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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Friday, November 30, 2007

I Know Why the Freed Bird Flies

        I had one of those alternate lifeline dreams where I seemed to live through all the highlights of another life, not my own. In this one I was a man who had really well honed robotic construction skills, but really poor luck with choosing significant others. This was a life full of tragedy. His (my) first love as a teen was killed in a post graduation car crash. He created a small statuette of her as a memorial. And so began a lifetime of apparently cursed relationships. Friends and family fell to a plague of some sort, as did his first wife.  He outlived his second and third wives as well, each falling to cancer while still relatively young.

        Again, as a memorial I made small statuettes of each of them. I was happy for many years working on artificial animal robots for an ecology department at a major university. The animalbots were used to follow the migration paths of the declining populations in the world. Climate change had accelerated quite a bit.

        I retired, but used the money from a patent sale to build a flock of 15 ducks. They had advanced sensors that allowed them to dodge shot and to locate viable water and forage from a distance. They were powered by some form of fuel cell that was easily re-fueled by eating any vegetable matter. The birds were released to help the last known migrating flock of wild ducks find usable food and water in an increasingly hostile world.

        I broke out of the point of view character at that point (I think he/I died.) Jumping forward into the future I came across the flock, now only about 30 strong, and one of the mechanical ducks had failed. I took it home and opened it up. Inside was one of the statuettes that the other me had made of lost loved ones over the years. I managed to discover the trouble with the mechanical bird, and after many long days in the basement shop of my home, I managed to rebuild the bird. I recorded the message that was included in the bird, scanned the statuette and then posted it online, without explaining the source. I then released the bird back into the wild, where it winged away, flying at great speed to return to the job of shepherding the last flock of wild ducks in North America.

        I immediately planned to go and add a pond and forage to the property I was living on, so the flock would have one more safe haven along its migratory path. I felt like I was part of something oddly primal, despite the obvious high tech overtones.

Ad astra per technica,

FF

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