Black and White Birthday, with Zombie

I was out looking at critters in a pet store, and there were several of my friends with me. We left without me buying anything, as I was concerned about the pool in the back yard (the fish were taking over) and the zombie in the basement. I really didn't have room for pets, and hoped against hope that they weren't thinking of getting me a new pet, as I was having trouble keeping up with the koi in the garden pool. The house wasn't ready for a party either, every horizontal surface was filled up with Lego based game prototypes that needed to be broken down and stored away. After photographing them, I figured, I checked my phone, over 8Gb of memory left, so no problem there. I slipped out of the store and headed home ahead of the crowd, they said they were going to stop somewhere for lunch. I cleared out all the Lego constructs surrounding the pool so that my birthday friends could use the pool area if they wanted. I kept dropping pieces off of the contructs into the pool. I tried fishing out the Lego pieces I'd dropped - a bunch of 1x1 round and cone-shaped bricks in long antennae-like chains, mostly yellow and light blue. (Everything else in the dream seemed to be black and white, mostly.) The fish (Beautiful black spots on white koi) in the pool kept hitting the chains of bricks, knocking them even further apart. After dropping an entire space shuttle model and watching it carreen down the stairs into the basement, bouncing and knocking bits off as it tumbled from step to step. I decided to head down there and deal with the basement zombie so that my guests would have some place to gather. The zombie, wearing a black and white checked clown outfit, would stop attacking if someone agreed to play a card game with him. It was a collectable cardgame sort of thing, and he had the two decks already made up. As long as thew game was in progress, the zombie wouldn't bother anyone. If you lost your game against the zombie, he would eat you, of course. I started the game, then left to finish cleaning up the dropped Legos. As I was taking the Legos back upstairs to my room, I was a little worried about leaving the game table after my turn, but figured the zombie would just have to wait. I heard the house manager saying my guests were arriving and they offered to usher them into my room - which I knew was way to small for everyone. I explained the issue, and as I came back from dumping a few pounds of Legos in various states of contruction, or destruction, into my room, I realized I wasn't even going to have room for me in there. I could only barely make out the fact that I had a black an white checked bedspread and pillow shams. The zebra patterned rug on the floor was barely visible between the desk, printer stand, office chair, file cabinets, book cases, piles of Lego and paper models and my bed. I sighed, wondering how it had gotten all so crowded. I shouted down to the house manager to ask my guests to wait in the frontroom until I could get the fish out of the pond and the Zombie settled. I was a bit worried about the zombie, as I was pretty sure he cheated. I found a couple of decks I'd made up myself many years ago and decided to bring them down. Maybe we could get him to play a four-hand game and that way he couldn't cheat by rearranging my deck. A part of my brain realized that the Zombie had picked the cards for the second player'd deck, so probably didn't even need to rearrange the draw pile. Heading back down the stairs, I discovered that my friends had brought me two black and white kittens from the pet store, they were adorable, and friendly. Also, a black and white puppy (looked like an English Bulldog, too cute) two guinea pigs (also black and white in their little white cage with a black exercise wheel) and a small very musical voiced black and white bird. I protested that I not only didn't have enough room for all of them, but I had no kitty litter, training pads, cat, dog, rodent or bird food for them either. They didn't seem to care about that, and started taking the cages downstairs into the basement. I hoped the zombie was fully engrossed in our game and wouldn't be a problem. The uncaged critters stayed in the front room, playing on the black futon. The little black and white bird fluttered up to my shoulder and sang a cute little song in my ear as I went down to face the zombie, and all of my guests, not sure which I was more frightened of at that point.

