River

The other day I sat by the river. It was a cool day with the sun peeking in and out of the clouds. The water lazily going by with a few leaves and drift wood bobbing slowing in time to a song that was near the edge of perceptible. Bird song was also light on the wind, trying to cull me into a midday nap. On days like this I liked to take my shoes off and rest my feet in the water. I never knew why this was so calming, but it would just take any and all the stress I had built up recently and let it flow out of my body and get taken away by the moving water.

The river bank was well kept, with short grass from the waters edge all the way to the paved foot path behind me. Every now and again a runner or a biker would amble through my world and continue on to wherever they were headed. I never really understood running to run, or biking to bike. I was a big fan of running from things that needed to be run from, or biking to places that I needed to bike to; the key being need. But that was beyond me this day, this was all about reflection and solitude.

There’s something so amazing and brilliant about having some time to oneself in nature. I mean, you’re never truly alone, you always have yourself they say, but beyond that, there are thousands of life forms all around you, all the time. It’s easy to lose sight of that, but sitting by the river you can focus. Close your eyes, and listen. You will hear the birds chirping, you will hear the squirrels collecting food for the impending winter, you will hear the wind kissing the trees and grass around you.

Open your eyes and look, look to places you would normally discount as scenery. I could spend a lifetime looking at a single tree from every angle imaginable. The trunk, with it’s bark, the base where it takes root into the soil, climbing up into the bows to see the intricacies of the branches interplaying with each other and every individual leaf. There’s even a wealth of life living on the tree, the squirrels, the birds, the badgers, the bees, the spiders, the caterpillars, so many life forms all in one space, and usually we just see a brown stick with green foliage on top.

I always found it good to make time to be here, at least once a month, I think I should do it more often. When the seasons change this simple space transforms into a new world each time. In autumn you get the crunching of leaves and animals preparing for hibernation. In winter, everything in a frozen state, a time to really examine life unmoving. And in spring, when life is renewed from the cold, waking creatures and new life infused into aged things.

-V-

Hacker

The sun came up early, at least it felt like it came up early. I suppose it came up at exactly the time it thought was right. It was just early for me. I had a very late night the previous night. Most of my nights are late. I’m a hacker, through and through. A lot of people seem to get scared or confused when they hear the title hacker. They ask questions like, “Have you ever gained access to secret things?” Or “How do I protect my data from people like you?” The truth is people seriously misunderstand what the name means.

Hackers are not people after your data, or necessarily evil in any stretch of the imagination. We are just enthusiasts. We love technology and all the applications that entails. Sure there are people out there who choose to use this knowledge for nefarious purposes, which just led to us claiming a sub genera of hackers, the Black hats and the White hats. As one would expect the white hats are the “good” guys and the black hats are the “bad” guys. Really though we all sit in many different shades among those distinctions. A true white hat would never do anything interesting, and a true black hat would have no motives beyond watching the world burn (there are some of these, but like any field the outliers are few and far between).

As a hacker, I found that my best time, the time where I have the most brain power to exert is in the wee hours of the night, where the world is mostly quiet. No distractions around, where I can just listen to repetitive music and tinker away at the technology in front of me.

Last night had been a particularly interesting night where I found what I believed to be a massive security hole in a common piece of code. My mind was blown as I tried millions of iterative attacks at the software, seeing if I could in fact break through it. I mean you have to understand how to break something if you really want to know how to fix it. Hours of watching the screen produce output I couldn’t possibly go through in my lifetime, I was just searching for large inaccuracies. It was a strange sense of excitement, waiting for the results of the attack on the code to run.

I was both hoping I had in fact found something, and at the same time dreading it. You see, if I had, in fact, found a security hole, I would want to also try and find a good way to shore it up, and have that available with the announcement of the potential breach, like I said, I’m not a black hat. I guess the sun felt like it was early because the night had led to nothing. Turns out I misread the lines I was looking at and spent the entire night all for naught, or perhaps not, in the end I was more sure that the security was good. I guess that counts enough to get a good days sleep.

