So about a year and a half ago I started this blog and I have let it float alone in cyberspace ever since. Recently I have been reading more from the blogging community and, you know, learning to use the work blog as a noun adjective and verb, even though word spell check refuses to acknowledge. I realised that between the start of school and moving and various lifeages, I have been far away of writing for awhile and I miss it, so here I am again, hopefully with thoughts.
Here’s a little sci-fi something that I have been working on:
When you dream, you are aware of things about the slippery world that you have entered into. It’s like you have some innate knowledge, or someone told you a story over and over when you were in your infancy, so it won’t leave you anymore. You know all the secrets. You can be afraid or happy or anxious in dreams, but you can never really be surprised. You know how the story is going to end, you just have to wait for it.
This is why when sitting on a sand beach in my dreams, my feet wet, and running my fingers deeper and deeper in to the sand I am already aware of the fact that rows and rows of people were massacred and entered here on my dream beach. I am afraid of what will happen when my fingers sift down deep enough, but I don’t stop. I know how this will end, and so my dream eyes look at the little undulations of my dream waves and they conform to my toes. The sun heats up my back. When I finally reach the layer beneath the powdery baked sand, the layer that is all cold and wet, and my fingernail snags on something hard as I look over the water, I am afraid. I know I have hit a bone, specifically my finger has stopped on the front tooth of a skull lacking the lower part of the jaw. I pull my hand up without looking down, seeing that a little bead of blood has formed on my pinky where I touched a tooth. I know it has poisoned me, because something was done to change the people before they were killed.
When I get up and run, I know I am going to die and fall with a swirl of sand and a splash of water, half in and half out of the ocean. My veins will go purple and stand out again my skin before they burst, making me look like I was bruised all over. Tears well in my eyes, I am so afraid.
I’m still not surprised.
I lay still in my bed for a few moments after I wake up combating the cold feeling like the nightmare might be bleeding over into reality surrounding me. My body feels weak from the dream, but I won’t close my eyes for risk of slipping back to sleep and landing purple and gasping on the beach.
My tank top has ridden up to my breasts and I pull it back down to meet my panties as the fear subsides and I go to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, flicking on every light I pass as I go drowning all the shadows.
I walk over and lean my head against floor-to-ceiling window of my apartment. I am on a low enough floor that a tree reaches to my balcony, valiantly tying to make me believe that nature is alive and well here. Through its naked boughs I can see a chunky line of traffic slugging through the streets, dense even in the wee hours of the morning. I squint though the window, rubbing my had across the glass as it fogs from my breath, but despite the city’s perpetual glow it is too dark to see the pock marks that are left on the building across from mine. I don’t know why I look for them still, they only make me unhappy. I am so unhappy here.
I plod back to bed, flicking off all the lights behind me, become conscious that anyone passing probably just saw me gloriously back lit in my underwear.
I stretch my arm across the empty half of my bed as I lay back down, staring at the ceiling. I don’t have much hope of being happy again. Nobody who remembers the war does, I suppose, precious few of us though there may be.
I flip onto my side and open the drawer on my bedside table, pulling out a well-thumbed little pamphlet. It’s a government issue, no images. The title page simply offering euthanasia, rest for all. After that details, addresses, dates, numbers you could call and at the bottom of the page my special call number to report when requesting to be put down like a diseased dog. I shove the pamphlet back in, bitter for considering it again.
Just before the war, there had been a break though in the metal health field. A new kind of psychotropic drug called the Blue Pill that worked the brain over, systematically deleting the memories that caused shock to the brain was invented. No more remembering still birth, no more little children missing the family pet, and, after the war, no more shell shock.
It had been a break though the had put a shattered society back on its feet, except it didn’t work for everyone, a small number of the population was resistant to the effects of the Blue Pill. One hundred and twenty two members of the population if my special call number 47 of 122 was any indication. After the mandatory drug injection we had still been able the remember the secrets we weren’t supposed to, the things we had seen, the things that had been done…
We were offered euthanasia, on the basis that our memories were too traumatic, and integrating back into a society that had forgotten a global war would drive us insane.
I remember sitting in the little white doctors office thinking how clean and fresh in looked by contrast to the outside of the building that was tattooed with bomb scars. An older man with died black hair explained to me how it wouldn’t be suicide, it was just a humane option, a solution to all the pain that was inevitable for me now. I refused, shook his hand, and told him I had seen enough burning in this life, that I didn’t need to burn in the next. I had been escorted to the door and mailed the pamphlet, along with my schedule of daily appointments with a government shrink. The psychiatrist didn’t remember the war either, but he had read one of the five or six copies of the recorded war history so that he would be better able to understand my thoughts, without retaining any real memories himself.
My eyes flutter open, as I fear returning to the nightmares. I wonder if anyone who has had their memories erased dreams about the war, if the drug can really reach into a realm where nothing’s shocking.
I am sitting in the psychiatrist’s office. Like everything else it is beautiful and clean inside, fine new furniture shining. I think it helps people accept what they have forgotten, because how could the buildings with their cracked outsides possibly reflect any horror if the inside is so polished and peaceful.
Thinking about it, it is a lot like my psychiatrist himself. I am struck again by the scar over his eye as he sits down in the chair in front of my couch. I wonder what the Blue Pill has taught his mind about it, and what he sees every time he looks in the mirror. It doesn’t seem to matter as long as his mind is all squeaky clean on the inside.
And here is an alter iteration:
They were all so thirsty, tumbling down the beach in droves. Some where still with their families, huddled together, parents and children and the family pet making their way to the bay, twisted vision of a picnic at the beach, manic looks on their pale faces, sucking the blood out of their own cracked lips and swallowing, desperate for the moisture. When they reached the shore they flopped to their bellies, gulping down mouthfuls of sand and water, wriggling deeper and deeper in, heedless of the waves crashing over their faces, inhaling them into their lungs. Most of them downed in knee deep water, only to be forced aside by dozens of others, eagerly drinking down everything they could, never satiated. The whole mad rush took less then twenty minutes and seven thousand corpses filled the bay, floating with their distended bellies. The waves that had been so heedless of them minutes before nudged the limp formed back towards the shore, trying to send them back home. Their pale bodies like flotsam capping the crests.
I watched
The news reports went on and on, showing the stacked slick corpses at a distance, the flicking of red quarantine tape dancing in and out of the shot. It wasn’t long before people were found all over the city in bathtubs, drowned. A terrorist act, tainted water, magic, an anti-virus gone wrong, there was blame spread everywhere, and as the mass drowning spread so did this blame.
I am a slightly creepy writer I will admit, but I think that makes for the best speculative fiction.
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