The Striding and Stalking Cloud Horrors

The dream started as I walked through the central part of my childhood town. The air was heavy with impending rain, but I knew the actuality of rain was still a distant promise. I looked towards the east, where the rain clouds had begun to darken in earnest. The rain began to fall, but then stopped to swirl and take on the ink in water appearance filling out into thick misty shadows. One a tall manlike shape, that upon its feet reaching the ground, began to stride North across the edge of town. Its footfalls rumbled like thunder, and likely to were taken as such by any who didn't see the apparition responsible. It strode on, completely indifferent to the chaos that exploded in the shadows of its footfalls. A second shape started similarly, but shorter, then bent over, long fingers of smoky blackness curling down into the edges of the down, stalking along the pathways between buildings and silently into then through open doors, windows or chimmneys. There the being found and turned a being here and a few there amongst the terrified souls who huddled in the shadowy tracks of its larger partner. Instead of the wise course, running far away, I found myself compelled to race towards the growing sounds of terrified people and animals in the wake of the two cloud horrors. I found myself drawn to a church, now crowded by terrified people, all milling about, many fallen to their knees, many arms raised to the ceiling all wailing in fear and calling out to various gods and saints, their religions fused into a single grasping need. In one corner of the crowd was a single small woman who was, to me, a single golden glowing figure, transfigured by an otherworldly power, but frustratingly incomplete. I looked down at myself, I too was suffused by an incandescent light, silvery but not as bright as the golden glow that was somehow still bound up in the shape of the woman. I straightened and strode over to the woman who was being stalked now by members of the impromptu congregation who'd been touched by inky dark tendrils that had diffused down from a ventalation shaft over the choir loft. I offered a hand on a shoulder here, a touch there and a word to those I approached, they moved out of my way, and grew still as I passed. The choir members, eyes now filled with a shimmering creamy emptiness, shrank back from me, confused and confounded. I reached out to the glowing woman, who was both relieved but still terrified. Her golden glow flowed through me, and, as the woman collapsed into my arms, radiated out into the space. Those who I'd touched, stood, and reached out to their fellows, offering comfort, support, and even leadership. Those touched by the smokey tendrils, howled and struck at their fellows until finally being overpowered by the recovering members of the crowd. I cradled the woman in my arms and stepped out of the building, growing and striding across the city for the next shadowed footprint. This one was a school and its immediate neighborhood. We shrank back down and the woman came to her senses, still frightened, but in control, she slipped her hand in mine as we enetered the parking lot. "Not the children, no..." she cried. I held her agains my chest, the top of her head barely reached the top of my sternam. While I still radiated the silvery light, almost like distant lightning, or moonlight, the woman's golden glow was not present, apparently depleted. I refused to abandon her when she suggested that I should find another. "We will find another." We entered the campus and I tried to find the adults to calm them so they could begin to protect the children. Eventually we exited the building and strode across the playground, now empty save for the stalking shadows that raced towards the handball courts where a small golden figure huddled in a group of sopping wet children. We broke into a run, hoping to reach the terrified mass before the shadows. We had dropped hands so that I could run faster, but when one of the shadows detached and swung back towards the woman I turned backn racing against the tendril. We reached her at the same time, The tendril massing around her face, trying to find its way in. She held her breath and stifled a scream. I grabbed her outflung hand, which drove the smokey tendril away. I could feel its frustrated curiosity and a casual poking-ants-with-a-stick cruelty as I passed through it. I looked up to see the stalking horror pulling up the rest of its tendrils and it hesitated as though debating what to do with this new development. Then it "looked" north across the sky, and lifted, turning to catch up with the striding horror that had moved a couple of long strides ahead of it. It reminded me of a small child who's stopped to play with something in the dirt, but then suddenly realizes that their parent has continued on without them. We were completely forgotten to it, dismissed. I realized the striding horror didn't care about the chaos and terror it left in its wake. The lights, both golden and silver, were something else that followed, feeding on the terror. We were just their hosts. The golden light seemed to leave its hosts intact, but I was not so sure about the silver light that inhabited me now, as I had very obviously been changed. I don't think I could step through walls and stride a half mile at a time before the silver entity empowered me to do so. I knew, however, that it was not its intent to empower me to help my fellows, that was just a side effect of absorbing the terror.

Cheese and Ball Lightning

I found myself climbing up out of the buried city, and beholding the world made new, covered in a layer of cheese ten meters deep, everywhere. It had begun falling in the fall, and by winter, the world was covered in warm velvety goodness. Religions, governments and economies the world over collapsed. Clogged up hydro electric plants, covered solar plants, stuffed up the intakes and outputs of gas and oil fired plants left much of the world buring cheese for energy. Humanity survived because the fall was gradual enough to stay on top of it, to dig one's homes and shops out from under it, mostly. Most importantly, it was completely edible. Apparently it was also rot resistant as well, a giant edible organism, like overabundant mana from heaven. During the same period of time, the ball lightning showed up. I remember looking at one YT video, shot from a security camera, so yellow and orange in hue as to look sepia-toned, where an unbearably bright ball of lightning was moving along the third floor of a hotel, and stopping momentarily at each door, its lightning tendrils snaking out along the door and window frames, blue white and crackling, as if searching for something, then moving on. The bottom two floors were not visible as the parking lot and lower levels were filled with the creamy yellow orange cheese. Fireweed, fleasbane and short grasses had alread begun to colonize the smooth surface. Whispy threads of smoke followed the ball lightning where its arcs touched the layer of cheese on the handrails and walkway.