-V-

Chloe's Prayer (Part 1)

The center of the room was a raised platform four feet off the floor and about twenty-five feet square. An elaborate iron railing along three sides stood about waist high with a wall completing the fourth. Fifteen people were in a heated argument on the platform. Chloe sat along the stairs on the right side leading up to the floor. She watched intently as the people quibbled.

Fabian, a tall muscular blonde warrior, stepped forward and spoke, “We can certainly hold down the church here for as long as we need. We have provisions, we have weapons, we have everything we need to survive the next few invasions.”

“We need to leave, this is just a very temporary solution to our situation, we can meet up with the others in the west.” Emil the elder responded.

As they continued there arguments Chloe found herself staring at the weapon resting on the railing in front of her. It was Emil’s sword, four feet long with a serrated razor sharp edge and a pointed hook at the end. It was pure beauty in weapon form, she thought. The blade had a bluish black tint to it that refracted the light in an entrancing way. Then she felt it, a presence.. no, two presences, that did not belong here. She searched with her minds eye into the room.

“We will be perfectly safe, Jance and I can easily protect all of you,” Fabian said as he advanced on Emil slowly and deliberately.

“That is nice,” Chloe chimed in, “but did you realize he’s already possessed?” She pointed a finger at Fabian. He shot her a death glare and swept quickly through the remaining space between him and Emil. In an instant Emil was on the floor limp, his head angled awkwardly from his body.

Chloe jumped up from her place on the stairs, leaping over the banister she grabbed Fabians sword and landed delicately on her feet a short distance away from him. He started to rush her; she sidestepped bringing the sword up level with his neck and then pulled hard forward. His body being carried by the momentum continued on, but the head lingered on the blade.

“We will get you,” the head garbled as it slowly fell to the floor. Chloe stared at it for a moment before swinging the blade around her and catching Gonfit across the waist separating him into two as he was leaping at her. She knelt down and whispered a prayer for both their souls and went back to her place, taking the blade with her.

“What will we do?” A small boy run up to Chloe and looked into her eyes expectantly.

“What’s your name? And are you fast?” She replied.

“Arwen, and certainly I am, fastest out of all the kids,” he beamed.

Chloe reached into her satchel and pulled out an ancient looking tome, flipped though a bunch of pages until she found the one she was looking for. She tore a section of the page off and handed to the child, “Take this to the east, the direction of the rising sun. You keep going and don’t stop until you find someone named Gar. Give this to him.” The boy nodded and was off.

-V-

Courtroom

They sat there in silence, everyone facing the north. Most of them had no idea which direction north was or why they were facing that way. The reason had long since been lost. The room was mostly empty, save for the five people currently occupying it. two seated at one table, and two at another with one person standing close to a door in the room. The entire room was finished in a light mahogany, ceiling to floor. It was as if these people had walked inside a tree, but along the walls were hundreds of cameras, aimed in various angles at the people seated in the room. There was no feeling of privacy in there.

The standing man quickly moved his hand to his ear, nodded and started speaking, “Rise, the honorable and venerable authority represented by Magistrate Adla shall now be processed.” Everyone in the room quickly got to their feet as if there were a race to see who could get there first. The slowest to her feet was slightly hunched over and obviously sleep deprived. Adla entered and swiftly got behind a raised desk, grabbed a wooden gavel and rapped it lightly on block of wood.

“Sit.” Adla commanded lightly, but with authority. Everyone in the room complied. “Emmi Wryhta, rise. You stand accused by the court.”

Emmi stood up and let her gaze flow freely over the room. Not a single person in attendance. No one came to the courts anymore, not after the last time when everyone in the room was thrown in jail for muttering disagreement, no, now they all stay home and watch on the Court Network, 400 channels of live decisions, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, “Judgement for the people.” What a tag line, she thought.

