NaOcyane

The light and warmth. Her world surrounded her with an embrace of a million minds and souls. She was all to them. Hope and love flew up to her in a wave of passion that took away her breath. They loved her. They needed her. She was theirs'.

The crowd stood in amazement of the woman who had simply appeared, floating above the ground and wrapped with golden light that streamed off of her like ribbons in the wind. Her eyes were closed and her head tilted upwards in exstasy, her arms crossed over her breasts, fingers stretching outward and muscles taut.

The noise, the violence, the panic dimmed and faded as a feeling of peace spread through the city, with the woman as its epicenter. They looked on her and they loved her. And as people duly crowded toward her, their hands reaching out to touch the woman, the goddess, her head tilted to one side and she opened her left eye.

An eye of vibrant green stared out on the faces of her worshipers. Flecks of red quivered in the sea of jade, working their way out from the abyss of the pupil, worming into the iris like trickles of blood. As if breaking a dam, red poured from the black void in the center of her eye, flooding her iris and spilling beyond its borders. Her right eye opened, a gaping pit of darkness and malevolence. Her expression of grace vanished, replaced by one of disgust and hatred. She flared her nostrils and drew her mouth into a deep frown of dismay. Her lips parted, revealing rows of ivory teeth, jagged like fangs.

Like the hallucination of an oasis in the desert, the feeling of peace fled from the denizens of the city, their eyes and mouths widening, unable to comprehend the shift. Where was their goddess? What was this... monster? Icy fear gripped them.

The woman lowered her head, tossing her gaze across the ragged mass of panic-stricken sheep before her. Her upper lip twisted into a sneer. Throwing her arms wide, the golden glow around her exploded outward with a silent finality. Those closest to her simply disappeared. They left no trace that they had ever been, merely a sigh on the wind as the golden light passed over them, and they folded into nothingness.

Eden descended from the sky, her bare feet touching the uneven pavement of the street, melting the stone and steel around her. Wrath boiled out of her like tendrils of hate, but the crowd could not flee from their doom. Awe and horror paralyzed their minds and atrophied their muscles. Some collapsed, weeping in the face of Eden.

Holding her hands outward, as if to cup the head of a penitent son, the goddess moved toward the mass. As her fingers brushed the face of one of the onlookers, the spell of silent terror was broken. The world erupted.

The thousands surrounding her screamed, their cries wrentched from their throats as if drawn out by ravenous beasts. Hands became claws as they surged over one another to escape Eden's embrace. Feet crushed ribs and faces, windows shattered as the panic spread and people leapt through plate glass to escape, their bodies evicerated by the transparent shards that broke around them. Ripples of the emotion spread with the speed of sound, bodies twisting to escape, directionless. The beastial screams reached a fevered pitch, drowning out all other noise.

And onward Eden moved. The sight of death and violence filled her with a giggy sort of pleasure, a strangled laugh escaping her throat even as her fingers stretched outward, as if to capture and strangle every soul in her domain. People fell forward, the strength of their legs stolen out from under them. As they landed against the ground, their life was torn from them by a crushing force, leaving a carpet of blood and flesh where once there had been worshipers.

Eden reveled in the wasteland that spread out from her touch like a wasting pestilence sweeping across a field of grain. She was the monster, the victimizer, the horror. At last, she was the villain. She had the power to end life and they were all her enemies. Tears of joy streamed down her cheeks and dropped from her jaw like a desert rain, soaking the parched earth. Her body shook with the intensity of her laughter. Her every nerve was aflame, and as each life withered and perished under the weight of its wretchedness, she felt like she was growing more and more real.

She lashed a hand out lazily, an arc of will scything through the air, tearing bone and mutilating flesh. She took a step forward, and creeping veins surged across the ground, throwing bodies into the air, igniting them even as they tore at their own faces. She widened her eyes in focus and a hundred men and women twisted backward unnaturally, the sound of snapping bones and tearing muscle echoing in the cacaphony like a death knell.