All Singing and Dancing, Science Fiction, Future-Fantasy, Seven Escape-Room Extravaganza!

Starting with a sliding ice puzzle and winding its song and dance routine way through; star crossed romance, rescues, tentacled maidens, mafia weddings with choreographed bridal deflowering, lost purses, exes showing off their reconstructive breast surgeries, and, in general no foot, hand or chest pains. What an exhilerating and eshausting morning.

Sky Tigers

We were running down the sandy sloped bottom of a wide canyon, our kite string payed out behind us, our kites catching the hot wind that rushed up from the desert below. In the sky behind us, ribbons made tearing noises in the sky, driving the flat rippling sky tigers ahead of them. The tigers roared and skittered side to side, dodging our kites and undulating on the desert current. As they tired they began to slow, and to drift upwards towards our waiting kites. The Jade tiger my friend was chasing suddenly broke for the far wall of the canyon, and in the excitement my friend raced under my line and his kite followed a moment later, bobbing above mine, and just like that, we were tangled. I had already sent my catchers aloft to nab the giant orange and black specimen that was preparing to turn and fight my kite, by my friend had not yet launched her catchers. I started to run after her, "quick, let's get the jade tiger!"

One of my catchers glanced the orange sky tiger and latched on, the kites and one frightened sky tiger swirled in a mad dance over our heads. The jade tiger turned and hesitated, I ducked under my friend's line and her catchers were suddenly free to zip into the air overhead, catching the jade tiger. We slowly reeled both kites in, the sky tigers becoming limp on contact with the sand. We raced to them to collect a bit of essence, then fed them from our vacuum flasks of cold chicken soup before lifting them into the air to catch the breeze and sail off. They liked the soup enough that catching them next time would be easier, and eventually, they would just come for the soup.

Despite the heat of it, I liked our new home.

Fevered Dream

Started with our little community theater group in Dream City, I'm in the second seat of the first row. The show is going, the audience is full of former cast members and parents, and friends, and the recently homeless, watching, and singing along. It is a run through, working rehearsal, but with a few stops as possible. It is going well. familiar music for everyone.

Take the stage with your friends, the writer and director urge, looking at me for permission. Who am I to deny these people, all these talents, their fun?

There is the digging to enlarge the stage, mounds of stored flats and frames and crates,
Lead down below the hall to the back of the ruined temple on the other side of the block.
And an exterior door.
Street Level.
A short walk to verify, Ware house of house of storage for house of horrors. (See us in Octobre)

It is one of my warehouses, holding a now defunct show's sets I cannot make myself evict.
I smile.

I walk through to a street, a band was set up,
Streets blocked, then been told their promised gig could no go forward.
This City must Move
Without them.

Pack it all up.

Interrupted Nuptials, famous vocal cords grown old, but still grasping at the youth promised of wedded bliss. Fran-San Cisco will not have them.

Take the stage, both of you,
Join the show,
Take the stage with our little community of performers, we're moving the audience into the ground floor,
Opening all the crates.
Under UV lights,
The faded sets like cartoon fireworks, all horror long faded.
We perform the Entre` Act
The choreographer adjusts.
Then a Wedding
Then Act II
Dizzying effects,
Unforgettable Nuptials
A community restoration
"Hallelujah" sung by hundreds of voices.
"We can't sing that, we don't have the rights!"
"I wouldn't worry about that," the silver-haired groom, and owner of the song smiles. "It's meant to be sung. Just, like, this."
He smiles.
"We have three more nights..."
The band, smiles.
My director and choreographer smile.
The excavators smile,
The bride and groom look at one another, all honeymoon plans fled, they take the stage.
And smile.
We finish the song with the crowd.
And smile.

I awake, music still thundering in my ears.
I smile.