Emmi sunk deeper into her our thought as the words coming out of Adla’s mouth drifted by her. She found herself fixated on a camera right in front of her. She wondered how people could just sit there and watch, hour after hour, of meaningless charges thrown on people nowadays. She recalled watching once, only for a few minutes when the charges read against a twelve year old boy, “Wearing a head covering in public without the requisite cancer patch so people wouldn’t panic.” It was disgusting, it even made her ill just thinking about it now. She wondered if her face was paling or getting a green tinge to it, would people notice?

“How do you plead?” The words brought her back to the situation right in front of her, standing in a court room. How did she plead? Most people did it on their hands and knees, but not Emmi. This just made her want to scream, at the top of her lungs, “Why?” She didn’t want to plead, she just wanted this to be over. To be done. Instead Emmi just stood there as her console raised next to her. Something clicked inside of her, she put a hand on them and stopped them from getting up.

-V-

Motel

The sun found the one crack in the blinds and inched it’s way up my body until it sat firmly on my eyelids. It’s the worst time to open your eyes in the morning, the piercing light like a launched spear straight from Apollo's hand into my retina. The sound of a sickly air conditioner is sputtering nearby, I was sure I had set it to “more cold” last night before I packed up and lay my head down. It was sounding like it had solidly landed on “barely alive with a slight chill.”

Motel rooms always felt like the necessary evil of my job. I’m a private detective, but not a highfalutin one that goes out and checks up on the rich and fancy. Nope, I handle real people with real questions they have no other way of finding out or solving. I have noticed there aren’t many detectives for the rich and greedy. I personally think it’s due to the fact that most well-to-do people just assume the worst of people and that they are in fact doing whatever it is they would hire me to find out. Sort of like an unspoken bond between them all, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, so if you don’t go looking, I won’t go looking into your affairs. It’s the only thing that made sense to me anyways.

A repeating plunk sound from the sink pulled me out of my thoughts and back into the room. One would think that they would fix that, water can be expensive, but then again they hadn’t fixed the air conditioner, so why start now? It was a standard room with two small beds in it. A carpet that had long ago had a royal pattern on it, but now mostly boasted a thread bare pacing pattern in the room of where most people slowly lost their minds. There was a television in the room, but it basically gave you three scratchy channels and the audio kept cycling from too loud to near mumbled sounds at random intervals.

The door looked like it had been pried open, more than three times. Which made me wonder how many were the management trying to get in, and how many were “other” people trying to get in. Neither option made me feel any better, but most Motels were like this. They always felt like the toy that one abused as a kid, something you could just throw against the wall when you didn’t know what else to do.

The pièce de résistance of the room lay in the door in the back past the sink leading to the bathroom. I wonder sometimes if housekeeping cleans the rooms in these places, I never wonder about the bathroom. I swear they just run in, take the towels and used soap, if you get any soap that is, and throw new towels in. Most of them are more terrifying than horror movies. It’s a wonder there aren’t more horror movies set in motel bathrooms.

-V-

The Clearing

I stood in the center of the clearing, deep in the forest. This was my place, a place where only the creatures of nature and I knew about. It lay a short walk from my back door through the woods. The trick was crossing the stream back there. There was a log you could cross, but it was hidden in a cove that was most likely created by beavers. To either side of the cavern was a branch and bramble wall, no way to forge over it. but if you looked real close you would find a small section of branches tied together with makeshift tree bark rope.

Once pulled aside you could crawl under the catch weed into a small space with the large timber to cross over the water. The space here was not mine, and I knew it. It was modified so I could pass, but there was always a sense of eyes upon you. I never felt in danger, but I knew that I was only welcome as a passer by and not invited to stay for any length of time.

Beyond the crossing there were a few love paths well trodden in the forest floor. They seemed ancient and terribly unkempt. I had once spent some time trying to map them out, but quickly became bored with the prospect of where they led when I had found the clearing.