Eden became aware that she was speaking, but she could not understand her speech. A strange sense of seperation overcame her as she heard the harsh, gutteral words pouring from her mouth, tormenting the living and obliterating the dying. She began to drift from her body, becoming aware of the world beyond the city. Everywhere, the sounds of death and strife. From every mouth, a lament of agony and a requium of fear. They were dying. All of them. She was their goddess and their devil and their angel of death. She was the nexus, the font of life.

But she hated them all. And they would die a million times before she was through with them. The glorious song of misery fueled her even as it scourged her to greater depths of depravity. They would all die. They had to. She hated them all. She hated them. She hated... She...

Eden wept as her world died.

NouTeva

"We've put all this work into the project and you want to trash it now? On account of... Her?" He swung his hand to point at the girl curled into a ball, shivering in the corner, her pale flesh reflected in the steel blue of the floor and barely illuminated by impotent LEDs.

The other man shook his head. "No, no. Of course not. It's just..."

"Just what?" The Engineer turned back to face his partner. "So much time, so much money. We're on the edge of something amazing here. Full immersion. The creation of identity itself!"

"I know," his partner said from clentched teeth, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He turned from the pathetic sight of the girl, only to drop his gaze from the fervant eyes of his friend. "But, doesn't it seem wrong to you?"

"We knew there would need to be a nexus. You were the one who figured that out! You want to drop everything and spend the next fourty years working on an artifical nexus? Hell, EIGHTY years! Maybe never!"

The girl's cheeks were stained with an oily grease and tears, her fingers splayed over her head. The song was in her mind, and she couldn't get it to stop. Her fingernails dug into her skin, pulling blood from her flesh. In her mind, she was in the green room again. It was happening again and she could do no more to stop it this time than she had been able to back then. She cried out.

The engineers glanced at her momentarily before drawing closer, lowering their voices.

"Listen to her. She's nearly dead like this. We'll be giving her life a purpose. A meaning. It will only hurt at first- if we're right, she'll be better than she's ever been in a month or less. Is that so much? A little pain for everlasting life? For omniscience? For godhood?"

"Please-"

"Sorry. I know you don't like that word. But it's nearly the same thing. She'll be like a god- a godess- as the nexus. What is she now? Like this, death would be a mercy."

His shoulders slumped. He closed his eyes. In his chest, his heart raced with anticipation, but he couldn't excise the dread from his gut. Or the guilt from his mind. "Alright."

The Engineer put his hands on his partner's shoulders, leaning in closely. "Hey." He gave his friend a gentle shake. "What we're doing is going to change everything. And she gets to be the center of a new world. History will forgive us."

The girl couldn't hear the exchange, couldn't see the approching men, couldn't sense the soundless shift of her fate. In Eden's mind, there was only the Green Room, the paralyzing fear, and the horrible song.

Dreams of Space

Before the crash...

My mind is a frenzy of images and events. A ship gliding in the utter abyss of space. A jet firing when it was not supposed to. The panic and death of a wounded transport. The jettison of escape vessles. How long did I drift for? What planet was I near when the stars lulled me into a waking sleep that confused my memories and opened me to dreams of black rains?

My vessel was jarred by the entry into an atmoosphere, pulling my mind back from the edge of waking emptiness.I am sealed in metal and foam, cutting off my sight, my connection to the outside world. What is happening?

A tremendous impact throws my body against the floor, dropped like a forgotten rag doll. Pain. Confusion. Sleep.

Am I sleeping? What is it I am seeing? Cliffs, volcanic plains, broken obsidian fields. But those craters, those red ridges, they are not natural. The terrain seems ugly, broken. Uneven, alien forms twist and rise out of the fields like cyclopean, heat-charred pillars, their bodies jagged and curving. From these towers, a wave of flesh and steel and fangs. Beastial, loping creatures, like long-limbed dogs of great stature pour over the volcanic ground in silent glee. Idiotic grins of servitude etched on their faces, these monsters scarcely bristled under the weight of their beloved master's driving will. And the masters...

A crack of metal and an urgent hiss tear my eylids open. The unwelcome light of an unfamiliar sun pours into my sequestered cavity. A sillouette, then a face. Where am I?

Escapism

A friend once asked me why I was so obsessed with stories...

