanted to say these things, and I only found the words today:

Current Location: Some magical far away place.
Current Mood: Mystic
Current Music: Guess.

I'm drunk on Pepsi and playing "Wind of change" by the Scorpions over and over. Its a wake.

Who's dead? Sweden's government is. We had an election today and the other guys won. The right side. The grab-what-you-can guys. They you-can-be-a-winner guys. The let's-privatize-healthcare guys. Fucking animals. They think we have to fight each other over everything. A child could see the best way forward for this world, the best way for us humans to act like humans, is to work together. If we could just trust each other, we'd see that what a man can do for himself is always less than what he can do for others.

They're not just ignorant, they're plain blind. They don't see that everyone can't be a winner. They honestly believe that everyone has in her- or himself the power to make things better for him- or herself. They do not understand that there are people who can't fight for themselves. And they do not understand that for someone to win something, someone else has to lose something.

The winds of change are blowing. It's cold. The winter is coming. The weak will not survive; the blue parties are effectively killing their opposition. Just because a bunch of stupid, rich kids got the vote and thought it'd be cool and interesting to change things; that the old prime minister was too boring, too predictable. Everyone wants a revolution but nobody wants to pay, I guess.

I didn't want a revolution. I want the people who decide where my next meal is coming from to be predictable and dependable. And I want them to care about people more than profits.

Red is my favourite color. Among other things, it can mean war. But I can't go to war against my country. A country is its people, did you know that? The people has decided. I guess I'll just emigrate to Polynesia if it gets too bad.

Here's to Swedish socialism. We had a good run.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: See above.

Today I'd like to present to you a short story. I like to think it's sufficently Kafka-esque in atmosphere to deserve the name it borrows from a story of his, but maybe I'm just flattering myself. Nonetheless, I give you:

The Transformation

A lonely young man named Giles wakes one morning with his hands transformed into Rodinian things. The master sculptor's genius sinews and muscles play in the dusty morning light and cast shadows so sharp they seem to cut his skin. The grotesquely large and detailed things prevent his work, amusement and masturbation. Pencils, papers, controllers and keyboards break easily and defeated the man walks to a nearby bar to drown his sorrows.

It is the first time he visits a bar and he manages to forget his troubles for a while, as he learns the rules and traditions of drinking. And when the bartender notices his delicately crafted giant hands, glinting like bronze gods in the soft light, Giles turns to the centre of attention. He gets to crack nuts, arm wrestle and pet the bar cat who normally steers clear of all human contact. An innocent young woman, who have heard the rumors about the relation in size between a man's hands and certain other parts of his body, drag him home with her.

Once there Giles learn that his hands, almost without his volition, feel and satisfy the woman's needs with outstanding results. They enter a relationship after a long night where it seems, to them, they redefine the concept of sex. After careful consideration Giles begins a career as a whore combined with a passionate, intense and innovative debate for the rights of his vocation. It is old traditions, prejudice and irrational fear, he says, that makes prostitution out worse than it needs to be.

Indeed he succeeds, in cooperation with several like-minded people, in washing the stamps from this oldest of service professions and separating it from criminal elements. A crime is something that hurts someone, he says in a speech that is broadcast on live television, unlike sex between consenting adults. The people cheer and the cameras follow him as he receives a dollar bill from a less than attractive woman and kiss her with great elation.

After his fifteen minutes in the light Giles disappear from the public consciousness, and the most interesting things that happen to him are threats from feminist and masochist groups, fighting over who gets to tear him apart. The woman has long since left him and started a family of her own, although she visits him more or less regularly for emotionless but spectacular sex. He wants to talk to her but she pays him to shut up. The man dies on a cold Thursday morning, alone and poor.