I had affectionately come to call it the glade. It was about forty paces in diameter and near perfectly round. The edges seemed to understand that they needed to maintain the circle. The foliage was emerald green, not a section of earth could be seen, thick and lush. A short grass about ankle high grew all over. It was as if it had decided that it was at the perfect height and stopped.

The trees encircling the space almost formed a perfect privacy fence. From everywhere outside of the clearing one would have no idea it existed. It was as if nature herself decided that this place was to be kept hidden from most, I would say all, but I had been given the privilege of locating the space.

In the summer I could lay in the open space for hours and just think about the universe around me. It was quite an inspiring place to be. Light breezes would light over the trees and swoop down into the center and keep one at the perfect temperature, also creating a soothing sound, a music all it’s own, in your ears.

Sometimes a squirrel would play along the edge of the clearing searching for supplies for the upcoming winter, mostly they kept to themselves, but if I brought snacks with me, they were certainly happy to share. Sometimes they would dance along the edge of the green, a complex series of movements around each other, elegant and otherworldly I could watch their movements losing complete track of time. When the shade would hit the center of the patch I knew it was time to head home.

-V-

Mind Sculpting

I was always interested in magic, even when I was a young child. The art of slight of hand fascinated me, being able to make things disappear and reappear in a different location or even making things completely vanish. Even as a child, something deep down in me knew that it was all illusion. Nothing more than party tricks that were playing on our inability to see some truth. Later in life I found this to be the case, but I also found out something much more interesting. There’s real magic out there. Not the goofy hocus pocus stuff you see in movies with guys in long cloaks and top hats, with white spats, or even the silly long beard with flowing robes types you see. But genuine down to earth real magic.

I guess I never did really introduce myself, Hello I’m Cole Schnutz. And I have found the true secret of magic. It’s not something that certain people are born with, well sort of. We are all born with the ability. You may not know it, but you have it, and have heard about it in action. I’m sure you’ve heard about Shaolin Monks, or people in lifting cars in extreme emergencies. They call the former exaggerations, and the latter adrenaline rushes.

What most people don’t know is these are really the same thing, It’s really magic. We try to wile away and explain it with science, which is fine, but it’s not really what’s going on under the hood, as it were. The truth is, we have access to this ability within ourselves to really sculpt and modify the reality around us. And I don’t mean in some hippy dippy way, but with a pure force of our will we can modify the space around us.

Some people explain it as believing really hard that something is somewhere else to the point that it now occupies that new space. This is sort of what I mean, if you tap into this internal power that we all have you can in fact shift objects around you into new spaces. What most people don’t realize is we sort of already do this. We all agree on the placement of all the things around us. If we all could tap the power and decide that something is in a different location, it will be.

The strongest magicians of history were able to use this power as well as open up and guide other peoples ability into doing the same. Say if someone wanted there to be a dragon, they would need to use their will to push the dragon into reality, but to keep it there for any amount of time would be daunting, convincing other people to add to this could be enough to keep it there for longer. Oddly it’s the same for making things disappear, one simply needs to sculpt everyones perception into knowing that something isn’t there, and as they say “Poof” it won’t be. Perhaps true magic would be better named Mind Sculpting.

-V-

Slugging Away

Freja sat on the big leaf and contemplated life. She’d been in the garden for nearly 300 daylights. The garden had been good to her. At the previous day’s courtyard meeting there was much unrest about the impending beetle invasion. She vaguely remembered the last one when she was just a juvenile slug; They preyed upon the tribe at at sun-brake while they were just coming out of slumber. The elders feared that this year was going to be worse.

“We can’t just simply keep doing our thing and pray they don’t eat us!” Runa the elder exclaimed.

“Certainly we can!” Vidar responded, “I’ve been here for 953 daylights, and it’s the way my mother did it, and they way their mothers did it, and so on, and so on…”

“That’s no excuse for not trying,” Runa continued.