Crimson Bullfinches

Several dreams last night, one where I fell again, and this time scraped up my knee as well as twisted my ankle and banged up a hip. But the worst part was that I tore holes in my favorite pair of pants.

The last dream this morning found me in my VR rig at the office, logged into Steam Trunk with my non-development character trying to replicate a teleportation game bug that had been reported, but we were unable to reproduce it with the development accounts. (Probably because they had a different teleport/instance tracking system.)

I was playing in a high mob intensity area, working on a king of the mountain scenario, one of the slightly more common reported trigger areas, when I overlapped the bounding box of an "Extra Large" wolf mob. The sanity teleport kicked in. Then all the teleportation gizmos in my inventory, one after another, began to fire. I was suddenly at the bottom of the hill, then on the edge of some violet and blue cliffs, about seventy clicks away (one of my "vacation" teleports had fired.) Then to a sandy beach, then to a portrait mobile device view of the minimalist map (low bandwidth, icon based for mobile devices) then several others, including the holding area for one of the more popular team sport gauntlet arenas. When I appeared there, I was also in my Crimson Bullfinch uniform, so at least the uniform widget part of that teleport charm was working along with the teleport. The uniform was a sort of padded striped looking armor with a catching mitt on one manipulator and a ranged thrower on the other. I also had the wide angle /medium range helmet. I could see the top down gauntlet overlay showing a match in progress. I noted that both teams were advancing off center from each other in a four by four square, and had passed one another, but just before the match turned into a straight race the cowboy hats at the top of the leftmost square snared the top four of the opposing team and then their strikers opened up, knocking the other team's cargo tokens willy-nilly across the narrow field of play. A sneaky maneuver well executed. As I blinked away from that location I got a message from another player complimenting me on the outfit, and asking what color it was. The last couple of teleport gizmos fired and I was left sitting on the top of a stepped pyramid overlooking a jungle. I made a note that the text communication overlay needed to be improved in the VR interface.

Before debriefing with the debug team I searched back through the messages to respond to the player who asked about my gear. I explained that it was my "Gauntlet" scout/striker uniform, and the team colors were dusky maroon with black pinstripes.

Then I went back to the VR to try to figure out, with the bug fix team, where the heck I ended up, and how the bug had fired not only the usual teleport gizmos I had in my inventory, but even the unopened charms in my mystery loot trunk. The Mystery loot charms weren't even supposed to be generated until they were opened. I looked in the "Mysteries Trunk." All of the items were still there, and all indicated that they were still unopened.

The detail on the "Gauntlet" map was amazing. Also, I seemed to know that Gauntlet Matches were played in teams of Two, Four, Eight, Twelve or Sixteen. The Crimson Bullfinches fielded all of the team sizes. In the top down map, each player was indicated by a top down view of their headgear with their number below it and their cargo token in the center (if it hadn't been displaced yet.) Little icons next to them showed what type of manipulator they had and if your range and sensitivity were enough, you could see active charms by zooming in. The Crimson Bullfinches B-Team was one of the open teams used for pickup games, their uniforms were white with maroon pinstripes. Don't know why my brain thought it was important that I knew that.

Dream City Moviplex

I was visiting the owner of the Dream City MoviPlex, located in the Old City Center's now aging mall. The carpets were starting to look a little worn, hundreds of thousands of eager steps, spilled soda and popcorn as well as the occasional toppled rope stand had taken their toll. The sound of kids eagerly headed to the latest big screen entertainment hadn't changed, though, and the place was filled with happy voices and the hubbub of pre-movie preparations and after movie celebrations.

I went up to the show office with the owner and we were conversing about the place, and the renovations he wanted to make. He knew I had some warehouses recently repaired, and wanted to move his theater equipment into storage during the renovations (as my warehouses were the closest ones to the theater.) I told him I would love to rent him the space, but perhaps he might be willing to make a different deal. I wanted him to give me a couple of passes that would allow me and a guest to attend any show that wasn't sold out when we arrived. While he was thinking about it I bumped the play button on his messaging machine. An old man's voice rang out of the office speakers with measured cadence and a sort of delightful passion - reviewing one of the theater's most recent offerings. The audio review was not particularly flattering, but was delivered with a great sense of respect and humor about the film, its director and actors, and the theater in which he saw it. I understood why the owner wanted to renovate. I then realized that the caller was actually me... True to this type of dream, once the recording was started, I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Though profoundly embarrassed, I also found the audio very entertaining, then felt guilty at my narcissistic pleasure. The plots and images of dozens of other films I'd seen there flashed through my mind, good memories, all of them, even the bitter-sweet memories of good times with past loves.

