Microstory 2307: Happiness That You’re Looking

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I don’t have it all figured out yet. I don’t know where my life is headed. What I do know is that I’m going to move out of this giant house, and into something more my style. I’m going to keep it a secret, though. I may stay in the area, or I may leave, but I need to return to a life of anonymity, if only for a little while. At the end of this year, I’ll post one more entry onto this website, and then I’ll cease. I don’t have my own social media, and I’ll be severing my ties with the publicists. I’ve bequeathed the rights to an appropriate party for the novel, and the stage musical that Nick wrote. I won’t be telling you who they are, but perhaps they’ll reveal themselves later on. It will have nothing to do with me. The lawyer came by this morning to officialize what I already know. All of the specimen money comes to me. I’ll be continuing to donate it to various charities, then using what little is left to protect myself from scrutiny and exposure. I may end up going back to work, or I’ll just lead a modest life, in a modest town. To be clear, while I was closely associated with Nick and Dutch, I was not one of them. I have never traveled to other worlds, and I don’t have any powers. If you come after me, it will get you nowhere. Both of them are dead, and that is all over. They could have stayed here, and contributed so much more to the world, but you ruined it. Not all of you, of course, but enough. You made it so difficult to find peace, and I’m not going to keep that burden hanging from my neck. Neither of them would want that for me. Hmm. I guess I was wrong. I do have a pretty good idea where my life is headed. I’m just not going to tell all of you about it anymore. I sincerely hope that you all find the happiness that you’re looking for too.

Microstory 2080: It’s Frickin’ Perfect

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I’ve been writing kind of long posts recently, especially that one from Monday last week. I’m particularly tired today, though. I had so much to do. I had to work first shift, and then go to several appointments for my apartment search. My real estate agent was great. She doesn’t make as much money in her job as the kind that sell full family homes, but she was committed, and she understood what I was looking for. There was one particular unit that I am very interested in. You can see the entire thing from one spot. A single room quadruples as a kitchen, living room, bedroom, and office. One door leads to a closet, and the other to a bathroom. I think they said it was 27 square meters in area, which is about 290 square feet, if you like to use the WRONG measuring system. The way the building manager tells it when we met him, there was a bit of an error when calculating the number of units that could fit within the length of the complex. Every floor has this tiny little thing that they tacked on in the corner. It’s too big to be just a storage closet, or something, but not big enough for most people’s needs. I am not most people. It’s frickin’ perfect. I can already picture the layout. The building is a little farther from work than I would like, because I would prefer to walk, but I think I can invest in a bike, and still avoid buying a car. I don’t know what I will do in really bad weather, but it might be worth it.

Microstory 155: Quang Phan

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Like Freeman and Gus, Quang Phan grew up not being aware that he had a special ability, instead assuming that what he could do was a trait shared by all. He had an innate sense of measurement, including length, area, volume, weight, mass, density, temperature, pressure, viscosity, time, speed, energy, force, flow, frequency, direction, and angle. At first, he could just tell the difference between two measurements, for instance knowing when an object was heavier than another. But the more educated he became regarding the human constructs of measurement, the more dynamic his ability became. Instead of only understanding comparisons, he began to see relevant numbers. His eyes adjusted to need, and he was eventually able to literally see numbers and lines superimposed onto the objects they were associated with. He could read in the space between a building and a vehicle, that they were separated by about one geara. If he so chose, he could focus on that measurement, and become more accurate, so that he would know that they were separated by 1.489 geara. His ability increased, and by the time he was an adult, he could even read the amount of space on a digital storage device, despite there being no real-world analog to such a thing. He was fairly young when he left Vietnam to join Bellevue, so he spent a number of years being further educated by the likes of Claude, Mandy, Laurence, Drummond, and Ceres. After he had completed his schooling, he put his ability to use in the construction department as they expanded into a full-fledged city, able to direct progress with no aid of blueprints. Many years later, he and several others embarked on the final journey in search of the missing children. Not only was his expertise valuable for the mission, but he was present for  his friends’ disappearance, and had a personal interest in finding them.