Well, no. That's not true. No one ever asked me about it. Sometimes I imagined that they would. And I knew just what I would say. I would explain how stories take us away from complexity. Life is a very chaotic thing, you see. We have a million tiny tasks that arise, fester, and die under our lack of focus or time. But in stories, there are only a handful of tasks, all of which are important. Things get done. Good, or in some cases anti-good (which is rather different from "bad") always seems to win. There is meaning in stories.

But what about real life? There's no meaning to it. Well, unless you graft meaning to it. I think that's why religion is such a big part of so many people's lives. It's a way of pretending that old stories are real. And it even gives us a story-book ending: the coveted "happily ever after."

But I couldn't buy into that. Religious stories are long and confusing, and they always stay the same. But fiction! Now, there is something that is always changing, always growing. You can read, or listen to, or watch a million million stories and not even sratch the surface what fiction has to offer. And our dreams, oh our dreams! What wonder worlds lie behind our eyelids! And it seemed like every day, it was a little harder to wake from my dreams.

I think that was why, when I began reading my last story, I felt like I was in a waking dream. It never quite seemed entirely real. I couldn't be sure if I was reading the story, or I was living it. Everything began to grow indistinct and blurry.

Memories. It's funny when you think about it, but the sum total of our whole lives can be boiled down to barely over a hundred really vivid memories. Sure, given enough time, we can think of all kinds of boring, trivial things that happened in our lives, but the things we really remember, the things we tell to others, they're so simple, so linear... it's as if our lives were stories all along. No complexity, no chaos, just beautiful fiction.

I can't imagine a nicer way to pass, than with the final words of your life story slipping from your tongue, into the ears of of the avid. Because what are we, if not the ripple of a story on the great dreamscape of human fiction?

Conversations in my head

-This is hard for me, so please give me time.

No, it's alright. What is it?

-It's just, well. We've known each other for a little, while.

A couple months, yeah.

-I like you, right?

I assumed.

-Well, it's more than that. I guess I've loved you for a while now. And, I thought about it, for a long time.

But...

-Yeah.

So...?

-So, I guess I just have to let that go.

Yes, that would be best.









-Ouch.

To the Victors!

I'd like to make a toast, if I may. Gentlemen? A toast?

Thank you.

I'd like to toast the Captains of Industry gathered here. You are surely the champions of the Capitalist Ideal. You gentlemen are well-dressed, well-educated, and more than a little clever. You've made fabulous lives for yourselves and your families.

Here you and your wives sit, dining on such meals as the Princes of Maciavelli's era never saw, attired in sumptuous extravagences that would darken the eyes of the greatest misers in history. Mammon himself knew not the wealth you fine men have reaped.

Money. It is our god and our devil- benifactor and nemesis. And we great men, for whom nothing is beyond reach, we ever seek greater hights of dizzying power. Come what may, there will always be people making money.

And as you well-dressed gentlement and exquisite ladies sit, eating the finest sort of luxuries we know, take but a moment and look to the main window. All this joy and cheer, when you fine men and women are oblivious to the hungry stares of those urchins beyond that darkened pane. And while we cannot see them or hear them, I can assure you all, that the destitue without gaze with envy and rancor within.

But why should they? Is it not the nature of our buisness to reward the hard-working, to punish the lazy? That a poorer class exists at all is merely a testiment to the unwillingness of humanity to better itself.

And we should give another toast, while our glasses are still raised, to the apathy of the middle class and the submissiveness of the lower class; without these fine co-conspirators, our opulence would be utterly untenable. We've built empires as the Egyptians of old: on the broken backs of a thousand thousand slaves, mortaring each stone with the blood and tears of the facelss mass that crowds beyond that dark window. The Jew of Venice had it right: barren metal can be made fruitful if one feeds it but a little blood.

And so, Cheers! To you, brave Captains of Industry! To you, o paragons of Progress! Long health, dear Lords of Capitalism! You have made the mass of democracy your serfs and stamped out all mercy from religion. Yours are the Kingdoms of Commerce, and your reign shall be greater than any king ordained by State or God could ever hope to achieve.