Abstract Dream and Alien Acrobats

I was looking at a plane, it had a black empty squiggle through a field of dark green so dark as to almost be black. Along what might be described as the shore of the pitch black river, twisting through the plain were spots of greenscreen green lights. I moved closer to the shore of the darkness and could make out small dashes of green, where they overlapped and reinforced themselves they were brighter. Along the shore there were grids and random patterns of the dashes that almost looked like the lights of a city from the air, except they were all dashes and green. There were some islands of light in the river of darkness, they were more congested and thus brighter than the places along the shore. I felt the program start. I was a small "A" shaped set of dashes in the stream, SP was a "0-=" shaped set of dashes. I am not sure how I knew it was SP, but I did. We were patrolling for pirates. As the simulation ran I found one of the islands rushing towards the shore. I tried to find a way to slow them down, they turned and crashed into the shore. Dashes flared and dimmed as they moved randomly everywhere. I noticed the shimmering as the structure broke up and the individual dashes swept out across the plane. I zoomed out and saw a similar thing happening everywhere along the river. Especially where SP and I had tried to intervene. The simulation was reset, and run again. We tried even harder to get things to run smoothly, at one point we came across a "Y" and "X" shaped pirate swarm, they were shooting at one of the islands. We swarmed down on them in a scene reminiscent of the old Space Wars video game. Our ammunition seemed to be tiny bright dots, the only shape in the simulation that wasn't a dash, until I realized the dots were the intersection of an "*" of dashes that whirled madly as they approached their target. On striking the target broke up and became ineffective. SP was struck by the pirates and lost half of her '=' suddenly she couldn't move as fast. I told her to hit "S" even though there didn't seem to be a keyboard involved for me. A glowing circle of intertwined dashes appeared around her icon. The pirate "*"s whirled off of her shield, shattering into their dim components. Each strike took a few dashes out of her shield. The pirates defeated, I zoomed out. Again, every island we'd attempted to influence and therefore all of the shore lines were disrupted. The simulation was reset again. This time we focused on just taking out the pirates, before they could attack an island cluster (I was starting to think of them as cargo or colony ships.) The Islands moved very slowly with no interference from us or the pirates. They turned gracefully and altered their shapes at the last moment to dock perfectly with the city like shore features. After mopping up pirates, SP and I also were able to successfully dock with a shore line city, where all of our damage was repaired. After a few minutes, the newly reconfigured Islands launched themselves into the dark river, and began to move up and down stream towards far shores, where I somehow knew they would be starting new shoreline features and sending dashes into the dark but not completely black interior. I found that SP and I could escort some of the island caravans for some sort of profit. We were not the only guardian vessels in the simulation. There were many others like us, but typically they stayed with their own fleets. We were the only mixed flight in the simulation. As we pulled back to scan for pirates, I noticed that I had a display of slightly over 100 dashes, they were replenishing about 6 a second, and I used about 12 a second at full thrust. It looked like a shot cost 4 dashes and the shield was a full 36 dashes. I think I had Power, Thrust, Hull, Weapons, Shield, Generators. The Generators added Dashes to the Power store, the Thrust, Weapon and Shield areas funneled those power dashes into usable form, and the Hull was the shape holding all of the components together. Despite the linear nature of the record and how it reminded me of a spaceship simulation, there was the feeling of organic control, almost like it was a personal projection into this nearly two dimensional world. SP and I got the bright idea to merge our two avatars. We were successful and able to create the dreaded double shot which was 6 dashes, and spinning at twice the speed. It tore apart pirate "X" and "Y" fighters in a single hit, as well as making short work of the pirate mother ship when we finally discovered it. It was sort of like a computer virus, spitting out little Pirate fighters in every direction. There was no real sign of intelligence in the motor ship or the small fighters.

I was part of a performance troupe that had become stranded on a small world when our theater engagement fell through. The theater had burned down. We were trying to make some money by performing on the street, but kept getting rousted by the local constabulary. Eventually we met a group of four armed long Blue-chalky-fur covered aliens. Their mouths were just above their stomachs, and they had an incredible sense of balance. They were also stranded. They were originally a singing group, although their music sounded like Kodo drumming. We taught them some of our acrobatics, and made drums for some of our members. They really liked the funny clicking noises we could make and so we combined our act. First job was at a human owned circus. The aliens in the crowd went wild when we came on and started drumming with the songs, and then when we started making pyramids and tumbling down from a six alien high tower then thrown from level to level back to the top, all the while drumming, juggling and adding human song, the humans in the crowd went crazy as well. We had a multi species standing ovation. Ed Sullivan was in the audience. He made his way back stage to our tent, and started a bidding war with the Circus owner and The Welk Show (not Mr. Welk himself, he'd dead.) The eight foot tall alien band leader and myself listening and weighing the arguments. The alien band leader had trouble taking me seriously, as I sounded like a baby to him. I tried to explain that he sounded like thunder. He had no idea what thunder was. That is what convinced him to go with the Welk show, he wanted to come to earth and hear thunder.