I suggested that the owner use the review of the theater as part of his web site explaining the need for the renovations, as well as capturing the lure of the place and the love for the whole enterprise. He admitted that he'd kept all of my reviews and suggestions on tape. I was flattered.

He actually wanted to put them up as a podcast about the theater's history, as my "reviews" apparently went back a couple of decades... I had no idea.

When I woke I was actually sort of stuck on the idea of the podcast, not so much for the theater review, but for the reviews/descriptions of the movies I'd seen there. They weren't anything like any movies I've actually seen in my waking city.

I wish I could recall more of the stories I'd seen on that big screen (realizing, of course, that the memories whether real or dreamed, would all be of stories that I created, remembered, or modified from my waking world.)

The Circular River Run, Game Demo

Another recurring theme is the circular river, actually a river that splits around a large rocky structure, and then flows into a quiet bay. On on side the river there is wide and shallow, surging with the tidal flow, a brackish mix of water that feeds lush marshy areas to either side. The other side is a wider deep cut along side the island that splits the river, the tide only rarely making headway. A flotilla of small sail boats carves up the wide slow current nearly year round. Swimmers can actually swim against the current with ease, often doing so to then ride down the wide shallow side of the river with the current and then across the bay side of the island, thus being able to make a full circuit of the "circular river."

In this dream I started out enjoying a sunny picnic along one of the grass covered levees, listening to a live band, and enjoying the sounds of conversation and laughter, the bright red, white and blue bunting snapping smartly in the wind, the flotilla of small sailboats in the background, weaving among themselves in the sheltered mouth of the bay and the wide stretch of river up stream. A woman in a wet suit caught my eye, and motioned for me to join her as she slipped down the slope of the levee into the slow moving river.

I suited up and when I put on my full face diving mask, I heard the girl talking over the headset. While she was talking to someone else, it was plain that she was making her location plain in her conversation. There was a set of caves under the island, sometimes open to the air, sometimes the entrance fully under water depending on the tide. At the moment they were well under water. I swam against the languid current up river past the tunnel like entrance and allowed myself to drift back along the water-worn shelf that led into the up river opening of the caves. Once inside, it was clear that the girl was in some sort of trouble, and didn't want to be there. I climbed out onto the ledge above where she and a much older, tougher looking fellow were conversing. He had some sort of motorized underwater drone, and was stuffing something into water tight bags tied to the device. The girls mask was off, but her microphone was still open, so I could hear their conversation.

I made a bunch of noise and started talking like a tourist guide. Webbed flippers slapping against the rock. I hear him fire up the motor as he abandoned his partner, who was obviously not ready to dive. She made noises like she wanted him to wait for her, but he told her she was on her own, he had what he wanted, and she'd better keep quiet if she knew what was good for her.

I came around the corner and she looked up at me, grateful for the interruption. I noticed that even soaking wet, the curls in her hair would not be denied, and the platinum sheen was not dulled for being wet at all. I also recognized the girl as a Middle School student who was frequently in my store. I helped her up the ledge to where I had come in and asked if she was up for a little more swimming. We ducked out the upstream entrance and swam up river to where she could meet up with her parents on their boat.

Once free of my charge, I swam across the lake and shot into the fast flowing current that ran along the other side of the island. I switched frequencies and made a couple of calls, working hard to make the upcoming meeting between criminal and police look like a coincidence.