This caught Vidar off guard, “Why certainly it is! Who are you to say that the way we have done things in the past is wrong, it’s what has led us to now. It has to be fine, or else we would be where we are now.”

“On a bunch of leaves?” Egil interrupted, a young slug. The space erupted into a cacophony of laughter. He was a young slug, and quickly making a name for himself. Freja had been noticing him a lot recently, and not just because he was disrupting the meeting, but there was something captivating about him. She couldn’t explain it, but overtime he was around her, her circulatory system would go into overdrive.

“Ahem…” Runa butted into Freja’s train of thought and throwing an icy glance at Egil, “moving on. We need to come up with a plan of action to stop the impending night raids.”

“Psssh…” replied Vidar, “I’ll not change a thing, and nor will my brood, or their offspring. You don’t go against tradition, it’s not…” he searched for a good word and ended weakly on, “traditional.”

“We should build a defense system and a series of battlements that the beetles can’t get through,” the voice sounded so close and terribly far away at the same time. It took a moment for Freja to realize it was coming from her. She had no idea where the words were coming from, but each one was necessary and needed in that order. It all just made sense.

Egil looked right at Freja, freezing her in place. He smiled and winked at her, “I agree with this, it sounds like a great plan!” General murmurs of approval started from the younger slugs and eventually became a full roaring of agreement from the space.

“I think you might be on to something here… um?” Runa looked expectantly at Freja.

“Freja,” she responded lamely, she shuttered and redoubled her response with a lot more force, “Freja is my name.”

“Ah good, I’d like to hear more of this plan.”

“I’d like to offer my expertise,” Egil declared.

“Yes, Egil would have many great ways to expand and make this plan impervious,” Freja added elatedly.

-V-

Branch

The television was blaring, bright colors were quickly crossing the screen. One would think it would be distracting, but she just stared out the window at the one lazy branch she could see from the couch. I moved slowly in the wind, nothing particularly interesting about it. The branch looked too weak to even support a birds nest. It was fairly gnarled, and had four leaves randomly placed along it. The seemed to be fainting in the heat, slowly dancing to make sure they were still living. The movement was entrancing to her though. She couldn’t pull her attention anywhere else in the room. Even with that television, she had no idea why she bothered turning it on anymore.

Perhaps it was just a ritual; after class: walk home, kick off shoes, turn on television, sit on couch, stare out window. How long had she been doing this? She’d be to bed before her mother got back from her second shift job, and out the door before mom would even be awake for the day. Kids dream of independence, but if this is what that meant, it was more like purgatory. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every day the same series of events. The uniform they made her wear didn’t help either, it just added to the monotony of the entire experience.

She was so lost in thought, she didn’t notice the lull in the sounds from the television and the creaking sound of someone ascending the rusted metal staircase leading to their tiny apartment. The light sounds of an old key slowly fitting into a lock. The door lethargically opened shining a strong beam of sunlight on her foot that grew up her leg and rested on her hands in her lap. The heat from the sun finally drew her attention to the door.

A man stood there, dark long hair matted down underneath a check patterned flat cap. He had a full beard, not terribly well groomed. His eyes were alight with a fire and a deep soulful fear. Part of her brain screamed, another part tried to sooth her. She knew this person on some deep corporal level. Her body trusted the part that was calming her.

She sat in place and just stared. Showing what she hoped was an expectant look on her face to the newcomer. He motioned as if he were about to speak, but just fell to the floor in a heap instead. Her mind screamed to her, “protect.” With decisive movements she was up and walking over to him. She leveraged herself under him and hoisted him onto her back. He was much lighter than she expected. It could have been the adrenaline, but even accounting for that he was certainly light.

She dragged the unconscious body into the well aged bathroom and rolled him over into the bath. Her sense of smell came slamming back to her, as the all the previous moments actions didn’t seem to need it. A world of scents her upon her, so many she had no way to describe, and one subtle light scent under the rest. One she knew, and could not place, but it was there.

-V-