Microstory 2152: Stop Stopping Moving

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I’ve gone back to being bored and boring, and that makes me nervous. Every time that happens, I get sick, and then something too crazy happens as a result of that. I’ve sort of exhausted every kind of infection that you can get, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get another one of the same type as before. To shake things up, when I had some free time, I returned to the nursery where I used to work to see my old friends and boss. It was a little awkward, because I didn’t leave in the best way. It wasn’t combative, like what sometimes happens with former employees, but it was really weird. To make things less uncomfortable today, I bought a few pots, and some seeds. I mostly chose daisies, since that’s my dog’s name, so it’s fitting. It’s not like I can’t do with a little bit more color in my apartment. I have a history of having very sparse dwellings. I don’t put up photos or paintings. I was born in 1987, so everything I ever cared about was in the cloud by the time I moved out of my parents’ house. If I wanted to look at a picture of someone I cared about, I could just take out my phone. It never seemed better to be able to see such things along the hallways. Walls are just there to hold up the ceiling, and I don’t see blank walls as problematic. All of those pictures are lost to me now, and no matter what I do, I will never get them back. I’m thinking about giving a description of my dogs, Sophie (who is no longer with us) and Daisy, so I can have drawings of them, though they may not be very good, because I have a notoriously bad memory. I am barely confident that the artist could even get close, and I’m not at all confident that we could figure out what my human family looked like. Still, it’s not a bad idea. It would certainly give me something to do with my days besides working, writing, talking about my feelings with my therapist, updating my parole officer on nothing, and sitting in jail. I should make a list...a list of things I can do, which may not necessarily improve my life, but perhaps just make it different. I’m a shark, so I should stop stopping moving.

Microstory 2051: Greetings From Boreverse

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This is not my world. I don’t even know where I would call home anymore. I was born an unremarkable autistic kid in central Kansas in 1987, on a version of Earth. When I was four years old, a random cosmic accident imbued me with access to a higher plane of existence. From there, my knowledge and powers grew as more and more data came flooding in from these other dimensions. I started writing this information down in the form of fictional stories. But they weren’t fictional. They were just mostly happening in other universes. I even wrote myself into the stories, and occasionally interacted with my own characters. I didn’t realize the danger I was putting myself in, until the boundaries between my world and the rest began to blur, and instead of merely bringing characters to life, I was becoming part of a new story. A lot of stuff happened that I won’t get into, but it involves time travel, my alternate self, and a desperate scheme to retrieve my dog from a collapsed timeline. I let the other me live out his life, and sacrificed myself to the same collapse, essentially switching places with my dog, Daisy. But there was hope. My other self had all my same powers, and part of that was being able to generate characters at will, so he made me. He remade me, and inserted me into one of the most pleasant universes in the bulkverse. That’s where I met Cricket.

Cricket is a bioenhanced posthuman from Moderaverse, who lived in a world that stressed biological improvement over external technological development. I was starting to like it, but it did not last. We found ourselves being randomly sent to yet another universe, on another version of Earth. We were able to escape that, but not back to Moderaverse. We started to travel the bulk, meeting all sorts of new people, and making a new friend in a U.S. Marine named Claire Fuller. We continued to go on adventures together, vaguely trying to get back to Cricket’s world, but mostly just trying to find our place in the cosmos. In the meantime, I found myself with the ability to borrow my characters’ special powers, one at a time. The last one I took was true immortality, and I never gave it back. But I lost it anyway when I went to Havenverse, which doesn’t allow such gifts. The three of us lived there for five years, trying to make the best of it. But then we were separated when a powerful being put me in the crosshairs of an abductor. It was he who forced me through an interversal portal that I imagine was meant for him. Now I’m here, in a world that is not unlike Havenverse, but it’s even worse, because it’s boring. Everything just seems so dull and tedious. My immortality is still gone, but I was able to get it back temporarily, so at least I’m young again. The problem is that I have no identity, no money, and no place to live. I’m in this internet cafe to chronicle my struggles as I focus on essential needs before I can move on to more metaphysical ambitions. I have to get back to Cricket and Claire, whether that means returning to Havenverse, or finding them somewhere else in the multiverse. Until then, natives of this Earth, enjoy my daily updates in a new series that I call Pleadings From Boreverse. Sorry to have to call it that...but you sort of brought it on yourselves.

Microstory 914: My Dogs

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I thought I had told you this story before, but I guess not. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, my parents told me that they would need me for a trip over the weekend. My aunt was in the market for a new (old) car, but was in Spain at the time, and unable to look for one herself. She liked a particular kind at the time, and I know next to nothing about cars, so I wasn’t fazed when they claimed the one they found was hundreds of miles away in Minnesota. I remember telling my whole health class about the upcoming road trip, for some reason, as dull as I assumed it would be. We stayed one night in a hotel, and then drove out to the farm in the morning, where the car was supposedly waiting. My dad said he wanted to speak with the seller, so my mom and I waited in the car. A few minutes later, he walked back out of the barn with a man, who was holding a smol puppy in his arms. Once I was out of the car, he offered to let me hold her, which I gladly accepted. Only then did my parents reveal that this was my dog. She was a nine-week-old American Foxhound, and the most beautiful creature I had seen in my life. The whole thing about the car was a total lie; a ruse to get me up there. On the way back home, my dad handed me a list of French names, and suggested I take one from it, since I was studying French at the time. I chose Sophie, because I was also into philosophy back then. I kept that girl for almost ten years before we lost her to the evil of Billy Rubin, and I’ve never forgiven time for taking her away from me. I miss you, Sophie Love Highfill.

Cut to nearly five years later when I’m finally ready for a new dog. I have my own house, with a huge backyard, and a nice deck. While there are fences surrounding most of the property, they’re not the kinds we want, so we decided to contract a new one. It took my family and me months to prepare for the new pup. We had to clean up the yard, hire someone to remove a few trees, and totally rearrange the first floor of my house. I got rid of the giant dining table, and moved my TV into the dining room, because that’s where the door to the deck is. We bought kennels, and a cage, and a doghouse, and food and water bowls, and everything else the dog would need. I also spent a lot of time trying to come up with a good name for her, ultimately settling on Daisy Quake; after a character in one of our favorite television series, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. On the fourth day of July of this year, my dad and I drove to the other side of Missouri to pick up the six-week-old English Coonhound. I chose her because, while her brothers and sisters were clamoring for attention, she was just chilling in their huge doghouse. As it turns out, she was probably just tired at the moment, because she’s an energetic wild one in real life. She jumps, bites, wrestles, and plays tug-o-war. And I love her just as much as I did Sophie. I regret all the time I didn’t take to spend with my first dog, and I’m determined to not make that mistake again. I never did say that these 99 things that I love are in a randomized order. If they weren’t, my dogs and my family would be tied for first place.