The dream shifted and I was in my shop, demonstrating a new game. Players were able to fly freely about the space of the game, like swimming in the river, the controls were essentially a number pad and a mouse, the camera on the computer could also be used to track where a collector was looking and would move the world view around, it felt dreamily fluid, of course. Most of the players were using a pair of hand controls and a DDR pad, though, so there was lots of flailing around and activity on the demo floor. A good mix of kids and adults in their VR glasses, goggles and tablets.

in the game were lots of things to discover, and much of the game world was made of modifiable, scoopable and sculptable "materials." Collectors not only could collect tokens by digging, trapping, searching, tracking, playing, puzzling, unboxing, fighting and even constructing from collected resources in the demo, but could use the various tools and tokens created to shape their world. I showed how the players could witness the NPC world deployment team in action, and pointed out how they could, by paying careful attention, get a fairly good idea of where some of the rarest materials were deposited. We swooped down to the surface of the newest world, a swarm of players intent of finding the best loot. They began scooping and sculpting the landscape in search of goodies. I banked away from the collectors to show the procedure generated "sky mall" and the critters around it (Giant conifers and dinosaurs, in this instance.) This is where collectors would be able to upgrade/acquire or trade virtual items, and have a look at the Sponsor's real world products as well. I pointed out that aside from the name and logo, all of the real world shopping was strictly opt-in, and could actually be blocked by a parent or the player themselves if they didn't want to be tempted to spend real money. I pointed out the while the big public servers were all ad supported, it was meant to be subtle, and not interrupt game play.

Someone asked how long a person had to play to be able to move around like in the demo and I indicated that your first "flight suit" was available as soon as you finished the twenty minute tutorial, which you only ever had to do one time. You would also come out of the tutorial with a full basic set of tokens, and several useful patterns and plans to make or trade with others. The movement and transport items in the game were meant to be discovered and shared in order to allow players to move to the areas that interested them as quickly as possible. There were some secret areas, and places that might be difficult to get to, but they weren't needed to engage in any of the games competitive mini-games. Unless, of course, you considered being "first" a competitive mini-game.

Back to Work

I was called back in to work, but only for the purpose of collecting up the toys that had accumulated around my old desk. It was full of dozens of brightly colored thirty-millimeter plastic robots and toy dinosaurs. I explained, as best I could, that the toys weren't mine, as I had been gone almost three years. Everyone insisted that they'd been there since before I retired, though. I took the boxes they gave me, and started packing them up. Lots of people stopped by to chat, so progress was quite slow. Also, every time I went back after filling a box, there seemed to be more of the little toys, even where I had just picked them up.

After a couple of hours, I had about twenty shirt boxes full of plastic toys. I made my former co-workers take my phone number and email address, so that when the actual owner of the toys showed up, they could contact me for their return. As I was packing the boxes into my shopping bags, I was thinking there might be a game here somewhere. My former boss insisted that I fill out a time sheet so I could get paid for the day. I didn't think that was fair to pay me for a whole day just for two hours of packing up someone's toys. She suggested I could hang around and answer questions for people who came into the department. I tried pointing out that any answers I had were based on very outdated information. She insisted it wouldn't be a problem, and folks started showing up for tech help on their tablets and phones. Turns out, my boss was right. I did know enough to be helpful.

When the drop in hours were done, I turned back to see that the help desk was covered in more little plastic toy soldiers and insects this time.

I think I'd been set up.

Time Transit Tech Support

I had gone back to work, and after a three day training marathon, I started my first day of tech support for "Time Transit" a company which was using a new technology to see into the past, and occasionally, when conditions were applicable, into the future. Most of the first tier calls were of a pair of issues; username and password problems, or browser not looking forward problems. I could see that I would be regularly explaining to people that while looking into the past was going to be pretty accurate (under most circumstances) it wouldn't be possible to always move into the future, particularly if knowledge of the future would likely change the outcome of current events and decisions. Oddly, this sometimes meant that a person in location "A" would not be able to see the future of location "A" while a person in location "B" who was unconnected to the events of location "A" might be able to see some, or even all of what was to happen there. This, of course, led to a somewhat rare third type of call. Something is wrong with my time viewer, can you look into the past and zoom into the future of my current location.

That trick rarely worked.

I was working from a VR rig in the isolation suite (a sort of home away from home that was supposed to keep our own effects on the future to a minimum) when I got a call of the third type. I managed to make the connection to the person's time viewer, and was able to see their past altercation with a woman, who I assumed was their girlfriend. Silly argument, really, and the gentleman was very obviously in the wrong. Suddenly, I heard a sound in my front room. It was the caller, and he threw a gun into my small bedroom and then ran out, disconnecting the call. He shouldn't have even been able to get into the isolation suite. I reconnected, but he just laughed and told me to sit tight, the police were on the way. I took off the VR rig, and noticed that my bedroom now looked like the scene I had just witnessed, and there was the body of the woman lying along side the bed, obviously dead. How had I not noticed the smell before now? I set my rig to look into the past, and there was someone, looking a lot like me, now arguing with the woman, who was blaming the "not me" for something that hadn't happened yet. I checked to make sure my recordings were uploaded to the company, and then to my own cloud backup, even though that was technically a violation of my TOS with the company. I had the feeling things were about to get very weird. It seems my call had come from the past, I'm not sure how that was even possible, but I knew, despite the visual similarity, that the perpetrator wasn't me, as I wasn't even working for the company a week ago. I called the police to report someone dead in my Isolation Suite while using the internal communications software to notify my supervisor.

Five Hundred Miles

According to the song in my head, that's how far I'd walk, then I'd walk five hundred more...
I wonder what part of my brain turns the volume up on the mix tape so loud that it wakes me up from what is (was) a lovely little dream of slipping across dimensions through doors that only I can see in closets and basements that don't seem to exist for anyone else.

Dolphinia

I had been selected for a strange experiment. I was injected with something that allowed me to stay underwater for several minutes, and sent out into a netted off bay to find and communicate with the trapped Dolphinia. I managed to find her, or allowed her to find me. I was able to communicate with her after a time, finding out that she was a mother, and her pod contained two of her children still. She desperately wanted to be re-united with them so she could see them join up with other pods after their summer feeding meet up. The more days that went by, the harder it would be to catch up. She also worried that it was dangerous for a lone dolphin to migrate the later the season got. I relayed this to our experimenters, and they told me to promise her that people could transport her directly to the feeding grounds where she could find the rest of her pod. She just needed to come play some games with us first.

I did my best, but it seems there were no easy way to talk about being transported really fast until I learned that dolphins bow surfed on whale and boat waves, so used that to say a boat would let us surf quickly to her pod. I felt bad for deceiving her.

The experimenters lowered a whole office building into the bay. I had to explain to them that we still needed to breathe air and couldn't reach the lower levels without extreme risk, so they put down diving bells with oxygen pumped into them. The two of us managed to swim through the building, with Dolphinia teaching me the proper way to swim, and how to glide to conserve air. By the time we were done with our experiments, I could stay down almost as long as Dolphinia. The longer these "games" went on, and the less the experimenters shared with me the more I began to worry that I had been deceived as much as Dolphinia.

Then one morning I woke up in a normal bed, with my normal body intact. I felt woozy though, as if I'd been drugged for days. I managed to get out of my room and found where they were keeping Dolphinia.

She had been completely transformed. She was human now, at least six feet tall, and in a blonde curly haired wig and red dress. She was stunning if a bit alien looking. She was frightened, couldn't figure out how to swim (walk) and confounded by the need to breathe continuously through this thing above her mouth. Turns out I had been allowed to find her in order to calm her down and get her cooperation again. She was so happy to see me, and concerned that I too had been made into this awkward land animal. She was convinced that I, too, had been a dolphin, and that was why I learned to swim and breath so well with her. Spiritually, I agreed with her, and I wanted nothing more than to be back in the warm water of the bay, swimming freely. I wanted to get her back to herself, and then delivered to the summer grazing area with a large pod she could travel with until she found her own. I had the feeling, though, that the dolphin to human conversion was only one way, neither she nor I would be able to go back.

A Rolling Kayak Gathers Momentum

Was out working in the back yard when I heard a commotion from on top of the hill. New neighbors had moved in, taken down the fence, and filled the drainage easement with two to three pound river stones (as they didn't want to water the grass that was there previously.) Unfortunately they had a couple of younger children who liked to roll the stones down my hill, smashing up the ivy and the celery and bean plants at the bottom of the retaining wall. This time one of the stones hopped the wall and grazed me in the calf. I was dodging, but just not fast enough to get missed. I shouted the Ouch, ouch! ow! song. They looked panicked a moment, and then ran off. I decided I needed to put all of the stones in a basket and make a trip around the block for a visit. As I was gathering up the stones I looked up to see an orange and white plastic kayak sliding down the hill towards me, but not in time to get out of the way. As I turned to run, the kayak bounced off the ivy swinging into my legs, knocking me down and leaving me with a huge cramp in my right calf. (Which was still there when I woke.)